Candice Kelsey
has been researching and writing, both creatively and academically, for
decades. She holds her B.A. (Miami University) and M.A. (LMU) in literature and
is inspired by Nelly Sachs, Linda Pastan, Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville,
and David Sedaris. Candice teaches English at a private Yeshiva girls’ high
school in Los Angeles, where she has been inspired to write her blog Don’t Nachas ‘til You Try Us. Her first
book explored adolescent identity in the age of social media and was recognized
as an Amazon.com Top Ten Parenting Book in 2007.
Her poetry has
appeared in Poet Lore, The Cortland
Review, North Dakota Quarterly
and many other journals. She feels honored that her poem “The Birth of
President Trump” was included in Sibling Rivalry Press’ special issue If You Can Hear
This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration. A finalist for Poetry Quarterly's Rebecca Lard Award
and recipient of honorable mention in Common
Ground Review’s 2019 poetry contest, Candice’s creative nonfiction was nominated
for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.
Candice is the
co-founder of a private high school, has served as an essay evaluator for the
College Board and the U.S. Department of Education, volunteered as a fiction
reader for The New England Review,
and continues to foster a love of writing in today’s youth. She is an unabashed
fan of Murder, She Wrote, Columbo, and The Nancy Drew Hardy Boys Mysteries as well as all things opera and
musical theater. She and her family
are passionate advocates for both animal rights and foster youth. You can find
her @CandiceKelsey1 @BooksBoxers and @HardyTonight as well as www.christianenglishteacheratorthodoxjewishgirlsschool.com
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most
recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Since Still
I am Pushing is my first collection of poetry, I cannot answer this
question yet.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction
or non-fiction?
I’m drawn to fiction more for the author’s use
of language than for the plot or even character development. I’m drawn to
non-fiction for the genuine, the real. Poetry for me is the best of both worlds
– it requires heightened attention to word choice and a reconfiguring of
reality. So by virtue of my own reading preferences, I settled into writing
poetry rather than fiction or non-fiction.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?
Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first
drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of
copious notes?
Typically my process begins with urgency –
sudden and effusive. Pulling the car to the side of the road or sitting on the
curb of the sidewalk and typing feverishly into my Notes app on my iPhone.
Which is wonderful because who doesn’t enjoy feeling fecund? It can be
exciting, but really it’s just the proverbial honeymoon period, I think.
Because the next step in my process requires identifying what’s missing. I need
to ask them, are you where you where you
want to be? Are you who you
want to be? So I work on solidifying my relationship with each of those
poems. I visit them. I sit with them.
I’ll take maybe four, and I will let them
marinate. [I will] sit with them, and read them, and right away I can see
little areas, little pressure points, that I can fix and places where I want
them to go. Essentially, what I’m noticing is wordiness, which has always been
my problem. But then I’m noticing that I lack the element of surprise. I lack
the twist. I lack that beautiful element of poetry that I love — for example,
in Billy Collins — where you think it’s taking you and then it takes you
elsewhere. Michelangelo said that the statues that he would sculpt were already
in the marble. He was just revealing them. I feel like my poems, in some way,
have a lot in them that I just need to take the time to reveal. So time is a
huge part of the process, and not giving into the need to submit them right
away. Letting them marinate. Letting them sit. Rethinking them. Gaining more
experience. Reading more poets!
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
I am definitely an author of short pieces, spare
strings of images or a single comparison. I sense a poem inside a tiny moment
of brief interaction and begin there. The more time I allow it to have without
me, the more I know how to spend quality time with it. Sometimes a poem becomes
two separate poems; sometimes three separate poems unite as one longer poem.
But they each begin small, like every one of us humans.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m an introvert in an extroverted profession –
teaching. Networking, schmoozing, LinkedIn-ing I cannot do. Set me down at the
AWP conference, and I’ll go fetal. But put me in a book group, an escape room,
or in front of one hundred people eager to hear a few poems, and I shine.
I spoke to large venues throughout North America
for my 2007 book (nonfiction) tour, and I enjoyed the adventure. I have yet to
be put before an audience for my poetry, but I can tell you now that I would
relish the opportunity! Especially since so much of my work is meant to be
heard… I put a good deal of effort into the sound elements of my work. It does
frustrate me that my poems are being read and not heard.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What
kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even
think the current questions are?
I do find some safety and comfort about when I’m
writing about things that are so personal, traumatic, or even puzzling. There’s
a safety in that if it never gets published, I have the benefit of having
written it for myself and having
revisited and tried to make some sense out it. In a sense, I am answering
questions from my past by taking something very prosaic and making it poetic. And
this process is fulfilling to me. So that, in a way, I’m manipulating — going
back in time — and manipulating some very ugly things that have not sat well
with me for many years, and reconfiguring it as something that I can now see as
beautiful.
I suppose one
theoretical concern I currently have is whether or not there’s a greater expectation for female poets to be
more raw and open. I mean almost a fetishization of female trauma. And I wonder
if I float into that current subconsciously. Or if being a survivor is just is who I am. The trauma is a part
of me. And it’s part of how I see the world. And it’s part of a
daily struggle. Look, we all want the world to be more empathetic. And I
(usually) have the strength to wrestle with things that are raw both for my own
art and for others who can connect to it, who find something in it, and feel
less lonely. But does it stand in the way of maybe a less exploited female-as-perpetual-
sufferer type of poetry? I don’t know. I do know I’m excited to find out as
I write more poetry.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer
should be?
This question. Yes. I love it.
Is see the role of the writer, specifically the
poet and memoirist, as that of the Fates in Greek Mythology – the three sisters
who spin the thread of life, dispense it, and then cut it. We should be
weavers, taking the stuff of life and forming something new and meaningful with
the intent to send it out there to be experienced by others while also knowing
when to let go and let it become an autonomous piece of work. Not unlike
motherhood, actually. If I may…
Not that I like to compare, but I watch other
mothers, i.e. mother friends, people that I work with, having trouble seeing
their children as their own individual people and specifically having trouble
separating. I ask myself, why am I not
struggling with this, or am I struggling with this -- and I just
think I’m not. I’ve talked to my eldest daughter about it. It seems like we
have a very healthy boundary, in that she is her own person doing her own
thing, and I’m okay with that separation.
I think writing poetry has helped me be a better
mom, and by ‘better’ I mean — and I hate to add judgment to it — a little bit
more willing and able to see my children as authentic beings, who are not an
extension of me in any way, shape or form. Which is the exact opposite of how I
was raised. And so, if they’re making choices I don’t agree with, I don’t know?
I wouldn’t say I’m numb to it, but I’m more accepting to the fact that they are
where they are, and I’m where I am, and let’s just see where we all go.
And that, to me, is the job of the poet.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
I absolutely cherish working with an outside
editor. I learn so much in the process and count it as invaluable to my growth
as a writer.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily
given to you directly)?
One
editor said, “I, too, wrote a first chapbook similar to this, and I needed to
write it to get it out of my system and move on to the real poetry.” And it
hurt, for a second, because Oh, I thought
this was my real poetry, but it has stayed with me because maybe what I’m
doing — and I have to be okay with that — right now is getting some of my
pre-occupation, some of my obsession, and some of my dysfunction out into the
poetry, and it is very personal. I can maybe get to another layer where I’m
maybe more political. But, right now, I’m a poet whose writing about things
that are so intensely personal that I cringe thinking that they’re going to be
published.
That
being said, I don’t think there’s anything I would avoid writing about. Maybe I
write more abstractly about something intensely personal. But, you know, I’ve
written about being assaulted and raped. I’ve written about my foster son. I’ve
written about issues in my marriage and incredibly hurtful things I’ve experienced
with my own mother. Poetry is where we learn truth. My circle of people
love me enough to know that my coming to terms with and diving into the truth
of things is more important than how they happen to be portrayed.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you
even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Because I teach full time, I have to be
strategic.
Luckily,
at this particular teaching job, I have a lot of free time because the day is
longer — there are ten periods every day. They [her students] are doing a dual
curriculum: my students are studying Hebrew and Judaica— it’s like they have
two school days in one day. But that means I’m here a lot, and I have a lot of
free time. That’s when I do much of my writing, so I feel like this job has
opened up the option for me to have more time to spend on my writing. And I
definitely take advantage of that.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return
for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I have two strategies, and both work well: I
either sedate my brain by watching re-runs of 70s and 80s police procedural
dramas, or I galvanize my brain by reading new poetry.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’m such an olfactory geek. Scents are
everything. For me, fresh cut grass reminds me of Ohio summers, and chimney
smoke reminds me of Ohio winters. I won’t object to pipe smoke, either, as that
reminds me of a favorite uncle we’d visit in New England.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but
are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,
science or visual art?
Trees. I am addicted to an app that lets me take
a picture of a tree I see and then learn its name and every unique fact about
that tree. Currently, I’m inspired by the Japanese Black Pine tree. Birds. I
have a book of birds and their literary appearances – I keep it in my car at
all times and read it when my husband is driving through L.A. traffic. Finally,
Turner’s seascapes. His paintings simply unlock all the doors in my head.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,
or simply your life outside of your work?
Linda Pastan. Kay Ryan. Mary Oliver. Ruth Stone.
Tracy K. Smith. Annie Dillard. Anne Lamott. Roxane Gay. Tara Westover.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Spend a year living and working on Nantucket.
I’m such a Melville nerd (and Philbrick by default) that I count it criminal to
have never stepped foot on that “great sand hill in the air.”
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would
it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you
not been a writer?
Mail carrier for the USPS. I often fantasize
about it. I love the uniform and all its variations, but specifically the vest
and the high socks. I’m drawn to being outside in the fresh air, feeling the
elements first hand. Imagine being able to pet the neighborhood cats as they
sleep in the shade on front steps or smell the wild roses at the fence. Imagine
listening to your ear buds while you walk around? Honestly, what a dream!
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I dabbled all my life in writing, starting with
creative grocery lists filled with rhymes and puns for my mother’s trip to the
market to better lyrics for sub-par advertising jingles during Saturday morning
cartoons. I also confess that I am the walking cliché who came alive intellectually
in 11th grade English class… the more I read, the more I wrote. For
me reading is the inhale while writing is the exhale. Some of my early early
stuff is mortifying, but this is why we have boxes.
I would say that I’ve been serious about poetry
for three years. Look, life is hard, and it kicks you in the kidney or sucker
punches you in the spleen. I think participating in life, in any small way, is just traumatic. But
it can and should be transformative, and that is where writing poetry enters
the scene for me. Poetry has been a lifeline in so many ways.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last
great film?
Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. My word. What a powerful memoir! His courage to tell his
story is breathtaking. I was especially moved by his struggles with gambling
addiction as my mother experienced that same issue.
I cannot think of a film, but I did just see Miss Saigon, the musical theatre show
that addresses the complexity of Vietnamese immigrants in the late 70s.
Shockingly relevant in the sense of exploring the American Dream and its being
warped over the years or from the very beginning, actually. I find it a bold
look at the widely accepted concept of America as always being the “good guys”
– especially in an age of growing oligarchy.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I have a number
of poems that are in process and need my attention. But my focus is mostly on a
collection of poems that detail a poignant time in my life – the conflation of my mother-in-law’s death and our home’s demolition.
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