12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rose McLarney

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is professor of creative writing at Auburn University.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I signed the contract for my first book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books), right after graduating from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and that must have been part of why I was chosen for a teaching fellowship in the college’s undergraduate program. That teaching experience led me to apply for more academic jobs, to be hired for some of them, and to move to all over the country. The Always Broken Plates of Mountains was largely about fidelity to place, so it’s sort of perverse that it was the reason I left my job with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, family, and property. But the positive spin is that this is a case of one love leading me to others.

Also, my partner in these repeated relocations was Justin Gardiner, a fellow writer I met while teaching at Warren Wilson, and surviving uncertainties together led to marriage, and a strong fidelity between us.

2. How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

The book of mine that most stands apart from the others is Forage (Penguin, 2019), my third book. While my other books center on Appalachia, Forage is more about my current location, the Deep South, and the environment at large. And I put greater effort into Forage than anything else I’ve ever done. Colorfast, my fourth and newest book, forthcoming from Penguin in March 2024, is a bit of a return and I didn’t write it with any illusion that it would change my career. In it, I am again writing about the mountains where I grew up, the subject I naturally turn to if I don’t direct myself otherwise. Yet, I am reexamining the stories about the culture and my own girlhood I have been told and told myself and recognizing problems such as how the perspectives of women and others were omitted.

Colorfast’s poems are more complex in their content than my first book’s, and they’re more advanced in their construction. My lines and stanzas are becoming more meticulously counted and shaped with each volume.            

3 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’ve never had any capacity for writing plot, conceiving of things happening. My mind wants to stay fixed in the moment and on a particular image and idea. I remember reading, early on, in Lynn Emmanuel’s “The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am A Poet”: “So please, don't ask me for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, although you can ask me a lot about death. That's all I like, the very beginning and the very end. I haven't got the stomach for the rest of it.” That resonated with me, though she’s got far more swagger than I ever will. When I began writing, I had very little time because I was holding down jobs in other fields (and working in some literal farm fields). Also, frugality was probably the highest virtue to me, then. I wanted to avoid the prosey task of explaining and the waste of words I thought it required.

Now I recognize that language in any genre can be subtle and economical, care at least as much about musicality as economy, and like some little flourishes. But there’s still no chance of me writing action scenes.

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?

My poems usually begin with an impression or scrap of information jotted down in my journal. Then I must figure out what I have to say about, what use I can make of, this material I’ve gathered that may appear to have nothing to do with my own experiences or be well outside areas in which I have expertise. For Colorfast, I mined information from reading about gemology, archaeology, natural dying, color theory, and linguistics, among other subjects.

To start a book, I must let myself write all sorts of poems that may seem to be of separate species, until I can identify some larger concern or little characteristics they share. In Colorfast, feminist themes were obvious from the outset, but I was also aided in revising and sequencing by noticing details such as how often the poems referred to hands and holding. After I have some general notions and grace notes for a book, I can write with more purpose (and pleasure), creating an arc for the manuscript, conversations between the poems, cohesion.

5 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Make do.” That advice may have never been directly issued or verbalized to me. But it’s an aesthetic that helped with practicalities when I was younger—such as finding the charm in dilapidated houses and learning how to wear secondhand clothes as if I intended a vintage look—and helps now when I begin writing projects and worry that I’ve used up the good stuff. It’s also a sort of exemplary piece of syntax. It’s economical, with just two words. It’s active, since both those words are verbs. And it’s a commanding imperative.  

That said, I’m not as rigorous as I once was and I’m recalling the New Year’s Eve when a friend advised me to “Resolve to be less resolved.”

6 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?

I have written what may be a full-length manuscript of lyric essays. (I’ve been letting them sit, so I can come back and assess them with more objectivity.)  It has not been easy. Transitions are the problem—and I mean not just between genres, but between paragraphs and parts. As I said earlier, I’m wary of—bored by—explication and exposition. So, I’ve aspired to write prose with a line of reasoning running underneath, but that, on the surface, leaps and seems to move from point to point by following elements such as alliteration or off-rhyme as much as by argument.

I took on the challenge of writing prose because I had information from research that was too cumbersome for poems to carry. Because there’s the possibility that people who don’t read poetry will give an essay a chance (though they’ll find my essays can actually be more heady than my poems). And, well, because I’ve completed four books of poetry and it was a challenge.

7 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I start each morning by looking out the window before I let my eyes turn to any printed words or screens. Then, I try to see that the first thing I read is a poem. Then, I write something down in my journal—not any sort of narrative or record of events, just an observation. For instance, my last two journal entries are quotes from an overheard conversation between airport bartenders and an architectural text. Then, I go running and try to think about how what I’ve written in my journal or drafted the previous day (though that’s gotten more difficult as I’ve gotten older and more injured and have started to have to think about the form of my body and the running itself). I will try to make some revisions or expansions over breakfast. 

If I am not going to campus to teach or attending to other errands, I’ll work on typed drafts until noon. It’s useful to me to have that cut-off point so that I don’t stick relentlessly, as I am prone to do, to a draft that isn’t going to amount to anything in the end, and so I don’t feel guilty about the laundry I’m not hanging and email I’m not answering—yet.  (If you send me an email, I’ll answer you the same day, but not until the afternoon.)

8 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The house Justin and I share often smells like kafir lime leaves or cardamom or ginger. He mortar and pestle pounds roots and spices into curry pastes. I am heavy handed with any spice available and like to improvise cultural mutt meals.  (To be honest, a person who does not have our callous palettes may be greeted at the door with a cloud of air peppery enough to make them choke.)

Underneath those fragrances, there are notes of antique furniture--my grandparents’ and great grandparents’ old possessions I’ve drug around with me—and his many books. I’m glad you asked this question because the first portion of Colorfast has a setting like my childhood home and deals with problematic relationships with men. I appreciate a chance to mention my current home and the love poems, after a reader makes it through the harder sections, in the latter part of the collection.

9 - 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?

Nature and biology inform most of my work. I have no scientific training or taste for precise figures and facts as firm answers. But I like to ask questions such as why snow melts around trees, where it’s shaded, before it melts in open fields; some dead-looking leaves stay on tree branches into winter; and fossils form in some soils and not others.  Those inquiries became poems in Colorfast.

I have published a few ekphrastic poems, yet I’ve probably written as many about the hushed atmosphere of museums—modern people exhibiting their most reverent behavior—as I have the actual art. And I may not have written any poems focused on music. Yet other art forms undoubtedly influence my writing. My musical tastes, for example, are much edgier and more diverse than the kind of poem it is easiest for me to generate. Music has inspired me to allow for some experimentation, dissonance, and noise in poems. In particular, musicians such as Will Oldham, who makes folksy songs weird, innovative, and utterly his own, prompted me to avoid cliches associated with writing about rural America. (You can read more of my thoughts on music and listen to a playlist I put together at Largehearted Boy.)

10- 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?

Veterinarians have told me I should be a vet. I’m not squeamish in the least and I have much more patience for and rapport with animals than the average human. I doubt I would enjoy the job, since vets meet animals when they’re distressed. And it’s an awfully non-verbal alternative for a poet to choose. But at least I might be competent at it and I suppose both vocations involve plenty of perceiving of emotion and reading of implication and tone.

I am more certain of the job at which I’d be worst: valet. I hate cars and driving, and being entrusted with (presumably) rich people’s fancy cars would wreck me.

11 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I read so much poetry that it’s hard for me to choose one book to mention. So I’ll tell you the last novel that I loved: Milkman by Anna Burns. It is set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and addresses political and cultural issues present in other countries and communities too, in some of the most colorful and original prose I’ve encountered. I admire how elements of the style—never giving anyone’s proper name, for instance—aren’t only artistic touches, but tied to the psychology of the people in the story, who must keep many secrets because they are under constant surveillance.

The film that’s stayed on my mind recently is Chocolat, directed by Claire Denis and set in Cameroon (not the Johnny Depp movie). It’s from the ‘80s and, obviously, not American, but its commentary on race relations felt very relevant and its approach original. My husband found the film because Claudia Rankine references the director in Citizen and Chocolat’s artful final scene, which left me with much to contemplate, felt like the conclusion of one of those great poems that open out to more thoughts rather than closing down with a pronouncement.  

12 - What are you currently working on?

I already noted that I have been writing a collection of lyric essays. But, with my new poetry book just about to come out, it’s not the time for another publication. And I am trying to put aside the validation of having the essays readily accepted by journals and learn to gauge for myself what finished really is for my prose, since I’m a beginner in the genre.

I am also composing new poems, because there will be a fifth collection someday. In order to help me get out of essay mode and back to poetry, I assigned myself to draft without any capital letters or punctuation. This is hardly revolutionary, I know. Many poets have written in this manner, including Ellen Bryant Voigt in her wonderfully refreshing Headwaters. But it’s a huge shift for me and, so far, these poems are more fun than what I usually produce. That said, they can’t contain as much information as essays and they don’t yet have the intricate craftmanship I tried to achieve in Colorfast and my other collections.  Maybe a current project should be remembering to celebrate Colorfast when it is finally in print and, rather than newness of style, the quality of endurance that is often what the poems are about.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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