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1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Plat, hasn’t been out very long, but it’s already brought so many lovely people to me. That is perhaps my favorite way it’s changed my life. That said, I finished writing it a few years ago, and I’ve since moved on from some of its obsessions, its frustrations, and its questions. It’s been interesting to time travel back into those preoccupations. My current work feels less angry, perhaps — but I also don’t quite know what the shape of my current work is, either. Perhaps it will take me a few years to look back and know, as it did with my first book.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I always thought I would be a novelist, and only started writing poems when I was a teenager. When I took an introduction to creative writing class as a college freshman, my teacher suggested that I sign up for a poetry class, and I took her advice. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I still have aspirations to write a novel, and I'm at work on a collection of nonfiction — but at this point my brain has been fully corrupted by poetry and its strange relationship to time and scale. Thank goodness.
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?
All of my projects have arrived differently. Some things (like my above/ground chapbook Perfumer's Organ) take shape relatively quickly; some begin with a burst of energy but change over time as I come to see the project more completely. Plat started out as a thought experiment to see whether I could construct a building in language that couldn't exist in the real world, and was primarily a way to inject some play back into my writing after finishing my MFA. Only much later did I realize I was, at the same time, writing through bigger questions, like death and capitalism and the afterlife. Some projects, like almost all of my nonfiction and many of my poems lately, feel like they have to be dug out of the earth bit by laborious bit.
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 love to work on a project that extends across multiple pieces. I always hope to find a thought that is too big for one poem, where an obsession bleeds over into the next day, the next approach. And I like to go back and mercilessly cut, rearrange, and reshape. I find stand-alone, slice-of-life poems extremely difficult to write.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
When I've been fortunate enough to be part of a local literary community, I like to read brand new work to see how it feels in my mouth and how it feels landing on the ears of others. It can be a useful gauge for me to see whether a poem is working, and can help give me a new perspective on things I don't understand about my own work. I get a little bored reading old work in front of people.
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?
Ultimately, I think I am always writing about sensory perception, God, and capitalism. What do my senses help me understand, even if erroneously, about Big Things like God, capitalism, and power? What kind of knowledge, what kind of experience is available through and despite these “errors”? Even when I think I'm not writing about these things, they end up making their way to the page.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
My favorite writers are mischief-makers, agnostics, and seamstresses.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like being asked what I meant by a particular line, or phrase, or image, because sometimes I don't know. And sometimes I don't know that I don't know. Being asked to account for my words, at least in an environment where an editor or peer genuinely wants to understand, is incredibly valuable. It's a kind of generosity that, while sometimes difficult (usually the most useful questions are the ones I don't have answers for in the moment), is something I hope to never take for granted. When I’m in the role of editor, I try very hard to approach an author and their text with that mutual generosity in mind.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don't know if this is something anyone ever spelled out to me, but it's something I learned by osmosis studying under Peter Gizzi: a poem's social life is more valuable than its craft or its aesthetic perfection. Poetry is a form of communication, both despite and because of its inefficiencies. And all poems are always speaking to one another, and have something to say to one another, across time and distances and languages. And if a poem cannot touch a social life, broadly defined — if it feels walled off, somehow, perhaps via an empty craft perfection or its perspective or something else, from the vibrancy of both the history of poetry and the now of daily speech — it can't be called alive. A good poem must have, in this way, a spiritual life.
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?
Routines are difficult; I think I might be allergic to them. When I feel restless, I implement some discipline and do very low-stakes writing in the mornings. Lately, that’s been things like playing rhyming games or attempting to write down dreams. Eventually, some problem or question will begin to assert itself, often through something I've read, and I attempt to write about it or around it in order to understand it, or play with it, or follow it to an end. Sometimes these beginnings fizzle out very quickly, but sometimes they build into a long poem or, if I'm very lucky, the beginning of a book project. In those situations I can't get away from the page, and end up writing a large amount very quickly.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
This process means I go through long fallow periods. I've learned to not be too anxious about them. These can often last weeks or months, and during that time I read. Usually I have several books going at once and end up abandoning most of them. (A terrible habit.) But many times a project will begin to take shape from something I've read — even just a line, or a throwaway reference, that I want to chase down somehow. I find I get ideas that make me want to write from books that are nothing like, on the surface anyway, what I want to work on. That means lately I haven't been reading much poetry, mostly nonfiction and novels, such as the work of D.W. Winnicott, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and Kate Briggs' The Long Form.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
On rainy June evenings in northern Utah, where I'm from, the fragrance of blooming sagebrush is everywhere, even downtown. It gets carried down from the mountains and from the gigantic sagebrush steppe to the west. It makes me feel very teenagerly and romantic — probably because when I was young, I thought that no one else could smell it, because no one ever talked about it. It felt like a completely mysterious and private scent, whose source I only learned many years later.
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?
As I said above, I find myself most interested in exploring in language what feels — on the surface, at least — radically different from language. So, lately: perfume, sculpture, physical sciences. I'm also a classically trained pianist and vocalist, so music is probably the art that got wedged in my brain the earliest, and seems to be something I can never get away from.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I could list so many: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer. And those are just the ones who are no longer alive. That said, probably no book has been more influential on my language-sense than the King James Bible. (It got there first.)
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Give birth to and name the baby I'm currently carrying.
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?
I don't see writing as an occupation in the traditional sense. I made a commitment to myself long ago that writing is something I will do no matter how I make my money. Even as I attempt to find a career teaching writing, I find it important to separate the two — I'm highly skeptical of the careerist mindset when it comes to the actual writing. I get bummed out by people who are "on the submission grind," constantly publishing, fetishizing productivity and networking relationships. As much as I, too, hope to find readers, I find it important for my own work to keep it sacred, to question and resist that mindset. To embrace what, to some, might look like non-productivity or anti-productivity.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language is interesting to me, endlessly, in a bottomless way. It's interesting to me socially, aesthetically, and historically. It’s something that feels big enough to devote my life to. Perhaps there will come a day when I plumb the depths of that interest and I won't write anymore. In that case maybe I'd go back to music, or get better at making clothes, or go to divinity school. But for now it's the primary way I think about nearly everything.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm in the process of reading Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, and loving it. Not too long ago I watched Bergman's Persona for the first time. It was all the things everyone said it would be — disturbing, beautiful, etc. — but I couldn't help but feel I came to it too late. By that, I think I mean it's possible to know too much about a movie before seeing it.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a book of essays about land art and land use in the American West, heavily influenced by Lucy Lippard. The project started because I noticed that few people who write about land art actually live in the same communities the most famous pieces do — and, as someone who grew up a drive away from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and other works like Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, I wanted to try to say something about them. The project, as projects tend to do, has ended up being about much more than that: it's also about extraction, and sonograms, and my own family history as miners and Mormon settlers in the west.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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