Olivia Cronk is the author of Gwenda, Rodney (Meekling Press, 2024), WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). She teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and Literature at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is also Vice President of NEIUPI, the union representing faculty, librarians, and advisors.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I found out that the very generous Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson (Action Books) would take my first book (2012), I was kind of shocked–but, of course, insanely excited that what I’d been working on would have a more tangible physical body than my pile of print-outs AND that it would come from Action Books, an unbelievably cool and expansive and smart press. Actually, what I sent them was a little too thin, and I had to keep writing some more, and I did, and huge chunks of the manuscript were untitled pages (kind of posturing as in media res and fragmentary)--and when they were editing it, Joyelle suggested that I either buff it up with clearer titles to contain/frame each piece or–here is her stroke of genius, something I sometimes forget even happened but believe me it’s CRUCIAL to my whole writing life–simply cut all the titles. (!!!) Holy shit this move shaped all of my writing and thinking thereafter.
So, the first book certainly helped me feel more confident about trying to send work into the world and, because it was from a press much cooler than I, gave me some more character/credibility–but the real thing that changed my life was Joyelle’s editorial moves! After that, I stopped thinking of poems as precious singular gardens with nice fences around them. I suppose I didn’t completely write like that, anyway, but the notion that the book of poems could explode into a book book, like a spell, like a movie (I was delighted when they let me request that the title page get held off until after the last page of poems), like something else . . . really, truly shaped my whole way of composing.
In fact, the new book is my attempt at a “poetry novel” (NOT a novel in verse, btw), and I wanted to make something that “gulps” like a novel but “sips” like poetry: like, is it possible to rapidly move through it, have the “effect” of reading a novel but none of the real weight, feel a stoner-style attention to small particles as a space for psychedelic un-selfing while still vaguely sensing, like a pebble in the shoe, a narrative? Anyway, I never could have tried to do that if not for what happened in the editorial process of my first book.
One last piece of your question: it is different, though: I’m smarter, now, and have read more and listened to more songs and looked at more paintings and had a baby who has turned into a teenager and have taught about 1200 more students and been alive for more things and thought more, etc. So, the book is different because I am different but of course also the same.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have probably told this story in other spaces, and it is kind of silly but represents a real piece of my interiority.
In second grade, I was taught about poetry and then assigned the writing of a poem. I came up with an idea about snow (it was probably winter, in Chicago, when we still had real winters) AS a broken open pillow. I blew my own damn mind. I couldn’t get over the narcotic, psychedelic pleasure of metaphor dropped like elixir into language and thus producing a new image. I wanted to write poems over and over again, to get high.
I’m also quite committed to what we often refer to as “hybrid-form,” and I love writing reviews and paragraphs and even, honestly, some/most work documents. I love writing. Love it, truly. In all forms. (I love writing responses to these questions.)
But I remain committed to poetry because of its availability to multiplicity/to proliferating shadow-meanings, because of its smallness as a site of explosive possibility, and because it can contain the whole world and the beyond-world.
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?
I get a feeling for what I want to write, as a whole project (which usually gets imagined as a manuscript, which means that I am imagining projects AS books, and sometimes they’ll never get picked up as “books”):
The “feeling” is a kind of constellation of: other pieces of art that I want to directly or indirectly ekphrasticize, ideas that I want to pursue (usually, these ideas are form-based inquiries but are sometimes more conventionally delineated “ideas”), bits of language (read, heard, spoken, randomly generated sometimes in exercises with my students or as a result of preparing seemingly unrelated texts for classes), visual art pieces at which I wish to gaze, music to which I want to listen, TV shows or movies I have been thinking about . . . and basically, all of my notes and fragments accumulate (as bits and pieces) in my notebook until I have time to write.
(I’m NTT at a regional public university that has been wildly defunded for twenty-five years and newly VP of my union, my husband is NTT with a 4/4 load, and we have a thirteen-year-old, so there is NO time to actually sit down and write during the school year. I can usually steal about three days of my winter break, but all the big writing time happens in the summer).
It takes me about two years to “finish” a project (by writing, sporadically, into a digital document with my notebook next to me, over a period of about a year, then tiring of the conceit and thus “concluding” the work, then revising by reading aloud and reading silently from printed drafts, then revising by asking my husband the poet Philip Sorenson for notes), but of course I’m only 46; I’m sure many other habits and ways of thinking about writing-time will evolve.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
See above.
Because of many factors, including the editorial acumen of Joyelle McSweeney and my own drive to pleasure, I do indeed write in “book” form.
For now!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I actually do LOVE to be in readings (even though I am kind of averse to too much social time). And, because I know that I wrote about this very clearly already and because it was written during the time of NO-public (Winter 2021) and thus with some critical distance, I’m going to repeat what I said in an interview with Logan Berry:
At readings, which I did (do?) enjoy for the possibility of flexing a muscle that I don’t regularly tend to, I like being a kind of actress when reading my work. I don’t mean to imply that I’m very good at that, just that it’s a kind of playing I enjoy. When I perform my poems I have in mind the producing of a kind of feeling in a listener/reader—not so much a meaning, of course. Much more like kids humming while also making dolls talk in a dollhouse. And I hope that when someone is reading the book alone they can have that same weirdness.
So–yeah–I do use readings to understand what’s happening in the writing–and either that causes revision (not very often, though; I am too anxious to share something aloud that I’m not already very happy with) or that causes MORE writing because I get some more “feelings”-info from the performance.
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?
Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?
A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.
Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .
In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .
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?
The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now;
can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;
can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader;
can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL);
can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;
can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.
That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve literally never had a negative experience with any of the editors of my book-length works.
& shout out to the quite brilliant, thoughtful, and incisive work of my most recent editor, the writer Anne Yoder! She is essential.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I still believe in the Golden Rule. I’m an atheist, but I honestly still think about a self-sacrifice that was narrated in a certain homily, in a Catholic mass, which I attended during the school week and on Sundays.
In art-making realities, I was deeply impressed, as a grad student, by a teacher who told us to say yes to EVERY art-making occasion, so that we’d know more and be bigger in our thinking.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I cannot write anything that would be widely understood as Fiction.
I can definitely write lyrical prose.
But, in general, I find it difficult to write without poetry as my shoulder-demon/-angel.
Ultimately, though, any writing occasion is appealing to me because I might learn more about writing itself.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
See above–notebooks that accumulate material & twice-a-year down time to actually compose.
My day begins with coffee and toast, and then our kid and us two adults go off to our responsibilities. My new role in the union allows me to only teach two classes, but my hours are otherwise packed with correspondences and member organizing duties.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read more.
I find new music, film, and TV that pleases me.
I do watercolors.
I sew curtains.
I truly don’t worry about it all.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My current home: incense and garlic.
My childhood home(s): wet dog, spilled gasoline and wood shavings on a garage floor, Kirk’s Castile Soap.
14 - 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?
See above; literally EVERYTHING is of use to me.
Right now, I guess I am most wrapped up in looking itself. I feel like, for reasons unknown to me, about five years ago, I got much better at looking, even though it’s always been one of my most favorite pastimes.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Again: everything.
But, when I was younger: Lucie Brock-Broido, Joan Didion, Carl Sandburg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright. Sometimes I miss that young reading-time of being completely unfocused and finding pleasure and information in every single book you find.
I read constantly, obviously–and anything can strike me as wonderful or informative! I love the books and writings of my friends and students. My husband’s work is very influential to me. The books I assign, even if I’ve read them many times, are influential. Some recent favorites/re-favorites include this and this and this and this.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I wish I could write cleanly about pedagogy and the collective act of Literature.
17 - 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 could have been, possibly, a park ranger. I thought a lot about studying that and then living alone-ish in a big public forest. I also quite seriously considered being a plumber when I was young. In my twenties, I always assumed that I would be some sort of copy editor–before that world disappeared and before I wound up in teaching, which suits me quite well.
I love teaching almost as much as I love writing.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It came easy to me, and I love doing it.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Oh–something I mentioned above: On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. I don’t at all agree with her premises, but I’m crazy for the way she writes/the little moves and gestures.
& this Truffaut movie called The Green Room (not the contemporary movie of the same title); it’s a little shadow box kind of thing, somewhat based on Henry James’ stories, and it’s wonderfully quiet and weird.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Probably another “poetry novel,” this one a “vampire thriller” about the gaze, infection, suffering, rage . . .
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