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?
Once a book is in the world, there’s a sense of having closed a door on something—some question, preoccupation, mode of dealing in language, specific investigation. It’s at that point that I tend to feel a kind of wistful relief: relief at being released from the demands of the project, a wistfulness for the process, for the book’s pre-publication possibilities. Each of my books has its own set of concerns; there are continuities, of course, such as a fascination with time, memory, geography, class, climate, but each book exists in a chronotope specific to itself. Field Notes, for example, was drawn from the specificities of California’s Central Valley, from my eight years’ time there, and as such it occupies a very different place in my mind than does my earlier work.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to prose first; I enjoyed writing stories as a child. In college, I signed up for a poetry workshop. It became apparent to me that poetry was the marriage of two of my great passions: language and music. I was done for.
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?
It depends. Sometimes the work comes quickly and sometimes not. Some drafts, as with Field Notes, look very close to their final form; others, particularly novel projects, endure much more revision. Sometimes a project will emerge from fragments I’ve jotted down, but more often than not, projects have found their momentum after I’ve heard a complete first line knocking about in my head.
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?
I’m rarely working on A Book from the beginning. I like to let the language reveal its form to me. For that reason, I’m not quite sure what scale of project I’m working on until I begin to realize a distinct shape.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings certainly alter the reception of the text; depending on the text’s form, I find readings more or less additive to the presentation of the language on the page. Sometimes, such performances add a depth of meaning and experientiality that the page simply can’t provide, particularly so with highly musical language that really should be heard. These are the readings I especially enjoy, both as listener and as reader.
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 try to be as aware as I can about the questions that the work is asking. Equally as interesting to me are the unconscious pulls and drivers that inform the writing itself. Only after the fact am I often aware of the questions being asked. As an example: when I began writing Field Notes, I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between the field as an historical site of oppression and the field as a kind of idyllic mythos; I was surprised, however, by how forcefully other inquiries, related to family history, memory, and the making of art itself, arose.
My theoretical concerns have to do with the nature of time and memory, the role of desire in both, the relationship between place and (personal, social, familial, political) identity, the loss of and role of nature, death, endings, the invisible and the unknown. These of course are questions that artists have always confronted; the difference now, as I see it, has to do with a shared awareness of a foreshortened future in a truly ongoing, accelerating, and global sense. All of the metaphysical questions, the epistemological and existential questions, are entirely rearranged by the exponential facts of climate catastrophe (which I’m using here as shorthand for myriad ills, including biodiversity loss, species collapse, soil depletion, extreme weather, etc., etc.).
For the painfully aware, even something as seemingly simple and beautiful as a walk on the beach conflicts sharply with the paradigms of decades prior. Once one knows, for example, that ocean spray releases more microplastics than nearly any other natural phenomenon, well, that quite changes one’s view of and relationship to and available means of expression for such phenomena.
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?
It seems to me that the current role of the writer is as it’s always been: ideally, to reflect the complex, paradoxical conditions under which we work and love and struggle; to agitate for transformation of the statuses quo that fail to honor life; to promote serious thinking and feeling within readers about the lives they lead.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It may be either, depending on the compatibility of writer and editor. I’ve had great experiences with thoughtful, attentive, generous editors; this was certainly the case working with River River Books toward the publication of Field Notes.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Two come to mind:
1. From James Wright to his son Franz Wright, recounted by a professor of mine on the first day of class: “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”
2. Keep going.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to stories)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like to move among genres. Much of my work is hybrid in nature—the forms in Field Notes, for example, might best be described as “lyric vignettes” or “documentarian poetry” juxtaposed with original photography. I’ve worked with this form elsewhere, as in my collection Women & Children, which similarly offers textual “windows” but through a fictive (though with many references to actual historical events) lens. Similarly, my essays tend to be lyrical and fragmented; as the essay functions as an attempt at testing some idea, I think that the fragment has a place there; the fragment provides visual and conceptual evidence of the attempt. I also move between more traditional poetic forms and long-form prose; there’s something resolute and very satisfying about the compression of traditional poetic forms, and I appreciate equally the breadth and scope of world that longer-form prose is able to render.
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?
I try to write. Sometimes I do write, usually at night. A typical day begins by finding the nearest window from which to check the condition of the sky, followed by a strong cup of tea.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I find space and solitude to be the best sources of inspiration. Nature is especially helpful: a wide, natural vista clears and opens my mind. Solitude for staring off and listening, for thinking and feeling without interruption in order that I might catch a line or image or music or idea as it comes.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean.
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?
Nature inspires me. Science, too, science being the invisible architecture that constitutes nature. I’m inspired by the systemic depths revealed by the relationship of space to lived experience: what is the relationship between the low-income housing at one end of a street and the Private Drive residences on the other? Who frequents that corner store? How do place and personhood inform one another?
I also love to hear people speak, to note the rhythms and tics and elisions of speech, and to investigate what these distinct aural fingerprints might suggest about other contexts.
Theory and philosophy are frequent co-collaborators in my creative process.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are simply too many to name here. For the sake of brevity: James Baldwin, Annie Ernaux, bell hooks, June Jordan, Patrick Modiano, Matthew Nye, John Steinbeck, Antonio Tabucchi, Virginia Woolf. Innumerable exquisite poems by my wonderful friends and teachers.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
When I was a child, my family and I lived for four years in Rome, Italy. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. I haven’t been back to Italy in 20 years; I’d very much like to get back there while I’m alive.
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?
Musician, mother, spy, actor, nun, delinquent, revolutionary, therapist.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The main reason is my love of language and music, for the cadences and rhythms of language, for the vast and varied registers and tones that language is able to capture. As a child, I was fascinated by the way that people speak, as I still am. I like to observe, to listen—important qualities for writing. Beyond these reasons, there’s something enormously fulfilling about documenting some aspect of life in language so that this capture can be transmitted across space and time. Writing is time travel. In a practical sense, writing requires little equipment and nearly no money. It’s something that can be done nearly anywhere.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Books: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; Émile Zola’s Germinal
Films: Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border; Felix van Groeningen’s and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m writing poems and writing music. I’m also working on an essay that’s partly about seismology and partly about the deep structural rifts endemic to American life.
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