12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lee Upton

Lee Upton is a multi-genre author of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism. Her novel Wrongful, a literary mystery that deals with writers behaving badly, is due out in May 2025 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, appeared in May 2024 from the same publisher. Another novel, The Withers, is forthcoming in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. Her other books include The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia 2023); Visitations: Stories; Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems; The Tao of Humiliation: Stories; and the essay collection Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. She is also the author of an award-winning novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, as well as six additional books of poetry and four books of literary criticism. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was a collection of poetry, The Invention of Kindness. It opened up new and gratifying friendships for me. Wrongful is a literary mystery and, as such, differs a great deal from my previous book, a comic novel—Tabitha, Get Up. This new book, Wrongful, feels quite different because questions about evil animate the book. It’s a romance, in some ways, but there’s terror lurking.

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

Poetry came most naturally to me—the way rhythm and images unfold, the way associative links lead us through a poem.  It has taken me a long time to learn how to orchestrate fiction in which cause and effect propel at least some outward action. Writing both poetry and fiction is satisfying—you can’t help but find yourself inside mysteries within other mysteries.

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 tend to work on multiple manuscripts at the same time—and things move quite slowly. When I hit a wall in one area, I work on another manuscript. By the time I return to the original trouble-making manuscript, I may discover a solution. This way of working means that multiple manuscripts finish at roughly the same time. My final drafts often are very different from my first attempts.

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?

My poems, short stories, and essays tend to have individual lives and often stubbornly resist becoming part of a collection. Or so I tend to think at first. And then I realize that the same obsessions are winding their way through much of the work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like readings. It’s only the hours before readings that tend to be problematic for me. I’ve hardly ever not been a nervous person. Once I begin reading, however, I’m often very happy to voice the work.

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?

In Tabitha, Get Up (2024) I was concerned with issues of self-trust and how we may attempt to defeat entropy and create sustaining meaning. In my new novel Wrongful I’m interested in questions of evil, how evil always has its “reasons” and a self-perpetuating vitality. Wrongful is not only about the temptations toward bad behavior that writers and all of us face; it’s also about readers and reading—the intimate romance of reading

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?

This is an individual matter, but it seems that writers should be profoundly grateful to whoever taught them to read and write and find their way to new adventures through the imagination. We can help others find their way by mentoring and by allowing ourselves continual freedom to be bold in our own writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve been able to work with marvelous editors and publishers and designers. Publishing takes a willing and devoted team, and I’ll always feel gratitude for those I’ve worked with.

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

 “Relax.” It sounds so insulting, but it’s pretty good advice. If you can relax, your own mind will give you something to imagine and consider…

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

Each form is difficult. Moving toward extended time and action frames in the novel was especially challenging for me, given my general proclivities. Each genre comes bearing its own gifts for discovering whatever mystery we might be avoiding otherwise.

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’m now able to write full-time, and so my life is very different from the days when I was working full-time and had small children and many other obligations. Typically, now, my day begins with too much coffee, and then maybe with my making a list about what I want to do, and then—if I don’t have any larger responsibilities—I dive into working. Usually on my laptop first. Then I print out the manuscript and revise. Next, I put those revisions into my manuscript on the laptop, and the process begins again. And again.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I usually read poetry or fiction—to hear another voice. I might pace around the house…I might eat something, like chocolate. Chocolate needs no defense.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs.

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?

Visual art, flowers, trees, talking with family members, overheard conversations

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m inspired by the writing of Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Anita Brookner, Tracy K. Smith, Margot Livesey, Timothy Liu, Charles Holdefer, Rachel Cusk….and so many others. I’m fortunate to have a number of friends who are writers, and they’re deeply important to me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I think it would be nice to stay for a while in a cottage by the sea and take long walks every day. And have marvelous hot soup on those days. (I sound deluded. I’m actually serious. It would be so nice.)

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?

If I could pick up another gift and had the talent…I would still want to be a writer. For the freedom and the adventure of it. If I couldn’t be a writer and were suddenly gifted with ability, I’d want to be a singer who worked on original material. Which really means being a writer with vocal range…

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since childhood. I also, as a child, wanted to be a spy. Now I don’t want to be a spy. Although writing is a little like trying to spy into the depths of the culture’s hidden life.

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

Last great book: The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch.

 Last great film: 1900, by Bernardo Bertolucci

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on poems—always—and I’m redrafting a novel in which a younger visual artist believes her life has been dramatically damaged by her relationship with an older artist.  I’m also rewriting a couple of novel manuscripts that I lost faith in earlier. I’m now trying to give those manuscripts new and more exciting lives.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Samuel Ace, I want to start by saying

 

I want to start by saying I hear the filter in the turtle tank like a fountain.

 

I want to start by saying like a fountain in the middle of a field of wildflowers.

 

I want to start by saying that today would have been my father’s 84^th birthday,
            that he died eighteen days before his 79^th.

 

I want to start by saying that he was young and that death took him by surprise.

 

I want to start by saying that my mother died nine months ago, less than four
            and a half years after my father.

 

I want to start by saying the beginning of this sentence.

 

I want to start by saying that a child could have been born in that time.

 

I want to start by saying that a whole year has gone by since my godchild’s birth.

And so begins the accumulative book-length poem by American poet Samuel Ace, the deeply intimate I want to start by saying (Cleveland ON: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2024), a work composed from a central, repeating prompt. The structure is reminiscent of the echoes the late Noah Eli Gordon proffered, composing book-length suites of lyrics, each poem of which shared the same title—specifically Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here]—or, perhaps a better example, the late Saskatchewan poet John Newlove’s poem “Ride Off Any Horizon,” a poem that returned to that same central, repeated mantra (one he originally composed with the idea of removing, aiming to utilize as prompt-only, but then couldn’t remove once the poem was fleshed out). “I want to start by saying,” Ace writes, line after line after line, allowing that anchor to hold whatever swirling directions or digressions the text might offer, working through the effects that history, prejudice and grief has on the body and the heart. I want to start by saying articulates past racial violence in Cleveland, subdivisions, loss, “trans and queer geographics of family and home,” chronic illness, love and parenting, stretched across one hundred and fifty pages and into the hundreds of accumulated direct statements. Amid a particular poignant cluster, he writes: “I want to start by saying that I accepted the conditions of my father’s love.” There is something of the catch-all to Ace’s subject matter, the perpetually-begun allowing the narratives to move in near-infinite directions. As it is, the poem loops, layers and returns, offering narratives that are complicated, as is often the way of family, writing of love and of fear and of a grief that never truly goes away. Further, on his father: “I want to start by saying I was frightened to upset the balance of our connection.”

            I want to start by saying that I’ve been out of the house twice today.

 

            I want to start by saying that now I am sitting with a friend over coffee.
                        She mourns the loss of friends because she’s in love with someone who is trans.

 

            I want to start by saying the familiarity of so many stories.

 

            I want to start by saying that I mourn the rise of rivers, the smell of creosote,
                        the relief of summer monsoons.

And yet, through Ace’s perpetual sequence of beginnings, one might even compare this book-length poem to the late Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch’s conversations of the delay, delay, delay: his tantric approach to the long poem, always back to that central point; simultaneously moving perpetually outward and back to the beginning. “I want to start by saying the deep orange skies of the monsoon.” he writes, mid-way through the collection. “I want to start by saying we have returned to Tucson.” Set into an ongoingness, the lines and poems of Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying is structured into clusters, allowing the book-length suite a rhythm that doesn’t overwhelm, but unfolds, one self-contained cluster at a time. His lines and layerings are deeply intimate, setting down a deeply felt moment of grace and contemplation. The book moves through the strands and layers of daily journal, writing of daily activity and thoughts as well as where he emerged; how those moments helped define his choices through the ability to reject small-mindeded prejudices. Through the threads of I want to start by saying, Samuel Ace may be articulating where he emerged, but all that he is not; all he has gained, has garnered, and all he has left behind. As he writes, early on:

I want to start by saying perfect in what world.

I want to start by saying desire.

 

Rennie Ament, Mechanical Bull

 

HOW TO MAKE MILK

Coat the cow in calm.
Sing it a song

with blossoms. Where a girl
who smells like vinegar

sells violets. Pick
your version: make her die or find

Wild mind by the side of the road.
Give her a lover.

They touch each other
like a goat and toddler

at the petting zoo.
Toddler calls the great pony.

Goat could use a strawberry
to rub its head against.

It took a while to get to, but I’m finally working my way through Maine poet Rennie Ament’s full-length debut, Mechanical Bull (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2023), a collection of short, sharp lyrics of sly humour, observational oddness, language play and smooth clarity. For much of the collection, Ament’s poems offer a straightforward lyric of subtle turns, with echoes of what could be seen as correlations with those sly Canadian surrealists Alice Burdick or Jaime Forsythe. “Someone told me, take a left at the next light.” Ament writes, to open the poem ““PERFECPTION IS REAL AND THE TRUTH IS NOT”,” “Her name was Imelda Marcos. She  sat like a window / festooned in blue silk. Her son Bongbong still a baby boy / in the backseat. I swung / on as instructed.” Elsewhere, Ament’s language play is more overt, allowing collisions of sound and meaning as the spark of the poem emerges from and across those breaks. Listen, for example, to the poem “RENATA S AMENT,” a short poem on her own name that begins: “Me. / A name. / An enema / as atman. Tart / as a manatee’s teat.” Ament’s poems offer a delightful sense of play but one still very sly, almost covert, and provide effects slightly disorienting. “Remember me knee-deep.” the poem “HE THEN PLEDGED” begins, “Remember me kelp-bedecked. / Remember me wet, / legs pretzeled, sex-melted  /yet spleen-tempered. Best egg / esteem the verve, never / defer me.”

These poems really are delightful, thoughtful, and compact. The collection is structured in two sections--halved, one might say—of short poems that play with a variety of line-lengths and form, each offering their own variation on that central core of compact observation, but one slightly turned, twirled or twisted. “Mother and father were nude models.” she writes, to open the poem ““DISCLOSE THE SHADY LOCATION IN WHICH YOU LURK”,” “Neither of them ever hit me. Once // I bit my mother so she bopped me, / which is different. I had crossed the street // wrong.” What a lovely book. What a lovely debut.