12 or 20 (second series) questions with Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Previous collections of poetry include Salient (New Directions, 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022), her translations of Iran’s major modern woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1937-1962), were a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. The Green Sea of Heaven, a 30th Anniversary Edition of her translations of Iran’s major medieval mystic poet, Hafiz (d. 1389), appeared from Monkfish Publishing in 2024.  She currently serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. She was a Founder and Managing Partner/CEO of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique corporate consulting firms. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives in New York City.

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 published book was The Green Sea of Heaven, translations of 50 ghazals from classical Persian, from the Díwán of Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1389), Iran’s most famous lyric poet. Some had appeared in small literary magazines, and the collection was originally going to be published by the Imperial Academy in Tehran in the mid-70s. The Iranian Revolution happened and I went to law school and into business. Twenty long years later White Cloud Press reached out looking for the manuscript and published it in 1995.

I had no idea, at the time, the effect it would have on my life. I thought I was done with Hafiz, Persian, and Iran. But Hafiz introduced me to scholars and translators of Rumi and other classical Persian poets, and New Directions asked me to translate a selection of poems by Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), which were published as Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season in 2022. And I’ve served on the boards of two NGOs documenting human rights violations in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. The Green Sea of Heaven, now with 80 ghazals, was issued in a 30^th Anniversary Edition in December 2024.

My first book of my own poems, Series | India, a lyric sequence centered on hippie pilgrims to India in the 1970s, came out from Four Way Books in 2015, and formally owes a debt to John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run. Salient, geographically centered in Belgian Flanders in 1917, came out from New Directions in 2020.

These are both very different from my most recent book, After the Operation (2025), which grew out of my experience of brain surgery in 2021 to remove a benign tumor. Assembling ATO was an excruciating process: not only did I have to revisit drafts I’d written during the months of dread and recovery, but it was a “first person” book. I generally dislike writing in the voice of an identifiable “I,” but this book demanded to be written, such evasions were “off the table,” and here we are.

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

I’ve always been a poet, for as long as I can remember. My mother read me nursery rhymes and poems, and they were magical. I figured a poet was the only thing to be. When I was six, she made a “Collected Poems” edition out of everything I’d written so far. Clearly I was an aspiring formalist.

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 try to write daily, I try to resist instant revision and polishing. My unit of composition seems to be the book-length series or sequence, so I go in search of something, in some direction, not quite sure what will appear. I write longhand, type up that draft, and put it into a box. When I have 50-60 draft poems in the box I open it up and see what, in fact, I’ve been writing.

Salient, built from WWI British military field manuals and medieval Tibetan texts on protective magic, required somewhere between 5 and 40 years of obsession and research, depending on how you count. After the Operation required none—just me and my brain tumor and a pen.

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?

Poems usually begin with a piece of language that seems incandescent, plus some long-standing interest (or obsession). I often begin writing by mimicking the formal moves of another poet using my own material. For example, Series | India began because I was trying to reverse-engineer Ashbery’s moves in his late book Girls on the Run. The collaged texts in Salient owe something to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts.

Sometimes I have a sense for a “book,” but what I thought I was going to write is usually not what heads to the publisher. I thought Series | India was going to be about The Boyfriend, it turned out to be about Mothers, and the Hindu pantheon, particularly Durga and Shiva.

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

I enjoy doing readings. I learn (and take energy from) the reactions and questions and enthusiasms from fellow-poets and readers. Readings require that one select and connect poems that will work for listeners. That ordering, and the inter-poem commentary that’s permitted, offers opportunities to open the work to an audience. It forces me to frame or look at the work in a different, and often new, way. It’s also a constraint, especially for those of us who work in larger units of composition: a poem that picks up resonance as part of a sequence may be less engaging out of context.

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 am always interested in what can be done with and to language. How at the level of lexicon, syntax, sequence, constellation, can maximum pressure be placed on language in the service of whatever the poem seeks?

I never think of my poems as trying to answer anything. They are engaged with seeking and asking. And the question I am always focused on is: How to use language to express or conjure—directly or in some space created by language—something that cannot be said? A lot of poets are working in that rich vein, bringing to light much which has been (or remains) silenced or unspeakable.

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?

Song, poetry, and tale-telling have been “brain stem” activities for humans for tens of thousands of years. The (hopeful) idea was that “if we get the words just right, then the gods must do as we ask.” The role of the singer and story-teller has changed in different contexts and eras, but perhaps the subject matter hasn’t.

Writers celebrate, lament, console, spin stories and histories, relay the news, sound alarms—these remain important. In our current moment of algorithms and concentrated communication channels, the creation and exchange of songs and stories in communities is of vital importance.

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

I have been blessed with great editors for both translation and my own poetic work, and they used a very light touch. Their questions and insights have been a gift to me and to the work.

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

Health. Food. Friend(s). A safe place to live. Everything else is gravy.

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

Curiosity about poems by Hafiz drew me to learn classical Persian. Translating Persian was an intense education about English, about poetry, and about writing my own poems in English. To bring something into your own language forces you to push your assumptions about what your language can and might do. It forces you to consider innovative syntactical or lexical moves you might never have considered.

In translation you push your own language, and it pushes back. For example, in Persian, there are no gendered pronouns and no capital letters. This forces you to make, or evade, difficult choices in your English translation—and these discoveries enrich your own repertoire.

Translation is also a way to train and exercise your “writing muscles” in a fallow time. It’s the ultimate close read of an author’s work. It opens a world.

While there is the danger that the voice of the work/author you’re translating can enter and overwhelm your own, I’ve only found that intrusion to be valuable, expanding the range of possibilities in my own work.

I love moving back and forth between them.

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?

The morning, early morning: coffee plus an hour or two of quiet time is when I am most creative, most able to absorb difficult poetry or critical work by others. Revision, corporate work, the administration of daily life, that can all be done later in the day.

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

I read literary criticism, preferring brilliant readers/critics on complicated or difficult writers. I find constraints or procedures that may provoke interesting work—in a fallow time I used pairs of random Tarot cards as a prompt, or lines from other poets. I translate, or pore over someone else’s translations from languages I know slightly or well.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Since my brain surgery I have no sense of smell. What I miss most is the scent of a southwest wind coming over the Atlantic in late August, laden with honeysuckle and the promise of fog on the New England coast.

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?

Archaeological artifacts and the excavated ground from which they came, the drawings from those expeditions. Megaliths, as on Orkney or in central Turkey. Visual art, largely sacred in nature, preferably Tibetan. The music that interests me most is improvisational music from India or Iran.

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

Oh gosh. What a list that would be after 50+ years of reading and writing. I truly don’t know where to begin. It’s possible that the writer who most recently (ten years ago) blew apart my assumptions about what writing can do is W. G. Sebald, especially Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. Poets Rosmarie Waldrop, Rachael Blau DuPlessis, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nathaniel Mackey, Renee Gladman, have also been important recently. Heimrad Bäcker, Eugene Ostashevsky, Donna Stonecipher, Uljana Wolf. Critics DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Peter O’Leary, Joseph Donahue.

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

There’s nothing left on my bucket list. Somehow my ferocious self got all those boxes got checked… I feel pretty blessed.

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 love the law, I love negotiation and complex decision-making. I loved being an entrepreneur and corporate consultant. I still work with individuals and their organizations to develop and implement strategy, to help them reorganize themselves or their operations, or to manage a collaboration with another organization.

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

Writing poetry was the most important thing, I had to do it, regardless of talent or product. It was a spiritual practice. Of course, I needed a day job…

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

I just finished the first two books of Danish author Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, in which the speaker finds herself trapped in an day that endlessly repeats—but that doesn’t begin to explain the book, or why I’m completely drawn into it. If I could explain, I would.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am picking up the various threads (sequences/series) of poems I was working on in 2020, before the decision to have brain surgery. Once that decision was made, the poems in After the Operation appeared and shoved all of this late 2010s work aside. Neolithic archaeology, divination, and the loss of an imaginary beloved who in fact never existed. I have no idea what will come of it all.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Megan Pinto

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.  She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, Storyknife, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.

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

Saints of Little Faith is my first book! I have always dreamed of having a book out in the world. Achieving a dream is life changing in and of itself. Now I know it is possible.

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

I read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, in my first college English class and was forever changed. Before that point, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But after reading Carson, I knew I wanted to devote myself to studying poetry, and learning how to write beautifully.

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?

In the beginning, I am following little curiosities. I tend to let the poems accrue, and not worry too much about the larger architecture . About every 6 months or so, I like to print out everything I have been working on and tape it up on the wall. I leave it like that for another month, and revisit it frequently. I start to see how the poems are talking to each other, and my deeper interests and themes begin to reveal themselves to me. Then I go back to generating new work. 

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?

Poems usually begin for me with a musical phrase or an image. A rhythm that stays in my mind, and propels me into the draft. I would say I write musically, imagistic ally, and instinctually at first, and only later after many drafts I start to ask myself “what is this poem trying to say?”. I am mostly going poem by poem. Only toward the very end, once the manuscript has started to become clear to me, am I writing more specifically into the holes in the manuscript.

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

I see public readings as a parallel practice. I read my poems aloud in private while revising, but public readings are different. They sometimes reveal to me what I want to revise, if I falter over a line or verbally edit a phrase mid-reading, but mostly they teach me about my own vulnerabilities. What I’ve processed enough to share with others, and what still feels tender to me. 

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 terms of my own work, I’m less interested in theory and more in beauty. I hope I make something that allows other people to feel deeply. 

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?

To listen, not just hear. To look, not just see. 

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

Essential! I’m not too precious with my work and I always appreciate the extra eye of a trusted editor. Sometimes things that make sense to me inside my head do not totally translate. Four Way has been so wonderful with edits. Hannah Matheson (my brilliant editor) is so thoughtful and kind. Editors make me feel confident about releasing my work into the world.

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

After college I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and she talks about leaning against a problem or idea, instead of forcing a solution. I love that verb in this context. To lean against the idea. Keeping contact, but not forcing. Sharing some weight.  

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?

I tend to have writing heavy months and reading heavy months, and these alternate due to the demands of my day job (I work in advertising) and personal life. That being said, I can write whenever, wherever. If it’s a writing month, some days will have 5 minutes of writing, some will have hour long stretches. It depends on what I’m working on that week. If I’m generating heavily or revising. A typical day begins with some movement, coffee, and breakfast. Hopefully I have a little time to read something that is inspires me.

 

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

This is such an important part of the writing practice. For me, I’ve learned that whenever my writing is stalled, it means I’m not reading something that speaks to me deeply. When this happens, I’ll either turn to some of my favorite books, or I’ll start a new novel. This gets me connected with language again, and I can start to fill the well.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Honeysuckle. 

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?

I think everything influences my art. My engagement with writing is a byproduct of my engagement with living in the world.

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

So many. But to keep it brief: Larry Levis, Susan Mitchell, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Carson. These are writers I can always turn to when I am feeling lost. 

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

See the northern lights. 

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 would be a therapist. And I think I would be an excellent therapist. 

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

I love writing. Writing has led me to everything that is good in my life. It has guided me, shaped me, changed me. I don’t think it is possible to be bored if you’re a writer. At least not for long.

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

Animal by Lisa Taddeo. And I just re-watched Moonstruck and fell in love all over again. 

19 - What are you currently working on?

Resting. It’s so easy for me to be in motion. Lately I’ve gotten much better at saying no and taking time for myself. I’ve noticed this has benefited my writing immensely. I would like to continue finding balance between being in the world and cultivating solitude. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Prufer

Kevin Prufer's newest poetry collection is The Fear (Copper Canyon Press in 2023). His new novel, Sleepaway is out in 2024 from Acre Books. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches  (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way Books.

He's edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/ Martha Collins).  

With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongside essays, photographs, and ephemera.  

 

Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.

Among Prufer's awards and honors are many Pushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.  His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.

Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book came out when I was still in my mid-20s.  It was accepted for publication before I defended it as an MFA thesis. I was certainly not ready to have a book out and it did not do well in the world.  It got one entirely negative (even nasty) review in a major literary quarterly, and then it vanished. Still, I had a book out from a reputable publisher, so I felt pretty good about it at the time.

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

I always liked poetry.  I had to memorize it at my toney boarding school and I came to love the cadences of Eliot and Frost and Dickinson, even though I didn’t necessarily understand the poems all that completely.  In college, at Wesleyan University, I took no poetry classes, but I wrote poems and edited the undergraduate literary magazine.  One day, I sent a single poem out to a magazine I’d found on the shelf of a local bookstore and—in retrospect, amazingly—they took it.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I became committed to poetry in a lifelong sort of way.

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’m pretty fast.  I get an idea and run with it as far as I can.  More often than not, though, I end up dropping it and going with something else, running with that, instead, and usually dropping it.  But for individual pieces that do make it into books: the first drafting process is fast.  Then I revise a lot.  I don’t take notes.  I do read a lot, though. 

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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 usually not working on a book—not when I’m writing poems.  I just get to a point where a book seems inevitable.  It is not a fraught process for me.  I gather the poems into a manuscript.  I think about how they are in conversation with each other and I try to make that conversation interesting.  That is all.  The difficult part is always writing the poems. My novel, Sleepaway, however, was always going to be a book.

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

I am ambivalent about readings.  I do a lot of them and I’ve had a lot of practice.  Because of this, I know how to read poems out loud.  (It takes practice, truly. And sometimes coaching from more experienced friends.) But I often leave readings exhausted and nervous and wanting, more than anything, a drink or three.  Alone.  But that’s just my own nonsense.   I think a poetry reading is a good way to encounter poems which are (or ought to be) experiences of both music and language.   These days, I’m reading from my novel.  I’m still learning how to do that, though.  It requires a slightly different set of skills.

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’m not sure what the current questions are and, if I were sure, I would probably try to avoid them.  I am interested in the way time passes and in the ways writers control the passage of time.  I’m also interested in history, the way history lives inside our senses of who we are and inside our language.  And I’m interested in the inevitability of decline—social, historical, personal, mortal—and how that inevitability shapes our art and selves.  I guess these are eternal questions.

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?

I used to admire the Victorian idea of a writer as someone who thinks carefully about ethics and values and communicates those careful thoughts to readers who need to hear them.  Now I think that the role of writers is to participate in a larger, multidimensional conversation of literature and art.  All of us, writers, artists, or not, get to listen in on that conversation, which is vast, polyvalent, and multiply simultaneous, and, in doing so, learn about who we have been, who we are, and who we might become.

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

Depends very much on the editor.  I’ve had many, most of them quite good.  My current editors, at Copper Canyon Press and Acre Books, are extraordinarily good.  And when I get good editorial advice about my writing, it is never difficult to take it.  It usually feels, instead, essential and inspiring.

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

For writers?  It is this:  “If you are chicken-shit all by yourself in front of your own computer while you are writing a poem or a story or an essay … then when aren’t you chicken-shit?”  I know that’s more of a question than a piece of advice, but it was given to me by a writer I admire when I was rewriting the same kind of poem over and over again.  I needed to be a little bit braver and try things I was uncomfortable with – there, in front of my computer, alone, with a glass of wine, at night.

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

It has been easy.  I love both genres and am curious about the tools available to me in each.  They are different, certainly.  The tool of the poetic line is formidable and many-bladed and it is hard, sometimes, to work without it.  But I’ve found that the paragraph has its own excitement and velocity.

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 write late at night only. With a glass of wine and music.

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

I read books.  Lots of them.  I am always reading a book or two.  But, unlike most my friends who aren’t writers, I read like a writer.  That is, I ask, “why did the author choose to do it this way? Why not that way?  What’s governing the odd choice of tense here?  Or the shift in point of view?”   Those kinds of questions are important to me because they give me ideas for my own writing (and help me understand other writers’ choices).  I can see how they might interfere with my enjoyment of some books, though.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

4711.  A cologne from Cologne.

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?

Mostly books, yes.  I always have music playing while I write, so in a vague way, music.  And, of course, my own experience as a living person.  That’s probably the biggest thing.  Still, I can’t overestimate the writing of other people as formative.

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

In prose, Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven.  And all of Willa Cather.  And everything by Henry James.  Flannery O’Connor.  And Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.  In poetry, Keats.  Eliot.  Delmore Schwartz.  Catullus.  Russell Atkins.  Laura Jensen.   I could go on and on. Truly, I am a useless machine that reads.  Those are a few, off the top of my head.

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

I would like to finish the novel I am writing now.  And I would love to go to Sicily, to visit the Classical and pre-Classical sites there, sites I’ve read all about for years.  I would also like to be able to go back in time.  I’d travel way back to the 4^th or 3^rd centuries in Western Europe—maybe Ravenna or Trier—and try to understand what it was like to be alive then. 

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 worked in the news for a while, for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  But I didn’t like it much.  I was going to teach high school and then I was going to get a PhD in comparative literatures (German, French, English).  I’m glad I didn’t do any of those.  I’m very happy being a writer and also working with talented younger writers as they learn who they are and how to write through that.

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

It was inevitable.  I’ve always written.   There wasn’t something else.  I remember showing my third grade teacher my story about a penguin.  “I didn’t copy this,” I told her. “I wrote it myself.”  I didn’t say this because I was insecure.  I said it because I knew my story was so great that she would think a professional, famous writer had written it if I didn’t inform her otherwise.  Probably a writer who had won many major prizes.

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

Black Earth by Timothy Snyder was the last truly great book I’ve read.  It terrified me.  Strangely, the last great film I’ve seen was on the same subject. Zone of Interest.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m editing a book of poems by authors you’ve never heard of (but should have heard of) for Wesleyan University Press.  I imagine it will be an alternate (or antidote) to the familiar Norton anthologies.  I’m doing this with a couple friends, Martin Rock and Adrienne Perry, both excellent editors and writers.  And I’m writing another novel.  And I’ve got a new book of poems mostly done, too.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

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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