Leah Souffrant is a writer and artist committed to interdisciplinary practice. She
is the author of
Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body (Unbound Edition Press 2023) and
Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, PULG Liège 2017). The range of
Souffrant’s work includes poetry, visual art, translation, and critical work in
literature, feminist theory, and performance. She teaches writing at New York
University.
1 - How
did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?
Every time a book is published, it is
important. That affirmation, showing that your work reached a reader, can
energize the works that come next, and that’s been true with my books.
2 - How
did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry had been the most freeing
writing, where sound and idea and image intermingle in unexpected ways. Given
how poetry is often taught with emphasis on form and received “meaning,” this
liberating relationship to poetry isn’t always the case for young writers. In
recent years, the categories themselves – poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoir,
and so on – have felt restrictive. Now, writing is most free when I’m not bound
by those categories, or where the boundaries blur. A poem composed of
sentences. An essay that slips into poetic lines. Non-fiction infused by
imaginative sequences. This flexibility revives the sense of freedom I recall
when poetry first seduced me as a writer.
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?
Writing is fast and slow at the same
time. Some of my most satisfying writing comes in bursts, quickly written, but
what the reader eventually encounters is the result of a slow process. In
starting a poem, I might see or hear something, and it begins, and through
writing I figure something out. Then I re-write, often for sound and often
cutting the first couple of lines or moving them to a later moment in the poem.
Writing longer-form prose is both fast
and slow, too, but on a more sprawling scale. Writing prose, what I’m
encountering is often research. So that takes time, collecting those encounters
with reading and experience and research. I write as I go then rearrange
things. I love both the urgency of getting ideas down, reacting to thoughts –
my own and others’ – and I love the slow meditation on the shape of the line or
the shape of the paragraph.
One of my favorite things to do with
my writing is to move things around and see how those changes impact the
writing, the experience of reading. It’s extraordinary and fascinating, how the
order of the encounter impacts our mind and feelings. Or, I might say, How the
order of the encounter impacts our mind and feelings is extraordinary and
fascinating. And to do that, I have to slow down.
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 begin noticing something – a word in
a book, a sensation in the body, and experience in life. Often those
observations build into a pattern of observations, which eventual become a
book. That can feel like a “project” once I start to fix on tracking those
patterns of encounter. I want a book to have a sense of wholeness, which
becomes more coherent when a project emerges. But it’s often hard to know what
will inform that coherence until later in the writing process. Nevertheless, we
all have preoccupations, and that informs what we write.
And as a reader I love project books
and focused series. Today I’m thinking about The Glass Essay by Anne Carson or the Lucy poems in Break The Glass by Jean Valentine come to mind. I love The
Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Pacing, repetition, coherence,
variation, silence and noise, ambient sounds we can’t control or anticipate… They
all fascinate me. Public readings push me to be thoughtful about what and how I
share with a live audience. Some books – likely most of my book Entanglements
– are more impactful when encountered privately by a reader. I’m interested in
the different ways we come to knowledge, and a live performance is a different
encounter than a private reading.
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?
Memory and embodiment – how what we do
and remember (and forget) relates to how we understand and make sense of the
world – are endlessly interesting to me, and lately I’ve been especially
interested in the ways these theoretical concerns emerge in everyday or mundane
experience. I’m deeply interested in questions about love, in private and in
community. My writing returns again and again to women’s experience, and more
generally those experiences that are underexamined or difficult to name.
Abiding concerns in my writing and art
include what is difficult or impossible to convey, yet are essential to human
experience, understanding, knowledge and ignorance. My first published book, Plain
Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable, works to name what is often most
powerful to me in books: the ways what is blank or silent in a work of art is
often holding something important, often traumatic, and the difficulty or
impossibility of conveying that importance is very exciting to me as a reader
and writer and artist. My recent book Entanglements: threads woven through
history, memory, and the body, enacts the principle that what we
experience, what we read, what we learn, what we inherit, all impact knowledge
and ideas.
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?
Reading can make us slow down, pay
attention. We pay attention differently and to different things (ideas, worlds,
experiences) when we read. This feels like an urgent practice to cultivate now,
given the ways the “larger culture” forces an attenuation of attention in so
many ways. Of course, not all writing challenges that force, but I value
writing that invites a slowing, that seduces us to slow down.
8 - Do
you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential
(or both)?
I have a few readers I turn to during
the editing process. I sincerely value the insights of those trusted readers. I
rely on different people for different projects. Finding these people is
essential work of writing, being in community -- and the challenge of finding
readers and editors you trust is something I appreciate more as time goes by.
9 - What
is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
I’m a writer because I write, and I’m
a poet when I write poems, an artist when I paint. I really believe in the call
to do the work. Create, write, persist. Put in the time. It’s a sort of faith,
but it’s also practice. You just have to do to become, and if you don’t do
then you aren’t that – you’re doing something else – but if you are doing it,
you can (and should) claim that practice.
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poems to art to criticism)?
What do you see as the appeal?
Easy – essential, even.
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?
Wake up early. Write anything. Then
pick up where you left off – a line, a reading, a sketch, whatever the work is.
And at the end of your (creative) day, leave something for tomorrow to discover
and continue. Leave these gifts for yourself to keep you working next time you
turn to the page or the studio or the file.
Depending on the time of year and my
other commitments (teaching, for example), my schedule fluctuates, but having
morning time to write makes a big difference to me. There have been times in my
life when that meant setting an alarm for 5am to make it possible. If I get
something down first thing in the morning, the rest of the day is buoyed by
that effort.
12 - When
your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?
Walking and reading – not at the same
time.
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
Less is more when it comes to
fragrance; I’m keenly sensitive to smells. When I’m not distracted by any
scent, then I feel at home.
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?
Entanglements, my 2023 book, is in part a meditation on how everything impacts us. I
steadfastly believe all these influences and experiences are entangled in what
we think and know and create.
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
I often return to Simone Weil. And
Rilke. They remind me of the profound power of thinking with others, of poetry
and ideas. And Anne Carson’s writing has been very important to me, not only
individual books, but the ways Carson experiments and reaches across genres,
disciplines, and conventions. Yoko Ono’s art and writing has had a deep impact
on me, too, for similar reasons.
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d love to show my art more widely,
to make the connection between my writing and visual art more available, and
perhaps to a different audience.
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?
As a child, I thought about becoming
an architect, because the architect puzzles out the use of space, but I’ve
never been very interested in precise measurements, so I wouldn’t trust myself
with architecture. Then, thinking about similar puzzles of space and how an
environment makes us feel, makes me think of interior design. Shaping the
experience of being in a space interests me, and interior design should be less
dangerous that an imprecise building.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is a way of thinking – I need
this, and I’ve felt connected to that process for as long as I can remember.
And it’s fun, too (sometimes!). Writing is fundamental for me. Even when it’s
hard. And beyond my own private needs for working out ideas and experiences, I
value sharing ideas with others -- in person, in conversation, in the
classroom, as a reader. As a writer, I enter this broader conversation by
offering ideas and images, even with unknown readers. Writing – and putting it
out into the world -- is an act of optimism, compassion, and curiosity, all of
which are vital.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Great books are hard for me to narrow
down, but what stands out to me right now are Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for
Forgetting and Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World
and Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. (Ask me tomorrow, and I’ll likely
have a new list!) The last great film I’ve seen – easy: Poor Things.
20 - What
are you currently working on?
As usual, I’ve got a few irons on the
fire. I spend many days in my studio painting and drawing. This summer I
finished the first draft of a novel, which is a new genre for me, and I’m
revising a collection of poetry, working to bring together older and newer
poems. And I’ve continued a performance research project as part of the LeAB Iteration Lab with poet and theater artist Abby Paige. All this contributes to
developing ideas about creative practice, memory, and experience, which are
abiding interests.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
