12 or 20 (second series) with Marguerite Pigeon

Marguerite Pigeon is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her first book, a poetry collection called Inventory (Anvil Press 2009), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her first novel, Open Pit appeared in spring 2013 with NeWest Press. Originally from Blind River, Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Vancouver, where she works as a freelance editor.

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, a poetry collection, made me feel like a real writer. I continue to be unashamed of it, which is all a writer can hope for. My second book is a novel. It took longer to write, and I felt that I had less facility for extended narrative, so it was harder, scarier, more confidence-shaking. All in all, a worse experience. But now I feel like, ‘Damn! Look at that! I didn’t give up!”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poems in my 20s. I didn’t know it then, but I’m sure I took it up as a counter to my then-life as a journalist working in daily news—the salt mines of non-fiction. I was very shy about writing (my own work), so composing poems and submitting them in secret to journals felt plausible, like taking small steps.

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 think I’m too junior to have a process yet. But I want one. I would say, however, that I am fast rather than slow. With my two current projects—more poetry and another novel—I’m trying to put the brakes on and think before I write. This coincides nicely with new constraints on my time, so maybe it’s just me making myself feel better. But I used to throw a lot of stuff out there that was half-baked and I’d prefer not to do that anymore. All of my writing goes through dozens of iterations, in part because of that throwing-myself-in tendency. I have no idea what I’m doing in a first—or fifth—draft. Maybe that’s why I’ve always made a lot of notes. Stupid amounts of notes.

4 - Where does a poem or piece 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 am amazed by friends who write a short story and find that they love one of the characters enough to build a whole novel around them. This is a depth of connection I have not experienced. My short stories feel alive, but only within themselves. The new poetry project I’m undertaking is intended to be a book-length poem. And the new novel, which exists mostly in my head, began as a novel. So I guess I’m leaning towards “books.”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like public speaking, so I’ve always enjoyed reading for others—and especially overcoming the odds by not boring every single person present. When I do read, I’m often startled to find that my work could be tighter, shorter and more dynamic. I usually edit down whatever passage I’m delivering if it’s fiction, so I guess that does tie reading to the writing process. I am also a convert to readings as an audience member. I used to poo-poo them, but I think I only cared about my own work back then. Now I go regularly and I feel like it feeds me hugely. I’m in debt to anyone who runs a reading series. I like to sit and think about the relationship between the speaker and the work. Of course, there are a lot of bad readings. But there’s a lot of bad everything.

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?
While I have an overriding concern with the position of women, specific questions vary book to book. With Open Pit, it took years to articulate these. I finally realized that I wanted to think about how we reckon with an unhappy past, especially when it feels like others would like to see it erased. Second, I wondered what it meant to live through a major historical shift—in this case, a revolutionary 1980s overlaid by neoliberalism. I suppose a third question was how to write about heavy political issues without making readers want to run away screaming. My newer questions probably seem slight: this book of poetry I’m writing is about fashion, which has always interested me. But I hope the book will be as much about self-fashioning, especially on the part of women, as it is about clothes.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The category of ‘writer’ is changing with self-publishing, blogs, etc., so it’s hard to pinpoint a central role. I hope I’m open-minded about what writing can do, and who can do it. But my favourite writers all get down and dirty with politics, which is risky and sometimes dangerous. I want to become that kind of writer. I went to a panel of very famous young American writers a couple of years ago and I nearly wept when they all agreed that there was little room for explicit politics in fiction. They thought that that kind of writing was an artefact of the 20th century and its various civil rights movements. This view blew my mind—in a bad way. I hope some of them have changed their tunes.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As a lowly editor of non-creative writing—that’s how I earn my living—I’m absolutely convinced of the necessity of the editor’s role. But because so much creative writing happens in isolation, it’s easy for writers of fiction or poetry to sign up to the romantic notion of the single voice in the wilderness and one person’s power to convey Ultimate Truths that should never be messed with. This is so bad for the world. Every time a close reader or editor takes the time to read your work, you should send them flowers—or money. They allow the writing to live. They bring their intelligence to it. And they can see in it the gaps and problems that you cannot. As the writer, your privilege is to take it or leave it, but never without considering their point of view.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I like this question because I have an answer: Greg Hollingshead, who was running the Banff Centre when I did a residency there, once told me that it didn’t matter what genre or topic I was writing in/about as long as the project was hard, because otherwise, I would get bored. Not me personally. He didn’t know me. He just didn’t want to see any younger writer take on a full-length project just to watch the energy seep away. It was was probably an off-hand remark for him, but that’s basically the day I decided to write my novel. No joke.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s not easy to shift genres—not for me, at least. It’s like speaking two languages. Whenever I speak French for any length of time, I develop a hilarious francophone accent that I’m sure people think is fake. But my brain doesn’t have that swiftness to switch without transposing one set of stylings over another. I do this with writing. And yet, being from a town of 3,000 where, literally, everyone does two things—the mayor runs a bar; my mom the nurse taught aerobics—I have a healthy scepticism of specialization.  Why shouldn’t a person take more than one form of writing seriously? But it comes with a cost. People get good at things they do often, and you need to read a lot in any genre you write in, so there’s a real time limitation to how deep you can go. Also, granting agencies give people with more books in one genre more money. I think maybe it’s because multi-genre writers are perceived as dabbling. I am certainly shocked at the frequency with which I encounter fiction writers who say they “hate” or “don’t get” poetry, and poets who think fiction writers are shallow or in it for the money (!!!). None of that makes sense to me.

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?
How I wish I could say that I get up, make coffee, and sit down to my computer for a long session of writing before taking a walk out of my stately home to feed the ducks. In reality, I have to steal writing time, and I’m not a very clever thief. That said, when I am writing, I am not a procrastinator. I’m too much of a goody-goody, as we used to say in grade school. I like to write a lot, for sustained hours, and then smugly review my progress. So it’s weird: I don’t put writing off, but because of external constraints on my time, I don’t get to it as often as I’d like. I do prefer to write in the morning. And I really do like to take walks and see the ducks, which helps me think.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
In fiction, at least with straight-ahead narrative, you often get stuck on plot, on whether a character is behaving in a way that’s true to who they are, or on the quality of the writing itself. For the first two issues, I return to my notes and then make more notes. I go so crazy note-taking that I sometimes have a sleeping fit, where I will barely make it to my bed before I conk out for fifteen minutes: my brain can’t handle all those hard questions. With regards to the quality of the writing, I turn to my idols, whose finished works are impossibly good, and the writing incredibly easy or funny or devastating. I am also a big fan of research, so sometimes it helps just to go back to that supporting literature. A new idea can pop up that opens the door for me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My best friend from childhood says my house always smelled like chicken. Which is a compliment, I think. Beyond that, my spiritual home, Northern Ontario, often smells like earth warming up while the snow melts away, maybe mixed with exhaust from trucks and snowmobiles. I can really get there, just thinking about those smells!

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?
Film has influenced me directly. I once saw a Bunuel film that literally made me run to my computer to write. I wanted so much for my work to be that weird and beautiful and smart. Oh, how I came up short!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Probably the genre that most influences me daily is news writing. I take in a lot of it—and not all high-brow stuff either; I’m not picky when it comes to news. I would then put fiction and poetry in a tie as my second-biggest influences.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to translate a long-form narrative—probably a novel—from French to English and do a good job of it. I would also like to participate in a writers’ festival somewhere out there in the big world, so I could meet and share work with writers outside of North America.

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 was a journalist first, and maybe I’ll be one again. Other than that, I could see myself working for a social justice organization again—hopefully one like Rights Action, the awesome group through which I originally went to Central America.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My path has been uneven. In my twenties I had several “real jobs” as a journalist. Then I spent time working in the international social justice movement. These days, I take my editing work seriously. So, there’s a pattern: I’ll likely always do other things while I write. But I feel more at home writing, and I see it as the biggest commitment in my life along with my family and friends.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Embarrassingly, even though it’s been three years since someone asked me a similar question, I still have the same answer: Proust. I’m on Volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time. It’s the best and most influential work of creative writing that I have ever come across. I fear it ending, but luckily, I’m going super slow and will probably reach age 50 before that happens. Film-wise, I recently watched Spike Lee’s 4-part documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke. It’s very straight and unadorned, but the stories don’t need embellishment. I was stunned. Mad as hell.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My ‘fashion project’ is a book-length poem in which I’m trying to figure out why I’ve always cared about fashion, how to reconcile the contradictions in fashion—ie, the freedoms and pleasures that consumerism has allowed for women vs. the low-paid labour, performed mostly by women, behind a century of garment-making—and, on a more basic level, how modernity allows self-fashioning and at what cost. My ‘prison project’ is a novel about two childhood friends from Northern Ontario who encounter one another later in life on either side of the women’s penal system: one teaching creative writing to a group of inmates, and one living life as an inmate.

[Marguerite Pigeon reads with Ottawa poets Chris McPherson, Chris Jennings and Shane Rhodes on Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 7pm at Raw Sugar Cafe]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late May, 2013

While digging through boxes to prepare further archive for the University of Calgary, I found this note from the late Jane Rule, with the best line about John Newlove: "He bit me at a party a century ago, but I remember him fondly for other reasons." She and I judged a first book competition for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild in 1999, the timing of which meant I was touring, and ended up calling her from various bars all over Alberta. She was horrified on my behalf at the thought of anyone touring, and nearly didn't believe me when I told her it was even my idea.

In other news, we’re gearing up for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, and the pre-fair reading the night before, happening June 14 and 15, 2013. And don’t forget WESTfest the weekend before, where I’m even performing on the main stage (if you can believe it), as a tenth anniversary WESTfest special. Is there anything else I need to mention?

Zurich, Switzerland: As part of her participation in the 2013 dusie kollektiv [see the above/ground press publications by myself and Kaia Sand here, for same] as part of this year’s AWP, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski [see her Tuesday poem here; see her 12 or 20 question here] produced This Place (dusie, 2013). The poems in this small chapbook (with one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen on a chapbook in quite some time, done and designed by Lauren Schimming) works an exploration of geographies, both physical and sensual, writing poems such as “Arrival (warm and damp),” “This Place,” “Driving” and the extended travel-poem “Classified.”

The cloud forest

Cloud coats us—shoulders hands

and arms at higher altitude

trees do not grow tall

no trunk-creak in the evening

nor afternoon shadows across field

            lava-lined riverbed in the valley

ohias flowering red from lichen-dripped

branches calling bird-song closer

The poems in this small collection are constructed around physicality, managing abstract and concrete foundations in each, held down enough so as not to free-float away.

This place

This place        not belonging not mine not

any place belonging     the longing place the land

belonging me to it to longing and green and

green fields calling green      and not naming not

knowing not names nor place nor origin     asking at

market given names and dates and given market

which like butterscotch given market to place

given to memory displaced     to morning sky blue

skied given to blue and placement above and

cloud given to shadow over place sheltering place

place sheltering misplaced memory of belonging

and not    not naming this place not given to place

to shelter to memory to sky to butterscotch to blue

Montreal QC: Where have all the student journals disappeared to? It’s been, admittedly, a number of years since I picked up a copy of Scrivener creative review, produced through the Department of English Students’ Association and the Arts Undergraduate Society at McGill University. Originally founded in 1980, the new issue of Scrivener, issue number thirty-eight, features an intriguing interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti. Conducted by fiction editors Julie Mannell and Gavin Thomson, the interview focuses on Heti’s third novel, How Should a Person Be (2010) [see my review of such here; see another recent interviewwith Heti on same here]:

JM: I also found the critique very gendered. In the article I’m working on for The Huffington Post I sort of draw parallels between some of the criticism you received along with the criticism Lena Dunham received, along with the criticism that even people like Roseanne [Barr] have received: If men talk about art, there’s a seriousness to it, but when women talk about it, it’s flighty and it’s frivolous and it seems as though almost no women has the right to speak about art or even art for women.

SH: Yeah, or herself, and that somehow talking about being a woman is not talking about being a human, but talking about being a man is talking about being a human.

JM: [The criticism of] Virginia Woolf is startling similar to the criticism that you’ve received, and at the crux of the criticism, Q.D. Leavis was trying to say that, because she wasn’t a mother, Virginia Woolf could not articulate the experience of being a woman or being a human being properly.

SH: Well, I don’t think there’s anything frivolous to talk about if you’re writing a book. Like I was just reading Jane Austen and she’s considered one of the greatest English writers and it’s all about gossip and who that men in going to choose and if you think life is frivolous, then, you know.

The interview is illuminating, slightly scattered, and endearing in part for its honest questioning, as the two interviews attempt to understand Heti’s perspective on life and writing. There were some interesting pieces of fiction and fantastic artworks by Stefanie Kuzmiski, Mary McCulloch and Amy Goh, but another highlight of the issue was the poem, “from News of Andrea,” a somewhat uneven collaborative sequence with intriguing lines by Eliot D’Silva and Nausicaa Renner. Despite the unevenness, the poem intrigues.

Eric Baus, Scared Text

My review of Eric Baus' Scared Text (The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2011) is now online at Galatea Resurrects #20.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Gridley

Sarah Gridley is the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (2005) and Green is the Orator (2010), both published by the University of California Press, and Loom (2013), published by Omnidawn. She is an assistant professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

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

Weather Eye Open, my first book of poems, was published in 2005, when I was 37. Pragmatically speaking, my first book changed my life by opening the door to an academic career. Goethe is said to have cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life.” I am grateful for the opportunities that came with the book, but it is good to remember that (and speculate how) things might have turned out otherwise. If you let it, academia can seal you up in its own strange wordy world. I have always been drawn to other forms of work, mostly physical ones, and farming and gardening in particular. Currently I am satisfying a need to be more in the material world by taking a ceramics class (inspired by the writings of M.C. Richards, for whom clay and poetry were mutually explicating mediums).

I hope my work is evolving in the direction of greater openness, silence, and simplicity, but I know I have a long way yet to go. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called my work in Green is the Orator “always a bit of a challenge” and a recent PW reviewer of Loom said my language can be “showy” and “labored.” These assessments sting, which says they are probably hitting a mark, if not the mark. When I was working on my MFA thesis, one of my advisors wrote on the draft, “You don’t have to flash your trash so much, Gridley.” This is a really good point. Just because you can make what Dan Chiasson (in One Kind of Everything) helpfully calls filigreed language, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That said, Dylan Thomas was my first love in poetry, and it is hard to expel the Celtic filigrees he put in my heart and lungs and ears. I just looked, and filigree comes from filum (thread) + granum (seed). A filigree is a grain-thread. This is another thing that maybe makes my language feel difficult: I took Latin for six years and am enamored of the idea Thoreau has of its tawny grammar (he pirates this from Spanish, grammatica parda) In this vision of language, words are not tools but living transplants, re-grounded in the page “with earth adhering to their roots.” I write poetry this way, with this desire for linguistic dirt. Does that make my work difficult? Maybe, but I’d prefer to think it makes it solemn, in the sense of ceremonial. Like any word ending in “mn”—hymn, damn, autumn, column, limn—the word solemn is a little spooky. The silent presence of the “n,” visible though inaudible, is a shade from another language, not alive, exactly, in English, but not quite vanished, either. Words are, as Emerson says, fossil poetry.  

After the so-called “linguistic turn,” we are no longer supposed to think of language this way, as having anything natural (or essential) about it. Language is convention, arbitrary convention. Meaning slips kaleidoscopically through shifting signs. But as process theologian Catherine Keller suggests, we can appreciate and even process the intervention of postructuralist thought without having to abandon the idea of ground, without sealing ourselves up in text. In what she calls “eartheology,” ground is understood as something other than foundation or essence. Ground is understood as ground, i.e., as dirt, the “black, organic stuff of soil that gives birth to all life,” whose molecular structure exhibits “fractal self-similarity with no self-sameness.” “At every scale,” she writes in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, “life is the story of complex emergence within a ground shot through with quantum indeterminacies and chaotic nonlinearities, composed of cosmic instabilities braided into tensely persistent orders…These orders can be called open-system stabilities.” That sounds difficult, but also exciting to me, and real to me. Ann Lauterbach recently published a wonderful book called The Given and the Chosen. In it she says that form emerges as a third term between Eros and Thanatos. I believe in a very earthy sense of composition and decomposition. I believe in worms, snakes, dragons, and other chthonic helpers.

 I do not set out to make difficult poems but that is often the label attached to my work. People can get aggravated—even enraged—by poetry that is perceived to be purposively difficult. One reviewer on Amazon is very enraged by Green is the Orator: “This collection of poems, probably considered "difficult" by the author, is mostly the gibberish that seems to be in vogue in academic poetry circles… I know my academic friends will say good poetry doesn't have to have clear, concise meaning or even beautiful language if it's ‘experimental.’ To this I reply ‘Emperor Ashbery and his acolytes have no clothes.’” I am sorry to get someone so agitated and defensive about poetry. I do not imagine John Ashbery sets out to make people angry, either. Though I do not identify myself with Ashbery, or consider myself his “acolyte,” I do enjoy his work. As my colleague, Michael Clune, brilliantly argues in “’Whatever Charms is Alien: John Ashbery’s Everything,’” the poet’s effort is not to alienate, but to bring the alien into familiar orbits. Whether you like that effort or not, it is not done to pain or alienate anyone. It is experimental, yes, in the sense that it is trying to see what language can do and be. Can language bring the alien home? I admire someone who can work on that question. I guess I work on that question, too, but where “alien” takes on a theological orientation.

Difficulty is certainly not my intended effect. That said, I do not sit down to make poems for effects, good or bad. I do not make poems for approval. I sit down to make them as methods of inquiry and acts of awareness. At present I still have a skipping-stone brain, but I hope as I age and concentrate I will have more of a big gray boulder brain.  

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

Poetry was there in first words, first memories, first books. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I loved the sound of blueberries hitting the pail in Blueberries for Sal. I would come home from a school vocabulary lesson repeating the word lugubrious ad nauseam. Certain words were like tootsie rolls, taking up all of my sensory attention.

Poet Donald Hall invents three mythic characters, or tutelary spirits, to account for the psychic origins of our pleasure in poetic form: Goatfoot (a muscle pleasure, a delight in beats); Milktongue (a mouth pleasure, a pleasure in vowels and consonants); and Twinbird (the pleasure of match-mismatch, rhyme, image, metaphor). These characters were a vivid part of my childhood from as early as I can remember.

As a child I loved fiction, too, and nonfiction. I remember being very attached to a nonfiction book about an otter called Ring of Bright Water. I remember reading books chosen randomly from my parents’ or my grandmothers’ bookshelves. I came from a verbally rich home that encouraged me to read peripatetically. Early on, I don’t think there was any conscious discrimination among genres. And I think my love of poetry is still very much caught up in, cross-pollinated by, my love of fiction and nonfiction. I resist purist attitudes toward genre. Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape.

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 am a slow writer, and a compulsive re-drafter. I keep a notebook whose entries then become starting points for translation. It’s transcription (from handwriting to computer typing), but it’s also translation. There is an interesting translation process that takes place between notebook-thinking and poem-thinking. I like that span, because it keeps the open-ended, the en plein air, in touch with the finding and making of form.

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?

I am never working on a book from the beginning. I think that approach would be a disaster for me. Books are bullies. To let a book into the playground of a poem would be like asking for a black eye. The poem as a mode of inquiry, which is the only kind of poem I am able to write, would run for the hills if the book’s shadow cast itself across the playground. After a certain number of poems are written, after they have started to play together, as it were, then the book is allowed in. Then the book has lost its power to bully.

As to where the poems begins? In silence. In disequilibrium. In curiosity. In wonder. In praise. In superstition. In faith. In disbelief. In accusation. In solemnity. In improvisation. To quote Dylan Thomas:

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: "I'd be a damn' fool if I didn't!" These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

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

            Because I myself prefer to meet poems on the page, in a space of solitude and with the opportunity for re-reading, spacing out, annotating, walking around, drinking ginger ale, sitting down, copying out, reading aloud, etc., I feel ambivalent about reading my poetry in a public setting where people are pretty much compelled to keep seated and pretend uninterrupted attention. For me, public readings feel like a certain kind of punishment fitting a certain kind of crime. The crime would be making material of introversion. The punishment would be requiring extroversion from an introvert.

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 have a lot of theoretical concerns behind my writing, some of which may have already leaked out here in preceding answers. Besides literature, the two fields I raid regularly for theoretical frameworks are philosophy and religion. Theorists like Levinas and Bataille, who theorized often in the intersection of these fields, interest me a lot. William James is a persistent influence on my work. And feminist theory, particularly of an ecofeminist stripe, is hugely important to me. The current questions have to be ecological. I can’t see how they can be otherwise. They have to be political, whether you conceive of political in macro or micro forms.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

            I think that depends on the writer. I think we need writers who can be public activists, who have the ability to be polemical without degrading poetry to propaganda, and I think we need writers whose gestures are not so explicitly political, who work to make language as humane as it is has the capacity to be, even in its smallest gestures.

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

            I love working with editors. It is such a privilege to have someone look at your work with such care and skill. I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with both Cal Bedient and Rusty Morrison, both of whom taught me things about my work I wasn’t prepared to see on my own. I love collaboration in general, and to my mind, working with an editor comes under that rubric.

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

“If you start something, finish it.” This is a piece of advice the man I love repeatedly gives to me when he sees me flitting from one activity to another and completing none of them. He is a stonemason. In his trade, this advice has obvious importance, and in mine line of work (what he calls “my trade”), it has importance, too. I think this is part of what I’m after when I talked earlier about skipping stone brain evolving into big gray boulder brain. I want to work on the virtues of slowness, quietness, and stick-to-it-ness.

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

Not easy! As my skipping stone brain metaphor suggests, I do not identify with discursive thinking. I am trying to be better about that, while also keeping in mind that maybe my mind is not made for that. I very much admire the discipline of my scholarly colleagues. Scholarly thinking and writing is an art form, too. Very recently I turned in a 20-page term paper for a Religious Studies course I took while on pre-tenure leave. It is always a great learning experience to write in critical prose as opposed to poetry. A spirit of inquiry energizes both forms of writing, but in channeling that energy they make different kinds of turns and gestures. I think it was Charles Olson who said poems should be more like essays and essays should be more like poems. An essay is a different animal, though, than critical prose. What I value and admire about scholars, which I hope will school the kind of poetry I write in the future, is the skepticism they exercise on their projects. They are always asking what they are contributing in relation to what has come before. They are always stepping into the conversation carefully, never with the assumption that they have free reign to blah blah blah. I like and admire this sense of the word, discipline. It reminds me of Quaker meeting.

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 do not fit the model of a scheduled writer. My typical day begins with coffee (in spring and summer) and with tea (in fall and winter). After that, it’s fairly up in the air.

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

Walking is the best form of inspiration for me. See Gary Snyder (from The Practice of the Wild):

Walking is the great adventure, the first mediation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of ‘Your ass is somebody else’s meal’—a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, ‘ecology,’ on the level of what counts, also a teaching of mindfulness and preparedness.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I love this question! It reminds me of reading Remembrance of Things Past as an undergraduate. I think it is in The Road to Combray where Proust says something about “the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.” Maybe because of this passage and Whitman’s poem, lilacs betoken nostalgia for me. But nostalgia is different than home. Nostalgia is a home-pang, pain associated with a home that cannot be fully reclaimed. But I am at home right now and my home itself smells like daffodils. Spring is the season when I feel most at home, and daffodils communicate the mounting energy of spring with funny subtlety. They remind me of something James Dickey wrote, “Wild hope can always spring from tended strength.” Home should be a place of tended strength, and the daffodil, a bulb flower, feels like an emblem for that.

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?

I think most of my books come from outside books. There is in fact an outside the text. There are classes in clay, there are paintings by Samuel Palmer, there are dinners with elders, there is mowing the grass, there is holding a cat who has just been lying in the sun, there are the voices of Sam Cooke, and Mama Cass, and Buddy Holly, there is mixing mortar, there is visiting a baby girl born last month on Shakespeare’s birthday, there are chives coming up, and conversations to be had. All of these things come into my work. Work, as Dylan Thomas suggests above, is an act of praise. The world is full of horrors and blessings. Work is a response to both, but it is a necessary cleaving, for me, to the thanksgiving side. What I call the Starbuck side. And I don’t mean a latte. I mean Starbuck in Moby Dick. 

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

Emerson

William James

Georgia O’Keefe

M.C. Richards

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

Build a tree house and sit in it.

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?

Well, I have known occupations other than writing. I have worked on a produce farm, in an apple orchard, on the landscaping staff of a seaside hotel in Maine, in an insurance company, in a bakery and in a library. My occupations have been various. That’s what’s a little disorienting about being an academic at times.

If I could go back and do something else, I would go back and be an arborist. A really good tree doctor.

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

Some combination of accident and perseverance and capability and word-obsession and luck. I write when I get the chance. I do not think of myself in light of the identity we call “writer.” I do not assume it as a consistent or durable status. Every day I either write, or I don’t. Maybe I will go outside and rake leaves or plant something. Maybe I will make some time to talk with a friend who is having a problem. Maybe I will volunteer at a local park. 

I do not put all my faith in writing. I have a lot of anxieties and skepticism about it, particularly when I attend writing conferences. When I stand back from writing it can too often seem like an occupation soaked in vanity, self-absorption, self-promotion, etc.   

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

            Book:   William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience

           

            Film:    Poetry (in Korean, 시)

20 - What are you currently working on?

            A retaining wall. A religious studies term paper (just finished!). A sweater for my nephew. Ceramics. A vegetable garden. Piecing my first quilt. Being healthy. Being kind. Saying no when it is necessary. Patience. Poetry. Saying thank you. Starting things and finishing them.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;