INSIDE TERMINATION DUST

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSANNA J. MISHLER

“So much of the day consists of arcs induced

between separate planes—

hand to doorknob, or a trumpet solo

and an ear

pressed to the door.

Which is more beautiful,

The thing vaulting from one side to another

or the dark rift beneath it?”

— from “KNOCK ON WOOD”

— “TERMINATION DUST” — by Susanna J. Mishler

Susanna J. Mishler’s poetry collection, “TERMINATION DUST” (RED HEN PRESS, 2014), casts a wide and well-stitched net over arctic ice fields and southwestern deserts and across abstractions of perspective, identity, geography, and childhood. The broadest scope of “FLYING OVER BUCKLAND, ALASKA” is met by the close-up moment of “WHAT FITS NEATLY IN A HAND,” all with a deft, deserving sense of lyricism and surprise. Language meets landscape, “learn[ing] to dub fall snows termination dust”. This life, the afterlife, and beyond are examined with curiosity and an unsullied, inventive way of seeing.

Susanna J. Mishler – photo credit: Christina A. Barber

Susanna, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I’m so happy for the chance to learn more about “TERMINATION DUST.”

In “WEEKDAY IN SPRING” the human condition is laid bare by way of waxwings and communication, chaos and entropy, Barbie and blueprints. The speaker has ‘the sense of living under a vault, inside one of those snow globes except it isn’t snowing.” Would you tell us about your process of examining nature while tipping human understanding on its side?

“Weekday in Spring” came from a prompt to write a poem about sequencing the human genome. It takes rooms in a house, and houses in a neighborhood, as loose parallels for genes and chromosomes. The poem ended up with themes of information and loneliness—we have the human genome sequenced but we don’t know which genes do—we are inundated by information, yet don’t know what to do with most it or know what most of it means. Which is a little like living in a suburb: I know the street names, but many of my neighbors and their lives are hidden. It’s amazing how isolated one can feel in a suburb during the Information Age. I want to call it a “watershed poem” because the form is stream of consciousness, which pulls from all kinds of sensory input. And so, “Weekday in Spring” is a watershed poem of an Alaskan neighborhood in the 21st century.

The strength of nature is striking in many of your poems, and is present in the form of fauna—from whales, blue sharks, shrews, and Arctic terns to wolves, caribou, vermillion flycatchers, and ravens. They appear in metaphorical form, “bar[ing their] teeth,” in “AFTERLIFE: URSUS ARCTOS;” as image, “running toward us in the summer dusk,” in “CARIBOU;” and in actuality, “at night, walking/on the ceiling,” in ‘WESTERN BANDED GECKOS.”

Observation and perspective are keen in these poems. How do you discover your subjects and decide your focus?

As an undergraduate in Washington State and working on a school project, I spoke with a landscape architect who had worked in Alaska. He said he felt that being in Alaska—even urban Alaska—felt fundamentally different from being almost anywhere else in the nation, because wild lands elsewhere exist as islands in a sea of human endeavor, whereas human settlements in Alaska exist more as islands in a sea of wilderness. Even in Anchorage, one’s sense of place in the order of things, wild and human, is turned inside-out. The presence of wilderness, animals, weather, light/darkness, and season are keen. The solstices may pass unnoticed in San Diego, but in Alaska they’re a big deal—we don’t have such a steady upper hand on our environment. When I write about animals and weather I’m writing about what’s in my daily life, which has elements of both the urban and the wild.

I think, too, that telling stories about animals is one of the oldest human pastimes. We know what it is to be human by contemplating animals. Curiously, when we apply human imagination to animals, we also connect to ourselves as animals.

University Lake, Anchorage, AK with Termination Dust on the Chugach Mountains – photo credit: Susanna Mishler

Would you discuss how content, especially in the poems concerning wildlife, suggests form? For example, how “CARIBOU” includes two sextets followed by two quintets, ending with two quatrains.

Form is a constant question when I compose—often a vexing one. I try to treat each poem as something that has its own kind of volition, as something that has a preferred form, which by listening and experimenting, I help it to achieve. That form could be anything from a sonnet to a lyric essay. A form is the poem’s structure for thinking. I cultivate a variety of ways of thinking—it’s part of why I write poems.

“TERMINATION DUST” as a collection reflects this taste for variety in form and in subject. It ranges from unrhymed couplets to a ghazal; a prose poem to short-lined tercets; roving, single-stanza meditations to short, syllabic lines with fictional characters. I wanted to make a robust collection, one that has themes and obsessions but does not simply feel like different incantations of the same poem. A poem should surprise a reader in some way, as the reader moves through it. So, too, should a book of poems.

“CARIBOU” proceeds from sextets to quintets to quatrains as it moves from an outwardly descriptive poem to a more internal lyric. Shorter stanzas mean more caesuras, giving the poem’s progressively internal content more space. In this case, it has the effect of slowing the poem down, and gives extra room for reflection on the action in the first two stanzas.

“Silas digs a motocross pit in his backyard

for Hot Wheels. The sun on his back and the humid earth

are like Hell, he thinks. Silas knows about Hell

from two Sundays in church with his friend, Jesse—

Hell is uncomfortably warm. He knows, even,

that Hell is capitalized and so is Lord

because they are proper nouns like

Tennessee and Ferrari—things

you can touch or be inside of. People

are a special category, but he’s not sure

if people are special things or special places.

He feels like he’s inside himself, mostly, but

he could walk to the edge of town

and be a different place and maybe

a different thing.”

—   from “REVELATION” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Some of the pieces in “TERMINATION DUST” are about a young boy named Silas. “REST STOP, WILDLIFE VIEWING,” “ASSURANCE,” “REVELATION,” “THE IMAGINATION AS A HEDGEHOG,” AND “THOUGHT POLICE” reveal this child from close third viewpoint and at times as if from the perspective of an older sibling. There is a sensibility concerning family and siblings, identity and discovery and loss, possibility and fear in these poems. How did Silas come to you? What did you realize in creating his character?

“Thought Police” was the first poem in which Silas appeared. He’s a mysterious boy. It was challenging to write both convincingly and compellingly from a child’s perspective. He brings another distinct voice and perspective to the book. His poems are woven through the five parts. Silas’s voice brings a kind of vulnerability and a kind of thinking to a subject that an adult character can’t. In trying to make sense of the world, a child’s logic can go surprising places for an adult audience. It was tricky to conjure that kind of logic without either making a parody of it or making it seem merely quaint or nostalgic. Kids are trying to understand the adult world around them with limited information—they draw lines between things that seem unrelated in the adult world—and this is a legitimate way for a poem to move. Through simple, direct association, to see where it goes and how it lands, like a monkey brachiating from one branch to another.

“TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler – Cover Image: “STORM BIRDS” – by Christina A. Barber

Bobbin, weathervane, or flip-flops in paradise?

Flip-flops in paradise, of course! The bobbin and weathervane are sunning themselves in adjacent chairs.

As an electrician by trade, do you find inspiration in the workings hidden behind walls, pathways that others take for granted and rarely know?

I think it’s interesting that writers use the language of craft to describe what we do. Visual artists have “studios” and “critiques;” whereas, writers have “workshops.” We are wordsmiths who talk about crafting things as if we’re constructing a three-dimensional object. William Carlos Williams famously said that a poem is a machine. If we’ve created this kind of language for ourselves, maybe it’s not so surprising that a poet would also feel drawn to work with her hands, to build systems and machines.

The hidden aspect of the work of an electrician also has similarities to the crafting of a poem. As an electrician, I had to learn the aesthetics of the industry. For electrical installations to look professional, they should be unobtrusive. A conduit run, for example, should not be irregular with regards to its surrounding lines, and it should appear uniform and deliberate. It needs to appear deft and effortless. This is an aesthetic I recognize from crafting poems. A poem should be an experience that does not draw unnecessary attention to its craft, just as a room should not draw unnecessary attention to its electrical system.

“The mind flaps between

shade and glass,

tangles in drawcords,

gnaws thirstily at

ice on the sill.”

—   from “(1/5) JANUARY CROSSING” – “TERMINATION DUST”

– by Susanna J. Mishler

“JANUARY CROSSING,” a stunning series poem, is a log of January contemplations. Winter, the arctic, the General, the girl, love, death, enclosed spaces, endless spaces, anatomy, identity (confused, mirrored, unknown), shapes, ice and snow, waking, and memory are revealed in its twelve sections. You’ve paid tribute to Anne Carson’s “BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND” in this comprehensive, thoughtful piece. How did this series come to you and then evolve?

Years ago I swapped a much earlier version of “TERMINATION DUST” with a manuscript by poet and friend Melissa Koosmann (part of which became the chapbook “ENDINGS,” published by Flying Guillotine Press in 2008). I had Melissa’s poetic voice in my head when I wrote “JANUARY CROSSING.” In her manuscript she was working in short, terse lines, packed with layered meaning and dry humor. I was also looking to tie together some of the many themes in “TERMINATION DUST” in a longer piece. I’d never written a poem more than three pages before and was curious to see how that feels, what opportunities it presents. January and February are long months in Alaska when the cold weather and darkness take on the tedium of a military occupation. It can be a very introspective time, when one sifts through memories and examines events with an edge of cabin fever. A long poem consisting of fragmented recollections and meditations seemed like a good formal fit for the subject and state of mind it attempts to render.

In subzero weather, all animal life feels borrowed. I appropriated Anne Carson’s line, “To stay human is to break a limitation,” from a tortured love poem. The context of her line implies that a hidden, internal limitation is overcome, an emotional one. I mean it more as an external limitation—a marvel that we don’t freeze or starve or lose all shreds of civil society.

“The days are bigger—I wake and am falling

inside them. The cups and clocks open their eyes and are falling.”

— from “LAKE CABIN” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Influenced by Li-Young Lee’s “SEVEN HAPPY ENDINGS,” you wrote your poem, “LAKE CABIN.” The idea of psychic and emotional spaces, as well as enclosed and anatomical spaces, is beautifully imagined here. Do you find that poetry aligned with the natural world is your best inspiration? Tell a little more of your process and what this holds for your literary future.

Sometimes I can’t get a good line or stanza of poetry out of my head. That’s how it was with Li-Young Lee’s “Seven Happy Endings.” I kept thinking about how it would be to open my eyes and find objects around me falling, and for the objects themselves to know they are falling. This image was the seed of “Lake Cabin.” The word, “falling,” became the refrain in a ghazal about falling out of love (Lee’s is about falling in love).

It was since pointed out to me that “Lake Cabin” can be read both ways—as a poem about falling in or out of love—and I like that discovery. That the poem has a flexibility of meaning, yet also has specific sensory details.

The seeds of poems come to me in all kinds of ways. While “Lake Cabin” came from a published poem I admire, I recently wrote a poem inspired by a RadioLab broadcast. Sometimes an image from a dream will stick with me and that will be a seed, or an encounter at work. Finding the subject or seed of a poem makes me think of water-dowsing—as a poet I walk around with my dowsing rod and when the rod inexplicably plunges toward the earth, that’s where I dig for water/poetry. Why does the rod dip where it dips? What force grabs and pulls it? How does the seed of a poem announce itself to the poet? I have no idea—I’ve only learned to feel it, follow it, craft it, and anyway, if I did know it might not be good for the poem. The following comes from a figuring-out, a pursuit and discovery, the suggestion of a mystery or of something much larger than it appears.

Susanna J. Mishler – Photo Credit: Clark James Mishler

Susanna J. Mishler’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as THE IOWA REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, and KENYON REVIEW ONLINE. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Arizona in Tucson, where she served as a poetry editor for SONORA REVIEW. She’s the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship in Poetry at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. In addition to her literary pursuits, Susanna is an electrician by trade. She lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.

All photos permission of Susanna J. Mishler. Credits to Christina A. Barber, Susanna J. Mishler, and Clark James Mishler.

*

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

Points of Connection

A Conversation with Bich Minh Nguyen

“In August 1965 a woman named Rose walked into my grandfather’s café in Saigon.

That much is known. My grandfather would say that’s the beginning of this story.

My mother would say I should have left it at that.”

So begins Bich Minh Nguyen’s much-praised second novel, “Pioneer Girl.” As in her memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” and her first novel, “Short Girls,” thematic points of connection–places of origin, family relationships, and comforts of food–are laid out before us, each influencing the next, each as important as the others. These points are textured by differences between the first and second generations of immigrant families, the feelings of belonging and not belonging, and the weight of lives that lead from east to west, all the while anchored in both places.

These points of connection are exactly what I love about Nguyen’s books. There is the sense of geography, which spans from Vietnam to the Midwest to the West all the way to the Pacific, which leads back to Vietnam. There are the relationships, close and distant, caring and complicated, between sisters, grandmothers, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, mothers, brothers, and friends. And then there is the food: from all-you-can-eat childhood comforts to the more mature market-grazing of peaches and oysters, white wine and lemon-lavender cake, and throughout the years, the love of banh mi and cha gio and pho and, ultimately, the shared love of eating.

Nguyen approaches these elements with the consideration and concern of a scholar, yet invites her readers in with the ease of a storyteller, her intricate narratives threading through terrain that is as tough as it is touching, revealing characters we come to care about.

“Pioneer Girl” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Thank you, Bich, for agreeing to this interview. You’ve had an incredible year, what with the publication of “Pioneer Girl,” moving from your longtime home in the Midwest to the Pacific Coast, and joining the MFA in Writing Program faculty at the University of San Francisco. Do you see a parallel between your own move to the West Coast and the travels of the narrator, Lee Lien, in “Pioneer Girl,” as well as those of Rose Wilder Lane, the mysterious subject of concern in the novel? 

Thanks for inviting me to do this interview!

I wanted to write a book that brought together some of my enduring obsessions: the immigrant experience in the United States; the “Little House on the Prairie” books; and bad food in small towns. In “Pioneer Girl” the city of San Francisco becomes hugely significant to more than one character; it was also the place where Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and editor/co-author, became a writer in the early 1900s. When I wrote “Pioneer Girl,” I’d been living in the Midwest for years. I also grew up in Michigan and have spent more time in the Midwest than anywhere else. I had no idea I would leave. But by the time the novel was finished and edited, I had accepted a job in San Francisco. I think what I share with Rose Wilder and Lee Lien is a sense of restlessness, or at least an understanding of that feeling. Neither Rose nor Lee wants to “bloom where they are planted”; they want to roam. They feel the tug of family obligation but also the longing for adventure. I felt many of these complications myself, growing up in a small city in Michigan in the 1980s.

The Midwest

For some, small-town America, as in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” generates a feeling of distress, of feeling trapped and wanting to escape. Your novel, “Pioneer Girl,” and your husband Porter Shreve’s novel, “The End of the Book,” in a way a sequel to Anderson’s book, approach this idea of entrapment with the sensibility and firsthand knowledge of town life in the Midwest.

Lee Lien, of “Pioneer Girl,” questions her family’s choice to remain in the Midwest, once they settle in the Chicago suburbs and open their own café, after years of moving from town to town through a series of Asian buffet jobs. In “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” you wonder at your father’s strength in bringing your family to the Midwest after the Fall of Saigon and at his decision never to leave. Do you think the Midwest will always inform your writing?

It’s true—Porter and I both wrote novels that deal with real-life literary figures, family duty, and the Midwestern feeling of isolation. We didn’t read each other’s work until we had pretty solid drafts and even then, it took us a while to realize we were on similar thematic tracks. I think it must have been because we were both in the midst of questioning where we were, geographically. We had ended up in Indiana for academic jobs and we had two young kids. We’ve both moved quite a bit, but having kids made us more anxious about where we wanted to be. The back-of-the-mind questions became daily ones: Are we going to stay? Do we want to live somewhere else? Where? What are the risks, gains, and consequences of leaving and starting over? Inevitably, these questions also came out in our writing and in our characters.

I’m sure the Midwest will always inform my writing because I am essentially Midwestern; it’s where I grew up and it’s what I know. One of the aspects of geographical identity I wanted to explore in “Pioneer Girl” is how our childhoods are made by other people. As children, we have no control over where we live or where we grow up. But it informs so much and, as adults, we contend with it. Lee contends with it against her mother’s expectations. Rose Wilder hated growing up in Mansfield, Missouri and couldn’t wait to leave. My father gave me and my siblings the best childhood he knew how to give, and it started with his decision to leave his world behind and start over in the United States. No move I make could ever be so bold and brave. Now that I have kids, I am even more in awe of the burden and responsibility involved in his decision.

Bich, Anh, and their dad – Grand Rapids, Michigan – mid-1970s

In “Pioneer Girl” you have created remarkable moments between the first- and second-generation members of an immigrant family. You’ve shown the conflicting sense of guilt and sense of responsibility, as well as the loyalty and memories that bind one to family. The daughter Lee’s relationship with her mother is seemingly no-win, the mother always disapproving, criticizing. Yet Lee tries to imagine why her mother is this way, and generosity, understanding, and compassion rise above feelings of shame, anger, and guilt. The grandfather, Ong Hai, is nonjudgmental, always understanding and optimistic, always caring and loving without agenda. His is true unconditional love. And the brother, Sam– first-born, the son, “spoiled”–separates himself from family by disappearing.

Could you comment about these relationships, how you found a way to describe them so deftly, focusing on each character, keeping their wants and needs distinctive and yet tied together, so that family remains the true collective sum of its individual members?

I wanted to explore the way people take on certain roles in a family and how sometimes those roles are given. You know—that’s the artsy kid, that’s the athletic kid, that’s the good one, that’s the wild child. These identifiers can be only partly true because they’re too reductive. But once they get made they can be hard to shake; they can end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Yet everyone has a secret self, a set of secret beliefs and feelings: this is who I really am, and no one else knows it. Lee feels this for herself, but it takes a while for her to realize that’s true of everyone else in her family too. She thinks she knows her mother so well, but there are, of course, hidden wells. The same goes for Sam and Ong Hai.

I also wanted to explore the way families make their own myths. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder did that through the “Little House” books—and they fought quite a bit while working on them. Most families have internal and often passive-aggressive struggles for power: who gets to control the narrative of the family story? In “Pioneer Girl” Lee’s mother seems to be in control, but Lee begins to question that. She does and does not want to be the good daughter. Obligation is inescapable in most families, I would guess, and not just Asian ones. And it’s a major factor in the conflict between the first and second generations in immigrant families. I wanted to find ways to show that conflict emerging, not just in big fights, but in everyday interactions.

Bich and her sister, Anh

“Short Girls” by Bich Minh Nguyen

Early in your novel “Short Girls,” the chapters alternating between two sisters’ viewpoints, the character Linny has a moment of understanding and empathy for her older sister, Van. She “thought of her sister driving through her subdivision in Ann Arbor, decelerating, directing the car into the driveway. She pictured Van just sitting there, almost unwilling to move. How well Linny knew that feeling… a mixture of relief and dread. Now I have to get out of the car, she thought at those times. And she always did, even though she dreamed of driving on without a map… For the first time, it occurred to Linny that maybe her sister had fantasized that very same thing.”

Would you speak about your process of approaching the tougher, more emotional concerns of relationships, especially between siblings?

Fiction writing requires empathy and understanding. In many ways, that’s why we read and why writers are born out of reading: we want to understand the lives and experiences of other people. “Short Girls” was partly inspired by my own relationship with my two older sisters and partly by Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (a book I’ve loved since high school). My sisters and I aren’t much like Marianne and Elinor, or like Linny and Van. But we had, as those characters do, our ups and downs, our arguments and resentments. I remembered always trying to figure out my sisters when we were growing up. Why won’t they play dolls with me anymore? Why are they listening to that same Led Zeppelin record over and over? How do they know how to behave as girls? Do they like me? Are we going to get along today? I wanted to apply these feelings toward Linny and Van. They have to figure out how to see each other not just as sisters, bound by the common, irrefutable bond of a shared childhood experiences, but as people who are in some way essentially unknowable. By the way, I should say that my sisters and I get along great; it’s just much more interesting to explore the conflicts!

Noi and her sons

Bich, Anh, and their grandmother, Noi

Food, family bonds, and identity are recurring themes in your writing. One example of how these themes come together, and in which you pay beautiful tribute to you grandmother, Noi, is in the chapter “Cha Gio” of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” When Noi prepares the ingredients of cha bio for Tet–the grated carrots, fish sauce, black pepper, mung bean noodles, the ground shrimp and pork–you recall the “forkful of filling on a triangle of banh trang spring roll wrapper,” Noi’s laughter and how later she would “pluck the cha gio from the frying pan,” and “the first anticipated bite, the sweet and peppery flavors of shrimp and pork and fish sauce weighted against the delicate crunch of the fried wrapper.” In Noi’s cooking there is love, as seen in the lines: “I ate slowly, trying to memorize the flavors, trying to know what my grandmother has always known: this amount of pepper, this amount of fish sauce. She had always been there to show me this world without measurements.”

Would you tell us more about how the world of tastes and meals, both Vietnamese and American, was influenced by family and friends, creating new ties and strengthening or complicating old ones, and how all this shaped your identity?

Food keeps appearing in my work because I think about it all the time! Don’t most of us? What should I have for breakfast, lunch, dinner? What’s in the refrigerator? Where should we eat? What should I make? I love thinking about food and reading about it; I love fulfilling a craving. I think I ended up writing “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” because I realized that food was an expression of longing in my childhood, a marker for cultural and social contexts. At home, we ate Vietnamese food. Out in the world of small town Michigan in the 1980s, no one was eating that; they were eating peanut butter and jelly, Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, and casseroles. So much of my experience growing up was about trying to figure out where I fit in as a child of immigrants. I felt totally American, yet could never “look” American enough; I was also Vietnamese, yet knew almost no Vietnamese at all. My relationship with identity became very complicated, but somehow my relationship with food did not. I loved Vietnamese food; I loved American food. No matter what else was happening around me, as long as I had the right food at the right time, then everything was going to be at least a little okay. I credit my grandmother Noi for instilling in me a great appreciation for good food. She truly enjoyed it—the process of cooking, the art of opening a pomegranate, the daily ritual of dinner—and so I did too.

“Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” by Bich Minh Nguyen

“Throughout my childhood I wondered, so often it became a buzzing dullness, why we had ended up here [in Grand Rapids, Mich.], and why we couldn’t leave. I would stare at a map of the United States and imagine us in New York or Boston or Los Angeles… I was convinced people were happier out on the coasts, living in a nexus between so much land and water.” – from “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner”

Bich, now that you’ve landed decades later with your immediate family in San Francisco, a city on the Pacific Coast, do you feel a sense of happiness and possibly a connection—geographical, spiritual, or otherwise—to the distant coast of Vietnam?

I probably felt that way, growing up, because when you live in the Midwest you’re always being told that you’re in the middle of nowhere. Flyover land. But the Midwest—Michigan, Indiana, Illinois—is where I’ve lived the most, and it wasn’t my life’s goal to move to New York or San Francisco. When the opportunity came up, my husband and I really debated it. It freaked me out, really, to imagine living on the west coast, in the Pacific time zone, far from everything I’ve known. Now we’re here in the East Bay and I’m still getting used to it in a sense—getting used to the fact that I chose to change my life. And that our kids are going to be Californian, which seems so strange. I wouldn’t say that living here gives me any particular connection to Vietnam or anything like that. But I do feel more comfortable, by which I mean normal.

Lemon-lavender cake, Twinkies, or a Top Pot hand-forged doughnut?

Lemon-lavender cake. I do love doughnuts though, and almost all kinds of homemade cakes. I love making old-fashioned bundt cakes and layer cakes.

And finally tell us something you’d like to be asked – from inspiration to breakfast to bliss!

Why the obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder?

When I was a kid I read those “Little House” books until I practically memorized them. I loved the descriptions of food, the cozy evenings, the ongoing battle of farmer versus nature. When I reread the books as an adult, it occurred to me that maybe I loved them because the experiences of the Ingalls family—pioneers moving westward, homesteading, in the 1870s—was not unlike the experience of immigrants moving west to America. They’re parallel stories of heading out to unknown places and starting over. Though Laura and I had nothing in common on the surface, I felt a kinship with her. She knew what it was to be restless, to be shy and bookish, to want to stand out while also wanting to hide. She had longings for certain foods and material comforts. She had a great frenemy. She had secret rebellious thoughts. When I started researching the origin of the “Little House” books, I learned that her daughter Rose had heavily edited, perhaps even co-written, the books. Rose is an obscure figure now, but once upon a time she was more famous than her mother. And late in life she went to Vietnam, as a journalist, in 1965. When I learned about that literal connection between the “Little House” series and Vietnam—this was probably twenty years ago—I knew I would one day write something about it. I just didn’t know what it would be.

Bich Minh Nguyen

Bich Minh Nguyen’s most recent novel is “Pioneer Girl.” Her novel “Short Girls” was an American Book Award winner in fiction and a LIBRARY JOURNAL Best Book of the Year. Her memoir-in-essays, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” received the PEN/Jerard Award and was a CHICAGO TRIBUNE Best Book of the Year and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Nguyen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University and the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She has also coedited three anthologies of short stories and essays. She and her family recently moved to the Bay Area. 

*

All photographs with permission of Bich Minh Nguyen.  

*

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

First posted in the ARTS section of Hothouse Magazine.

Amy Wright: In the Garden

“If the garden did not hum, it would cuss.”

— from The Garden Will Give You a Fat Lip 

by Amy Wright

“Tennessee Roses” – Photo credit: Amy Wright

“I wonder about the promise of love, how it makes none. Something else assures us, for awhile

–the push and pull of the old slipknot–wedding bands and daisy chains.”

- from “It Always Has Hit Me from Below”

 - by Amy Wright

Amy Wright – Photo credit: James Yates

Amy Wright rallies and rounds up words, treats long and short lines of poetry to ice cream and fireworks at the fair, and pulls up and down the shades of nonfiction, the stories always bright, never dim. She considers the earth, the spirit, the right or even the wrong way to look for an answer. And from search and discovery, she’s summed up several chapbooks of poetry, a realm of essays and interviews, and the words and the will to till more words keep coming.

Amy once hosted me in Clarksville, Tennessee on a flashflood kind of day, and as we talked, asking and telling, her lithe, well-dreamed, and swimming mind called me to ask more.

“Moving Through It” – Photo credit: James Yates

“It is not the story that makes a moment tender, but the life moving through it.”

- from “Moving Through It” - by Amy Wright

Amy, you’ve found a way to cross under the fence of genre lines, skirting the rough boards, never caught on barbwire, and making sure the essays and poems are tended, but not too tended. You were raised on a farm in southwest Virginia, and your grandparents were dairy farmers, your parents Angus beef farmers. When you were a child, your mother allowed you to read up a storm and told you once, “Sometimes you have to talk to yourself.”

Would you say that your background—the farm, your family—has provided the direction and the eventual path you needed to journey through poetry and prose, verse and memoir?

Absolutely, Karin. That winding dirt road I grew up on and the neighborhood named for it—Mudlick—informs my subject matter, my writing process, and even my genre choices, which demonstrate a refusal of hard and fast lines. Growing up in the country gave me a sense of inhabiting several centuries—the way my grandparents lived in a house that was built by our ancestors in the 1870s with horsehair mortar and locust boards. They added onto it, enclosed the front porch, plumbed a bathroom—but the core of the house, the Heart pine hardwood floors are the same. The fact that this house and my front yard were surrounded by the second oldest mountain range on Earth—the Appalachians—also placed me on a long geologic timeline. The mountains were more than backdrop; they were visiting neighbors. Deer and meadowlarks and box turtles were always popping by.

I’m glad you notice the importance of family in my work. It is probably the most fundamental aspect of my writing—loyalty to the land I grew up on and the people who have given it and me such good care.

“Then there’s this” – Photo Credit: Amy Wright

“so thereʼs that, so thereʼs that, so thereʼs this and this and that”

- from “Then There’s This” – by Amy Wright

Farms, gardens, the earth, sustainability, sustenance. What we collect, what we can’t keep. Spirituality, devotion, Zen, impermanence, letting go.

You are deeply concerned with where we’ve been and where we are headed in terms of the environment, farming, and making sure, as the world population grows, that we are all fed. These concerns inform much of your writing. Would you talk about this?

I am fortunate to have developed a relationship with nature early on. My brother and I played in the southwest Virginia hills and forests around our house. At least once, we had to walk back to the house barefoot on gravel because we mired our tennis shoes in the mud of a shoestring branch. We climbed shale banks, fished for bluegill, planted gardens, pulled weeds, snapped green beans, etc. Many summer nights we sat down to meals where we had grown every food on our plates—including cantaloupe or watermelon for dessert. That magic moment when a corn shoot breaks free of its seed, climbs through dark soil toward the light—sometimes alarmingly far away when one of us pushed the seeds too deep—filled me with wonder then and now. I know our tremendous debt to Earth for producing food, plumping it with minerals our bodies need. And to we owe the many humans present and past whose labor and invention make it possible to stock a grocery store.

It’s like the difference between falling in love with an abstraction and a man who snores. If I had not had the planet’s topsoil under my fingernails and its well water popping in beads from my forehead, I don’t know if I would have begun to care deeply about its health. When I read about a polluted river or a scalped mountain, I have brain cells and neurons that fire in response. Such scenes correspond in my body, making the causes and effects tangible and the need for responsibility real.

“Hands” – Photo credit: Susan Bryant

“I remember when I loved to be sad. I could feel sorrow coming on 

like a cold, which I also had my fair share of in those days.”

- from “Perhaps It Is Only Age” – by Amy Wright

“Oh, Heart” – Photo Credit: James Yates

Life. Death. Life.

I love what you’ve written in “Oh, Heart,” an essay you posted at Cowbird: “If John Keats was, in his youth anyway, ‘half in love with easeful Death,’ I am absolutely swept into the clench, the hiccup, the cough of Life.”

Death is the hardest, but sometimes life is hard for those who go on living. More thoughts?

That particular piece—in a small way—gave me a taste of those fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol promised everyone in the future. I collected so many “loves” on that essay, it stopped feeling like something I did as much as something I was taking part in—the way you might get swept into the momentum of a parade. Of course, I owe the photographer, James Yates, for the image, which spoke to so many other heart-heeding humans.

But, to answer your question, I feel I owe it to the ones I’ve lost to live fully. My younger brother died of bone cancer at twenty. To honor his memory, I try to be vigilant in attending the resources pumping through my irises, cochlea, fingertips. He asked me to do as much before he left.

“Hair Flying” – Photo credit: Susan Bryant

“the terrific blue, the movement of the hands upraised and hair flying”

- from “Fearlessening”– by Amy Wright

Sunflowers, amaranth, or salmon-colored orchids? And why, oh, why?

For the same reason species can evolve, metamorphose, mutate—because there are those of us who can taste words and there are those who can season them. It’s like canning. There are ways to preserve the sun-ripened bounty of a mulberry harvest for a February night.

“My Boon Companion” – Photo credit: James Yates

“We are never alone, johnnie; we are only–for varying stretches of road–entirely together in ourselves.”

- from “My Boon Companion” – by Amy Wright

I understand your latest project involves heritage as it threads from past into present, with a close look, as you’ve noted, at “one particularly marginalized and unstudied culture” in the south.

Would you tell us more about these poems? It sounds as though you may be crossing poetry with memoir, creating a hybrid of forms. Is that true?

I have long been interested in the relationship between research and creativity, and my scholarly essays and travel pieces reflect that. Recently I’ve been applying that dimension to the lyric in the form of anthropological case-studies of my life’s characters and stories. I’m interested in how cultural diversity can be threatened alongside many wildlife species. Thus, I want to preserve aspects of the culture I inherited, even as I have revised some of that conditioning.

My father learned to cane chairs from a blind man. My great-grandmother dipped snuff and taught school in a one-room Appalachian schoolhouse. Both of these facts seem akin to spotting a red-cockaded woodpecker, and equally worthy of attention. So, I’m wedding a few reference books to memories and running them through that great Victrola of the English language until something catches in my head like a tune.

Amy – Photo credit: David Iacovazzi-Pau

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and the author of three chapbooks, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, Farm, and The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip. Her fourth chapbook, Rhinestones in the Bed, or Cracker Crumbs is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her work also appears in a number of journals including Drunken Boat, Freerange Nonfiction,American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Western Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly.

Read more of Amy’s poems and essays at Cowbird.

http://cowbird.com/amy-wright/

“Leaning Back” – Feature photo credit: James Yates

 *

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Brad Richard: from Aubade to Bacchae

“Aubade”

7:01: the first rain of the last day

of August starts to fall, then hesitates,

postpones itself to let the light

that would have come here anyway break in.

Nothing is amazed. None of the azaleas

have changed their minds about not blossoming,

and the lady cardinal who visits the lawn chairs

between 7:15 and 7:20 assumes her station

and finds the yard in its ordinary order.

But she must notice how the long branches

Of the euonymous, yesterday so straight,

Now are bending under days of dryness;

how the fig tree’s leaves are browning,

as if burned by a slow, exhausting fire

the small rain did not extinguish. Summer’s

steady certainties, the creeping

increments of heat and leaf, falter

and break, utter final colors.

No expectations could sustain these last

intact yet stunted primroses. After all,

what is the soul? The black ant

mazing through the rose’s sex?

These tendrils shrinking from the endings of air?

The repetitions of cloud and sky,

the kinetic clocking down of things

caught in the cardinal’s eye in flight?

— from Habitations

 by Brad Richard

Brad Richard, New Orleans poet, writes with an incredible sense of perspective and place, reaching out toward history, mythology, art, and nature. Focus and attention are revealed in his poems, as well as questions regarding gender, an understanding of the world, literary and otherwise, and a way in which to examine it. Though I’ve known Brad for years, I’ve learned so much more in this interview about his way of seeing and about the form and fabric of his poetry.

Backyard Ferns

Confederate Jasmine

Brad, I’m thinking about the idea of perspective in your poetry. In your first collection, Habitations, many of the poems focus in on nature, as in “Aubade” and “Dirt-Dauber’s Nest,” and then lean away to widen and expand. And then there are those pieces that steal in and single out details that perhaps we’ve no business knowing, like “Everybody’s Little Secrets.” I felt a terrible, wonderful sense of voyeurism here, the digging down into places that are usually off-limits, and realized that these sorts of poems have a literary kinship with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Would you speak about your process, in terms of perspective? And about how that process may have evolved over the years?

First of all, Karin, let me say thanks for this interview. I’m really honored to be one of your subjects.

To the question at hand: I love looking at things and I love describing them. I hope my eye doesn’t censor what it sees, that whatever is seen is fair game for thinking, feeling, writing. Still, at times I feel incredibly obtuse, like I miss things that are right in front of me. Then again, I’m always surprised when someone reads one of my poems and something I’ve seen, something I may have thought was so obvious as to be banal, strikes a reader as perceptive. I think it’s just the habit of looking that makes me notice things in a particular way—something particularly beautiful, or odd, or telling.

Imagination is the next step, and that involves a looking out as much as a looking in. That is, if I can imagine myself into something (a person, an object, a painting), I hope that I can see from that particular perspective and generate some sense, however partial, of how that consciousness would think. I’ve written a lot of persona poems and dramatic monologues and variations thereon, and that mimetic habit of imagining a different perspective runs closely parallel, I think, to the habit of seeing I described above. What interests me the more I write is how I locate whatever I consider to be my perspective.

I love Sherwood Anderson (“Death in the Woods” is one of the most brilliant and haunting things I know) and As I Lay Dying is a touchstone. And yes, the sense of being a little too close for comfort is something I admire and am a little frightened of in Anderson and Faulkner’s best work.

Fiction

Poetry

You’ve written poems as tributes to other poets and to artists, landscape, mother, father, lover, self. And that’s all very nice. But here’s my question: have you ever written a poem of thoughtful, quiet revenge? And (even if you haven’t) what, pray tell, is the best poetic form for writing of reprisal?

I love this! “Writing well is the best revenge,” said a writer with a famously poison pen. And George Garrett perhaps wrote the wickedest bit of literary revenge in his novel, Poison Pen (dedicated to the memory of Joan Rivers). I can think of lots of examples of well-turned vengeful daggers in prose, but I think what makes literary revenge work is the same in poetry. It’s a matter of finding the appropriate balance of irony, ire, and bile, and singing your hate-song in perfect, pissed-off pitch.

Now, in my own work . . . hmm, is there anything I would admit to as arising from wanting to settle a score? I’ll take a kind of middle road with the two poems I’ll cite. One is “Eye-Fucking,” from Butcher’s Sugar, which is in the persona of a gay-bashing murderer. Letting him speak for himself is, to my mind, pretty good revenge. The other is “The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog,” from Motion Studies, in which I play a trick with point of view, withholding the identity of the speaker for as long as I can until it’s clear that it’s the wife, that is, Mrs. Thomas Eakins. He and she had a very complicated relationship, but I felt she deserved a chance to speak her mind about how that horrific portrait portrays her. Withholding and then revealing the speaker was a way both to complicate and dramatize how Eakins repressed her and her image. I hope a little brute justice was served in that case.

Now, if you were hoping I would reveal some juicier, more personal poetic revenge . . . sorry!

Poetic devices

Place informs so much of your writing. Your childhood in Texas, your adult life in Louisiana, the interim in Iowa and Missouri. Armadillos, levees, gulf waters, wasps, acorns, mockingbirds, sweet potatoes, wild sweet-peas, locusts: details of those places.

Within place in your writing are intonations of desire—to be home; to be elsewhere, near the shore, examining things washed up; to be wanted, loved, understood. What do you think? Places, people, passion. Sound familiar?

Of course. A person who will remain nameless (note to self: subject for revenge poem?) once made fun of me when I told him I was considering learning more about birds so I could identify them more precisely. Clarity is my absolute standard for good writing, and precision is fundamental to clarity. This is all essential to understanding place in a meaningful way. Places, people, passion: these things are very specific, and it’s their specificity that moves me.

Motion Studies - by Brad Richard

“Motion Studies”

I. [1929 / 2005]

We’ll never make it in time: you’re twelve,

Riding west to see a corpse in a flood,

I’m your grandson at forty-two, riding east

to see my city’s flooded remains.

Gueydan to Port Arthur, Austin to New Orleans,

you in a pickup with your daddy and one brother,

another brother waiting in a funeral home,

laid out in somebody’s suit on a cooling board,

you trying to imagine that body past this rain,

me in a rental car with the music cranked,

trying not to think about stories that got snagged

in stories that failed to hold up, to hold

water—

—   from Motion Studies by Brad Richard

Motion Studies, the title of your second collection and of three movements within the collection, becomes the telling of stories within stories, like sketch boxes inside the set of suitcases that, from smallest to largest, fill the old leather trunk in the biggest closet of your father’s art studio.

Would you tell us about the circumstances surrounding the writing of these poems? How they came to you, from the art examined to the exodus from and the eventual return to New Orleans?

I love how you imagine this big leather trunk in my dad’s studio! There wasn’t one, but you’re absolutely on target with the metaphor of stories packed into stories. And I’m delighted to talk about this.

I began writing the Eakins material in Motion Studies in 2003, after seeing the Eakins retrospective at the Met in 2002. I really didn’t know his work before then, and was in the middle of working on the poems that would find their way into Butcher’s Sugar. But Eakins work really got to me: I admired it, I was annoyed by it, and I wanted to make it give me something back for all the energy I was putting into looking at it, especially that damned Swimming painting. I ended up doing a considerable amount of reading and research and was planning to write a book of poems almost entirely about Swimming. By the summer of 2005, I was pretty far along with that project, and well into its explorations of impossible yearning. And then that stupid storm happened.

Among the many ways that Katrina affected me, one of the worst was it (or my reaction to it) made it impossible for me to continue the Swimming poems. Fortunately, I had already written a lot of those poems, and probably even more fortunately, they weren’t just about that painting. While Tim and I were in Austin, during our weird, extended evacuation period (our apartment was fine, the city wasn’t, and we didn’t need to return immediately), the Ragdale Foundation graciously offered me a residency. I went there to write one poem, “The Raft of the Medusa,” based on the very famous and much-written-about Géricault painting; that poem ended up taking months to finish, and I really meant for it to be my only Katrina poem.

In the summer of 2008, I received another Ragdale residency; I hadn’t been writing much during the previous year, and I was frankly unsure what to work on. I knew I didn’t have enough Eakins material for a book, but I also knew that work was good enough to become part of a book. I was also wondering if I could find a way to write again about Katrina that would mean something to me, just as the writing of “The Raft of the Medusa” had: not something merely didactic, but something really felt. About a week before I left, I had one of the few “eureka!” moments I’ve ever experienced as a writer. I suddenly realized that my Katrina story, a story about my paternal grandfather trying to get to Texas during a 1920’s flood to retrieve the body of a dead brother, and Zeno’s paradox were all related and could generate a single poem. It took a lot of work, including genealogical research, research about cooling boards (thanks, Audrey Niffenegger!), and imaginative re-creation, but over that four-week residency, I came up with most of what become the “Motion Studies” series that forms the spine and nervous system of that book. I’m still amazed that all of that meshed so well with the Eakins material, plus a few other poems I had written previously. I don’t expect to ever again have such an incredible experience of unity in creating a book.

Freddy’s tail

Butter Boy!

Influences: literary, cultural, culinary, gender-wise, otherwise.

I always go a little stupid when I have to answer the literary influence question. Once I start listing the usual suspects (Bishop, Stevens, Yeats), I feel obligated to start listing everyone whose work I love and has had some impact or left a trace on my own work and then I freeze up, can’t think, babble. So I’ll try this.

Literary: Gilgamesh. Moby-Dick. King Lear. Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, Plath. Tomas Tranströmer. Michael Alexander’s introduction to The Earliest English Poems (Penguin, 1966). Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

Partially literary/extra-literary/cultural/etc.: I have and have had many important literary friendships, and Dana Sonnenschein and Reginald Shepherd have been the most important of those. Dana’s friendship sustains me in all kinds of ways, and Reginald’s changed me, big time. I’m in a talented and invaluable workshop group—Peter Cooley, Melissa Dickey, Carolyn Hembree, Andy Stallings, Andy Young (and past members Jessica Henricksen, Major Jackson, Ed Skoog, Liz Thomas)—and am lucky to live in a city with a vibrant, diverse literary community. My relationship with my father is where my relationships to the visual arts, music, and food begin. Gender-wise = otherwise. OK, that’s a joke. Sort of.

Gladys – former bridesmaid, always the hen

Crawfish: étouffée, bisque, or boil? And how come?

I have to choose?! Well, boiled is the most fun, so I’ll go with that.

Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard

“The Men in the Dark”

Dropping shut the trapdoor that opened the dark

above my childhood bed, they don’t want me

 

to tell you about them, those two men

who left their smell with me each night

until I was no longer a boy. In tee shirts

or sometimes shirtless, they sat on bunks

as in a cell, smoking cigarettes and staring

down as I whispered. They liked to hear

about my parents, my dog, hurricanes, the wasp

and the dandelion, how blood tastes, how deaf people talk.

– from Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard

In your third collection, Butcher’s Sugar, you step out onto the ledge of gender, curling your toes toward “dirty boy” poetry, then lean over the edge toward yearning, sex, and even homophobic violence.

Tell us more. What else were you moving toward with these poems? And have these pieces led you into another dimension in your writing, a place where you can take off into the next stretch of work?

The first poems I wrote that ended up becoming part of Butcher’s Sugar were exercises in form: “Queer Studies” came from practicing the sonnet, “The House that Jack Built” from practicing the villanelle. I wrote sonnets and villanelles on other subjects, but in these particular poems I was interested in queering the forms. I didn’t think they would necessarily lead anywhere; they were exercises. I did play around with similar material, most of it also in forms, but a lot of it was pretty bad; this was back in the mid to late ‘90s, when the manuscript for Habitations, my first book, was basically done, and I was looking around for a new direction. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do and a lot of the abandoned work from then reflects that.

There were two turning points. One was “Eye-Fucking,” which was a response to reading about gay-bashing killers in Texas. Although I had played around with writing about creepy material, that was a more visceral writing experience, one that made me confront the real horror of what I was dealing with, and made me question why I wanted to write about it. After that, I couldn’t deal with material of that gravity without feeling more certain that it was OK—morally and artistically—for me to do so.

The other, more liberating one was a re-encounter with ancient literature, specifically Gilgamesh and Greek mythology. That gave me a frame of reference for dealing with material that was quite personal, even in poems that don’t refer directly to classical myths. I’m not a Jungian, but archetypal material is undeniably powerful, deeply referential in ways that heighten the intensity of a poem and give them a certain density (which I hope isn’t merely borrowed). I feel that, too, in the kind of material I drew upon for Motion Studies.

Motion Studies is a very elegiac book with some hope for the living, for those who can remember, for the lovers at the end. Butcher’s Sugar is also elegiac, but brutal: of all the classical influences in it, the strongest may really be Euripides’ The Bacchae, which is, in my reading, about the question of whether it’s necessary to destroy the self in order to have self-knowledge.

Right now, I find myself working between two impulses. One is directed outward, toward the idea of the city and of history, in a partially completed manuscript about the capitol of an imaginary kingdom and in another about New Orleans (which is also kind of an imaginary capitol). The other impulse goes more inward, and a lot of that material is very domestic; there are poems about things growing in my yard, and about my life with my husband, Tim. (Not coincidentally, I’ve been going back more often to James Schuyler’s beautiful poems.) Related to these are some memory poems, some cousins to poems in Butcher’s Sugar, others more like poems from Habitations. Which means, I guess, that I keep coming back to place and perspective, trying to get my bearings again and again.

Reprise of Freddy’s tail

Tim Watson & Brad Richard – Hansen’s Sno-Bliz – New Orleans

Brad Richard

Brad Richard is the author of Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), and Habitations (Portals Press, 2000). He chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.

All photos – with permission of Brad Richard and Karin C. Davidson.

 *

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Sharon Millar: from Caribbean to Commonwealth

“Out the window, the tide is changing, the sea frothing and roiling into the tight channel. But beyond, in the harbor, it expands in relieved swells, glad to be past the slick mountain walls. Four months ago, Laura had gone to see Dr. Harnaysingh. She’d made an appointment because at forty-six, her body was suddenly an unknown entity. Once calm and predictable, a source of surety and absolutes, it was now dense, fleshy, prone to thickened skin and odd middle-aged lust… pregnancy was not something she’d considered… When she’d told Mark, he’d lifted her nightie, rested his dark head between her ribs and hipbones, and traced gentle circles around the hard space above her pubic bone. She’d imagined a light swooping and fluttering deep inside of her as Mark murmured to the quicksilver heartbeat, that mere conspiracy of cells. A baby.”

– from “The Whale House” 

by Sharon Millar

 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize co-winner

Sharon Millar – Photo credit: Mark Lyndersay / lyndersaydigital.com

Sharon Millar, a Trinidadian writer, shares her insights about writing in terms of language, landscape, cultural identity, and literary influences. Her lyrical stories are informed by the Caribbean and address issues central to life there. For instance, how life repeats itself in traditions and behaviors laden with love, sexuality, and violence. That we shared a writing mentor—Wayne Brown, the late Trinidadian writer who wrote from his home in Kingston, Jamaica—is an honor. Wayne had high expectations, which Sharon fulfills in her writing, her prose remarkable in its risk-taking, compelling narrative voice, and lush language.

Trumpet flower

Forest foliage

The language of your writing is rich and detailed and saturated in landscape and sense of place. Would you speak about the Caribbean, as well as your inspiration and your process?

It’s interesting to try and see where inspiration comes from. How do we choose to tell the stories that we do? It’s taken me a long time to pin down my process.

I’ve been writing seriously since 2009. I’d always dabbled before, but it was only when I began writing with Wayne Brown again (I’d done workshops with him in the early 1990s) that I began to really write. Sadly, I kept almost none of this early work. This was before the days of the internet, and to take part in his class I had to rent a typewriter. That’s one of my biggest regrets. I’d love to look at the work now.

I write from landscape, which is to say I often have no idea what I want to write. Random things are triggers. Right now it is July in Trinidad. We have moved from dry season to rainy season. It’s almost like a different island. The light changes, the humidity in the air increases, little ferns appear on telephone poles.

Trinidad's tropical waters

All of these are subtle cues. I tend to latch onto a feeling in the air or a certain heaviness of the light through the humidity and this will propel me in a certain direction.

The Caribbean islands have complicated histories of oppression and violence. Like the American South, slavery is an inescapable and tragic blot on the region. We are a young country. Just barely 50 years old with a very multi-ethnic population. Daily the population struggles with issues of identity and belonging. That’s the negative side. The positive side is that there are so many stories to be told. I really believe in the power of the story to help us see ourselves.

My biggest challenge is to write against all the stereotypes of the Caribbean. The rest of the world sees the Caribbean region as having one culture, one people, one collective history. I think it’s up to the fiction writers to show the world that each island is different and that we are much more than the tropical stereotype.

I’ve been told that I write in a very specific manner. I do this deliberately because I want the reader to see and hear and taste and smell what it is I am trying to convey. So I pay close attention to the small things. The plate of food on the table, the way the chair feels under the protagonist. What’s gratifying is when people say – oh, I felt this story had to be addressed to me because only I could feel this way – that’s very rewarding. I think that the specificity enables the work to be both very personal and very global.

Sharon and her parents

Family relationships, including the passing of happiness as well as grief from generation to generation, are prevalent in your writing. Would you share a bit about your family and your background?

We are white Creole and have lived here for as long as my family can remember. My mother’s paternal family goes back to the 1600’s (out of Barbados), her maternal family are more recent, coming to Trinidad in the mid-1800’s from Lisbon. On my father’s side, it’s a mix of English and French. The white Creole narrative in the Caribbean is one that is difficult to reconcile with my day-to-day life. But I am moving slowly towards mining the stories, both the good and the bad. And there are so many stories.

Sharon as a young child

Sharon and her sister Jennifer

My younger sister and only sibling, Jennifer, lives in Miami. She is about five years younger than I am. We had a good childhood with many pets, vacations near the sea, friends.

Sharon's mother as a child

But there were defining tragedies that shaped us.

When my grandfather was in his early sixties, he died suddenly. He had a heart attack in his study and died at his desk. It was the day after my birthday. I had just turned five, and my sister was only nine months old. My grandfather was an independent senator, and so his picture was posted on the front page of the newspaper. I remember my mother crying. She was an only child and very close to him, so this was a loss from which she never fully recovered.

At 54, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and succumbed to the disease ten years later. Her death is the hardest thing I’ve faced. And, Karin, you have put it so eloquently – the passing of grief from generation to generation. And it’s strange that I’ve honed in on this area of my life. I feel as if I’m the keeper of all the stories now.

Sharon and her daughter Hayley

I’m married with one daughter. I’ve been lucky in many ways, but no one escapes grief.

Dusk at the Waterloo Temple cremation site

Literary influences?

I am influenced by what I read. I went to university in Canada and read lots of early Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Alice Munro. Also Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and I love Bessie Head and Ben Okri. I always liked reading the women. I loved Russian literature for the sheer magnitude of the landscape. I don’t consider myself a feminist because the very label carries its own level of patriarchy, but the women appear in my writing. I’m still reading and learning the Caribbean canon, an intimidating and essential one. Sir Vidia Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, C. L. R. James, Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, and too many others to list here, have set a very high bar. I recently heard Jamaican poet, Edward Baugh, read in Miami, along with Edwidge Danticat and Earl Lovelace. When you hear the work and it resonates so deeply, you think, okay, that’s it. These are the ties that bind; this is what we share. This is what it means to be Caribbean in 2013.

The Caribbean canon is young and is naturally, very politically charged with issues of ethnicity and identity. Migration and displacement are constant themes as are oppression, power, and authenticity. For a long time I couldn’t write because I couldn’t see how I could bring anything to the canon. I simply couldn’t find a voice within that context. Now that I am older, I can see my way in, which is empowering. I can only write the story I know.

Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown

There’s something about the Antillean landscape that infects our writers. I see it in the works of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, and Wayne Brown. There is a lushness that marks us all. I wonder if one hundred years from now if it will be obvious. The current generation has poets like Tanya Shirley, Kei Miller (Jamaica); Loretta Collins Klobah (Puerto Rico); Vladimir Lucien, Kendel Hippolyte (St. Lucia); Danielle Boodoo-Fortune, Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo (Trinidad), Sonia Farmer (Bahamas), and many more that I haven’t had the opportunity to read. Even though I write fiction, I read poetry when I need an entry point and the texture of the words. Then I move to fiction to carry me along. I’m experimenting right now, and perhaps those most influencing my work are fiction writers, Alistair Macleod and Andrea Barrett. But that’s today.

White Witch Moth on a coconut tree

Blue-crowned Motmot - Tobago

You’ve been writing a story collection, and a few of the stories have won awards. Is there a project you look forward to working on once the collection is finished?

I want to move on to a novel. One of my short stories declared itself a novel very early in the process. I’m enjoying the research and also looking forward to discovering how the form is different to that of the short story.

Divali lights

Favorite line, and why you are drawn to it.

“Soon the harbor was a scatter of lanterns floating above the water, face level, shoulder level.” – from The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

I’ve read thousands of sentences since I read this line and I still remember how I felt when I encountered it. There was something about the idea of the lanterns floating above the water. By using the face and shoulder references, my mind made a leap and I imagined not just light floating disembodied, but also faces. It captured that odd ghostly mood with such a deft touch.

Trinidadian architectural detail

Novel, story, or vignette? And why?

Novel.

This was a hard choice. I very nearly chose short story. But the novel is a world to me, the short story a moment. While I have been transformed and charged and shocked by a short story, I still look to the novel to really remove me from my reality. The world building in the best novels leave you homesick for worlds that only exist on the page. That’s magic.

Caribbean bloom

Caribbean breakfast

Best breakfast ever!

A big slice of fresh avocado and buljol (salted fish, lime, onions, olive oil, and tomatoes mixed together).

Sharon Millar - Photo credit: Michele Jorsling

Sharon Millar is a graduate of the Lesley University MFA program and is a past student of fellow Trinidadian writer, the late Wayne Brown. She is the winner of the Small Axe 2012 short fiction competition and the co-winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Prior to this, her work has appeared on several shortlists. She has been published in a wide range of Caribbean publications as well as Granta Online. Her fiction is strongly rooted in landscape and she draws her stories from both place and history. Cemeteries, the rain forest, and old buildings are all sources of inspiration. She lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad with her husband and daughter.

To read Sharon’s stories, “The Whale House” and “Earl Grey,” follow these links:

 ”The Whale House” - at Granta – “New Writing”

 ”Earl Grey” - at ArtzPub – Issue 20

*

Color artist photo – with permission of Mark Lyndersay.

Black-&-white artist photo – with permission of Sharon Millar – Photo credit: Michele Jorsling 

All other photos – with permission of Sharon Millar

 *

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.