An Interview with Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

Most of my interviews have been posted at Hothouse Magazine and then re-posted here. This summer I was approached by friend and writer, Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer, to interview her at R.kv.ry. Quarterly. Ruvanee's prose is elegant, deft, and surprising. Here is a snippet of the interview.

Karin C. Davidson:  Ruvanee, your story, “Craving,” is such a complicated and careful look at intimacy and, in a very restrained way, of sexuality. Sexuality is the theme of r.kv.r.y.’s Summer 2013 issue, and so I love that your story is included here. Would you speak about the origins of this story, how you came to write of this couple, exhausted and overwhelmed by their responsibilities of caring for the elderly, blessed and later unblessed by the presence of the young woman who comes to help them?

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer: This story was influenced by an essay I had recently written, about an elderly relative’s struggle with dementia, but it arose primarily from my feeling exhausted by a set of administrative tasks at work—that had nothing to do with caring for the elderly—and wondering about the very human tendency to want an easy way out, and about the value of service and sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice—with its many negative as well as positive connotations—interests me; it is a theme I explore elsewhere as well.

KCD: “On the day Ivy Auntie went missing, Sriya Polgoda wished, once again, for more help.” This is the first line of “Craving,” an incredible first line in that it is deftly worded, each part so very simple, yet pointing straight into the conflict and the story’s heart. When you begin stories, do the drafted first lines lead you directly into the rest of the narrative, or do you find those intricate beginnings through revision?

RPV: Thank you for the kind words, Karin. There have been occasions when I’ve labored over first lines, revising wording and even the point at which a story begins. Most of the time, though, first lines come to me almost fully formed. Beginnings are much easier for me than endings, with which I struggle, revising over and over until I feel they are right.

Read the complete interview at rkvryquarterly.com/interview-with-ruvanee-pietersz-vilhauer/.

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

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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

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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.

Matthew Draughter: Vision and Voice

The reason for our departure will be

splashed across newspapers, it will be investigated.

Known by all, known to everyone as the day

of our separation—noted by a day and time,

noted by a heat index. A temperature so hot

that the blue balloons of your birthday party

burst, and the helium dispersed into the air.

A time when we retreated because we confused

the popping of the balloons with gunshots. A date

remembered by few. We are absent from the body,

no longer tied, but free.

 - from the poem, “The 1200 Block of Simon Bolivar” – For Brianna Allen

by Matthew Draughter

I first met Matthew Draughter at his Certificate of Artistry reading at Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans. Lusher focuses on the arts and academics, giving students interested in creative writing, fine arts, music, and arts media a conservatory-style education. Matthew’s voice stood out to me, and I was included in his senior thesis defense. His bright, wise way of answering questions during the defense is also reflected in his writing. When I read his words, I hear strains of Carl Sandburg and E.E. Cummings in his poetry, and threads of Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor in his prose. But these are only my impressions. His literary influences surprised me, arriving not only out of his creative writing classes, but from his interest in gender and the female voice. I love his responses and am very happy to share them here.

Matthew Draughter

 Photo credit: Lila Molina

Matthew, you are a native of New Orleans, and your writing is infused with a sense of place, a love of place, which in a way becomes an allegiance to the city. Can you speak a little about how your stories and poetry are influenced by the city and community? For example, in your poems, “X – a city,” about how the city was marked and marred in the aftermath of Katrina’s flooding, and “The 1200 Block of Simon Bolivar Avenue,” a tribute and a cry out for Brianna Allen, the little girl at a birthday party killed in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting in May 2012.

To be honest, when I first started writing, I thought New Orleans was boring, and I hated writing about the city. But in the past year I began to realize there was a voice here, and that voice began to speak to me. Until I put it on the page, I didn’t realize how lyrical and full of imagery that native voice was. When I started writing more and more about the city, I was able to grasp what the voice of New Orleans was trying to tell me, and that’s when the real writing came. The city began to influence many parts of my writing, and it was never so much about being aware of the setting or having a sense of place—to me it was just writing about where I’m from as it relates to where I am in my life now. It’s funny, you never know how beautiful your home is until you stop, stand back, and look at where you came from.

As it relates to my work, like “X- a city” and “The 1200 Block of Simon Bolivar,” there is a sense of tribute, but also a sense of what I’ve learned from events in the city. This past year I felt driven to find out things about myself, including the connection to my home. I love my city, and there is so much I’ve taken from all of the areas of New Orleans. Each section of the city has spoken to me, and that is where my connection comes from. These particular pieces act as homage to events that have caused tremendous loss. For “X” it was Katrina, and for “The 1200 Block” it was a murder. Both events are ones that hit the city hard, but most importantly these events touched me and made me think more about where I am really from and how much the city means to me.

I was fortunate to attend your Certificate of Artistry thesis defense at Lusher High School this past May. Your senior thesis, titled “Ways of Women,” is a very thoughtful and beautifully sequenced collection of stories and poetry, in which the female narrative voice is predominant. Tell us about how you decided to focus on this perspective, and about your purposeful use of gender in writing.

Gender roles have always been something I’ve been interested in. Whether it’s the unstoppable femme fatale, or a strong female figure. The truth is, women have always come across as more interesting characters to me. I am a male, and I know what it’s like to be one. That’s why I like writing about women. I feel that as a writer you should never be in your comfort zone, and you should always find a way to challenge yourself. I do that through gender roles. My thesis, “Ways of Women,” is a compilation of works inspired by women in my life. Through these works I’ve recognized the importance of gender roles in literature, but I’ve also discovered what has captivated me most about women. In each of my pieces there is a mystery behind the woman—that idea of secrecy is what has inspired me to focus on women, especially in stories like “Hive” and “Bonnie.” What is unknown about women intrigues me—that’s what makes me dig deeper. As it relates to my characters, I think that there are some secrets they can have, even from me. I want my literary women to be just as mysterious to me as they are for my readers. This allows me to dig and discover, but it also gives me the chance to realize when to step back.

Gender roles allow me to think more about the big picture of the work, and ultimately, what everything means as a whole. A female character can give the narrative a sense of depth that not all male characters can. It’s just more interesting that way.

In your story, “Hive,” the use of metaphorical language reveals a woman trapped in a hive of memory. Virginia Woolf inspired this piece, yes? Would you speak about the use of metaphor and the very close viewpoint of this story?

“Hive” was inspired by Virginia Woolf—specifically, Mrs. Dalloway. I was drawn to the fact that Woolf was so intimate with her characters’ points of view. The focus on her characters allows readers to enter their perspectives, their minds, even when the narrator isn’t in first person. That’s the effect I wanted in “Hive.” Through details, I gained a precision that entrapped my main character. The entrapment she feels is a product of the events from her past, and I decided to expound on that. For the point of view I didn’t want to have a first person narrator because the entrapment Charlotte feels could be extremely overbearing to readers. Third person limited gave me the chance to explore her world. Through metaphor I was able to extend the senses and the idea of how Charlotte’s memory works in the narrative. This gave me a sense of control and allowed me to find her character. I became Charlotte while I was writing this story. I had to be able to think like her; that was the only way I could create her. I also had to step away and realize there were certain aspects I didn’t want to know. This is where the idea of the “hive” came from. I wanted her to have secrets that not even I knew. When I created her memory of the bees, the metaphor came on its own. She’s a very intriguing character, and there’s a side to her that I still don’t know. As a writer, of course, you need to know your characters. But, to me, I don’t want to know them as well as some other writers know theirs. That’s why my fiction is mostly character-driven. It gives me a chance to explore and understand how far the exploration will go. In that way, the metaphor of “Hive” came to be.

Some of your stories include details such as texture and fabric.  And so: raw silk, chiffon, or taffeta? 

Chiffon. I like the way it layers. It just flows a way certain fabrics don’t.

Influences? Writers, artists, designers.

In fiction, Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever and Ralph Ellison, as well as Virginia Woolf. I love how their range is so different, how they have different methods of characterization. I’ve learned so much from each of these writers.

In poetry, I’m a huge fan of Anne Sexton. She’s always inspired and influenced my thoughts about structure and diction, and how they work together for a poem. And ever since I started writing, I’ve loved William Butler Yeats. Recently, my work has been inspired by contemporary poets, like Ntozake Shange, Terrance Hayes, Kevin Young, and Langston Hughes. I’ve studied and drawn from them as I’ve began to find my own voice. “X – a city” was actually inspired by Terrance Hayes. The rhythm was a response from “Blue Seuss.” I was flattered when you mentioned E. E. Cummings because I think he’s brilliant. “The 1200 Block of Simon Bolivar Avenue” wasn’t influenced by another poet; it was just me and everything I’ve ever wanted in a poem. It wasn’t a response, rather a creation of something that had been on my mind for a very long time, and I finally had the chance to write it. Something triggered that poem’s creation.

In terms of designers, I admire Chanel and Alexander McQueen. These two have changed the face of the fashion industry. I love Givenchy and Marchesa because of the construction of their designs. I love when designers take fashion risks, as that parallels the risks I take in writing. That’s why I love fashion as much as I love writing. The risks are endless, and when you mess up, you can just start over. They both seem to go hand in hand, and it’s all art—and that’s the most important thing for me.

Matthew Draughter

Photo credit: Cassidy Driskel

Congratulations! You’ve graduated from Lusher and will be attending Loyola University in the fall. What are your academic plans?  What are your hopes and dreams?

I plan on majoring in International Business. I feel as though college is where you find yourself, so anything can happen between now and the time I graduate. I also want to continue to pursue my writing. Loyola has great literary magazines, and I would love to have the opportunity to have my work published in one of them. After college, I would really like to work for a fashion company to see how design, writing, art, and business come together. I want to go to school for design and eventually work toward an MBA. I’ve always seen life as a book—you can decide to make it as big as Moby Dick or as tiny as a pamphlet. I see myself taking more risks, because that’s the only way I’ll ever know what works and what doesn’t.

In terms of my writing career, I won’t ever stop. It’s what I have to do. After graduation, I hit a point in time when I thought, “Now what?” I started reading like I used to, and reading always sparks my imagination. Reading and writing are counterparts: you can’t have one without the other. As long as you’re reading, your imagination for writing is stimulated. I’ll keep writing about what intrigues me, about the things I love. Eventually, I’d love to be a published writer. I’d love to have three books by the time I’m thirty-three. But for now I just want to be able to finish the story I’m currently working on. I’m going to take it a day at a time, so I’m always enjoying life and can always experience something new.

And because we love a little lagniappe in New Orleans: your favorite music?

This question makes me smile. Honestly, I appreciate all types of music. I love listening to R&B, and I like some Rap. Sometimes I just like to sit and listen to Tchaikovsky and meditate on parts of Swan Lake. Other times I like to blast Kanye West. Then there are those moments when I feel like listening to music from my childhood: Destiny’s Child, The Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears. No matter what, I love music that tells a story. For me, there needs to be a beginning, middle, and end. That’s why I respect artists who still create albums. Singers like Alicia Keys and Adele have songs that have layers. That’s what I feel writing should have. That’s why, for me, music and writing are synonymous.

My favorite artist of all time is Mariah Carey. All of her songs do things lyrically that other artists can’t achieve. Her albums work as units, and there’s an element that drives each song from start to finish. This is why I love all of her music. Whether she’s singing about an enduring love story, or about missing an ex, there’s a narrative. She also has an amazing voice, which makes me happy no matter what. The element that Mariah uses in her albums—the thing that drives them—that’s what I look for when I write. My favorite Mariah album, Daydream, has a summery haze that coats every song. I feel that when you write, there should be an element—a summery haze—that coats each and every piece you write in its own way. Strangely enough, that’s the album that I listened to when I wrote “Hive.”

Most recently, one of my favorite albums is Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, which I love for its cohesive body of work. From start to finish, it flows. That’s how every poem, short story, and novel should be. Each song in an album should speak to the others, just as every line of every literary work should, in turn revealing what is versatile and unique about the whole piece.

Matthew Draughter is a writer from New Orleans. He attended the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop in 2011 and received Gold Key Awards in the 2011 and 2013 Southeast Louisiana Regional Scholastic Young Art and Writing Competition in Fiction, Poetry, and the Senior Portfolio categories. He recently graduated from Lusher Charter High School, where he competed in Track and Cross Country and completed his Certificate of Artistry in Creative Writing, and will attend Loyola University in the fall.

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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.