What struck me about this piece is the poetic nature of your prose. A certain experimental energy connects the piece together. What inspired this essay’s imaginative style, and what is the importance to you of bending genre conventions?

I get inspired by the courage of artists every day. The way a songwriter might talk about their grief or the way an artist might reveal a hidden character in the shadow of a painting. I’m intrigued by how a story is told and where it may lead us. I grew up in India where ancient Sufi verses often blended with folk music and stories were often shared as oral poetry. The way I personally think and write has come from all those years of growing beside art that was mystical and without defined borders, that merged and meshed with individual story and style, and was an intrinsic part of everyday life. It gave me permission to use language in surprising and unpredictable ways, and to never underestimate its depth and scope. As a second language writer I think of bending genre conventions as leading the reader into unchartered territory, being a bridge to the unknown. For me it is one of the most exciting aspects of storytelling.

Your essay deals beautifully with the topic of emigration. How do themes of relocation, movement, and immigration impact your style and writing?

Rumi said, “All language is a longing for home.” I often think about that as so much of what I wish to write has to do with making sense of time and distance, belonging and moving. As an outsider and as a writer I think the subject of home has always been elusive to me. I find myself chasing this elusive place and discovering and rediscovering its varied meanings. The way I write or use language to tell my stories ultimately is my way of showing and expressing how I long to connect with the vast and diverse world while still longing for home.

Towards the end of the piece, you begin to discuss how your mother’s sadness relates to your own. This moment is very powerful. Can you speak more to the power of emotional self-exploration in writing?

I think writing has always been a way for writers to look at the root of who they are and how they see things. A way to answer those deep nagging questions, to face our fears. It’s such a peculiar activity where we go into an unknown place with a hazy map in our heads and then trusting it enough to get us there. Sometimes on our way to these strange places we begin to make sense of where we hurt and why, or how we may feel about things that happened a very long time ago. I have encountered some unexpected moments in writing where I’ve found missing pieces of long forgotten puzzles. Those rare moments of clarity or discovery don’t come very often but definitely entice you to keep exploring, to keep writing.

What artists or writers have had a strong impact on you—especially as you wrote this piece?

There are so many writers and poets who’ve had an impact on me and have informed my writing over the years: Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Rainer Maria Rilke, Patti Smith, Deborah Levy, Orhan Pamuk, and Rumi to name a few.

Around the time I was working on this piece I remember reading Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel so devastating and lyrical it compelled me to write my own story that was tied to my mother within a vignette of this piece. Vuong writes about freedom, trauma, and survival with such bittersweet acceptance, I was edified by it.

When I first read this poem, I thought that the two figures in the beginning would collide. In a two-dimensional world, they certainly would. When they passed one another, I felt a real perspective shock, like an optical illusion. How did you conceive this play with perspective?

By suspending time—the poem is in the present tense, yet it isn’t until line 9 (in a poem of 13 lines) that the reader realizes with the word before that the event has already happened. This premeditated-for-a-split-second event happened during the pandemic when I was having very little interaction with others, by choice, and this was an opportunity to safely and actively “engage” with strangers without them knowing it.

There is a tight attention to space in this poem. How did this poem find its shape?

“For So Long” is from the ampersand series. These ampersand poems mostly employ an alternating one-line stanza/two-line stanza construction intending to enact instability for the reader. The poem’s vertical sensibility allows for a pressuring effect, as if the right margin is putting pressure on the left-justified words.

The final line ends in a colon. From a punctuation standpoint, one conventionally expects words to follow a colon, but instead we are met with endless silence. What did you hope for readers to hear in that silence?

Yes, silence does follow the colon at the end of the poem, yet it could also imply possibility or the hope of possibility or it could imply more of the same.

Throughout this poem there is a careful balance between wanting and hiding, observing and introspecting, dreaming and the immediacy of hands-on experience. What are some of your favorite poems on longing?

Since I directly associate longing with loneliness, longing’s origin, I will name favorite poems about loneliness for which there are many: “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” by Forough Farrokhzad (translated), “Hymn to Life” by James Schuyler, and anything by Hans Faverey (also translated).

What opens your eyes as a poet? What kinds of moments get stuck in your poet’s mind?

This is a great question! For me it is about sustained awareness, as opposed to the eyes opening, that allows for a greater chance for discerning what needs gleaning based on where I am with myself at a given moment. I use the word “gleaning” here because of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, a film that brought language to, and illuminated, my creative process, and affirmed that a collage approach to constructing poems is legitimate.

The journey of “Vasospasm” feels precise, ending in such a striking final line. How did you find the right moment to leave this piece? 

An emerging theme in my work is the tension between a mother’s devotion to her young children, her dissolving sense of self, and the failing state of the world, over which she has no control. In “Vasospasm,” I wanted to begin in the anxious, suffocating space of new motherhood and then zoom out to the existential magnitude of “the mess she came into.” The speaker experiences simultaneous hope and grief, adoration and terror. When I found myself at “mess,” I ended the poem and left the speaker there, in a mess she doesn’t know how to get out of. 

Frustration, I think, is such a difficult emotion to harness in writing. How were you able to grapple with that feeling here in such a concise poem? 

This poem definitely grapples with frustration, as well as other intense emotions. Alliterative verse (the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words) is what allowed me to propel the poem forward, both lyrically and narratively. I wanted to harness the momentum of those repeated sounds to convey the frantic pace of new motherhood and the rawness of the speaker’s emotions. Repetition also helped me depict the claustrophobia and exasperation of caring for an infant, especially when your body doesn’t do the work it is expected to. I let music guide this poem.

This piece is so generous in its vulnerability. How was the process of creating and then sharing this work?

Poetry is not memoir, and it isn’t therapy. Still, I feel compelled to share certain difficult experiences in my poems, because it is part of my work as a writer. Writing vulnerably is how I keep myself honest as a poet. I often share my drafts with a trusted editor who is also a mother; she is frank with me about the experiences that connect and those that don’t. It’s helpful to have that community before poems like “Vasospasm” go out into the world. I feel accountable to the experiences of other women and imagine, always, that I am writing to them. I hope that “Vasospasm” will reach other women and make them feel acknowledged.

What creators have been stuck in your head recently? 

As a poet, I am currently obsessed with Ocean Vuong’s book Time Is A Mother, which I read after a friend recommended it to me. Right now, I am living and writing from the perspective of a mother. It was refreshing and devastating to read a book written from the perspective of a son, grappling with the loss of his mother.

As an editor, I spent this summer reading manuscripts for the Coniston Prize. Poring over the poems of other women reminded me of the community and conversation we share. We ultimately selected five outstanding finalists, and I can’t wait to share their voices with the world. 

This poem evokes Henry James in the first line. What is your relationship to Henry James? Did you start from a place of reverence for his work or someplace else?

I have always loved The Portrait of A Lady. James' reverence for the place of objects and visual art in our world captivates me. So does his ability to describe psychological states with great, great nuance.

There’s so much unique, powerful imagery here. Where do you pull from when developing image sets for a poem? 

Some parts of this poems are shadows of other poems. The prayer shawl is an image I have been waiting to use for years. I first imagined it as worn by a disciple in an ashram, then later as a child watching my mother get dressed. The other images  come mostly from different times I spent in England—first as a little girl and then, in my twenties, in Cornwall.

The poem sets up these lovely images and then negates them starting at the end of the first stanza. How did you arrive at this unique move in the poem, and how did you develop a successful structure to highlight this move?

If I knew how to answer this, I could write poem after poem that I liked. But really the poem came as one long thread, like a gold chain that is unknotted as you find the right place to pull. The idea of it—the turn—was a vague idea that became precise as I wrote into the poem.

Along those same lines, why three line stanzas? 

The three lines, I hope, are meant to feel like a person, their shadow, and someone invisible to them. Perhaps the speaker, the companion, and her fears. The number three is an odd number and the speaker feels like the odd person out in others' lives.

I'm so intrigued by the companion that shows up at the end of the poem. I don't want you to feel like you have to give away any of the mystery, but could you talk a little more about how you thought of the “you” that punctuates the end of the poem? 

A great question. The companion is an internalized dark part of the speaker, one from her childhood. Her shadow companion is both constant (like a familiar) and frightening to her. I often write in the third person, using my first name Margaret. I suppose it is a way of trying to render how we can feel so separate from ourselves, always observing.

You say at one point, “If our name is our identity, who is my grandfather without his?” Later, near the essay’s end, you write, “our name is our constant.” It’s the journey from “if” to direct assertion that I find so interesting. Can you say more about how your thoughts on this topic changed during the writing & revision process?

My thoughts on this topic started in my kitchen. I open the piece by sharing this silly ritual I have of talking to my dead grandmothers, but I wanted a way to speak to this great, great grandfather I’d just discovered but knew nothing about. The first draft was about how different cultures pay respects to the dead through ritual, creating shrines, keeping objects and so on. Most rituals involve naming the person to be remembered, and this is where I got stuck. I knew his name wasn’t quite right. This changed the entire direction of the piece. It then became about identity and the power of names, how they humanise and dehumanise people and objects.

We name our pets, give them identities, make them family. I’m sure the “Ship of Theseus” conundrum wouldn’t have the same effect if it was just known as ‘the ship’ conundrum, even the axe conundrum isn’t about any old axe, it’s “Grandfather’s.” Someone asks, who are you? and we respond immediately with our name. So much of my grandfather’s poor behaviour feels like a reaction to losing his name, his identity. The metamorphosis of it, from Ah Me Fat Hock, then finally to George Fathock, after many changes in between, seemed to tell the story of his displacement: the constant moving, changing, unsettling—the only consistency is this dislocation. I do really sigh ‘Ah me!’ when I pass by the docks. By ritualising this disconnection, I do feel a bit more connected to him. 

Your essay features four lists, two of which are written as poems in simple, natural language — almost like the rhymes we might find in children’s books. What was your intention with these poetic moments? What did poetry offer that prose did not? 

I like your description of the language. There’s elegance in simplicity, and clarity. There’s also something chilling about describing horrifying events in a child-like way. The first poem explains the process of human trafficking in Guangzhou in the nineteenth century, a shocking practice. The next poem depicts some ‘perhapsing’ of my grandfather’s experience coming through Customs and having his Chinese name written in English for the first time. The experience of one, to me, is just as harrowing as the other and I wanted to emphasise this. I chose poetic form to separate these moments from the other lists because they are both profound events. 

Where I depict my great, great grandfather arriving at Customs in Melbourne, Australia, I wanted the reader to make the connection between this and the previous section, because both of these events are dehumanising. His arrival in Australia is a pivotal moment: The lack of documentation, losing the written Chinese version of his name, this is where it all starts, with this seemingly simple process of entering the country and declaring himself. Everything goes awry from here.   

Ultimately, this essay is a work of both imagination and research. You scour pots and imagine conversations with the dead; you scour newspapers and try to constellate facts into a story. Even though we as writers know it’s impossible to genuinely understand our ancestors from the past and embody all their feelings, we keep trying. What do we gain, despite our inevitable failure? And when we try stepping into the unknowable hearts of people from the past, is there anything we lose? 

I love that phrase “unknowable hearts.” And this is so true when all we have are documents and newspaper clippings. I think we gain a broad appreciation of their world from a distance. But when we invent too much to plug the gaps, we risk creating caricatures, or creating well-rounded, but largely fictional characters. In this way, we lose their voice, their “hearts,” because they can’t tell us how they felt, and no matter how hard we try, our imaginings—filtered through our technologies, our values and so on—will never suffice. I think we keep trying though because we want to humanise the bits of information we have, shape paper trails into living, breathing people. I think this is about identity and connection too. On the other hand, sometimes we need to be comfortable with not knowing. 

Describing the process of not knowing is just as much a part of the story, and in many ways the story here is not just my great, great, grandfather’s, or my grandmothers’, but the story of my investigation and the frustrations that came with it. And it’s quite confronting to me that I’ve revealed to a bunch of strangers I stand around in my kitchen inventing conversations with dead relatives over a cuppa. So, I guess something I gain is some further understanding of myself too.

What are some of the books or artworks that inspired you or gave you energy while you worked on this essay?

At the time I was writing it, I read quite a few personal essays which described the failings of research with as much detail and reflection as the discoveries, such as Elmo Keep’s personal essay, This is not an Exit. This helped me feel more at ease writing about my own disappointments and conclusions. I also drew a lot of inspiration from A thousand tiny fettered steps, by Michelle Hamadache, which you can read here. I love the way she writes, simply at times, then she drops this lyrical poetic prose at the right moment and it just sings. I like the way she structures her work too; she weaves so many different narrative elements so expertly. Plus, I love ekphrasis and blending artistic modalities, anything a bit unconventional. 

Not sure that The Bulletin’s 1886 image of the Mongolian Octopus gave me any positive energy, but certainly motivated me to write. It’s a terrible image, but placed my great, great grandfather’s deplorable behaviour into some cultural and historical context. It was one among many images and documents from the time that cemented my sympathy for him and other migrants. You can see it here. 

The title, “Dear Dead Garden,” gives this poem an address. This lends a degree of intimacy to the poem, keeping it personal and overheard. What opportunities did the form of an address create for you as a poet?

I don’t know if I know yet where this poem lives, though it lives somewhere close to me. So the title as an address is a reaching, or a call to which maybe, hopefully, there will sound a response. That address let me direct the poem toward something tangible for the language to latch onto while the subject of the poem is simply now a memory. Which is to say, I think being an address to someone, something, somewhere is a way of giving the poem roots so as to keep it from floating too far off as it wanders into more abstracted areas. It helps keep the language close.

I suppose, too, that the epistolary form creates intimacy because, as you mention, there is a sense of privacy about it. I did have as one of my guardrails in the project of this and its sibling poems a sort of thinking that they could be read on little torn-out sheets of notebook paper from an ashy shoebox in an attic somewhere. Certainly, I hope that comes across when reading it, but more, it helped me to enter myself more openly into the writing of the poem(s), assigning it a memory I return to, a name, a self I used to be.

Though this is a brief poem, it feels very precise. What was your process like for this piece?

Thank you. This poem arose from a 5-week workshop led by Mathias Svalina which was aimed at developing a daily writing practice. It was not a workshop designed around discipline or the sort of obvious notion that to make art involves the making part. Rather, I think, its fundamental goal was to allow, through a routinized writing practice, the room to try and fail, and also to provide a path toward a sort of unified project, be that a manuscript or a series, or just a single poem even. I came to around 70 workable poems.

I arrived where I arrived in a sort of lazy way, by working from a single title as a prompt for every poem I wrote through the 5 weeks. What I tried to do (which is what I always try to do maybe) was follow the music of my thoughts into the music of my words, starting from a phrase and its accompanying idea. And maybe I’m not alone in experiencing many of my thoughts as fleeting and brief. Some of my most profound and influential memories are quite simple moments. I tend away from packing these thoughts with language and rather try to provide a scaffold onto which the poem can grow itself without a lot of help from me. 

The first words of the poems are “Your last words.” What role does allusion to real life experiences play in this poem? 

A significant one, ha! I’ve lost a number of people and things and places in ways that did not afford finalities of the sort I think we’d all hope for, so, to me, that line and the following one dredge up a hollowness and maybe an artificiality. But also there’s an embrace to it. A shelter about it. A protection within it. The last of a thing as a whole of the thing itself, now.

There is a lot of regret in this poem, but I think it’s an unwarranted regret, a regret about things over which no one has any control. There is a wanting-to-go-back. I wrote some of the lines with a very specific person in mind, and some of the lines remember very specific selves. So in a way the allusions waver line to line between the outward and the inward. 

For me, it’s very difficult to write without some underlying emotional thrust that sits on top of lived experience, so I think I’d have to say allusion to real life is actually the core of most of my work and absolutely this poem. But sometimes the layers of abstraction and surrealism, even as I think them out, sock the material circumstances in so much fog I can’t see them, though I feel the presence. Still, there are lines in this poem, the first being one of them, that feel quite concretely like a moment in my life.

What is your writing practice like? 

I wish I could say my regular practice was as tight as it was during the period in which I wrote this poem, but I can’t say that. I work in communications for a small company and do most of our contract and intellectual property drafting, which uses an entirely different brain space than writing poems does. Often I am unable to navigate between the two mindsets without a substantial amount of wind-down time. So, my writing sessions are usually relegated to days off or very late evenings.

I am a writer of ritual, and I stick with a routine that works until it doesn’t, which is often. One of my most fruitful routines, though, is to find a spot outside (a park, my porch, the woods) and work through editing a few poems from a previous session, then slip into something of an automatic write—pretty much writing the words as they boil up without any filtration between the thought at the page. Usually, I’ll start to slide into short ’lil thoughts and concepts from here.

In truth, though, my writing practice feels a lot like playing a slot machine: I try a lot and fail a lot and sometimes maybe I don’t fail.

The simplicity of language and form here lends each line such lovely gravity. I was especially taken by the phrase "small, expensive dog." How did this brevity influence your use of language? 

Although I don’t write a lot of directly autobiographical poems, I really did write this poem on my deck next to my small expensive dog. I wanted to capture a moment when time seemed to stop and settle into a deeply peaceful stillness. I hope the economy of language captures the vertical depth a passing moment can drop us into, a sense of being momentarily outside of time. But I also wanted the poem to carry some discomfort. The “expensive” situates this peaceful moment in an economic framework. Money often makes refuge possible. And isn’t it absurd to pay for a dog? But I did and here he is.

What did your writing and revision process look like for this poem? How did you arrive at the ending?

This is terrible but I don’t remember! When I check back on my notes, I don’t have alternate versions, which probably means I only made small revisions to the original. So I guess it was largely a moment of inspiration! The ending is (in my mind anyway) inspired by Robert Frost’s poem “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” which describes people looking at the ocean. It’s meant to be something of a self-indictment. This moment is peaceful, yes, but in part because of what the speaker is choosing to exclude. The privacy provided by the trees protects the speaker and also discourages her from considering the world beyond her own comfort. 

Do you see "Sunday" as part of a larger conversation with your writing? 

Yes, I’m very interested in the interplay between respite and privilege, between our sometimes-competing social needs and responsibilities. “Sunday” is a sort of pastoral, but it acknowledges the limits of the pastoral, both in terms of how economic forces constrain the speaker, since she can only have this experience on the weekend, and facilitate her moment of peace, situated in her private property. A lot of the media response to “burnout” during the Covid-19 pandemic bothered me because it seemed directed towards the people least likely to be materially affected by Covid, people with the means and employment status to have refuge and take refuge. Yet I don’t feel it’s right to deny how much many people struggled even if they were sheltered from the worst economic and health consequences. I don’t know the answer to these questions! They are complicated! That’s why I’m writing about them, to explore my ambivalences. Many of my current poems return to these themes, with repeated motifs of the yard/garden and a partially imagined Marie Antoinette figure.

Which writers, poets, or artists have influenced your work? Are you typically drawn to imagism? 

I would say poems as unified as “Sunday” are rare for me, though they appear more frequently in my current project than they have in the past. Poets I love include Linda Gregerson, Kathleen Graber, Kevin Prufer and Natalie Shapero, all of whom can be discursive and “talky” in a way that profoundly appeals to me. I often wish my writing sounded more like theirs, but it doesn’t and I have to live with that, since I can only manage to sound like myself. They are all poets who helped me understand how to widen the lens beyond my own emotions, experiences, and family history.  I like poetry that engages with the world and holds the speaker accountable, and I hope I’m writing in that spirit. 

“Field” is a common term from poetics, but it can also just be a plot of grass. What’s the field here?

I wanted to do a few things with the field/the idea of the field. At its most basic, I wanted it to be a location, a plot of grass which serves as a landscape for the poem. This isn’t strictly true as there’s a street corner and elevator (“no one screams in the elevator” taken from one of Jack Spicer’s letters), but the field is the main landscape. I also wanted to use it as a conceit to explore people, and their very human affects/afflictions, through nature. The field is as much springboard as it is landscape. It’s a springboard to blur human and nature, itself an artificial divide and a boring one at that. I hope troubling this divide makes it more interesting. Formally, I wanted the poem to mirror a field with the final lines serving as a kind of propagation from the main body. This is where the caesuras and the lack of punctuation come in. The lines sprout, twist, grow from the left margin toward the page’s center. I like that they’re somewhat uniform and somewhat uneven. They remind me of a tree line. I should note, too, that I had these ideas before and after writing. They might have been around while writing, but just barely. They were left somewhere at the edge of consciousness. Mostly, I was trying to come up with a good (however we define good) line, image, sentence, fragment. 

Moss and goosegrass. These common, everyday plants set the scene to begin the poem, but it also ends with more fantastical vegetative imagery. What are the plants up to?

“What are the plants up to” is the best question I’ve been asked. I don’t know what they’re up to. I wanted to blur/bend/stretch the idea of human and plant. What the people in the poem (speaker, those mentioned by name, Jack Spicer and his proclamation) are up to is what the plants are up to. I wrote shades of alienation and addiction, physical and emotional hunger, begging, an almost satisfaction, religious/cultural ceremony, death, and probably other things I wasn’t aware of. I wrote these as understood by human-turned-nature-turned-human, which is to say I wrote a guess about what these would be like as experienced by, or understood through, the not human. Because it’s a guess it’s also, likely, a failure. I enjoy this particular kind of failure. An imaginative, reaching failure. I think that’s important for heart, mind, and species. Also something like religious/cultural ceremony is already not human. It’s a social projection of ideas, emotions, agreed upon behavior, ritual, etc. So, taking this and filtering it again through the not human is redundant, but it creates skips and fractures I find exciting. I hope the reader does too. Finally, on a banal note, I like plants. I’m a horrible gardener, but enjoy looking at and thinking about plants. I enjoy reading about them and their names. So, including common plants and creating human/plant hybrids is an homage to my leafy friends.

Tell us about one of the people mentioned toward the end.

It seems unfair to mention only one, so I’ll briefly say that they’re all friends who have died. Ryan, Kurt, and Zach were friends from high school. Ronnie was a friend from middle school. Chad, Al, and Ellen were friends in recovery (I’ve been in recovery fourteen years). Stevie and Josh were the younger brothers of two close friends. Ryan is the person I was closest to. I met him in kindergarten, then my family moved a lot, and I met him again when my family moved back to the same town years later. We listened to music, went to parties and shows, drank and did drugs, talked about literature, talked about music, lied. All the dumb things teenagers do. Eventually I ended up many states away working in the stockroom of a Pier1 Imports. He ended up working in the same stockroom. We were sober then. We hauled furniture and filled our mouths with chewing tobacco. We spent holidays together in a halfway house. Ryan was human – wonderful, kind, compassionate, creative, but also deeply, fundamentally, afraid and mean and sick. He died. I didn’t. He shows up in my poems now and I like that. It’s a bit hyperbolic to say he haunts me. I don’t believe that because I don’t believe in ghosts. Memory, though, is a haunting. Sean Bonney’s book Our Death begins with a poem titled “A Riot is a Haunt.” Maybe Ryan’s haunting is a riot of language, though I suspect Sean and Ryan wouldn’t agree. 

Does the poem fit into any larger projects you’re working on? 

Yes and no. I first drafted this poem two years ago. I’ve revised and tinkered since then, but it stands as an early attempt to move beyond human subjectivity. I’ve continued to explore this via poems (perhaps the only way to explore it). I had a project of incomplete history poems which were doing something similar. They attempted to escape subjectivity via history rather than nature/plant. You can find two of them in DIAGRAM. I wrote a longer incomplete history essay thing. An essay prose poem? I’m working on a manuscript of poems at the moment and am, I think, close to done. It’s of a piece with “The hurt field” and incomplete history poems, though doesn’t include either. It does have a poem titled “Morning with Fog” that’s about an imagined morning run. Trees and woods talk to the runner. There’s alienation and addiction and the poem ends with an image of the runner’s fingers curled around the handle of a coffee mug like a foxglove bloom. 

There’s a really interesting turn in this poem — the mother’s underthings were not engineered for awe, but she worships the sun. Can you say more about this “but” and the contrast that you’ve set up?

The mother (Alice) will not be body shamed. She has broken free from the confinements of what society deems beautiful or socially acceptable. She is unfettered by a younger woman’s concerns about age, weight, sex appeal, and the ravages of a life richly lived. Her body carries the heavy scars of time and childbirth, but her heart is weightless and full of gratitude. She is ready to worship anywhere, at any time. In this way, she enjoys a freedom that I admire…and envy.

There are two types of worship here, worshipping the sun and holding fast to a rosary. Or perhaps it’s one worship expressed in two simultaneous actions. How is this poem defining worship? And how does worship dovetail with the narrator’s witness?

The simple act of worshipping the sun — and worshipping Jesus — springs from the same place: a hunger to hold something sacred in our hands. The warmth of a desert spring on the mother’s unapologetically bare skin emboldens her to open herself to infinite, unconditional love of the divine. As the light embraces her, she holds fast to the rosary, rooting herself to this world and reaching into the next in a single gesture. Witnessing this scene from the security and sterility of her house, the narrator is both enchanted and afraid. She wants to experience pure, unabashed reverence, but knows that such freedom comes at a cost: perhaps old age, perhaps a diversion from norms, perhaps rebellion against the societal guardrails make the narrator feel safe.

This poem centers on an older woman wearing a grayed bra, and the last lines end with consecration. I find myself very struck by the idea of an aging mother’s “underthings” and how those items make contact with the very messy, undeniably real body — the body of a woman who bore six children. How do you see an unromantic object — a worn bra that makes the poem’s narrator think of death — leading to the consecration of “shamelessness of blood and love” ? 

Alice’s body was roughly sculpted by love as she carried, bore and nurtured six children. Babies and gravity pulled on her breasts, reshaping objects of beauty and desire as communion cups for her family. In old age, Alice finds that she is hungry for intimacy with herself, and with God. After a lifetime of giving, she is ready to receive. She searches for grace in her grown son’s backyard, shamelessly welcoming the light and warmth that embrace her time-ravaged body as she prays the rosary in her bra. Her longing for divine love is holy, and her naked faith transforms her greying bra into a liturgical garment; a vestment for her own consecration. 

Who are other poets, writers, or artists you admire that can find the sacred in the used and everyday? 

Three poets have inspired me to explore the divine spark in everything, and to draw the sacred from what may appear ordinary or profane to the casual observer. These poets are Ross Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude), Louise Glück (The Red Poppy), and Michele Miller (Holy). Michele’s work has helped me to be comfortable in the gentle tension between the profane and the sacred — to fearlessly connect with our humanity and our divinity…with love and kindness for both. 

What I enjoy most about your piece is that we’re always on the move, from one image or setting to the next. How do you find the journey of a poem? Of this poem? 

I do like your way of phrasing it: the journey of a poem. Writing poems for me is often an opportunity to let some interesting energies loose on a page and see what they do and where they lead me. Alongside that, I think of poems as a sort of dance between tension and resolution, where some images or ideas seem to raise the stakes while others provide a release or otherwise alter whatever dynamic is at play. A good poem is attentive to that process, and when people talk about a poem in terms of “flow” or how it moves, I think that’s what they’re reacting to.

In getting this piece into shape, the goal was to give the reader everything they needed to assemble the scene in their mind without providing too much. It’s painted broadly enough that, I think, you could ask many different readers to draw or describe it and everyone’s answer would be pretty different, barring a few commonalities. I’m a great believer that with the right details, you can “sell” the reader on anything. Some people have described my work as surreal (I couldn’t say whether this piece is or not), but the process of writing realism or surrealism is the same: present the right details so that the reality you’re portraying is convincing or at least compelling, which then encourages the reader to invest in the poem.

Your images are so clear, each one carrying their own spark, leading to the punch of the final line. What was the impetus for this poem? 

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, there were weeks and weeks of demonstrations, protests, vandalism and authoritarian violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. While that’s not a subject I feel capable of addressing directly, it weighed on me a great deal, this feeling that the world was convulsing while making its way toward, hopefully, some kind of collective awakening and improvement. So, my work at that time became infused with suggestions of clashing and strife, of places left scarred by struggle. At times, my brain being what it is, this expressed itself in a kind of comic absurdism — the parade in this poem is a funhouse-mirror image of a street protest, though in this case it’s not clear what’s actually being celebrated. Beyond that, the piece arises out of dreams I occasionally have of being out at night in some remote place, far from anywhere I know. Something about the opening images tapped into that dream-memory, and so the speaker finds himself at the ocean, in a sense having run out of places to go.

For such a short piece, every single word works to build the world of the poem. What was your revision process like? 

This poem came out of a long series of short stanzas I wrote, most of which ended up having nothing to do with each other. The first stanza of this poem was one of those. I pulled it out to make it its own piece and the second stanza at the ocean seemed a natural progression from the first. The early drafts of the complete piece were very prose-like, reading almost like a diary entry, with fewer but longer lines. I brought the piece to my writers’ group here in Portland and their feedback led me to reshape it the way it appears here. Very few of the actual words ended up being changed; it was really just figuring out the pace and shape of the poem. The early drafts also had conventional punctuation, which I removed. The logical relation between the lines then becomes more ambiguous, which gives the reader a greater role in assembling the poem’s meaning.

For you, what is the goal of sharing a poem? 

I don’t write poems to change the world — I wouldn’t know where to begin — but I can, perhaps, give back to readers something of what other poets give to me. I love reading a poem and being struck by an image, a phrase or an idea that feels new yet recognizable, that expands my mental vocabulary of possibilities. 

I know people who write solely for their own satisfaction, never attempting to share their work with a wider public, but for me, that feels incomplete. I want my poetry to find its way to the readers who will appreciate it, but more fundamentally, I want it to fully exist. That’s not to say I try to publish every poem I write; some of them just don’t feel like they make the cut. But just like Schrodinger’s cat is hypothetical until someone opens up the box, my poems are only possibilities until they emerge into a world of substance. Publishing entails a certain level of finality — I may not fully know my own intentions in writing something, but I ought to have at least a pretty good idea if I’m going to ask others to spend their time reading it. That extra step feels important, a way of holding myself accountable as an artist.

The mother/child relationship is very intimate. In this piece, you’ve managed to replace the child with a car battery and still retain this feeling of intimacy. In your beautiful second stanza, the speaker braves the cold and holds the “warm & alive” car battery “close to [her] chest in both arms” in a familiar gesture of maternal tenderness. What works or experiences inspired your depiction of the mother/child bond, and what inspired you to subvert the expected by replacing the child with an inanimate object? 

I loved the motherhood poetry of Eavan Boland and Sharon Olds after I had my own children. As a young woman who was not drawn to being a mother, I found myself overwhelmed by the spiritual power of it when it happened. In this piece I tried to find places or times I felt such a tenderness before. Was there any precursor for how much I would embrace being a mother? The caring for the life of my VW battery in Maine every subzero night seemed strangely maternal in retrospect. It definitely makes me smile to remember how careful I was with that heavy battery.

You show a masterful ability to include only as much detail as necessary. This is evident through the specificity of your images and the economy of your syntax. Talk me through your writing process. Do you pare down a lot in editing, or do you naturally lean towards this precision in early drafts? 

I always begin writing in my journal. Handwriting is important to me. I’m a calligrapher, a carver in stone and a letterpresser. Once I explore on the page (after freewriting from assorted prompts for a specific amount of time), I use the microphone option on a Word document, to speak what was on the page into a document. That was a life-changer, finding that microphone icon! Then comes the fun of creating a structure and playing with the language, figuring out what needs to go and what needs more power. So, I edit a lot, both paring down and exploring further in hot spots, seeking places for more music and sound, assessing line breaks and structure, always looking for surprising language.

Fear is a driving force in your poem. The speaker fears herself and her own inadequacy as much as she fears external forces (a “venomous bite,” a “car accident,” a “dramatic fall”). Fear, both inside and outside the home and the self, is so acute for many women. Can you tell me more about the divides between internal/external and domestic/public in this poem? 

You’re right, fear is a driving force. I remember wanting the nurse in the hospital to come home with me when I left with my daughter, so afraid I might kill her. Fear seems to live inside for me, in my mind, especially in my imagination—imaging the venomous bite, the dramatic fall. I always envision worst case scenarios. My mom even gave me a tool to keep in my glove compartment in case my car plummets into water and I need to smash the window to get out. 

In the second stanza’s description of a Maine winter, you created a beautiful and specific sense of place. Can you speak to the inspiration you draw from specific locations in your work? 

The places are mostly real in my work. I’ve lived all over and have been fortunate to travel quite a bit. I write down a lot of observations about place in my journal. I feel lucky that I have a very clear memory of the past, from the glossy kitten sticker on my cubby in kindergarten to the roughness of the tweed sport coat of a boy (I remember his name) I danced with in middle school to the opening of day at sunrise on a mountain near me in Vermont.

“The Breasts, The Spork, & The Butterfly Woman” appears in the Spring 2022 issue of Carve.

When girls begin to develop breasts, we often experience a disorienting shift—though we are still children, other people (men and women, both) interpret our developing bodies as a public message. There’s a push-and-pull between the privacy of the girl-child’s inner world and the public message that “adult people” receive (and often blame the girl for). How did you manage this tension between private and public in writing memories of girlhood? 

The public and private within my memory is very challenging, especially in terms of thinking of one of many edicts within my home of not airing dirty laundry. These moments/memories are private because they have to do with such intimate parts of my actual, physical body in ways that are still very present in how I am engaged. And by that, I mean the “I” as a person and the physicality of my “I” in the way that I still remember the first time I had to navigate the dance of eyeballs between my breasts and my face each time it happens within a current moment.

How does one publicly convey as a writer or even begin to think about what this means on a conscious level? Honestly, I think it involved spending some time within the “cellar hole” as I like to call it. Excavating and walking through the door of whatever I found, going back to re-live and actually “be” in that age again, in the moment.

In this piece, which is a part of a memoir, I wanted to ensconce the reader in my internal experiences while also placing the reader within my world. I thought a lot about what I call the micro: me, myself, my body, these experiences, within a macro: the household, the community, the world around me. Deciding on structure had a lot to do with this though I did not begin with the structure in mind. I always say that there were many midwives in creating this work and adding to my thinking/conception of the larger work. Sue William Silverman, one of my former advisors, often talked about navigating these terrains through the voice of innocence and the voice of experience.

Also, given that I began writing in my journal around the age of 12 and my poetry started as a private utterance as a teenager, I wonder to what extent this influences my ability to keep a tension between the interior and public within narrative in a certain way.

Throughout the essay, objects—like the children—feel, but do not speak. The children are seen and not heard; the couch is tired; the television is lonely. The adult-people pierce the ears and heart of the girl-child, but the child herself remains “silent-scared.” How did this kinship between silent, unheard children and silent, neglected objects arise for you in the writing process? 

I keep returning to my love and kingship with abandoned places, a relationship I developed as an adult in my thirties (basically, when I should have been old enough to know better not to go into forbidden places!) There is something powerful about a place—whether it is land or an actual abandoned structure—that was once so loved, cared for, and tended to that then is left, neglected, etc. I’d not written that chapter yet when I started diving deeper into abandoned places and maybe, in some way, the idea of the neglected or silent things remained present during the writing.

One of the things I never try to do is say, “I am going to write X about Y and I am going to do it this way.” In other words, I am not formulaic in the process of putting this together, though I had to adapt a different mindset each time I approached working on this. Early on, before I knew this was a book, I made a life timeline with all of the things I remembered—all of my teachers from elementary school, key moments in my life, etc.—with details. This happened around the same time that a prompt within Suzanne Kingsbury’s Gateless Gate Writers weekly gatherings that launched me into writing one chapter about how I got a black eye as a little girl on my first day in kindergarten. I believe that prompt was about engaging in using a child’s voice. I recall a number of people in the room encouraging me to keep going with this while also commenting on the detail of the memory. So for years, it was a matter of doing a download onto the page in different manifestations. In some cases, there would just be a burst of writing about a scene, I kept going as if to trick myself not to see this as the bigger thing. I didn’t say, “Okay, I have to plot out what the next chapter will be” nor did I try to fit my writing into the container of it needing to be geared towards the larger work of the memoir.

At some point when I was several chapters in—maybe about a dozen or so—I wanted to map some of the themes and what emerged. When I had a fuller whole, I used PowerPoint slides to color code how each of the chapters functioned while also paying attention to the things that emerged like the dance between the seen and unseen, different levels of secrecy, the thin veil between the adult world and the world of the children, hierarchy and power.

Through the various re-writes of this specific chapter, it was key for me to think about how a body, my body, so challenged between being seen and heard, also co-existed with the other things that might’ve felt that tension.

This relationship between you as a writer and you as the girl-child is really fascinating. Your child-self was not permitted to speak, and so adult-writer you takes up this long overdue injustice and fills page after page with words. It made me wonder how you saw yourself (or selves) in this essay; did you become an adult-person? Or has your work as a writer and poet allowed you to remain in-between child and adult, at least when it comes to writing on the page? 

Funny enough, I see myself walking between child and adult in many ways in life which also lends itself to my ability to do so on the page. One example of this is from a trip I took to the U.S. Virgin Islands for the first time in 2010. After that trip, I recall exclaiming to a friend repeatedly as I showed her pictures, “The water is really blue, I thought that was just on television.” There are a range of other stories like that where I have this odd combination of a genuine child-like sense of the girl I once was while also feeling like I have the wisdom of an old soul (on certain days). There is also a way that I bring things to a page like imagination and play from my actual life. I will always be the child at heart as much as I am the goofball as much as I am the wise woman.

When it comes to the actual page, all of my selves are also co-writers while the adult, the writer, says, “It is okay here. You can say and be whoever you want here. It is safe.” In many ways, I owe it to her—the little girl who was not seen and who could not say what she really felt—to go to that page and not hold back or hold my tongue. I am also interested in how to create a certain tension, dialogue, conversation between that little girl and the woman of now and I am not sure quite how that would play out on a page. Though I did see an example in Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood, in the way that the reader experiences Sarraute interrogating the memory on the page within each chapter.

What are some of the writers whose books, poems, or essays speak to the possibilities and complications of mother-daughter relationships in a way that you find either inspiring or compelling? And what are some of the possibilities for a writer like yourself to “see” the person that, in the past, controlled the seeing in a way that was harmful or cruel? 

There are so many but I will name some that have made a big impact in terms of the form and representation of the tensions that exist on emotional and psychological levels en route from girlhood to womanhood. I’ve long admired a collection from 1996, Rita Dove’s Mother Love, for the way that it explores tensions of the question of what does it mean to mother and then let go, using the vehicle of Greek mythology. Dove engaging with myth while making it her own to explore the anatomy of the mother-daughter challenges was very instructive, especially as a poet.

Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 essay, “Girl,” is brilliant in the way that the essay exemplifies the tug of war between a girl on the cusp of becoming and her mother. What is so great about this piece is the way that the girl attempts to carve out her own path and sense of self through the italicized speech. I’ve long identified with that feeling as the italicized speech is not so much speaking or talking back, but something one says in protest even if it is just internal or under one’s breath. In this example, for me, I have often revisited this in terms of the use of the poly vocal on the page.

Another that I must mention is the way that Rebecca Solnit handles the death of her mother and their strained relationship within her 2013 essay collection The Faraway Nearby. Not only is the overall structure eye-catching and what I describe as the Matryo-Noir, or the concept of the Matryoshka doll as memoir but Solnit uses the chiasmus or ring structure in a way that brings the reader back to the beginning in the working through of many complex issues, especially the relationship with her mother. The possibility here is the way that the page lends itself to mimicking a strained human relationship through structure. It also broke the usual memoir structure which I appreciated.

Also, as a whole genre, the relationship between parent-child, mother-daughter, that has been most informative all of my life has been a range of myths, legends, and fairytales. One of the things I revisited recently through the remake of the 2020 film, Gretel & Hansel, was the way that the witch became a mother figure, a wise woman for Gretel in this retelling encouraging her to engage with her power.

What strikes me, way beyond just mother-daughter relationship, is the way that we engage with each other as human beings and how stories or verse convey these tensions. What is unsaid or unexplored, seen and unseen within the panoply of human intimacy and relationship. One example that I’ve been floored by in terms of the rawness and the way that it goes there—though it is within fiction—are the dark, twisty, adult-fairy tales by ​​Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya. The poetry equivalent of the raw and the uncomfortable in terms of the boundaries often crossed, broken, damaged, or the harms caused between humans is the range of poetic work by the poet Ai though her monologues.

This leads to my ongoing inquiry of the idea of how one sees, how one is trained to see, or be seen, in addition to the power between who does the seeing versus who is the seen. Within the context of how I grew up, I’ve often had to revisit and ask the question: If I were a parent trying to raise a child in a certain environment, how would I want to control the ways that their body is seen and being seen?

I came from a two-parent home and my mother was a main strong force. My parents had me at a young age—my mother was 19 and my father was 29, they met just a few years prior—so in thinking of this, I consider that as an extra layer of anxiety that caused the alarm of the mother, my mother, within “The Breasts, the Spork and the Butterfly Woman.” I am not saying she was justified, in fact, there is a way that the extreme policing added another layer of harm during my teenage years that inspired me to create a secret life where I did put myself in danger (despite the authoritarian rule of the home).

And yes, there is an element of cruelty that takes place in a way that I continued to navigate long after this incident. The idea that I made a direct connection between a life event I could not control, puberty, to a certain kind of exposure to danger from an unlikely source—my own mother. I have this trope in one of my poems within my poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, where I talk about the body that betrays throughout a poem about coming of age. For many years I had to work on not adopting and adapting to the cruelty that my mother was showing to my body, so that I would not continue to inflict that upon myself, which is easy to do when one is raised within an an abusive environment.

For me, as an artist, it is about giving the power back to that disempowered girl that I was by shifting gaze. I’ve done this by either posing questions or by attempting to break the fourth wall between audience and narrator into there pieces of prose. The other ways I’ve explored this and other inquiries is through my current mixed media exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine.

In the first paragraph of the essay, there’s a beautiful description of your phone charger extending over you and your luggage like a net, “a pale cord between me and the world.” In a way, this line sets the tone for the entire piece. Did this idea of separation and dislocation influence your decisions regarding the form and language of the piece?

I knew first that I wanted to write about my experience in airports in bad weather and once I had that setting the natural things to try to tackle were distance and connection and between-ness. We were mid-pandemic when I wrote this, too, so those were things I was thinking a lot about.

Because the essay is based on a whole slew of brief memories, just glimpses really, and because I wanted to think about how places like airports give us glimpses into the lives of strangers, the form that emerged — short, separated scenes — just seemed to make sense.

I didn’t want to write a story about something that happened in an airport; I wanted to capture that whole world, and the natural way to do that seemed to be the way in which I actually experienced it — through glimpses. I think that did affect the structure of the essay overall, as well as of my paragraphs, sentences, etc.

There is a quiet, atmospheric sense of observation in your writing. We witness the humming ephemera of the airport, passing snippets of other lives in transit. At one point, the narrator describes the temptation “to make something of them, to rip-and-tear this glimmer of their lives into mine.” What was your process for assembling and connecting all these images and impressions?

When I sit down to write a news or feature story in my journalism work, I start by sorting quotes, notes, and observations into categories and themes. I used that tactic to write this essay. On one side of a page I made a list of things I’d seen in the airports, many salvaged from journaling I’d done there, and on the other side I listed other stories, images, and thoughts that shared a word or feeling with those observations.

The most difficult part was deciding what order all these glimmers belonged in. In the end, I tried to move as chronologically as possible, reconstructing as accurately as memory allowed my hours in the Philadelphia airport.

Once I had everything on the page, I started reading through, looking for threads, and trying to arrange things so that each thread appeared throughout the sections of the essay.

Throughout the essay, there are several mentions of hospitals braided in with the airport scenes. These two liminal spaces seem to be in direct conversation with the "pearly gates" invoked by the title. Can you talk about the use of setting in your work?

When asked if I like to travel, I usually say that I just like to arrive. But there is something magical about airports, train stations, bus stops, etc. … at least for me, these places are unique. They make us think honestly about our between-ness and our aloneness and our inescapable connectedness in a way that I think few other places do. At least, that’s what happens to me.

 The thing that connects airports and hospitals, for me, is the way both places connect strangers in passing. When I was hospitalized as a kid, I would look up from a blood draw or from a wheelchair and see another kid going through the same thing and feel like we could have been the same person. I feel that in airports, too, especially when things go wrong. When that third delay is announced and you look up and make eye contact with some other person who’s just trying to get home, there’s this overwhelming sense that you’re on the same team.

 In these places I feel more honesty about the fact that we’re all just fragile little bodies with one long life that’s over before we know it, every one of us waiting somewhere between where we came from and home, with no way to make that burden any lighter but by looking up and realizing we’re here with each other in the meantime. I think the world might be a little kinder if we were honest about that all the time.

I was really taken by the fragmented, almost note-like quality of your prose. Do you work in any other genres? Are there any writers who have influenced your style and/or approach?

I write poetry and do a lot of journalistic work; both of those genres influence how I write essays. Both demand concision and precision. My brain is usually in that mode now when I sit down to write anything, and I think that’s why my creative prose also tends to be kind of stripped-down. Through reporting, I’ve learned to take quick, detailed notes and to use those as a foundation on which to later build a story. In creative writing, of course, there’s a lot more freedom in terms of what you build, but for me the rebar of the story is still those details and images recorded in the moment.

I admire writers who don’t mess around with what they’re trying to say: The Road has had a special place on my bookshelf for a few years, and I’m currently reading through everything by Joan Didion I can get my hands on. Writers like Annie Dillard, who make great use of pastiches of images and anecdotes, inspire me as well.

Katherine’s poem “The Country of After-Grief" can be found in our Summer 2021 issue, order here.

I admire your control in guiding us through the narrative. How did you decide where to begin? 

At least half the time, I end up cutting the first few lines of a draft—or the first and sometimes second stanzas. Those are usually the poems that have happened because I sat down to write without any particular topic in mind. But with this poem, I found myself alone on Easter, a holiday that would have meant something to my sister but that really meant childhood memories to me. Practically every day of that first year after her death, I thought, “It’s Friday, and she’s not here” or “It’s the summer solstice, and she’s not here.” So, starting, “It’s Easter” was easy. The language of the holiday—one of death and resurrection—helped shape what came after, allowing me to fit text messages into a poem. Funny how no matter what technology we use, the same content will come up as it would if we were all sitting around a dining room table together: the old stories of families, or the old stories humanity has been telling itself for thousands of years.

Every line break in this piece feels so precise. What is your process for finding the right place to end a line?

If I can, I like to create just a bit of ambiguity for readers, so when the line is read separately from the sentence, there’s a moment of different meaning: “later. My sister wore bright clothes” can be understood, if only briefly, as pointing out that when she was no longer a child, my sister chose bright clothes for herself—something she did, deliberately, while as a child she wore the plainer colors my mother picked out for her. But mostly it comes down to my sense of what word I want to emphasize, and I put that word at the end of the line, right before the pause created by the line break. The end of a line is the place of greatest impact, I believe, though I’ve seen poems that subvert this “rule” beautifully. When my best friend (and oldest writing exchange pal) saw that I’d put the word “live” at the end of a line in this poem, she pointed out how that word hangs, for a moment, suspended. It’s a pivot point for the sentence and for the poem. But the truth is, few readers get to the end of the poem and think much about line breaks. They are like invisible scaffolding, able to affect us as readers but usually on a subconscious level.

Loss can be so difficult to write about, even more difficult to revisit and revise. How did you know it was time to write this piece? 

I couldn’t write about anything else for the first year after my sister’s death. I wrote poem after poem, some good, some bad. I sometimes shared them with my best friend, and sometimes put them away to look at later. Eventually I realized I had more than enough for a chapbook, and as usual for my process, I did a lot of the revision of individual poems when I could see them together as part of a chapbook/book. I don’t know if the chapbook will be picked up—it’s been rejected by a few presses—and I suspect that’s because it has narrative elements that require more context. So now I’m working on a hybrid/collage style book that will include poems, essays, lists, experiments, and images. I think as writers, we understand and process the world through our writing, so it’s natural to write about loss. The hard part is figuring out what’s so personal to us that it’s sentimental, and what might be compelling to others. I count on editors to help decide that, but I also have to remind myself to take risks, try stuff out, so I don’t shut down a possible work before it’s even had a chance.

What did you carry with you when writing “The Country of After-Grief” ? 

Eggs. It sounds silly, but it was the sense of touch that got me through. If someone blindfolded you and put an egg in your hand, you’d know immediately what it was: the size and weight of it, the smooth surface that still always has something that catches under the sensitive skin of your fingertips. I’m one of those people who can’t listen to music when I write because I hear the words so clearly in my mind and they have a music of their own, so what generally comes with me to the page is an image. 

Ashley’s essay “One in Ten Thousand Bees” appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Carve. Pre-order the issue here.

Many writers quote the axiom “write like your parents are dead.” That can be excellent advice depending on the situation, but this essay seems to take a different tack, something like, “write with a principled sense of what we owe other people.” It’s not didactic at all, but there’s a sturdy morality throughout that I find captivating. The essay is pastoral in both senses of the word (and the epigraphs from a nineteenth-century beekeeper and minister contribute to this mood). How do you think moral responsibility can contribute to an essay’s emotional breadth? 

 Thank you, for such kind words. Yes, I have heard that axiom myself, and I don’t believe I could ever write about my parents as if they were dead. Even if they were! They have made such an indelible impression on my life. In writing memoir, I often think of the words of Dorothy Allison, who wrote: “I tell my students that you have the absolute right to write about the people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is that you have the responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.”

 I agree that our work as writers carries a special responsibility to be fair to the other “characters” in our stories. This also means accepting our share of the blame for the bad things because this is where growth happens. On the other hand, I feel for writers who come from abusive or unhealthy families; it’s probably impossible to find balance. For those writers—and I’m thinking of Jeannette Walls and Glass Castle—to sugarcoat their experiences would indeed compromise the emotional depth of their stories. 

 At the end of the day, however, the story belongs to the memoirist. Above all, we must honor our own perception of the events, and this is part and parcel of our debt to the reader. Because we also owe our reader the extra gift of perspective. What have we learned from the events of our lives and what lesson can we share? 

Much of the essay deals with you and your mother’s 54-years-long relationship, sharing stings and balms on both sides. For example, as a little girl, you find that your mother has written “Ashley is selfish” in your baby book. But you also share your regret for how, when your mother earned her MBA, you failed to celebrate her accomplishment. There’s a sweetness in that balance between grace and justice. It’s almost old-fashioned—somewhat similar to the modesty that we can see in Jane Austen’s work. Jane Austen was a genius, obviously, but she was also very interested in a sense of proportion, and the practice of restraint and prudence. How does this characterization of your work strike you? And what are some of the challenges and/or benefits when it comes to writing nonfiction with a great deal of love? 

I am very honored that someone would think of my work in the same breath as Jane Austen, so maybe we should just stop there! Jane was a true genius, a remarkable human, and yes, she showed restraint and prudence but she could also be ironic, funny, and say so much in so few words. I often think of Mrs. Bennett, another mother, probably one of Austen’s most famous characters. She was imperfect, for sure, but she was so very real. 

I can’t say that I started out thinking of grace and justice; I began this project with the intent to show that both mother and daughter are also real, and hopefully, relatable to the reader. I could write endlessly about my mother, but that wouldn’t do her justice, would it? From Austen we also learn that writers must pick the things that say the most and leave the reader space to wonder, and perhaps think of their own mothers. 

Trying to capture the essence of a living, breathing person on the static page is just one of the challenges. That’s why, even in nonfiction, we think of the people in our work as “characters.” The writer needs to deconstruct and put them back together again in a way that makes sense to a reader who will never meet them in the flesh. There is also the fear that your subject will disagree with your distillation and portrayal. But in the end, can there be any greater testament of love than to create a written record of your life together? This is the primary benefit, and it makes all the work worthwhile.

The honeybees that you and your husband care for are described with such care and precision. You talk about their wings, their eyes, their habits, and their nectar preferences, but they’re still quite mysterious. You call them by many names. Sometimes, they are “machines,” and sometimes they are practically human: “little rascals,” “thieves,” “attendants,” and “foes.” Occasionally, they are “creatures.” What makes a honeybee such an emotional shape-shifter from a writer’s perspective? And how does this flexibility of perception connect to the very human story of change, maturation, and love between you, your mother, your husband, and your home? 

I call our bees by those names out of affection, yes, and for the purpose of trying to “characterize” them, but this is not fair. They’re practically perfect, the epitome of industry, purpose, and altruism. Even their thievery is for the good of the hive. I quite agree with Langstroth that nowhere is the hand of God more evident than in the humble honeybee. Nothing happens by chance in their world. As it turned out, it was our actions (our premature separation of the colony) that hurt them. They never thrived and multiplied enough to stay warm over the winter, and I regret to say that the colony I write about in this essay ultimately perished. But we have a new family this year, and they’re robust little warriors. They’re much more aggressive, so I feel sure that they’ll let us know if we do them wrong!

In my essay, the perfection of the bees actually underscores the frailty of the human characters, as evidenced by my selfishness, anger at my parents’ divorce, me and J.P. sniping at each other, and ultimately, our actions that caused the demise of the colony. Still, I never fail to be amazed at the arc of human achievement, particularly our ability to grow and change. This is the value of not being perfect, which is also a theme in my longer work-in-progress, the story of my life in the wild and mysterious Uwharrie mountains and my journey with multiple sclerosis. 

 Your mother is seventy-one years old in the present moment of this essay. As you move back and forth in time, you intermingle real dialogue with conversations remembered and imagined. You say something, and you imagine what your mother has said, or what she will say soon. There’s something lovely about this fluidity, and the way it allows an ongoing conversation with your mother to be real and not real at the same moment. Is this a habit reflected from your day-to-day life, or is it pure literary technique? When do you choose to bring this effect to bear on the page? 

The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides wrote: “It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back again there.” I, too, feel as if I’m living in one continuous moment—past, present and future combined. No matter where we are in space and time, my mother is always alive, always calling me “Ashie,” always sobbing tears of blue eyeliner when Elvis died, and always smelling of Enjoli and 10-0-6, and these memories come to bear at any moment while writing. 

 In terms of literary technique, I don’t plot or plan as heavily as I used to. No matter what I’m writing, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I tend to have a general idea of where I want to go and just lose myself in the flow. I try, just as Annie Dillard once said, to “spend it all, shoot it, play it, all, right away, every time.” That is not to say that any piece of writing spills out perfectly rendered. Not at all! Any project takes a great deal of shaping. In the case of this essay, the quotes from Langstroth were fundamental in helping me organize all these memories, and to him I owe a particular debt of gratitude. 

 When you start beekeeping, your husband hands you a nineteenth-century handbook from L. L. Langstroth. I often ask authors about their literary influences, but it can be imaginatively expansive to read outside of our time, as well as outside of our experience. With this in mind, what are some of the older works that you’d recommend for contemporary writers, and how have they influenced your writing?

I’m a hopeless bibliophile, and it helps that I married one. My husband and I love to spend spare time plundering through used book stores. We have so many books that when shopping we make a pact—if he stays out of the “Aviation” aisle, I promise to avoid “Cooking”! I adore the convenience of online sellers, but nothing beats the serendipity of perusing physical shelves and finding a gem you wouldn’t have even known to look for! This is how I found Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brandt (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934). While I love craft books, this slim volume is not that at all. It’s more about how to cultivate the habits and attitudes of a writer, and includes a rather avant-garde approach on incubating writing magic. 

I read a great deal of contemporary fiction and nonfiction, but when I want erudition, it’s always the classics, to name a few: Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Shirley Jackson, and Vladimir Nabokov. I’ll never tire of reading the first page of Nabokov’s short story “Spring in Fialta” because I just love his syntax and diction.

Lastly, no matter what you’re working on, it never hurts to read old-fashioned how-to books on topics other than writing. I recently stumbled onto a lovely adage in an embroidery manual, The Needlework Doctor by Mary Kay Davis (Prentice-Hall, 1982), that should appeal to all writers. In it she tells us not to fear clutter. “Don’t give up when you’re almost home free. Mess comes right before ‘Eureka’!” 

Michael’s poem “Home” appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Carve. Order print here or download here to read.

I’m curious about the fragmentation of language and lines that is occurring throughout this piece, particularly with lines breaking on prepositions or other seemingly minor words and new words forming (“nevernew,” “betweenfloors”) from familiar ones. Was this meant to mirror a deeper disruption or evolution in the poem? Were these decisions you made when writing the initial draft or during your revision process?

I should say first that the poem is heavily inspired by Lady Gregory’s translation of “Donal Og,” which features prominently in John Huston’s The Dead. Speaking towards line breaks occurring at seemingly minor words—I’m concerned, often, with creating a sense of momentum that can push the reader through the poem. The constant disruption creates a sense of unease but also forces the reader to ask what comes next. Of course, the poem deals with the death of a parent, an intense disruption to our sense of being. But my mother told me, after the death of her mother, that she felt a sense of calm about dying—that watching the process happen calmed her fears about it. So I think those are the two twines unraveling, one of discomfort and one of momentum, the reality that life is moving forward despite us.

Speaking towards the compound words—“betweenfloors” is a good example, and one of the only revisions I made. It was originally “between the floors,” but I wanted to summon a specific feeling. I had one of those paneled ceilings in our basement where mice would scurry. Soft panels, so you could really hear the feet. And sometimes, looking, I would lift up a panel and see the truth of a house, that it’s something made by people, and there was a large, dark space between the floors. Precision of language is one of the simpler joys of poetry, for me.

There is a delicate collocation between the animal/natural world and its living and dying and the more interior world and eventual death of the speaker’s mother in this poem. These domains often blur—for a moment it is unclear whether the small body described is that of the mother or the mouse. Was this ambiguity intentional? 

I have to admit that this ambiguity was not intentional but it’s a wonderful reading. I try not to analyze as I write and simply follow my typing fingers beat to beat, and I think in most good poems, the words are doing more work than the poet could. And there’s always a moment when you sit back and see that your subconscious was forcing something out. For years I was constantly writing about spit. Spit would just show up everywhere in my poems, all the time.

Speaking towards collocation—the house I’m writing about is my childhood home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, very woody and critter-infested. I think the animals that populate the poem, the deer and mice, are just as much a part of the architecture as the house itself. There’s a constancy to looking out into the lawn and seeing a family of deer, or a doe, or hearing stinkbugs fluttering against the wall, or hearing mice crawling around. And similarly, I’m writing about my mother here as the you of the poem, she’s spent two decades maintaining this home for us. It’s like the bacteria inside an animal—a community of things. And the presence of these animals prefigures the death of a loved one that, above all, I am trying to describe as very natural.

“Home” begins with a portended death and ends with “the first blood of the new spring,” seeming both cyclical and perhaps even hopeful. Was there a feeling you wanted the reader to leave with? 

I struggled a lot with the last line, even after it was accepted. It seemed, to use the colloquial term, cringe. But as I was fiddling with the poem—this happens sometimes—I realized that it simply did not want to budge, that everything had found its place and there was little I could do to fight it.

I wrote this for my mom for her birthday two years ago. She had lost her mother the year before. So it’s definitely an attempt at making sense of the big troubles of life—loss of a parent, the way time scurries faster than we expect, and of course what a home is, when it’s the site of our most formative experiences and often our most traumatic. I always want a poem to have a sense of ambivalence—some central tension pulling us in two directions. So there’s life versus death, the natural world versus the human world, the house versus the landscape, nurturing versus violence. I don’t think any of these tensions are resolved, but I think the poem ends with a truism—life definitely goes on, despite us.

This poem tackles grief in a beautiful and measured way. The description of the “long scrape” of the mice’s lives and the question that follows, “What noise have you / made?” were especially poignant. Are there particular poets, poems, or lines you return to in difficult times? Are there new writers you've discovered this year?

Thank you so much! That’s my favorite line.

Eavan Boland’s “Quarantine” is probably my favorite poem ever.

The last stanza of Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” returns to me often, I think, as I’ve grown up and out of a lot of the depressive episodes I used to experience. Frost captures a balanced sentiment; the speaker in the poem is only able to look away from this stark, frosted field where he contemplates his loneliness because he concludes, there’s something much darker within himself.

My favorite poem of last year was Ashanti Anderson’s “Self-Portrait as Kendrick Lamar, Laughing to the Bank,” which I read over and over when it came out. Wonderful sense of momentum, and the first time I read it, realizing she had postured the poem between a split line from “GOD.”, I was in a bit of awe. The speaker in the poem there, too, is lost in contemplation and must find a way to move on. The double connotation of a-ha as laughter and revelation—genius!

Allison Adair’s The Clearing has been the book staying by my side. The poem “Honey” ends “To those / I have kissed, on granite stairs and / idling trains, under a roof cut out / to frame the sky: What passed / between us? How did it harden? / Whom does it nourish now?”

And Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,”! Favorite line: “But the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight.”

Writing is intricately tied to who we are. As we grow, our writing changes. As we mature, it improves. As we learn, it becomes more expansive. I have been out for six Pride seasons now, and through each one that passes, I become a better human and writer, aided in large part by others from my community.

It’s hard to look back at the stories I did before I came out. At times, my voice was insecure, misogynistic, and shallow. Desire is at the root of all good writing, and I had no idea who I was or what I really wanted. Connecting to my own desire enabled me to become the writer I needed to be. It also saved my life.

Happy Pride.

Excerpt of Summer of the Cicadas

A boom of thunder shakes the house. I’m turning to grab an emergency kit, some food, and drinks, when I spot something on the other side of the kitchen. Peering closer, my stomach cramps up. It’s a cicada. “Fucker.”  

My immediate instinct is to smash it to death with my boots but I’m in socked feet, having taken left my shoes at the door. I’m exposed. Vulnerable.   

I glance around for something to kill it with.

There’s an old phone book on the kitchen counter. I grab it and move closer. I’ve almost reached the bug when it notices me and scuttles to the wall. I chase after it, but the thing moves quickly, scampering across the wood floor, up the wall, and to the open window. The ledge is wet with rain. Droplets stain the floor.  

The cicada climbs into the night, and I slam the windowpane shut after it.  

I peer out, trying to see where the little fucker came from. A giant oak tree stands next to the house. It was always a danger growing up—the long branches could easily crush the side of the house—but my parents never had enough money to get it removed safely. Somehow, after all these years, it’s still standing.  

I squint and spot something moving over the tree. It’s impossible to see clearly in the darkness, so I grab a flashlight from one of the kitchen drawers and shine it out into the night. At first, I don’t know what I’m looking at. Then, I spot the black liquored shell of the wings, sleek in the reflection of the flashlight. Thousands of the bugs flutter, hiving over the tree. I drop the flashlight.  

I pull the curtains over the window and grab the walkie. “Mason?” 

Static. I wonder if his walkie has run out of battery. Then it fizzles out and his voice echoes through the line. “I hear ya, Jess.” 

“They’re here.” 

“Who’s here?” 

“The bugs. They’re swarming over the oak tree out at my place.” 

Static crackles. Pain echoes in my chest again and touch the spot there with two fingers. “Must’ve migrated in the storm,” Mason says. “I wouldn’t worry.” 

“They’re swarming, Mason.” 

The walkie is silent for a few beats, then he says, “You know what to do. Stay inside. Stay locked up.” 

I close my eyes, lean back against the wall. Force my breathing to slow. I can feel the storm through the house, the rattle of thunder, the static in the air. I wonder then what it felt like for my mom and dad and Meg in the car that night they crashed. It was raining, a downpour like this one, I was told. I imagine them on the old highway in the early morning light, the headlights cutting across the darkened roadway.  

The tires hit a wet spot. The car slid before hitting the telephone pole, and the force wrapped the small SUV around metal and wood. Meg was in the backseat. Although she survived the original hit, she died from the swelling in her brain in the hospital. I was still trying to get there when she passed. It seemed especially cruel, to have that hope for a moment that she would pull through, and then to see it fade again just as quickly.  

Some Pride Reading

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden (memoir)

Soon to become a movie! For wlw who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, this book will give you all the feels.

Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison (novel)

Probably my favorite book of all time. Heartbreaking and beautiful. Everyone should read Bastard at least once in their life.

Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers, Assorted (short story collection)

This one was a finalist for the Lammy’s and is a joyful collection of sci-fi stories full of possibility.

How We Fight for Our Lives, Saeed Jones (memoir)

Beautifully written, poignant, and inspiring. This is another book I think everyone should read at least once.

Stop Writing Wack Essays, Sheree L. Greer (nonfiction)

Sheree is a mentor and friend of mine. Her advice is always spot-on, and I would suggest reading her amazing essay “None of this is Bullshit” on The Rumpus in conjunction with this book.

Sign up for The Audacity, Roxane Gay’s newsletter and book club.

Roxane provides essays weekly, reading recommendations, and essays from up-and-coming writers. (This newsletter never misses - I have legitimately enjoyed every single thing they have sent out.)

Mureall’s poem “Thirty-Two Miles West of the Edge of the Sea” appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Carve. Order print here or download here to read.

I am so happy "Thirty-Two Miles West of the Edge of the Sea" has a home with Carve. I have to say, the final line of your poem gave me quite the punch—and I loved it. What do you like about poetry and what is a successful poem to you?

I’m thrilled to have my poem in Carve. 

Poetry fascinates me because of its intensity. There’s such complexity in these rich-but-compact offerings that you can’t help but savor them. It’s like the most sublime bite of dark chocolate, a shot of espresso, a walk through the woods at dusk, or a sip of ruby port. Poetry is an immersive experience in a way that longer pieces of work sometimes struggle to maintain. There’s the visual aspect of the poem, the way the words feel in the mouth when spoken, and the layers of meaning, all within a brief selection of words.

When writing, I don’t feel satisfied with a poem until it hits the mark on all these levels, even if that means giving the work distance before coming back to reimagine it. As a reader, I love that moment when the poet has woven their words together in such a way that it stops me in my tracks. It’s like opening up a tiny giftbox to find you’ve unleashed a dragon. I’ve oftentimes spent days marveling over a particular phrasing I’ve read, returning to it again and again. The idea that someone might feel that way about something I’ve written is the most delightful gift I could be given.

The final line of your poem is powerful and authoritative, contrasting themes of fate, death, and presence. I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about authority or power-shifts in poetry. How do you build it as a writer, and how does it affect you as a reader?

I love how you reference fate, death, and presence in relationship to power and authority. There’s such strength in all three of those concepts, as well as the possibility of cataclysmic power-shifts. It begs the questions: What is power? Do we have ultimate authority, or is that an illusion and a destructive, unnecessary construct?

I’m constantly questioning my place in the world and what it means to have control, or even why any of us feel the need to claim it. Power is something that absolutely should be held up to the light and questioned. There’s impact in everything we do, in our ability to be present, our mindset, and our actions. A kind word, empathy, or forgiveness all hold significant potency.

My most successful writing (and my most enjoyable reading) comes when space is given to question the world we live in and our surrounding beliefs. Who has more power, the cicada ringing out its song in the trees or the humans listening to its chorus? Or perhaps it’s the connection between the two that holds the real strength. It often comes down to a matter of perspective, which is where the power-shifts come in. In my writing, I try to develop insight into contrasting themes, not from a position of wisdom, but as an encouragement towards viewing the world through alternate lenses. 

Personally, I love poetry because of how many different forms and structures it can take. Do you work in other genres besides poetry? What influences the structure of your work?

Like you, I appreciate that poetry allows for such a variety of structure and form. When I took my first poetry class, I found it overwhelming. Terms like metrical feet, caesura, and enjambment were new to me. My teacher was marvelous, though, and helped me understand the fundamentals of poetry and the ways in which form and structure inform meaning. After that, I was hooked.

Usually, I let the poem follow the path it wants to go. But if I find myself forcing the poem, I give myself permission to reapproach my perspective, experiment, and run wild. It’s a marvelous, freeing experience. I may end up reining myself back in, or I may not. In addition to poetry, I write short fiction and novels. I have a finished manuscript ready for editing. Reading and writing poetry has helped me tighten my fiction tremendously. I break my work into smaller pieces and examine them, not just for plot, but for essence. There must be meaning in every word, and each word/sentence/scene/chapter has to inform and add to the greater whole. As a reminder, I keep a framed copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s words on the bookshelf across from my desk: “Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance action.” 

As a writer, I can share that a lot of my work is informed by personal experience, some of it being very direct and literal. Do you mind sharing the inspiration for this poem? Have you ever poked a cicada belly, or declared that it lay its belly on your stick?

Like you, a lot of my work comes from personal experiences. My husband and I took a trip to Maryland a few years back. He’d spent a fair bit of time on the east coast and was familiar with cicadas, but I’d never heard them before. The sound was both magnificent and terrifying. The trees that lined the road roared with noise. It was quite a humbling experience and one that made me acutely aware of nature. Later in the day, I came across a cicada lying belly-up on the ground, and, yes, I crouched down and used a stick to get a closer look. It struck me at that moment how interconnected we are with the natural world and yet how distant we can sometimes feel from it. Not just the cicada, but the sight of our shadows on the ground, the feel of the sun, or the taste of sea air. It’s all part of our experiences if only we take the time to pay attention. All too often, we see the world from an egocentric perspective. While this makes sense on a fundamental level, it’s much more exciting and satisfying to take the time to consider a worldcentric or even a kosmocentric view.

Christie’s essay “The Family Recipe” appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Carve. Order print here or download here to read.

When describing your grandmother, you never mention the term ‘ladylike,’ but fellow Southern granddaughters may sense its presence. To be ladylike is to have personal elegance and a studied, watchful relationship to one’s own body (and perhaps also, a suspicious attitude toward bodily delights). In some ways though, the discipline that being ladylike requires runs parallel to the process of writing and revision. A writer turns her sentences around, kills her darlings, and tries to resist self-indulgence. Although it’s easy to see how demands to be ladylike cause harm, are there any other, more positive connections between your grandmother’s way of being and your work as a writer? Or do you see writing memoir and creative nonfiction as an inherently un-ladylike act? 

My very proper Southern grandmother would definitely frown on the personal essay and the memoir because it divulges too much, and privacy and keeping your business to yourself—especially your mess—are both hallmarks of being a lady. But I do feel a kinship around the notion of being a good host. My grandmother had those mints in the living room and the formal dining room. Those mints were sweet treats for guests in her home to feel welcome. 

As I writer, I want to always offer my readers something tasty that lingers and gives them pleasure the same way those mints delighted me and many of my grandmother's guests. Being a good writer is not unlike being a good host. I want my readers to see what I see and feel what I felt—that's part of being a good host to those who come to my writing. I want to offer comfortable chairs in the form of vivid scenes, and I want to give my readers something exhilarating to look out, so I try to avoid cliches or lazy conclusions. In the sense that readers are like visitors into my world, I line up with my grandmother pretty neatly.

Although the essay focuses on you and your grandmother, it’s a story crowded with other women: your mother, your sister, a cousin, and most notably of all, the daughter you were pregnant with. You recreate your grandmother’s brownie recipe for the first time in your unborn daughter’s warming, yet invisible presence. It’s very similar to your grandmother’s presence—the daughter and the grandmother, both there and not there at once. How similar are the sensations of pregnancy to the sense of being haunted by the beloved dead? Could you say more about the connection between your at-the-time unknowable daughter and the knowledge that you lost after your grandmother’s death? 

When my daughter was baking in my belly, I had dreams about the girl she would become. I dreamed of her walking down the hall, singing Skidamarink-A-Dink-A-Dink or dancing in our living room. My mind could imagine her, even when she was the size of a small apple. 

That conjuring was the way that my mind and spirit readied myself for her. And that's how it feels with my grandmother too. I dream about her—her Oil of Olay cheeks and her warbly voice. My mind holds her close—in day dreams and night dreams—and her memory lives on. The connection to the women in my family, the generation above and the one coming after me, is beyond the physical world. 

My mother and I are the living links between my grandmother and my daughter, who can only now her through us. That sense of being a conduit to the woman that has passed feels very similar to how my body was the conduit for my daughter to pass into the world. When my grandmother died, I lost all the chances to ask her factual questions or gather data from her about her feelings, memories, wishes, plans, fears—all of it. But the truth is that I knew her and experienced her enough to imagine the things I missed, and that might be just as emotionally accurate as any answer she would have given me had I asked about it when she was still alive. 

Although your grandmother didn’t talk about personal things, she wept when your visits ended. She showed her affection with gifts of brownies, time spent shopping, a package you received after her death. Only twice do you quote her words directly: first, when you transcribe her brownie recipe, and second, when you share that she called you “sweet baby girl.” How did your grandmother’s preference for action over language shape the way you wrote this piece? 

As I wrote this piece, I sifted through all impressions I have of my grandmother. I knew she loved me very much, but I pieced that together through the actions that she took. She wasn't a hugger or a cuddler. She was quite emotionally reserved, which is why her tears at the end of our visits were always so stunning. In this essay, I wanted to show how, as a girl and young woman, I understood my grandmother's love for me, even though she never sat me down and proclaimed it. 

Now that I'm a mother and old enough to see my own emotional limitations, I have so much more empathy and tenderness toward the adults who loved me growing up. My grandmother never had therapy, or 12-step recovery, or Glennon Doyle books urging her to be brave and emotionally open. With the tools at her disposal—brownies, a credit card, an Estee Lauder gift pack—she showed me she thought of me, held me in her heart, and wanted to stay connected.  

Food—and sharing food—is often very spiritual. Your grandmother was a devout Catholic, so she would have shared the meal of the Eucharist, but the history of disordered eating in your family left you without a “box of recipes” to call your own. Your grandmother’s brownies are the one exception, and recreating the recipe is a fraught, not-quite-successful experience—until the essay’s end, when you share a meal with friends. You describe loving, profane laughter as your friends rename the brownies, landing on “Grandmother’s Ashes.” It’s a far cry from your grandmother’s ordered elegance, but there’s something Catholic about it anyway: ashes and a christening. I’m curious about how you relate the sacred and the profane here. Can you say more about these connections in your work? 

Inside my soul there is an eternal battle between the sacred and the profane, and the "Grandma's Ashes" nickname for these brownies is a perfect crystallization of that. On the one hand, the good Catholic girl in me—the girl in her all-white First Communion dress and veil—wants to be pleasing to God, to her Grandmother, to the nuns, the priests, and all the people in my community. And at the very same time, I want to crack a joke and scream "Penis" during mass.

I've felt those tensions as far back as my memories reach. I see it in all of my writing. I've been called out in writing groups for making very untasteful jokes during emotional or intense scenes. It can really rub readers the wrong way. And I have to be careful: Sometimes the jokes are a way to hide or blunt the terror or agony of a scene, in which case it should probably go. But sometimes, it's an honest reflection of how I see the world, always with both reverence and mockery, and in those cases, the profane must remain because it's an honest reflection of my point of view. 

Who are some of the food writers (or writers dealing with food) whose work you admire?

Roxane Gay has an essay about making cherry bars that is interspersed with her relationship to disordered eating, and it's my favorite essay of hers. It's called We Lie The Most to Ourselves and I read it once for a class with Lidia Yunavitch and it blew my Smartwool socks clear off my feet.

Kiese Laymon's writing about the way he ate after witnessing sexual trauma and sexual violence in Heavy is like nothing I've ever read. And his description of binge eating during college is unforgettable.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was the first memoir I read that delved into the practice of eating locally and responsibly. She opened my eyes to the moral implications of eating without consciousness and it really changed how I thought about eating.

David Chang's memoir Eat a Peach was really about being a chef, but his discussion of food as creativity and innovation were revelatory and entertaining.

It's almost cliche to love Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bordain, but I love his sass and swagger, his hatred of pretension.  His singular voice was such a valuable contribution to food writing. He's a friend to the profane, and I love him for it.

Minh is a creative writing major at the University of Houston. He is a second generation Asian American and United States Marine Corps Veteran. At the moment, he enjoys reading and writing short story fiction. He plans to submit his work to literary magazines/contests and hopes one day to publish a collection of short stories.

Minh will participate in Fall issue editorial conversations and Raymond Carver Contest readings. Read on to get to know Minh!

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what experiences and interests drove you to seek an internship with Carve.

Hi, my name is Minh Wang. I am a senior at the University of Houston, majoring in creative writing and minoring in political science. I am Vietnamese/Chinese and I grew up in Houston for the most part of my life. I still consider myself fairly new to the literary world. I wasn’t a big reader or writer growing up, but my stint in the Marine Corps forced me to write many letters to my friends and family, and through those anecdotes, I came to appreciate telling stories.

I think the most prominent event that led me to Carve was taking a course called Journal Practicum. My professor, Audrey Colombe, to whom I am grateful for her support, helped me learn about the publication side of literature. We got to work with the school’s literary magazine, Glass Mountain, and we explored various literary magazines and their works. One of our projects was to find a literary publication to write about and present to the class, and Carve was my choice.

At first, I came across Carve because of Raymond Carver and I figured there was a strong focus for short stories, which aligned with what I liked. But as I reviewed the website and the publication, I found what Carve is doing is intriguing and wonderful, how authors are given recognition whether they are declined/accepted, or keeping up with the author’s progress. I felt I would gain valuable experience interning here at Carve, and hope I will be able to lend as much assistance as possible.

Why do you think literary magazines are important?

I think literary magazines are important because they’re the subtle way in which authors may develop themselves and acquire a certain degree of recognition before taking on larger projects. I believe in the process of how literary magazines take works from all parts of the world and make these prose, poetry, and art accessible to readers, allowing them to discover other great authors and their work.

 What do you hope to learn from participating in Carve’s editorial process this summer?

My main hope is to learn about the nuances of choosing a story or any body of work, what my senior peers are thinking when they discuss someone’s writing, and how they propose to edit certain things. Another interest would be the interaction between the publication and the authors, and where compromises are met. I do have to say I am not that big on the business/financial side of publication, which Prof. Colombe iterated to me there must be a balance of art and money. Thus I also hope to understand this balance and what is publication harmony.

What are some of your favorite short stories, and why?

1. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver

2. “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami

3. “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri

4. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

I’m not sure if I am qualified enough to express why I like these stories. I just know they seem to draw me in with a certain degree of expression and language. I would say I am a pretty simple reader. I tend to like prose like Ernest Hemingway, where the expression is basic but also profound. Where the author is able to convey this thought that makes me think and empathize with the character and story.

 Other than writing and editing, how do you like to spend your time?

I like to spend my time reading stories and news articles. I’ve been studying stocks a little bit and watching Netflix. I also like to work out and go jogging. 

What publications, magazines, or books you’ve recently read would you like to shout out?

I guess the most obvious one would be University of Houston’s literary magazine, Glass Mountain. I know it is a small publication, but I think the magazine is great because it comes from the mind of students and we are all able to learn and share our opinions as we grow as authors ourselves.