Small Press
Intravues:
Occasional
Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem
How is poetry a horse?
This is a spiritual, many lives, human thing. I am thinking of people who/m I have known who specifically believed they were once animal—and which animal, and those who feel their animals have lived before as people, and distinctly what kind of person they were. This probably happens a lot but folks don’t talk openly about it for fear of whatever folks fear looking or seeming like.
I was thinking of that Tim Burton film Big Fish, how Albert Finney’s character always believed he was a giant fish. That was the first movie I ever saw by myself in a theater. I was 21, a late age to first see a movie by oneself, I think, and was living in Asheville, NC, attending Warren Wilson College as a last semester junior who had just decided to be a writer and moved to study there because it was what my Granny, Norma Jean, my person, had saw in me and wanted for me—to be a writer—even when I didn’t get it myself, and it was a snow day so classes were cancelled. I got then how the character always was a big fish, and how people can be fish in their minds and so be it, and I can tell you I have always been part horse, and so too is poetry a horse and just about everything else, for me, anyways. I know them and can speak to them; I don’t think it’s a gift to talk to horses, more it is just hours of my day are spent with them and the majority of my brain space has been occupied by them since birth, so I suppose I have merged with them. I love how the compound words horsewoman and horseman echoes this.
Other people in my life have been more than people, have lived as animals in some other life, still shades of their prior in this one too, if not more. Jim Harrison, my dear friend, Uncle J, was distinctly a river and a bear—and maybe sometimes a wolf, which also made sense. I had the privilege of picking him up every Wednesday at the Arizona Inn in Tucson during his painful shingles treatment last years and accompanying him to dinner at Casa Vincente, where he was a celebrity and plates hit the table all night—poulpa!—and we had our own finger-picking guitarist who did not mind his need for Estrella Dalva! Jim was a river. If you knew him you knew this. Jim was a bear. He just was. He was never just a man. You see this in all his poems—water or creature. It was my distinct pleasure to know him, river and bear and man and spirit.
Horses are flank and hoof and mind, muscle and sense or none, just like people. They’re really just 1200 pound dogs and dogs are more often people than not. For me it is a going back to the beginning, these elemental things we’ll never get by as animal. It is all poetry because that is life. Nothing is not.
Can you tell us about your new book project?
I began B-Side Girls in 2014 after my house in Tucson was broken into and the manuscript I had been working on and had not saved externally in many months got gone with my laptop. I began this collection in devastation and kept demanding of it because here it is 2021 and I’m just now wrapping it up.
After the Hick Po anthology came out in ’15 I was free to give my mind back to this one and a loose version of it was listed as an Ahsahta Sawtooth finalist back in early ’17. It was not ready and I’m happy I got the next handful of years to spend slowly tinkering on it because the book truly became something else after leaving my beloved desert and returning home to very rural southern Georgia.
I have a little cottage on a little pond—big land on all sides and my four horses right here with me now. I have had the privilege of space and silence working here from the farm. I feel in many ways I have stepped to the side of the poetry world, or what I once knew of it, away from what I once felt was a pressure to create, to produce, stay relevant, or whatever. I just don’t care about that anymore.
I used to have a simple thing that meant a lot to me Jane Miller would say to her students hanging by my desk that got shuffled in these years of constant moving one house to another. It read: “what is your book about? What is your book thinking about its themes?” Really I had those words there to remind me of her voice—I love Jane’s voice—I could see her throwing both hands up as if exasperated but really it was just an impassioned “what are you doing? Keep going!” kind of thing.
She was my beloved teacher, and I do need that urging to pause here and there to examine what the hell I am doing because more often than not I have zero idea till years into the process. The book got unwieldly. I wasn’t sure what I was writing at; I never am. None of the poems stood alone. They each need each other. I make notes to myself on what I think I am doing. I sometimes don’t understand them year to year. I only recently feel like okay now I got it.
I dedicated the book ‘to my & all girl rarities’. I like the flipside best—awkward gritty things, a bite to them; I like a music to things; to get by you have to be tough but what happens when the armor is lowered a little, what cracks are there for her?
“Sugar in the Gourd” is an old-time fiddle tune. There are so many versions of what the phrasing means out there, but it my area, if you are “knockin the sugar in the gourd”, as my Granny would say, you are sure enough making good time. You may be skinned up but your ass is going to get there. Because I drive fast like my Granny, we are steady knockin the sugar. To make good time is good living.
She went somewhere I wish her well. She’s obstinate but what you give the devil for her. The book is southern testimony and dirt town myth. I hope it’s wide enough for you to find your her.
You touch on the idea of mentorship and different kinds of learning. Can you talk about school learning vs life learning? Talk about the education you received hanging with Jim versus the one you got being in Jane's classroom? Or, maybe the difference between college and life with your granny? How do those ways of learning blend for you?
I think similar to a lot of poets, my favorite thinkers, the academic classroom can be intimidating and not a space of comfort. I was never a “good” student in school nor did I really care to be, honestly. I preferenced life and living and fun to being a straight A student. I entered grad school from the wait list and was underprepared to dialogue with my classmates. I didn’t feel quite “smart” enough in that realm.
Poetry to me was a wild thing. Still is. Luckily, in grad school, I found refuge in the classroom in the form of one very intelligent Mara Vahratian, my liaison and homegirl. Mara is from Michigan and also loves Jim Harrison—we found that out on day one of workshop and I found someone who could verbally spar with everyone else who I could kinda hide behind. Ha! I was pretty shy in the classroom and easily intimidated. Poetry was a natural thing to me, a place of refuge, I could express whatever I wanted, how I wanted. Basically, I wrote for myself first then and still do.
Gordon Massman, fellow Tarpaulin Sky poet, gave a nod to this a couple years ago in an email that I printed, cut out, and taped by my writing desk as a reminder of being seen: “…I believe poetry called you, or more accurately, bit into your back like a panther commanding you to write it off if it takes a lifetime. It may or may not be true but I think you write for survival, not fame. That means tank or not you will write until you kill it, your panther.” It feels important to be spiritually acknowledged by other writers you admire and I have always felt this support from Gordon.
Back in grad school years, 2005ish, I was getting my car serviced and ran across an article in one of the waiting area fashion magazine where the designer gave a quote that I tore out and still have taped up next to my writing desk: “Because we really didn’t know what we were doing, we were able to develop things that hadn’t been done before in jewelry.” Such a blip moment gave me confidence that I didn’t have to have it all sorted out. Just write. You can do what you want; you can do things your own way. There is this energy of defiance in Black-Eyed Heifer, my first book developed from my grad thesis.
For me, there is wild comfort in a blank page and invention. You don’t have to be schooled to be a writer. I’m not chiding the MFA-route. I just don’t think it’s absolutely necessary lest you want to teach—and let’s face it, adjuncting will, more often than not, keep you in poverty, underappreciated, and at the whim of whatever institution you work. But that’s another thing.
I am not sure whether Jane (Miller) ever liked what I was writing or not, but she liked that I was my own individual on the page and she gave me love and support and still does to this day. Few things are more important. And well Jim, Jim never liked the work, really, but that was okay too. He wanted me to relax the language, tamp it down, say things more clearly; I assured him I would not be. One has got to do oneself or nothing.
As per academia, Jim was fabulously against the classroom for writers and very much against writers teaching: “the people in Morrill Hall bore me.” Ha! They do me too.
Similar to question #3 I guess, can you talk more about leaving behind the "poetry community" and building a different kind of community around you?
Yep, it has nice to step away, but I reckon we all have this last bit. There are no readings to give when you live in the middle of nowhere. You can become plump off the land should you want and totally irrelevant and that has felt good to me. One could do worse as a writer than be surrounded by horses and land.
When I lived in Tucson, and especially back in the day, there was this genuinely nurturing poetry community—I miss that place and that specific circle of writers so much, many who have also moved on since. It would be harder to imagine a community more supportive than those in that desert city, especially back in the Casa Libre days many years ago. I feel like it’s good to have readers of your work, other writers who inspire and push you to continue going with energy. It is a rare thing.
I do feel like we need a community of writers, and even though I don’t have an in-person community like before, this year I’ve joined a zoom online writing group with some neat writers and am using that as a push to create—so far so good, though the concept of “workshop” is still so odd to me. I think in my mind I’d like to get in the corner of a bar or something with a reader-friend and just work it out.
A handful of years ago I wanted more. So I moved home. Leaving Tucson was tough, it always was anytime I left, and I usually drug my tail right back after a year or so. That’s a common narrative for those who find magic in that desert city. Those years prior to moving home, it was enough to be a writer, teacher, bartender, etc. Then one day it was not. So, I packed it up and moved back to Georgia, a hard transition but one that has afforded me to ability to pursue this dream of making it as a professional horsewoman. My mama keeps the arena dirt tilled with her tractor and ready for my practice. Like just about all cowgirls, I have dreams of running at the National Finals Rodeo, a longshot thing but one I would like to try my hand at.
If you were going to give advice to a writer who wanted to write / create / make words, but not necessarily take part in academia and such, what would that advice be? How do we build a poetry-feeder that will have poetry coming up into our backyard and letting us hang with it?
Same as with everything, find a mentor if you can and find a way to keep at it.
I got thrown off a horse yesterday (not fun at 40) and same as always, you have to determine how bad you got hurt (broke middle bird finger), get the horse caught (quite the task), get back on (immediately), do it again (right then), then again (the next day, etc.). This is just how it is.
I think to be a writer, schooled or not, you have to have a tenacity first to write, and hopefully for oneself, then the work ethic to keep at it for oneself because the world nor anyone in it may not care if you do it or not and rejection is tough. But you don’t have to get a degree, MFA or God forbid, a Ph.D. in writing to write or call yourself a writer. Don’t get me wrong, I think education is important and there are great benefits to circling yourself with a group of other writer-editors in a workshop-type setting. But this can be done just as well at the local community college or in a community group. What there has to be is a barebones love and passion for it that calls you continually to the page and the bravery and backbone to put your work out there even if it is shot down for years.
The hardest thing is keeping with it, especially through teaching, as so many of us do, a real mental drain. Consistency and balance are things I struggle with in general. So much time goes towards teaching and the horses that I often haven’t brought enough energy to my writing. So, I’m trying to frame my brain to write as I drive or exercise horses, while just being. Finding a way to integrate that writing part of the brain into everyday life requires a mindfulness I’ve not tackled yet but am always trying for.
This past year especially, I’ve learnt that gratitude is a muscle and that the body needs more acknowledgement and grace. Go easier on yourself; I think the pandemic has brought this to us. Put all that self-doubt to the side. Just write. Start somewhere and find a fire for it and self-belief and just write. Don’t overcomplicate. Just write. And create a vessel you can build into and show up for at least mentally daily, but in person for weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.
Can you tell us about your choice of publisher?
This one is easy. Jen Tynes is a force, and any project she’s nurturing in the poetry world is one you want to be involved in or get behind. There is an outlawishness to the poetics, the attention to language, sound, play, place—a dislocated feel to work she publishes that I like and find a home in. The idea of a pay-what-you-want press is something I found intriguing. There is something so very anti-establishment about it that falls in line with how I feel about poetry, how poetry should be put out, especially nowadays anyways, when everyone seems to be losing versus winning financially, and what is poetry anyways but a cure-all, the salve and the fire, medicine, survival?
I remember the coolness of Horseless Review when I first started publishing well over a decade ago, and I remember receiving my first publication—exactly where I was at in my old kitchen in Tucson and how I felt and how I had so badly wanted that poem to be with her and those poems she published.
Horseless also published a chap back in 2012, Dirt City Lions. When B-Side Girls was finished, it seemed natural and right for me to query Jen and ask was her new venture, The Magnificent Field, seeking manuscripts. I love Nathan Hauke’s Indian Summer Recycling with the new project. From Horse Less Press, I love Kristi Maxwell, Serena Chopra, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Tim Early’s books. Jen has always seemed to champion a range of writers who are wild and a lil offbeat, eccentric, authentic—I love this. I am beyond excited for this thing to be a thing from her press. It seems full-circle, fitting, and I just cannot wait.
