Three Debut Poetry Collections: Identity, Intricacy, Wonder

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2017

Molly McCully Brown

What Becomes Beautiful is the Wildest Thing: An Interview with Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown’s poetry collection, “The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded” (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, summons historical shadows along with bright beams of empathy and identity. Exploring the lives of those who were institutionalized within and employed by the Colony from Fall 1935 to Fall 1936, Brown’s poems lead us from dormitory to solitary confinement—“the Blind Room”—out into the field, the chapel, the infirmary, and back into the dormitory ... Attentive to the individual bound with physical and mental difference, the collection calls up the cries and scarce laughter, the whimpering and swearing and silence of the bodies within its walls.

David Eye

There Must Have Been Words Once: An Interview with David Eye

The poems of David Eye’s collection, “Seed”, (The Word Works, 2017), remind us to breathe, to sit inside the shimmering, heartbreaking moment, to stop and wonder and laugh. Here is a world curtained in nature, rapture, fertility, and desire, while, beyond, lies a horizon constrained and fragile and full of possibility. Relationships—the “father, filling the doorway,” the “boy slapped into manhood,” the “pretty mother,” the “sister, nearly four,” the “smiling aunt,” the cousin “in the City,” the lovers with their “breathless kisses”—wrap themselves together, then wrest themselves apart, and we are reminded of the addition, subtraction, and division that mark a lifetime. Discovery occurs and recurs in the act of turning inward to view a past, to understand the instant when everything changed, to open and examine and somehow make peace. “Seed” reveals how beginnings are intricate, how journeys are remembered by what lay underfoot—“the sweet, sharp scent of sun on dry needles”—and how we return from the wondrous, reckless place where we began.

Mary Cisper

Open a Cocoon: An Interview with Mary Cisper

Mary Cisper’s debut poetry collection, “Dark Tussock Moth,” winner of the 2016 Trio Award (Trio House Press, 2017), is a sweeping land, crossed by drought and flood, coursed with wildflowers and white-throated sparrows, and never apologetic, always truthful, whether reflecting on the alpine monkeyflower, searching night skies for white and blue dwarfs, or bidding a glacial goodbye. This is a naturalist’s world, one in which scientist and poet meet; where ecological transformations are rendered and, by man’s hand, ruined; wherein 17th century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian is called forth and cocoons open. In this wilderness, one experiences mountains and meltwater, conquest and confluence, metamorphosis and migration, extinction and memory. Terrain, time, weather, and ways of seeing the world from another angle—via microscopic lens, via telescope, via wide-eyed wonder—are explored here, allowing the occasion to ponder the rich, slippery relationship between man and nature.

NINE-STORY MOUNTAIN

“In the far west of Tibet, there is a mountain some call the CENTER OF THE WORLD… MOUNT KAILASH.”

The opening of Nine-Story Mountain, a documentary film directed by Augusta Thomson, reveals soaring blue skies and a wealth of white clouds and the Kora, the route pilgrims follow around Mount Kailash, a holy pilgrimage site. Originally from the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire, Thomson is a dynamic and engaged world citizen, now in her final year of studies in Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University. She has been involved in other documentary projects, including as Director Corporate Screenings and Outreach Coordinator for ongoing screenings of Girl Rising, a strong and stunning documentary about nine girls in developing countries, and how education has transformed their lives and their communities. The powerful message of Girl Rising has inspired a global movement for the right to education for girls around the world, just as the panoramic footage of Nine-Story Mountain will raise awareness about the cultural and environmental impact of pilgrimage practices in Tibet.

“Nine-Story Mountain charts the journey of three western researchers on a path of self-discovery, from Lhasa to Mount Kailash, Tibet… to understand the secrets of a mountain and landscape that have magnetized millions of people for centuries.”

Four young Tibetan Bon pilgrims come barreling down the incline. “So, so, so, so, so,” they sing as they run. When they are directly in front of me, they raise their hands. “Tashi delek,” they say. “Blessings and good luck.”

I am in western Tibet, on the path leading up to the highest point along the Mount Kailash pilgrimage route, or Kora, a significant site for many faiths—Buddhists, Hindus, Bonpo, and Jains. I carry my karma with me—a 40-pound backpack filled with assorted books, clothes, notebooks, snacks; a Canon d550; and a 35-pound tripod. With the aid of two expedition members, I am researching the material culture of pilgrimage—the offerings left by pilgrims along the sacred route and the rituals associated with them.

— from“The Purple Umbrella,” by Augusta Thomson, WellesleyMagazine, Summer 2013

“Not only does material culture have implications for spiritual devotion, but it also connects individuals and communities to the geographical landscape.”

Augusta, tell us about your background, your interest in Tibet, and how you came to filmmaking as a student of Anthropology and Archaeology?

People always ask me where my interest in Tibet came from. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. Tibetans would say it’s Karmic. I do have one memory of when I was around thirteen and a group of Tibetan monks came to visit my middle school. They chanted for about an hour during an all-school assembly with these deep and haunted voices; during and afterwards I was completely transfixed.

Later, I did some research. And the more I learned about the Tibetan diaspora the more I felt compelled by Tibetan culture. I was intrigued by Buddhist philosophy, and especially, the concept of compassion. There was something so graceful about the way that Tibetans handled the Cultural Revolution and corresponding religious persecution. I thought then and still feel that grace like that is a valuable teaching tool.

Later, when I was studying at Wellesley College I remember watching my peers respond to academics and adopt career paths, and being struck by the realization that so many people seemed to be “running before they could walk.” They were filtering into finance jobs and career paths they hadn’t chosen intentionally, with self-awareness. It made me want to do something to help—to fill that gap. I decided to leave Wellesley and apply to Oxford University to study Archaeology and Anthropology—to learn more about alternative perspectives on the world and especially the culture of the Indo-Tibetan region. In the interim before the start of my first year I spent six months working on a Tibetan text preservation project in Cazadero County, California. For six months I worked in a bookbindery set up by the Nyingma Lama, Tarthang Tulku. I spent much of that time dyeing the sides of sacred Tibetan texts a traditional red hue, and preparing them for shipment to Bodh Gaya, India. Tarthang Tulku set up Yeshe De, the Buddhist text preservation project after fleeing Tibet during the Cultural Revolution and subsequently recognizing the need for cultural preservation through literature. Over the course of that time I developed a deep reverence for Tibetan culture, and especially, for the significance of cultural preservation in the Indo-Tibetan region. Every year the Lama funds a world peace ceremony in Bodh Gaya, India, the Monlam Chenmo, when thousands of monks and nuns pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya to receive offerings of the sacred texts prepared by Yeshe De—texts they might otherwise never have access to. To be honest, working in the bookbindery was the first time I felt wholly connected to a humanitarian project—probably because I could really see where it was going and how it was benefiting people. That sense of connection to the deeper intention behind the project was really transformative.

I never actually thought that I would make it to Tibet, and later, when I had the opportunity to launch an anthropological research expedition to study Tibetan culture, I realized the blessing of that opportunity. Tibetans and other pilgrims from different faith groups used to spend their whole lives dreaming of the chance to visit Kailash. In the past, pilgrims would walk or prostrate over 1000 kilometers from Lhasa to the Ngari Prefecture of Tibet just to visit the mountain.

To think that we would have the chance to live that dream was deeply humbling. And before Lara, Don, and I even left I remember thinking that we had to turn that gift into something more—a blessing for others—with the simultaneous purpose of memorializing the stories and myths of a mountain that are at risk of becoming lost. This film is our attempt at painting a picture of a mountain that deserves to be protected and preserved, as a landscape of peace.

“Nine-Story Mountain memorializes the sacred myths and stories surrounding Mount Kailash— myths and stories in need of preservation.”

Nine-Story Mountain focuses on “pilgrimage practices across the Tibetan plateau,” specifically around Mount Kailash. What is it about pilgrimage that calls to you?

As an anthropologist and artist, the concept of pilgrimage has long fascinated me. I am intrigued by the individualistic and community-focused elements of pilgrimage journeys, which seem to meander easily between the personal and the communal. For some time now I have been drawn to the ways that pilgrims cement their ties to transitional pilgrimage landscapes—either through storytelling, the construction of small shrines and sculptures, and/or the collection of photographs and other sacred mementoes in the landscape. Taken one step further, the material culture of pilgrimage might be viewed as a sort of meta-language, left by pilgrims in a sacred landscape, to connect them to the landscape, to past legends and stories, and to other pilgrims.

After sifting through assorted literature on pilgrimage I knew that I had to travel to Tibet. In Tibet pilgrimage is almost universal. Pilgrimage routes circle sacred monasteries, shrines, and even towns. Larger pilgrimage circuits weave from sacred monasteries to sacred lakes, on circuits stretching thousands of kilometers. Pilgrimage in Tibet is undertaken as an exercise in purification; pilgrims walk to cleanse their defilements and karma. Offerings comprise an ingrained part of Tibetan pilgrimage culture, as do stories and myths.

“As one of the few landscapes… where people of different and historically oppositional religious and cultural traditions can peacefully coexist, the story of the pilgrimage community begs viewers to consider how the mountain’s culture of tolerance might be a useful tool for different conflict zones around the world.”

“As some of the few westerners to make it into Tibet… they travel alone through an empty landscape, a landscape witness to changes most people will never have the chance to see.”

What did you, along with your fellow Oxford University researchers, experience and learn on the expedition across Tibet?

Over the course of five weeks we learned a landscape unlike any other we had ever experienced. Our amazing guide and Tibetan crew introduced us to locals and took us to locations off the beaten path to aid in our research. When we were on Kailash, our guide and translator, helped to facilitate the interview process, such that we captured never-before-seen footage and anecdotes of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims, Tibetan Bon practitioners, Hindu pilgrims, Western pilgrims, Chinese pilgrims, Tibetan teahouse owners, Tibetan guesthouse owners, Tibetan nomads, Tibetan monks and caretakers, and Tibetan mantra carvers. I spent most of the research period learning Tibet through a lens, and I will never forget how the colors of what we saw and experienced gave life to our film and story.

Nine-Story Mountain is our tribute to the landscape and culture, not only of Tibet, but of a sacred mountain on the Tibetan Plateau, with the incredible ability to transcend territorial ties. Mount Kailash is one the few places in the world, claimed by oppositional religious faiths, where pilgrims of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds walk together in peace. It is one of the few transitional landscapes in the world, shared by people of different ages, genders, cultural, and faith backgrounds, where the culture is unequivocally one of tolerance and acceptance. Throughout the research project I kept looking for a hole in the fabric and culture of Kailash; I kept searching for the one broken strand. In the end, I found that the only broken strand was my resistance to believe.

“The Tibetan woman holds a bright purple umbrella.”

At Drolma La Pass, “the most sacred point along the Kora,” which “represents the point of rebirth,” you came across the woman with “the purple umbrella,” as mentioned in your essay in the Summer 2013 issue of Wellesley Magazine. Would you describe this encounter?

I made my way up the incline toward Drolma La for the second time. The last time I’d climbed up to the pass, on our first Kora, the wind bit my face and the path was blanketed with snow. This time the rocks were clear, the sky cornflower blue. Behind me, a young Tibetan woman with a baby strapped to her back held a bright purple umbrella.

Almost at the top of the pass, the sun hit my back, and I found myself gasping for air. Around me Buddhist pilgrims blessed the sky with lungtas—five-inch paper images of the Tibetan “windhorse,” thrown into the air like confetti. Bonpo pilgrims sang mantras and shook strands of prayer flags to honor the sacred mountain. A small urn smoked; the smell of juniper mingled with the clear smell of Kailash. In Tibet, juniper is believed to possess healing and restorative properties.

As I passed another rock littered with prayer flags and other pilgrims’ mementoes, I saw the woman with the purple umbrella. She sat, picking tufts of juniper, her baby sheltered under the purple arc, then stood, approached me, and gestured at me to watch. She took the juniper, rubbed it between her fingers, and threw it into the air. “Ah,” she said. “Ah.” Then she gathered a bundle of the savory green shoots and placed them in my palm. She carefully closed my hand with her hand, looked right though me, and nodded. When her baby began to wail, she turned away, my gesture of thanks unnoticed. Drolma La Pass, in the mid-morning, was full of pilgrims. Together we sat—to share snacks, to smile when communication faltered, and to watch others learn the landscape—rebirth everywhere.

“In Tibet, pilgrimage sites are everywhere. They dot the landscape: lakes and rivers, monasteries and shrines.”

To have assembled the research team and funding for the expedition, traveled to Tibet and trekked the Kora, interviewed Tibetans and others about the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash and captured these moments and the landscape on film—really, this is beyond accomplishment. You must feel astonishment and an incredible kind of pride. And in exactly one month—on March 8, 2014, International Women’s Day—Nine-Story Mountain will premiere at the inaugural Women’s International Film Festival at Oxford University.

What are your thoughts at this point, about the film, in terms of the audience, and in wider scope, in terms of the world? And in close-up, what does this mean to you personally?

This film is about the power of community. It is a testament to the strength of stories to connect people of different cultures and backgrounds. It is a testament to the power of hope and perseverance, to the beauty that exists, always, at the foundation. Even as the landscape changes and evolves to welcome tour operating companies and hordes of pilgrims, I have faith that the beauty of Kailash will inspire a renewal.

I never thought that I would be the one to film Kailash, to capture its transcendence with a tiny HD camera. In the end, Kailash captured me.

Hearthside, mountainside, or deep within an archive of sacred Tibetan texts?  

I love this question. But, I would have to say, “none of the above.” I’d like to hope that the most comfortable place I find myself is always the place I am most needed. That could be any or all of the above. It could be anywhere. A little like a snail—I carry my home on my back.

What is your idea of absolute happiness?

For me, happiness is the feeling of running through a summer thunderstorm, of the wind on my face cutting through the waves of a wide ocean, of being totally and completely free. Absolute happiness is the experience of passing that on to someone else—bringing others into the immediacy of that joy. It’s something that drives my work; I truly believe that if everyone could feel that “splash-in-a-puddle, tennis-in-the-rain” type of freedom the world would be made better. So much of joy is tied to space—to the sense of expansiveness that comes with opening one’s heart. In my opinion, joy channeled into positive action, inventiveness, and productivity will change the world. That would make my absolute happiness ABSOLUTE.

Augusta Thomson

Augusta Thomson is currently a student at Oxford University, where she is studying for a B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology. She spent the last year living and working in New York City, as Director of Corporate Outreach and Distribution at 10×10/Girl Rising, and simultaneously interning with the filmmakers, Sarah Teale and Lisa Jackson. During that time she wrote pieces on the Girl Rising movement and spoke at schools and venues throughout New England. She is the Director of Nine-Story Mountain, a documentary film about an Oxford University and Royal Geographical Society-sponsored research expedition, which took place in July 2012, to study pilgrimage practices across the Tibetan Plateau and around Mount Kailash, a sacred mountain in the far western Ngari Prefecture of Tibet. The film will premiere in March 2014. At present, she is working as Regional Ambassador for Girl Rising, to help launch the movement in the UK, and is coordinating the first Women’s International Film Festival at Oxford University— to celebrate International Women’s Day, on March 8, 2014.

Photo credits: Don Nelson

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

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First posted at Hothouse Magazine.

The Coastal Concerns of JoeAnn Hart

“While he lamented the shipwreck that was his marriage, he mourned the equally disastrous changes in his old route. It was no longer the road of his blissfully rudderless youth, when this stretch was a wild and untamed curve of the bay, dotted with signs of warning—“Swim at your own risk” and “Caution, strong tides”—which had only encouraged recklessness. This area had once been so sparsely settled that, at low tide, he and his older brother, Nod, could walk the few rocky miles from their house to their dad’s office without ever touching the civilization of the sidewalk. They loved the damp band of earth that was neither wholly sea nor entirely land, a constantly changing landscape that offered their prepubescent souls new, exciting dangers to overcome. Duncan and Nod had felt themselves gifted at avoiding the perils of the seaweed slicks. They had leaped across the cracks and crevices with ease, even grace, and had waded unafraid through tide pools full of barnacles and crabs. They had scratched their bare legs on wire lobster traps and tripped on minefields of trash, surviving to tell the tale. As boys, they were masters of their world, demi-gods of the water’s edge. Now their infinite kingdom was gone.”–JoeAnn Hart

JoeAnn Hart writes about environmental concerns that affect coastal regions, where sea and land meet, and where ecosystems are made even more fragile by man’s irresponsible pursuits. Her characters are observant and engaging, her prose layered with metaphor, her setting lush with realism, and her themes linked to the beauty and tragedy of the natural world. In this interview she speaks of her novel, Float, and the environment, as well as community and collaboration.

JoeAnn, tell us about your background. Has Gloucester always been your home? And how has that coastal landscape influenced your writing?

I grew up in the Bronx, then Westchester, before escaping to the Rocky Mountains, which is where young people went in the 70’s. Most of New York was cavorting about in Boulder, including the man who would be my husband. He was from Manhattan, but had just inherited a creaky house in Gloucester, and so I was dragged, somewhat kicking and screaming, from the sunny mountains to the icy sea. It was January, 1979. The sky was gray, the snow was gray, and the harbor was frozen over for the first time in decades. It was no Coastal Living magazine spread. I was only 22, and I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude for maritime life, but love being what it is, I stayed, and Gloucester became a part of me, and me of it. I didn’t start writing until much later, when the working waterfront had already begun its decline. The fisheries were decimated by the industrial fleet with their bottom-scraping trawls, and plastic debris was becoming the main harvest in the nets. In Float, I’ve tried to come to grips with the crippling of the local fishing fleet, and the ecological devastation of the seas. Most writers attack these problems through journalism and other non-fiction formats, but I am comfortable writing about these issues in fiction. I believe that environmentally conscious fiction can forge a strong connection between the brain and the heart, and become a catalyst for social change.

JoeAnn Hart’s novel, FLOAT – Art by Karen Ristuben / Design by John Yunker

“A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean, JoeAnn Hart’s novel takes a smart, satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine.”

I love this description of Float. Would you tell us the details of what inspired you to write this novel? And how you decided on the title and on Duncan Leland, the man whose “infinite kingdom” is facing rising tides, as the character through which the story is revealed?

As with my first novel, Addled, I started out with the title, Float, then dove in to play with all the many different meanings and images. The concept of Float began when I heard a friend tell me what her therapist told her, that she had to learn to float over her stress, that she couldn’t struggle against every crisis or else she would get pulled under and drown. So she learned to just say the word float whenever she was stressed and it helped get her through. I thought that was brilliant, and started building on it. I developed a main character, Duncan Leland, who had both his personal and business life in jeopardy, then I gave him a crazy mother to boot. Through the course of the book, he must learn to float, or sink. I used ‘float’ not just in this psychological sense but also in its financial meaning, as in, to float a loan. Then there are the things that float in the ocean, such as plastic, or dead humans. A float is also a wooden platform connected to a dock by a ramp, and it moves up and down with the tides. Not to mention, floating on air.

Tidal pools, salt marshes, or white-capped seas?

Since I am a total wimp, no white-capped seas for me. I enjoy watching them from a distance, inside. Near a fireplace. And when I think salt marsh, I think greenhead flies, who will rip the flesh off your bones during breeding season. There are a few toe-biting crabs scuttling along the bottom, but you won’t ever find a shark in a tide pool.

JoeAnn Hart with Daisy – Photo credit: Morgan Baird

What has been the most memorable harbor sighting from your dory? And does Daisy, your rescue pup, share these fair-weather outings?

The most wonderful part of rowing around the harbor in a silent vessel like a dory is the seals. They are as curious about us as we are about them, so we – me and my rowing partner, Sarah – always have an eye out for a mammalian head peeking out of the water. It is amazing to think of these large animals, these air-breathing animals like us, living under the ocean’s surface. It is not just a parallel universe to ours, but a completely foreign landscape, and here is an ambassador from that country –  a seal – saying hello. To them, we are a dark lozenge shape moving slowly over their heads. They see the tips of our oars enter the water, then disappear. What are we doing, they wonder. What are they doing, we wonder. Daisy doesn’t come on the dory with us – she much prefers luxury motor yachts with staff – but when I walk her on Brace Cove and it is low tide and the seals are sunning themselves on the rocks, they seem to know one another. The seals arch up, as she goes by, and stare. Perhaps they feel their vestigial leg bones twitch, just a little, as they watch her jump from rock to rock.

You are active in the Gloucester writing community—including the Gloucester Writers Center and the Rocky Neck Art Colony—as well as environmental alliances and animal rescues—NAMA: Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Save Your Ass Long Ear Rescue, and more. It seems you’ve found a way to traverse the worlds of art and environment. Collaboration is also evident in your choice of artist Karen Ristuben’s cover image for Float, and your partnered gallery reading/artist discussion this September. With your past, present, and future endeavors in mind, is the environmental path of your writing career ever overwhelming? Or does the support of community and collaboration keep you energized and inspired?

In almost all cases, I get back more from an organization than I give. Usually, that pay-back is in the form of satisfaction of having at least tried to make a difference in the world, especially when it comes to the environment. There is also the payback of connection. I’ve met wonderful people working with groups. I’ve also met a few clunkers, but it’s all grist for the mill. Humans just crack me up. We say one thing, and do another, and we almost always work against our own best interests, especially when it has to do with the environment. Here we are, a species destroying our own habitat, and we just continue on our way as if it’s not happening. So I have nothing but admiration for organizations that keep fighting the good fight even as we’re sinking. Especially the arts and humanities, which are too often viewed as if they were an accessory to our culture, and not the defining aspect of our species. Science can make us think, but the arts make us feel, and in order to make the right decisions for the future of the world, we need to use the whole brain, not just half of it. We should all try to approach the world with the wonder of an artist and the curiosity of the scientist. Gloucester artist, Karen Ristuben, who did the cover art for Float, has this sensibility, so I was thrilled when Ashland Creek, who specializes in environmental literature, chose her photographs for Float. We were on a panel together this summer with other environmental artists and writers – Kyle Brown and David Abrams – to talk  about how the arts can be used to enhance environmental action. It was the hottest night of the year in an un-air-conditioned space, and we had a packed house, which demonstrates a great deal of interest in the collaboration between the arts and the environmental sciences.

NAMA is important because they promote local fishing in the same way that the plight of the family farm was brought to our attention. We can fish and save the fish at the same time if we have the right international policies, and if people understand where their fish comes from and how it is caught. And of course, Save Your Ass is close to my heart because we got Abe and Zach from them. We love our donkeys, and we like to think they love us too.

JoeAnn Hart – Photo credit: Brendan Pike

JoeAnn Hart is the award-winning author of the novels, Addled, (Little, Brown) and Float, (Ashland Creek Press), a finalist for the Dana Award in the Novel, and an excerpt of which won the Doug Fir Fiction Award. Her work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, natural or otherwise. Recent stories, essays and articles have appeared in The Sonora Review, Newfound Journal, and The Boston Globe Magazine.

Photos by JoeAnn Hart, Morgan Baird, and Brendan Pike.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

*

This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Amy Wright: In the Garden

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

— from The Garden Will Give You a Fat Lip 

by Amy Wright

“Tennessee Roses” – Photo credit: Amy Wright

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

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

- from “It Always Has Hit Me from Below”

 - by Amy Wright

Amy Wright – Photo credit: James Yates

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

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

“Moving Through It” – Photo credit: James Yates

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

- from “Moving Through It” - by Amy Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hands” – Photo credit: Susan Bryant

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

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

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

“Oh, Heart” – Photo Credit: James Yates

Life. Death. Life.

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

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

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

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

“Hair Flying” – Photo credit: Susan Bryant

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

- from “Fearlessening”– by Amy Wright

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

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

“My Boon Companion” – Photo credit: James Yates

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

- from “My Boon Companion” – by Amy Wright

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

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

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

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

Amy – Photo credit: David Iacovazzi-Pau

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

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

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

“Leaning Back” – Feature photo credit: James Yates

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

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

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

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This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Louisiana and Floods

Thinking about Louisiana, a place rich in cypress swamps and silt and wet, fertile ground. For every flood there are those who lose their homes, farms and fishing grounds, even their livelihoods. The years that mark major floods along the Mississippi River and the coastal waterways leading up from the Gulf—1882, 1927, 1965, 1995, 2005—don’t tell the entire story. One can’t help but notice how natural disasters can be diverted into manmade ones.

But this isn’t a diatribe on the history of floods. It is rather a remark on how those in small towns and in the countryside along the swollen Mississippi have been and continue to be drowned.  And now the Morganza Spillway has been opened for the first time in 37 years to divert the river floods away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to less densely populated areas. The Army Corps of Engineers, who have decided to open the spillway, have a less than favorable reputation after forty years of making money, when they should have been making levees.

The Corps have informed those of the Atchafalya Basin that they need to evacuate as if they are moving for good. Like the folks in the wagon, the dirt road and clouded skies pressing in, photographed years ago by Eudora Welty, the Louisianians south of U.S. Route 190, who know their houses and land will be ruined by the river’s exodus through the spillway, now take to the road in their trucks and through the bayou in their boats, leaving nothing behind. Nothing but a glimmer of hope.