New England Review

Behind the Byline

Lindsay Bernal

Staff reader Sabrina Islam talks with NER 43.3 contributor Lindsay Bernal about mystics, the reflexitivity of poetry, and the ekphrastic inspiration behind her poem “Visions.”

Sabrina Islam: “Visions” is inspired by your favorite mystic, St. Bridget, the patron saint of Sweden, whose revelations were influential during the Middle Ages. After her husband’s death, St. Bridget retired to a life of penance and prayer. What moved you to write this poem about her?

Lindsay Bernal: I was raised in the Catholic Church, attending parochial schools from pre-K until college when I began to reject Catholicism. My initial interest in Bridget stemmed from the fact that she was a writer. She was born in the 14th century and her revelations shaped decisions in Rome and established the revolutionary Brigittine Order for women with an abbess at the helm. I first learned about Bridget when I was preparing for Confirmation: before choosing the name that would seal my Baptism, I had to research the saints and write a paper justifying my choice. Ultimately, I went with Catherine, the Tuscan visionary, whose teenage life was darker and more rebellious.

I’m still fascinated by Bridget, Catherine, and other medieval women whose visions set them apart, gave them power, authority, and influence, and, in many cases, saved them from the potential violence of marriage, maternal morbidity/death, etc. I should admit, too, that within the context of writing the poem “Visions,” pure error led me back to Bridget. I misread Celia Paul’s 2015 abstract painting, St. Brigid’s Vision (featured in the spectacular 2016 exhibition, No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection) as an allusion to my beloved Bridget. Paul’s painting, however, references the Irish Saint Brigid, who I don’t find as compelling. I brought my own autobiography, my long obsession with Saint Bridget of Sweden, into her canvas. Because I saw the sea in the painting, I assumed it had to be about my Bridget, who, in utero, had saved her shipwrecked mother and thus, herself. A supernatural miracle-worker from the womb.

SI: St. Bridget exercised a wide apostolate and sheltered the homeless and sinners. In “Visions” you write, “only after she became suffering / an abstraction unfamiliar / yellowed at the center / even more hollowed out / what Bridget saw / in her mind’s eye was dangerous.” Is the poem directing us to what comes after suffering?

LB: That’s a tough one: I have so much trouble with directives. I’m thinking about what can come through suffering.  Bridget eventually gave up worldly possessions, desire, friendship, pleasure, to get as close to God as possible—to experience the ecstasy of a vision, many visions throughout her life. I’m deeply interested in the relationship between vision and imagination, vision and art: the artist as visionary.

As a child, teenager and young adult, I didn’t feel like I was good or blessed or worthy of God’s salvation. I prayed and prayed but whatever connection I should have created with God wasn’t happening. Unlike Bridget and the other saints I studied, I wasn’t able to communicate with God or Mary in a meaningful way. I was ashamed of myself for faking my faith at school, at church, at home. When I finally abandoned Catholicism, I found poetry: I don’t believe in God but I do believe in art, in language, in the imagination. Maybe in those rare moments when I forget myself entirely, when I get lost inside the reading or writing of a poem, I’m also experiencing something divine, something extraordinary. 

SI: You’ve said you have been writing and rewriting “Visions” for several years. Could you speak about your writing process?

LB: My process is exhausting and involves a lot of drafts. I can blame Catholicism for the slowness, the ongoing rewriting.

“Visions” is the first poem I committed to from my in-progress second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Misreading the Precipice.” It began as a study of Celia Paul’s painting that I didn’t trust would be a poem until I discovered (through revision) its fragmented, anaphoric form. The first versions of “Visions” were terrible—to which Kara Candito and Liz Countryman will attest. I kept setting it aside, ignoring it, but it kept calling me back.

SI: In her review of your collection What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, Claire Denson writes how embarrassing and painful it is to grow up and become. She writes, “The speaker of her collection absorbs art and place then presents them back within her own context, transformed.” In “Visions” I see how becoming still holds a strong place in your poetry. Is becoming a kind of transformation?

LB: Claire is such a generous and careful reader, as are you, Sabrina, and you’re both astonishing writers. I know that poem-making is transformative. What is metaphor but a luminous transformation: one thing becoming another and deepening our understanding.

My second collection is even more focused on my childhood, matrilineage, my struggle with religion, the sexual violence that was normalized in the Catholic communities where I came of age.

SI: In a blurb for the collection, Jericho Brown noted how What It Doesn’t Have to Do With is disinterested in self-involvement or melodrama. You write, “Darkness doesn’t descend suddenly at all.” What role does self-reflection play in your thinking and writing process?

LB: Poems are inherently reflexive, “memories recollected in tranquility,” and opportunities to connect with history, with the dead, to communicate something that in real life you were too shy, too afraid, too embarrassed, too rushed, to say.

Many of the poems in my first book as well as in the second manuscript are elegies, engaged with the act of honoring—and resuscitating—a place, a loved one, a past self from whom I’ve grown apart.

Writing, as we all know, requires solitude, which I have to believe is different from loneliness: writers need no materials beyond our imagination. As painter Joan Mitchell states so astutely, “When you are really involved in writing or painting you are someone else . . . You are what I call, ‘no hands,’ the riding a bicycle. You do not exist.” Mitchell’s quote brings to mind Keats’s annihilated self.

SI: In your exceptional poem “Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid” the speaker asks, “Does a child ever recover / from losing the vessel who bore her, / pushed her out of one watery world into this? / Is it an image of damnation?” How does poetry provide narratives for our own wounds and healing?

LB: In that moment, I’m thinking literally about my sister-in-law who committed suicide—after her death, we all lived inside our many questions. As a child she lost her mother: I’m wondering throughout that poem about that primal loss and how we can’t always survive grief. What It Doesn’t Have to Do With radiates around Oko’s narrative for which there is no healing. There’s no end to my brother’s grieving, there’s just time passing.

I don’t choose narratives or subjects: they choose me, as cheesy or unbelievable as that sounds, and then when I can no longer resist them, I shape them into poems.

Honestly, I long for poems that escape narrative, and I don’t turn to poems for healing. Rather, I read poetry to learn more about the world, to be moved, to be surprised, to remember.

SI: Are there poems or poets you return to often? How do they influence your work?

LB: Yes, of course. “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath is a perfect poem to which I return, without which I wouldn’t have been able to write “Visions.” In “Blackberrying,” Plath’s in Devon, where Celia Paul also lived, and the sea is everything (despite its nothingness). It’s literal and the objective correlative, where the self disappears when the imagination takes over: “ . . . nothing but a great space / Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths / Beating and beating at an intractable metal.”

I’ve encountered few sentences as aurally and visually supreme as Plath’s throughout “Blackberrying.” Stanley Plumly, quoting Eliot, refers to this effect as the “aural imagination.”

Celia Paul’s “St. Brigid’s Vision,” is an elegy to her mother, who died the year before Paul completed it. Only as her mother is dying does Paul begin painting the sea. Her recent “memoirs” about painting, Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John, have influenced my second book. She’s an incredible painter and writer.

SI: How does teaching inform your writing life?

LB: It remains an unending balancing act, but teaching and writing and reading are all indelibly connected. I definitely learn as much from my students as they learn from me. And whenever I contemplate a break from teaching, I remember the teachers who encouraged and challenged me and how awful my poems would be without their mentorship.

SI: Your poems are often inspired by other art forms including music, paintings, and sculptures. We’ve touched on how “Visions” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Celia Paul’s St Brigid’s Vision, and I understand Louise Bourgeois’s “Femme Maison” series influenced your exploration of the feminist imagination in What It Doesn’t Have to Do With. How does visual art shape your understanding of language and poetry?

LB: While writing What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, I tried to discover in paintings and sculpture other ways to imagine my own lived experience, to simultaneously establish distance and a deeper connection between the speaker and the subjects that subsume her: heartbreak, grief, self-doubt, estrangement, and suicide. Ekphrasis as metaphor.

The “Femme Maison” drawings, in particular, provided another angle into my sister-in-law’s struggles and my own, as they imagine domesticity and motherhood as physical burdens or barriers, the house, no longer a place of comfort or rest, swallowing the mind.

SI: What obsessions are you entertaining now?

LB: I’m obsessively trying to finish my second collection, filling in the gaps between poems. This past month I’ve been working on a long poem about species collapse and the postmortem attentive behavior (grief) of North Atlantic right whales. My typical uplifting themes.

Thank you, Sabrina, for spending time with me and my poems.

SI: Thank you so much for your time too, Lindsay.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Washington, DC. 

Behind the Byline

Ada Limón

In conversation with Sabrina Islam, Ada Limón talks about her poem “Open Water” (NER 42.2), the genesis of her poems’ images, and how “what we pay attention to is how we show our love.”

Sabrina Islam: In “Open Water” you write: “It does no good to trick and weave and lose / the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper / into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come, / my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent / in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you / moving through waves.” What is your process of navigating grief through poetry?

Ada Limón: I was just thinking of that recently. I don’t know if I have a process for navigating grief in my own work, instead it just comes when it comes. I often find myself sitting down to write and then my ghosts arrive. They are moving through me or they are with me always, and then when I allow myself to be tender to the world, to be open to the page, the ghosts come. It always feels like a gift to be able to receive them. To be able to open the door and say, “Oh I’ve been waiting for you!”

SI: Later in the poem we see, “That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish.” Kaveh Akbar once pointed out how in your poetry there is a preoccupation with animal life—sharks, fish, horses, birds. What role do animals and the natural world play in your thinking process?

AL: It’s true I’m obsessed with animals, but not just the nonhuman animal, but how we are animals too. A sense of interconnectedness on the planet is what encourages me to try to live each day with some sort of grace, some sort of enoughness. Animals are always reminding me that I am not the center of the story. That there is life all around me and that life will continue on without me. I am not the fulcrum or the arrow on the map. There’s a comfort in that. A spaciousness.

SI: “Open Water” ends, “But I keep thinking how something saw you, something / was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean / where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin, right before you died, / you were beheld.” Elsewhere, in your poem “A Name,” we see Eve walking among animals, naming them, and the speaker wonders if Eve also wishes for the animals to speak back and name her. I am fascinated by the amount of openness and vulnerability necessary for the desire to be witnessed so closely. What does it mean to be seen?

AL: I feel increasingly fascinated about the idea that we often don’t think of the animal witnessing us, but rather we are always the seer. Humans are the ones with the albatross around our necks. We tell the story. We have the language-laden tongue and the opposable thumbs. But that still doesn’t mean we are at the center. In my work, and more so in the new book that I’m working on, I’m interested in what it is to not always be the one witnessing, but also what it feels like to be seen, to be witnessed by someone, something else. I’m intrigued by the idea that to be witnessed is as essential as to witness. I’m also intrigued with the idea that when an animal sees the human animal, it sees the animal us, the body, the skin, the movement, the threat, the safety, without all the chaos that’s steaming in our minds.

SI: In an interview with Diana Delgado for Guernica you talk about feeling things largely, “There is so much feeling that is moving through me almost all the time, and probably many people have this happening to them, but for me, I feel it. It can be a little intimidating and overwhelming sometimes, and the poem feels like a place where I can put all of that.” Your poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” has an invincible quality, where the speaker feels things deeply and invites readers to see her “8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.” I’d love to hear the inspiration behind that incredible poem.

AL: Thank you, thank you. That poem, like many of my poems, came out of a curiosity. A question. I wanted to know what it was that made me feel connected to the female horses. Why was it that I wanted to see them win? I started out with that question and let the interrogation lead me to the idea of having that heart inside me, that courageous and powerful heart. The poem was written when I didn’t feel courageous or powerful, but I was allowing myself to imagine what that might feel like to hold that enormous heart inside me, to believe in my own strength and power. Perhaps it’s a spell? I know I needed it.

SI: You’ve said Aretha Franklin has had a huge influence on your poetry. While searching for “the faint music under things,” how do you think about sound and composition? Do you have other favorite writers/artists/musicians who inspire sound in your poetry?

AL: I love Aretha Franklin. I grew up listening to her albums over and over again. (A fact my older brother can attest to.) I can’t actually listen to music while I write though. I am too much of a mimic. When I listen to music it’s with my whole body and my mouth. I sing and dance and it requires all of my attention. I can barely listen to music while I’m driving because it absorbs me so completely. A few of my favorite artists that I return to again and again are: Joan Armatrading, Sade, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, oh I could just go on and on.

SI: Joan Didion writes how certain images shimmer for her: “Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.” In “Open Water” you recall your stepmother recount her swim, “That night, I heard more / about that fish and that eye than anything else. / I don’t know why it has come to me this morning. / Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.” How do you recognize if a certain image could become a poem?

AL: I love the way images come to us. The mind making paintings all the time. Recalling and recalling. I’m not sure which images are going to make poems when they come to me, but I can tell you that if something strikes me, moves me, changes my body, then I know it’s at least worth exploring in a poem. That morning, the morning of the poem, it really felt like she came to me, was swimming, and that it wasn’t about her final days, but about how she was witnessed in the wild. That was what mattered. I don’t know why, but that’s what the image told me, it was about the EYE, and I was so moved that by the time I was finished with the dishes, I was nearly weeping. That doesn’t mean that the image was going to make a good poem, but it does mean that it moved me enough to sit down and explore it fully.

SI: What obsessions you are entertaining now? What ideas are you exploring?

AL: Lately, my work has been leaning on the idea of ancestors, connections, how a life is not just singular, how a life is made up of our surroundings, our chosen families, our beloveds, our bloodlines, our stories, our possibilities. I’m interested in the mess, the unknowing, the mystery of our world. It’s interesting to try to write a poem that has no certainty or can breathe in the in-between spaces. I’m fascinated by what it means to be an artist that has no answers and how that can translate on the page.

SI: For fellow writers, how do you foster the tenacity to keep going?

AL: It is so hard to keep going, isn’t it? I laugh that I’m always telling friends that we should just give up, just lie down for a bit, just stop and surrender to the spin of the world. And then of course, I nap, and read, and then something in me wants to make poems again. I think of living, of making a living, that can require a bit of tenacity. We must have tenacity to live, to continue, to pay the rent, and get groceries, and grieve, and work through illness and pain, and continue on when all we really want to do is rest for awhile, is to have things be easy. Life is rough. But for me, writing is not about tenacity. I’m not saying it’s not work. I work at it, I edit for months, years sometimes, I throw away hundreds of drafts poems that just don’t seem to want to come to life yet, but at the core of me, making poems, writing poems is not hard. Writing poems is the good part, it’s the gift, it’s the part that doesn’t require tenacity. Poems come when I am not gritting my teeth; they come when I make myself available. So if there was one thing I could offer about how to keep going is to follow your joys when you can, follow the bright edges, let yourself be drawn to what you love and then make poems from that place. What we pay attention to is how we show our love. If it feels too hard to write, don’t write for awhile, take time off, take a nap, call a friend, work at something else, weep. Poems will come. Time will pass. If you love poetry and making poems, you’ll find a way to make them no matter what. They’ll be knocking on your chest to get out, and when you’re ready, when you’ve cried enough, and slept enough, you’ll open your mouth and those poems will come flying out.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Ada.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Behind the Byline

Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan, photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Sabrina Islam talks to Charif Shanahan about opening up conversations around trauma, poetry as a kind of spirituality, and his poem “Worthiness,” published in NER 42.1.

Sabrina Islam: In your incredible poem “Your foot, your root,” you write, “My mother says I am not African American, I am an Arab. / My friend Solmaz writes It matters what you call a thing.” Elsewhere, you talk about the psychic trauma of multiple colonializations and the complexity around identity in North Africa. Do you find that poetry provides any kind of framework that might help you reclaim your heritage and identity?

Charif Shanahan: My heritage and my identities are my own, whether I write poems about them or not. I think of my work less as a reclamation of my heritage and identity, and more as an articulation of the complexities around my cultural inheritance and subject position/s. The act of speaking within a given social context seems to require that one occupy a position within that social world—and so how does that problematize speaking, in poems or otherwise, for someone who challenges the integrity of those positions simply by existing? I try to take up this question in a poem recently published by the Yale Review.

SI: In “Worthiness,” you write, “On a cellular level trauma is inscribed into the body of the person who survives it, scientists confirm. / Some say the word “trauma” is overused these days to the extent its meaning is diminished. / The intention of the chokehold is to induce an unconscious state.” In your writing practice, how do you grapple with the heaviness of trauma? How do you show yourself generosity?

CS: I show myself generosity precisely by grappling with forces that would otherwise render me silent. It can be an act of generosity (to one’s self and to others) to speak at all.

SI: Then there is also the task of bringing this heaviness to your readers, students, and family: “You’ll have to forgive me for being heavy. / Speaking to you here, like this, is the most difficult thing I can do. / The presence it requires is agonizing, feels fatal.” How do you make room for these discussions in poetry and in the classroom?

CS: I make room for these discussions in my poetry by centering them at times, by being willing to have them at all. What’s the point of making art that risks nothing? That is silent about the aspects of human life most in need of our reckoning? As an educator, I try to make room not just for the “difficult,” but for everything—poems that exist across the full spectrum of human emotion and experience—because that is the truth of what we live. Without a sense of safety, I don’t think it’s possible to discuss meaningfully a poem whose stakes feel very high, and so it’s a priority for me to ensure that each student feels safe, seen and heard.

SI: In a review of your poetry collection in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Margaret Stawowy recognizes an uncompromising sense of the dignity of others in your poetry. In your poem “Single File,” you write, “I don’t mean who we are to each other; I mean / who we are to ourselves.” How do you think about identity and worthiness?

CS: Well, it’s clear that some identities have been rendered less worthy by the terms of the world. That’s a lie, of course. The first and only conferrer of worthiness is yourself.

SI: What does belonging to a physical place mean to you?

CS: I don’t know. I tend to think of “belonging” metaphysically, spiritually. And I don’t know that we can separate physical spaces from their ghosts. If I belong—am at home—anywhere, it’s in my body. But that body, naturally, carries histories, both personal and collective, and has different meanings based on where I bring it, some of which challenge my inhabitation of it.

SI: The line from your earlier collection, “I want to enter my life like a room,” is echoed in “Worthiness.” You once said that the poem is something we can experience in our body and that, although one’s analytical intelligence is often emphasized, our body can also be a guide to understanding and appreciating the poem without the need to articulate what that is. In your experience, does the ritual of encountering and repeating familiar lines of poetry help develop such emotional intelligence?

CS: Yes. The more we encounter an individual poem, the more sophisticated a reader of that poem we become, naturally, though what that means, for me, often has little to do with “the mind.” There is great pleasure for me in close reading and analysis, in breaking the poem down to its constituent parts to see how they come together to make meaning. At once, I think of poetry as a kind of prayer, and the space that poetry occupies in my life is akin to a kind of spirituality. In this way, I try to practice a fullness of reading, rather than a compartmentalization of it; to read—and experience—the poem not just with my mind, but with my entire being.

SI: Are you working on a new writing project?

CS: Yes, I recently completed my second poetry collection. I’ve also been working on a third—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness—as well as a collection of essays about mixed-race identity in the US; Blackness in the Maghreb; and the transnational dimensions of racial experience.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Charif.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Behind the Byline

Victoria Chang

Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence.

Photo credit: Margaret Molloy

Victoria Chang, author of the “Marfa, Texas” (NER 41.4) and “Obit” series (NER 38.3) talks to NER reader Sabrina Islam about meditations on loss and grief, and on finally writing her truth: “I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.”

Sabrina Islam: Your meditation on loss and grief in Obit is incredible. In “Grief” you write, “A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion. / My grief is not the same as my pain. My / mother was a mathematician so I tried / to calculate my grief. My father was an / engineer so I tried to build a box around / my grief, along with a small wooden / bed that grief could lie down on. The / texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing / me to speak about nothing.” How has grief become an obsession for you and what particular value is present in thinking and writing about the subject of grief?

Victoria Chang: I think why write about anything really? Why write at all? I don’t think we can choose to be writers. I also don’t think we can choose what we write about, at least for some things. Obviously, you can be given assignments or prompts, but even then, our own obsessions seem to creep out. Grief just is. We can’t choose when someone dies (or when we die ourselves), but those left behind grieve. As a writer, I write from deep wells of thinking and feeling, like most writers probably.

SI: Grief continues. In the newer series, “Marfa, Texas,” you write, “Is it // possible to stop loving / everything? The owl. The / hawk. Every person I meet. To / see everyone as my mother. To / have a heart // like this is to be made of / midnight.” You’ve poured your grief into Obit, then into “Marfa, Texas.” Do the poems ever speak back to you? How is your grief evolving and changing you?

VC: Poems always speak to us! Most of the time, we don’t listen very well. Writing, but mostly revising feels a lot like listening to the poems. Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because sometimes whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence. It’s ignoring me for a reason. Usually that means to let it sit or go read something else in a different genre or something entirely different. But given my stubborn personality, I usually just keep reading a manuscript again and again and even if I change one word, I think of it as a miracle and thank my manuscript. Right now, I’m reading academic articles. Sometimes I read philosophy. I actually enjoy reading literary criticism textbooks. I don’t watch movies but I love reading movie criticism.

SI: Your words become increasingly charged and powerful in the sequence “Marfa, Texas.” The last poem in the series ends, “To love so much is to live / within birds. // I have been waiting for / this heart to fade or at / least to kneel. Maybe the / heart is not inside me but I / am inside it.” You frequently write sequences: why are you drawn to this form?

VC: I think the obsessive person can be drawn into sequences. It’s the form of relentless pursuit. The trouble is that there’s always a gap so the obsessive person is running on a treadmill within that gap. I like to call that gap the gap of estrangement. That’s where I reside. That’s my address. I used to make apologies for being so obsessive, but now I just embrace that disposition and personality. My father was/is a lot like this. It feels chemical in the brain actually. I also think obsessiveness has something to do with immigration, estrangement from a country and white supremacist institutions. The chasing is a part of obsession because the gap of estrangement can never be filled. I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.

SI: Circles often appear in your poetry collections. In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” How does the form of a circle stimulate your thinking process?

VC: As sloppy a person as I am, I am always surprised at how I can make patterns, see patterns, or think in patterns. My brain often feels like a pinball machine. But then I can be exceptionally organized and linear when necessary. I love how malleable and unfixed the brain is/can be. It’s important (to me at least) not to stereotype myself, if that makes sense. We’re all multitudinous. We are exceptionally flexible. My attitude has always been “why not?” and this has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past, but in art-making at least, I would say it is my governing principle (if I even have one consciously). Experimentation is very important to me as a person, trying new things, the new, the fresh.

SI: Your new book Love, Love is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse about a girl who slowly solves the mystery of her sister’s strange illness, which we learn is trichotillomania. The protagonist, Frances, is also dealing with bullying and grappling with her developing identity. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese American family, why was it important for you to write this story?

VC: I’ve tried to write that story so many times (and just wrote another essay on this material). Sometimes we are at the center of our own narratives. Other times, we are not main characters. In my sister’s struggles, I was not the protagonist but a side character. I have begun to recognize that this doesn’t mean I wasn’t impacted (or implicated) by our family’s trauma surrounding this mysterious illness. There are a lot of unspoken traumas in our family, mostly centered around my mother, that only now, after she has passed, can I even properly or adequately reflect on. I have a whole book exploring these things that I am working hard on at this very moment. As an immigrant’s child, there’s also a reckoning with my parents’ trauma and my mother’s trauma and I am writing about all of this now.

SI: Realist painter Edward Hopper’s work prominently features in your earlier collection The Boss, which explores, among other things, American corporate life and power structures. How does visual art inspire poetry for you?

VC: I am very interested in visual art, the visual, aesthetics. How things look matters to me a lot. I am very interested in design, architecture, sculpture. I think this is pretty common amongst poets who spend a lot of time “seeing” things in their minds and in real life. I am working on some visual elements for a new book right now as well. If I could be any other kind of artist, I would be a visual artist. I took a lot of art classes growing up, but then somewhere along the way, switched over more to writing.

SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?

VC: So many! Too many to name here. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bishop. Tranströmer, Glück, Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Plath of course, Eliot, Stevens, Lee. So many contemporary poets and writers I admire too. I could list them here, but I fear I would leave too many people out. We are in a rich time of poetry.

SI: In your poem “Instinct” you ask, “What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, / even their own?” Writing about war and genocide, your work often wrestles with the truly vile parts of human history. In “Ode to Iris Chang” you consider, “How // to trust humans. // How to trust the earth / when all that is there is a // derivative of mud.” What motivates you as a writer to continually return to the page and still explore humanity?

VC: As a writer, I’ve always tried to honor my own truth, whether that truth went against the grain or with the grain. I can’t and won’t be anyone else. I used to feel a lot of shame for not being like other people, but now I try harder to write what feels true to me. I used to think I was supposed to sound like other writers, but I think perhaps starting with my third book, I gave up on that. I just began to write what rang true to me instead of trying to be like everyone else. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. I think I grew up a little bit (finally). This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback, though. I listen really closely to feedback from close friends who are kind enough to read my work. Sometimes, depending on what I’m working on, I need more feedback than other times. I think a writer needs many things, but persistence and a doggedness are two qualities that can be important. If I didn’t have these qualities, I don’t think I would have been able to survive the brutal literary world. I also think a writer needs to simply love writing. I do and always have. If I have nothing else, I know that I really like writing. As I get older and older, I am less afraid of writing about those harder things. The fear, though, is usually how others will perceive the writing or me. At some point, I have just accepted that poets in particular can be very harsh and judgmental. They won’t like hardly anything anyone writes anyway, so why bother trying to please them? I am more interested in pleasing myself.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Victoria.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

 

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