Inter-
Adrienne Gruber
On Practice:
Do you write at the same time every day, in the same place? How would you describe your writing practice/s?
If only! That would be a dream. Actually, no, it would be a nightmare, since I’m not convinced I could write at the same time every day and would probably just squander that time away. Since having kids I write during every spare second I have, which means I literally only have seconds squeezed somewhere between 5a.m. wake-ups, meal prepping, trips to the park/beach/aquarium/YMCA/library, My Little Pony, goldfish crackers, wiping sticky things off my furniture, laundry, etc.
My writing practice is sporadic and I’ve had to learn how to dip in and dip out of writing projects and accomplish what I need to accomplish (whether that be writing new material, revising, reading/researching for projects etc.) within a short period of time. I have a designated ‘writing day’ when my partner takes the kids for several hours and I retreat to a coffee shop, but that is also my time to prepare grant applications, submit work to magazines/contests, research, answer interview questions, etc. Almost daily I vow to work after my kids are in bed but after waiting for them to fall asleep, I’m usually half-asleep myself and unable to do much more than slump on the couch with snacks and Netflix.
What do you do if you get stuck while writing a poem?
I let it sit. Usually it’s not a conscious practice, I just move on to something else, knowing that if that poem still interests me in a few weeks or a few months (or years), it will get finished at some point. I tend to have dozens of half written poems kicking around on my laptop. I like knowing I have poems that are in progress. It makes me feel safe.
Take a photograph of a page from your notebook or a screenshot of an electronic file of a poem you have been recently writing or revising.
On Poetry:
Is there something you once believed about poetry that you no longer hold true? What changed?
I used to believe that every poem could become publishable if I only worked hard enough. I don’t feel like that’s true at all. I’d say about 50% of the poems I write never make it into my books and that’s a good thing.
What can/does poetry change?
Your outlook on life, your opinion on an issue, your worldview and your heart.
Is there something you now think you know about poetry that you wish you’d known a decade ago?
Nope. I don’t know much and what I do know would probably just have intimidated me if I’d known it earlier.
On Influence & Inspiration:
What books are on your night stand, the back of the toilet, your desk?
On my desk (which is really the kitchen table because I live in a two-bedroom apartment): Pregnancy, birth and motherhood related memoirs and literary non-fiction, like Pushed by Jennifer Block, Get Me Out by Randi Epstein, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk and Blue Nights by Joan Didion. Broom Broom by Brecken Hancock is always close by.
On my night stand: Dear Leader by Damian Rogers, The Chemical Life by Jim Johnstone and Hunger by Roxane Gay.
Oh, and Sandra Boynton’s Bath Time! is on the back of the toilet. Always.
Which writer/s do you (re)read the most? What does the writing do for you upon return?
I re-read a lot of work by peers and friends. Brecken Hancock, Raoul Fernandes, Alex Leslie, Linda Besner, Jim Johnstone, Rob Taylor, Liz Howard, Leah Horlick, Ali Blythe, Lucas Crawford, Kevin Spenst, Jennifer Still, Sandra Ridley, Elee Kraljii Gardiner...
I also go back to Brenda Shaughnessy and Sarah Manguso pretty regularly.
Honestly, it’s just straight up pleasure to re-read these poets. Some of it is wishful thinking that if I read their work enough times it will rub off on mine.
Among the poets you most admire, who has influenced you the least? Why have you not been influenced by his/her/their work?
I’m trying to think of a scenario where I could admire a poet but not be influenced by him/her/them. I can’t really come up with an example. The poets I admire automatically become influences because I read and re-read their work with gusto. Though I can see admiring a poet’s drive or ambition without being particularly influenced by their work.
Describe a moment from your life when you've been overcome by how beautiful something is.
I am regularly overcome by how beautiful my kids are, but that feels too easy. On a related note, the birth of my second daughter was a truly beautiful experience, where I felt both completely empowered and entirely powerful. It was quick and excruciating and joyful and overwhelming. The contrast between her birth and my first daughter’s birth, which was terrifying and traumatic, intrigues me. I can’t seem to stop writing about it.
On Teaching:
How would you describe poetry to a four-year-old? To the non-literary family ancestor you imagine as a great source of who you are?
I happen to have a four-year-old and she knows poetry as ‘mom’s work’. When I say I’m going to go do some work, she knows it means poetry-related work. In terms of actually describing poetry, I suppose I would tell her that poetry is like the condensed stories that you get to make up, kind of like the bedtime stories her dad tells her where she’s a princess and has a horse named Star. Or a cool way to talk about feelings or things inside you.
To the non-literary family ancestor I would probably say I write limericks. My Granny used to write limericks so I feel like that’s probably an understandable description.
What characteristics does your ideal poem possess?
Oh god, I don’t know. That’s such a loaded question. When I think of my ideal poems I think of my favourite poems and I’m not sure I could pin point specific characteristics. There is a mixture of maturity, of purposeful language, of emotional intelligence, of confession, of the poet themselves that makes a poem spark.
Do you teach poetry? If so, what are you trying to teach through poetry? What has poetry taught you?
I don’t currently teach poetry, but I have taught poetry to high school students in the past and it’s something I hope I get to do again. I don’t know if I’m trying to teach anything through poetry, I think I’m just trying to teach students that poetry can be a vehicle unlike any other, for self-expression, for story-telling, for one’s voice.
On Publishing & Themes Present/Future:
How has publishing your poems changed your writing practice, process, and product?
It’s made me recognize and understand the importance of revising.
Is there a poem you've always wanted to write but haven't? If so, why are you waiting?
I can’t really think of a poem I’ve always wanted to write that I haven’t at least tried to write. If I want to write something, I tend to go ahead and do it and then determine later whether it’s complete shit or has potential. I have full writing projects that I want to write but haven’t yet, mostly due to time constraints or waiting for someone to die first. That’s an awkward thing to put in an interview. I don’t make it a habit of waiting for people’s deaths. It’s just that certain people in my family don’t want me writing about them and really it’s just one particular person but she’s ninety-four so I figure I have a good chance of outliving her and therefore being able to write about her without experiencing any retroactive wrath.
What subjects, themes, forms, aesthetics, etc. do/will you explore in your work?
In the last few years it’s been primarily pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and parenthood. I love playing around with form, though I feel very undereducated on the diversity of form in poetry. I write mostly free verse, but also some prose poetry; some of my more recent poems have stanzas completely in haiku. I love glosas and palindromes, though my glosas always morph back into free verse or the quoted lines end up in the middle of my stanzas in some nonsensical way and I’ve only written one successful palindrome in my entire life (Proposal from Buoyancy Control, BookThug 2016). In my next book, Q & A (forthcoming with Book*hug in 2019), I have a variety of forms and the aesthetic of the book itself is unique for me. It feels much more experimental than my work has in the past, which is exciting.
On Oranges:
Oranges or apples? Why?
Apples, always apples. Oranges are messy and sticky. Apples can be eaten on long car rides, in front of the TV, in transit. You don’t need two hands to eat an apple. They are crunchy and satisfying. They don’t require extra work like peeling or removing pits. They don’t ask anything of me. They are content.
About the Poet
Adrienne Gruber is the author of two books of poetry, Buoyancy Control (BookThug) and This is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), and four chapbooks, Mimic (Leaf Press), Everything Water (Cactus Press), Intertidal Zones (Jack Pine Press) and The Rope (Jack Pine Press). Her poem Gestational Trail was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015 and she won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Mimic in 2012. Her third poetry collection, Q & A, is forthcoming with Book*hug in Spring 2019. Adrienne lives in Vancouver with her family.
Inter-
C.S. Fuqua
On Practice:
Do you write at the same time every day, in the same place? How would you describe your writing practice/s?
I usually write during the same hours each day at a wonderfully large and battered 1960s-era secretary’s desk I bought for a pittance from a thrift shop 25 years ago. I spend a good deal of the workday (far more than I would like) laboring under the necessity of promotion of published works—a requirement for independent writers, but increasingly a task of traditionally published authors as publishers rely ever more on their authors’ personal finances and promotional abilities to assume duties once performed by the publisher. My promotional work involves participating in various opportunities that come available (review possibilities, readings, guest-blogging, etc.), producing a semi-regular newsletter, and plugging works through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, although I loathe Facebook for all it claims to be and isn’t. The effectiveness of my social media efforts has yet to be determined. The time remaining in the day for writing is devoted primarily to fiction and poetry, but also to freelance work that once included the occasional nonfiction piece for trade and consumer magazines such as Honolulu and Business Alabama, now limited to editing and publishing services for businesses and independent authors. (For more information on editing/publishing services, see bio at end.)
With poetry and fiction, I write wherever and whenever an idea strikes me, jotting down a skeletal draft or outline that encompasses the points I want the final version to make. Revisions come during my regular working hours. Besides literary and editing pursuits, I also produce music, primarily Native American flute instrumentals, so I split some days between literary and musical tasks, devoting the largest block of time to the project with the closest deadline.
What do you do if you get stuck while writing a poem?
That depends on the poem. If it has potential, a glimmer of possibility, I’ll put it aside, work on other writing or music, but if it doesn’t look salvageable when I return to it a day, month, or year later, I toss it.
Take a photograph of a page from your notebook or a screenshot of an electronic file of a poem you have been recently writing or revising.
On Poetry:
Is there something you once believed about poetry that you no longer hold true? What changed?
In the high school I attended, the English curriculum covered only traditional poets, mostly people who’d died a century earlier, the poetry rhymed, highly stylized, rigid—poetry that, for me, had meaning only in an historical sense. In college, those same poets popped up again, but, thankfully, the works of a few contemporary poets were included as well. That’s when I discovered Nikki Giovanni, Randall Jerrell, Robison Jeffers, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and, most important for me, Raymond Carver. Their work demonstrates that a poem should be, above all else, a vehicle to reach, entertain, challenge, console, and arouse its audience, that it shouldn’t be highbrow, pretentious nonsense (though such poetry has its place if only to torment high school literature students), that it doesn’t have to be the darling of academia or the folks down at the poetry slam to be important. Poetry, I believe, should be a construct that transcends the definitions that would confine it.
What can/does poetry change?
Depending on its structure and delivery, poetry has the power, I believe, to change pretty much anything at all. In many cases, however, the delivery is equal to or more important than the words. Take musical accompaniment, for example. Music reaches a broader audience in ways the words alone on a page or monitor can’t. Every social movement has been, in part, fueled by music-borne poetry. Even the Norwegian Nobel Committee has recognized the ability of music to enhance words by awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. His lyrics alone wouldn’t have garnered the attention, following, or importance had it not been for the music that accompanied them. Be aware, however, a good friend and diehard Bob Dylan fan assures me I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Is there something you now think you know about poetry that you wish you’d known a decade ago?
I once thought I’d know most of what I should about writing in general and about poetry specifically by now. It hasn’t happened. It never will. And that’s fine. Each new piece is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. Writing’s a never-ending journey for me, and wiser folks than I have suggested, it’s the journey that matters more than the goal.
On Influence & Inspiration:
What books are on your night stand, the back of the toilet, your desk?
Too many, but here are a few:
- Hiroshima, John Hersey
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
- The Ballad of the Sad Café & Other Stories, Carson McCullers
- The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
- We Become New, a 1970s collection of feminist poetry
- Groucho & Me, Groucho Marx
- Letters, Kurt Vonnegut
- All of Us, Raymond Carver
- The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
- The Book of Bamboo, David Farrelly
- Dictionary of Superstitions, Jean-Luc Caradeau & Cecile Donner
- Zen Speaks, Tsai Chih Chung
All of these are re-reads! I need to get to a bookstore soon.
Which writer/s do you (re)read the most? What does the writing do for you upon return?
Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver. Kurt Vonnegut’s stories and humor provide perspective on the tragic and comic reality of life, no matter how desperate or despairing it becomes. Flannery O’Connor’s stories beautifully explore the people and places of my own background. Raymond Carver’s stories and poems reflect the humanity in the worst and best of us. Each time I reread anything by these three writers, I learn something new—about craft, about society, about self.
Among the poets you most admire, who has influenced you the least? Why have you not been influenced by his/her/their work?
T.S. Eliot. I’m sure his writing has influenced my own in some way, but, for the life of me, I can’t see how. I read his work more as a study of a master than as one whose style I would like to imitate or adapt.
Describe a moment from your life when you've been overcome by how beautiful something is.
The moment our daughter Tegan was born and put into my arms to place beside my spouse Bonnie on the birthing bed.
On Teaching:
How would you describe poetry to a four-year-old? To the non-literary family ancestor you imagine as a great source of who you are?
Rather than describe it, I would read various works—from Shel Silverstein to Carver to Giovanni to Poe and so on, depending on the child’s or ancestor’s age—followed by questions such as, “What do you think of …? What’s different about A from B?”
What characteristics does your ideal poem possess?
Common language that effectively relates a story to readers of disparate backgrounds. Raymond Carver’s poems employ this all-important characteristic with grit, grace, and somber beauty.
Do you teach poetry? If so, what are you trying to teach through poetry? What has poetry taught you?
If I were an instructor of literature, I would have a difficult time because I believe poetry cannot be taught. It’s a talent or craft that must be developed over time. A person can be taught all the technical aspects of poetry—themes, styles, forms, types, etc.—but that person cannot be taught how to write a poem. A poet must take each of the building blocks, put them together, and refine them into something magical through unending practice.
On Publishing & Themes Present/Future:
How has publishing your poems changed your writing practice, process, and product?
To have something published is the reward and goal most writers pursue, at least the writers I know. Publication of my work is acknowledgment that maybe I’ve done something right, that maybe I can do it better if I keep at it. So, I’ve continued to write poetry even though I must rely on other writing and editing work for income.
Is there a poem you've always wanted to write but haven't? If so, why are you waiting?
The poem I haven’t written is always the next poem, to which I’ll get around at some point. The only reason I haven’t yet is because I’m working on this one. Or that one. Or this other one...
What subjects, themes, forms, aesthetics, etc. do/will you explore in your work?
The subjects and themes in my poetry address everyday life, the dynamics of individual existence—family, society, life, death, sadness, joy, and on and on. I prefer free verse, but I enjoy the occasional challenge of stricter forms. The problem with form, however, at least for me, is that a poem runs the risk of sounding contrived due to formal dictates.
On Oranges:
Oranges or apples? Why?
Definitely bananas. I’m not much for fruit, but take a frozen banana, a tablespoon of cream, a bit of milk, some vanilla, and a good blender, and you’ve got the ingredients for a wonderful, nutritional desert or snack that has the same consistency of ice cream or a delicious, thick milkshake. Want a recipe? Write to me...
Many thanks to the folks at The Maynard for inviting me to participate in The Maynard View: Inter-. It’s an honor and much appreciated.
About the Poet
C.S. Fuqua’s books include White Trash & Southern—Collected Poems, Walking after Midnight—Collected Stories, Native American Flute Craft, and Hush, Puppy! A Southern Fried Tale. His work has appeared widely in publications, such as The Christian Science Monitor, Pearl, and Year’s Best Horror Stories. Please visit: http://csfuqua.com. For more information on editing/publishing services, please visit http://csfuqua.com/editing-publishing-services/. For bibliographic information, please visit http://csfuqua.com/literary-work/.