On Writing

Mary Akers: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me about your wonderful collection The New Testament. I enjoyed this collection so much, Jericho. It has stayed with me for weeks, much like your other collection Please did when I first read it. In fact, I would say you write the most haunting poems–in the best sense of the word “haunting”–the specter of them hovers, they follow me around, hang about, shimmer. It’s probably a personal thing, but what do you think makes a poem “haunt” a reader? Jericho Brown: Thanks so much, Mary! This is very hard to narrow down.  But I think being haunted means to be very aware of a presence we cannot see or touch.  I guess all good poems are haunting then, because they ultimately put sounds and images in our heads that are nowhere but our heads.  The poems themselves are only ink on a page.  So I’ll go with music and image as an answer for now.   MA: I like that answer–and now I’m thinking it could apply to all forms of writing. The term “Poetry of the Body” comes to mind when I read your work. I’ve heard several poets use lately, so I googled it and came up with a page that declares, “Poetry should be read aloud, tasted on the tongue, felt in the blood and heart.” I agree, but I wonder how a poet who writes work as somatic as yours feels about that definition. What do you think it means to be a poet of the body? JB: The “poet of the body” is one who reaches for revelations that are made in and through the body before they are fully understood in the mind.  I want to believe that poems ask us to make use of our instinct and intuition, that they create feelings in us similar to hunger or to an itch.  When we get these feelings, we know we need to eat or that something could be crawling on our skin.   MA: Yes. Beautiful. So…bearing in mind that artists and their work can fit into many different categories, would you place your own work in the category of Poetry of the Body? JB: I don’t try to do any categorizing of myself.  It would take all the fun out of writing if I bothered to place myself in such ways.  And because I’m so skeptical of my own habits, it would lead me to writing against something that may well be the thing that makes my poems particular.   MA: Reading your wonderful collection also had me thinking about form. You manage to create work that feels...

Interview with Mary Akers, author of Bones of an Inland Sea   My friend Mary Akers has a new book out, Bones of an Inland Sea (Press 53, 2013).  I plan to give you my own reaction to this wonderful book in a day or two, but for now let me share with you this conversation I had with Mary. By the way, here’s what National Book Award-winner Andrea Barrett has to say about the book (just so you know I’m not lying): “In Mary Akers’ stories, as complexly intertwined as the branches of a coral reef, her passionate characters engage both each other and a richly detailed, vital physical world. An impressive achievement.” Here’s our conversation: Clifford Garstang: Your book Bones of an Inland Sea is a collection of individual stories. But as readers move through the stories, it becomes clear that they are all linked together in fascinating ways. The more stories one reads, the more the characters reappear and relationships evolve. In the end, it feels a bit like reading a novel. Could you talk about that? Mary Akers: If I had to assign this book a descriptive term other than short story collection, I would call it a “composite novel” or a “polyphonic novel”—a novel told in many voices. All the stories are interrelated, and yet each story stands alone. Characters repeat throughout the stories and several characters get more than one chance to tell their stories. I liked exploring how our stories change over time. What we tell ourselves, and others, about our lives changes as we grow and evolve, and even how we tell the story changes. Do we focus on reliving the bad? Or do we gain acceptance over time and tell a very different story twenty years after the actual events occurred? The stories in this collection explore the many ways that stories are told: the long view, the personal letter, a retrospective, a play-by-play, from multiple perspectives, etc.   CG: I recognized some familiar scenarios in these stories. There’s a devastating tsunami in Thailand, a woman in a persistent vegetative state with a family fighting over her right to live or die, a cult reminiscent of Jim Jones’ cult in Jonestown Guyana. Do you take inspiration from the news? MA: Sure, I mean I take inspiration from just about anything, but especially from things that haunt me, things that I don’t understand and can’t let go. The Terri Schiavo case is a good example of that. And the awful images from the Boxing Day tsunami were so painful, especially for someone like me who has loved the ocean all her life. I...

Day One: After a two-and-a-half hour drive from my Mom’s house in Floyd, Virginia, I’m here! Oh. My. Gosh. It’s gorgeous and wonderful and I’m so thrilled to be here. I drove in, walked to the place where they said my packet would be waiting for me, saw my name on the envelope, and promptly started crying, because it meant that it wasn’t a mistake after all. (I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was waiting for someone to tell me my acceptance had been a mistake.) I read all through the packet, but couldn’t find my room anywhere on the map. I was walking all around looking for it, and I found the grounds guy and said, “Can you tell me where WS11 is?” He smiled big and said, “You’ve got the Queen’s Suite.” He showed it to me and I have the most marvelous, large, wonderful room, right next door to the resident artists…my studio is part of my room, I have my own bathroom…so I started crying all over again and called and left a semi-incoherent message on my mom’s answering machine, babbling and blubbering. The weather is fabulous and it’s time for me to get to work, lucky, lucky, lucky girl. Day Two: Today was good. I got a full night’s sleep last night. Comfortable bed, good temperature, no noise. I woke up just before 8am and breakfast goes until nine, so I showered quick and hustled down there. The table I picked was rather quiet, but the next table over was having a wonderful time. I was still full from the delicious dinner the night before and so only had yogurt and coffee and then went back to the room to work. (I am definitely going to go home weighing more than when I arrived.) After breakfast I got to work. First reading over my notes and then editing yesterday’s work. It was slow and sort of dispiriting and so I sat in the sun and read some more notes hoping for inspiration. Finally, I hit my stride just before lunch, so I went to the buffet and took a plate back to my room and kept working. Then I read and took a nap and wrote some more. So far, I have produced 3,000 words today (3,000 ugly, unkempt words, but still, words). I was very optimistically hoping to make it to 5,000 by end-of-business. I may yet. With the nap, I think I can keep going late. There’s a documentary film showing at 9pm that I want to see, though. I think it is called “Cropsey.” I’ll report back on it...

I’m interviewed at the Press 53 blog for the new year. Thank you Christine Norris! http://press53.tumblr.com/post/39928859763/5-questions-3-facts   P53: What is your favorite color, and what does that color mean to you? MA: Green is my favorite color. It always has been, even as a little girl when pink or purple were most often the favorites of my peers. I remember at least one adult trying to tell me that green couldn’t be my favorite color—that little girls liked pink. I also remember thinking, “Are adults really that stupid? My favorite color is my favorite color. Duh.” Yes, I was stubborn, even then. Green is so beautiful to me. The soft, lime, baby-green of new leaves in spring, the deep green of a pine forest that keeps its color all winter, even the fuzzy algae green in a stagnant summer pond just totally speaks to me. Ironically, I don’t wear green much because it doesn’t flatter me at all (my skin has sort of a greenish tinge and the extra green just pushes me over the edge into Nausea-Glam). But I adore it on others. P53: When did you first really feel like a writer? MA: I’m a writer?? Just kidding. But also not. Because it’s hard for me (most days) to feel like a (capital W) Writer, whatever that entails. I’m also a breather, and a sleeper, and an eater, but nobody makes much of those activities. And writing ranks right up there with breathing, eating, and sleeping on my list of Things To Do Today. Anyway, I’m being glib, but I guess my point is that we all write, even if it’s only a grocery list, right? So anyone can “be a writer,” especially in this day and age. I guess a more accurate question might be, “When did I first start to think like a writer?” Because I totally do. Writing is how I process the world. It allows me to pull back from things that confuse me,that I don’t understand, or even that hurt me…and take a calm, collected look at the whole evolution of the thing. It allows me to get in the heads of people I don’t like. It allows me to take an upsetting event and write a different outcome into existence. It allows me the snappy repartee that I’m never capable of in the living moment. Anyway, I probably started to think like a writer as soon as I learned to write. I always understood that stories were not the real world…but I also understood that they created their own world that felt as real to me as the real world. And...

Big thanks to the fabulous Ellen Meister for tagging me in this latest writer’s meme. I am so looking forward to reading her forthcoming novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker which has been described as “wickedly funny and surprisingly poignant.”   And now, on with the questions for me: What is the working title of your book? Bones of an Inland Sea Where did the idea come from for the book? From the late–and much admired–literary agent Wendy Weil. For years, I’ve been a fan of the work she represented: Anthony Doerr, Andrea Barrett, Molly Gloss, Rita Mae Brown, Alice Walker, Fannie Flagg, and most recently Heidi Durrow. I sent her my first collection and even though she passed on it, she said she would love to see a linked collection that focused on my marine ecology experiences. (I co-founded a study abroad marine ecology program in Dominica, West Indies, and that was in my bio. She was very observant.) I started working on Bones of an Inland Sea that very same day. What genre does your book fall under? I would say it’s literary. I’m calling the manuscript a “composite novel” because many of the stories work alone, but they do interweave extensively and are meant to be read and appreciated as a whole. Other works I would also call “composite novels” would be The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. These are all books I greatly admire. What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Oh, my. Too complex a question for this non-moviegoer. How about instead I say who I would like to illustrate the cover of my book? I’d love to use a photo collage by Matthew Chase-Daniel. I adore his work. Maybe something like the image below–one that captures the essence of many smaller perspectives combining to make a more complete image of the whole: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? (Pardon me, please, but I’m going to use the two-sentence description from my query letter.) In BONES OF AN INLAND SEA we come to know passionate and restless Leslie Baxter through the secret lives of a host of characters whose paths intersect with hers, over many years, in locales as varied as the Sinai desert, a tsunami-torn reef in Thailand, Bikini Atoll after the atomic testing, and a futurist island utopia run by a dangerous charismatic leader. Written in a bold and inventive array of styles, Akers captures the longing we all feel for family, home, and a...

First and foremost, I am a writer. But I have also been Editor-in-chief of the online journal r.kv.r.y. for about a year and a half now. It’s been a wonderful, enriching, exhausting, eye-opening experience. So much so, that I thought it might be valuable to share some of what I’ve learned from my time spent on the other side of the desk. I took on the challenge of editing the journal for three main reasons. First, I had been published by r.kv.r.y. in the past and I liked their mission (literary work on the theme of recovery) and I respected their founding editor Victoria Pynchon a great deal.She loved her journal but found that she didn’t have time anymore to give it the attention she would have liked, so in the summer of 2010 she put out a call on Facebook for someone to take it over. I hate to see good work die out, so I volunteered. Secondly, I have always wanted to be part of the side of publishing that helps authors get their work out into the world. I didn’t want to only be an author clamoring for space herself. I think it’s important for writers to give back to the literary community they belong to, and I saw this as an opportunity to do that. Lastly, and most importantly, I wanted to understand what it was like to be in charge of reading, evaluating, and selecting work and putting together and publishing a final product. In some perverse way, I felt I needed to understand what it was like not only to give authors the good news, but also to give them rejections. By that time in my career I had received thousands of rejections myself, so I knew what it felt like to receive them. Many of my rejections had made me grumble and grouse about editors and their lofty decisions handed down from on high, but intellectually I knew editors couldn’t be so different from me–they were people, many underpaid or volunteers, who were passionate about language, and in it for love rather than money. Well, guess what? I learned that it’s tough to be an editor, mainly (in my case) because I WANT to be open and excited by every single piece of writing I receive. I want to find value in everything that comes across my desk. I believe in nurturing writers and giving them a vehicle for their voices. I wish I had the time and energy to say yes to everyone. But man alive, is that ever an exhausting position to take. I never fully appreciated the side of...