St. Mark’s Medical Center is the iconic rural hospital politicians on all sides claim to be saving; it’s also where my mother has worked as a surgical nurse for over thirty years.

In this tucked-away corner of Central Texas, we are close-knit, a population of four thousand and a smattering of farms and ranches for miles on every side. We don’t have much in La Grange but we are proud of what we have: a good school system, a great football team, a Wal-Mart and an HEB, the Colorado River and some of the prettier views supposed to belong only to the Hill Country. And, once we rebuilt St. Mark’s, we had one of the finest community hospitals in the area.

St. Mark’s serves a vast rural population from a fifty-mile radius needing everything from antibiotics to bone surgeries. Previously, the hospital was housed in an outdated building from the 1960s, forever bursting at the seams. That an expansion was necessary was never up for debate.

We envisioned all it could be: brand-new, state-of-the-art technology. The shining beacon of the town, something to put us on the map. A hospital that could actually hold us. We weren’t a wealthy town, but we raised enough to fund a quarter of the building. The hospital borrowed the rest, broke ground in 2003, and finished construction in 2005.

Then came 2008 and the Great Recession. The blue wave of Obama followed by the red backlash of the Tea Party; the Affordable Care Act; the proliferation of unregulated social media upending public discourse, until the 2016 election splintered small communities exactly like the one in which my mother’s hospital was the beating heart.

It is fifteen years after the renovation, and St. Mark’s struggles to breathe.

If the hospital closes. The words had been a drumbeat in my mother’s mind for years. For my mother, nursing is a way of life, a sacred obligation to a purpose not many are willing to serve. The hours are long and unforgiving. Patients come out of anesthesia sedated but swinging, cursing as their lives are being saved. This is not unique to St. Mark’s—the story is the same at any medical facility. But we are a small community; everyone knows everyone else. The people going under the surgeon’s knife aren’t strangers. My mother has held neighbors’ hands as they sobbed. She’s literally seen their organs inside their bodies.

The hospital has been my mother’s identity my entire cognizant life. I still remember the laminated name badge clipped to her shirt, the sterile smell of her hunter green scrubs, the way she importantly answered her work phone with “Surgery, Karen,” the way she pulled her wavy brown hair out of the claw clip when she came home, the hospital’s smell invading our house.

I could’ve grown up hating this hospital. My childhood was made up of on-call weekends, when a ringing phone or a buzz from the beeper at my mother’s hip would ruin everything. She got called in on my ninth birthday and I was so upset I canceled my own party. Similar stories are lost to my memory but not to hers, as maternal guilt runs deep and long, the word “sorry” conditioned down to the synapses.

But I never hated the hospital, or even felt jealous of it. I was a child absolutely in love with my mother. I would stand in the bathroom and watch as she applied mascara before shifts, my face just cresting over the sink in the mirror. Her work was important. A picture of my mother accepting her nursing license was framed and placed in a spot of honor in our house, eye-level to my childhood height. The white uniform, the cute little hat, the effervescent smile on my mother’s face knowing she’d done it. Because I grew up watching her work, I grew up knowing my voice can and should be heard. My mother gave me my voice, and the hospital gave my mother her own.

If the hospital closes. To consider this is an impossibility.

This community is a very patriarchal one. The local industries are oil and gas, ranching, trucking, farming and milling—enough to keep the men afloat. But it is the school and the hospital that bring people in; it is what women create that make the community whole. This gendered emotional labor is all but invisible to the men who live in La Grange and the surrounding areas. It is women who think about the children they don’t have, and women who worry for the grandparents of others. Local leadership likes to say that the strength of a town is determined by the strength of the economy: how many people are at work, self-sufficient, personally responsible for their own destinies. But something women often intuitively understand is that it’s how we care for the vulnerable among us that determines true strength. When the community is hurt, are we there to heal it? If there is a need, is there a supply available without conditions? In other words, where is the mother and how well is she respected? This is a concept women are socialized to understand at their core, and one most men don’t notice until well after the system is broken. By then the wound is deep, the break hard to heal.

There is, of course, a man behind the creation of this new hospital. But this man is different. His name is Kelly, and it escapes no one’s notice that he has a woman’s name.

Kelly is a master of navigating vulnerability. He remembers every staff member’s name, and their family members’ names, too. He wears costumes to meetings (most notably and frequently, an Elvis outfit), and comes armed with jokes that aren’t terrible or at anyone’s expense. He has two-colored eyes, one blue and one green. He knows your insecurities but never exploits them. He is a man unlike any man I have ever come across before because he is a man that demands your respect without demanding your deference. Beloved by the staff and community, Kelly raises the renovation money, opens the hospital to great fanfare, and then succumbs to brain cancer and dies.

It’s not my first experience losing someone so beloved or so young. In small, rural communities each death is known because each person is known. Funerals are a common affair. Always someone’s granny, Uncle so-and-so, faces in the casket I recognize from church. I’ve seen my slew of cancers, heart attacks, car accidents. I’d lost three teachers by high school. One family killed in a horrific car accident. Drowning deaths, oil field accidents, fires, explosions. A little girl who ate a poisonous mushroom. Each loss is unbearable until we bear it. Losing Kelly feels like an unbearable loss. It is the first in a string of mortal wounds.

And yet, when the newly built hospital opens, everything seems perfect. I am seventeen, a senior months away from graduation, the drum major of the band. I drive myself everywhere. I remember feeling so very adult. I wear my nicest black dress, a halter top to show off my lanky teenage arms, a satin ribbon at the waist, heels on my unpolished feet. Because I am my mother’s daughter, everyone knows me. Someone slips me a glass of champagne for the toast. There is so much happiness in the room, more than I can hold. I sip my champagne and roam the hospital halls feeling dizzy. The new building is vast, filled with new technology and bright, natural light. Gone are the dark and drab days of before. Now is the time of St. Mark’s.

Everyone’s favorite part is the water fountain and flower garden at the hospital’s center; we will dub this garden “Kelly’s Healing Garden” after he passes. We’ll place a plaque next to its door. It will hold Kelly’s smiling picture, his two-colored eyes, remembrances from his family. Later, when the hospital falls into debt, the garden will be first to go dormant in order to save money.

I leave for school, I graduate, I get a job. I learn about the hospital’s struggles from afar from my mother. It’s losing money. Employees are chronically underpaid and jumping ship. A management firm brought in from Dallas proves only to exacerbate the hospital’s problems because they don’t understand the nature of its rural location. The hospital is hacked (hacked!) and forced to pay ransom (ransom!) in order to protect their patients’ privacy. It is on the brink of bankruptcy. The board is looking for a buyer. Deals are made and broken. The options grow limited.

Finally, a last-ditch plan materializes: the community will vote on whether or not to fund the hospital through a tax district. I perk up at this news; finally, a plan that may work. After all, the community had demanded the hospital’s expansion in the first place. Funding would require a one-percent property tax increase. It seems a more than fair ask.

But this is 2019, deep in the heart of red territory. As soon as the tax proposal is made public, opposition mounts.

This is where my knowledge of what happens becomes spotty, because my mother, in classic mother fashion, keeps from me the magnitude of the vitriol the hospital receives. I know there is plenty of grumbling over this proposal, but it isn’t until I follow a (since-deleted) Facebook page entitled “Save St. Mark’s” that I begin to understand just how much has changed since I left home.

The page has been created to garner support for the proposal. It posts statistics of how many people the hospital serves, how the hospital boosts the local economy, patient stories thoroughly preaching to the choir. Then, I read the comments.

On every positive post, there are negative comments. People can’t in good faith support the hospital any longer for [insert reason usually connected to taxes and/or the government in general]. If the hospital was well-run, it should be turning a profit. (The hospital is and always has been non-profit.) They knew a friend of a cousin who had a procedure done there that got infected. (Unfortunate, but par for the course at even the best hospitals.) They aren’t interested in putting any more money into something that “gives nothing back.” And, of course, there is the usual grumbling about Obamacare.

The biggest issue, and one that rarely gets talked about, is that the majority of patients at St. Mark’s are recipients of Medicare, due to the large local population of elderly and low-income families. When Obamacare was passed, Texas denied the Medicare expansion that would have come along with it, sounding a death knell on rural hospitals like St. Mark’s. The simple fact is that we live in a community teeming with Medicare recipients, but no one wants to acknowledge it.

Growing up, I was taught never to show weakness. We were raised by Depression-era grandparents who taught us to expect the worst as a given and be thankful if it doesn’t happen. Sons lost in Vietnam loomed large in our collective imagination. Family farms went under in the 1980s because of “go big or get out” corporations in the 1970s. In the early aughts, workers were laid off because “coastal elites” in Silicon Valley let the dot com bubble burst. Then the towers fell, and we sent our children off to yet another war we wouldn’t win. Not our fault. We are not weak. You are not better than us. This mantra like a drumbeat in our internal story.

The isolation of America’s rural communities cannot be understated. Much as we love to deny it, there is a deep and abiding insecurity that runs through the bones of Texas, one I still grapple with today. TV showed me a nationwide idea of poor, rural communities being full of po-dunk hillbillies, rednecks who didn’t know what was good for us, who always voted against our interests. Our homes were ugly because we didn’t know better. Our food was fried and fattening because we couldn’t cook any other way. I went to college believing these myths. Year after year, the kids move away to the cities in search of higher educations, higher incomes, inclusive communities for those of us who are Black, brown, female, queer. When I left home, I left happily. I’d had enough experiences of being belittled, made fun of for reading, told I was too smart for my own good. I was just another kid lost to the liberal media.

I was told that one day I would grow up and want to come home. I did want to go home, so many times, but I never did. I eventually realized the problem wasn’t my rural home—it was the insecurity around the idea of my home. To this day, I still fight tooth and nail with my East Coast husband when he suggests anything that I can conceivably construe as an attack on my upbringing. It’s a game of cognitive dissonance that never ends.

After the 2016 election, cognitive dissonance abounds. It feels like everything stable in our democracy has been peeled away like a scab on an open wound. Truth is subjective. The ground grows false. Nothing can be trusted, not even what we can see with our own eyes. The world fractures and splinters around us and none of us care because we are with the ones who get us, both those who left and those who stayed.

I can hear the isolation in my mother’s sighs. She has stayed all this time; she has been forever loyal. I think about all the times she has been called to save a neighbor’s life. How someone would collapse or feel pain in their chest or go short of breath or any other breakdown of the body that is alarming when you’re minutes away from medical assistance and terrifying when you’re in the middle of nowhere. The CDC released a report a few years prior looking at the rate of deaths from unintentional injuries and found them to be fifty percent higher in rural areas than that of in cities. The cause? Distance to a trauma care facility. I remember several moments in my childhood when we would be out enjoying a day and someone would call, “Get Karen! Where’s Karen?” and my mother would hurry over to where she was needed. Her very presence had a calming effect because it was okay, there was someone there who knew what to do.

I consider all this as I read the Facebook comments attacking the hospital for asking for help. But what about everything I was taught growing up, I want to ask. What about grace and second chances and caring for our brothers? What about the supply without conditions? What about the mother? What about her beating heart?

My mother is called to a town meeting to answer questions about the upcoming vote. She is nervous. She is not one to get up in front of a group and speak, especially not when the group is mired in conflict. The invitation has been sent to everyone who lives in the community and the surrounding areas—sixty RSVPs.

“These people know you,” I tell her. “They’re not going to turn on you.”

“Mmhm,” she hums, having seen far more of the ugliness than I have.

We practice with role-play. I throw some hotly worded questions her way and she answers each one perfectly. We reframe the story, talk about Kelly, the community support of the past, the facts, the truth. We practice again and again. This feels not unlike we are begging for our lives.

I text my mom throughout the day before her evening talk. She is nervous but ready. I watch the clock; I imagine her in front of a large room, microphone in hand, people at attention, ready to hear from Karen.

I call after it is over.

“How’d it go?” I ask, nervous beyond nervous.

“It was fine,” she says. “Fifteen people showed up.”

I go home for my niece’s high school graduation party. We are two weeks out from the vote. I ride in my mother’s car and on the way we pass sign after sign telling passersby to vote no on the hospital tax. The signs are large, red, imposing.

“There’s one,” my mother says, not really looking at it. “There’s one again.”

I’d started to feel optimistic. I’d seen more people defending the hospital in recent weeks. One of the doctors, a known Trump supporter, even wrote an editorial in the newspaper asking the community to vote yes on the tax proposal so we can “Make St. Mark’s Great Again.” Now, driving with my mother, I realize my optimism has been misplaced.

After ten years of a deepening political divide, of separation between those who leave and those who stay, of accelerating climate change (in 2012, we nearly burned to the ground; in 2017, Harvey flooded the town up to the central square)—the sense of despair had crept in until it overwhelmed the area like a bad smell. We had been the toughest of the tough, but nothing is invincible. Despair demands to be felt. I watch as we pass sign after sign. Vote no, vote no, vote no.

My niece’s party is held in the fellowship hall of a local church on the edge of a large, west-facing hill overlooking the surrounding pastures and cemetery. I catch up with old friends, eat barbeque, stay until the party winds down. Then, I go outside to watch the sun set.

To get to the hill, you must walk through the cemetery, a smattering of tombstones dating back to the late 1800s. I read the surnames, most of which I recognize because the families are still present. At the edge of the cemetery, I am shocked to find the grave of a kid I went to high school with. Apparently, he had died years earlier. The flowers on his grave are fresh, crumpled beer cans scattered over the plot as if a group of friends had come out in the night to share a drink. I sit next to his grave and watch the sun. Others come out, too, this being a tradition for everyone. We all stay silent; there is nothing more important than sitting and watching the moment the sun slips behind the hill. Then, my brother calls, asking where I am. I and the others walk wordlessly inside.

“What happened to ___?” I ask my brother about the grave I found outside.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I think he killed himself.”

The night of the vote, I try to distract myself. But my mother sends me screenshots of the election results. Not looking good, she texts. The comments are so ugly on Facebook. It makes me want to cry.

Later, she sends the final screenshot: 1,360 votes for passing the tax; 5,500 votes against.

At this time, the hospital’s doors are still open. They are again looking for buyers to take them under their financial wing. Or, they will claim bankruptcy. Or, the doors will close. My mother reads a draft of this essay and tells me to include that they have more options than those, okay? Okay, I say.

I go home to accompany my mother for a minor outpatient surgery. I don’t recognize the nurses behind the front desk, nor do I recognize the nurse who preps my mother for surgery. But she is the kind of nurse I remember from childhood—sweet but strong, pretty but determined, hair in a feminine but functional ponytail. You couldn’t push this woman over if you tried.

Through the Obama years, Black Lives Matter protests, family separations, and most recently, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, Facebook has revealed to me exactly where many hospital workers’ priorities lie, and they lie far-right. Even with everything that’s happened. The collective story holds them in its firm grip.

Even so, the nurse checks my mother in for surgery, takes her vitals, gingerly slips the IV under her skin. I sit and watch as they talk. First, the necessary questions before going under, then business. Do you have enough techs? Is ___ still out sick? Can ____ cover call for you? The nurse nods at each question, answers dutifully. I feel an out-of-body experience, like I am watching some other mother and daughter.

“We love Karen,” the nurse says, my mother like the queen herself bundled up on the gurney.

“I know,” I say. “I know.”

***

Rumpus original art by Lauren Kaelin.

My body is electric with desire when I realize I haven’t been held for months. I swipe back and forth on photos of strangers in an eternal quest for that rat-pellet hit of dopamine: a rainbow in the bio; a mention of #t4t; someone, anyone, not holding a dead fish up by the throat. Intellectually, I know that I am trying to fill an emotional need in an unhealthy way. I note this fact and keep swiping. In Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, T Fleischmann wonders whether if what we all have in common, the thing that “binds the family of man together,” is the “desire for a top and the lack of a top.” Inside the glassed-in pane of my phone, square avatars of tops want to fill me up. My mind stays in the gutter. At the edges of several queer polycules, I receive leftover dregs of physical and emotional affection when others have extra capacity.

G and I meet not on Tinder, but at the sole coffee shop in the town where I teach. When we find each other, it is with mutual delight and exuberance, recognizing our iterations on queer-coded masculinity in a place not always welcoming of it, as though we are the two houses painted green in an all-gray block. Over a score of Christian contemporary, she asks if I want to come over and get drunk by a campfire in her parents’ backyard, where she has dug a hole behind their looming manse that is silhouetted against the dusk. I do. The shock of recognition: She has Big Top Energy. I feel foolish for spending so much time on apps when she’s been here the whole time, a gender nonconforming butch dyke, in the same tiny town in rural Alabama.

The line between our external gender expression blurs to circularity. We’re both AFAB and masculine-presenting, so we share clothes, even though internally our self-perception marks near-opposite ends of a spectrum: She’s a butch dyke and I’m a trans man. I edge toward manhood as though toward the ledge of a skyscraper. Every now and then I peer over the edge with a rush like vertigo, like a sudden sense of my own mortality. Here’s what the ground looks like, if only I were ready to leap.

When we hang out, G leans against her parents’ hundred-and-fifty-year-old house and smokes cigarillos with orange wrappers emblazoned with “2 for 99 CENTS!” The house itself is missing a subfloor, and it was remodeled over the past century to grow squatter, taller. Like I do about everything that old in the South, I wonder who built it and whether they had a choice.

By the fire, G wears a soft waffle Henley shirt, no bra. Threads of dark hair line her upper lip and the tops of her cheekbones, reaching to both sides of her eyes. Her comfort in the long lines of her body makes me want to kneel before her. The intensity of her stare matches mine. I love being the center of her attention, feeling cherished, being consensually owned. The safety I feel in our relationship is the same safety I feel when I shut a door behind me and deadbolt it. Where my masculinity dwells, I am in control. Nothing can touch me here without my consent. G and I both have trauma and baggage from men. I am afraid of going outside and of becoming someone that people I love might fear.

Before transition, I bobbed through the world like a disembodied head on a stick. Anything which brings me back into my body works as a tool to articulate selfhood, to anchor my consciousness inside this cave of flesh. Trans elder and historian Susan Stryker conceptualizes BDSM as a “technology for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment, a mechanism for dismembering and disarticulating received patterns of identification, affect, sensation and appearance, and for reconfiguring, coordinating and remapping them in bodily space.” Masochism helps me locate my physical body in space, helps me determine how best to live inside it. Part of my experience of dysphoria comes through the unmooring qualities of dissociation, and masochism mitigates these feelings. G and I find joy through the mortification of the flesh: broken wooden kitchen spoons and leather fraternity paddles; a hand or a switch made of yard trash. Being beaten up feels like dropping down into a place where I am held. I trust her with the landscape of my body, and, to return to Fleischmann, “we take our joy very seriously, our deadly serious joy.” The localization of pain within my body—having control over its literal and metaphorical impacts—brings relief.

When G tops me, our pleasure builds on itself in a feedback loop. I bend over and pull down my pants. I let her control if and when and how often. Her sadist pleasure at hitting me builds on my masochist pleasure in experiencing pain and my excitement at her pleasure. The marks on my body are evidence of her care and affection, or at least of her interest in me. Something deep in me cherishes this warped attention. Maybe it’s the way I’ve spent so many years using sex with cis men to self-harm, or maybe it’s compensation for not having parents for whom I might exist fully, for having to take care of myself and my sister entirely too young. G photographs the bruises on the ripe peach of my ass and saves the images for later.

G uses a prosthetic cock better than many people I’ve slept with use their flesh ones. When I tell her this, we’re on our way home after getting pastries from the only bakery in town. She laughs so hard she has to pull over by the big Baptist church, laughter that bursts from her and floods the car.

When G and I are together, I call the bundle of nerve endings between my legs my cock. Simply calling my genitals a cock makes them a cock. And, on hormones, it does look more like how I think of a cock: the head emerging from a defined stalk which becomes engorged and erect. All genitals form homologous structures, and yet I find trans genitals especially beautiful—the way that with or without any hormones or surgeries they form an intentional spectrum. I am astonished to watch my own morphology, how the clit blooms from beneath labial folds into thickness both inside and outside the body. The same process happens in reverse with estrogen—cock softens into clit, more open to sensation across the breadth of its surface area, with a broader quality of orgasm. The artist Chella Man photographed his own genitals as they underwent a similar process on hormones. Before I began the medicalized part of my transition, I viewed the photos with pleasure and astonishment. Here were beautiful genitals. Here is something similar to what I might have. I was grateful to Man for sharing such an intimate view of himself with the world, a view of his body under construction.

My body is an architecture-in-process. Trans bodies are as complex and beautiful as the Gaudí cathedral in Barcelona. My skin thickens. Hair sprouts in a downy line on my belly, up between the halves of my buttocks. It’s the South, so there’s swamp ass. And, of course, there’s the remapping of my neural self-conceptions of my body: Here, the shoulders broader; here, the new pouch of skin beneath the chin. None of my professional wardrobe fits—the shoulders of my old button-downs and cardigans seem like they would only fit the folded wings of birds.

If my body were a house, it would be a sturdy New England cape with no flag flying.

If my body were a house, it would be a handmade Earthship of recycled plastic bottles stacked into walls, one that moaned when the night wind blew over the open Os of the bottle-mouths.

If my body were a house, it would be a repurposed warehouse near the train tracks, and every time a train went by, it would shake from side to side.

Here, the exact spot on the outer edge of my right buttock which G hits with the leather paddle, is a sturdy gable of the house of my body. New trapezius the dormer. The front door, of course, my mouth. The inside of my body and the outside flatten with the gatekeeping medicalization that accompanies taking hormones. I know more—and am required to share more—about the interior of my body than ever before. Blueprints once private go public. There’s an unnerving exactitude about the quality of my blood, the grayscale echo of my interior. The highly regulated assistive technologies for my own embodiment are often difficult to access, difficult to perfect. Stryker defines magic as “the art and science of creating change in accordance with the will. Transsexual body modification is one such practice.” When I stab a needle into my butt, BDSM becomes a mortification of the flesh, a religious practice where we worship homologues. G says topping is the only thing that feels good and makes sense. She’s going through some big life changes, a simultaneous living situation and work environment shift; so many things are out of her control except her part of our dynamic, the control I let her have over the house of my body. G deals with its exterior appetites.

I first realize I am passing as a man when women in darkened, public spaces—the sidewalk under broken streetlights at night, in an underground parking garage—fear me. I am aware of their awareness and modulate my body language to match. At the periphery, I am fearsome because of my masculinity. With G, unlike with cis men, I am fairly sure that our kink dynamic isn’t about taking out internalized misogyny or hatred for me or my body, that the power between us isn’t that phosphorescent weed. Whenever I see people online say that men are trash, I think: Okay, that’s me, I guess. It doesn’t matter the number of times I’ve survived rape or sexual assault or that my first awareness of sexuality was at eleven when an elderly relative perved on my calves in capris. My body a round archive of crumpled paper, dumpster pools, a backhoe over a landfill. What’s the counter to toxic masculinity? Is it simply nontoxic masculinity? Antiseptic masculinity? Fleishmann asks, “What can one do with a past? What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?” G holds me, our bodies matching, the swoop of hair over our undercuts matching. We are each others’ shelter, and we build on a sturdy foundation so it lasts. With this increasingly masculine body, with this history, I want to play with that interstitial space between specificity and hope, into an imagined future.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

***

Works referenced:

Fleischmann, T. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. Coffee House Press, 2019.

Stryker, Susan. “Dungeon Intimacies: The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism.” Parallax, vol. 14, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 36–47., doi:10.1080/13534640701781362.

If Mike Alberti weren’t a fiction writer, I imagine he’d be a master builder, the kind with the square pencil behind his ear who constructs a house so every inch is level and sturdy and glowing. His stories are built from that kind of care. Alberti’s debut collection, Some People Let You Down, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and it’s easy to see why.

His characters live at the intersection of rural America and loneliness. “First there was nothing, just the silent empty prairie and the darkness that hangs over it.” This is how “Prairie Fire” begins—with a sentence that could speak for the entire collection. The landscape—itself a character—is capacious and haunting. It leaves its mark on characters who are left to fracture or endure in the face of loss.

Though Mike and I have worked together for years running the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, we’re far more likely to talk about a grant application or a student publication than our own creative work; that’s the nature of nonprofit life, even if that nonprofit is a literary arts organization. So, it was a rare pleasure to take an hour to talk about Mike’s fiction. Fittingly, we spoke a few days after the Capitol riots, and in addition to toxic masculinity and landscape, we talked about literature’s role in showing us our human failings.

***

The Rumpus: You grew up in New Mexico, but you have this deep, creative attachment to the Midwest. What is it about the Midwest that calls to you?

Alberti: I’m interested in that idea of only having one landscape. And part of it, I think, has to do with the constraints of a small town—almost like a formal constraint. Well, I’d also say part of my interest in landscape is in how the human or built environment interacts with the natural landscape. And in particular, I’m just interested in ruins and relics of human habitation and human use.

Rumpus: And the Midwest stands for ruins?

Alberti: Yeah. That kind of leads naturally to an interest in these dying towns. I’ve never really lived in the Great Plains for any amount of time. But I’ve driven across it dozens and dozens of times, and, and something about that landscape really captures my attention. You know, there are the Woods, Kansas stories that I think of as the gravitational center of in the book. And Woods is an abandoned town. There’s just something kind of narratively and spiritually interesting about that, to me. I mean, the Great Plains are full of these abandoned structures and grain silos, barns, houses, whole towns that have just been left there. They’re just there for years and years and years.

You think about those ruins in terms of, history, like, this is what used to be here. But it’s also, in a weird way, a harbinger of the future.

Rumpus: Did you have coastal insecurities like I did out as a kid on the Texas Panhandle?

Alberti: Growing up in Albuquerque, the state motto is The Land of Enchantment, but people call it the Land of Entrapment. And that’s because people feel like they’re stuck there. I had this feeling that I wanted to get out, which I think infuses the stories, you know, feeling trapped, but wanting to leave. But then when I did get out and I went to college on the East Coast, I experienced this kind of inferiority thing. In a really direct way. Just going to school with these rich, sophisticated, East Coast, artsy kids. You know, I think half of the people from Vassar are from New York City, or something like that.

The first time I went to New York City, I was like, totally overwhelmed, just really a fish out of water. So I felt that created a certain kind of resentment in me. I think that my characters also have this. It’s a weird paradox, where you’re thinking you resent the place where you’re from, but then you resent the places that contrast with that place, and also how they make you feel.

Rumpus: Every one of your stories is filled with negative space. It’s quite often beloveds who are missing. In “Summer People,” it’s those empty houses, and Janine’s brother, then Lorna, then Lorna’s father, then Lorna. In “Upper Peninsula,” there’s a son who drowned. And on and on. It just strikes me that absence is very present in almost all your stories. What are your thoughts about that?

Alberti: That’s really perceptive. I haven’t exactly thought of it that way. But I think that’s really exactly right. Yeah, I mean, again, if there’s something that I’m obsessed with, you know, it’s kind of these abandoned spaces, these ruins and then what kind of life they have afterwards. And really tied up in that is negative space and absence and loss. Thinking about what was here and what wasn’t, and what is here now.

Rumpus: That’s hard to write. I mean, you do it well. The absences are so very mournful. Again, with “Summer People,” there was so much loss in that story. It was tender and beautiful and filled with a lot of love, but also my gosh, absence.

Alberti: Yeah, well, there’s this kind of idea of impermanence. You know, you might have an attachment, and you might love a person or a place, or you might have an idea of who you are, and where you belong. And that might just be wrenched from you. Yeah, if there’s some sort of, you know, ontological reality of the book, that’s what’s going on.

As soon as you step into the book, it’s like, you’re very much in danger of having something taken away from you, and having to grapple with that loss. But I also think that’s true of life.

Rumpus: I find it fascinating the way the physical places mirror the losses the characters experience.

Alberti: Yeah, I think there’s one thing that ties them together. And in terms of narrative, I love thinking about that. There’s the emotional drive to write a story, you know, the kind of content that you’re interested in writing about. But there’s also this, more intellectual interest in discovering what other kinds of narrative structures are out there, and what type of content fits well into the structure. You could think of loss in the normal narrative arc, where you know, you’ve gained something, and then you lose it, or something like that. But if you’re staying with the loss, and the story doesn’t end, then the story shapes itself around that loss, right? This is something I’m interested in. Like, how do you tell a story where the loss happens on page two?

Rumpus: It doesn’t ever really end, does it? In your stories?

Alberti: I think about loss as echoes or circular structures. It’s just—the character goes on. Time passes, right? But the loss continues. It keeps coming back, it reverberates. Or sometimes I think of it as a different kind of visual metaphor, like a black hole, that the characters are orbiting around, you know. That becomes the central point of your identity and of your life. And you just go around and around and around.

Rumpus: That seems right for your work. I mean, not in a grim way. There are some stories, like “Upper Peninsula,” that reckon with loss not with not resolution exactly, but acceptance? And in “Prairie Fire,” it’s almost celebratory.

Alberti: Yeah, if the character can come to terms in a way. Like, this is what it is. Yeah. I have to just go on and live. That’s what I’m going to do.

Rumpus: There’s almost an ode to ordinariness for both people and place. But a lot of your characters get a fleeting moment of being special. Except it doesn’t endure.

Alberti: Well, it never does, does it? It also has something to do with a kind of suffering, too. And the character is able to connect somehow with the world around them. Those are moments that I look for in what I read. I feel like I’m kind of obsessed with this idea that part of being human is this ability to transcend yourself occasionally, very rarely, you know, so that’s what we’re looking for, and it can happen.

Rumpus: I love that. It articulates for me the moments of hope that I feel in your stories. Speaking of transcending the self, why do you write so often from a female point of view? Not an accusation. Just truly curious.

Alberti: Yeah, it’s a good, hard question. I guess I see so much wrong with the kind of normative masculinity that’s so pervasive that I find it hard to write a sympathetic male character.

Actually, when I wrote the title story, “Some People Let You Down,” it was a conscious attempt to do so, even though it’s from a woman’s point of view. I wanted to think about the dad as being a sympathetic character. I think it’s telling that he’s gay.

Rumpus: It seems like the male characters are kind of imminently concerned about themselves. In the short term, anyway: their sexual gratification, their violent urges, their next fix, their glory, their job. They’re very self-focused. The characters who do transcend the ordinary—am I exaggerating to say?—are almost always women. The dad in the title story and the townsmen who helped put out the fire are exceptions. But when there’s a tight lens on any of the main characters, for the most part, it’s the female characters who seem like they have the ability transcend the self.

Alberti: I really think that’s so right. I think that’s such a good observation and makes me think in kind of a new way about about the stories, too. And, raises this question of like, why am I writing about this kind of myopia? It is narratively interesting in the same way that the myopia of a small town is narratively interesting. You know, there’s a line in “Pestilence” about a character. He is only six, but the narrator says [of him], “he couldn’t see beyond the limited horizon of his most immediate concerns.” That’s kind of the task. It’s the same for the town. But it’s also these men. There’s just something missing there that they can’t, they can’t see past. They’re confined to their constraints by themselves. They’re doing it to themselves.

Rumpus: I know you, and you are not these male characters. Where in your world are they coming from?

Alberti: [Laughter] Where are they coming from? It feels like they’re everywhere to me. Not in my family, but it was all around me growing up, this kind of patriarchal, misogynistic ethos. And even though I’ve always found it repulsive, it’s impossible not to be influenced by it, for some of it to rub off. And that demands a kind of active disinvestment from it, which requires trying to understand it. Even though it’s all around us, I still feel like I don’t fully understand it. Like, I don’t know, you see these guys breaking into the Capitol and you’re like, okay, yeah, this is real. I mean this kind of awful, toxic masculinity that you know is out there. I don’t totally understand any of this. So, some of it is a desire to look into it.

Rumpus: Well, fittingly, I guess, I don’t think any of your male characters are ever forced to have a reckoning. Not unlike many of the rioters at the capitol. Shit goes down and you think, okay, here it goes. It’s on such display right now that the world is going to say, Enough. Put your big ass guns away. But there never seems to be a real or permanent reckoning.

Alberti: This brings up a big, a larger question that I struggle with in writing and also, kind of, in teaching. There’s a degree to which I think art can do a good job of simply reflecting the world in a different way so that it becomes more clear, and we understand it better. And there’s also a way that art can imagine better ways to be. I haven’t really gotten to that second one so much, you know, in my own writing. But, yeah, it’s just what’s true. I mean, there is no reckoning.

Rumpus: Also, no redemption?

Alberti: I’m not super interested in redemption for these characters. So, it’s not really something I think about. I don’t want them to be redeemed. I want them to be roundly condemned, right? So for example, there’s Wayne, in “Woods, Kansas.” I wanted to start the collection with that story, because I think, to my mind, it’s the bleakest story and, and I want to kind of move generally speaking from bleak to less bleak, to some extent, although I knew the risk. That’s a hard story, but it was important to me to lay that groundwork for the arc of the book. And also to make this kind of statement, which is, if you’re looking for some kind of redemption, or a happy ending or something, you’re in the wrong place. But then as the book goes on I kind of do try to mitigate that somewhat, because that’s part of life, too. Sometimes people do change, and sometimes they apologize, and sometimes they don’t let each other down.

Rumpus: My last question is about our students through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. I’m sorry to have to ask you, because I hate it when people ask me. But I do wonder if you’re conscious of any of the ways that the work in the prisons affects you personally, professionally, or even at the level of the craft.

Alberti: I guess to paint with way too broad a brush, I would say that a lot of fiction writers and writers, any kind of writers in general, seem both in their lives and in their work, to be almost extraordinarily removed from the pervasive suffering that seems to be the defining feature of how our society is currently constructed. And I’m in that group, you know. I don’t mean to exempt myself from it, but there is also very little kind of curiosity about it. I see very little attempt to wrestle with the suffering that we do to each other. So, you just spend time in a prison and you learn what that life is like, and that’s one kind of view you have to fit that into your understanding of what the world looks like.

It has the flip-side, you know. I mean you’re working with these men and women who are so much more well-acquainted with those circumstances, and I don’t want to be too bombastic about it or whatever, it’s complicated, but often they are able to make their lives meaningful and positive. It’s actually so remarkable. I mean, everything in their environment is intentionally punitive, dehumanizing, demoralizing, and they’re still able to make beautiful art and do good in the world and just be good people. It rescues me from fatalism. To the extent that this book is not fatalistic, to the small extent, I really credit them.

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Photograph of Mike Alberti by Kristin Collier.

The poems in Shy Watson’s new collection, Horror Vacui, speak to the many different lives we lead within a single lifetime and how we understand ourselves within the context of our varied experiences. The collection was published by House of Vlad Press this past January, and in it, Watson explores themes of memory, identity, and the struggle for human connection in an isolating age.

Shy Watson is a poet and novelist. She and I have known each other since we met through the literary community in Philadelphia in 2016. Since then, she has published two full-length poetry collections, Cheap Yellow (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Horror Vacui (House of Vlad Press), co-founded blush lit, attended the Mors Tua Vita Mea workshop in Italy, had work published in New York Tyrant, Wonder, Peach Mag, [PANK], and Joyland, and has completed her first novel.

We spoke recently about Horror Vacui, the ways relationships impact our writing, finding a balance between stability and emotional turbulence, and “the quiet pain of not being in love.”

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The Rumpus: Your first full-length collection, Cheap Yellow, was published in 2018. Horror Vacui feels very different in many ways than Cheap Yellow. One major difference that stood out to me was the structure of the new collection. This book feels more organized and narrative. The poems comprise a single, long section of the book, followed by the waking-dream prose pieces and the quarantine diaries. This creates a very different reading experience than we had with the many small sections that made up Cheap Yellow. Between the publication of Cheap Yellow and the release of Horror Vacui you also began work on your first novel. Do you think beginning to write prose affected how you decided to structure this second poetry collection?

Shy Watson: I think so. I usually write poems in short little bursts. Working on a second, prolonged project at the same time as Horror Vacui, I think the longevity did kind of seep through. Horror Vacui didn’t feel like a bunch of little bursts; it felt more like a chunk of poems I’d written mostly during quarantine and then two projects—the waking-dream section and the diaries.

Rumpus: One of the techniques you apply in Horror Vacui is the juxtaposition of concrete facts with emotional states, i.e. “today is the super bowl / i like you more than i’m supposed to” or “good morning / it is cold out / can’t wait for someone / to see / the good in me.” Placing these exterior and interior details immediately next to each other poses the question of what the difference is between these two kinds of truths. What made you decide to start so many of your poems and stanzas with concrete details about the weather or the time of year? What was the process of composing those poems like for you?

Watson: I think sometimes it’s easier to access an interior if you start from the exterior. Maybe I’m guarded and that’s a reflection of having walls up and having to touch first on objective reality before allowing the reader into my feelings. I think if I immediately started with my feelings that would perhaps feel a little too vulnerable for me, or I would be afraid I was splashing the reader right in and that it would be jarring. Maybe I start with objective observations as a way to sort of “get the reader’s feet wet.”

As far as my process, I’ll usually have the first line reverberating through my head. I’ll think of a line that I like and put it in my notes, then return to it later. I start with the line that occurred to me and then it’s kind of like a portal opens and the rest of the poem pours out of it. If I don’t have one of those lines to start with, it’s more of a draft-y, handwritten ordeal, where I’ll have an event that I decide I want to write about. In that case, I’ll just start writing all these lines that come into my head. Last week I went to this Love Hotel in New Jersey with my boyfriend, and we did acid in this Blue Lagoon-themed room and it was maybe the most intense experience of my life. I wanted to write about it, but it didn’t start with a little line, so I just opened my journal and started writing down details I remembered from the night that seemed poetic or stood out to me. I jotted down a bunch of those and then tried to restructure them into something poem-like on my computer, then tinkered with it until it started to reveal itself as a poem.

Rumpus: I want to talk about some of the themes that emerged throughout the collection. In “MET poem 2” you write “my family loves me / they’re born again christians / I’m wearing a one-piece / & it says Gucci / in gold font.” The juxtaposition of the speaker’s life as it is now and her background is really interesting to me. You document the life of a young, contemporary urban writer with lines like “is this the life i lead / changing my mind / about various warby parker frames / & taking selfies anyway?” and “i could have gone to dinner / with someone who upsets me / i could have felt like shit / with fried oysters in my mouth” but there are also a lot of references to growing up in rural Missouri. The question this juxtaposition brings up for me is how the lives we lead and the decisions we make do or don’t define us. I’d love to talk a bit about the theme of identity in your work. Is this something you intend for your readers to grapple with?

Watson: I think the decisions we make define our lives on the concrete plane. What we’re doing, what we’re interacting with, who we’re interacting with, the choices we’re making, do sculpt our lives in the material sense. The daydreams and the fantasy realm that make up our interior world exist regardless of circumstance, but I think people can only consciously dictate their lives insomuch as they have an awareness of what exists. For example, growing up in the country before the internet, I wouldn’t have known about Warby Parker glasses. There are things I mention that I didn’t know existed when I was a kid. Back then, I couldn’t have even imagined having the life that I have now or being exposed to the things I’m exposed to now. So, I think our life choices do define who we become but I think there’s also some privilege in that. I think our actions and the choices we make do sculpt our lives from the outsider’s perspective, but also that the interior is independent of all of that, and I think both need knowledge to continue to develop.

Rumpus: In the vein of what changes us and how the choices we make sculpt our lives, you also talk a lot about relationships in the book. There’s a strong sense of desire to connect with others and the pain that results from the failure to do so. You write of “the quiet pain of not being in love,” and lines like “my eyes were water / until i met you / and they are still” and “if i threw / a stone into the air / you wouldn’t catch it” seem to imply a sense of isolation and a deep awareness of the ways in which we fail to have a real impact on each other sometimes.

Watson: For me, interpersonal relationships are the most fertile breeding ground for self-growth. I think people are mirrors and I think you’re a mirror to people. Everything’s relative and I think that other people show you what you like, what you don’t like, who you are, who you’re not… So, I love being in relationships, and I love having a lot of relationships, whether they be romantic or platonic or just cordial. I love interacting with people. I think a lot of my writing is about that, because relationships are where I feel the most strongly and where I learn the most about myself. It’s what I spend most of my time thinking about. I’m also really extroverted, so I think that has something to do with it. I get bored easily, so I need people around me!

Regarding isolation, I feel like, yes, no one can ever fully understand us and we can never fully understand anyone else, and we all die alone, and love is a projection. It’s hard not to feel isolated when you’re close to someone because there’s that frustration of never really knowing them, just like you can’t ever actually touch a person because there’s atoms in between… I think there’s a poem about that in Cheap Yellow. It’s something I think about because it’s not only a physical reality but a psychic and emotional reality, and as much as we’re all isolated, I also feel like we’re all one… Maybe that’s because I did acid five days ago but, you know, looking into Kirk’s eyes and knowing we were the same person was also insane!

Life is tricky and being in our human forms—I swear, I’m not on acid now—is tricky. We’re forced into the prison of our own perception and sometimes it seems like we’re connected to others and sometimes it feels like there’s no way anyone could ever understand us, and we have no idea what someone’s going through and we’re just constantly oscillating between these two hallucinations, and I don’t think either of them is real because I don’t think it’s a binary situation. I don’t think it’s that black and white, but I think both feelings are very polarizing and strong and that they come and go in waves.

Rumpus: You often mention people in your life by name in your poems. I’d love to hear about why you made that choice.

Watson: I try not to say anything compromising, and if I do, I ask the person first, but I kind of like that that’s a thing in my poems. It’s definitely present in both Cheap Yellow and Horror Vacui, so it’s like there’s a cast of rotating characters, and I feel like readers get a sense of these people from seeing them in different contexts in different poems. I think it’s kind of cool to have that as a record, too, like reading letters or journals of someone who’s passed away, just to catalog the time: who I’m surrounding myself with and how they impact me and what my feelings are for them. I guess I like to be pretty direct.

Rumpus: The cast of characters idea makes me think a lot about the transition you’re making into writing prose. I wonder if that extroverted impulse and that impulse to populate your writing with people who become characters in the life of the speaker led to your interest in writing fiction.

Watson: Well, I don’t think it led to my interest in fiction, but I do think they’re related, like a chicken or the egg situation. I think I was writing characters in poetry before I ever even considered writing prose, but I do think you’re onto something. Maybe that was like a foreshadowing that I would one day write prose and maybe it was already written on the wall and, you know, Looking back it’s so clear to me now! But of course I would become a prose writer! And I think that may be part of my interest in doing it, too: to have a narrative that continues throughout the poems as well as having each poem contain its own separate story.

Rumpus: In a recent interview, you said that you want “as many romantic partners, as many friends, as many different types of both, as much travel, as many fabrics, as many different lives as [you] can possibly squeeze in.” How do you think this desire for experiences affects your writing, or has an impact on the work you produce?

Watson: I think it makes it much more rich and varied. I want the scope of experience and emotion to be as wide as possible, and I think investing in creating a life where the conditions are set up for that results in having a larger array in your writing. I was thinking about this last night, because I was listening to a podcast with Giancarlo [di Trapano] and he was talking about how you’ve got to live to write, and I was like, oh no, I hope even though I’m moving in with my boyfriend and living this quarantine life and not drinking as much that I’ll still have interesting experiences to write about. But I also think it can be unhealthy to rely on that too much. I don’t want to feel like I have to end every relationship I’m in and start a new one so that I can have a new muse, because at that point it’s all just consumptive. It’s like you only have so much energy and it’s easy to spread yourself too thin.

When you’re trying to have a million relationships and go to a million places, you don’t have time to go deep in any of them. For example, I’ve been in New York for three and a half years now, which is three times longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. I feel like I really have a sense of the place, and a sense of home and community. On the other hand, I lived in Portland for eight months, and I can’t really tell you shit about Portland. I feel like you can have too many experiences and they’re shallow or you can have too few experiences and they’re extremely deep and you’re completely marinated in them. Maybe the goal is to be somewhere between the two. I do think I lean toward having too many thin experiences, so maybe I should embrace stability.

Rumpus: Stability was another theme I noticed in the new collection. You begin Horror Vacui with “every day / a new obsession.” The speaker describes herself as “always in flux” and “in control & then not again.” At the end of “MET poem 2”, she says “i’m shitty until i’m not shitty & then i’m shitty again.” The speaker seems to be of two minds about the instability of her world. At times she seems to revel in it (“i am wet with it”) and at others seems to be ashamed or regretful of this instability. Do you worry about stability decreasing creativity and about artistic stagnation? Do you think stability and growth as an artist are mutually exclusive, or can you have both?

Watson: Honestly, age has changed my relationship to stability. When I was younger, instability was really exciting, and I feel like now it’s really exhausting. When it was exciting, it would help me write, but now that it’s exhausting, it kind of makes it impossible for me to write. I don’t know if that’s just a maturity thing or if it’s like a physical curse that you just run out of energy when you get older, but stability feels a lot better now than it did before. When I feel rested, it’s easier for me to write and to focus. So, I think it depends on the time and place. I’m moving into favoring stability, whereas for a long time I favored instability, but I think it’s good to have a little bit of both.

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Photograph of Shy Watson by Tony Tulathimutte.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Kayleb Rae Candrilli about their new collection Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon Press, April 2021), the seriousness of love poems, normalcy, a creation sestina, and more.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here. Upcoming poets include Andrés Cerpa, Kevin Simmonds, Kaveh Akbar, Carly Ingram, Derrick Austin, Amanda Moore, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Matthew Olzmann, and more!

This Rumpus Poetry Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.

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Brian S: I was looking back at this 2018 interview with Stephanie Trott, about your first book What Runs Over, and I was curious how you think your writing has evolved between that collection and this one.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Thank you for that interview in 2018! I had a blast with that one.

I do think a ton has changed since then in terms of my style. When I write it feels like a quieter experience, more reserve, more pause and silence. I’ve been enjoying that calm with the newer work. More house plants and sonnets, and less catastrophes!

Brian S: Lots of love poems in this collection!

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: We all need more love poems in our life, I think! But for me, if the first book was memoir and childhood trauma, and the second [All the Gay Saints] was queer joy and flamboyance, this one is more about the intersection of the two, i.e. maybe what a type of normalcy looks like.

Brian S: Absolutely. It’s been a long while since I was in school as a student but I think I was kind of trained to look at love poems as unserious, and I had to learn to tell those voices to get bent.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Love poems are always so deadly serious, and I think that’s their charm even when they are kind of goofy and unserious. A sincerity pulsing in there.

Brian S: I imagine that if this is a reader’s first experience with your work, they might be surprised to think of it as a kind of normalcy, given the way you write about your father and drug use, for example. But the poems look for beauty even in the middle of that stuff. Like one of the poems I wrote about in my piece about selecting this collection for Poetry Book Club, with the image of the bullets firing off in the fire where you and your partner are burning all the stuff in the house.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I think we are all, maybe as Americans, pretty intimately familiar with drug use careening into our lives in some capacity. I do think it’s normal, albeit pretty devastating.

But yes, I’ll give you that it’s probably not the norm to burn the contents of your childhood home (lol).

Nicole: Hi, just to jump in here, this is my first experience with your work, Kayleb, and Brian, you have an interesting point there which relates to a question I have. Hi Kayleb! First, I loved your book. You have such a beauty with words and expression of feelings and thoughts. It was an honor to read your work.

My question is this: throughout your book, from my experience of reading it, there is this sense of violence surrounding the culture/landscape and the speaker (you) admitting they are partaking in it, to an extent sometimes, but the gentle nature of the speaker (you) really shines through. I was left with a feeling of a gentle soul who has had a hard time and just wants to live a loving, simple existence. This was one of the lasting impressions of the book for me. Was this gentleness/violence tension intentional or were you unaware that it came through?

Given this is my first experience with your work, I can’t comment on how it relates to your earlier work—but I am excited to read it.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: This is a beautiful question. I think for me the beauty of writing is that it provides me a way to track my growth, maturity, resolve, empathy, and capacity to love. So, I wanted it to come through because it was time to grow.

Nicole: That’s lovely.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I think, too, being queer in rural America is a tough thing and queer children learn the art of camouflage. For me that camouflage was being a participant in toxic masculinity and it’s taken a long time to shed the remnants of that performance. Getting there, though.

Nicole: I can imagine… I think it’s so beautiful you are wanting to grow and allowing that to be tracked on your work. It really shines through and I loved it.

Brian S: Yeah, I think about the people I went to high school with (a very long time ago) who later came out and I recognize that camouflage—and the need for it.

Nicole: So, when you wrote these poems, were you thinking, I want my gentleness to come through? Or were you just open to allowing me parts of yourself to come through?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I think it’s all pretty organic gentleness, mainly because I’m so often talking to my partner or other trans people.

Nicole: I love that.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: It’s hard not to be gentle with the people you love most. The camouflage comes in so many forms! We are amazing like that.

Nicole: That’s beautiful. Really. Thank you so much for answering this.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Thank you for asking! I appreciate you.

Nicole: Likewise.

Brian S: The way you end that poem, “My Partner Wants Me to Write Them a Poem about Sheryl Crow,” with the image of you packing them half a grapefruit and some sugar, that’s tender. That’s really expressive of how much we lean on each other.

And that’s a moment where the camouflage is gone, which is most important, I think.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I love that. That moment feels like the most important moment of the book to me, and I think you’ve just articulated why. The full veil gets dropped right there, not just in the book, but in my life.

Brian S: I’ve got to ask you about this sestina, because I’m a form nerd and I especially love experimenting with the sestina. Can you talk some about how you conceived it and also how it appears in the book, separated and sideways?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: So, generally speaking, I don’t like sestinas very much, and I really wanted to write to form in a way that would be fun for me personally.

Brian S: It’s a real risk-reward form, because it can go bad so easily.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I wanted a bombastic, sacrilegious, queer story of genesis with hysterically long lines and the lines growing, to me at least, was the additive nature of genesis, the stacking and multiplication of “creation.” I had a lot of fun with the poem! Which I can’t always say.

Brian S: One of the big challenges of the form is that it announces itself so loudly at the end/beginning of each stanza with that repetition of the end word, and breaking it into basically seven verses on different pages negated some of that.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: And I think each stanza is meant to be a bit different than the last, simulating a new day. The repetition gets buried in the line length, too. I think most of contemporary form is about breaking rules, and the rules are definitely broken here, even if they are kind of unspoken rules.

Brian S: And also the way you play with the end word “man” as the poem progresses—“man” to “men” to “unmanned” to, finally, “humans.” Like there’s an evolution happening in the poem.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: That’s about all we can hope for, but I love evolution bumping up against genesis, so thank you for pointing that out.

Brian S: I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, so my feelings about evolution and creation have changed a great deal over the years, and I still get a kick out of putting them side by side.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: With all the UFOs in restricted airspace it’s probably best to keep an open mind lol. Conviction has never done me a ton of good one way or another.

Brian S: What’s it been like trying to plan a book release during a pandemic? I feel like we’re in the early stages of coming out of it, but it’s still probably a little fraught?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: My last book came out in May 2020, so in a way this has become the norm? I think it’s been hard for me to find a space I feel comfortable taking up. This is an important moment in history, the confluence of all these human disasters at once. All this is to say, I don’t think I did a ton of planning, though perhaps I should have!

Brian S: For what it’s worth, I think this book deserves to hold some space. It’s speaking to basic humanity and that’s a thing a lot of people could use to be reminded of at present.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I appreciate that and for holding space for it here.

Love poems! We all need deadly serious love poems.

Brian S: The planning, I imagine, is tough. Like maybe we can think about in-person readings again? Maybe not right this moment, but they’re on the horizon, I’d think. Start doing readings at vaccination sites…

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Writers were so odd to begin with! We are going to have a bumpy transition back into amp feedback and open bars.

Brian S: Everybody’s going to be going over their time limits. Somebody hanging a sign behind the readers that says “No COVID Poems.”

Nicole: Can you speak a bit about the title of the book? I know there were several poems in the book with that title, and for whatever reason, I didn’t fully understand it but I really want to.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I’ll start by saying I can’t swim, but also it’s about alcoholism, dehydration, storms, growth and roots. I think it takes on new meanings throughout, and is contextualized differently by different poems. We are ninety percent water. What a ridiculous thing.

Nicole: That’s cool, the shifting meanings.

Brian S: Which poems from this book are your favorites to read, when you have the chance?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I like reading the Sheryl Crow poem the best! And second to that, I like reading the crown when both me and the audience has the stamina. It’s an eleven-minute poem, so it’s not an everyday thing. There is a line in the crown, though, that’s so clunky and I knew I should fix it but never got it quite right. Now I’m just rocking with the clunker line.

Brian S: That is excellent.

What other books have you been reading lately? Are there any forthcoming collections we should be looking forward to?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I love Aeon Ginsberg’s Greyhound! which came out semi recently! I’ve been spending a ton of time with photobooks lately, too. Death Magick Abundance by Akasha Rabut is so good

Michelle Hulan: Hiiiii! First of all, this collection is just so fantastic. I am obsessed with this book. Thank you for your art and for joining us.

I’m thinking a lot about the placement of the poems and sections themselves, specifically the last poem of the final section. It reads (for me) like a radical act of persistence and survival, despite the anger/rage/trauma some of earlier poems explore. I’m wondering, with this in mind, how was the process for poem and section placement for you? Was this a fairly organic/intuitive process?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Hello! Thank you for being here and for the question, my friend! In regard to ordering, I felt pretty intuitively that the crown of sonnets had to end the book. I so badly wanted to put myself in a position to repeat myself as the last line of the book. I think it also completed a personal arc there, too, and I knew the book was done in a really fulfilling way.

Michelle Hulan: Mmmmm yessss. That feeling comes through.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: The sestina though, used to be much closer to the crown, and after some astute edits by Copper Canyon Press we moved it earlier, and I think it did a lot for pacing so I appreciate them a ton over there.

Brian S: That’s the hour. Thank you again, Kayleb, for joining us tonight, and for sharing this wonderful book with us.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: Thank you for having me and being here! And for the wonderful questions, appreciate y’all and please have a wonderful night!

***

Photograph of Kayleb Rae Candrilli by Beowulf Sheehan.

Irene, the protagonist of Karen Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness, narrates with a distinct brand of raconteur’s energetic storytelling that will immediately put readers at ease. Set in the fictional rural town of Anklewood, North Carolina, Bewilderness doesn’t take long to follow Irene and her best friend, roommate, and coworker, Luce, through some dark and difficult moments, but the ups and downs are carried along seamlessly by Irene’s inviting barstool manner. It’s difficult to stop reading, because there’s a magnetic sense of intimacy—Irene is telling us something we need to hear.

Irene and Luce, along with Luce’s boyfriend Wilky, struggle with opioid use disorder, which not only disrupts the dynamics of their friendships, but also exposes them to violent and predatory systems that exploit their addiction. At times, they find temporary sobriety with the help of local NA meetings and sponsors. As Irene reveals more of their shared past, Bewilderness confronts many of the harmful myths and misconceptions around pill addiction.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Karen Tucker’s awards include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers, a PEO Scholar Award, and the George M. Harper Award for Creative Writing. Her short fiction appears in The Missouri Review, The Yale Review Online, Boulevard, EPOCH, Tin House Online, American Literary Review, Salamander, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere.

I was overjoyed to discuss Bewilderness with Karen by email this spring. We talked about literary depictions of rural settings, writing about addiction, and finding humor in struggle.

***

The Rumpus: I think books about addiction in rural areas of poverty present a lot of distinct challenges. There’s a sort of suggested genre expectation the author will examine class, racism, education, systemic failures, and place, which all come with potential criticisms related to representation. To name a problematic popular title, Hillbilly Elegy received well-deserved criticism for reinforcing harmful myths about poverty and addiction. This might be a tough question to start, but in fiction or nonfiction, what do you think we often get wrong about these narratives? Is there a risk that representations of addiction in popular culture can cause harm or reinforce problematic tropes?

Karen Tucker: You’re right! Stories set in rural low-income communities often fail those communities, and Hillbilly Elegy fails spectacularly, with the spectacle made far more public—and profitable—by a wealthy film director who first came to fame on a popular whitewashed series set in rural North Carolina called The Andy Griffith Show.

But the expectation that these narratives engage with class, racism, education, and systemic failures is in some ways pretty wonderful. Certain books by white middle-class authors, set in middle-class communities, would be far less boring and useless if they were held to similar expectations. At the same time, BIPOC authors, who are already expected to confront racism in their narratives, should be paid well and equitably to write whatever story they want.

Viewed generously, harmful myths about poverty and addiction stem from a failure of imagination. Too often, we writers fill our stories with timeworn tropes and stock characters. Where’s Meemaw at? Sitting on her porch swing, drinking hooch out of a jam jar and admiring the kudzu. If only she’d had enough sense to go get herself an education.

Worse, they’re an insidious attempt to retain power. Tell the same mudslinging tales over and over and soon people will believe them, no matter how false: poor people are lazy, poor people are stupid, poor people live in filth and squalor, addiction is a failure of willpower and morals, someone who abuses painkillers isn’t in any actual pain or experiencing a medical crisis—they’re being reckless with their one precious life!

And once they’re done dirtying things up, creators of poverty/addiction porn like to apply a romantic gloss to their product—similar to that old Hollywood trick of smearing Vaseline on the lens. Not because any actual romance exists, but as cheap and effective lubrication, making a difficult subject more comfortable for readers.

Rumpus: I should say here, one of the things I really loved about Bewilderness is how you manage to write a lot of organic scenes throughout the novel where your main characters, Irene and Luce, deal firsthand with the corrupt systems that support their pill addiction. I guess what I mean is you give your characters agency, but we see how larger systemic failures exploit their addiction and try to use it to steal that agency from them.

Tucker: Ah, I’m glad those scenes felt organic! It’s kind of like Dolly Parton’s joke, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” For me, it takes a hefty amount of manufactured effort to make a sentence feel even somewhat natural. Revise, revise, have a private tantrum about how hard it all is, revise.

While it’s true that Bewilderness is a work of fiction, the monstrous institutional failures that the narrator and her best friend experience are still Bigfooting their way through the US, targeting vulnerable individuals and communities. Some tracks in the woods: this book wouldn’t exist if a VA hospital hadn’t killed my father with indifferent care and a sloppy diagnosis. If my ailing mom hadn’t been sent to a rehab center where the staff was egregiously underpaid, and patients suffered medical neglect. In this country, the health of low-income individuals—who, because of institutional racism, are often people of color—is treated with appalling carelessness.

Rumpus: Irene and Luce also spend much of the novel negotiating their addiction. There’s always an end date in mind, but they struggle to stay clean. Did those kinds of internal character negotiations, the mental cycle between addiction and wanting to be sober, change your approach to the plot and structure of the novel?

Tucker: Funny, I’ve seen the geometry of this novel described as either a cycle or a spiral by multiple large-brained readers—so maybe this is exactly right! Besides, about the last person you should trust to say anything reliable about a novel is the person who wrote it. And yet from my admittedly limited and unreliable perspective, all I see is one mostly straightforward line: Who among us doesn’t want a pain-free existence?

Sometimes the desire to be pain-free leads Irene and Luce to use illicit substances. Sometimes the desire to be pain-free causes them to pursue sobriety. And sometimes, the desire to be pain-free means making use of harm reduction strategies. This made plot and structure delightfully easy (says the author), since all I had to do was attempt to keep my characters away from what hurts them. And yes, I failed.

Rumpus: Bewilderness takes place in North Carolina. In my reading, setting felt very important to the novel, not only as background, but also regarding plot and progression. Irene and Luce drive around a lot and everything seems pretty spaced out. How were you thinking about geography?

Tucker: Anklewood, where most of the novel’s action unfolds, is based loosely on two places. The first is Black Ankle, North Carolina—where my dad grew up—and Troy, North Carolina, a somewhat larger community about fourteen miles south.

My sister and I spent considerable time there as kids, hiking all over the Uwharrie Mountains, camping out, roaming the church graveyard in search of Tucker headstones, watching my grandmother cheerfully toss thawed-out chickens to the three-legged alligator who lived in the pond behind her house. If you’re going to commit to writing a novel, it means you’ll have to spend a lot of time in that world, and it was a pleasure to return, day after day, to the peculiar realm of my childhood.

Rumpus: I know you currently live in North Carolina. Do you get excited or nervous at all about people in your home state potentially reading the novel?

Tucker: I get excited and nervous for anyone at all to read this thing! I’m grateful for every single human person who so much as takes a peek. Years of working in restaurants preceded this experience, and so did years of rejections as I tried to stake out a place in the world of writing. I will never, ever take readers for granted, and every morning, as I plop my bottom in my writing chair and get started, it’s readers I’m thinking about. Will this make you laugh? Will this get you to lean in a little? Here, let me show you something I’ve never shown anyone. It’s you and me now, we’re in this together. To anyone out there who has or might read this book: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Rumpus: You mention years of rejection. How long did this novel take to write? What parts of the process were most difficult?

Tucker: The long answer is it took me roughly twelve plus years, give or take, to write this novel. Short answer: two and a half years.

The story though, is that I began writing my first novel in 2007, and after six hard years of work the novel turned out to be unpublishable. I spent all of February in bed grieving, except for the restaurant shifts I couldn’t no-show on without getting fired. Dragged my sorry self out sometime in March and began writing a second novel. Four years later, that one also went exactly nowhere. Back to bed I went.

In January 2017, my pillow-creased face and I signed up for a novel workshop with Mark Winegardner (by this point, I’d fought my way into grad school) and it was there I started Bewilderness. It took me until May 2019 to get a complete draft down—I do that inadvisable thing of revising as you go—and then I workshopped it with my brilliant writing group, did another quick pass, and by mid-July I was once again seeking representation, having been dropped by my two previous agents. Things moved fast after that.

In the alternate universe where my third attempt to publish a novel has also failed, I’m back working as a food server in the North Carolina mountains, wearing safety shoes and refilling iced tea over and over, earning a base wage of $3.25 an hour and paying out-of-pocket for terrible health insurance. It’s not so hard to imagine.

The thing is, this time I got lucky. There are so many novels out there that we’ll never get to read, for any number of reasons. You asked what parts of the process were the most difficult, and first on that list is the publishing stuff we have no control over. Coming in at a close second would be the exploitative side hustle so many of us rely on to stay fed and sheltered. Tip well, people!

Rumpus: To switch gears—and forgive me if this is a tough question—while the novel hasn’t come out yet, I imagine the pandemic will in some ways change the conversation around it. Reports of struggling with addiction have increased over the past year, but seeking treatment has become more challenging due to social isolation. Have you started thinking about Bewilderness differently since March 2020?

Tucker: This is probably one of those bad news, worse news, good news situations. Should we go in order?

So, yes, probably anyone who hasn’t retreated into total hermit-land during the pandemic knows that we humans are struggling more than ever. This includes people with substance use disorder, which research tells us is often linked to trauma.

I walk a lot—one of my personal coping mechanisms—and while I used to see two or three discarded syringe caps each time I wandered through my city’s downtown, in the past year the quantity of those orange plastic bits has rocketed skyward. More people are using, and using more often. Early CDC data bears out this unhappy anecdote. Another coping mechanism, is what it comes down to. We all do what we can to stay alive.

It’s not just needles. Because prescription opioids have become difficult to access, even through legal channels, counterfeit pills have taken over the market. The one thing I want to stress in this conversation: these days, any opioid tablet you encounter, unless you get it straight out of a pharmacy bottle or a foil blister pack, has a very high chance of containing fentanyl or one of its analogs—deadly if you hit a hot spot.

Maybe one day I’ll do an AMA-style interview, but for now all I’ll say is I experienced this firsthand with a loved one in January 2021. Thank god they survived. That alternate universe is unspeakable.

Test your product. Get Narcan nasal spray. Never use alone.

The existence of life-saving naloxone/Narcan is a big part of the good news. Same goes for fentanyl test strips. Needle exchanges, absolutely. Also, medication-assisted treatment: Suboxone, Vivitrol, buprenorphine, methadone, medical marijuana, and other harm reduction strategies. There are many ways to help a person stay alive.

More good news: virtual appointments. Before March 2020, an initial in-person appointment was required to begin treatment for substance use disorder. That changed with the pandemic. If you’re in need of help, Eleanor Health, co-founded by Dr. Nzinga Harrison, who also hosts In Recovery, might be a great place to start.

Rumpus: I do want to make sure I’m not overlooking the bright, humorous, kind aspects of this novel. Irene and Luce’s friendship is the glue of this book. It reminded me of Julie Buntin’s Marlena. 

Tucker: Haha, I’m glad you and a few other readers are finding some humor in this story. I certainly didn’t set out to write a novel that was anything close to funny, and one of my primary concerns when I started drafting was the abundance of poop jokes, pee jokes, and vomit jokes that kept appearing in the manuscript. Now, I’ve come to accept that even though this is a story about pain and love and struggle, a little foolishness is fine on occasion. My final edit included the addition of one last dick joke, which cheered me up.

Viewed from a certain distance, the painful struggle itself is funny. Gallows humor is one way to describe it. Whistling past the graveyard. Maybe that grizzled old saying, “comedy equals tragedy plus time” has some viable juice left. No doubt Freud has something to contribute to this conversation—but then we’re back to dick jokes all over again.

I just typed “why is sad stuff funny” into my browser, in hopes of getting some insight into this phenomenon, and a creepy Wikipedia entry called “Sad clown paradox” was a top hit. I didn’t spend too much time reading it—it seemed important to quickly X out of that window—but I think there was maybe something in there about self-medication and self-preservation? Not me.

As far as any other qualities go, I have no idea how they got there. Once upon a time, I started writing this story, having only the vaguest of plans before me and the icy winds of failure at my back. I did my best to take things moment by moment. I did my best to be true to these characters, even when they were lying their faces off. Now I’m almost fourteen years into this whole writing thing, and lately it feels more mysterious than ever. These days I’m blundering my way through another novel draft, and most mornings the best I can hope for is a zingy sentence or two and minimal self-loathing. Instead of writing smarter and faster now that I’ve logged some experience, I’m floundering around in cartoon quicksand. Instead of the prose sounding Rachel Cusk-esque, it’s open-mic night at a Myrtle Beach saloon.

***

Photograph of Karen Tucker by Jared Lipof.

When my great-grandmother, Susan Bishop, was fourteen years old, her parents traded her to a man named Henry C. Hazelwood: a marriage for an apple orchard. He was seventy-four.

There are nearly 8,000 different kinds of apples grown around the world, and 2,500 of them can be found in America. Kentucky is one of the best climates in the eastern United States to grow these fruits; yes, there are cold snaps in the mountains, but not so frosty as to be inhospitable to plant life, certainly not to hardy apple plants. In June and July, you can find Early Gold varieties ready to be plucked from their trees and eaten raw or made into pies. Mid-season brings Golden Delicious and the ever-popular Honeycrisp, which will typically cost about a dollar more per apple than a regular ol’ Macintosh or Red Delicious because their stems have to be removed before shipping or they’ll damage the fruit’s skin. Late in the season, shiny red Rome Beauties will hang heavy on the branches¹.

To live in eastern Kentucky is to be surrounded by wild things. Itty bitty towns with names like Lost Creek, Hazard, Quicksand, and Wolf Coal circle the place where my great-grandmother married twice.

We are a family of nines. Susan Bishop bore a total of nine children. Her elderly first husband, Henry C. Hazelwood, was the oldest of nine siblings. Susan’s oldest daughter from her second marriage, Mary Elizabeth, my Grandma Mary, had ten children. Nine survived to adulthood, my father being the last.

While most of my father’s siblings were born in Keavy, Kentucky, the youngest were born in northern Indiana, after the family had immigrated away from the dried-up coal mines in search of factory work. It’s just like that Dolly Parton song “Smoky Mountain Memories” but written in a minor key. They settled in Riverhaven, a poverty-stricken flood zone, and I get the impression that my alcoholic grandfather didn’t look too terribly hard for the work that was supposed to give his family half a chance.

Although no one is quite sure how, considering how poor they were, my grandparents continued to own some land back in Kentucky. On their patch of wooded mountainside was an abandoned schoolhouse with no electricity or running water, which wasn’t terribly different from their house up in Indiana; an outhouse; and a wood-burning stove that would heat the small railcar home and sear any child’s skin when they got too close.

During the family’s frequent visits to Kentucky to see relatives like Granny Bishop—the one who traded Susan for an apple orchard—my dad and his siblings would camp out in that schoolhouse, running wild through muddy creeks before hunkering down in the dim, empty classroom for the night. It wasn’t one of those stately brick structures that line country highways or get converted into salons. This had been built with wood planks, weathered and gray with age—nothing more than a hollow shell, without any desks or long-forgotten school supplies—by the time my dad stepped inside. A small amount of light seeped in the gaping windows, long since relieved of their glass panes. The road leading up to it was lined with pine trees and stained red from iron oxide.

None in the family could say when the last teacher had stood at the front of the room. Would she have been a frontier school marm with a gingham skirt twisting around as she walked to the green chalkboard, pointing to spelling words with a yard stick? Perhaps one of her students, a brown-noser to be sure, had plucked a ripe, weighty apple from a tree branch in the early morning hours. Maybe he cupped that shiny piece of fruit between his icy fingers as he made his way to that building nestled beside the creek where my uncles and father would fish out crawdads decades later. He must’ve carried that apple—an Empire or an Enterprise?—with care, cradled between his hands, a light grasp so as not to bruise through the skin. Could it have come from the orchard that cost my great-grandmother the remainder of her girlhood? She must’ve sat in that two-room schoolhouse when she was a child, learning “i” before “e” except after “c,” and her past participles and prepositions. In the before. Before Henry C. Hazelwood came for her.

One of the Latin names for an apple is Malus Domestica. To my untrained ear, Malus Domestica sounds like “Bad Family,” or perhaps, “Bad Home.”

My hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the final resting place of Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, who is known for traveling around parts of the United States and Canada, starting and cultivating apple nurseries. Every fall, my town celebrates him with the Johnny Appleseed Festival where people dress in Little House on the Prairie garb and churn butter for an audience. Our minor league baseball team is called the Tin Caps, after the cooking pot he supposedly wore on his head.

My Aunt Norma—my father’s oldest living sibling—told me about Susan and the apple orchard just as I was getting up to leave what had once been my Grandma Mary’s Kentucky home. Uncle Terry, one of my dad’s two surviving brothers, now lives there full time and has made some upgrades: feral cats no longer rule the backyard porch; the kitchen has been degreased from decades of Grandma Mary’s biscuits and gravy, a Herculean task; tiles now exist where there was previously textured linoleum. The home frequently flooded. My Uncle Larry (yes, Larry and Terry) claims to have been taking a nap on the couch one day, when woke up and rolled over to see his own sandal floating by his face.

My dad brought me to Riverhaven because I’d been wanting to write about his early life, which had been so unlike my own comfortable, suburban childhood. He thought I’d have a better shot asking his siblings for stories, since he remembered so little. Some were adults by the time he was born, so they might remember his life differently, more clearly. At the end of our time together, I’d casually asked Aunt Norma if she had any other family stories to share, knowing that we don’t get together often and that time is a terribly finite thing for her these days. I had already shut my laptop and stood up from the Formica table when she said, “Well, Mom’s ma married an old man for an apple orchard when she was real young.”

“She got an apple orchard for marrying an old guy?” I asked, thinking maybe that wasn’t the worst exchange if she was a girl who loved apples.

“No, Granny Bishop, her mother, got the orchard,” answered Norma.

“How old are we talking?” I asked, knowing that old age meant something different one hundred years ago.

“Seventy-two.”

“No!” I yelled before making a gagging sound. At the time, we all laughed a little. Maybe in shock. Maybe because old men marrying young women is a punchline. Maybe we just didn’t know what else to do. Nothing was funny. Not a thing.

As my dad and I walked out to his car, I asked if he’d known about the orchard, about the price paid by his grandmother. Like with most things, he said he might’ve known and forgotten. The trauma of his upbringing—spending his toddlerhood in a tuberculosis sanitarium, his early childhood taking weekly baths in a metal tub (the kind Pinterest people now stuff with ice and La Croix for their cookouts), and his school-age years playing “Ode to Billie Joe” for his drunk dad on the record player again and again—causes almost everything else to float away like it’d never even been there. If the seed of a memory can’t take root, if it’s drowned before it reaches its tendrils down into the black soil, did it ever really happen?

“Better go,” my dad said, looking at neighbors out in the driveways, standing around burn piles the size of their homes. “Nobody knows me here anymore. Wouldn’t want to be here in the dark.”

Apples do not grow “true to seed,” meaning that what you put in the ground isn’t always what comes back out of it. The apple will be from the same family, but you could plant a Granny Smith seed and the tree will yield a French crabapple².

While the apple, given its abundance in supermarkets, seems like a hardy plant, in reality, the trees require a lot of care and attention to produce edible, attractive fruit. In order for an apple plant to grow into a fruit-producing tree, it must be cross-pollinated with a different variety of apple. Inside of one apple are many seeds, each genetically different from the other, like siblings, a blend of the original plant and whatever type of apple with which it was cross-pollinated³. If each seed from that one apple was planted in a row, every tree that sprouted could produce a different type of fruit. Because of this, most apples are not grown from seeds but are instead cloned by grafting. Wild apples are often called “spitters” due to their bitter taste.

For a working parent of young children, I spend a large amount of my evenings on genealogy websites. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I knew exactly who Aunt Norma was talking about when she told me about the orchard because I’d seen Susan Bishop’s picture on Ancestry.com. In the photograph, she’s around the same age I am now and holding my great-uncle JB on her lap. Her features are clustered together beneath a heavy, overhanging brow, and yet, she’s lovely to look at. Even though the picture is that aged sepia tone, I can tell our hair is the same: stick straight, shiny, and regular old brown. Maybe I’m trying to understand how my life is so remarkably different than the lives of those just one generation ago.

After my Aunt Norma told me about the orchard, I went back onto Ancestry and clicked on Susan Bishop’s data. The site lists her children and her second husband, my great-grandfather Phillip Cornett. I could also see pictures of Susan as an old woman at my late Aunt Rosetta’s high school graduation in 1959.

And then I found him. Henry C. Hazelwood. Born in 1831, sixty full years before Susan Bishop. There is no mention of the orchard (and there wouldn’t be on the simple family tree accessible to someone like me, who is unwilling to pay a monthly membership fee), but there he was. Henry C. Hazelwood. Not seventy-two but seventy-four years old, in fact, when he married my teenaged great-grandma. There is his first wife, Elizabeth Seaborn, just two years younger than him. I see their sons listed beside her, George and James, respectively thirty-four and twenty-nine years older than my great-grandmother. And then five years after Elizabeth died at the age of sixty-seven, Henry C. Hazelwood—age seventy-fucking-four—married fourteen-year-old Susan Bishop on June 27, 1905.

114 years later and 170 miles to the north, I twist around in my comforter and bedsheets, unable to fall asleep because I’m so furious about something that happened to a relative who died twenty years before I was born. That can’t be healthy, normal. The bedroom I share with my husband—a man I chose to marry at twenty-five and chose to have children with at thirty—is dark and quiet, the white noise machine whirring. All the optimal sleep conditions are there as I curl my spine and clench. Before I went looking online, I’d taken some solace in thinking what little harm a seventy-four-year-old man could do a century before Viagra was patented. But I clicked on “children” beneath Susan’s name on the website, and now I know: enough harm to leave my great-grandmother a widow with a newborn son before she turned sixteen.

Biblical experts aren’t so sure it was an apple that brought ruination to Adam and Eve. Its place as the fruit that brought sin into a perfect world might have just been a pun chosen by the scholar during Pope Damascus’s reign who spent fifteen years translating the Bible from Hebrew into Latin. As a Latin adjective, malus means “bad” or “evil.” As a noun, it means “apple.” Back then, malus could also refer to a fig, a pear, a peach, or any other “fleshy, seed bearing fruit.⁴“ While the association has stuck, the language has changed: So many years later, the common apple malus pumila, is also known as the “paradise apple.⁵”

At my evangelical K-12 school, I was taught that the pains of childbirth were the price women had to pay for Eve’s deception. She was the First Woman, and all of us who followed her would suffer a punishment. I didn’t understand what could make an apple so tempting as to go against the commands of God, a terrifying figure that loomed over my childhood. Surely, it couldn’t have been just an apple. Were apples different at the dawn of humanity? Better? It seemed like a lackluster reason for expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Now that I’m older and approaching the polar opposite of evangelicalism, I think back on how disturbing it was to have been taught this as a child. Twice now, the pains of labor have cracked over me like a whip. Not once when the contractions rippled through did I think of Eve and her apple. There was no room to think, only to suffer. I wonder now what kind of teacher tells a child that she will be punished when she’s grown—while doing the work of childbirth—because some supposed ancestor she’ll never know punctured the skin of an apple with her teeth, sucking in the juice before chewing through the flesh.

I doubt I’ll ever know if any of it—the tree, the Garden, Eve, the Devil, everything I was taught as fact alongside conjugating Spanish verbs and solving for X—was anything more than a story from a long time ago. And honestly, I don’t much care anymore. But I also want to know if Henry C. Hazelwood is the serpent in this scenario. Or is it my great-great-grandparents? Maybe they were a den of vipers, coiling and undulating their scaled bodies around a bucket of Braeburns and Galas.

While an apple is often associated with good health (“an apple a day keeps the doctor away”), it is quite possible for an apple to contain both arsenic and cyanide. The arsenic comes from the soil—it exists there naturally as well as in greater amounts as echoes of the poison that used to be sprayed on orchards before being outlawed—and can spread to the fruit itself as it grows⁶.

Regardless of the plant’s environment, cyanide, derived from a defensive compound known as amygdalin, is always buried within the apple’s seeds. This cyanide is harmless as long as the seed’s hard coating remains intact. While other fruits, like plums and cherries, also contain this same compound, apple seeds have the highest concentration. Still, a person would have to ingest approximately two hundred ground-up apple seeds to receive a lethal dose of cyanide⁷.

Last fall, my husband and I took our two young sons to an apple orchard for the first time. We did everything but pick apples for most of the afternoon: the bounce pad, the burlap sack slides, the barrel ride caterpillaring through the fields, the goat and fly-covered-pig visits, the sharing of one small $4 apple cider slushee.

Once we got around to filling our $15 apple bag, there were only two varietals left to choose from—Jonamac and Macoun. A Jonamac is a cross between a Jonathon and a McIntosh, and the Macoun is named after a Canadian horticulturist⁸, not a tropical bird. Even though we were tired, I insisted that we walk to the back of the orchard where the Jonamacs grew. I figured if they were harder to get to, they would be less over-picked.

It was between the Jonamac rows where we kept seeing a girl, no older than twelve, joyfully chomping on apple after apple. First on the barrel ride, then twenty minutes later on the hayride, there she was, ignoring her family as she took huge bites, her messy brown hair falling into her face. The girl was so clearly still a child, unbothered by her appearance, content to be out in the sunshine, consuming as many apples as her stomach could hold. I saw her grin in between bites. Some girls get to be children longer than others.

While North America was once home to over 15,000 different apple varieties, now only 3,000 remain. The apple industry has winnowed the biodiversity of the fruit to those that generate the highest crop yield. The varieties found in grocery stores—Red Delicious and Granny Smith—are not the most delicious but the most profitable⁹.

In an attempt to remedy this, David Benscoter founded the amateur botany group The Lost Apple Project after learning that his neighbor lived on what had once been the world’s largest apple orchard. Benscoter—a former FBI agent and IRS investigator—and his friend EJ Brandt now spend their retirement hunting for extinct apple breeds in the Pacific Northwest.

This pair of apple detectives scour old homesteads on what was once the Oregon Territory, looking for lost breeds. Together, they have rediscovered twenty-three different apple varieties that were thought to have died out. When they think they’ve unearthed a lost variety, they take detailed notes of the location, seal the fruit in a Ziplock baggie, and mail it to the Temperate Orchard Conservatory. If the apple is confirmed “lost,” Benscoter and Brandt return to the tree, taking a cutting to be grafted at the Temperate Orchard Conservatory’s to be “reborn” and preserved¹⁰.

Our sons picked maybe ten of the small greenish red Jonamacs before my husband suggested we try one to see if we liked it. We did not. The skin was thick and bitter. The small fruits felt like they had a coating of wax just like they do in the grocery store, even though we’d plucked them straight from the tree.

After the disappointing Jonamacs, we headed to the front of the orchard to try the Macouns, not knowing that, as another McIntosh hybrid, they tasted and looked remarkably similar to the Jonamacs.

As we walked the worn path between the trees, trying not to step on the piles and piles of fruit on the ground, my husband lamented, “Look at all this waste. There are more apples here than in the trees. How can they stay in business with all their apples rotting on the grass like this?”

“Maybe they come through after everyone leaves and use the ground apples to make the cider slushees,” I offered.

At first, we thought that people were throwing their unwanted apples onto the ground. But every time we reached for a fruit, we’d knock at least one other off the tree. The slightest jostle of a branch, a tiny graze from the back on my son’s hand, would cause a small army of Macouns to plummet downward to join the carpet of ruined apples. No amount of effort or care could stop the fall.

“What happens when an apple is set on fire?”

– Question from Quora user, Dawn Bash

“I can’t say that I have ever tried to set an apple on fire, nor have I ever been summoned to extinguish a burning apple… Depending upon how much heat you did apply, it would eventually evaporate all of the liquid and the apple would then burn. Perhaps you’d have to continue to apply the heat, but it would eventually combust and turn into a black carbon mass. I am, however, very curious regarding your reason for asking this unusual question.”

– Answer from Dave Smith, retired fire officer with twenty-nine years of experience¹¹

Susan Bishop was eight years older than my first son—who still cannot tie his shoes or sleep without three nightlights—when her parents took the orchard in her place. She and I were born less than one hundred years apart. Like me, my great-grandmother was the oldest child in her family. Her mother went on to bear three more daughters, but as far as I can tell, records don’t show anything beyond their births, meaning they probably died in infancy. What would my great-great grandmother have done had Susan’s sisters survived? Would they too have been traded for land, maybe livestock? Or would the orchard have been enough for the family that the other three girls could’ve grown all the way up before marrying men their own age?

I’ve heard it’s not right or fair to judge those in the past through the lens of current morality. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing back then, to arrange a marriage between a teenager and a septuagenarian for a few rows of apple trees. Susan Bishop might’ve expected such an occurrence. Perhaps her schoolgirl friends were placed in similar circumstances. Here, old man, take my thirteen-year-old and give me half of your goats. You can have this daughter of ours in exchange for that copper moonshine still I know you’ve got running in your old barn. Millie would be pleased to take your hand in marriage, but first let’s transfer the deed on this patch of land that the creek runs through. It was a different time, as they say. A different place.

I wonder what the great-grandmother I never met would think if she could see the life I have shaped, that my parents took care in cultivating. I’m pretty sure it’d make her sick to see how much we paid for a handful of hours spent in an apple orchard. It might hurt to look at what a woman could do with her life and her body if she were born at the tail end of the next century.

I can’t unlive those two years of Susan Bishop’s first marriage for her, and maybe she wouldn’t want that for herself. Her first son was a product of that marriage, after all. To unlive that short but significant sliver of her life would make him “discappear,” as my youngest likes to say.

The orchard, though. I can’t stop thinking about that damn orchard. The trade that was made. Apple for girl. Girl for apple.

I wish I could go back and burn those rows of apple trees down until nothing is left but a blanket of ash and charred fruit covering bluegrass. I’m not even sure if an apple can burn, being so weighed down with water and juice. But I would light a match and try.

***

Rumpus original art by Meg Richardson.

***

^{1. Barth, Brian. “Apple Varieties in Kentucky.” Living The Bump. The Bump. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://living.thebump.com/apple-varieties-kentucky-13151.html.}

^{2. Richins Myers, Vanessa. “Can You Grow Apples from Seeds.” The Spruce. June 26, 2019. https://www.thespruce.com/can-you-grow-apples-from-seeds-3269511}

^{3. Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences. “Johnny Appleseed: The Problem with Growing Apples from Seed.” The University of Manitoba. 2020. https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/afs/hort_inquiries/907.html#:~:text=Apple%20seeds%20do%20not%20reproduce,in%20order%20to%20produce%20fruit.&text=Therefore%2C%20a%20seed%20planted%20from,different%20appearance%2C%20colour%20or%20flavour.}

^{4. Martyris, Nina. “‘Paradise Lost’: How Apple Became the Forbidden Fruit.” April 20, 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/30/526069512/paradise-lost-how-the-apple-became-the-forbidden-fruit}

^{5. “Apple Tree.” Shenandoah National Park. February 26, 2015. https://www.nps.gov/shen/learn/nature/apple_tree.htm}

^{6. “Arsenic in Fruits, Juices, and Vegetables.” Dartmouth. February 15, 2017. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~arsenicandyou/food/fruits andvegetables.html}

^{7. “Are Apple Seeds Poisonous?” Medical News Today. [2] “Are Apple Seeds Poisonous?” Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php}

^{8. Waiser, W.A. “John Macoun.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. March 4, 2015. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/john-macoun}

^{9. Rossi Anastopoulo, Rossi. “Where Have All the Apples Gone?” PIT Journal. 2014. https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gone-investigation-disappearance-apple-varieties-and-detectives-who}

^{10. CNN Wire. “10 Kinds of Apples That Were Thought to Be Extinct Have Been Rediscovered.” Fox 43. April 25, 2020. https://www.fox43.com/article/news/history/10-kinds-of-apples-thought-extinct-rediscovered/521-97344ca6-94c3-41f8-a0de-63058c22d821}

^{11. “What Happens When an Apple Is Set on Fire?” Quora. April 19, 2019. https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-an-Apple-is-set-on-fire-1}

How has our sense of “place” changed during the pandemic? Are you a knowledge worker who migrated to a “Zoomtown” on Planet-COVID? Were you a cashier who’s now called a front-line worker because you sell groceries from behind plexiglass, COVID-19 having made the supermarket a danger zone? Were you worried about where you’d go, what place you’d inhabit when you lost your lease or your house to unemployment, to climate disaster? Did you wait in a socially distanced line to vote?

Reading has always been able to transport us from that Wordsworthian couch where we “lie / in vacant or in pensive mood” to lakeside daffodils, from Du Fu’s floating exile in the Three Gorges to a time of peace before the capital was a war zone. COVID intensified this by keeping us in exile from better times, on the couch imagining the places that haunt us.

I’ve been drawn by COVID’s muddling of place to revisit The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, edited by Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider, published in 2017 by Pleiades Press. The essays in this eclectic collection share themes of isolation and memory and should be assigned reading for a pandemic crash course on processing grief, surviving isolation, battling loneliness, and now, cautious reemergence.

For poets, place is associated not only with setting, but with an emotional landscape (“no ideas but in…” places?). And now, for many of us, teetering on the verge of a COVID-induced case of agoraphobia, place has earned its spot on the list of “constructs,” i.e., shared ideas of meaning that rely on unevaluated habits of mind which dissolve under close study. In other words, we subjectively build our ideas of what race, ethnicity, family, gender, and other constructs mean. By calling them “constructs” we subject them to scrutiny, reevaluate our received perceptions, and open their definitions to a fluidity that reveals that constructs don’t exist without our making them. We invent them. The Poem’s Country shows that place had arrived at “construct” well before COVID. This collection (and the pandemic) shows us that places are as mutable as memory, easily photoshopped in the albums of our minds, deep fakes on replay, and yet essential, beloved, dangerous, rich.

Many of The Poem’s Country’s ”places” don’t even appear on maps. But not being on a map doesn’t mean a place isn’t a place. Here are some conceptual “places” this collection maps for us, places of the mind, constructs if you will: the internet cloud, “America,” the Earth as food source, the psychic space of post-traumatic brain injury, “MOTHER,” consciousness and mind, the place left behind by a military spouse, the site that is human body. Displacement, aquariums, silence. Reading The Poem’s Country now, we connect these with pandemic places, seen on the other side of plexiglass, of screens: the singing from windows in the empty streets of Milan, Link watching the sunset while wading in the sea in the Breath of Wild’s video game Lurelin Village, the relatives we couldn’t hug on the other side.

This collection also travels to places on maps, but places many of us, still cautious, might hesitate to visit right now (Guam, Iraq, Lambeth Palace), and many that we can’t visit anymore because climate crisis, or time, has transformed them (King Island in the Chukchi Sea or The Central Virginia Training Center, formerly known as The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded). Places that have been mutated by memory (a small town in Minnesota), inflated by myth (Compton), unfairly damned (Detroit), and places made important in poetry by the imagination of writers who experience them (Mt. Rainier/Tahoma). Maps legitimize our constructs. We can find King Island on a map, so it’s real, and we can see it through the words of Abigail Chabitnoy, for whom the island is of great significance as an ancestral home. In her essay “A Place for Ghosts,” she asks, “What is it to be of a place? To be removed from that place? To carry that place?” In a poem, place allows us to create, to recreate, to recover, to mourn, to embody, as Chabitnoy concludes: “Each poem is a wave, a shore, a piece of the landscape, is the landscape. An Island to the archipelago. To write place is to be in the company of ghosts, to carry home with me always, like the fog that settles in my bones.” This collection suggests again and again that poets and poetry are conjoined with such places—found on a map and indelibly mapped to the psyche.

The editors’ own essays are among the gems of the collection. Shara Lessley’s wide-ranging piece succeeds at engaging both perceived real and constructed locations. Titled, “One Cluster, Bright, Astringent,” it dwells for a time with Elizabeth Bishop in her Nova Scotia house, but also, through personal stories, “[i]n the strange planet called childhood…” The essay is built associatively, drawing connections between Lessley’s memories (often of discovering the universe beyond earth, and of ballet) and Bishop’s influence. Lessley writes, “about Bishop’s living years only fragments of fact exist,” indirectly echoing the fragmentary memories that Lessley presents about herself. Lessley begins the essay, “The year Elizabeth Bishop died I learned to read…,” and then a page later, “Nearly twenty years later, Bishop’s work is teaching me to be a better reader…” Then, seven pages in as the essay turns on its associations, memoir, and reflections on Bishop, we arrive at, “When I say Bishop taught me to be a better reader, I mean this: she taught me that readers of poetry should expect equal parts mystery and clarity, imagination and intellect… [Poetry] demands courage of movement, a willingness to start in one place and arrive at the unknown.” As psychic travelers, then, poets need to risk transportation, a “willingness” to be guided by their poetic ancestors.

Places in these essays have resonance, whether it’s Great Village, Nova Scotia, or a concept learned there. Places are charged with nostalgia, with traumatic memory, with loss, and with hope. Our phrase “the environment” offers a synonym for place, but while in the past poets have often turned to nature as a place of idyll and inspiration very few of these essays seem to celebrate the wild world’s continuing importance, except as a loss to be mourned. This makes sense given climate crisis: the record heat, flooded islands, orange skies, and empty reservoirs of the past several years. Meanwhile, urban places offer a wider range of individual and group identity.

In fact, for many today, the rural has never been an idyll, or was a conflicted one at best. Bruce Snider’s essay, “Trouble & Consolidation: Writing the Gay Rural” is set in the Indiana town where he grew up and recounts his experience of observing a gay couple who lived there: an undertaker and a high school teacher. This essay is lyrical, elegiac, and tragic in its conclusion: that the author would need a more diverse and accepting urban setting to nurture his personal and poetic life. Certainly, reading Snider’s book Paradise, Indiana could only enhance an appreciation for this playful and wise poet’s essay.

Indeed, The Poem’s Country spins, an axle with more than twenty spokes leading to the wheel of contemporary poetry written by this diverse range of authors, informed by place in myriad ways. Another of those spokes would lead to the work of Sabrina Orah Mark, whose initially mysterious essay, “If You Need Me, Mother Is the Poem Where I’ll Be,” begins to emerge, on rereading, as a prose poem homage to all who’ve had a maternal influence on Mark, as well as a giddy riff on the word “mother” itself. Its thirteen sections might be “Thirteen Ways of Looking at MOTHER.” It’s associative and playful like the best of Stevens. Claudia Rankine plays a vital role, “(Forgotten) rumor has it that a famous poet once referred to me as Claudia Rankine’s ‘tail’… She is my poet MOTHER.” The shortest section captures the maddeningly playful repetition of the theme, and brings a laugh, “For my 40th birthday I wanted two things. #1 to clean my entire house. #2 to have a word with Gertrude Stein’s MOTHER.”

Is it a kind of defiance to put an associative prose poem about a repeated word in a collection of essays about place? But in 2021, how can we not think of George Floyd’s, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” too? Or that, during the pandemic, mothers were left with no choice but to exit the workforce in droves as the majority of childcare and housework was left to them. For many women during this pandemic, MOTHER was not a happy place. This essay suggests to me, in 2021, that the longing and reconciling with the maternal is central to every cry for justice, every celebration of life. Mark concludes, “Just between you and me, I’ve already plotted the coordinates of my new collection. It is a perfect drawing of my MOTHER’s face.” Poets map the “coordinates” of the places, the faces, the themes that haunt them, that play with them, that inspire them, that bring them to revelations.

Eavan Boland, whose death was a brutal, early-pandemic blow, writes in the foreword to this collection, “For a long time the [Wordsworthian] theme of turning a place into a world persisted. Then something happened.” This collection, Boland proposes, “addresses that something.” These essays show us that this “something” is that the idealized natural places of Wordsworth are less important to the poetic imagination, and the concept of place has become as richly varied as the voices of contemporary poetry. Boland continues: “The subject is place and its intersection with poetry, but there is the widest possible range [of places] here: from meditation to assertion.”

Or maybe a “No-Place.” Christopher Kempf’s essay, “The Cloud, the Desktop, & the Poetics of No-Place,” wrestles admirably with the metaphors of the internet age and questions of whether we’re truly connected, whether we can have access to the “Romantic sublime” via our laptops:

The arrival of the internet—for myself, for my generation, for our species—was a setting forth, I think, from what Gaston Bachelard has called ‘the consolation of the cave,’ a taking of our way, with wandering steps and slow, through an unknown, threatening, yet potentially liberating, possibly revolutionary global village. We had swapped the shelter of our homes for the information superhighway…

During the pandemic many of us have had only our caves and our internet connections. In that way, Kempf’s essay can seem momentarily dated in its bemused contempt for the transformations brought about by networked computers. But his 2017 perspective can lead us to ask whether some of the hollow seductions of technology have not now saved us? Kempf couldn’t have known what was coming and his references to media theorist Marshall McLuhan still ring true as he warns us how we’ve been taken over by this constructed life. Kempf’s essay is prescient in its analysis of the metaphors we use for tech, the constructions of a “no-place”-place where many of us now dwell in connected isolation, pandemic or no.

For a poet reflecting on how a place might inform their poetic practice, this collection offers a virtual atlas of possible models: no two places are alike, nor are the ways of making poems that derive from them. Rereading it, dipping in at random, this collection never fails to provoke questions and spur insight. Many of the essays share a sense of being haunted by an enduring connection to a source-place of inspiration. As Mark Wunderlich puts it in his essay: “I have gone into the world, but I brought my home town with me, along with everyone in it. They sit with me now as I type these words into a machine. I am alive in a multitude of places, though I know with certainty that most of those places no longer exist.”

Poets don’t always have hometowns, but we all bring something with us. In The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, in this range of ideas about poetic practice, “place” is wherever our poems come from.

***

[Edward Derby will be a student of Bruce Snider this fall. This essay was accepted prior to this development. – Ed.]

A Maine transplant to the Bay Area, Jacques Rancourt writes at the intersections of queerness and the pastoral. The winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, Rancourt’s first collection Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017) reexamines bucolic and religious iconography for an alternatively imagined gay youth. More recently, his chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) grapples with the memory of the AIDS crisis for queer men since the dawn of PrEP.

Of Rancourt’s latest, the poet Mark Wunderlich writes, “The poems in Brocken Spectre document a queer new age—one in which the AIDS crisis has abated, though the lost quietly ghost the periphery of this writer’s imagination.” Brocken Spectre is at once haunted by the memory of those lost to disaster and troubled by how we memorialize them. Through cliffside landscapes, French frescoes, and sultry gay bars, the poems in this collection dramatize the speaker’s uncertainty: How do we as queer people today relate to, or belong in relation to, the traumas of our collective past?

Rancourt’s work appears in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares, among many others. A former fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, Rancourt currently lives in San Francisco, where he just concluded his final year as a middle school principal.

We met over Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon in June. On the precipice of summer vacation, we talked about Brocken Spectre, the AIDS crisis, the gay pastoral, and what’s next for queer art.

***

The Rumpus: I’m so intrigued by your work with memory, and the sense of the collective past that bears down upon your work. The poems in Brocken Spectre exist in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, haunted by a voyeur’s anxiety. The speaker wants to feel connected to this not-too-remote past. Yet, this anxiety is complicated by a sense of heredity, of time and place. In one poem, the speaker asserts that “all art once / was about conquest.” What now? How do we elegize and memorialize in art?

Jacques Rancourt: That’s a great question. One of the ethical questions I was asking myself when I approached this work was, “What right do I have to this topic?” I even say in one poem “that six hundred thirty-six. / thousand of us died & I did not. / know a single one.”

My generation has a particular relationship to the crisis years; we are a part of it in that the ripple effect of it has weighed heavily on the gay community, and yet we have enough remove from it that it’s not something we have immediately witnessed firsthand. Something I felt like I could speak to was that generational divide—being a part of something and at the same time apart from it. That tension really drove the inquiry of these poems: thinking about collective memory, about inherited trauma, and how so much of the way the community is thought of by the outside world is through the lens of the crisis. In a lot of ways, so much of the progress of humanizing queer people was a direct result of the crisis. Part of it is also thinking about the ethics of memory: what right do we have to memorialize and remember, and what obligations do we have to memorialize and remember?

I’ve also been interested in personal history. My first book focuses on family history. I come from Appalachian Maine. My father being a Quebecois immigrant—thinking about his roots, which are very much tied to logging and farming, and this different lifestyle than the one I have, and trying to be a part of that life, too. My poems have always been trying to find a place where I belong where I feel like I don’t belong in some ways.

Rumpus: I’m interested, too, in this tension between voyeurism and bearing witness, recording history and not allowing us to forget. How do we record history and remember past trauma and our ancestors, especially when there’s this loss of a generation and mentorship? What helped you make decisions around these questions as you worked on this collection?

Rancourt: Number one for me was that I wasn’t interested in rewriting the elegy. There are so many books from that time period that are important to me. I think about Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats and Mark Doty’s My Alexandria. These are the books that come out of that lived experience, and I wanted my poems not to try to replicate or duplicate what they had done or even dare to imagine what it’s like from that perspective. I wanted them very much rooted in the twenty-first century, considering what it means to look back and recognize the ripple effects and the ways that history presses up against our current moment.

In the poem “Kirby,” at the end there is this idea that the only ability we have to romanticize the past is because of our distance from it. When we think about the heroes of the AIDS crisis or ACT UP, these things that were incredibly traumatic and tragic to go through, the only way we can see romance in that is because we are so removed from it.

Rumpus: The speaker’s belief in a soul seems to give him some peace, as well. How do you map religion, spirituality, and ghosts in your work? I’m curious, particularly, in how it intersects with queerness.

Rancourt: These are some of the driving forces in my work. I grew up incredibly Catholic and I was preparing to become a priest for most of my adolescent life, up until I turned twenty years old, before I grappled with my own sexuality. Religion has always been a seed of my work, and always exists in my poems. The specter of religion and belief in being part of something greater than your own lived experience, being harkened or driven by the calling is something that—even if I intellectually disagree or find fault with it now—is still an instinct that I’ve leaned into throughout my life. I’ve often figured that I’ve replaced my fervor for a god or religion or spirituality with my fervor for poetry. It’s become my new religion, of sorts.

So, thinking about the soul and ghosts, as someone who, again, intellectually recognizes these things may not exist, the idea of the hope for it still compels me. Going back to the romanticized past and heroism, this idea that these lives weren’t just squandered, that these souls could move on, that we could still be haunted by them, that there’s still something that resides or some residue left over from that time helps give it some sort of hope or meaning. The tension is the opposite of that: what if what’s gone is gone forever? A central character of the book is the lover, my husband Walter, who’s decidedly very atheist and grew up atheist and had a very different perspective from what I had growing up, so his skepticism on spiritual matters drives some of these poems as well.

Rumpus: In many cases, this soul is transmuted into fog or rainbows and animals. Animating natural forces exist even in these urban landscapes. Does nature connect to your speaker’s or your notion of the spirit?

Rancourt: As you were asking that, I was thinking of the poem “And Soul” by Eavan Boland. It’s a beautiful poem about the speaker taking the bus to the house where her mother was dying and remembering that the body is made mostly of water, and as Ireland is a very wet place, so by some logic the rain will have remnants of her mother in it, which gives some comfort to the speaker.

I have always found comfort in nature. I grew up at the mouth of the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, which is one of the wildest parts of the Appalachian Trail. Nature is something that’s very important to my work. In part, I’m interested in its ability to comfort and to give solace, and also its inability to do that. As you mentioned, the dead are often associated with nature. But also, there is no queer pastoral, there is no place for us in the wilderness, despite the fact that that’s where we find the ghosts, the remains of the past, in the poem.

Rumpus: I recently read Bruce Snider’s essay asking where the rural gay poets are. Growing up in the countryside, Snider developed two impressions as he dove deeper into gay poetry: “The first was that if you were gay, you needed to live in the city. The second was that if you were gay and wanted to be a writer, you needed to write about the city.” I’m interested in this movement of gay poets from the country of the past to the city of today. How do you understand this queer migration in your work, from Maine to San Francisco, in Brocken Spectre?

Rancourt: There’s a poem in the collection, “Golden Gate Park,” that addresses this. Obviously Golden Gate Park is this very famous park in San Francisco, this natural space in this urban center where the speaker comes across a cruiser who solicits him. The speaker recalls his home where someone was murdered for hitting on someone else. It’s this parallel between past and present connected by this natural space. We often think of cities as these places of progress whereas rural areas seem locked into the past. That’s something the poems in this book attempt to do, to seek out the past and find connective points. For me, I find these rural landscapes part of that intersection, where past and present butt up against each other.

It’s an interesting question, too, what Snider brings up—what are gay people allowed to write about? I wanted also to address in this book the queer pastoral, which is sort of an unwritten poem for a reason. The idea of the queer pastoral factors into my first book, which I think has a perhaps more idealized view of it, whereas this one is a little bit more hopeless. There’s a hopelessness about finding queerness in a rural place. The speaker acknowledges, exactly as Snider points out, that we’re driven out of the woods into the cities for survival and there’s no going back.

Rumpus: Considering this lack of a certain body of poetry, I wonder how you relate to formal traditions. I think of your poems as being inventive with form and white spaces. Do these choices emerge from some sort of creative imperative? How do you approach the page?

Rancourt: I don’t consider myself to be a formal or experimental poet. I always approach poems without any invention of any sort. They’re always written directly in a paragraph at first. From there, I chisel my way through to find the line, and once I find the line, to find the form that breathes life into it. “In Fátima,” a poem which is in twenty-four sections, was not originally written in twenty-four sections. If one would ever find that issue of Prairie Schooner where it was originally published, they’d see it presented in more traditional tercets. A poem like “June 12, 2016” was not written in syllabics originally. As I revise and draft, part of that process is finding the form that creates the right tension and life for the poem. I think a really good example is “The Wake,” which didn’t start off punctuated by periods in places where they don’t belong. It began as a poem with enjambment. Not satisfied by the lack of punch I was getting out of that enjambment, I played around with end stops and eventually found my way to the final form, which uses those end stops in a way to create double meaning, to create stops in places to give pause, to create fractures, double reads.

For this book, I was interested in movement between lines. In a lot of the poems, every other line is indented. I wanted to think about the friction of past and present, of speaker and subject, of not belonging, whether through memory, through place. Having those offset lines added to that sensation of friction and disjuncture.

Rumpus: All three of your collections operate with very distinctive organizing themes. I’m particularly interested in the storytelling of this collection. What do you want a collection to do?

Rancourt: I appreciate that. That wasn’t necessarily something I set out to do. I never plotted out a storyline with Brocken Spectre. It came about organically. Obviously, I had this obsession that I was working my way through at the end of four years of writing poems. When I was picking through which ones would go together, some of this narrative work emerged. Then I could write through a few of the gaps. The last poem I wrote was the triptych. Part of its goal was to flesh out the relationship between the speaker and the beloved, the context of the generational divide, and the crisis.

We had this really big surge of the project book in the aughts and the 2010s that we’re seeing a lot less of now. There was a while where poetry collections were just collections of the poems and then we moved to this idea of the book: what does the book want to say and what constitutes a book of poems? Now the pendulum swings again and there’s some resistance to the project. For me, I feel both sides a little bit. I want each book to have a life of its own within it, a complete world, a sense of belonging between the poems that meditate on a narrative theme. There were a lot of poems that I cast aside from Brocken Spectre because they didn’t contribute to the goal of that work.

When I was selecting which poems to keep from the chapbook, I was thinking about which I felt would be complicated or expanded by the poems that didn’t speak directly with the AIDS crisis. The chapbook was a project book. It was very much focused on a historical moment and our vantage point of that historical moment, but this collection less so. I wanted to see what kind of interchange there could be. For example, how would a poem about my grandfather’s acquired trauma from World War II react next to a poem about saying my wedding vows twenty years after the height of the AIDS crisis?

Rumpus: We’re coming up on the end of Pride. You’ve previously said that your hope for the queer community is that “our art, which has never shied away from representing our true selves, can continue to come out and be embraced fully by a more open-minded, non-queer audience.” I see a potential tension here. When I think of Pride now, which has been so whitewashed and co-opted by capitalism for a straight public, where do we go from here? What possibilities do you see with queer art? Where do you hope things go?

Rancourt: It’s funny to think how much has changed since I gave that quote for that interview. It already feels different. It’s been one of the interesting things about being in my generation, watching the relationship of the capitalistic eye on queerness. I remember when Target became super edgy for including shirts with rainbows on them ten years ago. Now if you don’t have a rainbow product, you’re going to be lambasted. That shift has been very sudden.

Rumpus: Is there anything that scares you with your poems? Writing from marginal spaces, there’s the potential to be classified as a niche writer or to be censored. Are there ways you censor yourself?

Rancourt: The poems I’m writing now are scary for me, which I think is a sign these are the poems I should be writing. I need to lean into that. In the past, so many queer people had to talk about their queerness in a way that was digestible for the heterosexual community. As you mentioned with the whitewashing of Pride and such, so much of our progress has been a result of people fitting the mold to be deemed acceptable. It’s when the straight community can see, They’re just like us; they, too, want two kids, a dog, and a picket fence; now we can extend the same benefits to them, that’s been the trajectory of progress. Whereas I feel so much of the reality of the queer experience would not be as easily condoned.

Some of the new poems I’m writing, about the fluidity of love, fluidity of desire, fluidity of commitment and betrayal, and non-monogamy, those poems are exciting to me but feel dangerous in a way, too. Even if within the queer community that’s not a dangerous concept, it is [seen as such] by a larger community, which I think is changing as well, and rather quickly.

In terms of queer art, one thing that I’ve been happy to see is that more and more artists are writing unapologetically about queer desire and queer sex. That’s been something that I think is revolutionary, seeing these writers write graphically and beautifully about the truth of that experience. I hope that provides an open door for others. I think there are still a lot of spaces that we can explore that haven’t seen the light of publication for the queer community. We’re moving in the right direction. It’s exciting to watch.

***

Photograph of Jacques Rancourt courtesy of Jacques Rancourt.

In 2013, while dredging around Joe Leary Slough in Bow, Washington, two farmers discovered an abnormally large rootwad rising from the mud along their property. Near the stump, they unearthed a tree weighing over fourteen thousand pounds. Scientists estimated that a landslide, or some other dramatic geological event, knocked the tree down, sealing it in water and layered muck for twenty-three hundred years.

The same year the farmers discovered the pickled tree, I came out to my parents over a video call. My father stood quietly behind my sister and mother, drinking whiskey in the background. On the other side of my laptop, my partner, C, sat cross legged, smiling at me encouragingly. Early on in our relationship, they suggested that the secrecy of my identity made them feel unsafe. Telling my family, for them, was a way of asserting that my queerness—and our relationship—was not a phase. Studying my family’s faces, my stomach turning, I said loudly, I’m gay, with more certainty or confidence than I felt. The news disrupted the screen. Or I was the disruption, watching them. Nobody knew how to hold themselves.

Joe Leary Slough runs orange between neat fields of crops in Mount Vernon, Washington. People call it a manure canal because of its appearance, and because it absorbs cattle runoff. On the edge of my grandparents’ tulip farm where they hosted large yearly festivals, the slough was always bubbling but stagnant. Absent of animals. My sister and I tossed in rocks and sticks, watching the white of its clay spool up. Our grandparents ran the festival each April. When the crowds receded, my sister and I took turns hiding between thousands of flowers, quiet, running to find each other. Our knees and backs coated in cracked, bright mud.

At my age, my mother thought about becoming a nun. She tells me this shortly after I say I think I might be a lesbian. At her elementary school, Immaculate Conception, she was struck across the knuckles, shoulders, and legs with wooden rulers for making simple mistakes in math and spelling. All of her teachers were nuns.

J, my most serious girlfriend, was majoring in environmental science when we met. She came regularly to the coffee shop where I worked. Eventually, she knocked on the glass to get my number while I mopped dirt that always accumulated at the doorway. For two weeks, I thought of her constantly but rarely texted her back—a game I felt was necessary to keep her interested.

Once, she waited so long for me to write back that she missed the opportunity to monitor a lost seal pup in the bay. Frustrated, she wrote, I’m sorry, but you’re not worth the wait. I was still accustomed to the casual cruelty necessitated by dating men, or people who I conceived to have more power than I did.

After the tree was lifted from the slough, scientists cut into cross sections, “cookies,” to be studied by students at the university where J and I went to school. The tree came from 300 BC, around the time Alexander the Great passed away. Sawed open, the tree’s exposed wood oxidized. Within twenty minutes a staining fungus began to feed off the newly exposed proteins, starches, and fats stored in the ancient sapwood, turning it blue.

After the pup incident, J said she would forgive me if I pretended to be a biology student so I could accompany her to a seal necropsy. That way, she joked, you can make up for what I missed while I waited for you to stop pretending you weren’t interested in me. In a professor’s backyard, the seal carcass lay flat across a large plank of wood. Assuming I was trained in dissection, he instructed me to cut a line down the animal’s chest with a kitchen knife, exposing a thick layer of white blubber. He suspected it was murdered by fishermen, so we looked for lodged bullets, or signs that it had been clubbed. I pushed its brain through a strainer into a bowl of water, waiting for the clink of fallen metal. When all the meat pushed through and there was no bullet, I felt I had done something wrong. The stink—like garbage, body odor, and seaweed—coiled deeply into the fabric of my clothes.

Every summer, my sister and I were terrified by the sight of dead trees at the base of a lake in the Cascade Mountains. The logs hung under the surface, as if on a fishing line, with one side lifted towards the surface. Coated in loose slime, they reminded us of cartoon ghost pirate ships. We tried not looking down, creating a mental map of where to not to swim. But the trees, unless we kept our eyes on them, somehow always snagged our shins.

You’re not gay; you just had a bad experience that has temporarily changed your relationship to sex, my therapist said. I frowned. The statement felt implausible to me. I think I said no. I think I argued, but I was eighteen then, so familiar with being told that what I associated with identity might actually be imposed by social pressures and, as a result, not to be trusted. My feet folded up under my body. When I was in high school, a man fell more in love with himself through our interactions. Unfortunately, I actually loved him, which complicated the aftermath of him forcing himself on me.

Two years later, he apologized for raping me. We were sitting at a diner outside town. I remember thinking it was weird that he ordered turkey. He said, I wanted the part of you only one person can have. I cherished this confession. It shielded me from panic, from self-deprecation. Whenever those memories resurfaced, I held them within a wrong, flattering context. I would think: what happened happened because he loved me beyond his moral limits.

I never asked my mother what parallels she drew between identifying as a lesbian and choosing to be a nun. When she said this to me, I thought the comparison was funny, and I regret that I left it there, never asking her about it. Maybe at my age she was queer herself and felt joining a covenant was her only option. More than that, I think, because of my mother’s strength, she was trying to say she had also considered how to take agency over her experiences with trauma. As if by becoming the thing that shattered and determined so much of her childhood, she could not experience the same pain.

But, as I assume would also have been the case for her if my mother had become a nun, my queerness has not protected me. If anything, it introduces me to other, complicated forms of sexual violence. I still try daily not to connect my sexual identity with rape. The joy I experience in my queerness has always felt like an expression of agency independent from but connected to all of the other parts of me.

In 2015, J and other students studied the rings and chemical components of their own cookie at the university. After, the bark was covered in resin and set in a lobby between labs and classrooms. At this point, she’d met every member of my extended family. For months, I heard many of them dodge the subject of our relationship, or reflexively refer to her as my friend. It always hurt, but I learned many ways of rationalizing and finding patience for this. When the local newspaper took a photo of her and another woman crouched beside this famous disk of wood, it gave my relatives local status. They began proudly calling her my partner, even when I wasn’t present. For the rural community they lived in, finding this preserved tree was a notable historic event.

In the last conversation I had with my grandfather, he said he hoped, before he passed, to see me walk down an aisle wearing a white dress. We were eating smoked salmon on crackers, leaned against a wall in their kitchen. I went home angry. I knew him meeting my partner at the time—a straight man—signaled that queerness had been a phase for me. Of course, he could have also been trying to say that he hoped to see me settled and happy, regardless of who I was with. Maybe he understood, even if he couldn’t articulate it, that my identity was fluid, not changing.

Every year after the successful bulbs are dug up, swans drop to tear the remaining roots and worms from each turned field in Mount Vernon. Their breasts coated in grey sludge, the birds honk like trombones, jogging awkwardly before taking off.

I don’t know who in my family knows that I am a survivor. That, weeks after it happened, he asked me to meet him at Taneum Creek. A place between our houses. The place where I got my name, where I was conceived. This is how I was raped twice by the same person: I pulled my car beside his in a parking lot, hoping he would say he loved me. The problem with a name is like the problem of metaphor. When subjects conflate, they can eclipse each other. He followed me home after I pushed him out of my car, his headlights filling the rearview mirror. I didn’t feel like a victim; I felt like a representation of rape. An insect coiled at the center of who I was, surrounding itself with a grassy webbing.

A friend calls and asks how I define queer memory. Not memories of queerness, she clarifies, I mean queer memory. The leaves of a houseplant like four fingers on her screen. I am skeptical of assigning the word “queer” to anything outside identity, but where do we categorize memory? At this point, on this day, my brain wants to conflate queerness and trauma, and does so while I scrape around for an answer to her question. When I think of traumatic memory, I think of events that are difficult to access or relive because of how attached they’ve become in my mind with other things. A nonsensical layering where objects, people, places become synonymous with assault. Like traumatic memory, queer memory is memory that resists linearity, building instead on interconnection that opposes a traditional view of time.

Queerness and surviving assault are both parts of myself I’ve felt forced to bury for the sake of the people in my life. I can chart where they’ve spilled into each other, like when J said she worried she was a stepping stone in my recovery process after assault, as if once I stopped having panic attacks I would revert back to dating men. Now, after I was so recently engaged to a man, my queerness feels concealed. I don’t know how to show it; it is still one of the most important parts of who I am.

In Bow, one slab of the pickled tree has been cut and sanded into a small table. It stands at the center of a gallery, collecting window light. The wood is soft and easily scratched. The rings run tiredly off its sides, like ridges in beach sand. A fossil. A body. A message from a recovered life. I cannot fathom that I am allowed to touch it with my bare hands, remembering how we ran out of napkins eating our breakfast at a busy restaurant down the street. I feel remorse in this proximity, as if being faced by my own perception of what it means to honor something.

***

Rumpus original art by Teresa M. Beatty.