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Q: We are living through extraordinary times right now. We’re in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. People across the globe are trying to halt the spread by social distancing. This is a tough question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Why should people care about poetry right now?
A: I would hope people are tending to their immediate safety and health first. But after that, I know there are a lot of folks wrestling with feelings of loneliness, isolation. We’re social creatures and thrive off of contact. Poetry is one way we continue to connect with one another, a bridge over the dark river. There’s a brilliant little poem about writing poetry by Sean Thomas Dougherty called “Why Bother?” It goes: “Because right now there is someone / Out there with / a wound in the exact shape / of your words.” I trust that. I’ve lived it. Right now, I’m reading more poetry than ever and find balm, solace, companionship. Words in the shape of my wounds.
Q: I’d like to turn now to talking about your book. We recently published your first full-length collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall. I noticed that there are several long pieces in this book that have “Mormon” in the title: “The Mormons Are Coming,” “Post-Mormons Are Leaving,” “Former Mormons Catechize Their Kids,” and “Still Mormon.” Can you tell us what prompted you to write this series?
A: I think one of the interesting things that happens when a person decides to leave Mormonism is that they go through an identity crisis. At least, that’s what happened to me. After thirty-three years of calling myself Mormon, here I was, an adult, and I didn’t know what kind of underwear to buy, let alone what to call myself. I wrote the “Mormon” series over the course of several years, and they appear in the book in the order that I wrote them. They progress from safety/comfort and faith crisis to an eventual, final reckoning that even though someone may discard orthodoxy, that person can still identify as Mormon in layered, complex ways. That’s where I sit now. I’ve come to the realization that even though I drink coffee and spend my Sundays running errands, canoeing, workshopping poetry, etc., I’m still deeply Mormon.
On a craft level, I wrote the first two pieces in the Mormon series after I came across Carole Maso’s “The Intercession of Saints” in John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay. Maso writes about Catholic saints, but it sparked me to think of a Latter-day Saint application. I’d heard from professional poets I admire that verbs are the most important part of a poem, but something about the radiant objects, the thing-ness of Maso’s work, grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. In my Mormon series, I allowed the verbs to be pretty weak (coming, leaving) while focusing in on resonant nouns that I hope will make images bloom in readers’ minds.
Q: It’s interesting that you mention nonfiction. We are publishing your book as poetry, but there are pieces in this collection that sidle up to prose.
A: Absolutely! I love writing that blurs genre, that exists in that hard-to-define in between. Lyric essays. Prose poetry. Some of these pieces I submitted to literary journals as prose and they ended up getting published as poetry (in one case, the editor went in and added line breaks!). The opposite happened, too. I would submit a piece as poetry, and it would be published as prose with the white space between lines deleted. It’s both frustrating and enormously satisfying to be pushing against boundaries and expectations of genre.
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