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| Cover Art/Arrangement: Berly Brown and Kristy Bowen |
Mourning becomes eloquent elegy in Sarah A. Chavez’s All Day, Talking. The narrator, in this tightly woven
collection of poems, grieves within vivid memories of her Carole. These poems bring readers into an intimacy
between two people and between an individual and her world as it was. La Bloga
is fortunate today to have Sarah A. Chavez tell us more about All Day, Talking.
Thank
you so much for being with us today, Sarah. Your chapbook, All Day, Talking
is a collection of poems that hits the heart with deep loss. How did this collection come about? Did you write one poem that became two,
three, and suddenly you knew it would be a manuscript, or was it more planned?
Thank you,
Amelia, for your thoughtful questions and interest in the chapbook. I read La
Bloga often and am thrilled to be included here. This chapbook
came about sort of accidentally. It was in my second semester of graduate
school, in Grace Bauer’s Poetic Forms workshop and one of the first assignments
was to pick a poetic form from the text we were reading and write a poem to
turn in. I wasn’t entirely interested in taking a forms workshop, but I was
very interested in working with Grace, so I was a bit resistant in the
beginning. In fact, the first “Dear Carole” poem was born a little out of
laziness, frustration, and a feeling of isolation. Flipping through the text, I
came across the section on epistles and thought that’d be easy: no syllabic
count, no line restrictions. But then I wasn’t sure who to write to. I didn’t
have access to a car at that point and got around by walking and taking the bus
or riding my bike, and used that time to think, but mostly during those times
my thoughts were filled with questions like what the hell am I doing in a PhD
program? What am I doing so far from California? I felt a bit overwhelmed and
out of place, fresh from a visit home where my working-class family (most of
whom didn’t go to college at all, let alone consider graduate school) had been
commenting on how different I was after going to grad school, how much I’d
changed. I wasn’t like them anymore. But when I was in classes, I wasn’t like
my colleagues either. So many of them came from middle and upper-middle class
homes, had a mono-cultural upbringing, parents with white-collar jobs, and so
many of them had family who were professors or artists; they had a toe-hold in
this world. They were new to grad school, but not to the academic environment.
They understood the etiquette, the unspoken rules of décor that I was only
just, very slowly getting keyed into. I felt like an outsider in both worlds,
and experienced resistance and dismissal the few times I tried talking about
it.
Working
out ideas and talking to loved ones who weren’t physically around, particularly
a few who had passed on before I moved out of California was not a new practice, it
became one I engaged in more frequently during this time. It was in the midst
of one of those moments when I was complaining in my head to Carole about not
knowing what to write that I got the idea to write my epistle to her. The poem
was received well in workshop, and I didn’t think any more about it, until one
day I wrote another one. I hadn’t set out to do that, it felt like it just
happened. Then I wrote another one. It was as if the first poem was a fissure
in the dam, and the second one a hole broken through, until they all came
flooding out.
You
are taking the elegy form and making interesting moves with each poem. Examples:
“Dear Carole, It’s Dia de los
Muertos,” or “Dear Carole, For Hours It’s Been Burning,” and also, “Dear
Carole, I think I’m going to Start Publishing These Letters.” Tell us about
these moves.
I’ve often felt
troubled by the conventional ways in which society is encouraged to speak well about
the dead, and in turn the expectation of many traditional elegies which elevate
memories of the dead. People who were petty in their earthly life are treated
as if they were generous, or someone who was a shitty parent is lauded as a
loving mother. The convention is to celebrate the person who has died, but it
seems to come at the cost of the honest facts of who they were. No one is only
one thing. Hardly anyone (if anyone) is all good. I understand the argument
against remembering the negative characteristics of a person who has passed,
but to ignore those aspects of their lived existence is to ignore the real
person, to ignore parts of that relationship. The way I see it, the best thing
about loving someone deeply is knowing that even when you mess up, they will
still love you. The good times are amplified when held against the bad and
frankly, in much of my life, the two are so intimately intertwined, I wouldn’t
know where to begin pulling them apart. We also tend to think of interactons
with the dead as something special, something reserved for holidays, or late at
night when we are alone, but who’s to say they are not always here. Again, it’s
the everyday mundanity, the ordinary that I find most interesting. That’s in
part where “Dear Carole, It’s Dia de los Muertos” or “Dear Carole, For Hours
It’s Been Burning,” comes from. The small things in life become how someone
stays in our hearts. It’s not necessarily the grand gesture, but remembering a
habit, a favorite food – like the mini Hostess donuts –, an act that at the
time seems normal and boring – like sharing cheap pizza –, but under
contemplation was a clear sign of love and understanding. I wanted these poems
to reflect what I see to be a more relatable elegy, one that considers the
multiplicity of the person.
I’m also
interested in the intangibility of loss and ultimately of death, and the elegy
is the perfect form/genre to explore this. When someone dies, their body is no
longer physically there, but their body isn’t physically with you when you live
in different states either. It sounds dumb, but in a way, how do we know
someone is dead? Because someone tells us? We read an obituary? It’s so ethereal,
in some ways the knowledge so theoretical. Grief is so tangible though, chokes
the throat, clenches the stomach, burns the eyes. It’s hard for me to negotiate
the mind-fuck of death’s uncertainty, while mitigating the very corporeal pain
of grief. In a way these elegies are the speaker grappling with that concept of
loss. It’s particularly surreal when you don’t see the body, you didn’t see the
person sick, didn’t watch them get buried. How do you know for sure? In some
ways the letters from the speaker are reluctant elegies. The loss is real, but
she can’t conceptualize Carole’s death. The ghost of loss omnipresent.
From a more
structural, craft-specific standpoint, the elegies are ordered intentionally to build
in intensity. A poem like “Dear Carole, It’s Dia de los Muertos” is
light-hearted, sort of funny; the speaker glib about the altar she’s built and
the ghost she’s not sure she’s haunted by. As the collection progresses though,
the feelings of loss become stronger, more clear, more real. “Dear Carole, I
think I’m going to Start Publishing These Letters” is representative of a last
desperate refusal of death’s finality.
In
these poems you take us to a geographic area that is more overlooked than
written about: Fresno, California. Why Fresno?
Why Fresno,
indeed! Partly because I grew up there and know it very well. It’s funny
really, when I was in high school and college, I spent so much time thinking
about leaving and then once I did leave, I couldn’t stop thinking about my life
there. Fresno is a strange place in large part because of its central location
in the state and connection to corporate agriculture. It’s a city of over half
a million people, the fifth largest in the entire state, and yet in certain
parts of the city you’ll encounter a small-town mentality, a kind of
conservatism that doesn’t jive with the demographic as a whole. Fiscally, it’s
a fascinating place as well. Underemployment is high, and there are millionaire farm owners living a mile
from impoverished undocumented workers, Silicon Valley moguls taking advantage
of the cheaper property who commute a few times a week living just blocks down
from a dishwasher making minimum wage at a local café. It’s also one of the
most ethnically diverse cities in the country which causes both environments of
incredible generosity and acceptance and environments of extreme racism and
hate. There is a lot of anger that lives under the surface of the asphalt which
can get under a person’s skin. This is also due in part to the historical
oppression of Mexicans and Native Americans in the area that is shockingly still
active even while the city’s population has become a majority minority and
people of color are more and more becoming prominent business owners and
politicians. It’s this bipolarness, this mixing that makes it such an
interesting place. Though I couldn’t see it at the time (and would have hated
to acknowledge it, if I did), I am very much a product of Fresno’s environment,
its mestizaje and conflict, its work ethic. Fresno is like the hard-working
cousin to LA’s flashy Hollywood and San Francisco’s bohemian artistry. It might
not be fancy, it might not look pretty, but Fresno gets the job done. It’s what
I love about it.
Literarily, I
was also interested in telling Central Valley stories from the perspective of
women. There are so many amazing writers who have come from Fresno, but the
ones most people know are men and their writing focuses on men or on women
through the male gaze. I’m interested in sharing the ways females navigate this
same strange, rough space.
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| Sarah A. Chavez giving a reading in Indiana (photo by Adam Wagler) |
What
is your writing ritual? And what was it,
specifically, for this chapbook?
I know what I
wish my ritual was – consistent and structured. There are so many writers
(including Julia Alvarez and Ted Kooser, two people whose writing I very much
admire) who get up extra early in the morning, go straight to the computer and
write for hours before getting on with their day. Maybe they always get their
cup of coffee or make sure to have their favorite pen laid out on the desk near
the computer, sort of ceremonial. That stability appeals to me greatly, but in
practice, my writing habits are the opposite; it’s almost as if my ritual is to
deny ritual. I write like a scavenger, picking up everything I can when I can,
wherever I am. Particularly when working on the poems for All Day, Talking, I was often in transit. I got a good deal of it
done on the bus, letting the drone of the sound system blend with the
conversations happening around me, creating a sort of white noise bubble. Sometimes
I stopped mid-ride on my way somewhere, pulled my bike over to the side of the
path, got out a notebook, and sat in the grass. I guess maybe my writing ritual
is actually physical movement, like when my arms and legs are in motion, it
jars loose the thoughts and memories. And I suppose that makes sense since poetry
writing in particular has always felt visceral for me, carnal rather than an
exercise of the intellect. Of course revising and ordering poems can’t function
that way. That requires more steadied and disciplined work.
Even
though your poems are specifically to “Carole,” they feel very universal as if
the reader is also the letter writer. It
makes it quite intimate. Did you
initially intend to do this?
That is
wonderful to hear! Thank you. It was not my initial intention, but this outcome
further solidifies for me a lesson I teach my creative writing students about
specificity. The more specific you can be to your truth – whatever that looks
like for you and your characters – the more engaged the reader will be. When we
try to anticipate what an audience might “relate” to (a word that has become
the bane of my literature and creative writing intro classes), we miss the
mark, because the details are the vehicle to the abstraction at the heart of
most writing. If the vehicle is whole and functions, then you’ll get to where
you want/need to go. My initial conception of these poems was that they felt so
personal to me, I wasn’t sure they would translate to a larger audience. It
makes me happy to be able to share this intimacy with the reader.
There
is also breathing between poems. You’ll
have a long piece and then a very short, one-line poem. It seems to encourage the reader to stop and
contemplate further or stay in the moment.
Yes?
Absolutely. With
collecting these poems and having them come one after another, I was concerned the
experience would be overwhelming (as it sometimes had been for me). The letters
come from moments when the speaker has allowed herself (or been emotionally
compelled) to stop and try to translate and negotiate her complicated feelings
in the midst of material changes. You
have to slow down to write a letter, especially if they are, as I conceive of
them, handwritten. As well, I didn’t want the collection to only be long, sad
narratives. I think that denies a more realistic texture to the narrative arc.
For the chapbook to mirror a natural progression of grief, it needed to have a
few fits and starts.
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| Photo by Adam Wagler |
What
is your next project/manuscript of poems you are working on now?
I have a few
projects I’m working on currently, one being a full-length manuscript of “Dear
Carole” poems. I thought once the chapbook was published I would be done
writing these, but that has not been the case. If anything, afterward, and
especially while I was doing a couple mini DIY reading tours for the chapbook, the
poems came to me more insistently and they just kept adding up. The manuscript,
which is pretty much in the editing and organizing stage, is currently titled This Dark Shining Thing, which is in
homage to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “that dark shining thing.” Sections of it kept
coming back to me as I wrote, particularly the last three lines of the poem and
one stanza from the middle: “I want to turn my back on you / wash my hands of
you / but my hands remember each seam / . . . each rock you tread on / as you
stumble I falter too / and I remember.” There is so much resistance and
conflict there that really spoke to me and this project.
The other
project I’ve been working on is a series of poems that reimagine the indigenous
myth of the turtle who carried the Earth. I’ve always loved turtles (desert
tortoises in particular, but most people use the terms tortoise and turtle
interchangeably), their slow steadiness, the sturdy design of their body. And
it’s actually that hard shell that allows for the myth; it’s Turtle’s physical and
spiritual fortitude that makes carrying the Earth possible. There should be
pride in that, but I also feel such sorrow for Turtle’s sacrifice. More land,
more space, more animals able to exist together was due to Turtle’s acceptance
of isolation. I began to think about Turtle’s agency and what life might have
been like before taking on that responsibility and what it might be like for
him to return to the earth and live now
in the 21st century. The first three poems in the Turtle series
(titled “When Turtle First Began to Carry the Earth”) were recently published in
the Summer 2015 issue of North Dakota Quarterly. I’m also working on making that first section into a chapbook.
Is
there something more you would like to share with La Bloga readers?
I do have some
very exciting things coming up in the next few months (aside from Halloween
& Dia de los Muertos, which are my favorite holidays). I’m the guest editor
for the November 2015 issue of Stirring: A Literary Collection, which has been a wonderful experience. I’m still in
the process of reading and selecting poems, but it’s looking like there will be
a compelling diversity of voices in the issue. I hope people will check it out.
http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/
Also in
November, the 14th actually, I’ll be reading at the Pittsburgh GlassCenter as part of the inaugural launch of the new literary journal Pittsburgh Poetry Review. It’s an
amazing line-up of writers, that I’m thrilled to be part of: https://www.facebook.com/Pittsburgh-Poetry-Review-133171997018261/timeline/
And the last
most exciting event before the end of the year is the Flor de Nopal Literary Festival in Austin, TX. curated by ire’ne lara silva. Friday, December 4th will be the featured reading and on
Saturday, the 5th I will be facilitating a community poetry writing
workshop titled “When all your antenna quiver, your body becomes a lightning
rod: Sensory Details & Writing From the Body.” https://www.facebook.com/flordenopallitfest?fref=ts
Thank you so much, Sarah!
Thank you so much, Sarah!
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| Photo by Sarah A. Chavez |
