 You recently published Bloodstream with Mercer University Press—congratulations! How did this book come to be? Could you talk a bit about the title and lovely cover image? Thank you! This book came together fairly quickly in the summer of 2024 after a conversation I had with a longtime poet friend of mine, William Woolfitt. We had been talking about my debut full-length collection, The Grief Committee Minutes, which I’d just received a contract offer for from Saint Julian Press. At some point in the conversation, Will came up with “a crazy idea,” as he put it, which turned out to not be so crazy after all. We’d been talking about various themes I’d touched on in the poems I’ve written over time, and he suggested the possibility of a second manuscript that combined new work with older work I’d published some years before in my two previous chapbooks. Will was such a huge help to me; he helped me select many of the poems I ended up including in the book. I can’t overstate how incredibly valuable his time and his editorial expertise were in bringing Bloodstream to fruition. He even helped me title it! The theme of ancestral inheritances is strong in the book, along with the constant pulsing of the self as it evolves. I was having trouble coming up with a title, and asked Will for his ideas. When he threw out Bloodstream, I knew that was it. By the fall, I had submitted the finished manuscript to Mercer University Press, which accepted it for publication a few months later. That meant my first collection and Bloodstream were only 17 months apart, which has kept me on my toes. But I know how lucky I am. As for the cover, Mercer works with a husband-wife design team on all of their books. The designer who read Bloodstream arrived at the concept of a passion flower because that’s an image in my poem, “Consistency,” and also seemed to mesh nicely with the nature and scientific overtones in the book. I was quite impressed when I learned the thought process behind their selection, and couldn’t be happier with how the final cover turned out. In a beautiful opening poem, "Anchorage," you write, "Where we come from / doesn't ordain what we cling to." Could you speak a bit to where you come from? And what anchors you? I love this question. I actually return to it a lot in my own head: where do I come from, and what’s the “holdfast” in my life? I think the most honest answer I can give is that I live in — and am anchored to — both story and memory, my own and those of others. I come from loving but complicated parents who gave me the best of themselves, to the best of their abilities, as they did my sisters. I’m held, even now, knowing I was loved and appreciated as a kid, and that I had parents who believed in me and encouraged me to be my own person. There was no “do this” or “be that.” While I know my parents sensed my desire for independence even before I left for college, they always were supportive of the decisions I made, and understanding when those decisions turned out to not be the best ones. I hold closely my ideas of home, as shifting as they can be. Home for me is a nesting assortment of places. Home is rooms, within my house, within my neighborhood, within my city within my state, within the broader South. Home is also wherever I find my family, who anchor me even more with their stories and memories. Home is the familiar; home is my dog. To all of these things, I feel deeply attached. At the same time, I am ever-conscious of life’s fluidity and the importance of not holding too tightly to the past as one moves through life. It’s a constant tension. An editor who read Bloodstream in its later stages told me that one of her takeaways was that the poems themselves were like rooms within rooms, spaces within spaces. Physical locations from houses and regions, but also selves within selves existing and moving to and from these spaces. I thought that was a keen insight, and it helped me think about the book as a whole in a different way. How have living in Florida and North Carolina influenced your poems? My own origin story starts in North Carolina. My parents met in college there, and my father got his first job out of divinity school as a chaplain at Catawba College in Salisbury, where I was born and spent the first three years of my life. My mom had strong ancestry in North Carolina on both of her parents’ sides. She was born and grew up in Miami, where her parents had moved during the depression. As an only child, she felt especially close to her N.C. cousins, whom she would see every summer during trips back to the family homestead in Mount Gilead. I’ve always been fascinated by the family stories and ancestral threads that weave through North Carolina, and frequently return to those in my poems. My dad was a mid-Westerner who grew up in Indiana. Unfortunately, because of the distance, I was not able to know my paternal grandparents or his side of my ancestral tree as well as my mother’s. I just never spent any significant time in Indiana, so I can’t channel that area in the same way I do North Carolina and Florida, where I actually lived. I grew up in Tallahassee and have been in Gainesville now for 36 years. All of which is to say: Florida is really my backyard! The wildlife, flora and fauna of Florida are intimately familiar to me as part of the environment I’ve been immersed in for nearly all of my adult life. I’ve written often about the ways in which this environment has changed due to ever-increasing development and commercialization, and the ways witnessing those changes has affected me. You write, "In the thinned old forest, / I draw breath from toes / to gut, lungs to throat, all the way up, / claiming my brief space on earth, / like any native of this world." What has the process of claiming your space here on earth been like for you? Growing older, the awareness of mortality creeps up on you. I just know I want to make a mark in some way in the small space I occupy. I’ll always claim my family, my beloveds, including the animals I’ve loved and lost, as parts of me I will carry until I die. As my personal losses accumulate in older age, I’ve found myself increasingly obsessed with making the time I have here on earth count. I think a lot about memory and how I might witness to whatever in my life feels meaningful. I try to feel grounded in nature and the environment, but it’s difficult to watch the increasing commercialization of wild spaces, which is a thing in so much of Florida (and elsewhere) right now, and only getting worse in our present political environment, where land and species protections are being cut everywhere in the name of development. My awareness and alarm at environmental changes in my state has sharpened in recent years, and I’m still wrestling with how (and if) my actions can effect meaningful change. But I do find peace in nature, and inspiration in comeback stories! I’m reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer right now. One of the key things she talks about is how it’s still possible to claim “belonging” in the sense of being a part of the earth in a shared relationship of mutual care, as opposed to the Western capitalist view of “belongings” as possessions. I’ve thought a lot about that recently. In my ideal world, others I care about will claim me as I claim them, and the world I occupy and plant myself in will also claim me reciprocally because I somehow am able to give back to it. Could you share a bit about how you honor and write about "your cherished animal companions" who are part of your dedication and in so many of your poems? As just one example, in "The Heart Contracts," you write so lovingly of Max, your dog companion: "...in a few days, he'll return to chasing crows, I tell myself, and with this hope, I let him go wherever life may lead, squeeze myself tight in the space between bided time and eternity, where our hearts both beat. In between our breaths, I believe." Thank you for acknowledging my animal poems! Max is definitely a recurring character in Bloodstream, as he has been for many years in my consciousness. I got him as a puppy in the early 1990s, and only had him for eight years. But those years were pivotal in my life for many reasons. In his last two months of life, he developed a rare heart condition. “The Heart Contracts” tries to capture some of the rollercoaster emotions I still associate with his trips to the University of Florida Small Animal Hospital, where I took him for care. While we were able to get his condition under control, Max ended up dying tragically in an accident a short time later. That was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever been through in my life. I remember every detail of what happened as if it was yesterday. As a person with no kids of my own, my pets, specifically my dogs, have held a unique place in my life and have provided a comfort and a stability that I am ever mindful of. I wrote my “dog poems” and other animal poems in Bloodstream as a way to help me remember and document their stories, as well as the history I shared with them. A duplex poem I wrote about my current dog, Finn, recently won a poetry contest (the 2026 Sweet Lit poetry contest), but up until then, only one literary journal ever published any of the poems I wrote about my dogs. I used to feel like there was a certain bias in poetry circles against poems about pets, but Mark Doty & Linda Pastan have written wonderful poems about dogs, and their work inspires me. I just know that the animal poems in Bloodstream felt necessary to me. I’d like to think readers who encounter them will feel the same. In the final stanza of "I Revisit My Father's Rooms in Anchorage," a beautiful portrait of your aging father, you write, "Hear Father translate nostalgia from Greek roots: return home and pain." In another poem, you write about caring for your mother, wondering "what we might provide to cushion the blow of the move" to an assisted living apartment. Could you speak a bit to writing about memories, aging, and loss? Sometimes I feel like that poet who writes the same poem over and over! No matter where I start in a poem, or what its ostensible subject matter is, I always end up feeling like memory, aging and loss all inevitably show up in some manner. I’ve written many poems about my parents over the years, probably because as I seek to understand myself and the world around me better in later life, I frequently look back to who they were as people and the choices they made. In many cases, these choices affected my life and who I would become as a person. I imagine (and reimagine) who they were by revisiting their correspondence, their effects, specific things they gave me, many of which surround me in my home. I’ve also done research via Ancestry and Newspapers.com, which has an incredible array of documents and old clippings I’d never find elsewhere. The whole concept of roots in its many definitions intrigues me. I’m currently working on several poems that explore roots, not only from the genetic/physiological/ancestral perspective, but from environmental/ecological perspectives as well. I’m also looking more closely at the roots of certain words, such as the one you reference in “I Revisit My Father’s Rooms in Anchorage.” The process of aging has opened fresh channels to memory and to my understanding of loss, as well as change and how we adapt to it. For that reason, while I’m sure I’ll continue to return to many of the same themes in my poems, I’m hopeful that I can expand the ways I write about them. Did you always know you wanted to write? As far back as I can remember, yes. When I was a young child, I wrote stories, mostly about my family and horses! I definitely kept journals as I grew into my teenage years, but those were more accountings of my day-to-day life and crushes I had on various boys! I only seriously started writing poetry consistently when I was in college. I had my first poem accepted for publication at the Florida Review when I was 24, just after finishing graduate school. How did you balance your writing with journalism and working in communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine? How do you feel your professional life influenced your poetry? Did you consciously choose to not enter the world of teaching and academia as so many writers and poets do? As I approached getting my master’s degree in English with a creative writing concentration from Florida State University, I knew I didn’t want to teach. That would likely have meant pursuing a Ph.D., and I wasn’t interested in doing that, for a few reasons. I wanted to get a job that would let me write, and I was not an outstanding student. Getting that degree was a good thing for other reasons, but I did not love being in school. The job interviews I remember were mostly for writing positions of some kind, and even though I was from Tallahassee and had some connections, I didn’t get a single offer. I started working for the FSU student newspaper and was able to build a collection of clips I used to market myself as a journalist at small weekly newspapers. I ended up as the editor for the weekly Gadsden County Times in Quincy. It was my first “real” professional job in the sense of giving me what felt at the time like a lot of agency and independence. After five years, I was ready to move on. I applied for and got a job as editor of a citrus trade magazine I had freelanced for. Two years later, I arrived at UF when I took a job leading communications at the UF veterinary college. I wrote a lot of stories about animal patient successes and research discoveries that advanced animal and human health, and I’ve always thought of myself as a storyteller, which is reflected in my poetry as well; many of my poems have a strong narrative thread. Although I didn’t write many poems directly about my vet school work, a relatively recent poem I wrote a few years ago did end up in Bloodstream: “Friesian Story,” which was inspired by a piece I’d written about a horse with a bad case of colic that the UF equine surgeons were able to save. I do feel that my exposure to the science of veterinary medicine and animal health made me more sensitive to animals and nature in general. I obviously write often about animals and about naturem and there’s a scientific thread that weaves through many of my poems. Who are some of the writers or books you hold most dear? There are so many excellent poets out there, and I read mostly books by contemporary women poets, often by people I know or hear about from other writers. I feel strongly about buying and reading other poets’ work, and when I can, I like to review other poets’ books as well. There’s not any one specific book I turn to for inspiration, but do often recommend Mary Oliver and Ada Limons’ work to people new to poetry. I’m crazy about anything Maggie Smith writes, and her “Good Bones” poem is one I’ll never tire of. I have several books that I am currently reading that deal with the process of writing; The Poet’s Companion, edited by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, Poetry’s Possible Worlds by Lesley Wheeler, and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver. After I retired, I joined a book club, and its offerings are entirely fiction and non-fiction. I also joined the First Editions Club at The Lynx bookstore here in Gainesville, and consequently have read more fiction in the past year than I can ever remember reading before! In addition to poetry, I really love good fiction and discovering new writers. I always have several books going at one time. I’ve been on an Ann Patchett jag recently and I’m currently reading So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as a mystery by Walter Moseley and the Odyssey, which I somehow never read in school. Three books I read this past year that I absolutely loved, all very different, were Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, James by Percival Everett and Mule Boy by Andrew Spivak. How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world? I’ve gotten better over time about sensing when a poem is ready to send out, but I’m a constant reviser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to poems, even those circulating among various literary journals, and made tweaks to them. Very recently, I had a poem accepted by a journal I’ve been sending to unsuccessfully for years. In the eight months or so that had gone by since I first submitted, I’d revised it. When I learned of my acceptance, I asked the editor if he would consider taking the updated version. He agreed, but I’ve asked the same thing of other editors who ended up preferring the original versions. So, I guess it works out the way it’s supposed to; many of the poems I’ve published that have wound up in my collections were revised extensively from the point at which they were first written or published in a journal. I think I’m better at sensing when a poem is not ready than I am at understanding when it is! However, I won’t send a poem out just because I’ve finally given up on making it better. I’ll send it out when it feels as finished as I am able to make it at the time and feel comfortable that it’s doing all or most of what I want for it to do. What is your writing and editing process like? It’s never the same, but I rarely nail a poem on the first few attempts. Many of the poems I’ve written that have ended up being published were written many years ago, even decades ago! Some poems do emerge more quickly than others, but in general, my poems are in the works and in revision for a long time before I feel comfortable enough with them to send them out. When I was younger, I was terrible about taking my time with poems. My former professor, Van Brock, used to say, “Revise, revise, revise!” I was impatient, and it showed. When I’m lacking for inspiration, a practice that has worked well for me is to return to very old poems that never went anywhere, or I gave up on — poems that live in my “dead files,” as I call them — and try to look at them with fresh eyes. I try to summon what I might have been thinking of at the time I first sat to write that particular poem. Then I might ask myself what, if any, concerns that poem wrestles with seem relevant to me today. Somehow the stakes seem lower when I’m taking old poems and playing with them in revision. I do think the element of play is important as well. Not everything has to be profound and deep, particularly as a poem is taking shape and I allow myself the freedom to allow more word play and experimentation. What the poem is doing or trying to do or say is important, but I think putting too many conditions and “requirements” for craft excellence at the very beginning especially is a mistake. Do you have any favorite writing habits or rituals? I have an actual office in my house, but my functional office is our family room, where I lie on my couch with my laptop facing our porch and the bird feeder. We have a “bird cam” that I often have open on my computer so I can give myself frequent breaks and stare mindlessly at birds while I’m working. It’s so relaxing and helps me tune out the noise, whatever the noise happens to be on that day. I’ve never been a write-every-day person, but I try to do something poetry-related every day, whether it’s reading another poet’s work or sending out submissions. One favorite ritual I have is using a really nice pen for book signings! I have a few, including a Mont Blanc rollerball that I bought years ago as a present to myself and use only for special occasions like signing books and publication contracts. I always take a couple of good pens with me to signing events in case one runs out of ink! What do you hope readers will take away from your writing? Do you have an overarching aesthetic, artist statement, or ethos? I hope readers will see their own lives and situations in my poems. The highest compliment for me is when someone points to a specific line or poem and tells me how and why it resonated with them. Someone told me once, “I know exactly what you meant when you wrote about your mother finger-walking walls (because of her poor eyesight), because my mother used to do the same thing.” The poems that resonate most strongly with me make me want to be a better observer of nature and of humankind, and make me want to be a kinder and more loving person, not just to people and non-human animals, but to the environment. I would love it if my poems had a similar effect on readers. What are you currently working on? I mentioned earlier that I’ve been working on several poems recently that explore the many definitions of roots. I’m also beginning to envision a third collection, but I’m taking my time. Two books coming out within 17 months of each other has been exciting but exhausting, and I want my vision for any next book to be something I can clearly articulate. Right now, I’m thinking that my next collection will explore more deeply the concept of roots in its many manifestations, including environmental/ecological in addition to biological. But we’ll see! Do you have any advice for young writers? Read, as much and as widely as possible. Don’t limit yourself to poetry; read whatever keeps you reading late into the night. There’s reading for knowledge and reading for joy, and you can have both! Not every writer will you love, but you’ll still benefit by expanding your understanding of perspective and what other writers today, and in the past, have done to explore their personal worlds and the times in which they lived. It took me a long time before I began to understand and trust my own voice, and it’s something I’ll probably always work on. Writing is a long game, and one you’ll always be learning from if you commit to it. I always like to keep a few “how to” or advice handbooks around to turn to for inspiration, even if I’m only reading a few pages or a short chapter, to remind myself of the gift that poetry is, and the importance of not giving up. Do you have any life advice in general? You’re stronger and smarter than you think you are. I have learned over time that I grew the most from some of the most vivid disappointments I’ve experienced. Give yourself grace when you fail, and recognize that figuring out who you are and what matters most to you can be a long process. I’m not sure there’s really an end-point, either. But don’t be afraid to take risks in your life, and recognize that risk does not always announce itself with a capital “R.” Sometimes even seemingly small actions that take us out of our comfort zone can prove to be rewarding in ways you would never expect. Find your people! Building connection with others who share your passion is so important. Whether that connection is with one or two people you trust and can talk to, a small group, or a larger circle, knowing you’re not alone in the dilemmas you face as you pursue your passion can make a world of difference in sustaining the momentum you need to keep going. Try not to compare yourself to others who are pursuing the same passion that you are, especially when those others seem to be achieving things you’re not — winning the contests, publishing in the journals you hope for, getting books out there when you’ve been circulating your manuscript for years, receiving reviews and invitations you never did, etc. I know; it’s easy to say this, and difficult not to feel those pangs of envy at times. But we all need to try to lift each other up. It feels better to do that than to be bitter, and remember that the people you’re lifting up will likely remember those who cheered them on, and will be right there in your corner returning the favor when your successes come. And they will come, if you don’t give up.
Comments are closed.
|
Search Site |
Follow Us |