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Poetry feels like one of the few places where people are authentic these days. Do you feel that way? I do. Besides, words, meaning, craft is important and authentic as well. Sometimes it can be faux-authentic depending on how it plays on the page. As poets we are good actors, the challenge is the projection of the work representing thoughts and feelings. I try not to dwell on the mundane, unless I’m being playful with the day-to-day. You write: “Can you hear me at this distance / saying, I don’t need people / I can stay in my room. / But I don’t have to be that person anymore.” So much of writing is solitary and language can keep oneself company so well. How has the process of letting the world in more unfolded for you? I think that it is more of a metaphor for isolation, and the wondering if you are important or just a tree in the forest, so to speak. My isolation now is more to re-energize than anything else, not because I’m depressed. I appreciate my alone time, certainly stay busy, but this alone time is also for my spirituality and to stay “in tune.” I so appreciate the vulnerability in your poems. How do you decide how vulnerable to be? Or is anything a go? No decision to go or not go into vulnerability, but emotional vulnerable is one thing for my writing that is an open book. I may not wish to share innermost secrets but rather innermost thoughts. We are all vulnerable, whether we like it or not, but how that plays out, and how much you want to show is the key. As they say, “you MUST go there.” I think I must be vulnerable to be honest and take that leap because otherwise the extreme opposite can just be objects sitting on a shelf, which of course there is an art in that too. How do you decide whether something belongs in a prose piece or poem? Most likely, I decide before I even start what genre I’d like to produce, but maybe after the first two lines or sentences I can go the other way immediately if I see something in there. If it’s not that immediate then it’s going to be where it is at that moment, poetry or fiction, or recycle bin. You write in the Introduction to Best of Timothy Gager about having an ego for many years and then learning some humility. Could you talk a bit about this phenomenon of writers and ego? Well, we are all pretty much self-centered sons of bitches, aren’t we? It’s just a matter of reeling it in. Self-centeredness, mind you, is just thinking about yourself, which our mind tends to do whether we like it to or not. I learned humility in my recovery, and I feel the best when after fifteen years, when someone else in the rooms tells me, “I didn’t know you wrote.” There is a time and place for everything to be done or said. Relatedly, and conversely, do you think art reduces ego? That is one of the reasons I think that art is of tangible value to the world, because the act of creating seems to reduce individual ego. Today less so than ever. Social media is just ego, and one must promote, to some extent there. Who is the person always having a good time or succeeding is all you see there. We, as humans, seek and yearn for endorphins much more than acts of philanthropy. You’ve been sober for 15 years. How have your writing and life changed in this time? I mean I hope I would have naturally gotten better in fifteen years organically, I know my focus is better, and how I move through narratives or how themes change and stay aligned. How has having children changed you and your writing? Other than having time to write when they were younger? It gives me more to write about, but also, they are now grown adults, so I feel that it is their story to write. Are you always looking at the world through a poet’s lens? Or do you have multiple brain states? I know you work full time as a social worker which requires a different set of skills. I have lenses to look through that’s for sure, and also wear many hats. Social work, podcasting, host of a literary series, performing solo as singer-songwriting artist, full-time meetings of recovery…so for writing. It’s like I’m driving and a red car rolls by, and I think, “Look, there’s a red car.” For me, something strikes me and I can say, “Look, there’s a poem, or a flash, or a novel.” I don’t go looking for it, but it will always find me. Could you talk about the Dire Literary Series and your more recent adventure into podcasting? Eighteen years live, and now six as a virtual series, which someone got me to start up again in 2020. I try to be of service to other writers, but I get so much out of it. It’s amazing talking to writers, sort of geek-tacular in many ways. Now the podcast I started with a college friend because we were talking about dating and disasters which happen, so I do that too, every week. Disasters in dating are hilarious, and as my therapist says, “now you have an outlet for your type of sense of humor.” Writer Jackie Dawes is now my co-host and the podcast is called Dean and Dawes: Dating, Dread and Disasters. It might be self-explanatory, but could you elaborate on what you mean by “live 24/7,” which you write in your book’s Introduction and when signing books? One Day At a Time. 24 hours a day for 7 days a week, then, for me life is better. I try to do that. Live for life to be better. It already is about a million times over.
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