Interview with Laurel Snyder [by Reb Livingston]

Once I dreamed that I sent Laurel Snyder a package that contained a canvas bag (because hers was old and crappy) and a DVD player. For some reason the package was returned to me while I was at the Men's Wearhouse with a friend. I told my friend all about Laurel's husband needing a new suit. Then I woke up (woke up in the dream, i.e. came into consciousness) in a car with my husband and son. It was June and snowing. I told my husband to get out of the car and take a picture. When he did there was a viscous wolf who tried to attack him. My husband barely made it back into the car safely.

Laurel Snyder is the author of The Myth of the Simple Machines (No Tell Books), a chapbook of choose-your-own-adventure poems, Daphne & Jim, and she is the author of three forthcoming books for kids, including Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, which comes out next month. She is also an occasional commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, an obsessive blogger, and a very happy (though tired) mom to two little boys. She lives online at http://laurelsnyder.com

Reb: Your book is called The Myth of the Simple Machines. I thought poetry was supposed to be about truth? And what's so simple about those machines? Are you trying to make me feel stupid?

Laurel: Yes, I think the goal of most poetry these days is to make you feel stupid.

Just kidding.

Kinda.

Seriously, I'm really interested in myth. In the idea that we have grown too smart to trust things. We don't really have faith anymore, since everything around us is perpetually being disproved. but we need something to hang onto, and so we have myth instead. Myth suggests that we already know something to be false, but important.

Like, we don't believe in God, but we need God, so we embrace the idea of God. Or family. Or Fluoride. Meta-faith. That way we get to be smartypants, but also feel safe, or nostalgic. When we embrace myth, and the culture of myth, we leave a door open so we can love our grandmothers without totally disrespecting them. "Aw, it's so nice to have faith. Ain't she sweet."

I hope that the book addresses some of this. It's about poetry, I think. And about how, as poets, we treat things like personal experience and narrative the same way we treat God. We encode them with distance and reflection and intelligence. But underneath it all, we're still reliant on stories and beauty and our own emotions. I say all this as though I've got something figured out. I don't. As reviewers have pointed out, it's a book of questions not answers. I'm still not entirely sure what I arrived at.

Which is also how I feel about God, now that I think about it.

The machines changed as I wrote and then ordered the book. To begin with they were mathematical. By then end they were people. I think.

Reb: You also write children's books. Do you save truth for the children or are they getting a pack of lies too?

Laurel: No, they're getting a pack of lies too. But kids are smart enough to like lies. They take things at face value. Kids don't have to outfox the narrative. They don't think a sweet ending is sentimental. They like words and stories and that's a lot of fun. I will always write and read poems, but it's way more fun to write for kids than it is to "be a poet." Kids clap and stuff. They believe in unicorns. Not ironic ones, real ones.

Reb: When are you going to ditch poetry and write something people want to read?

Laurel: I will never ditch poetry. Not ever. I really do think it matters. Is that cheesey?

See, agh! There! Just now! I called myself cheesey and somehow managed to earn myself credit for earnestly thinking poetry matters, and also being a cynical self-aware gal. I'm having my cake and eating it too. I hate myself.

I'm off to write something about a unicorn. I'll decide later if it's a poem.

Comments

[Bible Timeline Chart]

In the last 20 years this has been challenged. Even within my own seminary-Dallas Theological Seminary, this has been challenged. But it is not primarily being challenged because of a difference in the interpretation of a particular verse (lower criticism) but rather a difference of hermeneutic (higher criticism), meaning that the Bible was true then for that time, but not for ours. The hole in the theological dike here is obvious. At what point do we say what is now outdated? Something is ended only if Scripture says it is ended. That was not the way I was brought up. When I was in college we had to write in our Bibles and because I could not bring myself to do that in a pristine copy, I got a used hardcover study Bible complete with full-color pictures and commentaries. It was already highlighted and written in, but not much. It is still the copy I use to study my Bible and the one I bring to each Bible study even though it is bulky and heavy, but over the last couple decades, it has been thoroughly highlighted and written in. It has been a great blessing and I fully agree with Pastor Brian. If you haven’t experienced this blessing yet, perhaps you too were taught that you should never write on the word of God (or any book), then go ahead and jump right in. Perhaps you’ll want to get a used copy as I did.

[DL]

Personally I wouldn't believe a word Pastor Brian says. The laurels go to her who declared that need for god surpasses belief as both cause and effect.