In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry. In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories: Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art. As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.
Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.
Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press.
Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”?
Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.
BM: After receiving instructions, making mistakes, and internalizing the judgments you mention re: “Painting Time,” I find children’s behavior to be refreshing. They’re often doing things with their hands—pressing glass, tossing forsythia, practicing piano—in a way that inspires me.
Whether it’s the use of scientific research in “Hunters & Gatherers” or the various technical genres in “Annunciation,” you seem inspired by other rhetorical situations in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters. Can you talk a little about this?
MS: I’ve long been taken with stories and essays that borrow forms from other genres. Although neither of the stories you mention belong in the hermit crab genre as such, they do draw on and reference academic writing and documentation. In “Annunciation,” I was really interested in exploring what constitutes a “self” and whether the “self” is ever knowable—either to the individual or to those around them. I wanted to see how much of a “self” I could build from the most external sources possible—then, of course, to play with the idea that someone could be “known” only from those sources, and finally, through Luke’s musings, to question whether the self can be known at all. That story uses its voices of authority to question the genre they’re borrowed from, while in “Hunters and Gatherers,” I was actually interested in re-creating some of the aspects of academic writing. Although that story contains a narrative (the main events take place over an afternoon), the real movement is through ideas, the way an academic paper might make an argument. I hope the evidence in the story (from the quoted sources and from the fiction itself) moves the reader from a simple acceptance of man=hunter/woman=gatherer to a much more fluid and nuanced understanding of gender roles, not just in our own times but in our distant ancestors’ lives as well. As for the quoted material itself, I just loved what I found in my research and couldn’t see inventing anything better. I mean, you can’t beat Barbie saying “Math class is tough!” followed up by Mattel creating a Barbie math workbook to counter the criticism they received.
Speaking of research, many of the poems in Figure 1 engage deeply with the natural world: moles, deep sea coral, ants, birds. How might you characterize your approach to this subject matter?
BM: I suppose I see the natural world as both frame-worthy and resistant to framing because I’m often thinking about coral, ants, or birds through a prior representation of them while also reading or researching beyond that representation. I’m obviously not a scientist, but I learn a lot by thinking through the behavior of nonhuman animals and how they’re described or depicted as operating in a particular habitat that may or may not be “natural.” I find the topic of “ecopoetry” fascinating because it’s somewhat antithetical to the assumption that poetry is sentimental and without any basis in fact. The Ecopoetry Anthology is helpful in this regard; editors Fisher-Wirth and Gray Street write that accuracy and unsentimentality distinguish ecopoetry from poetry about the natural world more broadly speaking. Writing about art, or ekphrasis, requires a similar fidelity to what is actually “there,” even if the poem I write ultimately moves beyond or through the visual representation to make another verbal one.
My impulse in writing poetry is to narrow my focus. I also see you zooming in with precision in a story like “The Arches, Our Home.” You write with scientific exactitude and lush language. How do you know when to add details, places, or even found text (whether real or imaginative) to a story?
I wish I could say that decisions to be more expansive or more compressed are always conscious and intentional, but they’re not! I do tend towards writing in fragments, longer fragments but still sections that exist next to each other paratactically. I’ve never been great at, or particularly interested in, developing an extended, cohesive plot, although I’ve gotten a bit better at it over the years. My love of lists is probably related. Doesn’t a list basically work through parataxis? Without a title, the reader is left to figure out why those items belong together. A story like “Six Views of Seattle” is basically a list, with a title that provides a clue about how the items are linked. Other stories in the collection proceed the same way. Others, like “Hunters and Gatherers” or “Disintegration,” feel less “list-like” but still work by accreting distinct moments of time.
On the level of syntax, I think much less about parataxis but I do include many lists—I just love lists and the stuff of the world that gets reflected in them, and I find them easy to generate. I sometimes remind myself that I don’t actually need to include all the items in a list I’ve written, that just the best one may suffice.
Early on in my writing career, I was very conscious of writing in fragments as a democratic political act: I wanted readers to actively participate in the process of making meaning of my work. I still believe in this but it’s less of a driving force in terms of how I construct a story or essay.
BM: I’m interested in what you’re saying about lists and fragmentation because I don’t use many fragments, even though my poems contain short lists, i.e. “fire / starters, mulch / makers, nest / builders and composters” in “Can You Be Present.” But even though my lists may fall within complete sentences, I love how the poetic line ending can annotate the poem’s meaning and create complexity in what may otherwise be a rather simple grammatical plane. The line becomes a place to take risks that I don’t have to take elsewhere. I can split a compound noun like “tooth- / pick” over a line ending and get some mileage from the visual separation of those two words and how they sit in the contexts of their individual lines while also preserving “toothpick” as a modifier.
MS: So many of the poems in your collection circle around or spring from works of visual art, from the Civil War photos of Alexander Gardner to paintings by Vermeer and Degas to work by 20th century artists like Hockney and Mapplethorpe. Each poem seduces me into having a direct visual experience of the work, only to be jolted from that by an apt but completely startling metaphor which reminds me that I’m “seeing” the work anew, through your eyes and consciousness. Can you tell me about your approach to writing about art and your relationship to the tradition of ekphrastic poetry? Other poems in the collection take art-making, particularly photography, as their subject matter. How do you see the relationship between photo-taking and poem-making? I’m wondering in particular if you ever see your work aligned with the work Lucy does in “At the Historical Society Spaghetti Dinner,” documenting “barns approved/for demolition”?
BM: A number of my poems reference paintings of a pair or small group of people. I typically end up interrogating the dynamics among these representations and consider how they’re positioned towards one another. I almost always start with thinking about the artist’s perspective and how they decided to position the painted people’s bodies: why are they here and not there? What is their attitude towards one another? My thoughts on photography are very much influenced by Susan Sontag, who wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others about thinking about what one is looking at. I think I approach writing poetry in a similar manner, despite that “thinking” isn’t always enough. I appreciate the question about “At the Historical Society Spaghetti Dinner,” because Lucy is based on a woman I met who did photograph “relics” in the landscape; in the poem, I interrogate whether Lucy has any motivations beyond documentation and, if she doesn’t, whether documentation is enough. I think I do see my own impulses aligned with Lucy’s drive to preserve what is about to be gone forever.
A handful of stories towards the latter half of Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters feature Mina, her mother, and son. Mina is pressured or bookended by being both a daughter and a mother. “Visitation” ends with Mina literally stuck between her mother and son—a position that reminds me of the final image of a skull, brain, and its secrets in “On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale in the Harvard Museum of Natural History.” I wondered if you could talk a little about how your writing is inspired by the concept of generations.
MS: When I was writing these stories, I felt quite “stuck” sometimes myself. I was a mother and also a daughter to an aging and ill father, a role in which I felt I was also “mothering” him. That was the impetus—but as I wrote I became aware that in writing about older mothers, particularly the mothers in the Mina story cycle and in “Forest,” I was trying to understand my own mother, who died before I had children. Even though she’s been long gone, my relationship with her continues to change. As I reach different ages and milestones, my understanding of and sympathy for her only grows.
In addition to societal expectations about what it means to be a “good” mother, we each have expectations that our own mothers will be “good” and “good” to us. Of course, some mothers are truly and incredibly abusive (as are some fathers), but I’ve come to think that for those of us who’ve had run-of-the-mill “bad”—or actually just human—mothers, part of coming into one’s own as an adult is moving past those expectations, whether that means forgiving, forgetting, or just accepting one’s hurts and moving past the pain.
It’s interesting to me that you mention “On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale…”, because in that story, the daughter is the one who does something unthinkable—abandoning her father in the museum. In that moment, she is actually being a bad daughter. In that story, Mina is again stuck, this time between her father and son, who have been treating each other horribly. Although given her father’s condition, he, in fact, may be more helpless, Mina makes a choice to favor the younger generation, and is “rewarded” by her son holding her hand.
BM: I’m struck by the references to hands and fingers in these stories. I think of art-making and caretaking, but also life without these things. Do you consciously return to certain images as you’re working on assembling a collection?
MS: I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here, since I don’t do this consciously. In fact, if I noticed direct repetitions of phrasing in multiple stories, I would probably go out of my way to change some. That said, I’m deeply intrigued by the idea of writing inside one’s obsessions, unable to free yourself from them. To a certain extent, that happened to me when writing the stories in this collection, and I don’t think I’ve completely shaken the compulsion to write about mothers and children. Last summer, I was determined to write a fairy tale-ish story about an old woman and her black fox, but before I knew it, her long lost daughter had shown up!
I used to think that kind of obsession was unprofessional. I remember reading Kate Braverman’s story collection Squandering the Blue for the first time and literally chucking it across the room when I realized it was basically the same story told 13 times over. I don’t mean that it’s a consciously arranged linked story collection about a single character, but that the lead characters in each story—or perhaps the lead character’s mother or daughter—is so similar, the situations she finds herself in are so similar, that it feels like we’re in a hall of mirrors. I think it scared me to see a writer bare their obsessions so completely on the page, but I’ve come to embrace the idea that obsessions lead to more compelling art. And one of the stories in that collection, “Temporary Light,” is an all-time favorite of mine—oddly (or not!) it’s about a mother who’s lost custody of her kids. I’ve read it at least 20 times and it makes me cry each time.
Much of Figure 1 is infused with a feeling of loss for me, but without ever sliding into an easy nostalgia. In what ways were you conscious of diving into this particular emotional landscape as you wrote these poems or decided which to place in this collection?
BM: I don’t think I was conscious of the feeling of loss at the beginning, but I was invested in imagining other people’s experiences with loss, which I now realize was a way to talk about my own experiences less directly. I was pretty obsessed with the idea that a place could be lost, whether landscape or house. I think poets (and maybe writers or artists in general) often look backwards to anticipate the future. There has been a lot that I’ve experienced in recent years that felt completely outside of my control. I look back at some of these poems—obsessed with expressways through corn fields and eminent domain—and I think I was onto something before I actually experienced it.
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