12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Indermaur
Katherine Indermaur
is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall LyricEssay Book Prize, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review and is the winner ofthe Black Warrior Review 2019 PoetryContest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has appearedor is forthcoming in Coast|noCoast, Ecotone,Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in FortCollins, Colorado.1 - How did yourfirst book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compareto your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, I|I,came out on November 15, 2022 from Seneca Review Books. It changed my life inso many ways, but perhaps the most interesting to you and your readers is theway it made a certain kind of thinking possible for me. I|I is abook-length work, a serial lyric essay, so while it is fragmented, there is alsoendurance present. And with endurance comes a kind of rigor not achieved in thetypical single-page, social media-friendly poem form we’re used to seeing thesedays. I was able to see for the first time the way my brain wrestles with the subjectmatter of I|I—vision, self-perception, mirrors, mental health—and comesto a new understanding with it through that very endurance.
2 - How did youcome to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetrythe way one comes to a crush—I was totally enamored. Poetry felt like magicbecause it wasn’t obvious or even really explicable how what was on the pagemade me feel. I wanted to be a part of its magic, to write into that place thatseemed the truest to human experience, the place of revelation as in toliterally reveal.
To be clear, I|Ilives in the space between poetry and nonfiction, but I think of myself asa poet first, and of I|I often through that lens. (To me, betweennessfeels like a space poetry inhabits.)
3 - How longdoes it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writinginitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear lookingclose to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I just gave birthto my first baby last June, so I’m struck by how different all my answers arenow compared to what they were back when I was writing I|I, or workingon other projects before she arrived. From start to submission of the finalversion, I|I took about four years. At first I didn’t realize I waswriting a book, but my MFA workshop cohort and professors insisted there wasmore for me to uncover, more work for me to do on the topic than just a fewshort poems or pages.
I think my writinginitially comes quickly, but then revisiting the drafts is a much slowerprocess. For lengthy projects, I tend to chase an initial spark of interest,then realize I have to follow that up with reading or researching or otherwiseexperimenting off the page in order to come back to it and make something meaningful.
Since I’ve been amom, I definitely take copious notes, mostly in my phone between tasks or whilebreastfeeding. So far I’ve been able to sit down and look at those notes and writesomething resembling a poem from them exactly once!
4 - Where does apoem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short piecesthat end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?
It depends on theproject! With I|I and one in-progress manuscript, I realized prettyearly on that the subject matter demanded a full-length form. I have recentlytended toward writing longer, multi-page poems, but one of mymanuscripts-in-progress consists (currently) solely of very brief lyric poems,mostly fewer than a dozen lines each. I feel like that only works for mebecause it’s in the context of a much broader project, though.
5 - Are publicreadings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort ofwriter who enjoys doing readings?
I can’t say I enjoythe act of reading publicly, but what I truly enjoy is being in a room withother people who are there to think about the same kinds of things I’m there tothink about. The community we form together at a reading is invaluable to mebecause writing can feel pretty lonely, even though I’m often thinking aboutthe reader while I’m doing it. Readings seem to lie outside my creativeprocess, but they feel essential to the part of writing that is being a writer.
6 - Do youhave any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions areyou trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the currentquestions are?
Light and distanceand the implications that these facts of our universe have on divinity come upin my writing over and over again, even when I’m ostensibly writing about, say,environmental collapse. I guess there’s an element of hope inherent in thosephenomena for me in the same way that there’s an element of despair, too. I’mobsessed with the nexus of those opposites, and why hope is so beautiful whenit is necessitated by absence—of a solution, of a god, of answers.
7 – What do you seethe current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one?What do you think the role of the writer should be?
As much as Ibristle at claiming to know what the role of a writer in our culture should be,I do have a few guiding principles for myself. The main one is that I shouldgive back to our community by supporting other writers, whether through reading,teaching, writing reviews, or sharing their work. I’m thinking of Ross Gay’sparaphrasing of Fred Moten in Inciting Joy, which I’m currently reading:“We’ve got to get together to figure out how to get together.” Putting my workout there into the world is really, I think, an attempt to get us together.
8 - Do you find theprocess of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both! I have theexperience of being both an editor and a writer, and as an editor, it can feelso nerve-wracking to have to lightly say to the author, “Hey, so I fact-checkedthis, and you’re wrong.” As a writer, I’ve also been on the receiving end ofthat very statement. Ultimately if you as a writer care about your reader,that’s something that can unite your efforts with your editor’s, and you canthink about your editor as a reader, too—albeit a very vocal one.
9 - What is thebest piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I had a poetryprofessor in college, Alan Shapiro, who I remember told us to follow ourdiscomfort while writing—to trust it, in a way. I have found that to be sotrue. If I’m nervous about including something in my writing, if it feelsrisky, there’s often a lot of energy there, what some of my poet friends havecalled “the white-hot center of a poem,” or “the central anxiety of a poem.” That’soften where you’re being the most vulnerable, and what I’ve found to be themost meaningful and rewarding about my own work is to trust thatvulnerability—in myself and others. Vulnerability is where we connect.
10 - How easy hasit been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see asthe appeal?
When reading, Igravitate most to nonfiction writers who are also poets (Maggie Nelson, Ross Gay, Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Terry Tempest Williams,Robin Wall Kimmerer, Claudia Rankine, Kylan Rice) or who otherwise have verystrong poetic sensibilities (Brian Doyle, Eliot Weinberger, Ellen Meloy,Rebecca Solnit) because what I like most is nonfiction that movesassociatively, the way poetry does. To me, the mind is the driving force of theessay, whereas in poetry it doesn’t have to be. Poetry is often moreinstinctual; nonfiction has to back up its instincts, justify them. Movingbetween nonfiction and poetry has been thus at the whim of the subject matterfor me. If it needs to be more about my mind, about investigating the mind,then nonfiction it is—or has been, so far.
11 - What kind ofwriting routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does atypical day (for you) begin?
I wish! Before mybaby was born, I would often write in the mornings before I went to work (Iwork a typical office job, 8-to-5 situation). Now all that is in flux. The mostI can do is read while breastfeeding and type notes toward writing in mysmartphone in the stolen moments between caretaking. So a typical day beginswith being woken up by a hungry baby, feeding her, and getting ready for work.Not very glamorous but certainly essential and lifegiving.
12 - When yourwriting gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a betterword) inspiration?
I feel mostinspired to write when I’m reading excellent writing whose thinking I admire.Second-best is observing art in other media, or spending time in nature. Mybrain is often at its most creative when I’m taking a walk outside, but I needto be immersed in texts to actually come up with something worth saying on thepage myself.
13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?
Sagebrush after asummer rainstorm reminds me of my home in the Rocky Mountain West, but bloomingazaleas and daffodils are what remind me of growing up in North Carolina.
14 - David W.McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I love listening topodcasts like Radiolab or watching PBS documentary series like Natureand Nova for how they spark curiosity and are accessible to people whodidn’t major in STEM, like me. Spending time outside is also really importantto me and the main reason why I live where I do. I like recreating outdoors,but I also love just sitting in a camp chair and looking up at a mesa in NewMexico or a granite cliff in Wyoming or a red canyon in Utah or a snowy peak inColorado. I love learning about the native plants and animals here; I use theapp iNaturalist to identify what I observe. I also love keeping my ownvegetable garden. But I think the influence that all this time spent outsidehas on my writing can be somewhat subtle; it’s more an overwhelming love forthe world. As Pam Houston writes, “the Earth doesn’t know how not to bebeautiful.”
15 - What otherwriters or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside ofyour work?
I’m looking up atmy bookshelves while I type a response to this question, because I am easilystumped when some well-meaning stranger at some benign get-together asks me,“Who are your favorite poets?” Every time! I feel like I need to carry around anotecard in my wallet. So here is what my bookshelves (and library history) aresaying: all works by Rainer Maria Rilke, H. D., Christian Wiman, Jack Gilbert,Linda Gregg, Simone Weil, Terry Tempest Williams, and W. S. Merwin; themagazine Orion; Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight; Paisley Rekdal’s “Nightingale: A Gloss”; Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem; AlfredLord Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; AliceNotley’s The Descent of Alette; Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard;Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red; Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variationson Dawn and Dusk; Mary Rakow’s incredible Biblical novel This Is Why ICame; Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for the beauty of a lifelived in the mountains; and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.
16 - What would youlike to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to float theRio Grande in Big Bend National Park. I want to do a hut-to-hut backpackingtrip through the Swiss Alps. I want to see Alaska. I want to become proficientat trad climbing. I want to kayak the mangrove swamp in Congaree National Park.I want to ice skate on an alpine lake in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
When it comes towriting, I don’t have as many specific goals. I’d love to publish a collectionof shorter poems, as my first book was a book-length work, but really I justwant to keep making things I’m proud of and excited to share with the world.
17 - If you couldpick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, whatdo you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I can’t imagine I’dbe some other kind of artist, as I’m not really good enough at any other craft!When I was young, I thought alternately about being a spy (thanks, Harriet), avolcanologist, a Navy SEAL, or one of those scientists who climbs redwoodtrees—apparently anything involving risk and adventure. Let’s go withvolcanologist!
18 - What made youwrite, as opposed to doing something else?
As soon as I couldread, I loved books. I loved the worlds they created, the characters you got toknow, the stories they shared. I was also raised to revere the Bible, so textreally was magical. I wrote stories in grade school—most of which I abandonedpart of the way through, then lyrics to little songs, and then poetry in highschool.
Aside from a lovefor books and language, I have teachers to thank for making me write. From elementaryto graduate school, I had incredible teachers who taught me how to lovewriting. What more could you ask from education, to learn how to love somethingfor the rest of your life?
19 - What was thelast great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great bookI read was Geoffrey Babbitt’s Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), which is a beautiful and confounding exploration ofilluminated manuscripts and spiritual identity. Appendices isever-so-aware of its being a text, and takes full advantage of its form, whichI love. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I’ve found myself thinking andtalking a lot about White Noise, the new Netflix adaptation of DonDeLillo’s 1985 novel. The way the American family is portrayed and in the80’s—this era of great excess and self-absorption and apocalyptic fear—feelsdeeply true, but also weird as fuck. And I like the new LCD Soundsystem songthat plays as the end credits roll, “new body rhumba.”
20 - What are youcurrently working on?
I’m slowly workingon and thinking about two projects. The first is a series of poems on andsometimes in the voice of Egeria, a female Christian pilgrim from the fourthcentury who was the first known woman to summit several peaks like Mount Sinai,and whose writings from her travels have partly survived to today.
The second projectis a long poem-kind-of-thing about the process of my baby’s acquisition oflanguage. I’m adding to it every so often as new things occur to me, happen tome, teach me.
