Ruin & Want interview excerpts, final part

Here’s the final excerpt from my Sundress Publications interview with Izzy Astuto. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read some of these. Had one friend refer to them as part craft talk which means so much. These words, in the book, on slides, here between us, matter so much. 

Thanks to those of you who have pre-ordered Ruin & Want and who are considering doing so and/or requesting the book at your public library!

Izzy Astuto: Some final questions, specifically about the close of the book: Why did you name the last section “epilogue,” rather than an eighth chapter? Also, how did you decide to end the book with another poet’s words? In this case, with Yeats? , Sundress Publications

José: In regard to the “epilogue,” I wanted to mark a shift in tone and perspective, that the narrative whirlwind was dying down and some sense of closure for the reader (if not the speaker) was in sight. Also, I feel like the I in this section is more assertive, doing the work to make clear connections across narratives, less of letting the reader do the work.

As for the ending image and words, I have Samantha Edmonds (Associate Prose Editor at Sundress Publications) to thank for that ending. In some of the later drafts, the epilogue section was a little too on the nose, a lot of underscoring my intentions in the book rather than letting them ring and resonate. When she pointed out the image in the Yeats reference as a possible ending, it felt right. The Yeats poem is central to the manuscript and the experience. 

There’s also that quote about all of us being in the gutter only some of us are looking at the stars—there’s some of that in that last line. Also the feeling that the reading experience of this book is a “blur” of memory and narrative that leaves us looking at the “stars.” That starts are things romanticized but also, as the devil tells us in the book, they are things that are “dead inside” as well. That mix of darkness and light, hope and nihilism, pues, that’s where I live.

More Ruin-related content soon

José