12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk
Olivia Cronk is the author of Gwenda, Rodney(Meekling Press, 2024), WOMONSTER (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), Louise andLouise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse(Action Books, 2012). She teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and Literatureat Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is also Vice President ofNEIUPI, the union representing faculty, librarians, and advisors.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How doesyour most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I found out that the very generous Joyelle McSweeneyand Johannes Göransson (Action Books) would take my first book (2012), I waskind of shocked–but, of course, insanely excited that what I’d been working onwould have a more tangible physical body than my pile of print-outs AND that itwould come from Action Books, an unbelievably cool and expansive and smartpress. Actually, what I sent them was a little too thin, and I had to keepwriting some more, and I did, and huge chunks of the manuscript were untitledpages (kind of posturing as in media res and fragmentary)--and when theywere editing it, Joyelle suggested that I either buff it up with clearer titlesto contain/frame each piece or–here is her stroke of genius, something Isometimes forget even happened but believe me it’s CRUCIAL to my whole writinglife–simply cut all the titles. (!!!) Holy shit this move shaped all ofmy writing and thinking thereafter.
So, the first book certainly helped me feel more confidentabout trying to send work into the world and, because it was from a press muchcooler than I, gave me some more character/credibility–but the real thing thatchanged my life was Joyelle’s editorial moves! After that, I stopped thinkingof poems as precious singular gardens with nice fences around them. I suppose Ididn’t completely write like that, anyway, but the notion that the book ofpoems could explode into a book book, like a spell, like a movie (I wasdelighted when they let me request that the title page get held off until afterthe last page of poems), like something else . . . really, truly shapedmy whole way of composing.
In fact, the new book is my attempt at a “poetry novel” (NOTa novel in verse, btw), and I wanted to make something that “gulps” like anovel but “sips” like poetry: like, is it possible to rapidly move through it,have the “effect” of reading a novel but none of the real weight, feel astoner-style attention to small particles as a space for psychedelic un-selfingwhile still vaguely sensing, like a pebble in the shoe, a narrative? Anyway, Inever could have tried to do that if not for what happened in the editorialprocess of my first book.
One last piece of your question: it is different, though:I’m smarter, now, and have read more and listened to more songs and looked atmore paintings and had a baby who has turned into a teenager and have taughtabout 1200 more students and been alive for more things and thought more, etc.So, the book is different because I am different but of course also thesame.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say,fiction or non-fiction?
I have probably told this story in other spaces, and it iskind of silly but represents a real piece of my interiority.
In second grade, I was taught about poetry and then assignedthe writing of a poem. I came up with an idea about snow (it was probablywinter, in Chicago, when we still had real winters) AS a broken open pillow. Iblew my own damn mind. I couldn’t get over the narcotic, psychedelic pleasureof metaphor dropped like elixir into language and thus producing a new image. Iwanted to write poems over and over again, to get high.
I’m also quite committed to what we often refer to as“hybrid-form,” and I love writing reviews and paragraphs and even, honestly,some/most work documents. I love writing. Love it, truly. In all forms.(I love writing responses to these questions.)
But I remain committed to poetry because of its availabilityto multiplicity/to proliferating shadow-meanings, because of its smallness as asite of explosive possibility, and because it can contain the whole world andthe beyond-world.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writingproject? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Dofirst drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work comeout of copious notes?
I get a feeling for what I want to write, as a wholeproject (which usually gets imagined as a manuscript, which means that I amimagining projects AS books, and sometimes they’ll never get picked up as“books”):
The “feeling” is a kind of constellation of: other pieces ofart that I want to directly or indirectly ekphrasticize, ideas that I want topursue (usually, these ideas are form-based inquiries but are sometimes moreconventionally delineated “ideas”), bits of language (read, heard, spoken,randomly generated sometimes in exercises with my students or as a result ofpreparing seemingly unrelated texts for classes), visual art pieces at which Iwish to gaze, music to which I want to listen, TV shows or movies I have beenthinking about . . . and basically, all of my notes and fragments accumulate(as bits and pieces) in my notebook until I have time to write.
(I’m NTT at a regional public university that has beenwildly defunded for twenty-five years and newly VP of my union, my husband isNTT with a 4/4 load, and we have a thirteen-year-old, so there is NO time toactually sit down and write during the school year. I can usually steal aboutthree days of my winter break, but all the big writing time happens in thesummer).
It takes me about two years to “finish” a project (bywriting, sporadically, into a digital document with my notebook next to me,over a period of about a year, then tiring of the conceit and thus “concluding”the work, then revising by reading aloud and reading silently from printeddrafts, then revising by asking my husband the poet Philip Sorenson for notes),but of course I’m only 46; I’m sure many other habits and ways of thinkingabout writing-time will evolve.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin foryou? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a largerproject, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
See above.
Because of many factors, including the editorial acumen ofJoyelle McSweeney and my own drive to pleasure, I do indeed write in “book”form.
For now!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to yourcreative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I actually do LOVE to be in readings (even though I am kindof averse to too much social time). And, because I know that I wrote about thisvery clearly already and because it was written during the time of NO-public(Winter 2021) and thus with some critical distance, I’m going to repeat what I said in an interview with Logan Berry:
At readings, which I did (do?) enjoy for the possibility offlexing a muscle that I don’t regularly tend to, I like being a kind of actresswhen reading my work. I don’t mean to imply that I’m very good at that, justthat it’s a kind of playing I enjoy. When I perform my poems I have in mind theproducing of a kind of feeling in a listener/reader—not so much a meaning,of course. Much more like kids humming while also making dolls talk in adollhouse. And I hope that when someone is reading the book alone they can havethat same weirdness.
So–yeah–I do use readings to understand what’s happening inthe writing–and either that causes revision (not very often, though; I am tooanxious to share something aloud that I’m not already very happy with) or thatcauses MORE writing because I get some more “feelings”-info from theperformance.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind yourwriting? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? Whatdo you even think the current questions are?
Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinkingabout is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsizedMEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop thoseeffects up in a kind of shadow box?
A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility ofa coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on thepage.
Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection,vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .
In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types ofwriters) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally coolwith being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the bigquestions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) oflooking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within andbeyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos thatmight help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansionof collective knowledge . . .
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer beingin larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of thewriter should be?
The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quiteactively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragilethreads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate inservice of surviving the horror of Now;
can create literal or figurative occasions for what is alsomy current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;
can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes ofwitness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can bemeaningful to any single reader;
can, because Literature is a shared experience and requiresmany types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to aJesuit high school LOL);
can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for anotherhuman, which might act as salve or as awakening;
can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov)suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once givesomeone an onion when they need it.
That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on thisagain in ten years.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outsideeditor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve literally never had a negative experience with any ofthe editors of my book-length works.
& shout out to the quite brilliant, thoughtful, andincisive work of my most recent editor, the writer Anne Yoder! She is essential.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (notnecessarily given to you directly)?
I still believe in the Golden Rule. I’m an atheist, but Ihonestly still think about a self-sacrifice that was narrated in a certainhomily, in a Catholic mass, which I attended during the school week and onSundays.
In art-making realities, I was deeply impressed, as a gradstudent, by a teacher who told us to say yes to EVERY art-making occasion, sothat we’d know more and be bigger in our thinking.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres(poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I cannot write anything that would be widely understood asFiction.
I can definitely write lyrical prose.
But, in general, I find it difficult to write without poetryas my shoulder-demon/-angel.
Ultimately, though, any writing occasion is appealing to mebecause I might learn more about writing itself.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, ordo you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
See above–notebooks that accumulate material &twice-a-year down time to actually compose.
My day begins with coffee and toast, and then our kid and ustwo adults go off to our responsibilities. My new role in the union allows meto only teach two classes, but my hours are otherwise packed withcorrespondences and member organizing duties.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn orreturn for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read more.
I find new music, film, and TV that pleases me.
I do watercolors.
I sew curtains.
I truly don’t worry about it all.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My current home: incense and garlic.
My childhood home(s): wet dog, spilled gasoline and woodshavings on a garage floor, Kirk’s Castile Soap.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come frombooks, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature,music, science or visual art?
See above; literally EVERYTHING is of use to me.
Right now, I guess I am most wrapped up in looking itself.I feel like, for reasons unknown to me, about five years ago, I got much betterat looking, even though it’s always been one of my most favorite pastimes.
15 - What other writers or writings are important foryour work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Again: everything.
But, when I was younger: Lucie Brock-Broido, Joan Didion,Carl Sandburg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright. Sometimes I miss that youngreading-time of being completely unfocused and finding pleasure and informationin every single book you find.
I read constantly, obviously–and anything can strike me aswonderful or informative! I love the books and writings of my friends andstudents. My husband’s work is very influential to me. The books I assign, evenif I’ve read them many times, are influential. Some recentfavorites/re-favorites include this and this and thisand this.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I wish I could write cleanly about pedagogy and thecollective act of Literature.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt,what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended updoing had you not been a writer?
I could have been, possibly, a park ranger. I thought a lotabout studying that and then living alone-ish in a big public forest. I alsoquite seriously considered being a plumber when I was young. In my twenties, Ialways assumed that I would be some sort of copy editor–before that worlddisappeared and before I wound up in teaching, which suits me quite well.
I love teaching almost as much as I love writing.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing somethingelse?
It came easy to me, and I love doing it.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was thelast great film?
Oh–something I mentioned above: OnBeauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. I don’t at all agree with herpremises, but I’m crazy for the way she writes/the little moves and gestures.
& this Truffaut movie called The Green Room(not the contemporary movie of the same title); it’s a little shadow box kindof thing, somewhat based on Henry James’ stories, and it’s wonderfully quietand weird.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Probably another “poetry novel,” this one a “vampirethriller” about the gaze, infection, suffering, rage . . .
