12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stephanie Cawley
StephanieCawleyis a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of
No More Flowers
(Birds, LLC) and
My Heart But Not My Heart
(Slope Editions). Recentpoems have been published in Protean, Prolit, and the tiny.More at stephaniecawley.com.1- How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Mybooks have felt like an outward materialization of what I had been orienting mylife around and towards for a long time in a sometimes more private or interiorway. That’s a sideways answer. I guess I think life changes and books are partof life so they both do and don’t change a life. My second book is in many waysvery different from my first, because the first is a kind of enclosed,contained sequence written out a specific period in the aftermath of myfather’s death, while the new book is a collection of more individual poems andis a little bit more sprawling. But I think it is obvious that the same personwrote them, even though in some ways I’m not really the same person.
2- How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Ilike thinking of myself as a poet first, as someone working in the field ofpoetry, because it feels so expansive, and so concerned with the material oflanguage itself. I’m aware that the other fields are expansive and concernedwith language, too, and that this is likely just my own baggage andassumptions. A lot of what I write is in prose. I have difficulty with the ideaof writing fiction because I have trouble with the ideas of narrative andcharacter and plot, but I suspect this is also a me problem.
3- How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does yourwriting initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appearlooking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copiousnotes?
Iam not particularly project-oriented, usually, though there have been timesI’ve set myself some constraints or committed to a particular experiment. I dotend to write poems kind of quickly, kind of all-in-one-go. I’m saying that butlately I’ve had some poems I’ve written in pieces over a period of a few weeks,so maybe it’s not true anymore, or right now. And often I have to let a poemsit around for a long time before I can decide if it’s worthwhile, or make thesmall changes needed for it to be finished. I also produce a lot of writingthat isn’t very good or that I know will go nowhere. Or it points towards thenext attempt, or helps me work something out that clears the way for the nextattempt, perhaps. So in that way, it is also a slow process.
4- Where does a poem 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?
Apoem is often preceded by a certain kind of itchy poem-feeling that arises. Ioften write poems while reading, putting a book down to write, or thepoem-feeling emerges while I’m in transit. In terms of process, though, I feellike as soon as I have a grasp on a given process or method for myself, itchanges. Historically, I have liked to give myself a lot of spaciousness aroundwhatever it is I am writing, letting myself make things without necessarilyknowing where they are heading. Then the process of shaping those things into abook is a more deliberate sitting down with whatever I’ve accumulated andfiguring out if there’s a book to be made from the mess.
5- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you thesort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Ilove doing readings, though I’m not an especially performative kind of reader.I like that readings can be a space to sort of test out new material, orincentive to finish something new in order to share it. And then you can learna lot from how it feels to put a poem out into the air for others to hear.
6- Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds ofquestions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think thecurrent questions are?
Ionce said, in a poem “I have no / theoretical positions to explore / in thispoem. I have no ideas about / anything.” In a more recent poem, I wrote “I hadno ideas / and my ideas got better / the fewer of them I seemed to have.” Ofcourse, writing about having no ideas is itself articulating a sort oftheoretical concern about the relationship between ideas and writing, orwriting and life itself. That sounds very abstract. I guess I can tend towardsbeing a kind of bootleg philosopher. I’m interested in writing, feelings,ideas, love, desire, despair, the future, and film. And my questions aboutthose things are like, what even are those things? How do we stay alive in aculture committed to the destruction of human life? How can we find anythinglike freedom?
7– What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Dothey even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Idon’t think writers are that special in terms of their role in the culture. Byculture I guess I am thinking of and generally preoccupied by the realm of the“political.” I think there is much more risk in writers thinking their writing“achieves” something in and of itself as an exertion of a desire for changerather than thinking about how to use their human time, energy, and resourcestowards that end more directly. I have just finished reading Ben Davis’ 9.5Theses on Art and Class, which I found really interesting and useful inarticulating this entangled relation between the artist and the “world.” Allthese terms feel kind of insufficient. And I do also believe in the kind ofmysterious potency of art to transform the world, or the culture. I just don’tthink that’s so literal, or straightforward, or obvious. And I think a lot ofwriters, particularly those in academia or with money, seem frankly divorcedfrom the material reality of life for most people in this country and world,but see themselves and their lives as contributing meaningfully to someabstracted “cultural” realm that transcends that world, which I find reallytroubling. Recently I found myself being kind of hard on myself for strugglingto write, and I was like well I live in impossibly horrific conditions andtimes for human life: maybe struggling to make art in such conditions is reallynot an indicator of my personal failing. But I do believe in struggle, andfailure, and persistence. I don’t know.
8- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult oressential (or both)?
Iloved working with Sampson Starkweather, one of the editors for Birds, LLC, whoworked with me on No More Flowers. Other than with friends, I have neverhad such a fruitful and open editorial relationship, where I felt like I couldshow him some of my messy half-starts and see what he thought should go or notgo into the book. It made the book better, and more interesting, to have aneditor who I knew could see what I hoped the book could be, and figure out howto help it become richer and wilder.
9- What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to youdirectly)?
Idon’t know why but I cannot come up with an answer to this question. Maybe I’mopposed to blanket advice.
10- How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to hybridwriting)? What do you see as the appeal?
Ithink a lot of my writing is animated by rhythm, and sometimes that rhythm isoperating on an engine driven by the sentence, and thus emerges as prose, andsometimes driven more by lineation or fragment. So it’s just a matter of tuningin to the frequency a certain expression seems to be asking for.
11- What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’mcurrently still getting adjusted to a new rhythm and routine with a new job.Previously, I have not been particularly routine oriented, except I have hadlong stretches of time (years) where I have written poems at 11am on Sundaymornings in writing groups with friends. I’m glad for that standing commitmentto time for writing. Otherwise, my daily habits are pretty erratic so I try tocarve out larger blocks of time when I can. With my new job, I’d like to beable to read and write a little before work sometimes, but that’s an endeavorfor a little later on.
12- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack ofa better word) inspiration?
UsuallyI just need to take the pressure off. Read, watch movies, see friends, takewalks, let the writing sort itself out.
13- What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pinetrees, the ocean.
14- David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there anyother forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visualart?
Iwatch a lot of movies, which appear in my writing quite a lot in direct ways,but I also think of them as useful for thinking about structure, texture, andtone.
15- What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply yourlife outside of your work?
Mystandard answer to this question is usually Alice Notley, because I admire herlifelong commitment to poetry, and the wide-ranging and shifting nature of heraesthetic and intellectual development. I find similar inspiration in , whose films are often reduced to tropes but who, I think, has beenusing his films to approach a set of questions about human life and the body ina much more wide-ranging and interesting way than he is often given credit for.I find that kind of sustained investigation really inspiring when thinkingabout how to have a long life in writing. There are many others. The list islong, but I don’t like to make one for fear of who I might accidentally leaveout.
16- What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Ireally would like to write a novel, to find out what my version of that wouldlook like.
17- If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or,alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been awriter?
Iguess I don’t necessarily think of writing as my “occupation.” It feels like Iwas sort of bound to be some kind of writer, no matter what. There was analternate trajectory for my life when I was young where I could have becomemore serious about music. I think I wanted to write film scores, but I mighthave actually liked being a piano teacher. Instead, I have spent a lot of myworking life teaching, but even that has been inconsistent. I recently startedin a new line of work as a paralegal, which so far I quite like. I like beingvarious in many parts of my life, but my writing life is really kind of theconstant. I try to think of it always as the larger project, even thoughmaterial reality at times makes that difficult to do.
18- What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Iloved books from the time I was very young. I wrote a lot, often justprivately, from a very young age as well. I think I like that writing is aquiet, private creative practice, and that you can take it with youanywhere.
19- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Themost recent true greats are Margery Kempe by Robert Glück, and a rewatchof Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, but I also watched Robert Altman’s 3Women for the first time a few weeks ago, so I’ll slide that in.
20- What are you currently working on?
I’vebeen more seriously trying to get to a place where I feel finished with amanuscript mainly of fragments that I’ve been working on off and on for 4-5years now, which may never go anywhere but I need to finish so I can stopthinking about it. Other than that, trying to find my footing writing new poemsagain in what feels like a new season of my life.
