{"id":6058,"date":"2012-12-01T00:10:44","date_gmt":"2012-12-01T05:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=6058"},"modified":"2015-03-25T20:57:02","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T02:57:02","slug":"an-interview-with-alison-deming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/6058","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Alison Hawthorne Deming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of four books of poetry, <\/em>Science and Other Poems (1994), <\/em>The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), <\/em>Genius Loci (2005), and <\/em>Rope (2009); in addition to three books of environmental creative nonfiction, <\/em>Temporary Homelands (1994), <\/em>The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and <\/em>Writing the Sacred Into the Real<\/em> (2001). A descendant of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming was born in Connecticut and earned her MFA from Vermont College in 1983. She has since found a home in the American West; she lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is the director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Arizona. Her latest book, <\/em>Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit,\u00a0is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the spring of 2012, Deming visited Nashville to participate in a Vanderbilt Creative Writing symposium: <\/em>\u201cWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Sustainability & Creative Writing.\u201d The following is an edited version of my conversation with her after the symposium.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Interviewer: When I think about sustainable or environmental writing, which you are actively engaged with, I think about the idea of the writer \u201cbearing witness.\u201d Can you talk about that to begin our conversation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alison Hawthorne Deming: Sure. I mean, I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing when we\u2019re writing anything, we\u2019re bearing witness to the time we live in and how it\u2019s different from any other time in history. But, in the environmental area, it\u2019s an extremely important task for writers. We\u2019re facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it\u2019s extremely important to bear witness to what\u2019s happening. Everything that\u2019s happening now is a baseline for what will happen tomorrow or fifty years from now or a hundred years from now. People don\u2019t usually think of poems or essays or stories as actually taking a measurement of their moment in time. But that is extremely important, and it\u2019s extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don\u2019t have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost. There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them. The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.<\/p>\n

We talk a lot about bearing witness in political contexts, like Carolyn Forch\u00e9\u2019s great anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness<\/em>; all of that applies to environmental issues. There\u2019s also this important notion of the \u201ccitizen scientist.\u201d People can keep a record of the natural world in their own backyard, as, you know, your Great Aunt Mabel or somebody wrote down when the first robin appeared in the spring and how high the lake level was or when the first ice went out on the river. Some people just did that because they loved their place and they kept a record of it. Now, climate scientists get to look at Aunt Mabel\u2019s journal and\u2014 it\u2019s science. She\u2019s not trying to be a scientist; she\u2019s just an attentive person who cares about her place. All those documents created by citizen scientists in the future are going to help us see the picture of what is happening in the world around us and how we can be responsible toward it.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I love that idea, and it seems to be such a great defense of that famous Auden line that \u201cpoetry makes nothing happen.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Right! Right. It makes nothing happen, and yet I always love the ambiguity of that statement. It makes nothing happen, so nothing is a result of poetry. But it also makes nothing<\/em> into something that happens!<\/p>\n

Interviewer: It also reminds me of some lines from one of Emily Dickinson\u2019s poems about Nature: \u201cNature is what we know \u2013 \/ Yet have no art to say \u2013 \/ So impotent Our Wisdom is \/ To her Simplicity.\u201d How does this dichotomy between nature and art affect the task of bearing witness?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: That\u2019s the incredible challenge. If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It\u2019s almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say<\/em> the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me. I am a result of what has happened on this planet\u2014how could I find the art to say that? I can\u2019t, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important. And that last part, the difference between our wisdom and nature\u2019s simplicity\u2014that reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like ours is impotent compared to the intelligence of a monarch butterfly migrating from Canada to Mexico, or the intelligence of hummingbirds that have co-evolved with the flowers all along their migration route. That seems so simple; it just happens, it just unfolds. What comes out of a seed\u2014it just happens and unfolds. And you see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We\u2019re gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I want to switch now to talking about your craft as a writer. I\u2019ve been reading some of your prose book Writing the Sacred into the Real<\/em>, and I was struck by this passage: \u201cArtists live by their contradictions. \u2026 If I knew what I believed, I would not need to write.\u201d Can you talk a little about writing as discovery in your process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Life seems complicated to me; I feel confused a lot of the time by life. I feel confused about the fact that we can be so tender as creatures to one another, and so monstrous at the same time. I think I started writing as a young person because I felt a lot of psychic confusion and emotional confusion, and writing was a way to sort it out. You know, to externalize it, sort it out, put it down, look at it, and hopefully it would become clearer. Or, at least, I would document that sense of contradiction. I don\u2019t think you ever get past it. But I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that\u2019s the human condition\u2014to be forced to live in contradiction.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Do you see your poems and your essays as you working something out, discovering something?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Yeah, I\u2019m always writing towards a discovery. When I\u2019m writing poems in particular, I\u2019m often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, \u201cI wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them.\u201d I\u2019m trying to learn something every time I write a poem. I\u2019m trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn\u2019t write if I didn\u2019t need to be making those discoveries, if I didn\u2019t feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being. Poetry is a really helpful instrument for doing that. It\u2019s so physical; the musicality becomes a sort of expression of the body. The mind is there too, in the formal aspects of the poem. The emotions are there in the way the senses gather things into the poem. For me, it\u2019s one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It\u2019s all about discovery. A lot of times students will come up to me and say, \u201cWell, I can\u2019t write because I don\u2019t know what I think about such-and-such.\u201d And I say, \u201cThat\u2019s why<\/em> you have to write.\u201d You don\u2019t wait<\/em> until you know, because then who cares \u2014 it\u2019s static.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I wonder if that\u2019s maybe part of the reason you came to writing essays, creative non-fiction, after writing poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Yeah, I wrote poetry first, for a long time. I had a crisis of genre. Partly I felt that because I\u2019m always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way. I began to feel that there was so much of life that wasn\u2019t getting into my poems. I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I had some content and some ideas I really wanted to pursue, but I didn\u2019t want to overburden poetry with that kind of subject matter. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page \u2014 it was terrifying. [Laughs] So yeah, I did just jump into it. Now, though, I really like working in both genres. Beginning was awful, though. I don\u2019t know why I was so scared of the genre change, but I was. I thought I\u2019d try a novel, but I was absolutely incapable of inventing a character. Completely incapable of it. So I said, \u201cAlright, I\u2019ll write a journal. Anybody can write a journal. Just sit down and work with the journal form.\u201d So I started writing prose that way. I tried to be as observant and particular as I could be. Eventually, the journal turned out to be an essay called \u201cAn Island Notebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interviewer: When you were coming to the form of the essay, did you have any models you were looking at for inspiration?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: I had been reading a lot of twentieth-century nature writers and essayists and non-fiction writers. I loved Edward Hoagland\u2019s essays; they are very associative, almost poem-like. I loved Peter Matthiessen. I think I had always liked great essays, too. Montaigne, James Baldwin, these were really compelling authors for me. Especially Baldwin. Here was somebody who perfectly married personal and psychological concerns with the social and political concerns of his time. His essays are so passionately inward but so passionately outward as well. So, I was reading a lot but I was really tormented. I\u2019m sure I was reading all the great environmental writers, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen. I also liked aspects of travel writing, aspects of meditative essay, and aspects of nature writing. I just thought I\u2019d just take a little bit from all of these genres. I was less crazy about memoir, because I saw too few memoirs that took on a larger subject. The memoirs that turned me on, and still do and still inform me, are those with big subjects like Nabokov\u2019s Speak, Memory<\/em> and Primo Levi\u2019s The Periodic Table<\/em>. They\u2019re personal but they\u2019re also very engaged with political situation.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I think the, as you put it, marriage<\/em> between personal and political concerns speaks to a lot of your work as well, not just your essays. Your poetry obviously has to do with nature, but it also has to do with more than that. It also addresses the context, the \u201cculture,\u201d to borrow word you use a lot, that surrounds nature. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: I\u2019m really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it\u2019s all about the individual. As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world. I\u2019m interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways. I\u2019m just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that\u2019s where the arts live. Sometimes it gets talked about as if it\u2019s all about the individual, and I don\u2019t think it is. I\u2019m really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: How do you think the culture of nature manifests itself in your poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Well, for one thing, I\u2019m extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It\u2019s always deepening my understanding of the natural world. So, for me, bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment. If I sit down and I read Science News<\/em>, any issue, I\u2019ll sit down and I\u2019ll say \u201cOh my God!\u201d Like in the one issue, there was this piece about luminescent bacteria, bacteria with a phosphorescent substance that makes them light up under water. The brine shrimp that feed on these organisms favor the ones with this luminescence. I read something like that and I think, \u201cHoly cow, the world is amazing. I want to put that in a poem.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m always trying to ask myself both \u201cWho am I as an individual?\u201d and \u201cWhat are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?\u201d How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I\u2019m really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it. Often a student will tell a really powerful personal story, but it feels small. I always ask him or her, \u201cCan you place that in a cultural context?\u201d Then the story becomes a bigger one.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: What you\u2019re saying makes me think of a term environmental writers often use, \u201cthe wild:\u201d the idea of bringing the wilderness or a sense of wildness somehow into the work. I wonder if you see writing a greater cultural context as a way of doing that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: That\u2019s an interesting question. Maybe I do. Maybe it\u2019s that same kind of exploratory impulse, wanting to trail-blaze away from the domestic, both in myself as well as out in the woods. A desire to say, \u201cIf I allow my mind to range more wildly, what will it gather and bring to the poem or the essay?\u201d<\/p>\n

Interviewer: You\u2019ve talked a little bit about the differences between writing poetry and writing essays. I wonder if there are similarities you\u2019ve found?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Yes. I think one is associational thinking, that same sense of discovery\u2014allowing the subject to unfold as you pursue it. One of the things I\u2019ve been working with in my recent non-fiction, my latest book Zoologies<\/em>, which is composed of short essays. I\u2019ve been trying to see how I can bring some structural elements from poetry into a short essay. They\u2019re not prose poems, but in one short essay I do use a refrain line \u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t know when I first noticed the absence of birds\u201d \u2014 and then it kind of riffs off, coming back three or four times. That idea of a refrain line as a rhetorical gesture, that sort of stitches the essay together, is a lot like a poetic gesture. I like that. I also like bringing poetry\u2019s focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose. I grow very impatient with prose writers who don\u2019t pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you\u2019re wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice. I see a lot of similarities between the two genres; I\u2019m always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I\u2019d like to end by opening our conversation to a bit of speculation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Oh boy \u2026<\/p>\n

Interviewer: I read a lecture you gave at AWP on the future of the environmental essay. I wonder if you can expand that to your ideas about the future of environmental writing in general, including the future of environmental, sustainable poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Well, I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament; in some ways it\u2019s important to be the vessels for grief for all that\u2019s being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking; that\u2019s why I think science fiction writers have a role in environmental writing. Kim Stanley Robinson has been doing incredible work with climate change in sci-fi. For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice. I don\u2019t want people to write these programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry\u2014an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice. Poets can speak for those things because they come out of a really deep place in us. We don\u2019t accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to that same deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet\u2014for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.<\/p>\n

I see poetry changing in this way. It used to be, oh, you know, you\u2019d have a few environmental poets, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, the great American nature poets. But what I see happening now, because the environment is becoming so much a central concern of our time, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won\u2019t have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing. Our collective conscience is being affected by what\u2019s going on. I think we\u2019re going to be surprised; I hope we\u2019re going to be discovering extremely interesting ways that environmental concerns will come into American poetry. For example, I want to see urban perspectives on these issues, not just \u201cI took a hike and it was beautiful and here\u2019s my poem.\u201d But, you know, sitting in the middle of Chicago reading an article about carbon in the atmosphere and our lack of political will\u2014is there a poem anywhere in there? I don\u2019t know! If you can find it, write it.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: This brings to mind the fallacy of nature or the environment as something different from human places or human life, the specious dichotomy between humanity and nature. Isn\u2019t everything<\/em> nature?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: Right. We\u2019re<\/em> nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature. Like Snyder\u2019s idea of the \u201cwild mind\u201d\u2014it\u2019s the wild mind that wants to make the poem. I think that dichotomy is breaking down, though. Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn\u2019t just what surrounds us\u2014it\u2019s all one whole. Maybe we\u2019re coming into that holistic view now.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: So you see environmental poetry as maybe\u2014a poetry of the whole?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deming: I like that. Yes! I like that very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of four books of poetry, Science and Other Poems (1994), The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), Genius Loci (2005), and Rope (2009); in addition to three books of environmental creative nonfiction, Temporary Homelands (1994), The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (2001). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-1zI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11799,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6058\/revisions\/11799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}