by L. Renée

Jamaican-American poet Shara McCallum visited James Madison University in May of 2024. L. Renée, then-Assistant Director of Furious Flower Poetry Center, interviewed McCallum on behalf of The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a transcription of their conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.

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In your work, you can wrestle with history, identity and myths. Writers, prose writers especially, could spend hundreds of pages wrestling with this, but you do so in poems. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about why you think poems–this form, this economy of language–can hold those themes that are so full? 

I think there are two answers for me where this is concerned. One is that poetry is the oldest of all art forms in literature, but originally, its orality merged with song. So, in it, it contains all the threads of history, myth, storytelling, music; and I feel as if the lyric, the dramatic, the narrative—all those modes exist in a poem. I’m honoring that history of poetry and the tradition of the art. The other reason is, I’m sort of obsessed, as a poet, with silence, so I hear a lot of the weightiness of language, when I’m writing. The caesuras, those pauses, that syntax, sometimes create the line or creates the spacing on the page that you can also manipulate in a poem. I feel as if that silence, especially, is where the myths in the history that I’m concerned with come together. So as much as I’m interested in speaking to the silences in those stories that we have, the incomplete narratives of the past of people like you and I, I’m also interested in sounding that silence, allowing that to reverberate in the poem. 

I often think about that, the sentence as a sentence, right? Expectations that are brought to that and how we can use poetry in line breaks, and as you said, caesuras to disrupt expectation, or to make that turn that one might not expect otherwise.  

Right, and I feel as if in a poem, we’re working with both of those rhythms. Because we have the backdrop of the sentence that’s always going, right? And then we have the line, which is a measure on top of that measure. And I like that multiplicity of sound and disjuncture that you can create with enjambment in a poem, and sometimes you would go with the rhythm of the sentence, sometimes you move against it, you cut against the syntax. So, it is having multiple musics to work with in a poem that is interesting. 

Well, speaking of music, in 2017 at AWP I was walking through the exhibit hall, and I heard this voice, this sound, this beautiful music that led me to you. I have been a fan of your work ever since: the music, the assonance, the consonants, the rhythms, the resonances, that your work creates really draws me, as a poet who’s often led by sound first. In your own practice, when you come to a blank page, are you coming with sound, music, and maybe not even language before you come to the page? Are you coming to the page with an image? A narrative? How do you start? 

I would say voice is probably the way that I hear a poem. And it is often driven by patterns of sound that would create, then, a character of that voice on the page. But I think narrative comes late for me. It’s not that I’m not interested in storytelling, but I have a hard time telling a story in a very direct fashion. I think that that’s the lyric. That’s the sound of the speaker and the poem’s voice, often driving the point for me. And it’s a choice to make in revision, as a writer to move in certain ways when you when you have the distance from whatever you’ve drafted. But what I’m brought to the page by is a sense of someone speaking to me. I don’t usually know who they are. Usually, it’s a woman, sometimes, as in this book [No Ruined Stone], I’ve written in the voices of men. But I write the poem in a way to give habitation to that voice, to flesh it out, to hear it, follow it, and see where it wants to go. 

How have you trained your ear to listen? In this world with a cacophony of sound, of distraction, of news, of stuff? How do you tune in? 

Well, I’ve read a lot of poetry. I feel as if I put myself in the presence of other art that I love. And I’m then in conversation with those other poems. I’m a teacher, too, and whenever students bring poems, I’m often saying to them, I hear this other poem, I hear this other poem. And they may not have read these poems, yet—they often haven’t—but that’s how I hear the language of poetry. So yes, it’s voice driven, for sure for me, but it’s also the voice of poetry that I’m hearing, which is very different than how “Shara” speaks. I mean, my kids would beg to differ [Laughs.]. They teach me that my syntax can be very convoluted, it’s just very Jamaican to have this kind of syntax, I’ve come to understand and to talk long. We’re long speakers! But I do think it’s a combination of the reading I’ve done, the history I carry with me, the voices I’ve heard that aren’t in books, the voices I imagine. But filtered through the lens of what I hear is a poem. That’s a mixed metaphor, the lens, I’d say more to be the reception that I hear as a poem. 

I want to talk about the first book I happened to read of yours—Madwoman. And the speaker of this poem, “Exile” says: The trick is to remember // time is a fish / swimming through dark water.” In another poem of yours that I read “Dear Hours,” which appears in This Strange Land, that speaker references the kind of fleeting quality of time with the narrative of this daughter picking a zinnia. And these lines really made a mark: 

That movement, that shift of time, made me wonder, especially with your continual grappling with history, present, future—what is your relationship with time? Does it feel linear to you? Nonlinear? How were you able to hold the complexities of such a thing? 

That’s a good question, and thanks for reading the poem so carefully and connecting those; I’m thinking about those lines in tandem now. What I think is: I don’t really think I experienced time in linear fashion. I often have difficulty with this because when I’m in the present, I think I’m often pulled out of it into the past. And when I’m in the past, I often can hear the present as well. When I’m working in the past with memory, with archival histories—and this is true even of how I experienced the world as a person, I suspect—it’s that shifting focus, for me, that’s interesting. But the arrangement of language, and the storytelling impulse to make ourselves cohere in the present, is strong in me. And that is a desire to arrange these details in such a way as to create a kind of through-line of self. So, I think that’s where the narrative pull comes from me, is wanting to be a coherent person who moves through the world. But no, I don’t think I experience time that way. 

I suspected so! Speaking of time, we go way, way, way back in time in your newest work, No Ruined Stone, which enacts this speculative history of what might have happened if the poet Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland to Jamaica, as in some facts that you found out, to manage a slave plantation. In your author’s note, you leave us with this question that you said, ‘kept rattling you,’ in your mind over and over and over. “What would have happened, had he gone?” I was curious why that question arrested your attention and kept it for years in making this book. Why was that a thing that you could not let go? 

I tried to recount going back in time, which I tried to do in the author’s note a bit by describing the kind of fixation I ended up having on this subject. There are some obvious answers to this. I think one is that I’ve walked through the world my whole life carrying the surname, McCallum. It’s my father’s name; it’s a paternal name that I did not change when I got married. And my father’s father carried it, and he was a Black Jamaican. This is not something people guess when they look at me, and I’m aware of that. But I think there’s that thread in which I was troubled by the fact that this name, which is so obviously, of Scots origin, and my family’s inheritance of that name, on the patrilineal side. Where did that happen? It’s the question I think that’s true for a lot of Black people in the New World: “How do I come to possess this name?” That’s a European name; it is in some way implicated in slavery, whether you know it or not. If you’ve been here for a few centuries, or even just a few decades, actually, usually that’s the case, right? And so, I knew I was carrying that history in me, I knew it. But I think it collided with the story of Burns in a way that also inflected my own relationship to poetry, to the enlightenment, and even to histories of male genius. A lot of things were going on at that point, which is why it was so troubling for me.  

I had a vision of Burns that came from the poems, and I am not the kind of student of poetry that I increasingly see my students being. Which is to say, I work with so many more students of color in workshops than I ever was with when I was [myself] in workshops—the few that I was in as a literature student. I see so many beginnings in the present, and a plurality of voices in the present, that they have as their tradition. That was absolutely not my tradition starting out. I have worked for that tradition. But my tradition—and I’ve been clear about this with students and many times with people—was the British romantic. So early on, I loved an art that wouldn’t love me back.  I loved poems where (and I came to process this at some point) I wanted the poem without the person, because if I had to wrestle with the person who wrote the poem, I would feel so undone sometimes by that. That is also the history that made this question such a vexation for me. Then the whole history of the Enlightenment, as I said, the whole unfinished project of democracy, slavery, colonization, all those forces in the eighteenth century that so clearly for me are in the present. You know, that question you asked about not being able to hear time in linear fashion? That’s the problem, or is it the gift, I’m not sure if it’s a problem. If you can see those threads that are playing out still. 

I have chills thinking about that line, ‘loving some something that doesn’t love you back,’ and how to wrestle with that love of language and what poetry opens up from a time and a space where people who look like us were not represented. 

There are no histories of us in the archives. There’s very, very few, like a name here or there, but so few. 

That made me wonder about inhabiting this voice of Burns, using his diction, troubling it. In some ways, it felt like to me like, stepping into someone else’s skin, and moving about with it and having that inclination to go No, no, no, no, that doesn’t feel right. This feels right, and doing that with this kind of character. That is complicated. How did you move through that? 

My practice is to read a lot as a poet anyway, but with this book, I read everything Burns wrote. I went back and reread it and really sat with the prose, too, as the poems, to be able to imbibe his language, his syntax. Not to make it imitative mimicry or parodic, which was not my attempt. But to have enough of it in there that I was taking in that syntax, so I could write in a voice that felt distinct from my poetic voice. I knew his history; I knew his backstory and his biography. But I think this also surprises people with Burns. For example, Isabella, who’s in the second half of the book. Everybody just immediately says, Okay, she’s an avatar for Shara. Clearly, she is, though there are some differences that are significant. But I joke with people well, you know, I’m also a poet, why are you not doing that [making the character an avatar] with Burns? What people are failing to see is that there can be other layers that you can create character in, both drawing from your own personal experience, but also from the experience of people I have loved close to me. My father and my grandfather, in different ways, were absent, or people who were complicated figures. I love them, and they were instrumental in the person I am, but there were gaps in how they weren’t fully cited. The women in front of them—we were all this family of women—I can see the ways in which they couldn’t quite, as a consequence of patriarchy, could not completely see the people in front of them. It surprises people to know that I might have borrowed from these people in my life and created this character out of his history, me, and language. Principally too, I’ve watched many male friends, even who are poets, and what the pressure of genius does to destroy them in a way. So, I think it’s so many things that are interesting, and how a character develops that you can see after the fact. The practice, though, was principally to read, and to know as much as I could know.  

There’s another question in this for me, which is the ethical question of doing something like this. I think I wrestled with that, with what right did I have to take a figure like Burns, who is important to Scottish identity, when I am not Scottish. I don’t claim to be by carrying that surname, I am Jamaican. I had to come to the place where I felt like this was also my inheritance, because the Scots came here, and this is why I carry this name. So, I am not claiming Burns for all of Scotland in any way. If they want to admit some part of my Burns into their history, I would be grateful, because I think it would complicate their own narratives, but that’s not my right or role. I’m writing this as a mixed-race Black Jamaican woman who looks white. That is my vantage point. So, this is my Burns, you know. So, I think that’s also a question when you’re dealing with dramatic monologue based on real people. History, myth, these men sometimes were larger than life. There’s to me always the ethical question that you have to ask too, not just what would have happened if he’d gone, which is a narrative question, but the why of this book. “Why, Shar, do you need it to be Burns?” 

You’re using this language of inheritance, which kept hitting me over and over. I wondered, what you feel like—and this can be related to this work, or in general—your inheritance is as a Jamaican-born poet, who has also lived in Maryland, and Indiana, and in all these spaces. How do you carry inheritance? In tangible ways and intangible ways? 

Well, it’s a rocky inheritance, as I’m looking down at the stones on the book [cover] and thinking There’s my answer, the truest answer. You know, I like humor a lot, because I come from a line of women who use it to survive whatever pains you. My grandmother always says, “Yeah, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” so I think this is my answer. In the best of worlds, I feel invited to many parties. In the worst, I get invited to none. And that’s inheritance. I have to wrestle with both of those. Why I want so desperately to belong is the profound question of my life and my work. But I do, except that I’ve wanted more than anything to be claimed, by the people who I claim. And sometimes that happens, and other times it doesn’t. I’m fifty now, so I’m less completely undone by it, but it’s still there in me. And I don’t know why. If I want to psychoanalyze myself, I could offer up what might be obvious, which is I migrated as a child, my father died a couple of days later, my mother didn’t come with us—lots of ruptures that I’ve written into and about for a long time, I can see that. But it might also just be temperamental. Poets and artists tend to have things that we’re fixated on, obsessed by. I’m the kind of writer that works with those things. And I do walk around the world doing other things, besides thinking all of this, but it does occupy quite a bit of my thoughts. 

I was also interested in this use of persona to probe a lesser-known history, which you talked about in your author’s note, thinking about the voices of people who are not reflected in the archive. I wondered if you might speak a little bit about this practice and craft choice of persona, what that opened up for you, and allowed for you in the making of this work. 

So, for example: Nancy. She is the enslaved African woman who has one monologue, but I think she’s the formidable force across the entirety of the book. She is a presence felt throughout Burns’s section, and Isabella’s. She came to me because I went to Jamaica, and you know I’m from Jamaica, but I have to say to people that just as I went to study Scottish history and went to the archives, I didn’t trust that just being Jamaican meant I was an expert in eighteenth-century plantation slavery and the history of it in Jamaica. So, I went to the archive in Kingston to look for maps of the plantation so I could really re-envision that space, and I came across a bill of sale, which I had never held before. I knew what it was, but I actually had to leave and go on onto the streets in Kingston after seeing it because I was completely a mess. I think it’s the way the individual pierces us so differently than how history often allows us a kind of distance. The abstraction of numbers, the way in which we recount the past, even sometimes the language we use that’s so depersonalized from the experiences, but the artifacts on which that history is built? They are tangible, personal experiences of the past. I thought about the girl child named at the age of nine, and I thought about her, and I thought about her mother, and I thought: she’s in this book now. It’s just that moment for me which was the birth of Nancy. That’s the best I can explain for “Why the persona?” It’s because it’s the form I’ve written in instinctively, as a poet, for a long time. But also, a monologue is a provocation to speak, and often you have a very clear point of address. That intimacy of voice personalizes what otherwise people reject. People often still are like “I don’t want to hear about slavery, I don’t want to hear about this.” But I’m like, “Imagine a nine-year-old child taken from her mother, going across this horrible, torturous—” I don’t even have the language for the experience of the Middle Passage that’s adequate “—Now, imagine that, hear her speak.” I think that we will get through some of the defenses that we all put up, because the history is so horrific that we don’t want to engage. 

I’m curious about what your hope for the book was, as a part of that. Are you hoping to engage people on the level of learning about something new that they didn’t know historically, or on a level of having a deeper level of connectedness and empathy? What were you hoping came out of this work? 

It’s a book of poems, so my hope is always pretty low for readers, to be honest with you! I do realize that I have that hope, but I would say first and foremost, I wrote this because I needed to reckon with this history myself. I was avoiding the most obvious subject I’ve only written about—constantly—at the margins. I could see I’ve done it, but while masking myself more clearly, as the mermaid. That history of passing, of miscegenation…it involves rape, and it involves sexual violence, and it’s difficult for me to write about that. I’ve done it, though. I could point to the book I’ve written and say, “I’ve done it,” but Isabella was a sustained attempt to address that history, but also in me. I don’t know if that really answers the question you’ve asked, but I do think that’s partly what I would say. 

That’s even more significant, I think, that it’s the hope that was, in some ways, for you. 

But always as a byproduct of that, you have hope that others who might read this would engage and be willing to engage. There’s always that hope, too, so I’m not trying to deny that. I mean, otherwise, why bother publishing, right? So, it’s illogical to pretend you don’t hope for readers as a writer because we always do, but the first line of entry, in all honesty for me, is grappling with it. What I find I cannot look at is what I always seem to have to look at. Finding ways, as a poet, to do that has been a struggle, but it’s a beautiful one, and you hope other people feel so inclined to join you in that if they read the book and do not look away. And I hope for that. 

I wanted to talk about some of the practical elements of writing a book about so much research and archival work. It’s easy when you’re researching to go down a complete rabbit hole and dig yourself back up to making. I’m curious, how did you know “I have enough,” “I can stop,” “I can write,” “I need to look back at this.” How did you do it? 

Well, your former teacher, Adrian [Matejka] is a friend. The Big Smoke is such an amazing book, [Last on His Feet], with the history of Jack Johnson and how he brings it back, and now he has the graphic novel too. I could name any number of poets, but I’m a big fan of Adrian and his work, and we both know him, I would just say that I had many models. This is a little different because each book is different, but I’m indebted to Lucille Clifton[’s poem], “At the Walnut Grove Plantation in South Carolina.” I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was reading—through all the decades I was reading—it’s particularly Black poets whose need to recount these histories is greater. We see these absences readily, we feel them, and we want to be part of the project of history. So, in a way, I’m joining in that chorus of voices. I don’t want to single my work out because I recognize my debt and that I’m part of a tradition, Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Venus Hottentot,” Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. Too many people have gone before for me to not least allude to or directly mention the fact that there’s a body of work I’m writing into. How I worked with research was different than each of these writers, but I think the basis of it is that underpinning that we need to see ourselves present in a history that would have it be otherwise. 

I only write anything that feels like I need to write it. That’s a litmus test for me, as a writer. If I don’t need to write it, I don’t like to write it—I won’t probably. Even when I’m given assignments, I have to find the need, if I’m commissioned. I was commissioned to write a poem for a project in the UK that’s looking at the Transatlantic Trade and enslaved Africans from the perspective of the UK experience, which resulted in an anthology of poems that accompany to this art exhibition that was launched last fall throughout the UK. I was asked as one of the Caribbean writers to contribute a poem, and I had to find my way into that through need. I ended up writing a monologue that was another monologue in my mind in Nancy’s voice about speaking to her mother. In this book, she speaks to her granddaughter Isabella, for whom she has played the role of a mother because her mother dies in childbirth, but this is Nancy’s poem, speaking to her mother, who she lost. So, I think that’s how I do it. Even when I’m given an assignment, and I wanted to honor that, I find a way in through saying, “What is my unfinished business? How can I make of this something that feels essential and organic? 

I was thinking about the fact that you have been an educator for quite a while, you know, teaching students at Penn State, also the low-residency program. How have your students influenced your writing journey? 

It’s been 28 years that I’ve been teaching workshops, now, and I started, as many of us do when I was studying for my MFA degree, and in my PhD, I kept teaching them. I’ve taught in numerous settings, both inside universities and outside in the US and outside the US. The common denominator for me is I love poetry. When I’m in conversation with students, I’m reminded of that love. Nowhere else in my life has anybody asked me to have this conversation. The rest of my life, how I live, is compartmentalized, and I play other roles as we all do, right? Most of the time, in my house, I’m a wife and a mother, a sister, a friend, and an auntie. These kinds of social roles are very meaningful for me, they’re grounding roles; but as a poet, to be able to have a conversation with you right now, or to be able to have conversations with my students on a regular basis about the line? That’s nerdy stuff that nobody really cares about, you know, so I feel it’s this exchange that renews my love of the arts. I also really, really like to be useful, so as much as my students will allow me to be, I want to share what I know. I think that’s an honest way to approach teaching. So much of the movement toward always empowering student voices is extraordinary because it creates conversations, it creates potential for students to explore and learn and feel confident in their own learning.  

But I always say to them, this is two ways. Because I’m not going to pretend that I don’t also want to share something with you that is a contributor to your development as a poet, I won’t pretend that. That feels dishonest. So, in other words, I like the Socratic method as a teacher, but only to a point. I also I think I’m very Jamaican and I’m like, “actually I know something, so this is the time. Take out your notebooks, this is the time now to listen and write. Here’s what I’m going to say to you, and I want you to think about this; here’s a question I want you to be thinking about.” So, I think it’s also because of that desire to share the journey of my own learning, that there’s an avenue and an opportunity to share that. It’s both of those. What my students give is their enthusiasm and energy, and there is nothing so beautiful as seeing somebody discover that they can do something that they didn’t think they could do. It’s beautiful to me to be in the presence of that and be a participant enabling that. And then I get to share these nerdy conversations and say, “I love to talk about the line, you want to hear?” 

Well, I will share that you empowered me as your student in 2021 at the Kenyan Writers Workshop. One of the reasons I took that workshop with you was because I heard for the first time those years ago at AWP Jamaican Patois in a poem, and I’m someone who is grappling with the language of Black Appalachians and trying to hold what I know, what I hear, while also understanding that there’s stereotype attached to this language and not trying to make a caricature of people that I know and love. I felt empowered by you in that workshop to lean into a poem’s language and voice. I heard it, and I was so worried about doing that because I did not want to reinscribe any kind of harm. So, I wondered if you could talk about that, especially coming from a Jamaican tradition of language and musicality that is also tied up with the colonial project. How do you gain the confidence to write exactly what you wanted to write exactly how you heard it, or if you worried at all about being understood? How did you navigate that? 

I think that there are so many great, great comments that you’re already making about this that I want to just add to those. So, the worry wasn’t driving me, it was the desire to write the voices I could hear, all of them I grew up hearing. I don’t think that in my twenties, the first time I wrote in Patois, it came whole to me like that. So, it wasn’t so much a conscious thought at that moment. I will, again, name names. Miss Lou, Louise Bennett, the Jamaican writer, actor, an amazing presence in Jamaican culture. I grew up also hearing Miss Lou’s stories and about Anancy, and her retellings, and her poems. It felt a part of my inheritance, when I was a young writer, looking for ways to bridge these different influences and worlds. You know, I want the British Romantic tradition, I want the Jamaican tradition, I want the African American tradition, just to name some. I want all of it in me and in my poetry. And so, I’ve tried to bring those voices in. And I know your work, L., and I think you’re doing it beautifully. I hope that the worry will lessen. I understand that that’s a good place to begin from, and I don’t know why I just had such bravado or something. I think it sounds weird to say, but because the voice is what I hear, and I write the poem. “Calypso” came almost whole to me like that, her story in that voice, in that modernized Jamaican setting I had transplanted her into. I don’t know exactly, but I’m sure Miss Lou was an influence, I’m sure of that. I name her because I know she gave me a kind of literary, cultural grounding. I also think it’s just the idea that you write what you need to write and what you hear, that was driving me. 

It’s interesting to think about the oral history component tied up in that, listening to people telling stories, picking up language, pacing, syntax and diction from that oral tradition. 

And I know this book has no real moments of Jamaican Patois, I mean, there’s a few inflections that I can hear, but you know, I was working with Scots in this book. So, I think it’s also a sort of keen interest in the various registers of English and language that I have. Early on, I wrote a poem in my second book, I think, that is also with some Spanish because my mother is Venezuelan. I don’t have firsthand access to the language, it’s always my secondhand, very poor Spanish I speak very baby Spanish. But I think it’s that interest to bring the fullness of the registers of language that you have access to as a poet into your poems. 

I’m curious since at this point, you’ve written six books, you’ve directed at an amazing center for poetry, you’ve been an educator, you’ve had your work, translated in many languages, work set to music—you’ve done all these things while still pouring back into community. Do you even think of what’s next? What is the thing that you want to do or would love to try or have a curiosity about that hasn’t happened yet? Where do you go from here? 

Well, I think I’ll continue to deepen the things that I have done. But you know, I would love the experience of working with a composer and being part of the piece that was performed, that was just extraordinary. It opens me up to the idea of even further collaboration, because normally as a poet I write in solitude. I think that’s going to continue to be my principal practice, but I liked that idea, to talk about community, the way in which it’s orchestrated quite differently. When you’re in a musical setting and performance, you’re working with a conductor, you’re working with a composer, the chorus, it’s collaborative, it’s in the moment, right? The poem on the page is fixed, and then when you give a reading, that’s a similar performance. So, I think that’s interesting to me to continue to do. Translation is the area that I would like to move into more specifically, I need to improve Spanish to do so in my mind. I’ve done a few poems already from Spanish to English, but I’m always feeling it’s not sufficient. I’ve translated for a project. Alicia Ostriker wanted everyone to translate the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty into other languages as part of a pushback against Trump’s anti-immigration policy, and I translated it into Patois, which is the first time I’ve ever tried anything like that. I’ve never attempted it; I just don’t do that. But I found that these experiences, limited as they were, have inspired me to think about that as another way to give back to the tradition of poetry and other poets in a different context than I have so far. I practice principally as a teacher, sometimes as an editor. I guest edited with Malika Booker, an anthology in the UK of African American, Caribbean, Black British women and women identifying poets. That kind of work exposes me, enlarges me—exposes me to other writers and thereby enlarges me. So, I suppose that’s what translation can further to, and I’d like to practice more of it. What I need to do is find a time when my children are grown, because my vision is to go and spend time in Latin America where I’m forced to speak Spanish again. When I’m forced, it’s amazing that I can remember it, but otherwise, I don’t speak it and haven’t for decades. I need that to be part of the practice, I think, because I’d like my ear to guide me as a poet. 

You’re thinking about part of your practice as immersing yourself in a space, a place, and a culture, so what else do you do, or what else enriches your practice, beyond just the reading? What other things do you do when you’re writing, or do you have any rituals or things you go to, to stay with it? 

I try not to make too many prescriptions, because my life otherwise would enable me never to write, so I just don’t have a lot of rituals. What I do know is I prefer to write in complete solitude. But I grew up in a big family in a small house. I didn’t have my own bedroom until I went to university, so I’m accustomed to sharing space and being alone inside of that. So, I’m also capable of sitting in the middle of everything and tuning everyone out. But I think that’s the only other thing I require. I don’t really have a lot of these kinds of practices. I prefer to write by hand, but when push came to shove, much of this book I changed the practice based on travel—I wrote it on a laptop. I think I don’t want to be so precious personally, about anything, because I would worry, given the other things that I do in the day and in my life, that I would never write if I set up a certain set of parameters that are ideal. 

And I think, again to go back to Burns, the model that we have of artists as the male genius. We need to reckon with that directly, and I’ve spoken about that for a long time. Not just because it excludes the possibility of women being geniuses, I don’t care about that term that much. And I think it’s fraught for me; I don’t like it. It’s not that I’m fighting for the label for women, it’s more so that it’s predicated on this very exclusionary idea of how one practices as an artist that denies caretaking. I am a person who caretakes. I care for my students, I care for my family, it is a part of what I consider valuable in the world, even if it doesn’t result in a poem. I want both of those to coexist, and I dislike the narratives that often are hard for women to follow. So, I want there to be another way and I have models. Lucille Clifton talked about writing her poems when she was in the kitchen, Eavan Boland the Irish poet was a mother of two girls. I had the great fortune of loving both their works and then meeting them. I look for models of people I want to be when I grow up, and I think, as poets and as women, we need those even more. 

I’m grateful to have had your presence here at Furious Flower, here at JMU, but more specifically, of being able to show the capacity of what one can do when they lean into their knowing and what can open up not just for the writer, but for the reader. I am so deeply indebted to you for your light. 

Thank you, and same for yours. 

Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt

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L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, scholar, educator, and collector of stories. A descendant
of proud Black Appalachians who labored in West Virginia coal towns and Virginia tobacco fields, she was selected by the National Association of Black Storytellers as the winner of the 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller’s Fellowship representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. Her work has been widely published, and has been awarded several prizes, including the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award, among others. She has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the dots between, and has been supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc., Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts, among others. L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. She also previously served as the Assistant Director of Furious Flower Poetry at James Madison University.