Interview with Theresa Boyar
RSP: Theresa, you've mentioned that certain teachers, such as Terri Witek, have had an incredible impact on your motivation and growth as a writer. How did these teachers influence you, and how do you feel you've helped the elementary children in your poetry classes?
TB: My academic career has been pretty spotty. I dropped out of high school and then went back the following year to finish it up, dropped out of college and then went back. I've done a lot of stopping & starting over, a lot of life-editing. In my final year of high school, I was lucky enough to have an English teacher, Debbie Clark, who was so incredibly smart and fun and wild and just really, really good. She read my stories out loud to the class and gave me that initial boost of confidence I think I really needed at the time.
In college, I took a class with Terri Witek and was an absolutely terrible student. I skipped class more often than I attended, I never spoke, and I wrote crummy, dreadful poems. I think she probably helped me most by encouraging me in spite of all that. She would find the one decent line or phrase in a crappy poem I had written and make me understand why she thought it was good. She made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile, something important.
The year that I taught poetry at our community school, there was a pretty big age range – from 5 to 8. At our first meeting, I read a poem by Russell Edson and everyone just sat around staring until one kid finally said in this low, awed voice, "Wow." We spent the next weeks writing and reading and I was amazed by the poems these kids could produce. It was a blast. I like to think that I helped them a little in terms of having a positive initial experience with poetry. I've talked to friends who were first exposed to poetry in middle school or high school, and it was all Shakespeare and Donne and the Romantics. It was very intimidating and a lot of them were turned off right away. They couldn't relate to it and so poetry became this snobby, difficult, and scary thing, something they had to get through. With the elementary students, we had fun with it. We read contemporary poems and the kids wrote about things they liked, things that were important to them. About a year after the class ended, I ran into one of the students at a community event and when he saw me, he immediately started making up a poem on the spot. It absolutely made my week. I'd love to do something like that again.
RSP: Can you walk us through the development of one of your poems, from the first inkling of an idea to the final draft?
TB: I am so going to regret admitting this, but my poem Weight of Sundays started about five years ago with the idea in my head that I wanted a poem to be titled "Weight" and I wanted it to begin with the word "feathers." I can't remember why this was so important to me, but I've been obsessed with weight almost my entire life, and I guess some weird part of me thought it was funny. The final version of the poem doesn't resemble these early versions at all.
--Here's the first rendition, which has been generously scribbled on by my son Tristan. About halfway through, I started going off on some weird tangent about my father and the Cousteau documentaries he used to love watching. I have no idea why.
–Second version: Okay, the feathers stayed, the Cousteau left. I still had no idea where I wanted to take things – I just had this image of a married couple sitting in their backyard eating cherries. I'm a horrible scribbler and I guess I started jotting down an idea for another poem in the upper right hand corner while I was revising this one. I liked the phrase "thin medical jam" and had spent a lot of time in doctor's offices around the time this version was written, so I guess at some point I was looking for a way to work that phrase in too. And I apparently found the word clammy very offensive.
– Third version: All of a sudden a deer appeared in the poem and the couple had children. I started to get the feel for some of what I wanted to go after – that heavy feeling of Sundays, the do-nothing mornings, the inertia; but the couple wasn't right. There was something I wanted to say and I was struggling with how to say it. I also went off on a pretty lengthy tangent about Fun-Dips (I think that's what they're called), those candy fence-post things that you dip in colored sugar.
WEIGHT
Feathers are everywhere.
The neighbor's cat curls
beneath your lounge chair, licking his teeth.
We have been here before,
the morning rising against our necks,
a basket of cherries between us,
a bowl of water for dipping stained fingers
between fruits.
You say love
until it hurts to see your mouth move,
while a lone doe grazes in the field nearby,
the tall grass hissing every time she startles
at your voice.
Inside, sunlight is stretching through the rooms –
the sun of children's voices,
unmade beds, and newspapers that
lose their centers, unwind
through our living room,
and idle for days.
Out here, our wooden fence is failing. Each post, painted
white by earlier tenants, softens in the sun, like
the edible candy sticks we used to dip into colored sugar
as children, growing up in separate towns,
licking it clean again and again until the stick itself
dissolved, giving in to the sweet weight of our mouths.
Our backyard thickens with the noise
of a passing car and narrows again into silence.
It is early still, not for the farmers
peddling berries and corn downtown,
not for the paperboy or the neighbor
girl who jogs religiously in white sweats
in predawn dew.
But after the cherries, we have bread
inside and it's still warm, wrapped in tea towels.
It's early and we're only
on our first course.
We lean forward, reaching
simultaneously for the bowl,
and when our fingers
come together
beneath the surface,
the water magically reddens.
--Fourth version: I finally got around to changing the title and a lot of other things about the poem began to snap into focus as well. This is the couple that I was aiming for – the inertia of those lazy Sundays mimicking, almost mocking, the inertia of their marriage. There's a darkness, here, I think, that was absent from earlier versions. I was still clinging to that last stanza here though. That happens to me a lot – I get attached to certain ideas, images, or concepts and it's really hard for me to let them go. The editors at DMQ Review suggested cutting that last section and it took an outside party saying that for me to realize that it was true, that those last lines had to go. I think the final version of the poem is stronger because it ends earlier, on that note about passivity and destruction.
THE WEIGHT OF SUNDAYS
Feathers are everywhere. The neighbor's cat
curls beneath your lounge chair, licking his teeth.
We've been here before: the morning rising
against our necks, a basket of cherries between us,
a bowl of water for dipping stained fingers between fruits.
You say love until it hurts to see your mouth move.
The doe grazing in the field startles the tall grass
as she moves away from us, bored with voices.
A side street downtown has growers peddling berries and corn.
But closer by, the paperboy has curled himself back into his dreams
and the neighbor girl who jogs religiously in white sweats
is rinsing predawn dew from her bright skin.
Inside, sunlight yawns through our rooms –
the sun of children stirring and unmade beds,
newspapers that lose their centers, unwind
through our living room, idle for days.
Out here, our whitewashed fenceposts soften
in the sun, slouching under the weight of rot and rain,
the boards swelling into spongy layers: a failing
provoked by our mutual neglect, proof
that passivity can lead to destruction.
We feed ourselves on cherries and fat moments
and when we lean forward, our fingers
come together beneath the surface,
and the water magically reddens.
FINAL VERSION, orig. pub'd in DMQ Review:
The Weight of Sundays
Feathers are everywhere. The neighbor's cat
curls beneath your lounge chair, licking his teeth.
We've been here before: the morning rising
against our necks, a basket of cherries between us,
a bowl of water for dipping stained fingers.
You say love until it hurts to see your mouth move.
The doe grazing in the field startles the tall grass
as she moves away from us, bored with voices.
Inside, sunlight yawns through our rooms. Inside:
the sun of children stirring and unmade beds,
newspapers losing their centers, unwinding
through our living room, idling for days.
A side street downtown has growers peddling berries and corn.
But closer by, the paperboy has curled himself back into his dreams
and the neighbor girl who jogs religiously in white sweats
is rinsing predawn dew from her skin.
Out here, our whitewashed fenceposts soften
in the sun, slouching under the weight of rot and rain,
the boards swelling into spongy layers: a failing
provoked by our neglect, proof
that passivity can lead to destruction.
RSP: You write stories, too. Fiction makes such different demands than poetry - there's so much to think about at once: charcter development, dialogue, suspense, plot, climax...it's daunting. What is your method for creating a story?
TB: Yeah, they really are two different animals – I've found that I can never work on a piece of fiction the same day as I'm working on poetry. I just physically/mentally cannot do it. When I write a story, more often than not, I start out with a first line or paragraph and a fuzzy idea of where I'd like the story to go. But it's rare that it actually makes it there. I've tried story grids, tried plotting things out x,y,z – but it doesn't work for me. I get sidetracked and find some other direction more interesting and off I go. Aside from my inability to nail down a setting, I'd say my other big weakness might be plot. I have a hard time adhering to the whole upward sweep, climax, denouement arc.
RSP: How do you tackle the logistics involved with the business side of writing?
TB: You know, I love reading this sort of stuff about other writers – but I'm afraid my own answers aren't all that interesting. I aim for submitting about a dozen or so poems and stories each month. But some months, I'll only get around to sending out one or two submissions. I keep track of things in a few ways. As for my current submissions, I have a little chart that I print out and tack to my bulletin board, with the titles, journal name, date submitted, response time, and a column to record whether something is rejected or accepted. I pencil things in as I go along. I also have a computer file, where I track individual poems and all the places I've submitted them. To date, I'd guess that I've had between three and four dozen poems published.
How many poems I write each month really depends on the month and what else I have going on in my life. November to February tend to be my painfully slow months. My creativity just goes on hibernation, and very little gets accomplished. In Montana, we usually have a preview of spring around mid to late March – the weather will get really warm (well, it'll get to about 55, which feels pretty warm after our below zero winters) and I'll sit outside in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, with a notebook, pen, and Diet Coke, and that moment usually marks the time when I can begin to write again. Of course, the warm spell only lasts a few days and we're typically in for another eight weeks or so of winter weather, but it's enough to get me going.
RSP: What sort of experiences have you had with editors?
TB: Oh boy. A few years back, I submitted some poems to a print journal. I'll be the first to admit that the poems weren't very good, but I wasn't quite prepared for the letter I received back from the editor which said, in part, "Poetry is a fine art and easy to learn, but you know nothing of it." That one stung. A lot.
As far as good experiences, I think Tom Dooley and Julie King of Eclectica do an amazing job of communicating with writers. They offered suggestions on one of my poems and it was gratifying to work with them because I really felt they had my best interests at heart. It wasn't a my-way-or-the-highway style of editing; they were genuinely interested in maintaining the integrity of the poem.
Overall, I feel very appreciative toward editors – it's a tremendous task they've undertaken and they typically receive little acknowledgment for it. One thing I'd like to see changed with regard to online journals is the acknowledgment of received emailed submissions. It's frustrating when you submit something and assume it's been received, and wait for a response, and come to find out four months later that it never reached its destination.
RSP: In an email, you once wrote, "I've written a lot of what I call 'housewifey poems'. It's amazing how many times laundry and dirty dishes find their way into my poems and I get mad at myself for it. I think I should be looking at other things, exploring different
subjects. But at the same time, this is just my life right now. It's where I'm at." Why does the domestic flavor of your poetry upset you? Do you feel that being
a stay at home mother sends the message that writing is just a hobby, that you're an amateur?
TB: It's not really that it upsets me, it's just that I sometimes get frustrated and worry that in some ways, I might be writing the same poem over and over. Here comes another broom, there goes another dishrag, that sort of thing. But it's silly to apologize for it because this is just what my life is at the moment. It's broken garbage disposals and coupon-clipping sessions and unmade beds. So it's natural, I suppose, that those sort of things would fly around in my poems.
I definitely don't think being a stay-at-home mom sends a message that I'm an amateur writer. I think some of my poems send that message loud and clear on their own. I'm still learning and I have a lot to learn. But I can't see discounting my experiences; I can't simply choose to write about something else. My experiences are real and honest and, I believe, just as valid a subject for poetry as is anything else.
RSP: You've been submitting your work in earnest since mid-2002, and you've been widely published. Do you feel that it was difficult to get your foot in the door? What worked for you?
TB: I'm still in the middle of that struggle so I feel a little silly trying to dispense advice in this area. I think that, with me, it was a matter of coming to terms with exactly where I was at in my writing. I researched those magazines and journals that were more open to work from beginning writers and submitted to them. That was an important step, and the acceptances I received gave me the confidence to continue sending out my work.
Once I've submitted something, I won't read it at all until I hear back from the journal. That way, if it's a rejection, I can look at the poem after having forgotten it for a while. The "new-eyes" approach. I scrutinize it to see if there's anything that's not working and then, if necessary, I revise it and submit it elsewhere. I think it's helpful to remember, too, that a rejection doesn't necessarily mean you've written something unpublishable – you just need to find the right place for your work. I read the most amazing story in this year's Best American Short Stories and was shocked to read in the contributors' bios that it had been rejected by 30 journals before being accepted. So I guess there really is something to be said for persistence.
RSP: Have you entered poetry contests or submitted your work to chapbook publishers yet?
TB: I've entered five or six short story contests, but I've only entered one poetry contest. As far as a chapbook goes, the material is there, but the organization is not. I can't stop myself from reshuffling the poems, pulling ones out, putting new ones in, that sort of thing. I keep going back and forth, too, between two titles: Kitchen Witch and Nothing Ever Happens Here. One week I like one, the next week I'm into the other. And of course, each time I flip back and forth, the whole thing needs to be reordered and tinkered with, so who knows if anything will ever come of it.
RSP: How do you react when you receive rejection letters? Do you feel you've grown a thick skin, or do they still sting?
TB: Rejections still have an effect on me, but I've definitely gotten better about this. When I first started submitting, a rejection would just wreck my day. I mean, I would mope around the house, feeling lousy and ugly, feeling like I'm a terrible writer and wouldn't life be easier if I were a house painter instead. There are still days when I do that, but now, it's in response to my own frustrations with writing rather than someone else's rejection of my poems. When I get a rejection now, for the most part, it stings for a few minutes and then I get past it. I move on.
RSP: How do you react when an editor requests that you revise a poem in order to streamline it with his or her taste?
TB: I am absolutely the worst judge of my own writing, so when an editor requests a revision, I always try to keep an open mind and listen to what he or she has to say. If I feel very strongly about something, I'll try to make my case. But overall, I feel grateful when an editor expresses an interest in helping me improve or clarify a poem. I haven't really had any experiences yet, though, where an editor has suggested revision in terms of redesigning a poem to better suit his or her taste. I honestly don't know how I'd feel about that.
RSP: Having moved often as the child of a carnie father, and later moving eighteen times with your military spouse, do you feel that these frequent moves have given your work a wider scope, or do you wish your work could be more rooted in a specific landscape?
TB: My husband and I have sworn to each other that as long as we live, we will never again pack up another U-Haul. When my oldest son was eight, I counted up the number of different homes he had lived in since birth and came up with eighteen. It's an unusual way to go about things – constantly packing and unpacking and planning and relocating – it just doesn't leave much time for anything else.
On the positive side, I was able to accumulate a lot of details regarding different geographies and cultures. But in some ways, those experiences were wasted on me as a writer because I'm just not the type of person who can easily bring that onto paper directly. Instead, I think the main effect that our lifestyle has had on my writing has been in the feeling of disconnection it's produced. Having relocated so frequently, I've always felt that I really didn't belong to any particular place, that I was just passing through. I think that particular sensation, more than anything else, has wriggled itself into my writing. I've been told by more than a few people that my poems have a detached quality to them, and, to be honest, I suspect that's not always a good thing. But it's something that's embedded in me – it's not deliberate.
I also think it's pretty telling that in writing fiction, one of my biggest struggles is almost always with setting. I'm horrible at it. It's incredibly hard for me to locate a story geographically. I know it's important and potentially powerful and necessary, but I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to the end of writing a story and realized that I haven't got the first clue where the damned thing takes place.
It's been interesting to finally stop moving and settle down in one place. We've lived in our current house now for just under three years. It's the longest (by far) that we've ever stayed put and I am absolutely loving it. I've been so much more productive since we've stopped reshuffling our lives every few months. I have to keep reminding myself that it's no longer necessary to hoard every cardboard box that comes our way.
RSP: Are there any subjects you avoid because you're afraid of how your sons may react to it? Have you ever had to explain any of your poems to them, and if so, did you feel that writing the poem was an irresponsible or a liberating act? Or both?
TB: I don't think I've ever consciously avoided writing about a particular subject for fear of my sons' reactions. Tristan is only six and he knows that I write, but unless something's about him, he's not especially interested in it. Keegan just turned twelve and he's beginning to get curious about exactly what it is that I do, so things might change, but I doubt it.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think that as long as we can talk openly, as long as I can explain myself to them, things will be okay. Recently, I wrote a poem called "Apathy" and it's pretty harsh for me in terms of its outlook on motherhood. I hesitated before I wrote it, not because it's venomous or anything, but because it was difficult for me to admit to having had certain feelings. In the poem, a mother is exhausted and so preoccupied with the mundane/unimportant details of house-life that she essentially ignores her son. When she realizes what she's done, she's still too tired to do anything about it. I felt like I was confessing to something shameful and criminal when I wrote that poem. At the same time, though, I knew that I had to write it. I don't think it was irresponsible of me to tackle the subject, but I personally wouldn't have felt comfortable if I had just written the poem and then sat back and let Keegan draw his own conclusions from it. I worried about how he might react to it, and so I ended up spending a lot of time beforehand trying to explain things to him, how we all have good days and bad days, and how it's important to talk about the bad days because they make you really appreciate the good ones, etc etc. He listened patiently and then when he finally read the poem, he seemed disappointed and looked at me and said, "That's it? That's what you were so worried about?"
Now, having said all this, I should probably confess that I'm pretty much a goody-two-shoes when it comes to poetry. Until this year, I had never even written a poem with the word penis in it, and I still don't think I've ever used any of Carlin's seven dirty words in a poem. It's not that I'm against it or anything – it's just the way it's worked out. So, there you go. I can say that if I had written an explicit poem about sex, I wouldn't exactly be encouraging my kids to read it – there's the whole eeeewwww factor that I don't think they're quite ready to overcome yet.
RSP: You once told me that you can't write if your house is messy. Can you take us through a real day in your life that involves both domestic drudgery and poetic
bliss? How do you organize your responsibilities so that time is freed up for your writing?
TB: I hate, hate, hate that I'm like this. I used to be able to write anytime, anywhere, it didn't matter. But as I get older, I'm getting more and more demanding about certain prerequisites that have to be met before I can even think of writing. It has to be quiet. I have to be at home. I have to be in comfortable clothes. If the house is a wreck, I end up feeling guilty for trying to write when my kitchen floor is all gummed up with spilled juice. I remember seeing this film in my sixth grade math class called Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land – it was supposed to show us how mathematical concepts were everywhere, but what I took from it was this one scene where Donald's mind is shown as this messy, scattered room full of overflowing file cabinets. The narrator chides him for his poor organization and tells him that before they can get to work, they need to clean house. A broom appears and everything flies into place. I think I took that film a little too literally. I feel like I can't think unless my physical environment is at least mostly unsnarled.
A typical day for me – I wake up around 7, have coffee, read the paper, and see the boys off to school by 8:30. I try to have the beds made and things upstairs generally in order before they leave. Then I come down to the basement, pop in a load of laundry, and turn on the computer. Tristan is in Kindergarten and his school day only lasts from 8:30 til 11:10, so I try to cram in as much writing as I can during that little knot of time. Either I'll work on a new poem, revise old ones, or dive into a story. It's difficult, though, because I always feel like someone's holding a stopwatch over my head, saying, "on your mark, get set, be creative. . . . NOW!" On days when the writing doesn't come, I end up doing a lot of "writing-related activities." I'll read and respond to email, check out various online literary journals, listen to the Writer's Almanac online, that sort of thing.
And some days, I just play computer solitaire. I shouldn't admit to that, but I do.
RSP: You've mentioned that you're "socially phobic" and can't stand attention, yet you crave response to your writing. Can you comment on this Wizard of Oz-like
anonymity of writers?
TB: I'm not just socially phobic – I'm socially incompetent. So, for me, I think that writing is a way of being heard without having to suffer through the torture of actually speaking. It's extremely efficient in that regard!
I've attended poetry workshops of five or six people, and even in a setting as small as that, having to read a poem to the group is beyond terrifying for me. I can't stop shaking, I trip over words, I mumble lines together, and my voice cracks and breaks. It's pathetic. I can't imagine having to read to a large group. I do know that it's something I'm committed to improving. It's something I desperately want to be able to do, and so I guess I'll keep squirming in front of smaller groups and working on it until I figure it out.
I love receiving feedback from people who have read my poems online – I think this is one way the anonymity of the Internet helps, because when people talk to me in person about my poems, I'm really uncomfortable. The attention makes me feel self-conscious and fidgety. A few months ago, I was at the library when a friend introduced me to her husband, who shook my hand and said, "So, I hear that you're a poet?" I think he was taken aback a bit by my reaction, which was along the lines of, "Shhh, be quiet, someone might hear you."
RSP: What are your feelings about internet vs. print publishing? What are your ten favorite print and online journals?
TB: I love that I can visit an online journal and find an amazing poem by someone I've never heard of before. The online magazines seem more open to accepting work by unknown writers, and I can appreciate that as both a reader and a writer. I think that the online world is slowly beginning to garner the respect that it deserves. I love what Jason Sanford did this year, with storySouth's Million Writers' Award recognizing achievement in internet writing. I'll always enjoy print journals – their portability and the fact that you can curl up with them, smell them, crack them, fold them, etc. But I think internet magazines are getting better and better, and I count myself lucky to have discovered authors like Rebecca Cook, Kristy Bowen, Karyna McGlynn, & Kelli Russell Agodon in the pages of different online venues. As far as favorites, I subscribe to a few print journals including The Atlanta Review, Poetry, and the North American Review. I also like Crab Creek Review, The Florida Review, Rattle,
Ink Pot, Missouri Review, New Letters, and Nimrod. I probably have over a hundred online journals saved in my favorites folder, but the ones that spring to mind most readily include Eclectica, Wicked Alice, 42opus, Branches Quarterly, Stirring, Disquieting Muses, flashquake, Lily, Tarpaulin Sky, Pierian Springs, Paumanok Review, Slow Trains, and VLQ. Oops. That's more than ten.
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Read Poems by Theresa Boyar in this issue of Rock Salt Plum.
