Who knew when we were charting out our list of interviewees for 2022, a year in which River Heron Review celebrates its fifth anniversary as a literary journal, that Shawn R. Jones, the first poet we hoped to interview— would have gone on from having her first published poem appear in our 2018 debut issue, to recently winning the prestigious 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.
Recently, Shawn and RHR co-editor Judith Lagana met online to catch up on a variety of topics, including, but not limited to, how writing about family, trauma, and truth demand emotional readiness, courage, and confidence on the part of the writer.
Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain and A Hole to Breathe. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, was awarded the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2023.
Shawn is the co-owner of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc., a dance instructor at Halliday Dance, a member of the Langston Hughes Society, and the poetry performance troupe, No River Twice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and an MFA from Rutgers-Camden. When she is not writing, dancing, or teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family and her lucky pit bull, Ross.
RHR is honored to present Shawn’s interview.
RHR: Do you believe a poem can be over crafted?
SRJ: Yes, because I believe some poems can come together quickly, especially when meaning and rhythm connect without bumping into each other. A poem can feel right and sound right after the first draft. That’s not to say it doesn’t need revision, but you don’t want to craft the passion out of the poem. You want to keep the spark that ignited it. For example, a few of my poems have over fifty drafts, and I am aware that I’m trying to run away from something draft after draft. What I’m afraid of is probably in an earlier draft on page one of the document. Then, I have to go through all the drafts to see when the poem was actually finished. When I find the draft that is well-crafted but still has its spark, that’s it. So, overworking isn’t always great. You swear you are doing something because you are putting so much into it when really, you are only exhausting yourself, taking everything out of it.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
SRJ: So many! Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison had one book of poems published, but even without knowing that, if you read her novels, you know she was a poet.
RHR: Tell us about your writing process?
SRJ: First, I try to prepare my mind to write. I do that best if I'm alone in a room with the blinds down and the door closed. Then, I play instrumental music—something melancholy like Jorge Mendez’s song, “Cold”, from his album Silhouettes. I enjoy all the songs on that album, but it’s just something about “Cold” that has a way of turning me inside out, and that’s a process I prefer to go through alone. I don’t know what that looks like from the outside, but I know what it feels like. Those moments are sacred to me, and I want to dwell in that space without questions or without making someone else feel uncomfortable.
It is the same reason I have spent years suppressing some of my feelings. What I say may make someone feel very uncomfortable, but in order to make it real to my readers, I can’t hide those feelings from myself when I am writing. For example, I don’t want to remember almost drowning in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not something I carry with me from one day to the next, at least not consciously, but if I am going to write about it, I have to give my mind permission to revisit that specific day, permission to evoke an unpleasant memory. I have to go back to that place and reexperience it. What does it sound like to me now? What do I see? What do I feel? How did this make me who I was and who I am now? Is it because of this experience or that experience that my body spends so much time drawn into itself? You know, in protection mode.
Being a woman in and of itself is enough to keep me guarded. Being a “strong” Black woman adds pressure and another layer of complication because I really grew up expecting to be a “strong Black woman” at all times. However, experience and my body tell me I am both vulnerable and strong. I need those traits to be welcomed in the same body. Writing helps them to coexist in the same space. If I’m lucky, they both show up in the first draft.
Usually after I finish the first draft, I let it sit a few days, sometimes a week. I read through it. Then, I revise it in silence. No music because at that point, music would just be a distraction. I need to make sure the poem can stand on its own, create its own music. I delete words that I feel are unnecessary. That usually means getting rid of as many articles, adverbs, and pronouns that I can without stripping it of its meaning. I might end up with five revisions or fifty revisions. I also read it aloud and listen to its sound. If I can change a word or two to improve its musicality, then I will. For example, if I have a wreath in a poem, and a character named Joe. I am going to change his name to Keith. The word wreath might be in the title or first line of the poem and the name Keith might be five stanzas down from it, but bringing that same sound back matters.
RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
SRJ: For years, I have attended The Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway. Peter Murphy always comes up with the wildest writing prompts, I mean wild in a great way, and one of the requirements of the writing prompts is to “Tell a secret and a lie, and never tell which is which.” That really freed me up. It made me a more courageous writer, and took away a lot of the anxiety I would feel while my poem was being workshopped. In that setting, folks don’t usually ask if the poem is true or autobiographical. The poem is free to have a world of its own.
RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?
SRJ: Oh, I say to definitely keep them! They are proof of how you have developed as a writer over time. Last summer, I was cleaning out my garage, and I found this cute, little flowered trunk. Although I had forgotten all about it, right away I recognized it as a trunk from my childhood. I had no idea what was in it. Among other things that surprised me, there was a notebook full of poems, each one dated in the table of contents! The collection, written in my childhood handwriting, includes 41 poems from 1976 to 1983, and I can pair a few of the poems up with poems I have written in my forthcoming collection, Date of Birth. For example, I can compare what I said about racism in my poetry back then to what I have to say about racism in my poetry now.
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?
SRJ: I am haunted by ideas often. Especially my poems about family trauma. For example, my great aunt stayed at my house one night, a few years ago. She was about eighty-eight years old then. My daughter and I asked about our family’s history. We got much more than we expected. It was heavy. Very heavy. I told my daughter, “That’s all mine” because Jade is a writer, too. She said, “You can have it. That stuff’s too creepy.” Then, Jade went upstairs and locked her bedroom door. I didn’t see her again until the family left the following morning.
I actually found my great aunt intriguing, the way she moseyed around my house, smiling, humming, and dragging her hands across every surface she passed. I wrote down as much as I could because she told me she had written it all down years ago, but her husband threw her manuscript in the trash. Of course, after she told me that, I talked to her for hours.
I'm not always haunted by ideas, though. Sometimes I find poems everywhere and in everything. In the diner. At the dentist. On a plane. In a trunk.
My poems are often stories that convey poignancy in both the big and small, the tragedy and dailiness of life. Then, you have themes like racism that just keep recurring in different spaces, so I don’t have to look for it. It finds me and I write it down. I guess that is a bit of a haunting, too, though.
RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?
SRJ: I usually start out with a journal and a pencil. Then, I type it in a Word or Google Doc. If I am on the go, I sometimes write poems in notes on my phone.
RHR: What is most satisfying about writing (and finishing) a poem?
SRJ: The relief you feel after you let go of something you have been carrying a long time.
Read Shawn’s poem, “To the Women in the Family Who Wrote Before Me.” Shawn shared that, “An earlier version of this poem was published on my blog years ago, a very different version.”
To the Women in the Family Who Wrote Before Me
They rise from the folds
of my knuckles, their miniature
arms anchoring pencil to page.
Limpid legs wrap
around wood.
They are kids hugging
tree limbs, afraid to fall.
Wild with story, in need
of help, they press my fingers
like heavy feet on stiff pedals
and when I shake them off,
they return like boomerangs.
Trapeze artists who swing
from pinky to thumb.
Nibble on my hangnails.
Tickle my palms. Untwist
the seam of my sleeve.
Drum in time
to the pulse of my wrist.
They will not leave.
I cannot resist. Loud birds
these women—loud birds
with words for wings.