...with Carolina Hotchandani by Joanell Serra

Carolina Hotchandani was born in Brazil and has lived in most regions of the United Stated before settling, a few years ago, in Omaha, Nebraska, where she is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Northwestern University. Her debut poetry collection, The Book Eaters, won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize for first and second poetry books and was featured in Poets and Writers Magazine.”

Hotchandani’s beautiful book, released in September 2023, has received a very warm welcome to the poetry world. Awards include: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, honorable mention; Poetry by the Sea Book Award, finalist; Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Category, finalist, and Reading the West Award, shortlisted. Several poems from The Book Eaters were published leading up to the release of the book. You can read “Archipelago''and “Somehow History” at Blackbird, “Self-Portrait as the Cornfields” at Four Way Review, “Blueprints” and “A Cord to Bind Us” at Diode, “Wormholes” at SWWIM Every Day, and “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved” as “Poem of the Week” at Missouri Review.

From Perugia’s site “...The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani’s poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling—through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce—these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection.”

I embraced every moment of the journey I took with Carolina’s words. The careful unfolding of the poet’s world and the characters within it remind me of the process of getting to know a friend through a series of deep and intimate conversations. Like all excellent poetry, her poems invite multiple readings--once for the story, once for language and sound, once just for pleasure. While some of the material relates to life’s most challenging events—a parent with dementia, immigration, the pandemic, loss of a loved one, political upheavals, and the birth of a child, the poems lean towards redemption, hope, and making meaning of pain and loss through language.

It was a delight to get to know Carolina through our conversations over the last month, and to unpack some of the more nuanced layers of her book. I found her answers illuminating as a reader and helpful as a writer. Please check out the interview below and as always, I encourage you to purchase the book from the publisher, Perugia Press.

* * *

Joanell: Your book is divided into three discrete sections, although they build on one another nicely: ”Memory, Halved,” “The Making of Mirrors,” and “A Family of Trees.”

I am always interested in the poet’s process of assembling a book--the decisions of what to keep, what to place where, and how to create a book that is a journey. How did you make your choices in terms of sequence and sections? When your manuscript was chosen for the Perugia Press Prize was it as it appears now, or did the editors guide this process? 

Carolina: When I submitted The Book Eaters to the Perugia Press Prize, it was structured as it is now, divided into the three sections you named. I see the first section of the book as concerning primarily memory loss, the second as exploring new motherhood, and the third as interrogating what an identity even is, given that a single person can transform so dramatically in one lifetime.

Witnessing my daughter’s entrance into language was powerful and inspired me to write, yet simultaneously, I observed my father’s falling out of the narrative of his own life. Seeing these opposing yet simultaneous transformations, I wrote The Book Eaters, which traces these divergent paths. I spent a very long time mulling over the structure, considering the pacing of the book, and ordering/reordering poems in order to create a reading experience that I imagined would be smooth.

One aspect of my book that did change between my submission of the manuscript and the publication of the book was that my father passed away—of a heart attack–an event unrelated to the cognitive decline the book explores. Once Perugia accepted my manuscript, I wondered if I should or should not “edit death into the book,” so to speak. A few poems refer to his passing, and when I made these changes, my editor, Rebecca Olander, felt that the book achieved a new sense of completeness and closure.

Rebecca was a wonderful, sensitive reader of these newborn elegies, and we worked on fine-tuning these and other poems together. The overall structure of the book, however, was the result of six-and-a-half years of my own pontification, editing, self-scrutiny–all the obsessive brooding associated with poets!

Joanell: There are resonant repeated metaphors that I found particularly striking. One of them is the concept of things being split open—starting with the poem about the Partition of India, the country of your father’s childhood. And then I see it visually when you write about your father’s brain scan, which of course contains hemispheres. In “Because I hear she hears me from the womb” you write:

This strange body of mine
will divide itself in some
weeks’ time, to birth

a body, to feed
that body, splitting itself
again as I read and inhabit

the lives inside a book.

And then of course there is “Memory, Halved” and “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved.”

Did this metaphor come about organically? Does it feel like the natural consequence of being the daughter of two people from different continents while living in a third?

CaroIina: I’m an analytical person by nature, and I was sometimes channeling my father’s scientific orientation as I wrote this book, so what feels organic to me might be more analytical than what is expected in poetry. My father was a nuclear chemist, and perhaps it was the fact that he was always scribbling chemical equations onto napkins that made me think about the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy as my father lost his memory and as I created a new human from my body. I’d wonder, where did my father’s memories go? With what were they replaced? How was it true that, one minute, I was a single body and upon giving birth, suddenly two?

As the book evolved, I considered other sorts of halving—namely, this sense of being culturally and linguistically bisected. And often echoes between poems or themes would beget other echoes. I started to think of the Partition of India as another sort of splitting that could resonate with a poem like “Self-Portrait as a Woman Halved.” I enjoy when poems converse with one another in these ways in a book.

Joanell: Much of the material you share is quite painful—watching your father lose his ability to communicate, and his memories, facing your mother’s cancer, a challenging birth. Yet you write with a sense of detachment, able to observe and record small but intriguing details and share them in gorgeous poetry. Can you speak to this voice of distance within the experience?

Carolina: I am intrigued by your way of seeing my perspective. I definitely didn’t feel detached as I was writing these poems on difficult subjects, but I think the act of writing compels me to search for ideas that exist within or behind or under my experiences. Though emotion is what brings me to the page, usually it’s an idea–or the interplay between ideas, emotions, and sense data–that keep me engaged in the writing process.

My poem “Order of Operations,” for instance, is a poem that sprang from grief, but as the writing process unfolded, other ideas asked to be folded into the poem. Who knew that I was going to think of algebra when I came to the blank page and started to write about how one prepares for loss and grief? When my writing feels fruitful, this is how it goes; I begin with one feeling but am led by the association of ideas that emerges on the page, to discover new focal points.

Joanell: The cultural pieces are so important in your work and yet so understated. There is a sense the writer is both Brazilian, Indian, American, and yet none of them. You are your own country in some ways--this powerful blend, sharing stories from both aspects, but grounded in the Midwest of this third country. I’d love to hear about how being a child of multiple cultures influences your experience of being a poet.

Carolina: I think being a person with a multicultural heritage made me feel, for a long time, the absence of a clear literary tradition to which I was responding. I envied Black American writers who could point to their literary lineage as well as their response to it. I was never steeped in Brazilian or Indian literary traditions, and though these cultures certainly shaped my life, I know that no Brazilian would consider me especially Brazilian, and no Indian would see me as very Indian. Although I have lived in the U.S. since I was four, I’ve never been seen as an insider in this country. My family’s confluence of cultures, and our habit of moving from place to place made me feel that our way of life was not widely shared. Because of this, I enjoy reading works that explore liminality. As I’ve familiarized myself with other writers who explore cultural contact zones and who do this in a philosophical way, I’ve felt more empowered to explore my cultural heritage.

Joanell: Who or what were the book’s doulas? A place that offered support or respite, like a residency, a specific graduate school mentor, a personal choice to go on retreat, or a contest that convinced you to keep at it. Can you share any of those things that helped this book arrive in the world?

Carolina: Attending the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2021, the year when it was virtual, was life-changing. Being there helped me forge connections with a wide community of talented writers: at that conference, I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Victoria Chang and attending a lecture by Paisley Rekdal. I later worked with Rekdal when I was a Tin House Scholar in 2022 and with Chang when I was a Community of Writers participant in 2023. In 2022, Rekdal discussed the more public role that poetic elegies played in the pre-18th century period. After the 18th century, elegies tend to mourn the loss of private individuals, yet in doing so, they raise the question, “Why should the public care about a private individual’s loss?”

Though I knew of this shift about which she spoke, I hadn’t asked this question of my own work. I am deeply indebted to Rekdal for encouraging this mode of inquiry. Meanwhile, Chang encouraged me not to shy away from the strangeness of my poems—and to make them stranger. Her book Obit is a steady source of inspiration for me.

Joanell: Do you think being an academic informed your ability to organize the book?

Carolina: I believe that writing a doctoral dissertation strengthened a certain “muscle” (if one may call it that) that I then deployed while working on this book. In writing a dissertation, one has to hold inside the mind an argument that has a large scope; each chapter is but one part of the dissertation’s 150-200-page argument. The poetry manuscript is not as polemical, yet I did find myself asking of my manuscript, “What is each chapter trying to do? What is its function in relation to the whole?” Meanwhile, I also wanted to create a sense of chronology as I ordered the poems. It was sometimes overwhelming to juggle in my mind the idea of chapters as arguments and also the desire to create a narrative arc with my poems, but I could think back to my dissertation days and tell myself I’d surmounted other such challenges. This was helpful.

Joanell: How has the experience of the book being published been for you?

Carolina: It has been an unexpected joy to “come out of the closet,” so to speak, as a poet. Is it okay to use this terminology? I am not sure. What I mean is that, when people would previously ask me about my profession, I’d be vaguely evasive, mentioning that I was a professor, but I’d hide my poet persona behind my professor persona. The book’s publication has been a chance to claim poetry writing as a central part of my life and to lead with it. This has been immensely freeing.

Joanell: I am loath to ask, as I hate this question myself sometimes, but--what’s next?

Carolina: I am in the early stages of working on my second poetry collection. I recall this phase of working on my last book—when each poem seemed to contain a seed for the whole manuscript and existed as a sort of pressure cooker that felt both exciting and scary to approach. My first book depicts the birth of my daughter, the death of my father, my mother’s cancer; I was living through a time that was fraught with personal loss and also ripe with poetic material.  Fortunately, there aren't any tragedies brewing in my personal life right now, but I admit I’ve felt a bit anxious about the way that, in the past, loss has seemed to inspire writing for me. But then, I don’t really want to experience more personal loss! Obviously, there is much to mourn and redress in the public sphere; we live in a world that seems perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. The wars are incessant. The turn toward far-right nationalism everywhere is terrifying. The many ecosystems that are withering are alarming and tragic. But I don’t always know how to channel into poetry my thoughts and feelings over our collective situation. These are some of the questions I am grappling with and the limits that I’m testing.

Joanell: My sense is the poems you write and eventually share will be necessary poems, because they come from a deep inner knowing, matched with your critical thinking and marvelous wordplay. And I’m looking forward to reading them!

Carolina Hotchandani’s collection The Book Eaters is available to purchase at Perugia Press.

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Joanell Serra is a Northern California writer with work published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books include The Vines We Planted (Wido, 2018) and (Her)oics Anthology, a collection of women’s essays about the pandemic (Regal House Publishing, 2021). A  licensed therapist, she offers personal coaching, women’s retreats, and writing workshops. She is currently an MFA student at Randolph College. Discover more about Joanell at https://joanellserraauthor.com/

...with Rebecca Brock by Joanell Serra

Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023).  Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, River Heron Review, THRUSH, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest at The Comstock Review, the Kelsay Books Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor's Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. She is a reader for SWWIM. Rebecca has been a flight attendant for most of her adult life and is still surprised by this fact. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.

IG: @rebecca.brock_writer

A few months ago, I stumbled on one of Rebecca Brock’s poems, “I Remember How I Believed,” on the River Heron site. I was floored by her imagery of the Idaho foothills, of a baby’s gravestone, combined with truly concise and powerful language. I was also struck with her use of space and even grammar to create mood and meaning. 

I looked and found her work in other places online, and ultimately asked River Heron’s editor to introduce us. Before we met, I had the sincere pleasure of reading and re-reading Brock’s new book of poetry, The Way Land Breaks. 

This impressive collection, published by Sheila-Na-Gig in 2023, brings the reader into the various realms where the poet exists--as a mother to two growing and changing boys, as an airline attendant, as a wife and adult daughter, as a frequent traveler—especially to the landscapes of the West, and as homebound parent through the pandemic.  We feel the intimate moments of being in a body that is coping with chronic illness, the fear that swells when a child is ill, the humor that comes from spending time with small children, and the awe that accompanies deep attention to the natural world. 

Each poem holds a miniature journey, often into intimate places like the inside of a seashell or in the folds of a mushroom. But in a Lewis Carroll sort of way, these small places become deep and wide kingdoms to traverse—kingdoms of grief, of motherhood, of hope, and of despair. We enter them armed only with Rebecca’s shining poems, but ultimately that is enough. 

Like all excellent writers, Rebecca looks at the world with clear and observant eyes, including seeing how the climate crisis is affecting the planet, feeling the pain of the political landscape, accepting her own flaws when held up by her family, and seeing the stunning beauty of the world in surprising places. 

Our conversation was wide ranging—from the ways her editor helped her “birth” this book to the way motherhood both interrupts and informs the creative process.  I encourage you to join us as we unpack some of the layers of being a writer. Of course, reading her book is the best way to know her work. You can order The Way Land Breaks here. 

Joanell
Congratulations on the publication of The Way Land Breaks. I’ve read and reread it, and keep finding more ways to relate to the work. I’d love to start with the first few poems which I feel relates to one of your overall themes, embodiment.

In the first three poems, we feel and see parts of the body: jaws unhinged, the mouth loose, born and bone, acrimony on the tongue, tongue torn by her own teeth. We feel the suffering: 

 ....Swollen 
breaths like sharp stones--
tongue torn by her own teeth,
hurt that hurts after...

This theme, the bodily language, is present throughout the book. Can you share about the decision to ground your work in this way? Is it a choice? Or is this simply your window of understanding? 

Rebecca
This is an insight that actually surprised me—but once you called my attention to it, I saw it, too, and agree with you that it is just my window of understanding. It’s startling to find things in your work that you didn’t realize you were doing—startling and wonderful. 

I’ve struggled with embodiment since I was a child with emotions too big for everyone around me. I think I was overwhelming to my loved ones—or at least, I felt I was overwhelming. Reading, writing—all of that was a place to take my confusion or pain, fear or joy and let it rest. I chose those three poems to start the work because they felt so true to me—true to an opening, an introduction. 

The birth poem is personal but also, for me, what these last years have felt like in this country—the chaos and the sense of inevitably that pervades so many aspects of our daily lives: political, racial and, of course, the climate. Until 2020, freedom of movement was an absolute in my life—I work as a flight attendant. My home is in Virginia, and my family of origin in Idaho. I was often on the road (or in the sky) or about to be. During the pandemic, distance became tangible. It was strange to be so settled, all of us—two kids, my husband (working from home now) and the dog. It was a relief, in some ways, to pause. But it also reminded me of how much my sister and I, when we were children, loved to spin until we collapsed, our heads still swirling--that strange reformatting of everything that was familiar. 

“A Woman Might Say This Is What Birth Looks Like” was written in my parents’ backyard in the summer of 2020—we’d driven cross country in a mad three day dash and were staying in their RV/Camper until we were sure we weren’t infected. Their backyard is long and narrow and we would sit on one side, my parents on the other—together but not together. I wrote about that hurt, the sharp stones—the bending—and felt it in my body, that movement through birth, that rough rush of beginning. 

Pregnancy and birth are both experiences that absolutely placed me in my body in ways I’d never been before—I guess I mean awareness. As if, most of the time, I’m just a head walking around, dragging my body along without much thought or care. So, to finally circle back to your question, I think the answer is that bodily language is becoming my window of understanding—my way of moving what’s in my head into the physical world/time/place of the poem. The body as anchor. The earth as Mother—as body. The bones of the earth, say, or the scars on my body. It’s instinct, I think, in a moment of disconnect from so many other bodies.

Joanell
What a stunning answer! I love the idea of how often we are heads walking around in the world, forgetting the body below. 

Many of your poems are brimming with the experience of motherhood. In “Tiger,” you write of finding yourself …mother to a boy who would be interested in tigers. In “Amanita Phalloides” and “What to Tell Them,” we experience the fear that comes with motherhood, almost within days of conception and the dangers that erupt around us whether from a mass shooting or a mushroom. And of course, your mother’s lost child is an echo in several poems. 

I am always interested in how motherhood plays a role in a writer’s life whether it saps the creativity for some period of time, or infuses the work with more light or more gravity.  Did you see a major shift in your work after becoming a mother? Do you find “birthing” the book has any resonance with mothering? 

Rebecca
I did not find much resonance with the “birthing” of my book—it was and is still surreal to me that it’s done and out in the world. When people say, oh, I’m reading a poem a night or I read your poems by the Christmas Tree last night—I still can’t believe it’s out in the world—that I’m out in the world. It was more a work of revelation for me, a coming out of hiding, heart in hand, right? Hoping for connection, maybe, or reaching toward my own understanding.

Motherhood shifted me entirely—I think if I had just set down writing, allowed myself to fully set it down, I would have been a happier mother and, eventually, that’s what I had to do. I couldn’t carry the emotional load of both—when they were little, it hurt worse to try and write and be torn between those two worlds. I know other mothers have managed it, and my admiration for that is immense. I was not one of those mothers. 

The biggest change is that motherhood shifted me from writing fiction—short stories, novel drafts—to writing poems. My kids were my subject, myself as a mother was my subject—the days such rivers of time. By 10 AM, I would have lived ten lives with them, the whole day ahead. I began catching at moments—like catching lightning bugs, or seeking shells on the beach—and holding them still long enough to look, breathe, think. 

The intensity of poetry matched the brevity and intensity of the time I did have to write. But I did stop writing for almost a decade. My youngest was six and starting kindergarten when I began again with morning pages and, eventually, gave myself a day of writing every week. It had to be the same day—and I worked hard to schedule appointments, work and house chores all around that day. The more I wrote, the more urgent I became about keeping that day sacred. That lasted and worked for me until the pandemic years—and now, I write in snatches, since the book, during the book—my kids are in another stretch of needing so much from me. 

I didn’t expect to be so needed at this age, but I think the pandemic and the politics of these times has forced things into such dissonance for my kids. At least, for now, I’ve grown enough to know to give myself grace in these stretches of silence.

Joanell 
Ah, grown enough to give yourself grace. This is the work of lifetimes. Many of your poems are in relation to the natural world—your imagery suggests one might:

glide thermals
like a full bellied hawk
with time to spend
on pleasure...

Compares an earthquake to:

A horse losing patience 
with the bridle or the buzzing
of flies. 

You write about the goose that misses his mark when landing, the squirrel who leaves his bones behind for your son to puzzle over, enter a poem with your saving of a mollusk, and leave it with the longing to assure your son’s survival. 

Can you speak to the knowledge you carry about the natural world? Were you always interested in knowing the names and habits of creatures, or has that developed as a poet? Or as a mother—which is to say a tour guide to the natural world?

Rebecca
I’ve always loved the details. And when my children were small, I delighted in their curiosity and wonder. Any little interest they had, we’d pursue in books or travel: dinosaurs in Utah, a special exhibit on Egyptian hieroglyphics in the city, all those DK Eyewitness books. 

My oldest, especially, was a words person and wanted to know what, why, how, when. I was so immersed in their childhood—I think, in part, because it felt so clear: feed them, show them, love them. They would find caterpillars or squirrel bones and it would make me look again, look deeper or further. All of this was in me, but my kids woke me up, shined so much light on the world. They were sponges. And it was lovely to have answers to their questions. 

Also, two active kiddos in a smallish house with no backyard meant we had to get out into the day—everyday. The movement of our days felt more tangible when we learned something, saw something new—picked blueberries or went to a farm to watch bunnies and llamas. I am no good with useful routines. It’s taken me ages to realize there is so much freedom in structuring your days. But when they were little, even when they weren’t so little, we were wanderers. All of us, a little bit insatiable.

Joanell
Yes! I think being a little bit insatiable, such a funny phrase, but I completely get it. It might be the very definition of the creative mindset. 

It seems you visit the mountains and the West frequently, and the imagery from those areas infuses many of the poems. Would you say specific places inspire you?  

Rebecca 
Yes, absolutely, yes. I love the mountains of the American West—Rainier, Mount Hood, the Tetons, Sawtooths, the low foothills that surround Boise, Idaho. I love the way they rise up and stay. I love the Badlands, the desert sky. For me they are both like the ocean—which I also love, especially the Oregon and Washington Coasts—something so much more permanent, more telling than us—something to place me as human in this world, human in time and scope, that immensity made tangible and intangible at once.

Joanell 
Many of the poems have an awareness of the climate crisis. There is both the sense of desperation and the awe of the world and the anticipatory grief for what is to come. It is especially clear in the poem “Banana Bread.”

...what will I say when they ask 
what it was like to live knowing 
you were on the precipice 
Of time unsung-or, rather-end time...

It made me wonder, are there eco-poets that you specifically find inspiring or whose work you resonate with? Or are there other resources you find either informative or reassuring as you navigate this difficult but urgent topic? 

Rebecca
Mary Oliver feels too obvious to say, but she can bring a poem in for landing so gorgeously. Oliver speaks more of adoration and attention to the natural world than she does of crisis, but the devotion is key, isn’t it? That loving and seeing what’s here to save. Brittney Corrigan’s Solastalgia recently came out and Jared Beloff’s Who Will Cradle Your Head? Jane Hirshfield works with such minimalism in her book Ledger. Ada Limon resonates and, of course, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones and Goldenrod. The world we know now will not be the world our children know. Parenthood underscores the whole of this ache, our responsibility and our helplessness, our necessary hope. My poem “Raising Glaciers” really tries to reach for the complexity of how to do parenting at this time and place in our world—also my poem “ROVE” thinks about the Mars Rover: there is this, there is this and there is also you. There is also you. Don’t we tell that to our children? Look at this mountain, this crane, this wild fox—and you, also look at you. It’s so difficult and yet I think poetry comes the closest to addressing the whole.

Joanell
Finally, the book does a fabulous job of letting the pandemic arrive, and be part of the collection, without it being a “pandemic collection.” As someone who edited a book of essays about the pandemic, I was really moved by the poems that referenced it without making it central. We get a sense of life going on, albeit in a more challenging way. Late in the book, we arrive at the title poem, and it is both startlingly beautiful and heartbreaking. It is also very relatable. Who didn’t feel “broken” by the end of 2022? I appreciate that the writer does not apologize for breaking “the way land breaks” or even being “hard.” The poem ends by pointing out that we are close to being animals, creatures, even plants. 

 This reminds me of recent discoveries of the similarities in human and mushroom DNA. Also of the strange crossovers between the human and animal world in recent years, that Covid was rampant in the deer population, that mountain lions, coyotes and other predators are changing their behaviors due to their increased interactions with humans, that scientists are learning to “speak whale” in order to aid in protecting them. Is that some of what you meant? That the boundary between humans and the natural world is thin and permeable? And that the differences are less that we perceive? 

I’d love to hear any insights about your title poem. When was it written, how did it evolve, what made you choose the poem’s title for the collection’s title?

Rebecca
I’m so happy you saw the human connection to mushroom DNA! It’s exactly what I was referencing with that line. I’d also read several articles exploring how climate change sort of charged the pandemic—how fast it spread, how it spread, how it started.  Growing up out West, it is easy and obvious to remember my fragility—the landscape that much harsher, the wild just a bit away, by car or by foot. How more and more we struggle to define the thing that makes us human, that makes us separate from creatures, from plants.

I hoped the pandemic poems would hold at the end of this collection, the way it crept into everything—the way I saw my friends and family trying so hard to cope and adapt. It stripped so much away, revealing what was already broken in all levels of American society—all the systems—education, healthcare—already stretched, just fracturing. Even parents, but mothers especially. We were already asked to carry so much for free in society, that invisible work, emotional and mental loads, raising and educating the next workforce, the fact that there was some tangible relief knowing that, at least, our kids wouldn’t be in a school shooting because they were stuck at home. It was all too much, and it did feel like breaking to me.

That poem started with the title “I am too comfortable with absence,” which didn’t even survive as a line in the poem. I had, in a way, been isolating well before the pandemic as I worked through the complications from my Lyme Disease diagnosis in 2019.  I never knew when I would feel capable or when I might crash. My oldest began middle school and began struggling in ways I couldn’t help with or see. So, when the pandemic hit, there was a part of me that was relieved, I needed everything to stop. I was able to take a leave from my job and really pushed myself to tend to my family. I tried so hard. I baked. We had game nights and a semblance of order to our days. We got outside to walk or exercise. We called far away family often. 

But, of course, it just kept going and going. And more and more I let screen time go, I let dinner time go, I let go. We all did. My youngest was the only vibrant one among us, and his need, his energy would burst out with these questions—such as, do you ever feel bad for things? And he meant things: stuffed animals, toys, shoes he had outgrown. We were all cooped up in this small space of our home. I noticed how easily his dad, brother, and I had all checked out, on our phones, deep into the news stories of climate, Black Lives Matter, Trump threatening to gun down protestors. 

We know the human mind is not equipped for all the information, all of the time. I thought of the Badlands, dry desert stone, escarpments, and rock cliffs.

The actual innocence and loneliness in my son’s question was a jolt, the break in me felt unsubtle but also something I had missed happening. But it was there—like something I could point to, like in the poem “A Geology,” it was there, just there. I did not miss the ‘normal’ everyone was talking about. ‘Normal’ was not okay for many of us. My son’s question broke through my absence, so to speak, and that poem came fairly fluidly, fairly quickly. Mothering through these last years has so many threads—and the children, the children are watching as adults fail and falter and fail again.

Joanell
Yes. Your sons’ observations arise in various poems and did remind me of that feeling as a mother, of being seen in a different way.  I am interested in how this collection itself came to be shaped. By the end of the book, I have a sense of your life—your boys, your marriage, your relationship with your mother, a few insights on the life of a flight attendant, a sense of your interests in nature. Kudos, on giving us such a broad picture with so many fascinating details. I am curious about how you chose the order of the poems and any experiences you had along the way, such as a particular publication or award, that helped get you across the finishing line to creating a full-length collection. 

Rebecca
I won two Editor’s choice awards at Sheila-Na-Gig, in 2021 and 2022, and the editor, Hayley Mitchell Haugen, and I were emailing when she asked if I had a manuscript. I did not. But I knew I had poems. So many poems. Having someone ask for more of your writing was wonderful and tethering. I wanted to make her something beautiful. I took a long weekend and booked a stay at Porches, a writing residency outside the Washington D.C. area. I brought ALL my poems and folders of scraps of poems. I was able to drop in, fully, and immerse myself.

The book I thought I had in these poems became instead this book about home and distance, motherhood and time. I had the luxury and space to stretch poems all across the floor and read, reread, place, pace, replace.  In my mind, the book moves in three parts—the pandemic, as you noted, coming in slowly near the last half of the book. I left with a solid manuscript and worked on smaller edits at home. Before sending my manuscript to Hayley, I submitted individual poems and several poems received honors and awards that encouraged me to trust the manuscript would hold together, that it was ready. I think I would still be tinkering, moving poems, replacing poems but, eventually, once Hayley saw and worked through the manuscript with me several times, she said, “It’s time. She’s ready.” 

I’m so grateful for her faith and guidance through this process. I set my writing down for such a long stretch and then picked it up but working in an entirely different genre—every acceptance, every encouraging rejection. I’m grateful to be here, writing. My days are better, my mothering is better. I’m better for it.

Joanell
I love hearing about a positive and kind relationship with your publisher. Lovely.

Now, a few “fun” questions to finish off for our poetry writing readers: 

Are there any other classes or experiences that have really influenced your growth as a writer? 

Rebecca
I’ve really enjoy and learn from being a volunteer reader for SWIMM (Supporting Women Writers In Miami). I send in a “yes” or “no” on each piece I am assigned and offer short feedback. Often the small edits I recommend are accepted. This has helped my confidence as a writer and in my own editing process.  It’s a really impressive organization which I recommend to writers and readers.

I also sign up for “prompt a day” programs with several writers or organizations I follow. For instance, right now I am doing advent prompts from Two Sylvias Press. Responding means I write at least one poem a day, no matter what, and then I can use them, or not, later. It’s a helpful process to keep me writing through busy times. 

Joanell
I love meeting the challenge of daily prompts, as well. Next one, also for fun, but a tough question for many poets. If I said you could meet any poet you want for tea next week, dead or alive, who would you choose?

Rebecca
Oh, that’s a hard one! I don’t trust these questions or my answers! I’m so changeable. Off the top of my head, Lucille Clifton. Anna Ahkamatova, Jane Kenyon, maybe Rilke? Isn’t it strange I picture myself listening raptly, absorbing the energy and insight of Clifton, Ahkmatova, Kenyon—just reveling in their presence. But for Rilke I have questions.  

Joanell 
Rilke is mine! It’s been fabulous getting to know you and your work through this process, Rebecca. Thank you for sharing the journey. 

Rebecca Brock’s The Way Land Breaks is available to purchase from Shelia-Na-Gig Inc.

Joanell Serra is a Northern California writer with work published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her books include The Vines We Planted (Wido, 2018) and (Her)oics Anthology, a collection of women’s essays about the pandemic (Regal House Publishing, 2021). A licensed therapist, she offers personal coaching, women’s retreats, and writing workshops. She is currently an MFA student at Randolph College.