#365 Backstory of the Poem “Interview” by Pauletta Hansel.

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? In 1990 Chris Green, who is now the director of Berea College’s Appalachian Center, conducted a series of interviews about the beginnings of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative to be used for his undergraduate thesis at the University of Kentucky. Sometime before June 2019,

Click on the link to read about Chris Green and the Berea College’s Appalachian Center

Chris Green

Click on the link to read about the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative

https://www.facebook.com/Southern-Appalachian-Writers-Cooperative-157245575677/

Chris donated these to the Morehead State University archives, where I found an interview he had done with my sister Renee and me. There I was, thirty years old—half a life time away—telling a truth that I had forgotten I knew.

Click on the link below to watch the interview OF Pualetta and her sister. (https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sawc_interviews/15/).

The interview itself was less about me as a writer, and more about the challenges of the early days of what we now know to be an Appalachian Literary Renaissance. My sister and I, as young women within that movement (I was 15 when I was first swept up into it) faced some particular challenges in maintaining our voices which we mostly “told slant” within the interview. I was not writing at all by 1990 (“I haven’t written in that way for many years.”).

From LEFT to RIGHT: Pauletta Hansel at ages 15, 30, and 60. Copyright by Pauletta Hansel.

I know I read the transcript with a particularly open heart because of the ways that it intersected with the writing I was already doing back in 2019. I was engaged in intensive generative work with poet and mentor Rebecca Gayle Howell, and (separately) in leading workshops as part a community writing project at my old high school in Breathitt County, Kentucky. “Let’s go back to 1975,” Chris had instructed in his 1990 interview. In 2019, I was already there. So, reading the transcript wedged that opening up wider by creating an opportunity for direct conversations among the girl (15), the younger women (30) and me, nearing 60 at the time.

Click on the link below to visit Rebecca Gayle Howell’s website

https://www.rebeccagaylehowell.com/

Here’s what I wrote to Rebecca about the poem’s creation: “I began early July [2019] by writing down first words and then phrases from the interview Chris Green did with my sister and me in 1990. (These words and my work on the poem affected the other poems I wrote around that time too.) It took about ten days to compile all the parts, and I know that the reading I was doing, especially Whereas (Layli Long Soldier), but also Kill Class (Nomi Stone), threaded its way into the poem. I was not yet reading One Big Life (C. D. Wright), so was interested to see the use of repetition of lines in that book length poem, as I had felt the need to keep referring back to interview lines in my poem.”

From LEFT to RIGHT: Layli Long Soldier; Nomi Stone; and C.D. Wright. Web logo photos.

Click on the link below to read Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Whereas”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/91697/from-whereas

Click on the link below to visit Layli Long Soldier’s Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/llongsoldier

Click on the link to purchase KILL CLASS by Nomi Stone from Amazon

Click on the link below to visit Nomi Stone’s website

http://nomistone.net/

Click on the link below to visit C.D. Wright’s website.

https://cdwrightpoet.com/

I wrote Section 2 of the poem first, using from my word bank, “trapped,” “voice,” “cracked,” and “history.” “Truth” is drawn from the epigraph which Chris quoted from an early Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative brochure. Other words from the transcript that repeated both in the finished poem and in other poems written in that time (and after, to become part of my book Heartbreak Tree) are “mountain,” “mend,” and “road.”

Click on the link below to visit the Facebook page of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative

https://www.facebook.com/Southern-Appalachian-Writers-Cooperative-157245575677/

I kept writing other poems during this period, but (as I said to Rebecca) the poem that became “Interview” was my obsession. Section 1 came next; in that section every line is either a direct quote from the interview or a riff from one of the quotes. Section 3 is a photograph of a poem I wrote when I was 15. I went back through my own archives to find it, and was startled to find the reference to biting nails that was alluded to in the section I wrote at (almost) 60. Section 4 is one line, and is, I think, an indication that the adult poet is now taking control of the “interview.” The final section, which weaves together the interviewer, the adult poet and the girl poet, was written last, and is no longer “slant.”

Click on the link below to visit Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/rebeccagaylehowell

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. When I write, I move back and forth between my office and what my husband calls my “other office” which is our guest room with a daybed covered in a red patchwork quilt. I prop up on the bed and write longhand. It is helpful to do this away from my computer as to not get too distracted by email. (I have a chaise lounge in my office where I can also write longhand, but my cat thinks it is his.) Both rooms have three bookcases each, and art on the walls. The “other office” is also where I keep my collection of vintage hats and linens. When I am writing, I tend not to see any of this.

What month and year did you start writing this poem? July 2019. (I changed the year in the poem to “2020” because I like the symmetry of the voices being first 15 years, then 30 years apart.)

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Not really. There is one sentence in the very first draft of section 2 after “touch your own mouth,” which I crossed off immediately: “Were you checking for breath?” It clearly did not fit. The “but” in these lines “out of that girl,/ but into silence” was originally “and”; I changed it after an early reader questioned why leaving the girl led to silence. I chose not to address her question directly, but to not equate the left-behind girl with the silence.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? When I first shared this poem with Rebecca Gayle Howell, I wrote, “I go back and forth between thinking ‘Interview’ is a strong poem that others might want to read, and thinking that it is only for me (and you) and that its purpose was only to open up space for other poems. But the poem definitely [takes] risks!” I hope readers feel engaged in the conversation between past and present, girl and woman, history and story, and perhaps are moved to engage in such dialogues in their own lives.

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Sections 2 and 5 cut the closest to the bone. In section 2, I really did feel as I were speaking directly if the girl I was, and she to me. In section 5, I come to a truth that was both difficult to say, and that also allowed me to write almost every other poem that is now in Heartbreak Tree.

I have read this poem aloud maybe a dozen times (always asking a male friend to read the part of “interviewer”), and every time I do, tears are just below the surface. I grieve for that girl, but I am also so very proud of her. She survived.

Click on the below link to her a recording of “Interview” being read by two poets with an introduction by Rebecca Gayle Howell. The reading of the actual poem is at the 34 minute mark.

https://www.crowdcast.iio/e/heartbreak-tree-an

Has this poem been published? And if so where?

This poem has been published three times, first in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, then in Women Speak (the Women of Appalachia Project) and now in Heartbreak Tree. It was important to me that it be in PMS&G first.