On learning to prioritize your creative practice

When did you start to call yourself a writer?

I had a second grade teacher who made us write poems weekly. My parents were friends with a lot of poets, and I remember they showed one of their friends some of the poems I’d written. He ran a small literary magazine in North Carolina, and he published some of them when I was nine.

Oh my god, that’s amazing.

I was a really precocious nine year old, and I think I just thought, “Oh, I’m a writer.” I asked my dad to help me submit poems to The New Yorker, and they sent back a handwritten note that said, “Dear Ms. Bonner. We tend to publish authors who have at least one book. Best of luck.” I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also think I wasn’t fully comfortable calling myself a writer until a few years ago.

Oh really? Why is that?

I think because it was always something I did on the side. I taught for four years then I went to grad school for film studies, and I wasn’t getting paid to write, not that you do when you’re a poet. But I felt like I couldn’t claim it or fully own it. When I got into the creative nonfiction MFA program at the University of Iowa, it was a three-year lesson on learning how to feel comfortable claiming that identity. I learned how to treat that identity seriously and to take my writing seriously.

What does it mean to take your writing seriously?

In the past, I always said yes to everything from work opportunities to spending time with friends and family. Melissa Febos, one of my instructors in the program, gave me a piece of advice my first semester. She said, “Treat your writing like you would a doctor’s appointment.” You would never cancel a doctor’s appointment. It took me nearly three years to say to a friend who wanted to get lunch, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m writing,” and not feel guilty about that.

It’s a hard lesson to learn. It’s something I’m still working through.

At this point, I feel okay doing it, but it was so hard to get here. Now, I can treat writing with the kind of time and attention I’ve always wanted to.

I was talking to a friend recently about how sometimes we can have difficulty putting our art first.

Yes. For me, as a woman, I’ve always been taught to please others above myself. You’re trained all your life to ignore your body, instincts, and urges. It took a lot of deprogramming to realize I can prioritize myself and my work, and even though it may not be compensated, it is important and it has value. Learning how to do that has holistically enriched my life. Writing has always been intensely personal. I’ll never stop doing it. I realized I need to treat it with the care it deserves if I want to take care of myself.

You were a poet first, right?

Yes. I got my bachelor’s degree at UNC-Chapel Hill for poetry. I wrote a thesis of poems, and afterwards, I felt burnt out with academia and writing. There was a period of a couple of years where I thought I didn’t have it in me to keep writing. Then I reached a point where I made a deal with myself to get a master’s degree in film studies before I turned 30. I ended up attending the University of Iowa for that.

I was on a track where the natural progression would be to get a doctorate, and I worked towards that for three years. But instead of working on my dissertation, I kept writing essays about films that personally resonated with me. I was also writing a little bit of poetry on the side, and I realized that was where my energy was, and to be in academia felt paralyzing. I wound up dropping out of my program a week before Iowa City shut down for the pandemic.

What was that like?

It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I also left a 10-year relationship a few months later. It was a pivotal moment where I realized I really did want to pursue this path and getting an MFA felt like where I needed to be. It was two parallel paths from that point forward, working on both poetry and prose, and it still continues to be.

You’ve mentioned that reading non-fiction helps you generate poetry. Could you expand more on that point?

When I was writing [Another Woman], I was reading Deleuze’s The Fold and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. I was reading about affect, senses of ongoingness, and what Roland Barthes calls “bloom spaces.” All these texts had to do with possibility and unceasingness. All those writings evoked an atmosphere of feeling I wanted to capture through images or through my poetry, because [my poems] were also wrapped up in a sense of continuous spaces or periods of time.

That sense of ongoingness felt really important to the book because grief is unending. It can soften, but it is also unceasing. Those texts felt important, at least during the nascent stages of working on the book.

Where does a poem start for you?

Usually a line or an image will come to me when I’m walking. When I was writing this book—I started it in October 2020—I would take these really long walks in rural Iowa. I would walk for an hour late at night then come home and immediately start to write. I think movement generates rhythm for me as a poet. Also, I never take my phone with me when I go on a walk. And so it allows for a kind of attention to the landscape that I wouldn’t pay it otherwise.

With a lot of the poems in this collection, I feel like the landscape, the external world, mirrors the speaker’s internal world. Do you think that’s a result of those long walks and paying deep attention to the world around you?

Absolutely. Also, the pandemic was a time of intense isolation. I was going through a horrible breakup, but I was also living in a house with friends. There was this sense of being isolated yet having no privacy. The walks allowed me to be totally abject. I could be out at night alone crying or just processing. I think when we’re in heightened emotional states, we’re always projecting onto the world around us, so everything I saw took on the residue of my emotional state.

How do you know when a poem is done?

I had always been a poet whose first draft was the poem. It is not the way I approach my poetry now. I think it was very adolescent for me to think that the first draft was the final draft. So when I would go on these night walks, I would come home and write until two or three in the morning. I was also reading a ton at the time too. And I think that taught me about enjambment, word play, rhythm, intentionality, and how a poem moves. It was a time period in which reading was a great teacher for me.

In terms of how a poem gets written, I always say it feels like a fever dream; the poem just happens. Then there is a really intense revision period. I think what allows for that sense of being possessed by the poem to happen in the first place is all the work I’ve done beforehand. I try to read really widely as much as possible. I think I was also working really hard at the time and honing this practice I’d always loved but hadn’t had time and space for in a real way.

When you say “reading widely,” what does that mean to you?

I like to joke that I’m a promiscuous reader. I have writers and genres I’m drawn to, but I push myself to read books that might not necessarily be “my thing.” I like to read new books that get a lot of buzz, but I also read writers I’d never heard of. I read a lot of contemporary poetry, but I also just finished a book of Robert Creeley’s Collective Poems. With nonfiction, I read a ton of theory, but I also read memoirs and investigative nonfiction. I think all of those different registers feed you as a writer.

You mentioned that late night walks and reading widely helps you enter a creative headspace. Do you have any other habits or rituals that help nourish your creativity?

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine Wyatt Williams, who’s a great essayist, and I was talking about how it’s really hard for me to start new projects. He gave me advice that’s been so helpful ever since. He said, “You just have to sit down and do it because you know how to do this.” When I’m working on pieces now, I get up, make coffee, and immediately start writing. Morning writing is an important ritual for me.

I thought I needed to read, do yoga, or go on a run in the morning before I started writing and I’ve just learned that’s all a distraction.

Do you write every day?

No. I wish I did because I’m much more emotionally regulated when I’m writing. I teach, so there are some days where it’s just impossible. This summer, I’ve gone through waves with my writing. In May, I wrote every day, then I took off June to travel, and now I’m dipping back into it. It feels hard and good.

You mentioned film studies earlier. What drew you to get a master’s degree in that field?

In college, I took an introductory film class with Professor Greg Flaxman, and the way we read and analyzed films changed my life. I had always loved movies, but I had never thought about films as text before. It felt both creatively thrilling and intellectually challenging. I loved that there could be poetry in these really gorgeous shots. Professor Flaxman got his masters in film studies at the University of Iowa. I didn’t do a ton of research. I thought if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

How does film feed into your prose and poetry?

I really love and mainly write about experimental films. My favorite types of experimental films evoke a mood or a feeling. They have an affective quality that opens up a specific atmosphere I want to be steeped in. So, in that way, they get me to think about mood, voice, and image. Because they’re not typically narrative, it’s not a linear story or film, it feels like a sideways path into a poem.

In a review of Lisa Taddeo’s short story collection, Ghost Lover, you mentioned a summer where you’re working on a collection of poems and not working on your thesis. “Most days I do not get dressed or brush my hair, and yet I still prioritize my pleasure more frequently… I don’t feel vindicated that dating in my 30s has allowed me to harness my own sexual agency, but I’m astonished at how it still shocks me, desire without effort, beauty without pain.” I love that last sentence, and I feel like that’s a theme that you explore in the collection.

When I hear those words, they don’t necessarily feel like a marker of where I was, but of where I wanted to be. I wanted to have that kind of assuredness or certainty within myself. I think those lines resonate more now. This notion of desire without effort feels much more true in my life than ever before. And I don’t just mean that I’m in a good partnership now that is equitable and based in reciprocity and respect, but I think my desire for my life feels a lot less effortful. I’m working a lot, I’m writing more than I ever have before, and there’s labor involved, but it’s everything I want to be doing. There’s personal desire and pleasure, but there’s also desire that is very much wrapped up in my practice and writing.

The beauty without pain feels more complicated. For me, beauty has always felt thorny. I have always wanted to be taken seriously as a person and paid attention to for my thoughts and character and not what I look like. This is salient to the book because I think women and femme-presenting people are accustomed to role-playing. You have to switch in and out of characters or costumes to navigate the world and survive. But the rewards of that survival perpetually feels like oppression. This question reminds me of the beginning of a Linda Gregg poem [“Whole and Without Blessing.”] She says, ‘What is beautiful alters, has undertow.’ I just kept thinking about how beauty is transitory. It doesn’t last. That’s part of why we love it so much, it’s fleeting. But it’s also passive.

I also thought of another poem by Assata Shakur titled “Love,” and there’s a line that says, “Love is an acid that eats away bars.” That’s what I want, something that is active and activates change, and beauty doesn’t offer that to me.

Have you seen the movie Cleo from 5 to 7?

No, I haven’t.

It’s really good. It follows a woman throughout the course of a day. The whole film is about her as this kind of beautiful doll; she’s an object that is looked at and regarded by others. Then in the second half of the film, things flip, and she’s so much more within herself looking out at and perceiving the world. When I’m present to either a film, book, friend, or the environment, I’m fully attuned to the world and feel like a subject within it. That feels beautiful to me. I’m constantly seeking that purity of attention.