Each year, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) Word for Word Literary Series dedicates an event to instructors from its online creative writing programs. This year, the spotlight was on poetry for the first time ever, with instructors Carla Rachel Sameth and Stephanie M. Wytovich reading and discussing their work.
Stephanie Wytovich is an American poet, novelist and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous magazines and anthologies such as Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, Southwest Review, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volumes 8 & 15, as well as many others. Wytovich is the poetry editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press and an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University and Point Park University. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant and has received the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. Her 2023 poetry collection, “On the Subject of Blackberries,” is a finalist for the 2023 Stoker Award.
Carla Sameth is the 2022-2024 Co-Poet Laureate for Altadena, California, and is a 2023 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her books include the memoir “One Day on the Gold Line,” the chapbook “What Is Left,” and, most recently, the poetry collection “Secondary Inspections.” Her work appears in a variety of publications and has been included three times among the Notable Essays of the Year in “Best American Essays.” A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, a Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Sameth teaches creative writing to diverse communities.
The following is Part I of an edited transcript of Carla and Stephanie’s interview:
W4W: Welcome, Carla. It’s great to have you here.
CS: Good to be here.
W4W: Where did you first start with your writing career?
CS: I started primarily in nonfiction, in memoir. And I wrote pretty extensively. I wrote long essays and often alternative-form essays, what we call hermit-crab essays — essays in the form of an instruction manual, or a recipe, or operating instructions, for example.
I started writing fiction after I published my memoir, because I was ready to get out of my own story. It was really great to be able to write in the voice of someone other than the mother, because I wrote a lot about my journey as a mother.
And then I always wrote some poetry here and there. But at some point, I was recruited by a poet to be part of a group of poets that read poetry around Pasadena. I kept insisting, “I’m not really a poet.” And she kept insisting I was. And it was as if there was a spell cast upon me. I started writing more and more poetry around, I’d say, 2016, 2017.
I don’t know if the pandemic affected anyone else this way, but I started writing shorter form, either flash, nonfiction, flash fiction, or poetry. I fought it for a while, but then I just gave myself over. I guess I’m more of a poet right now. That’s a little bit of my journey.
W4W: Your debut volume of poetry, “Secondary Inspections,” came out a little less than a month ago. Was that born out of the pandemic?
CS: The book that was actually born out of the pandemic was one called “What Is Left.” And the poems in that collection were basically all written between March and August of 2020. But this latest book is a collection of work that I’ve been writing for a number of years prior to the pandemic up through the present.
W4W: We’re looking forward to hearing some of that poetry tonight! But first, let’s welcome Stephanie.
SW: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.
W4W: Tell us about your new poetry collection, “On the Subject of Blackberries,” and its connection to the work of Shirley Jackson.
SW: I have my copy of Jackson’s novel “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” right next to me. It’s my favorite book. I read it once a year. I usually teach it once a semester in my classes. In a lot of ways, it has become my comfort read, which, if you’ve read the book, you know it’s anything but comforting. So we’ll put a pin in that for later. But I had my daughter, Evelyn, in January of 2022. And I had horrible, horrible postpartum depression.
I couldn’t write. I didn’t have a good attention span for everything. I just felt like I was in a cloud, if that makes sense. So I turned to “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” And I just felt this wave of security, like it was a blanket being draped over me.
I treated the book like a puzzle. If you look inside of my copy, there are words circled. There’s lines drawn. I looked at it as this form of almost bibliomancy that helped me find myself in the book and tunnel away out of some of the darkness that I was experiencing.
It was a very weird process. I’ve never written a book like this before. But honestly, I think it’s something that I’d like to try to do again, because the entire experience of it was so magical. It almost felt alchemical. I was able to be inside a text in a way that I’ve never been able to be as a teacher or a student or just as a reader before. So yeah, Jackson saved me again. She got me.
W4W: It’s interesting that you use the word “alchemical,” because in listening to you talk about it, it seems like there was a transmutation going on, both on a personal and a literary level.
SW: It was a transformative experience. I’ve studied with Pam Grossman, who wrote the book “Waking the Witch.” And I’ve taken some writing workshops with her and her colleague Janaka Stucky, who himself is just the most magical being I’ve ever encountered on this planet.
They talked a lot about bibliomancy and tapping into magic and stuff like that with their poetry. So I have to give them a lot of credit, because I felt like I started to open up to that after studying with both of them.
W4W: Very cool. We’re going to get back to this whole process thing later, the opening up to the magic inherent in poetry, which seems so important in various ways for both of you. But first let’s hear some of Carla’s poems.
CS: I’m going to start with this one.
‘Love Letter to a Burning World, Southern California, 2020.’
Praise the dark that covers us with ashes,
this morning’s tears, reminding us why we cherish
the not-burning baby cry of awake, not heartbreak.
Mom, I need a hug, please,
I just can’t seem to do anything right.
Raphael, the angel name, should we have birthed
a warrior instead, one who could fight the demons?
I can’t say for sure I’m an addict but I’m doing too much.
He gets up, then decides he’d rather smoke,
not feeling OK right now.
I am twisted up, feel the same way. Not OK.
No, son, what you are feeling are singed embers
after six months of shutdown. Broken glass.
Murder after murder of men and women the color of your skin.
At traffic stops, in the dark, in bed, while jogging. Anywhere.
Praise the path that brought you here today, a boomerang.
Mom, I can’t make it, I’m at the car repair, I need
to keep looking for someone who can fix this.
The drop like we hear in music, I hear it in his soul.
My face is wet as he leaves in a gust:
I have to meet my friends at the demonstration, I’ll feel better.
More purpose. Do you kill a child by holding or letting go?
Ashes, ashes as he runs out the door.
Doesn’t he know this is an emergency?
Like the blare of fire warning,
Pack your bags comes from the evacuation order.
Today his voice searing into my chest.
Praise his tears for crying with me.
Praise the seat that holds me fast.
W4W: Thank you for that. Quite a powerful poem. It’s set in 2020 and talks about the fires in California. But a lot was happening at that time. The pandemic, singed embers after six months of a shutdown, as well as George Floyd’s murder and the reaction to it. It was a very, very hard time. It’s hard to believe it was four years ago at this point. It’s still burned in my memory . . . I feel like I am still processing the trauma. Was writing the poem a way for you to process the trauma of that time as well?
CS: I would say it was. I think writing poetry is a way to process and to come out the other side in some way, to puzzle through what’s going on. And some things, you just can’t. I mean, like at the time of George Floyd’s murder, I really couldn’t write. As the mother of a Black son, I couldn’t finish a poem during that time.
W4W: I like the phrase you used, to puzzle through, because poetry definitely feels like a puzzle in a lot of ways. You have to find those right words and phrases. Memoirs and nonfiction basically spill everything out onto the page, whereas poetry is more selective in choice. And by the end of it, maybe that’s why it feels more therapeutic.
CS: I think the process that happens with poetry between writer and reader is also interesting. It’s like you’re coming up with a third entity. There’s what you write, and there’s what the reader understands, and then there’s what that becomes after the two of you have in a sense collaborated by virtue of them reading your work.
W4W: The poem you shared is deeply personal, about things that are not only affecting you but also your child, who at some point, I assume, is going to read your poem and glimpse things about you and about your relationship that might not have been verbalized before. How do you write about a family member, a loved one, in an honest way that is respectful of the relationship that you have and wish to maintain?
CS: That’s a great question. And it’s one I grapple with. When I was writing my memoir, my son told me, “Write the book.” And he’s very present in that memoir because a lot of it is about my struggle to have a child and having many miscarriages and eventually having my son, raising my Black and Jewish son in LA, and as he gets older, eventually him struggling with addiction, with drugs.
In doing that, I asked for his buy-off repeatedly. Once my book was accepted by a publisher, I gave him the manuscript and asked him to let me know if there was anything he wanted to talk about. And he never did. Since then, I’ve continued to write about similar issues as he got older. And I began to ask him again, how do you feel about it? I’m still writing poems. And you’re still in them. Of course, it’s my experience as a mother, but he figures in there. And he continued to tell me, write “Write it.”
I will say that my siblings have always been really supportive of my writing, but one thing we all know about growing up is that we all have different experiences. And I know that my sisters, in particular my older sister, was not always comfortable with my writing about some of the chaos of our childhood. But they unequivocally support my writing and in the end tell me, i“It’s your story. Go ahead and tell it.” Which I really appreciate.
W4W: Thank you for sharing that. Do you have another poem for us?
CS: Yes. This one has a little family in there.
‘We Used to Argue Over Hearts.’
I called my older sister over and over again whenever I ran away. The first time, six, crossing the street to the little park–but then I couldn’t come back because I’d remember I wasn’t allowed to cross the street by myself. I sat on a pile of leaves sniffling, imagining my sister rescuing me.
When I was a teenager, she went away to college. I’d telephone her my complaints, a steady pitter-patter or a torrent, depending on the temperature at home.
My brother taught me how to avoid recurring nightmares by focusing on the scariest moments before going to sleep. I was terrorized by dreams about “Bunny Goo,” who was either a tall bald white man who wanted to take over the world or a sticky tar that got on the bathtub faucet and caused it to overflow.
My younger sister gave me imaginary sleeping pills, told me to just breathe and think about ocean waves and Mt. Rainier, ferry boats and sunsets over Puget Sound. She teaches meditation now. We were so young then, turning to the closet for refuge.
My dad was a high school teacher who used to say with liberty and justice for some when forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He was my favorite dance partner, and I felt graceful on the floor with him at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. My mom went out for Shirley Chisholm. She worked, went to school, and took care of the four of us plus my dad. Later, with almost all speech robbed by dementia, she found the words, God, that man is repulsive, when pre-2016 Trump was on television.
I miss my mom and dad, even the fights and the television blaring news, my dad’s temper, his humor, his kindness. Our stuffed animals, large, wise and plush, sat sentry, while we ran amok. Eat a thigh instead, dark meat is juicier. We used to argue over the hearts and gizzards; now no one wants those parts.
W4W: Thank you so much. You have really captured a great tapestry of a family dynamic in this poem! It ties into what you were just saying about having a lot of support from your siblings. It seems like your family was very supporting of each other and everything.
CS: Well, my sisters have feelings about some of the poems I’ve written. Sometimes when I’ve written about my mom’s dementia, for example, it’s been upsetting. My younger sister did a solo show about being stuck in Sri Lanka when the war broke out there and how the bombs and the noises reminded her of growing up in our home as a child.
Poetry is not memoir. I feel like I constantly need to remind people of this. It can be fiction. And I have poems that have a lot of made-up things. You’re not held to the same standard of truth in a poem as you would be in a memoir.
W4W: Let’s jump over to Stephanie for now. Could you read a poem or two for us?
SW: The poems in this collection don’t have titles. Each poem is a chapter, just like the chapters in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” I thought I would read Chapter 1, which has an illustration of the thistle plant etched onto it on the page. The thistle is a plant that is used for purification, for protection against negativity, evil. It’s used for cleansing, hex–breaking, things like that. So you can tell right off the bat that this is a piece that’s going to evoke and talk about some evil and need some help.
Chapter 1, Part I
My name is
werewolf, death-cup,
noise.
I say “Good morning”
to flowers underneath
library books,
drink black coffee to
the foundation of pictures
left on the shelves,
a place built up with layers
against the world the sky wishing
opposite the village—
Empty, deserted:
their children, an invitation
I have always screamed,
screamed a long still minute
a flock of taloned hawks
striking, gnashing
at the grocery’s door
You watch transfixed,
perfectly straight, stiff,
a carton of spilled milk,
a spoiled rack of lamb:
my hands, a shopping list
for locked doors, rotting hearts,
heaps of golden coins
Yet
through the door
there was a little laugh,
a minute wrapped, waiting,
ready to deliver me home,
their hateful words a cracked
cup, a bloodied yolk, the last
bag of sugar.
How I wished them all dead.
My goal was a deep breath
my thoughts, unbearable
so much noise
unending noise
The demons found a way in
opened their eyes in broken plates
glanced at me,
smiling.
SW: I’ll take a stop there.
W4W: Thank you so much. What an incredible poem, so filled with rawness. It’s got a primeval quality to it that seems almost beyond words to talk about. This is a poem that is like — it’s what’s left over after everything else has been taken away from it.
CS: What was your process for writing this poem, Stephanie?
to my hate.
SW: I keep a shame journal, which is essentially all the things I never want anybody to know about me, or things I would never say out loud. In a way, it loopholes my brain into being like, oh, well, I’ve already told somebody about it, so I can put it in a poem now.
So (I) went through that and tried to cherry-pick certain things I could put in the poem. But then I went back to “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” and I started circling words that jumped out at me. I put them all in a Word document. And then I quite literally treated it like a puzzle.
I was picking pieces and words from the novel, from my shame journal and then a lot of stuff that I had been talking about in therapy. It was a very cathartic experience. It was also extremely terrifying, because I was sharing a very dark side of me during a moment that was supposed to be this huge joyous celebration.
I have this beautiful daughter who I’m so intensely grateful for and in love with. But I’m having all of these intrusive thoughts. And I was diagnosed with postpartum OCD. I had to find a way to separate them but also honor that they’re both parts of me and yet needed to be expelled. I mean, in a way, it’s very exorcist-like thinking. I needed to get it out so I could tackle it. So that was a little bit of the experience. It was a lot of puzzling. It was a lot of being really honest, really vulnerable.
I think the trick to writing this book honestly was that I never intended to publish it. This was like a postpartum exercise that was going to just be for me and something I would eventually share with my daughter when she got older. But my publisher and I, we’re very close. She came over to visit one weekend, and we started talking. And the more I talked about the project, the more she thought it might be something to consider publishing, because postpartum OCD and all these things aren’t wildly being talked about and acknowledged, and this could be something that opens dialogue and starts a conversation and brings a bunch of women together. So I eventually decided to move forward with it. But had that always been the plan, I don’t know if I would have necessarily been able to be as raw and vulnerable as I was while writing it.
W4W: Do you want to read another one for us, Stephanie?
Chapter 1, Continued
Those poor girls in the garden
had always been there—
haunted, ghastly,
openly disliked:
two shadows against
black woods and gossip.
They stood strong on broken
feet, voices cracked, the hum
of fruit flies stuck in their throats
just watching, waiting
six feet deep.
I built the fire in the yard
instead of in my bed, but this
desire
to drink gas, to swallow
the match still smoking:
how beautiful it would be
to die.
I wondered if a cup of tea
could make them stop
if changing the poison
would burn them faster:
a thousand flames
inside a flower, an herb.
The boneyard waiting,
begging them to sleep.
SW: Thank you.
This concludes Part I of Carla and Stephanie’s interview. Continue reading Part II here.
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