We Have Permission: An Interview with Jennifer Givhan

 Jennifer Givhan has two new books: the collection of poems, Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), and the novel, River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone, 2022). Her five books of poetry and three novels have won accolades from both literary critics and the popular press. Givhan’s poetry collections include Landscape with Headless Mama, winner of the 2016 Pleiades Press Editors’ Prize for Poetry, Protection Spell, a finalist for the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Girl with Death Mask, winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Prize, and Rosa’s Einstein, a 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist. Her novels include Trinity Sight, winner of the 2020 Southwest Book Award, and Jubilee, a 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist.

Givhan grew up in Southern California’s Imperial Valley and earned BA and MA degrees in English at Cal State Fullerton and an MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. In Fall 2023, she will teach in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico.

We spoke over Zoom in November 2022.

Kevin Cummins: Both Belly to the Brutal, your fifth book of poems, and River Woman, River Demon, your third novel, were published in 2022. Are the novel and the poetry collection in conversation with one another? Or, are they separate works in distinct forms whose author just happens to be the same person?

Jennifer Givhan: I birthed twins this year. That’s how it has been with three of my poetry collections, each written alongside a novel. They weren’t published together, but Jubilee and Landscape with Headless Mama are twins, Trinity Sight and Rosa’s Einstein are twins, and Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon are twins.

In both the poetry collection and in the novel, I am healing bloodlines of mother-daughter. I consider myself a bruja, [and brujería] is tapping into the magical connections around us. Curanderismo is a part of that. My mother and my mother’s mother are healers. I do my healing on the page. That is my magic. These books are an extension of my journey into the shadow, the underbelly, the darkness, the duende, where there has been trauma in the bloodlines—violence against girls and women, in my family. I am healing myself, my mom, my grandmother, and then forward to my daughter. My daughter teaches me and heals me, too. We pass on wisdom along the matrilineal bloodline. Fearless, we explore and suck out the poison of the trauma. Both the poetry book and the novel are about my experiences with brujería. The poetry is more memoir-like, a poetics of vulnerability. The novel puts it into a fiction form. Both books come from real experiences and real emotion in my life.

KC: River Woman, River Demon is a page-turning thriller, and I mean that with respect. Are there any writers of thrilling novels whom you admire as mentors?

JG: Toni Morrison is the writer. I connect with Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling. And my friend, Erika T. Wurth. Her novel, White Horse, just came out. It’s uncanny. We had no idea what each other’s books were about, but they’re similar in many ways. With River Woman, River Demon, I set out to play with genre, to write my Chicana Girl on the Train. There’s a feel of Gone Girl and Girl on the Train because I was playing with the thriller genre. But the books that speak to my heart are literary, gothic, and magical realism. Those are the elements that I fuse together.

KC: How do you balance the work of drafting and editing?

I’m always drafting. As a poet and novelist, I’m always writing in journals. I need a piece of paper all the time, and files in the computer, and my phone now. I’ve started to record things. Always creating, in a fluid state of chaos.

JG: I’m always drafting. As a poet and novelist, I’m always writing in journals. I need a piece of paper all the time, and files in the computer, and my phone now. I’ve started to record things. Always creating, in a fluid state of chaos. With my work on my novel, there’s pressure to have a finished product that is marketable. I hate that. I’m trying to get back to where it begins every single time, which is this nascent loam, that is just curiosity, fun, play, and language. My daughter calls me punny. Instead of funny, we’re punny. We love word play.

KC: You have published poems in many journals, and your poetry collections have been awarded prizes. How do you approach potential publishers?

JG: How do I approach publishers? Well, because I can. [laughs] We have permission, if we give ourselves permission, to do whatever it is in our writing and our publishing. If you’re knocking on the door, and they’re not answering, they’re not letting you in, go around, climb a fire escape, open a window, and then swing the doors open. As a writer, I’ve received over a thousand rejections. At least a hundred a year for ten years. I don’t submit as often now, but my acceptance rate is about 20%, and I’ve published about two hundred poems and short stories and essays. I’ve been sent many more rejections. I just keep trying.

I’ve had to shape myself into the kind of writer who can meet deadlines. In the poetry world, nobody’s expecting anything. There’s flexibility. I wake up, I read a poem, I see something, I take care of my kids, something happens with my kids. That leads me to write something. If I’m not writing a new thing, then I will edit something. I’m always writing and creating, and always editing, there’s always something in a state of flux. Maybe it’s done, maybe it’s not, but if it feels pretty solid, I’ll send it out. That’s been my life for the past 15 years. I count my poetry publishing life by my son’s age because they’re the same age.

KC: Your poetry life and your son are the same age?

JG: Yes. My first published poem was about being his mom. So, it’s fitting I call myself a mama poet. Writing is like mother work to me. There’s always something to do, and I try not to judge the process. My poetry is teaching me how to stop judging myself by external measures. ‘Cause in the poetry world, a bestseller is like if a hundred people read it. You just don’t have those same measures. That’s not why we’re doing it.

KC: Motherhood is a key theme in your writing. Does publishing writing that’s about your kids ever challenge you, in terms of whose stories you get to tell?

JG: As the primary caregiver, there’s blurring of boundaries, and blurring of selfhood. I became a mother at 23 and was preoccupied with motherhood. For several years, it never crossed my mind—the question: should I write about my children? As a poet, Sylvia Plath is one of my influences, but I don’t like the term “confessional”. I work toward a poetics of vulnerability— being whole, presenting a whole self, a whole world, a whole life. Mother Poetics was the subject for a conference panel I was on with Molly Sutton Kiefer, who I became a co-editor with at Tinderbox Poetry. She’s a dear friend of mine now. She gave a talk on the ethics of writing about our children. That started the wheels turning, thinking about what is our story to tell. I became more aware of the idea of appropriation. So, I developed my own poetics about it. What I have found in my own writing life is that there are boundaries that need to be upheld on both sides of any relationship. There are things that I do not write about, aspects of my children’s personalities or choices or conversations we’ve had that I would never break the sacred trust bond between us to share. Or, I would need to ask permission. My family has long influenced my writing. For instance, my brother inspired one of the characters in the first novel I wrote—the second novel I published—Jubilee. I asked him, before I published it, and he gave me his permission to use a likeness of him as a character.

It was funny because he said, “If I ever write my memoir, I’ll surely write about myself in a less flattering light. So, don’t worry, this is fine.” [laughs]

Because I see myself as a mother-writer, and I use social media for marketing, presenting myself as a whole person who mothers is a big deal to me. Now my kids are like, Why did you have to post that on social media? That’s where I have to ask permission. Sometimes they say no. And then I don’t post it. [laughs] Everyone has to make that choice, in terms of their own ethics, their own family relationships. My story is my life as I’m living it, and my life is not in a vacuum. How can I write honestly about my experiences when my experiences are relational? I see myself through my relationships with others. Who are you? I’m a mother. So, how can I write about myself if I can’t write about my relationships? First and foremost, we need to give ourselves permission.

KC: I have lived in Albuquerque for sixteen years, and I enjoy seeing New Mexico portrayed in your novel River Woman, River Demon. As a white man born and raised in New York, who has lived in many places, I’m intrigued with the question: Where is one’s place? You were born and raised in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, on the Mexicali border with Mexico, went to college in Orange County, lived in Albuquerque for over a decade, and now live in San Diego. Place, for you, is not merely where you are on the earth. It has to do with your lineage. Could you talk about place and how to write it?

We have permission. We give ourselves permission. That’s how I feel about place. Our place is wherever we are, ourselves, living this experience through our sensibilities. I feel connected to deserts because I grew up in the desert. My mom’s family is a desert people. I have a love/hate relationship with the desert. It is so hot.

JG: We have permission. We give ourselves permission. That’s how I feel about place. Our place is wherever we are, ourselves, living this experience through our sensibilities. I feel connected to deserts because I grew up in the desert. My mom’s family is a desert people. I have a love/hate relationship with the desert. It is so hot. [laughs] It’s not always my favorite place to be. I enjoy the beach, but my heart is in the desert. There’s something magical about where we grew up because childhood is magical. We see something in the place we grew up that adults don’t necessarily see. Writers are always trying to get back to what we saw in childhood. In terms of place, that is what I am doing.

Why am I connected to New Mexico? My grandmother’s family is from New Mexico. We have ancestral lineage in New Mexico. When I was a girl, we made a trip there to find the graves of our family. My whole family, like fifty of us, caravanned in vans to New Mexico. We went to White Sands. There was a lightning storm. I remember my whole family rolling down the hills of White Sands. The impression it left on me was magical.

When I moved to New Mexico, my uncle had moved there to get back to his ancestral place. My mom followed him. Then, my husband and I and our kids followed my mom. And then my brother came. Because I see myself relationally, through family, and connection to the land, New Mexico became an extension of the roots of the family tree. We were already connected there, and I was raising my kids there.

I don’t think that gives me more claim to anywhere than anyone else. That’s just how I see myself and how I see story extending from me. We, as individuals, are living our experiences, and so we can become connected to anyplace we are. It doesn’t mean that we have a sacred claim to land, especially Indigenous land. But, in terms of connection to place, both in my life and in my work, I am reclaiming a sacred connection with my ancestors.

If I were to move to New York—I have a friend who lives in upstate New York in a forested area—and if I were to move there, I would probably write novels and poetry and see myself through the forest. That would be my place. Anywhere we are, we have permission. As long as it’s not on someone’s sacred [land]. Right? So, if we went to a reservation, we would need permission. That’s sacred.

KC: In your poems, you fit words into many structures—couplets, tercets, quatrains, serial sonnets, and prose poetry among them. When you write, is it more common for the language to flow first and later you find structures, or to start with a structure and then find what kind of language flows into it?

I go into that space of the duende, and dredge it up. It’s sludge, it’s mud, it’s gross, and it’s oozing. [laughs] And that’s what gets poured onto the page, everywhere, in every direction. That’s how it comes out of my brain. And it’s usually broken—all over the place. The work is to give it shape.

JG: It is more common that language flows. Not only language, but emotion. Emotion and language are intricately tied for me. I go into an underbelly space. Or, the upside-down. Sometimes I use a Stranger Things metaphor. I go into that space of the duende, and dredge it up. It’s sludge, it’s mud, it’s gross, and it’s oozing. [laughs] And that’s what gets poured onto the page, everywhere, in every direction. That’s how it comes out of my brain. And it’s usually broken—all over the place. The work is to give it shape. As new ideas amalgamate, there’s an alchemical infusion. It comes out in pieces, and it’s like putting Legos together. When they fuse together, then I have this new meaning.

Every once in a while, I will give myself a structure, a form, and then work to put language into it. Gabrielle Calvocoressi, in a lecture, helped me to see the value of starting with a form. While the conscious mind is busy arranging and puzzling it together, the unconscious mind can come out to play. Because I work primarily in the unconscious, in that duende underbelly place, what happens when I give myself a very set form, a set of rules, things will ooze out in a cool and playful way. Some of my favorite poems have come out that way. My sestinas, or—I have an abecedarian—they came out that way. Because I have oozed out in all of my journals, the subconscious work is being done behind the scenes. I’m dedicated to the crafting process, but sometimes magic just happens.

KC: You mention magic, and as I see you now, as we talk on Zoom, a six foot by six foot room-dividing screen decorated with tarot cards sits behind you. What tarot set is that?

JG: Rider-Waite.

KC: That’s the most famous origin set, right?

JG: Right. This is one of those room-separator screens, and I only like to show this side. The other side has the devil and death which I don’t prefer to have out because I feel that gives it power. I like this side. [She gestures toward the screen.] It has the moon and the lovers and the ace of wands. Some of my favorite cards.

KC: Does the creative growth that you feel when you work with tarot cards compare with the work of your writing practice? Do you seek guidance ever, through the tarot cards? How do your writing and tarot cards interact with each other?

JG: Yeah. I seek guidance and wisdom from the spiritual elements of our daily lives, from my ancestors, and from whatever is not the physical, tangible that we access with our five senses. My writing has to do with a sixth—or sixth and seventh and eighth—sense that can tap into the duende place, the underbelly, the upside-down. Tarot cards do the same work of going into the unconscious. I write to portray experience, but connection to place is otherworldly.

What is usually manifested in the tarot reading is what we already know, on some level. We’re getting these answers from out there [JG points away]. The out-there is in-here. I’m pointing to the gut, the heart, and the insides of us. Going to tarot cards, like going to my writing, is like turning the inside out. It’s what I do as a writer.