It was a hot muggy Monday evening in my studio on the North shore of Louisiana’s Lake Ponchatrain, just about an hour’s drive from Gulfport, Mississippi, Natasha Trethewey’s birthplace. Ms. Trethewey had just finished a hard day’s work in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson when I phoned her.

Daniel Reinhold: Why don’t we start with the obvious?  What are you doing with the archives? 

Natasha Trethaway: Well, I’m just beginning to gather some information for a particular history I’ve become interested in recently. I was looking for records of all of the men executed in Mississippi’s traveling electric chair for a 15-year period from 1940 to about 1955. I’m trying to find out not only their names, but also the locations that the chair traveled to around the state.

DR: Are you able to find any photographs of these men?

NT: I did.  I found just today a photograph of the first man executed in the chair, three photographs of him being strapped into the chair, his bare feet, the executioner leaning over before giving him another jolt of electricity.  It was pretty harrowing to look at.  I didn’t expect to see those today.

DR:   In Bellocq’s’s Ophelia and Domestic Work you also work with photographs.  I was curious what you might say about how that called you, or if it just happened.

NT:   I think that photographs always called to me. I’m always drawn to what Roland Barthes called “punctums” in photographs, those things that are little sparks, drawing your attention.  In a particular photograph I was looking at today, it was a dog, someone was holding a small dog in his arms while looking at the electric chair, and the dog was looking at the electric chair.  I was struck by that.  It’s seeing that kind of thing that draws me toward writing a poem even more than some of the other things that might have been going on in the photograph.  I’ve always been drawn to photographs because I’m such a visual person. Having an image to begin with when I’m writing a poem always seems to lead me in some interesting direction.

DR: When you work with images, do you tend to seek out images like with Bellocq, or do you find random images moving you?

NT: Both.  I think now, today, I was seeking out some of those images, but there have been times when I haven’t been looking for them that I’ve come across them and felt compelled to write.

DR: I was fascinated by a detail in Bellocq’s Ophelia, which was that the subject that was being photographed, the photographer’s model, also eventually took up photography herself and there’s sort of a recursion, or a sort of circle: she was becoming the photographer after being photographed.

I’m drawn to form in that way because of the possibilities that the poems suggest that I might follow—not the other way around.

NT: Right.  Well, I think it was necessary for her to find a way to take some kind of agency and to reverse the lens in a sense, not to always be the one on the end of the lens being looked at, but someone instead who had the kind of subjectivity to look outward at the world.  I think, perhaps, that some of the idea for handing her the camera and making her an apprentice came from my reading about Victorine Meurent who was the model for Manet’s Olympia—a painter herself who even exhibited a painting at a salon in Paris. But then the trail that might lead us to her, show us more about who she was and where else she went, goes cold. I liked the idea of her also being an artist and trying to forge her way as an artist while working as an artist’s model.

DR: In Native Guard, you’re writing about your mother and the racial climate of the Deep South. How did that process work, what kind of struggle was there or what kind of a release? And in correlation with that, there are a lot of forms in your work (the sonnets, etc.) so while writing Native Guard how did those two things work together and affect you?

NT:  Well, in Native Guard in particular, I learned early on (while working on that unrhymed crown of sonnets in the voice of the soldier) that repetition was an important element of what I was trying to do.  That is, in trying to inscribe or re-inscribe those narratives and stories—histories that had been erased or forgotten or not recorded fully—it was important not to just say a thing, but to say it again.  And so repetition became the formal element that I turned to most, which is why there’s the crown of sonnets. There’s the blues sonnet which requires repetition, there’s a ghazal which has a refrain, there’s a pantoum, a villanelle with repetition, as well as the repetition of certain words and motifs throughout the entire collection.  To me that was the main scaffolding of form – the idea of repetition. It underscores my handling of those difficulties you mentioned.

DR: Are there any forms that you’d like to still tackle? The canzone, or something farfetched…

NT: You know, I don’t think of it like that. I don’t think of tackling a form just because it’s there.  I think of using form only when something formal suggests itself in a poem I’m beginning to work on. I’m drawn to form in that way because of the possibilities that the poems suggest that I might follow—not the other way around.

DR: Are there any people – name the top three that come to your head, who have influenced or informed your work.

NT: The top three?  [laughing]

DR: Or five or as many as you want.

NT: Well, I should name my father because he’s a poet and my first poetry teacher – that’s Eric Trethewey.  Toni Morrison is always a big influence for me—her elegant language but also her themes and the fierce way that she approaches the work she has to do. Working on Native Guard I turned to some Irish poets: Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Eavan Boland, to help make sense of my South, my history, my sense of psychological exile.  When I was first starting out I loved two books, and carried them around with me in graduate school.  One, by Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah, and Yusef Komunyakaa’s Magic City because they took me both to my material and to my landscapes.  You know, his Bogalusa landscape is similar to my Mississippi landscape.

DR: As this is an Antioch journal and we’re focused on social justice, do you see poetry and politics as…well, exactly how do you see them?

NT: You know I’m really impressed with Antioch’s focus on social justice and I’d like to model what we’re doing on an undergraduate level at Emory on Antioch’s graduate social justice component because I’m interested in that, in poetry—beyond aesthetics—for what it can do and show us about our lives and the history that we’re wrapped up in, the ongoing challenges that we face.  I gave a lecture called (borrowing from George Orwell’s title) “’Why I write’:  Poetry, History, and Social Justice.” It is my argument that those things that compel me to write—the idea that poetry might not just be beautiful, but that it also might do something is very important to effect what Seamus Heaney calls “the redress of poetry.” It might help change the way we think about the world we live in, or the world that we’d like to live in. That is, it might help us make it better.

DR: That leads me to think of Beyond Katrina, obviously a lot happened to a lot of people and you spoke in your lecture about the difference between the New Orleans disaster and the Gulf Coast disaster, but also your sense of coming home and your sense of being distanced from that.  And do you want to say anything about Katrina or the book or that whole thing?

NT: [Laughs] That whole big thing…well, I saw this on the side of the road: it was a politician’s political campaign slogan, and the sign read “Katrina isn’t over.”  And I think that’s true – it isn’t over.  I think it will be awhile before we’re distanced enough from it to really understand its impact on the region and people.

DR: Thank you.  And now, the final question:  I asked this of Kevin Young when he was at Antioch and I’ll ask it of you:  How do you like your grits?

NT: [Laughs] That’s pretty good.  I happen to really like cheese, so some good cheese mixed into my grits and salt and pepper is good.  As a child, they gave me grits and sugar, but I grew out of that, so either plain or with a lot of cheese.

Natasha Trethewey is the newly appointed United States Poet Laureate.  She also holds the distinction of being a professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta.  She has authored three poetry collections: Domestic Work (2000) which Rita Dove selected as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book by an African American poet, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2006) about the imagined life of a mixed-race prostitute who lived in the red-light district of New Orleans in the 1900’s, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard (2006) comprised of poems about the Civil War as well as moving elegies to her mother.  In addition, she authored the non-fiction book Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010).  Her forthcoming collection Thrall, which is said to focus on her relationship with her Canadian poet-father, is due out this year.  Ms. Trethewey suffuses her oftentimes historical work with her intense personal background as a bi-racial woman from the South born to a black mother and white father.  Her quietly powerful poems draw us in with their intimacy, emotional knowledge and beautifully saturated close-ups into the lives of those who would not otherwise be seen.

Rick Moody is a counterculture writer who once got to throw a pie in the face of his biggest critic. A New York City native, Rick Moody studied under Angela Carter and John Hawkes at Brown University and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986. His first novel, Garden State, received the Pushcart Editor’s Choice Award in 1991. His latest work, On Celestial Music, is a collection of essays that delves deeply into music. The title essay was included in Best American Essays, 2008. In the time span between these two works, Moody has been prolific as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist while still finding the time to play in The Wingdale Community Singers band. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at New York Public library, which recognizes young authors.

His memoir The Black Veil won the PEN/Martha Albrand award as well as the NAMI/Ken Book award. Moody’s novel The Ice Storm has been published in 20 countries, introducing more readers to his dark comedy and lyrical, evolving prose. His works, with their artful digressions and playful vocabulary, explore themes of addiction, family tensions, the inexorable pull of history, the limitations of language, and love’s failures. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of his career is his willingness to engage wholeheartedly in literary experimentation; having already enjoyed success, Moody does not grow stagnant; each of his works are distinct and speak to a writer not content to remain in familiar territory.

In his interview with Lunch Ticket, Rick Moody tells us about taking risks and his adaptive approach to storytelling. He also gives details about his forthcoming novel and talks about surviving and growing as a writer.

Robert Egan:  How do you take risks as a writer? It’s as if, in addition to writing what you know, you’re writing to know. Would you elaborate on this exploration?

Rick Moody:  I do, I guess, write to know, or to find out what I know. Or out of intellectual curiosity. It’s hard for me to imagine doing otherwise these days.

The reductive, conservative, story-heavy version of the novel, the English 19thcentury model, would seem hard for me to do now. I don’t believe in it. There’s no risk at all for me there. If I’m not discovering something in the process of writing, I get a little bored. So my recent tendencies are also somewhat about trying to avoid boredom. I don’t want to repeat myself. Even if that might mean a little bit more in the department of accessibility. I don’t know if that involves reinvention of self so much as a recognition that there is no one self there in the first place. That’s a loaded issue: self. I think we are probably more a society of tendencies than we are society of selves.

RE:  Are there any rules or traditions that you won’t break? Or do you have a rule about breaking rules?

I haven’t met a rule yet that I didn’t want to break. Rules get their value from people breaking them.

RM:  I haven’t met a rule yet that I didn’t want to break. Rules get their value from people breaking them. Without a certain amount of scofflaw activity, the rules wouldn’t exist in the first place. So go ahead: break them all. That’s how you learn which are valuable. However, here are two I like: stick to a minimum number of tenses, and avoid sentimentality.

RE:  The notion that rules get their value from breaking them is intriguing, since we have to recognize these rules to be consciously subversive. There also seems to be a subtler subset of rules, camouflaged as habits. How do you uncover habits that you wish to break or redirect?

RM:  I think what you say about habits is very interesting. At least in my case habits arise out of a tendency to want to avoid improvising new responses and solutions to the world on a daily basis: it would just take too long. Responding to the world as though new (I guess the Buddhists would refer to it as Beginner’s Mind) would just take too long. However, there is no art without Beginner’s Mind, without trying to create new pathways, new neural connections, each with its improvised narrative structure, all of them without or apart from routine. So: a habit is a logical and pragmatic way to approach life and literature, and probably essential in part, but also totally deadening. In a writing sense, I therefore try to root them out, these habits, and kill them. I want to be educable, no matter that I am rapidly becoming and old dog, a mid-career artist, a survivor. I want to be willing to grow despite this.

RE:  How does your heightened sense of setting shape your stories. Also, for aspiring writers, do you have any suggestion on how they can let setting shape their work?

RM:  I love landscapes, and they are important to me. The work shouldn’t only be about the people. It should be about their landscape as well. (And maybe ideas, too.) And to do so, to make use of landscape: just pay closer attention. Be a person, as I believe others have said, on whom nothing is lost. What does the city of Los Angeles feel like? I guarantee you it has real impact on the characters of the stories written there. Why not try to describe that fully? Car culture, and tanning salons, and breast implants, and hispanic people, and beaches, and mud slides, and water wars, and The Business.

RE:  Your landscapes, from American Suburbia to Mars, are as diverse as your subject matter. What does traveling to new places do for people, their thought patterns and tendencies?

RM:  I think travel broadens. There is a wealth of literature to support the idea. America is a straitjacket. When the opportunity arises, go elsewhere.

RE:  If the place exists, is it essential to visit it or live there before writing about it?

RM:  No, but it can help. I believe in imagination, so I believe some of the places to which we might travel are imaginary (see, e.g., Calvino’s Invisible Cities), but when they are not it sometimes helps to visit them.

RE: What’s next for Rick Moody?

RM:  A new novel!

RE:  Any hint as to what type of landscape we might encounter in this new novel?

RM:  The new novel is in its infancy, but it concerns a radio producer who is badly injured in a roadside bombing in a certain Middle Eastern city, and who comes home to attempt to put the pieces back together. It is mostly realistic, though his memory is full of holes. It is, I hope, a bit dramatic. It is unfilmable. It is about the clashing of certain points of view. It has fewer jokes than the other books I have written recently.

RE:  When you speak of trying to create new pathways and neural connections, the premise of your new novel sounds like it’s geared wonderfully to do just that. Does music play a role in trying to navigate a memory that is full of holes?

RM:  I don’t know that music is going to play much of a role in the new novel. In fact, the character, Joshua Burns, has sort of bad taste in music. He’s from the Midwest, and has kind of a Farm-Aid sensibility with regard to music: John Cougar Mellencamp, and contemporary country, etc. But there is a music in radio, to radio, which is why he works there. The novel, in a way, is meant to be mostly aural. He doesn’t describe visual things, after a while just the way things sound. Or that is the idea. I don’t know if it will work or not. And a novel is what happens after you give up on all your original ideas.

RE:  How has your long love affair with music shaped your writing career?

RM:  Music gets me out of the house sometimes, into the world, and it also makes me a better listener, and that is good for my language, my craft. Music makes me think more carefully about language, about melody and rhythm. So it has shaped me a great deal, probably as much as literature has.

RE:  How intentional is the use of brand names in your work? Are they used to subvert or evoke rather than directly advertise – is it branding used in an ironic sense?

RM:  Right: the product placement is parodistic, spasmodic. And intentional. Literature is not supposed to have such things in it. But that rarified version of literature is something worth thumbing your nose at occasionally. If only because it makes you feel alive to do so. I bet there aren’t too many brand names in Thomas Mann. But I like them, and they feel as though they refer to a world I know well, and that is reason enough. Brands, though they are post-modern and dreadful are also, in the run-amok capitalism of now, totally realistic.

RE:  During your visit to Antioch Los Angeles in December, you discussed imagination and revision and mentioned a scientific approach to writing. How do you view the relationship between this scientific approach to writing and the art of it?

RM:  I don’t really think my approach is scientific so much as it is about boiling down the ineffable part of writing into some steps that may prove useful to anyone. I would use the word pragmatic. There are certain pragmatic steps you can take today to improve. I think that doesn’t de-romanticize craft entirely. There’s still a lot of room for creativity, as long as you agree to revise as well. So there are these two steps, the ineffable part (which involves imagination), and the pragmatic part, which involves rewriting. You should try to make use of each.

RE:  Do you see your work as affecting any type of social change? What is your greatest hope for your readers? What’s your greatest hope as a writer?

RM:  I believe in social change, and I believe that literature can serve that function, but I also think that social change, as an aesthetic agenda, can sometimes slow down the work, make it a bit sludgy, because social change, if you lean on it too much, can be a bit preachy in a novelistic context. For me, therefore, the goal is to find a way to get to that material without being heavy handed about it. One way to do that is: formal innovation. If you can change how people think, maybe you can change how they act.
To answer your other two enormous questions: a) I have no hope for my readers except that they are quixotic types who are willing to go to a new place with me, b) I am somewhat hopeless as a writer now, at least as regards my own fortunes. I guess I still want to save lives and change the world, but I would be satisfied with avoiding total obscurity.

RE:  How does formal innovation play a part in not being too heavy-handed when it comes to presenting material related to social change?

RM:  What I mean is a variation on the George Clinton line: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.” New ways of thinking about story change the way people think. And changing the way they think changes the way they act. In my view, then, Ulysses, by James Joyce, is a revolutionary novel, because it brings humanity to marginalized peoples, particularly a Jewish-Irish protagonist, for whom Anti-Semitism is a daily part of his life. It doesn’t bring about this revolution by saying “Leopold Bloom was going to have to deal with Anti-Semites again that day.” It brings about the revolution by making him a completely verifiable and true character, one with whom anyone could sympathize, even an Anti-Semite. And he is made true by all the experimenting with point of view and permeability of consciousness that is essential to Joyce’s project. You don’t need to free your mind with propaganda, you need to free your mind by casting off all the shackles, of which a rigid naturalist formula for storytelling is one.

RE:  If we can change the way we think to change the way we act, can this find its roots in memory? If we can change the way we remember, then can we change the way we think and so on?

RM:  Ideally, memory is accurate, but in a practical setting, not so much. So it may be that you can re-imagine your relationship with memory. You can understand memory as a faulty system. And you can plan for your future that way. You can “remember” that your memories are more wish fulfillment than accurate depiction of what happened.

RE:  I see wishing to avoid total obscurity as wanting to connect with readers and be remembered. Say your new novel will connect so fully with one reader’s mind and soul that his or her way of thinking will be irrevocably changed.  Whose mind do you change?

RM:  It doesn’t matter who the reader is. It only matters that they get it, that they care. It could be anyone.