Aaron Schneider Interviews Amanda Merpaw

(Anstruther Books, 2024)

Amanda Merpaw

Aaron Schneider (AS): Where did this book come from? Did it start as disconnected poems that you assembled into a book or did you always see it as a coherent, unified project?

Amanda Merpaw (AM): The full-length collection grew out of my earlier chapbook, Put the Ghosts Down Between Us (Anstruther Press, 2021). The chapbook’s poems explored the period of time where I got divorced and started dating again. I was writing a lot at that time about grief, intimacy, queerness, returning (tentatively) to joy, and thinking about how the space of a poem or many poems might engage with questions I had about being in relation with others, with myself, with the world. When the chapbook came out, I was already working on additional poems with the same preoccupations, so it felt clear to me that the project was growing into a larger collection—one where I could expand what I was playing with in terms of content, voice, form, language, sound, etc. 
 
AS: The book is divided into four titled sections. Can you talk about the sections and their titles? How do you see the structure of the book and how did you place the poems within that structure?

AM: I arrived at sectioning the book this way after a lot of consideration about how the poems exist in relation to each other, and in considering the speaker and the reader’s emotional journey together through the collection. I knew after reading through all the poems that I wanted the collection to have movements the way large-scale musical work like a symphony does. It felt right in relation to the emotional and tonal movements of the poems (and of life) to have sections that engaged with different pacing, mood, themes, etc., while still contributing to an overall atmosphere and experience larger than each individual section. I also grew up playing instruments and singing in choirs and competitions, so it felt natural to draw on that relationship.

My hope is that the section titles hint towards their tones and themes. “Any Closer to Grief,” the opening section, focuses on the end of my marriage and the immediate reality of divorce. The poems range formally, and a few of them offer a lot of white space on the page—a scatteredness. The next section, “I Did Not Die,” is the early period of being alone afterwards. There are some longer, slower pieces in this section. The titles for these two opening sections come from lines in Mary Oliver’s poem “Heavy.” The third section, “If Only in the Dark,” moves with the speaker into joy, playfulness, sensuality—while still carrying her sense of caution and uncertainty. Some poems here move fast, some echo themselves or each other. The final section, “Coniferous for You,” explores the complexity of the speaker finding themselves in or close to a relationship again, and how difficult it can be to let go of the past—how heavy it can loom, how long. Both of the final section titles come from lines in poems within the sections.
 
The sections do have some chronological anchoring. The speaker is generally moving forward in time, though time isn’t intended to be experienced in a linear way throughout the collection, so I’ve usually included a poem or two that pulls the speaker backward or draws her forward. For placing the poems, I started with those that had obvious chronological references, and then moved on to others of a similar time and place as those poems. I thought about the mood, the voice, the images, the form, the pace, the lightness of the pieces, and moved them into sections with those considerations in mind. It was important to me that the sections not feel overly uniform, so I did play with small shifts of tone and pacing within the sections, too.
 
AS: This is your first book. Can you talk about the process of getting from a chapbook to a book, and do you have any advice for early career poets about making the transition from journals and chapbooks to a full-length manuscript?

AM: I wondered about this so much when I was in my early days of publishing in journals! Something that was important to me was to take my time. I definitely felt a desire to jump quickly from journal publication to a chapbook to a manuscript, but I’m glad I gave myself space to linger in each of those experiences. I think the book is stronger for it. I had been writing for a very long time before I started submitting to journals. Then I published in journals and volunteered as a reader and editor at journals for a long time (five years?) before publishing my chapbook, and now my collection is out three years later.
 
I’m lucky and grateful that I had the chance to work with Jim Johnstone as the editor and publisher of my chapbook (and later my full-length)—some of his best advice is about taking time. To focus on writing one good poem. Then another. I tried thinking about the poems as a collection or as a book as little as possible. I was naturally preoccupied with writing towards interconnected questions, so I just kept accumulating poems until I had more than enough for a collection. That’s when I shifted to thinking about the book, and what the poems could accomplish together. I ended up cutting many poems and also writing new ones once I could see what the collection was shaping up to be overall. I also really tried not to worry about how early in my life I would publish a book—I’m 36 and I think that’s a perfectly fine age for a debut.
 
In terms of the practical reality of the book publishing process, it was actually a rejection that started moving things forward. I had submitted poems to Arc Poetry Magazine and, while they were rejected, Arc offered me a spot in their Poet-In-Residence (PIR) program. Jim was the PIR at the time, and the program involved sending a few poems to Jim for feedback and brief conversation. I really enjoyed the process of working with him in that context, and the feedback he offered was really helpful. I went on to submit the chapbook manuscript I’d been working on for consideration at Anstruther Press. I was thrilled that he accepted it for publication. Working on the chapbook was a fantastic editorial experience—Jim is a generous and perceptive editor. I was gradually working towards growing the chapbook into the full-length, and I knew after working with Jim on a smaller scale that I’d ideally like to work with him on the book via his role at Palimpsest Press if both he and the press were interested in acquiring my manuscript. Thankfully, they were and did! The process of editing the book was made smoother by the fact that I had worked with Jim before, and I trusted Palimpsest to be a good home for my work. There’s value in casting a smaller but more intentional and thoughtful net, and in building and sustaining meaningful relationships in the literary community.
 
Also, there’s no rush to publish your debut by the time you’re 25 or something! Take time with and for your work. Really.
 
AS: There is a real range to the poems in this book. In particular, I am thinking of the difference between poems such as “Aubade in Yesterday’s Dress”—this is a great title by the way!—and the poem that follows it in the collection, “Confessor’s Flood.” “Aubade in Yesterday’s Dress” is grounded in concrete events that poem makes accessible to the reader, giving us lines like “Last night, / after the bar, you walk me to your borrowed / room.” “Confessor’s Flood” is as rich with feeling and as rooted as “Aubade in Yesterday’s Dress,” but operates at a much greater level of abstraction, opening with the extraordinary stanza
 
               Everything is ancient.
               Monument of fate
               burns firm, tender.
 
               Bravery is a mistake
               of make-believe,
               fragments of love
 
               wanting and sick.
               Down the street
               everything is so easy.     
 
What draws you to these different modes? Is there a sign or signs that a poem will gravitate in one direction or another? And did you think about these kinds of differences when deciding on the order of the poems?

AM: Thank you for the title love! I’m pretty naturally drawn to engaging in these different modes—sometimes more accessible, concrete narrative and images, sometimes more abstracted or even leaning towards theory or philosophy. I’m interested in the possibilities of both registers. In this collection, I was especially interested in how I could explore them while still writing from the same speaker, the same voice. It was important to me to challenge myself to show that range, to attempt to reflect the realities of how the human mind naturally moves in this way, and also to offer that range to the reader. It’s usually clear to me from the first few lines of a draft, from the diction and the movement and the images and tone, what direction the piece will take, and then I run with it. Then I work to hone it in (or sometimes offer internal tension to it) in revision. Sometimes beginning with constraints of language or form help too: “Confessor’s Flood” is an erasure of all the lyrics to the songs on Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, an album I was listening to repeatedly while writing. Starting with the constraint of working only with her pre-existing language helped me find the tone and abstraction I was looking for through substantial erasure.

I thought a lot about these differences when deciding the order of the poems! It was a priority for me to consider the reader’s experience through the pieces and not to overwhelm them with one mode for pages on end. The variation feels more surprising and compelling to me, and I hope it does for the reader too.

AS: There are three poems in the collection that their titles identify as essays—“Essay on Memory,” “Essay on Closure,” and “Essay on Me, You, Sure.” All three of them are prose poems, and they are also the most sonically charged of the poems in the collection. Take for example the alliteration that plays through the opening of “Essay on Memory”:

I return at the thaw. First fog of ferry light. There’s always a boat,
a body of water. Benediction carries itself the same. Can you
stumble on grace uninvited? Once, there was mud. We wore
matching boots. Not here, another lake, the other side. You
burned coffee on the fire. The mosquitoes stayed the night. What
bends in the balsam stays buried.

Can you talk about why you titled these poems essays? About how you think about the prose poem, and, specifically, why these kinds of sonic elements seem to come to the fore in the prose poems in the collection.
 
AM: Both “Essay on Memory” and “Essay on Me, You, Sure” originally appeared in my chapbook with different titles. As I worked on the full-length and wrote more prose poems, I noticed a relationship between them in terms of what I was working through in the moment of composition, the voice of the speaker, and what they were doing in their final forms. When I wrote the poem that would become “Essay on Closure” and was searching for a title, it struck me that what I was doing with the piece—and what the speaker was doing—was making an attempt toward something like closure. I was trying for it, towards it. That made me think about how the word “essay” comes from the French essayer, which means to attempt or to try. (I’m Franco-Ontarian, so I’m often thinking in or towards French even when I’m working in English.) An essay is an attempt to put to proof an idea—a reaching towards, even if you don’t achieve it. Given it was a prose poem, I thought that labeling it an essay was apt. Maybe a bit playful, too. Is it an essay? Why or why not? Once I’d titled “Essay on Closure” (trying for closure, trying to explain closure—a bit of both), I returned to the other prose poems in the manuscript to see if I could identify something similar in how they were working. That’s when I renamed the other two which now form the series of essays—they both felt like they were attempting something similar.
 
The absence of line breaks in prose poems definitely heightens my awareness of the other elements of poetic craft that are available to work with. I’m drawn to the prose poem because of how its compression and lack of space offer the possibility of speed and rhythm, and how the sonic elements of a piece (internal rhyme, alliteration, repetition, etc.) are felt at closer proximity. There’s a heightened intensity and momentum for me there, and I want the reader to feel that too. Prose poems feel like an ideal playground for musicality, for attention to the sonic elements—the reader is paying so much attention to that without the breath of the line break, the pause of white space, at their disposal.

AS: There are some quite personal and revealing poems in the collection. How do you think about the confessional mode, and, more precisely, the limits of confession? Is there material that is off limits and how do you draw that line?
 
AM: From the beginning, I knew I was writing poems about intimacy, about the relational. I knew that the speaker was a close proxy for me and my voice. I aspired for this collection to feel like a friend whispering a secret, her gossip, her personal confidences to the reader. That’s why so many of the poems embed dialogue, the epistolary, etc. The speaker is maintaining this ongoing gesture of hey, I’m talking to you. Let me tell you something.
 
I had to work through socially imposed notions of shame when I got divorced, when I came out, when I was dating and loving widely as a woman. It was important for me that the poems resist that shame by sharing these intimate, personal details in intimate, personal (and revealing) ways. It feels liberating. The poems are definitely “confessing” in the sense that they are telling detailed truths of my personal (and often private) lived experiences, although I’m careful not to associate confession here with the concept of sin or with the hope of being pardoned or absolved by someone outside of myself. Quite the opposite.
 
In terms of the limits of confession—oh boy. I’ll admit, I talked to my therapist about this a lot while writing the book. Ultimately, I want the poems to be revealing about me more than anyone else. Even when sharing personal experiences I had with others, I aspire for the poems to reflect the speaker’s state of mind, her observations, her feelings. I imagine that some of the real people who are implicated in the events of the poems would be able to spot versions of themselves, but I don’t want to share details that make their identities obvious. There are definitely limits to what I’m willing to share about myself, though those boundaries aren’t yet easy to articulate. I can sense when I’m writing what it is I’m willing to make public and what I want to keep to myself. There are elements of all these experiences that are still just privately for me. I guess the line is one I’m intuiting as I go along. 
 
It's also important for me to circle back to placing the speaker of these poems in the world around her—in the city, amongst other people, in nature, etc. I think of the limits of the confessional “I” in that sense too. I want her to be in and of the world around her, not only focused on herself.
 
AS: I’m interested in the granular details of craft. Can you pick an element of the collection—a line or lines, a stanza, potentially even a whole poem—that you are particularly pleased with or that you struggled with, and walk me through its composition. Where did it begin? How did it change and evolve? What did you add, take out, etc.?

AM: Since we’re on the topic of confession, I’m immediately thinking of “Letter to a New Lover,” which is a 12-line single stanza poem in the third section of the collection.
 
When I first submitted my manuscript, this poem was originally two 12-line stanzas—the second stanza went on to become “Reply From a New Lover,” which now appears a few pages later in the book. I realized during revision that the two stanzas felt like different voices, one speaking back to the other. My first change was to separate them and give the second poem its title. That second stanza/poem felt more finished from the beginning—it’s undergone almost no change at all.
 
I went on to wrestle with the language, pacing, and line breaks of “Letter to a New Lover” until the very end of the editorial process—I’m sure I sent Jim a handful of different versions, and those were only some of the options I’d been working on. I wanted this piece to open with a long stream of consciousness, to see how far into the poem I could go with a single sentence across many lines. In the original version, the entire 12 lines were just one long sentence. There was no break in pacing until the only period arrived at the end of the stanza. I sensed this wasn’t working in terms of keeping the reader’s attention (even my own attention) and maintaining some clarity, so I opted to close the sentence a few lines up and make the last few lines more end-stopped, briefer, more direct. As though the speaker has lost control of their momentum in the beginning and then regains it in the end. I also turned some declarations into questions (in the final version, “After all, what’s restraint if not survival?” and “Don’t you agree?”) towards the end of the process, to vary the speaker’s tone and engagement with the intended recipient of the letter. 
 
This poem always started with “It’s easy to become,” but otherwise the language in the opening 8 lines (the single sentence) shifted significantly over time. The rhyme of “precision,” “tension,” and “distinction” arrived early in the process, but the added “seduction” and “suggestion” (and the image of eating one’s own tail) came towards the very end. The placement of commas in these first 8 lines took me the longest to settle on—what’s a pace that the reader can follow, but that also reflects the speaker’s state of mind and speech? Same with the line breaks, though those felt ready before the commas did. At some point I just had to decide I was done playing with it (at some point we were going to print, hah!) and that was that.
 
The end of the poem as it currently appears was also a late-in-the-game change. The last two lines were significant revisions to the lines that originally closed the poem, though they do incorporate language I had cut from the first 8 lines when revising those (for example, I’d cut the word “maddening” from the opening lines and eventually brought it back in the closing ones).
 
AS: Finally, what question would you like to be asked about this collection that you haven’t, and can you answer it?   
 
AM: I think I’d have to say that I’d like to be asked about the role of humour in the collection. I thought a lot about how to build in moments that are genuinely (hopefully) funny, where the reader might actually laugh out loud, where the speaker is successfully using sarcasm or telling a joke. Humour is central to my own life and how I engage with the world! I also wanted to provide relief from the intensity of some of the heavier poems.
 
I worked on this in individual poems and in the collection overall—I hope that in getting to know the speaker over the course of many poems, the reader can sense when she’s being funny. It’s an interesting challenge from a craft perspective: if a reader hears me read the poems aloud, they can tell from my intonation that I intend for there to be humour, but how can I achieve that without being there for the reader when they’re engaged in the book privately?
 
I tried to do this by building a multifaceted voice and personality throughout the collection, as well as through word choice, line breaks, tone and emphasis, the presence of other speakers/others’ dialogue in the poems (as reaction, as contrast, etc.), through tension and surprise, through allusion (and playing with the expectations of allusion), through asides and parentheses, through the choice of images.
 
You know, if someone tells me they both laughed out loud and cringed with recognition while reading a poem like “Intimacy Study”—well, that feels like some of the most affirming feedback they could give me. 

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Amanda Merpaw (she/her) is a writer, editor, and translator. She is the author of the chapbook Put the Ghosts Down Between Us (2021), and her writing has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, carte blanche, CV2, Grain, Prairie Fire, Plenitude, with Playwrights Canada Press, and elsewhere. Amanda has been a finalist for the Poem of the Year Contest and the Montreal Fiction Prize. She is currently a contributing editor at Arc Poetry Magazine and a member of the editorial board at Anstruther Press. Most of All the Wanting is her first full-length collection.

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Aaron Schneider is a queer settler living in London, Ontario. He is the founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review, the publisher at the chapbook press 845 Press, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies at Western University. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Ex-Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed (Quattro Books), was published in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), was published in Fall 2021. The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books, 2023) is his first novel. ​