{"id":719,"date":"2016-08-08T15:51:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T19:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=719"},"modified":"2016-08-24T15:10:06","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T19:10:06","slug":"an-interview-with-christina-duhig-author-of-lesson-by-coral-nardandrea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/an-interview-with-christina-duhig-author-of-lesson-by-coral-nardandrea\/","title":{"rendered":"An interview with Christina Duhig, author of \u201cLesson\u201d (by Coral Nardandrea)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was a Gender Studies major in college, and I\u2019m a person who, generally, just cares<\/i>. It\u2019s difficult for me, as an assistant editor on the MAR staff, to pass up a poem that speaks to something bigger and manages to remain artistic. Any of us can say an alarming amount of women are murdered each year\u2014each day\u2014but few people can say that in a way that\u2019s different. Thankfully, \u201cLesson,\u201d by Christina Duhig, does just that. <\/span><\/p>\n

A poem like \u201cLesson\u201d is hard to read. It deals with what every girl who makes it to womanhood deals with: the violence she knows is happening around her, and the violence she is unable to fully escape. \u201cLesson\u201d speaks to the author\u2019s first time grappling with this knowledge\u2014a young girl trying to imagine the details of a murder and how this experience impacts her future. <\/span><\/p>\n

All young women have the moment they realize they need to worry about something more than most of their male friends. The \u201cdon\u2019t go out alone\u201d discussion, the \u201ctake a friend to the bathroom\u201d discussion. The moment they watch a newscaster talking about a woman who has been assaulted or killed or both. Duhig brings awareness to that in a way that hurts. Because it needs to. <\/span><\/p>\n

When I first read \u201cLesson,\u201d that hurt sneaked up on me. Duhig uses short, clipped sentences and powerful, controlled diction to put the reader exactly where she needs them to be\u2014in the moment, on those train tracks, in the flames. Duhig forces readers to live these moments in time with her nine-year-old self, forces them to look at the dental records the way she looked at them, to \u201clearn to see the body beneath the body.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Duhig\u2019s \u201cLesson\u201d is such an important addition to Mid-American Review<\/i>. A poem that reminds us what we don\u2019t want to be reminded about, a poem that forces us to remember the moment we understood. <\/span><\/p>\n

Do you have a writing ritual of any sort? Tell us about it.<\/b><\/p>\n

I need a stack of poetry books, an iced coffee, and\u2014 about an hour into the effort\u2014 I usually need a cookie. Substitute iced coffee for Diet Coke, a cookie for a sleeve of saltines, books for different books. The caffeine helps with focus. The food soothes desperation. The books, of course, unlock the head- space.<\/span><\/p>\n

Has your idea of what makes a poem a \u201cpoem\u201d changed since you began writing?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

My aesthetics and the aesthetics I appreciate in a poem have certainly evolved over the years. I\u2019ve come to embrace a short and succinct title, the kind that seemed \u201ctoo easy\u201d when I was younger. (I was no good at writing those long, delightfully clever titles anyway.) I shy away now from abrasive language, which appealed to me as I was figuring out my feminist politics. What hasn\u2019t changed is my desire for sincerity and the sense of urgency I feel as both reader and writer when piecing together meaning. I love the lines in Marianne Moore\u2019s \u201cThe Steeple Jack:\u201d \u201c<\/span>it is a privilege to see so<\/span>\/<\/span> much confusion. Disguised by what\/\u00a0might seem the opposite.\u201d I\u2019m drawn to well-ordered confusion in a poem\u2014the way the poem\u2019s order shifts as it moves down the page.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is your biggest writing-related success, other than a publication?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Cue the list of writing-related successes I wish I\u2019d experienced by now. I\u2019ve written a number of poems that attempt to confront the traumas that women I care about have endured. Each of those poems\u2014 poems that feel \u201cfinished\u201d and honest\u2014are my best \u201cwriting-related success\u201d because they are my best effort to confront violence and support women, in writing. \u201cLesson\u201d is one of those poems. Though I never met the woman that poem is about, her story\u2014as I heard it on the news when I was nine years old\u2014was the first of many I\u2019ll never forget.<\/span><\/p>\n

What was the most useful feedback you received for \u201cLesson\u201d that helped it evolve into the poem it is?<\/b><\/span> \u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cLesson\u2019s\u201d early drafts the last three lines\u2014a couplet and a final one-line stanza\u2014were clunky and vague. I think I knew the couplet in particular was off, but I didn\u2019t know how to fix it until a friend suggested that it wasn\u2019t scary enough, that the poem had to hurt more. She was right.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few years later, satisfied with the revised couplet, another friend suggested that the last line\u2014\u201cgirl, fire, track, man\u201d\u2014move into the body of the poem. I resisted at first. I loved the last line. I felt power in the line, and I wanted that power. But, together, we moved the line, and the second line of revised couplet became the last line of the poem. She was right, too. The poem had to hurt.<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you ever feel you are unable to write out of fear?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Yes\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Without this sounding like a therapy session, I am almost three years out of a terrible run involving deaths in my family, a breakup, bed bugs, panic attacks and parallel anti-depressants (my first!), adjunct exhaustion, and my escape (rescue) from Brooklyn. I\u2019m convinced the poems that will ultimately result from all of this will finish my book, but I\u2019ve also realized that I have a habit of avoiding the place where the poems are scariest, where they should hurt most. And I just have no interest in fear and hurt right now.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLesson\u201d has a very distinct message concerning violence against women, and how women learn about this violence. What were some techniques that you used to help tackle such a loaded subject?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I tried for years to write a poem about her death, and in doing so I tried any number of times to find out more information about her. One of those times, I entered the right search terms, and the news was right there. I was stunned by<\/span> how many of the details I remembered, and stunned again by the details I either never heard or forgot. In particular, that he \u201cstarted a fire with gasoline.\u201d At nine, when I heard \u201cshe was burned,\u201d my little self imagined matches or a lighter held to her skin. And that\u2019s one of the images\u2014even as an adult\u2014that stayed with me. Realizing, finally, the disconnect between how he actually set her on fire and my attempt at nine years old to understand how she was burned, the poem wrote itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, time? Recollection? Detail?<\/span><\/p>\n

I also can\u2019t tell you how grateful I was to learn her name.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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