An Interview with Rebecca Macijeski Regarding Autobiography (Split Rock Press)

Interview by Crystal S. Gibbins

Crystal S. Gibbins: Tell us about your writing practice. Do you have a particular physical writing set-up that fosters your writing? If so, what does it look like? What creates a productive writing space for you?

Rebecca Macijeski: My writing practice changes all the time—season by season and project by project. Every few months or so I need to figure out a new routine. The reinvention of habit is part of the process for me. Sometimes I have to be a morning writer. Sometimes it needs to be afternoons after teaching. Sometimes I’ll be a true poet cliche and spend an undetermined amount of time lost in my thoughts—each cave more winding than the last—before I emerge with a poem that finally lights up something I always knew was there but couldn’t quite see. Though the character of my writing changes all the time, some things tend to hold constant. I found my favorite drafting pens and blank notebooks (unlined, this is important) about ten years ago and we’re loyal. I have a soft chair that’s older than my marriage. Most of my poems start there. Usually with a cup of tea. Usually with quiet. Usually with leaves rustling out the big windows. The best ones come in the lucky hours when I have no idea what time it is and the rest of the world feels far away.

When did you begin writing the poems for Autobiography? What was the biggest surprise as you were writing and gathering poems for the chapbook?

I started writing these poems in late fall 2020. The intensity of covid isolation was hitting me, like all of us, in ways that were difficult to manage. I was working and teaching from home, barely leaving the house. My relationship to my own mind was changing and I needed to do something to hold onto some core sense of self I felt was at risk. In all the uncertainty and activity around me, I returned to my imagination as a lantern to light me back home. I started writing poem after poem beginning with the same metaphor phrase “my brain is.” The common beginnings gave me a sense of grounding I needed, but the repetition also became a declaration. I had to keep telling myself that I was still here, am still here, despite whatever was coming. The poems helped me to recognize myself again in a world I was finding it harder and harder to recognize.

The biggest surprise about writing these poems was how easily and excitedly they arrived for me after months of writing nearly nothing. The project of writing a group of poems that all start with the same premise proved a really interesting artistic challenge. I enjoy the idea that each poem feels kind of like an alternate version or alternate history of what my brain is/what my brain can be, but that they aren’t competing with each other. I like that they argue for multiplicity that way. Originally each poem was separately titled “Autobiography.” That felt important, too. I wanted to resist writing about myself through narrative, especially since I was drafting these poems at the same time I was also beginning the work of processing some difficult parts of my past that continue to shape how I see myself in the world.

What is the most difficult part about putting a collection together?

I find that I’m almost always writing poems toward a larger collection project. I don’t tend to write poems that feel like one-off pieces. I can more readily create new work when I have at least a general sense of what kind of curiosity or aesthetic framework I’m building. This means that the hardest part of writing a collection for me is actually the time between when I’m finished writing a project and trying to figure out within myself what I’ll tackle next. That part tends to feel like a bunch of aimless journaling, list making, listening to psychology podcasts, going for walks, etc. Once I figure out what the conceptual thing is that activates my creative curiosity toward writing a new collection, I have a whole series of steps I love following. First comes a more focused kind of list making—possible titles, subjects, memories, rules, categories, etc. Then I write the poems that jump out at me from those lists. Then I type them. Then I print them out and see what I have. That’s the fun part—literally sitting on the floor surrounded by a circle of my poems looking for gaps, finding an order, identifying resonances between separate pages.

Can you tell us more about your connection with place or the environment (natural, built, or wild) and how it informs your writing? 

I’ve had the opportunity to live in three very different American geographies. Each has shaped my view of myself in the world. I grew up in Vermont where I saw the distinctness of the four seasons set in small valleys and towns. I fell in love with trees and fireflies and blackberries. Time outside in little streams and covered bridges as a girl instilled a curiosity for growing things, for the boundary between tamed world and wild world. 

I lived for five years in Nebraska completing my PhD. The landscape there felt alien, empty, almost menacing. I remember the first time I went to the observation deck at the top of the statehouse in Lincoln and looked out over the distant sight line filled with railroad tracks and grain silos. I felt exposed in all that open, all that horizon with no mountain shapes to break up the meridian between land and sky. It was a pretty big upheaval. Over time it led to a shift in my aesthetic. Before moving to Nebraska many of my poems were short tight lyrics that lingered in small moments—a coffee shop, another tired bird metaphor, neighborhoods. After moving to Nebraska my poems shifted away from close ups into wide shots. It’s like I wanted to let in more sky, more sprawl.

Now I’ve lived the last handful of years in northwest Louisiana. I cannot emphasize enough how different this place is from anywhere else I’ve lived. Childhood me growing up in Vermont winters with feet of snow, mud season, slush, and winter coats could not imagine that present me lives in a place where you can still get bitten by mosquitos in December. Magnolia blossoms bloom bigger than my head. I see herons, egrets, and mockingbirds instead of robins and chickadees. “Winter” here means residents cover their citrus trees when there’s a freeze warning. It’s sometimes 80 degrees for the Christmas parade. Every so often there’s an alligator census of the several big lakes in town. This place, as different as it is, also feels like a kind of homecoming. I recognize the small town sensibility. I feel the wildness and the history of the trees. When I interviewed here for the job I now have, someone said his favorite thing about this place is how it seems to collect interesting people. Coming here, working with the students here, and learning about the history of this place has made my poems start to feel more human, more embodied, more lived. Instead of lingering in the close New England gaze or the Midwest far distance, I feel like I’m writing more in the middle range. I have a more consistent sense of who I am in the world for having lived in these different places.

As Autobiography goes out into the world, who do you hope will read it? What effect do you hope it will have on readers or the larger world? 

I hope these poems will help people feel reignited in a celebration of themselves and their own imaginative power. This book is for anyone who maybe doesn’t always remember how strong they are, how creative, how resilient, how resourceful, how determined and worthy of happiness they are. This book is for people who often feel like they’re watching the world from outside of it, not quite sure how or if they fit into the larger story of society. I hope it will help people slow down and connect with the power they have to determine how they do and do not want to be in the world. I also hope it might help neurotypical individuals understand more about what it’s like to be neurodivergent. We’ve made amazing strides in recent years to do the important work of destigmatizing mental illness, but there’s always more to do. Making metaphor is one of the most powerful tools we have to understand ourselves. Metaphor can close the gap between what limits us and what unlocks us.

What is the best piece of writerly advice that you’ve been given?

My MFA thesis advisor shared the following advice that was passed down to her from a mentor: “Dare to be particular.” I don’t anymore remember who she heard this from, but it’s something I think about all the time. It sticks with me on a number of levels. First is the “dare.” There’s courage implied there—and boldness, assertion, declaration, the reward that comes after meaningful risk. In the “to be,” Hamlet resonance set aside for a moment, is the idea of presence. That might seem too obvious to mention at first, but I know it’s been critical for me. As a recovering perfectionist, a worrier, someone with mental illness distracted and consumed by the multiplying pressures of contemporary society, it’s harder and harder every day to be in the moment. It’s harder and harder to let the now, the only place where we all ever actually live, feel alive and sustaining and enough. As writers, we get to build the now. We’re making poems or stories or essays, but we’re also making a life. We get to decide where we give our attention. We get to frame the narrative. That all starts with being here now. Then there’s the “particular.” When my advisor shared this phrase with me, she was encouraging (okay, maybe challenging. I think there was some aggressiveness and frustration there, too) me to write more acutely as myself. She wanted me to write the weird, the specific, the unique, the things that celebrated my life as an individual rather than performing some generic and problematic poet ideal. Being particular is about not hiding. Being particular is about resisting narrative, performance, veneer, gloss. Over the years I’ve transformed this phrase and shared it with my own students as the following: “embrace your weird.”

What’s next for you? What are you working on now, and what can we anticipate in the future?

I’m working on a collection of poems that, for the first time for me, takes on gender as one of its explicit projects. I’m imaginatively exploring my own experiences of transitioning from childhood into adulthood, girlhood into womanhood, and the shapeshifting of self that comes with those changes. Some of the poems dig at specific narrative memories from my life, while others seek to reconstruct the power I felt I had as a girl before the upheaval of that transition. I’m trying to render those extreme shifts in body and mind, which is leading to experiments in form. I’ve been particularly drawn to prose poems and list poems, and some of what I’m writing feels more in the lyric essay category than the poem category. It feels exciting. It feels like a reinvention in what I hope my writing is trying to say, do, and argue for.

As a publication focused on place, environment, and the relationship between humans and the natural world, we’re curious: if you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why?

Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, David Abrams’ Spell of the Sensuous

These are all books with deep attention and intelligence. They build worlds. Ruefle’s poems feel like tight puzzle boxes inviting me to see how each moment can open up into a world. Lightman’s stories look at each day like a different thought experiment. They make me feel like I can shape my world according to what I decide to see. Abrams’ book reminds me to luxuriate in a sensory-rich world constantly reminding us of the intensity and imagination in nature. I like the thought of setting out for some distant forest with these three friends tucked under my arm.

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Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski was published by Split Rock Press in November 2022. The book is available for purchase on Split Rock Review’s online store, Amazon, and through your favorite indie bookseller.