Interview with Dustin Pearson – Winter 2019

In between winter storms, our editor Jenna R. London and Dustin Pearson chatted about his forthcoming book of poetry A Family is a House, which releases March 31, 2019!

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Jenna R. London: What inspired A Family is a House?

Dustin Pearson: Probably a lot angst and bafflement around the word and concept of family, and the people who always seemed to be using that word around me in both passive and aggressive ways.

Do you have a favorite poem in the collection?

I think it might be a toss-up between “An Occasion of Potted Meat” and “Diamond Dog.”

Was there a dramatic difference in the writing process between your first and second books?

I think there was a more dizzying navigation finding the right aesthetic presentation for Millennial Roost. The poems in A Family Is a House kinda just showed up, already very much so themselves.

How did your writing change between your first and second books?

I was really interested in lyric, disclosure, music, replicating human thought, speech, and intimacy when I was writing Millennial Roost. I struggled to understand what was so compelling about imagery and why it tended to make poetry compelling for so many. I think it was because, for the longest, I didn’t have a strong reaction to the things being described in the language of the poems I read. Reading a poetic description of an object or process I didn’t have a strong relationship to didn’t help me picture it, and even if the thing being described was something I did have a strong relationship to, the language probably didn’t do much to conjure a vibrant image in my mind. If the poetic description didn’t reorient my relationship to something or capture my interest beyond actually interacting with or seeing the thing, I was miserable about finding the utility of it. The poems in A Family Is a House compile some of the most vibrant imagery I’ve ever put into poems, and that imagery is all fueled by powerful emotions, so I’d say A Family Is a House finally let me establish a meaningful relationship to the image in poetry.

What is the most challenging aspect about revising a single poem? Collection?

I think it can be difficult sorting through the various voices that we encounter in the spaces that would ideally facilitate the revision process. I think more often than not when a poet has a vision in mind for a poem, it can be really stressful to give that vision up in favor of what someone else might prefer or a product that more closely resembles something that has been received favorably or landed in a prestigious publication. I think the best thing a poet can do when revising a single poem is developing a mechanism for tuning out or sorting through those voices. A lot of revision suggestions are selfish—people projecting what would make a poem more pleasing to them as a reader rather than get the poet closer to their ideal.

I think the most challenging aspect of revising a collection is staying in the mindset that allowed you to write it in the first place long enough to make revision productive. The thing about writing in general and poetry specifically is that you grow over the course of producing it. I think any worthwhile project will cause the writer to be a different person after they finish it. If a writer mentally moves on from a work and then receives feedback that major changes are needed, it can be devastating, because they’re likely not the same writer anymore. These days, I find it much more productive to see every subsequent project as a revision of sorts. If it’s true that there’s no such thing as a perfect work, then no one should be stressing it if it’s not helpful, if the aspiration toward something perfect contradicts that essential thing inside you that says it’s time to move on from a work. Writing allows for many returns.

Did working as an editor influence your writing?

I don’t think so. Editing let me see major trends in the work that gets sent to and places in literary journals, and perhaps gave me invaluable experience in the big production feel and operations of directing a publication, but that knowledge hasn’t made my writing any more practical or the opposite.

What can you tell us about the process of arranging the poems and do any new poems result from needing to “fill holes?”

I always arrange my poems according to what I think is the most emotionally truthful progression. I think it can be tempting to arrange a collection of poems toward a strong or definitive lyric thesis or a kind of optimism. I was pressured to do that kind of thing in Millennial Roost at various points. I had a conversation with a survivor of abuse who was passionate about telling me that he didn’t like that my speaker went from achieving what he felt was a healthy resolve and then subsequently relapsing to a less healthy resolve and back again. I explained that I thought it was unrealistic that my speaker not represent that back and forth correspondence with his abuse and reckoning with it, that I knew I could write it differently in a book, that it could be different because it was a book, but I didn’t want that because it’s never represented any facet of my reality, so why would I want that reality for the book? He ended up agreeing with me.

When it comes to filling in gaps, I just tell myself that I can do that kind of thing in later works since I firmly feel that I’m just writing one big book anyway, so I don’t really worry about what other people feel might be missing. If I feel that something is missing, I address it before the arrangement phase. If I come to feel that way after the arrangement phase, I make a mental note of what the possibilities for addressing such an absence could mean for the future.

How have the fellowships you’ve been awarded influenced the completion of two books of poetry?

I wrote six poems in A Family Is a House my first year at Cave Canem. I love Cave Canem. I was working my way up to writing various aspects of Millennial Roost during my three years at The Watering Hole. I love The Watering Hole. I don’t know what I was writing when I was working my way through Southeast Asia (I combined a lot the writing I did over that trip into one poem in A Family Is a House), but that’s an experience I know I would’ve never had if not for The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and I’ll never forget how I felt during that trip.

Is there are particular poet(s) who you feel most influence your writing?

I carry all of my teachers—those that I’ve worked with in that mentor/mentee capacity over years (Jillian Weise, Sally Ball, Cynthia Hogue, Norman Dubie)—into every poem I write, so they are easily the most influential, and probably much more so than the poets I love for all the other reasons I do.

Do you read much prose and if so, how does it influence your poetry?

I started gravitating toward Ethnic American literature in undergrad. Most of what I read were novels and short story collections. I mostly read Ethnic American novels when I was earning my MA degree in English, so most of the prose I read now still falls into those categories. There’s usually some sort of magical navigation or rendering brought about by great stresses related to the reconciliation of identity that emerges from seemingly incompatible notions of self. Things get a bit unhinged. I think I take major cues from that.

What can you tell us about your current project(s)?

I’m working on at least two new projects. I don’t yet know the genre. One of the books is about friendship. The other book is about two brothers who make their way down to Hell together but then get separated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

long_bw Dustin Pearson is the author of Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018) and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. His work appears in Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Check out A Family is a House here!

And also Pearson’s first book!