Landscapes Carved By Death, Onto Memory: An Interview With Poet Laura Read

Laura Read, 2011 Winner of the AWP
Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

 I sat down recently at Madeleine's Cafe in Spokane, Washington with writer and fellow teacher Laura Read to discuss her new book of poetry, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral, which won the 2011 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was a finalist in the 2011 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her first book, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, won the 2010 Chapbook Award held by Floating Bridge Press.  


Read is an active member of the Spokane writing scene, co-running with poet Maya Jewell Zeller the monthly Beacon Hill Reading Series at Spokane Community College and co-advising with poet Connie Wasem Scott the student literary journal WireHarp at Spokane Falls Community College. Read participated as a panelist in last year's GetLit!, a Spokane-wide literary festival, and has read her work with other well-known and local poets at Auntie's Bookstore.

As part of the AWP award, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral will be published in late 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Judge and poet Dorianne Laux, and one of Read's deepest inspirations, had this to say about the book:

Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral uncovers the mysteries of girlhood in haunting tableaus and synesthesiac encounters with the past and [ . . .] domestic present. Strange in that way all art is strange, light come to light, but always a palpable darkness riding beneath; a mature lyrical voice translating memory’s turbulent, wordless world. 

Like the title poem, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral is a mapping of absences and, in returning to where each absence began—or what best symbolizes the absence, Read recreates the past into the present. Explanations to questions of why occur, but not all explanations serve and many questions still remain, such as what is it for a father's death to cause a house to be sold and strangers to live in it, and what is it to live in a house where he never lived.

Just as the title poem directs the listener not to go back to the mother's birthplace because it's all gone—all the buildings that were important, all that made who she is exists only in memory—by imagining the return, the identity is created through the path of return:

[. . .] If I go back, I won’t find her—

they took the town down

like the Heath Library

across the street from St. Aloysius

where I read the World Book Encyclopedia

for my ornithology report—

I had to tell the story of 30 birds,

where they lived, what they ate,

how you can spot them up in the branches

and tell them one from the other. [. . .]

Sometimes the path of returning is linear as is the overall organization of the book; however, 
the return to memory resists the linear movement and causes a stylistic tension that is 


corroborated by the tension within the poems, the tension between what happened and how it is remembered. 

Sometimes along the path to the present, a side-road is found, like the poem “Ars Poetica” in which the narrator remembers the gift of a green coat from her father, how she kept it long into its tatters—a coat that reminds the reader of the one shirt that the narrator's mother saved after her father's death, and reminds the reader of the tattered coats that appear much later in the book, on the shoulders of five children whose dangerously secretive father brings them to the donut shop where the poem's narrator works. It is in the way Read repeats images that she shows the complexity of memory—that in a way she's playing a wise trick by organizing the book linearly, for the images often work to show how resistant to time time is, how circular, how clashing.

The mother's future death haunts the poems that often seem caused by the father's death—causing a ghostly parenting of the poems' voice. We see the memory of oneself both through the poet's voice and through the mother seeing the child. . . as though, in speaking memories, the narrator allows mother into memories she didn't exist in before. Much like, perhaps, the experience of death in which the deceased begins to permeate all the living's memories. At times the book reads as an exercise in mourning—an attempt to mourn the mother before the death happens, hiding the mother in memories as a way to prevent the unexpected surprises that a real death will bring. Like the way the narrator remembers her little brother Tom driving his miniature cars at their father's funeral and then stating afterwards his decision about their mother, in that

If she dies too,/we’ll go to Kentucky Fried Chicken/not Wendy’s. 

The Little Mermaid by Edmund Dulac

It is in the third section of Instructions for My Mother's Funeral that readers learn how death in early childhood, which is the emphasis of the first section of Read's book, might affect how the future adult interacts with other children.  The poem is staged at the son's bedside.  In a protective move, the narrator tells her son the short version of The Little Mermaid but, like the little mermaid, in not telling the longer version, the narrator becomes sort of victimized by the happy ending, by choosing it over the sad one.  


In doing so, she seems to sacrifice not just the sadness but herself—perhaps because of the knowledge of pain, of death—in order to protect her son's childhood and his perceptions of how life works. 


But the promise of times where she will have more time to tell the story ensure that the longer will be told, that the protection can last for only so long before he will learn what she knows about the little mermaid's demise:

        Her body is the bright line

of green that keeps washing up in ribbons.

This is the long version. I can hear her

out there in the water, the sea-hum in her throat,

her fingernails scraping the sand

as she tries to hold on with every wave.

The interview begins early, the food has come and though we've decided to delay my questions until we're finished, our discussion inevitably turns to writing because that's why we're here, we're both writers, and most likely because this is our first time ever talking to each other for more than four minutes.

I ask about her writing schedule in the past, how she finds time to write, how she found time to write when she first had her children. The topic has been on my mind as more and more of my female writing friends give birth and seem either not to write or not talk about their writing or write about raising their children, likely as a way to keep in the habit of writing. Their lack of talking about their writing has begun to scare me, and so since I have Read here, I ask.

I was a high-school teacher right out of college. I wasn't writing at all because I was stressed and busy. The schedule is hectic. I was 23, 24, and then in grad school I was 25 and wrote a lot, in large blocks of time. [Read attended Eastern Washington State University in Cheney, WA] After that, I wasn't in a writing scene. I was in a monthly writing group, but I wasn't sending out. I wrote only during the summers.

Then, after graduate school, I worked at Auntie's and had two days off in the middle of the week, and Brad [her husband] was teaching so I wrote on those two days. I had Ben in '99. In 1998, I started teaching at The Falls [Spokane Falls Community College] part-time. I was pregnant and taught in the mornings and did schoolwork or wrote in the afternoons. If I had morning sickness in the afternoons, I'd read, which I consider a part of writing. But I was part-time, so I was working a lot. When Ben was a baby I'd write in the night.

Would you write in the nursery?

In the study, which was on the second floor. I'd have the baby monitor and Brad would be sleeping with the baby, but I wasn't sure if he'd wake up right away. [She giggles but then returns serious; this happens throughout the interview. There is a time for joking, but now we must get to business.] I also wrote during the day. I spent a lot of time thinking about writing. I read while he was sleeping. With a baby, he was awake every two hours and so it's hard to get sleep or calm down, and so I wrote.

When I had Matthew, I didn't pick writing up again until he was five or six. Then, I went to the Port Townsend conference in 2008. That helped a lot. Kim Addonizio was my teacher. I learned a lot. I met Maya there [Maya Jewell Zeller, Spokane poet and Read's writing companion]. I started to think more seriously about sending some work out. I hadn't devoted enough time to writing to feel confident.

When Read returned home from the conference with plans to write, her husband had a serious bicycle accident that led to a long recovery and little writing time.

That was a setback because the kids were still young. But Maya would motivate me by sending me e-mails or asking when we could meet.

The Chewbacca on Hollywood
Boulevard Reminds Me of You
by Laura Read

I entered a chapbook contest to have a goal to have a group of poems done. I did not think that was going to happen. Big publication. I used to write fiction, and it's the series aspect of poetry that I enjoy—that helps me keep going. With fiction, you can set it down and pick it back up, but that's harder with poetry.

In 2010, I went back to Port Townsend. I liked the teacher, Martin Espada. He encouraged me a lot. I spent a lot of time in the computer lab, writing, revising, organizing. But then I didn't like that it was done.

When did you begin writing?

When I was a kid. Probably 7, 8, 9. Just because I loved reading. I wrote lots of stories, but I also wrote poems. My stories weren't very good. My mom would read them, and say, But something has to happen. That's what I have always had trouble with, but I'm really good at description. And images. But I had a really hard time figuring out conflict.

Did your mom read to you?

Oh, yeah. I think maybe more during the day, but maybe at bedtime. My dad died when I was 6. There was a lot of illness in the house before then. My parents were both professors, and there were tons of books around the house. When I was 5, I was reading. I remember reading to my brother a lot. My father was sick probably my whole life, probably from when I was 4. Tom was born when I was 3. 


 My mom worked full-time after my dad died, but I think she still read to us. I know reading was a big important part of our family life. We all had books that we read together and some apart. Tom was a big reader all through childhood. That was a value in my family.

Do you still have some of your father's books?

I have his bible. He was a religious studies teacher. A few other religious texts that were important to him. My mom reads a lot of fiction. She's a sociologist. She was a huge influence. Every week we went to the library and had library bags, and we would fill them. I was on the YACC, the youth advisory committee, who gave advice to the library on what children's books to buy. We'd get review copies of children's books. Then all week we would read them and then on Saturday advise the library. Me and some my nerdy kid friends. My mom goes to the library each each and still calls me with titles that I need to get. She and I share a lot of the same reading tastes. We talk about books a lot.

Was your mother's mother a reader?

Her mother. . . I think both my mom's parents only graduated eighth grade. I shouldn't say she wasn't a reader, she did read romance novels. I remember she would come, and had big fat books in her pocketbook.. She was a reader, yeah. My mom's dad I never knew. I don't know if he was reader. I know that my mom decided very young that she was going to college, and so she read tons of book. She would have summer reading lists for her to do. I think that's always been important to her.

Is your husband a reader?

That's sort of how we met. A friend of his knew my parents and told them that they know someone Laura would like. He's really quiet and reads all the time. He's probably a bigger reader than I was. I was a huge reader as a kid. Some days I wouldn't even get out of my pajamas I was reading so much. Now not as much because I'm really, really busy. We read at night and he's a much faster reader than I am so he just goes through tons of stuff.

When you went to St. Aloysius, did the nuns encourage reading?

Well, there weren't many nuns—mostly laypersons. But absolutely. There was a little library there in the basement. There was a nun in the library. Gosh, I loved her. I would go down to the library. We had to sign our books when we checked them out. I remember some of the books were all me—that I checked them out so many times. The nun would kid me about it. My teacher would let me go down to the basement at other times. The nun also taught me how to bind books. She showed me how to put books together. I loved that about my school. It was a pretty big library for elementary school. I really loved her. I was in that school last year and feeling really sentimental.

How many writing years do these poems span?

In terms of chronological time, some were written about my dad's death shortly afterwards—so 1977ish to present. In terms of writing years, a few I wrote in the 90s. Like “Donut Parade” and “Pearl”, I wrote that in the late '90s, like at the end of graduate school. Maybe 2000. Most of them I've written in the last three years. There may be three or four from a previous manuscript that I submitted to a couple places in 2004. I just went through there and picked some out that I thought would thematically fit; I think the poem “Flight” was in that and also “The Deaf Girls”.

I tell her how much I liked “The Deaf Girls”, the way she describes their mouths. Like many of the poems in the collection, “The Deaf Girls” deals with a narrator who is unsure of what is happening, why the world, as death, acts as it does—why it is antagonistic to her. The deaf girls are compared to their fearsome dogs, unpredictable, frightening, showing up in unexpected places like the swimming pool where they try to drown the poem's narrator —as surprising as the unexpected images that will occur in Read's poetry.  A familiar image from earlier in the poem returns but changed, and the inherent shock of expecting what doesn't occur. The child who nearly drowns in one poem becomes the mother who, later, will not tell of the little mermaid's drowning.

Map Crazy, a quilt by Mrs. A. E. Reasoner in 1885

Much of the book is full of landmarks outside the traditional way of considering them. For example, the death of the narrator's father is returned to throughout the book, the death of the narrator's grandmother reveals that her home of New York City was her and that it is now changed, the scene of a woman's rape becomes a landmark in the child's identity landscape, and several pivotal moments in the narrator's way of thinking about her identity occur at famous landmarks like Paris, New Orleans, and the lesser known (or written about) landscapes of Wyoming, Omaha.  When you sit down to write, does landscape play into your writing early on?

That's a good question. I actually don't think it was intentional. But in the second collection I'm doing, it's called The Northwest Room, that's intentional. I feel like our emotional landscape is imprinted on the physical landscape. You know how when people can't read clearly, they'll put a colored slide over the material so they can read better? It's like I look through the slide, and the slide is the emotional landscape over the physical one. Since I've lived in Spokane, I often think of its places as though they're all little containers for my life too.

And then, I feel like I didn't necessarily think [as I sat down to write] “I'll just visit the places in my memory”, but I think that's an effect on the book. I remember Maya saying that the whole middle section of the book goes out and comes back. I thought about it chronologically when I was organizing, but maybe that's the time in our lives [the middle section focuses on early and late adolescence] where we do go out more and then come back. I guess the landscape in both collections is a reflection of self. I must have a romantic sensibility. [She laughs.] That's what I always tell my classes about Romanticism.

Attic nostalgia

The experience of reading the book is like stumbling into a stranger's attic and going through the trunks and boxes, and as you pull each object out of the trunk, its colors return to it vividly—that she is returning the colors to the past. It's not just Nostalgia for nostalgia's sake but purposeful.

That's a nice description. I decided with The Northwest Room to be more conscious of that, as I don't think people write about Spokane much or enough. A lot of people thing it's boring, like my students but most of them grew up here and that's typically how a person thinks of the place where they grew up.

I think it would be good to write deliberately about this landscape, but it still has a lot of personal stuff in it too, but I don't know if that's going to be a book—she begins to laugh—right now it's just a bunch of poems. Who knows? She laughs harder—as though no prize has been won, no poems have been published, that she's back at square one and it can all crumble down.

That's one thing I wanted to ask about. You tend to laugh a lot and tell jokes and you're really funny. But the poems in the book resist humor, your creativity comes out in the surprising movements from image to meaning. Why do you not write funny poems?

The poem I'm writing about Neil Diamond is a little bit funny. [Her book with quoting lyrics from a Diamond song, and the path to getting copyright for the quote was quite arduous and funny.]  I like to be funny. And so, for some reason, when I'm writing poetry I get really serious. I guess I just don't know how to do it exactly. I feel like my strength is poetry is when I'm serious. But I read funny poems, too. So I'm trying that. When I write a funny poem, or one that has humor in it, I still feel like does this belong here?

Like Tony Hoagland is very funny. Some of his poems are funny and serious, but the poets I more admire are serious. The people I've worked with tend to be writers of serious tones, Jane Hirshfield, for example, is very meditative. I'm trying to think who else I like, Eavan Boland.

It may be that I think about the genre that way. I've also thought about that before. Why can't I integrate that part onto the page? I'll let you know know the Neil Diamond poem goes.

The Dead Mother by Edward Munch

In many ways, the book seems more directed by the death of the narrator's father rather than the imagined death of the mother For example, it's his death that many of the poems revolve around—the one in which the narrator witnesses her brother's experience at the funeral, the one about the green coat the narrator's father gave her, the one about the people who buy the family's house after his death, etc.; this creates an interesting invisible dialogue around the poems. What led to your decision of titling the book as you did?

I actually thought about this. I thought I should also dedicate this to my father. I feel like death has been a part of everything for me my whole life. So my dad's death is over, but my mother's death is coming. I feel like my father's death informs the way I see my world and because my mother is always telling me about her death, well, then my whole relationship with her is how it can happen—so I guess that's how I was thinking: How does that death point forward to hers? I think that's the event that I've been dreading.

The book reads as confessional poetry, despite the dedication to your mother that reassures the audience that the title is a sort of fiction in that your mother's alive and well. Again and again the reader is asked to see the experiences in the poems as having happened—as though one is reading private diaries. Would you consider yourself a confessional poet?

I always have trouble with that line; it's hard to admit that I'm not talking about something that's true. I know that you're supposed to, to have the speaker distant from the poet. But I'm like, that really is me. Oh yeah. I remember Sharon Olds said that for 20 years she pretended that everything wasn't true, then her parents died, and she said everything is true. It's not like everything is true, because I rearrange and invent, but there's a lot of absolutely true things [in my book].

What We Carry by Dorianne Laux,
published by BOA Editions (1994)

I have read a lot of Sylvia Plath, but much more recent confessional poets have been an influence . . .Dorianne Laux has been a much larger influence. What We Carry. I got the book when someone suggested it to me in graduate school, I still have this book. I had a pink highlighter, and I thought, As I read, I'll highlight what I think I can do. By the end, the book was basically pink. [She laughs.] This is so the poetry I can write, I thought. Though not as good, of course.  But I was inspired by its narrative, the way it has images used in interesting ways that echo. So I thought, I could try to imitate her a little bit because I really admired what I was reading.

I read the book, reread it. Figured out what kinds of content I would like to write about. I had already written a novel in graduate school. I pulled out little moments that I liked from it and turned them into poems. I would say she's a confessional poet, I don't know if she'd say that. She's the largest influence. And then Sharon Olds. I admire her work.

Do you ever plan on returning to fiction?

I actually keep thinking I should try it again. I feel like it would be a good thing to do as a creative writing teacher, too. But every time I start writing fiction, I start writing poetry. Stop and then I try to pull myself back.

I have written non-fiction. I wrote an essay about motherhood that was published in a book a few years ago, and I've written three or four essays a few years ago. I like non-fiction while I'm doing it, but then I lose interest. To me, it almost feels embarrassing. With the essay, it's me, it's non-fiction. It feels just a little bit too intimate to me. With the poem, I'm slipping between fiction and non-fiction and it's like we were talking about with the poem's personal, so I feel a little more protected. So I guess that's part of the reason I steered away from it.

Instructions for My Mother's Funeral is split into three thematic sections, the first primarily centering on the narrator's childhood; the second on her adolescence and becoming a sensual being; and the third on marriage—becoming married and on being a mother. Organizing stories or poems into a book is one of the more difficult things writers seem to struggle with. Your book is organized so well. How did you go about deciding the placement of the poems?

This one was easier than the the book I'm working on because this is basically in chronological order. The one I'm working on I went through the poems and tried to find the poem that all the other poems could revolve around. Organization is important to me because it helps me think about the work as a project.

Many of the poems deal with issues of female identity in terms of their victimization by faceless men such as the girl on the swim-team who has developed early and gets unwanted attention from the coach, or the poem in which the child narrator dwells on the story behind a graffiti sign that says “A Woman Was Raped Here” which is an interesting poem in which schoolchildren are trying, amongst themselves, to piece together how it happened as though that will answer what it means that it happened.

Do you envision your audience as primarily female and feminist or this book as a feminist text, or how exactly do you think of your audience?

Okay, I hadn't thought about that. I would be pleased to have it called a feminist text. My mother is the feminist studies professor at Gonzaga. She has been a huge influence on me. I remember all these books on the coffee table with the word woman in them, and I wondered what that was all about. But yes, there are female issues, like female identity, motherhood, sexuality in the book, and primarily female experiences in the book—and a few unwanted ones that happened to me, to my friends. Like the woman-who-was-raped here poem. That sign was there, and it had a huge impact on me. I thought about it a lot. But it makes sense that the book would contain feminist undertones because I read many feminist writers, have taught courses on it. I don't know if it's feminist, but I would be pleased if it were called that. Though I wasn't thinking of that audience.

Who were you thinking about in terms of audience?

I didn't really think it would get published. I think more women would be drawn to it. There's also quite a lot in it about loss, and that's universal. I'm just hoping some people read it. I don't know who's going to read it, though. Who knows?

The following poems by Laura Read are available to read online in their original journal publications.

• “Salt of the Earth” in Pank Magazine
• “ThisTime We'll Go to Kentucky Fried Chicken” in Rattle 
• “December” in Booth (this link will open directly into a pdf)

Stay posted to What She Might Think for publication and purchasing information for Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read.