Interviewed by Trevor Newberry
Shelly Puhak lives in Baltimore and is currently Writer-in-Residence at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She earned her MFA from the University of New Orleans and her MA in Literature from the University of Delaware. She was a 2007 Maryland State Arts Council grant recipient. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, New South, Third Coast, and other journals. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre and Road & Travel. Her first book, Stalin in Aruba, was recently published.
Q: In your recent book of poetry, Stalin in Aruba, your work negotiates and combines the complexity of the distance between the personal realm and the historical realm. In one of my favorite poems, “Purging the Aunties,” for example, you write of Stalin’s alleged dislike for women visitors in a wonderfully personal style. What inspired you to write these types of poems?
A: The post 9-11 landscape: wire-taps, terror alerts, and the elimination of any gray in our political discussions.
I was reading classic and contemporary dramatic monologues and working in that form. I’d written a short series based on scraps gathered from local nineteenth-century cemeteries: the overlooked lives of the parish priest, the schoolmistress, the young wife dying in childbirth. It seemed natural to experiment next with the perspective of those intimate with history’s monsters.
I’m interested in the distance we create between ourselves and those involved in large-scale evil: we reassure ourselves other people, people not at all like us enabled the Holocaust, the Red Terror, the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. As if these people did not also dote on their dogs and sometimes drink too much and say something awkward to their mothers-in-law. What might we learn about ourselves if we eliminate that distance, reintroduce the gray?
Q: Stalin—as the title implies—comes up quite a bit in this work. Why Stalin?
A: There’s a bit of a personal connection. My father immigrated from Czechoslavakia with his family. When I was a child, photographs of Stalin in my history books became my own internal shorthand to explain his family’s flight.
Also, Stalin had a weird and complicated relationship with literature. As a young man, Stalin was a published and anthologized poet; he even secured a major editor and prince as his patron. As a dictator, he respected and feared poets and writers. He often protected writers, preferring to have them exiled rather than exterminated. When Stalin was deciding the fate of the poet Osip Mandalstam, he called Boris Pasternak first, asking if it was true Mandalstam was a genius. Pasternak said he was; Mandalstam was exiled.
And it was a matter of opportunity. Stalin had an extensive propaganda department full of photographers, chemists, morticians, graphic artists, and painters. He left behind more to study than most regimes—mock-ups of propaganda posters, doctored family albums, and multiple drafts of confessions.
Q: You’ve clearly done your research for these poems. Have you always had a passion for history?
A: Yes. I had a set of paperback biographies in grade school—I remember reading about Amelia Earhart, Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Elizabeth Blackwell by nightlight, when I was supposed to be asleep.
Q: Did your fascination with history precede your love of poetry?
A: Yes. I suppose I liked history well before I understood what a poem was.
Q: For our aspiring first-book poets out there: This is a conceptual book on a large scale. Did the organizing principle for the book precede the poems, or did you, at some point, find yourself with several poems that worked together thematically?
A: “Purging the Aunties,” which you mention earlier, and “Nadya to Stalin, 1925” were the first “Stalin” poems I wrote and workshopped. I enjoyed them so much, had so many scraps left from my edits, that I kept going, spinning off to other un-persons.
I figured these poems might become a single section in the book I was working on. Then I started thinking of these poems as anchors for all of the sections in the book. And, by the end, I had written so many of the Stalin poems that they were no longer anchors and had become the entire boat.
Q: Did you find that the poems came easily? Or did you really have to wring the concept for ideas?
A: I actually had to force myself to stop. There are so many people’s stories that I’d still like to tell.
Q: Now that you’ve completed a wonderfully crafted concept book, would you ever attempt one again?
A: Sure.
Q: As writers—purveyors of language—we tend to value the power of the expletive. What is your favorite curse word?
A: Fuck. As in, fuck, I’ve misplaced my three-carat diamond ring, or fuck you! use a blinker, why dont-cha?
Q: I know this sounds harsh, but who is a writer whose work you’d prefer to bury, never to be seen again?
A: It’s a toss-up between John Grisham and whoever authored the Twilight series.
Q: On the opposite pole: Who is a writer whose work you admire?
A: British novelist David Mitchell.
Q: And finally: Are you working on anything at the moment? Anything we should know about?
A: Getting settled into a new home. Renovating a bathroom. Working on a new collection, tentatively titled The Consolation of Fairy Tales. Tinkering around with some essays.
