Laboring Together
Sarah Vap & Charles Jensen: The intimacy involved
in successful collaboration seems readily apparent in [the
poem] “On Collaboration: Downward Dog, Happy Baby, Cobra”
in your latest collection, Tender Hooks. In
that poem, you consider the ground state of collaboration,
tying in yoga teachings—and the experience of connecting
on many levels to a yoga instructor—to the practice
of writing. Could you expand on the idea of “laboring
together,” as you mention in the poem? How do
all of the various labors (childbirth, yoga, cooking, mourning,
speech, aging) connect the process and experience of writing?
Is it synchronicity or system?
Beth Ann Fennelly: “On Collaboration:
Downward Dog, Happy Baby, Cobra,” is actually
half of a longer poem—I wrote the first half and my
friend Ann Fisher-Wirth wrote the second half, and we published
them together in a journal, though just my part is included
in Tender Hooks. It was a matter of synchronicity,
not system, that brought that collaboration together—I
had just moved to Oxford, MS, where we live now, and Claire
was three months old. Ann was getting ready to move
away for a year. I’d never practiced yoga before—I
hadn’t really understood it. It had seemed too
new-agey for me and not enough of a workout; I’m into
sweating, not glowing, and I have no idea where my inner chakra
are. But my new friend Ann encouraged me to try, and
I became addicted. We started doing yoga every morning at
dawn at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s estate, which was just
down the street from my house. At the same time I was
getting to know Ann and finding these parallels in our lives.
She’s older than I am, has kids about my age.
My life with Claire seemed to parallel her life with her aging
Mom who was nearing death and had stopped speaking—we
were both completely involved in the minutia of caring for
these beings who couldn’t speak to us, for example.
And Ann was writing about a child she’d miscarried thirty-seven
years prior, and I was for the first time beginning to be
able to talk about the miscarriage I’d had before Claire.
Ann gave me courage, and helped me understand that I should
stop waiting to “get over” my miscarriage—that
I would never get over it and didn’t want to.
What I really needed to do was mourn that baby’s death.
All during that blistering summer the stretching and expanding
of physical limitations through yoga seemed mirrored by a
stretching and expanding of mental limitations.
Our poems kept displaying these consanguinities, we were throwing
sparks and catching the other on fire, and it was both intoxicating
and rare—two women at different stages of their lives,
both having an intensely creative burst that seemed somehow
tied to the other’s.
[From "Telling the Gospel
Truth: An Interview with Beth Ann Fennelly"
in The Southeast Review, Volume 24.1-2.
Click to order.]
