I met Rebecca years ago because we both teach writing at a community college in Albuquerque. In the fall, I actually took her online poetry class and loved it (and if you know me, you know I’ll write almost anything but poetry, but this class gave me a new appreciation for all that goes into writing a poem). She’s a great writer and community builder, and we know you’re going to love her words when we feature her next month. Please enjoy our interview with her!
Plume: When did you know you were a writer?
Rebecca Aronson: I’m not sure when I began to think of myself as a writer, but I have always been interested in writing. I remember (or maybe I have been told about it. Memory is funny that way.) pretending to write in notebooks before I really could write, and, once I did learn to write I always liked writing poems and stories. When I was about 15 I took my first poetry workshops at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. I took several classes there over the years, and I always loved them. However, I don’t think I wrote very much in between taking those classes. I think I only took one poetry workshop as an undergraduate, and it took me about five years after getting my BA to decide to try to study poetry more actively. While in graduate school at UNM I got involved with the nascent slam scene in Albuquerque, and some of my first experiences reading my poems to an audience were at the old Dingo and 66 bars. The bar-poetry scene then was active and interesting and warm (it might still be, but I haven’t been in years); I’m by no stretch of imagination a slam poet, but I did learn valuable lessons about performing poetry from those early experiences. Those early slam-scene years were probably when I first started to think of myself as a writer.
P: Where do you get your ideas?
RA: Looking out my window, reading the news, family stories, living, words I like the sounds of, art work, daydreaming. I often start with a sort of ear bug of a phrase I like the sound of and then move by association from there. I’ve learned to trust that imagery and sound will do a better job of helping me work out an idea than setting out to think about that idea or situation directly. My brain does better when it doesn’t know where a thought is heading.
RA: Where do you write?
RA: Mostly at my dining room table or kitchen table. Sometimes in my office/cubicle at work. Almost never in coffee shops, though I love the idea of doing that. I’m too easily distracted by other people’s conversations, interesting hats and shoes, and background music. But in the past couple of years, because I had to travel a fair amount, I also wrote in airports, hospital rooms, hotel rooms, and other people’s homes.
P: Do you have any writing rituals?
RA: Not really. I usually have tea or water nearby, and I try to start putting words on paper even if my mind is a complete blank. Reading a little bit of poetry is always a good way to prepare myself for writing. I like the idea of having rituals, but in truth my days are usually packed with obligations, and so my ritual is to make myself write when I have ten or twenty minutes to myself.
P: How supportive is your local community for writers?
RA: Very. For a while I had a regular writing group that turned into a regular writing partner as people moved away, and then for a while it was just me and I felt very isolated and without writing peers in Albuquerque, but once I started actively to look again for other writers to work with, I have found a welcoming and supportive community. And I am lucky also to come into contact with many writers both through running my college’s visiting writers series and my own local series, Bad Mouth.
P: What are some of your self-care practices?
I don’t have a lot of what I think people mean by self-care practices. I try to exercise regularly, which helps ease anxiety and does make me feel better. During the current stay-at-home I am taking daily walks, either alone, listening to podcasts, or with my family. I’m bad at sleeping these days, but I do try to let myself sleep in a little when I can. I let myself watch stupid TV to calm my anxious brain. I eat well. Writing is a self-care practice for me because when I actually do write it always makes me feel more like myself.
P: What is your favorite book about writing?
RA: I have always liked Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, and I use parts of that in my classes regularly. Robert Hass’s books about poetry are all wonderful (What Light Can Do, Twentieth Century Pleasures, A Little Book of Form). Right now I’m very slowly reading Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense (essays on reading contemporary poetry).
P: Are you able to write during this strange, scary moment we’re living in? If so, what are you working on?
RA: Yes? No? Every April for the past few years I have participated in an online 30/30 project; that is committing, along with a group of other writers, to writing one poem draft every day for the month of April (National Poetry month). April is also the final month of the Spring semester, and usually a really busy time for me, so the drafts I write during this time are generally pretty terrible, but I do get a lot of material to work on over the summer from the project. I am trying it again currently, and finding that I am really distracted. Some days I just do not have it in me to write a poem. Some of what I have posted to the 30/30 group is more like journal entries, rants, or floaty disconnected thoughts, and I have probably missed almost half the days, but I’m still trying. As for what my new project is, I hope that whatever writing I do now might eventually form the basis for a fourth book, but it is at this point too new and amorphous to know what that might look like.
P: What writers help you find solace in difficult times (either ones you know personally, ones you read, or both)?
RA: I’m having some trouble reading right now, but I am finding that I can focus on Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. It is a series of very short essays on delight, and it is helping me to feel a bit saner during this tough time. In general right now I am feeling drawn towards poems that seem directly relevant to living in difficult times (such as “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski as one example) and poems of hopefulness or gratitude, such as “Praise House: The New Economy” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Go-to poets for me include Natalie Diaz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mary Oliver, Robert Hass, Sylvia Plath, Jessica Jacobs, Nickole Brown, and friends such as Erin Adair Hodges, James Arthur (the poet, not the popstar), Sonia Greenfield, and so many others.
Rebecca Aronson is the author of ANCHOR, forthcoming from Orison Books in 2021, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and finalist for the 2017 Arizona/New Mexico book awards and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She teaches writing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she lives with her husband, son, and a wild beast-cat.
Rebecca is Plume’s featured writer for May. We’re now in the process of transitioning our Plume editions online (For the foreseeable future? Forever? Like everyone else, we’re still figuring all of that out. Stay tuned!). Our exciting May edition is going to be FREE to everyone on our email list, so if you haven’t signed up you can do so here. And as always, you can find us on social media: Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook.