Words Come to Me Furiously at Inconvenient Times:
An Interview with Featured Poet Danèlle Lejeune, by Jonah Meyer, Poetry Editor
“I hope to do book readings at observatories and in conversation with astronomers. I want to take it and read it from beginning to end at the rim of the Grand Canyon, under the wide-open night sky.”
Thank you, Danèlle, for taking some time to chat with me about your poetry and other creative endeavors.
First, why do you write poetry?
I can’t not. I started at age eight and just felt pulled in. I have estranged myself from it at times, but the empty and heartbreak haunts me, and I end up back at it. I always end up finding poems in the concepts I read about, in advertisement mis-reads (yay dyslexia), and visual experiences that pictures cannot capture.
I really love the portfolio of your poems we have featured in Mud Season Review for our 75th issue. Can you tell me a little about these “space poems,” or “science poems,” as I’ll call them? What was the genesis for their inspiration? Please share some background about their composition. Do you often compose science poems?
Yes, I love the language of math, science, and physics. The definitions of terms are often inherently poetic. But also, they parallel concepts like soul mates, mythology, and art — so the crossing is easy. What is hard is this — I sometimes understand the concepts sideways or wrong, so I get them checked by experts before sending them out.
Of the five poems we have published here, what are some sections—or lines—which stand out as personal favorites for you? Can you share a little “inside information” about them?
“Horizontal and previously unknown
faults rise to the occasion and tenor
become weapons of economic destruction
everything.”
From “Couples’ Therapy.” This struck me as I was reading about fracking and also attending couples’ therapy. The parallel of the language, specifically “faults.” The poem was born and grew around this idea.
“Spooky Action at a Distance” begged to be a love poem, the idea of twin matter that reacts to harm no matter how much distance you put between them. Twin flame, soulmates, twin babies — this mythology existed, and we knew instinctively of the effect before we studied matter in such delicate and microscopic ways.
Also, I was recently divorced, and the loneliness was breaking me. I could only pray that a soulmate existed somewhere. Often, I would sit on my porch, rocking in an old chair, and watch the stars. Physics textbooks became a comfort, trying to grasp the complex ideas beyond me in the same way I was struggling to know the unknowable of estrangement and heartbreak.
Tell me about your general process or routine for poetry composition—where, when, initial ideas and inspiration, revision process, and the like.
This one is a mixed-bag. Each poem is different. One of my poems I revised over seventy-five times. I started it intentionally and overworked it, turning back to an earlier version to start again. The one Healing Muse is about to publish exists as I wrote it on the back of a medical appointment printout at 4 a.m. Sometimes I sit down to write and sometimes words come to me furiously at inconvenient times.
Can you tell me a little about your experience as a livestock farmer in southern Iowa? How did that lead to your move to Georgia, where you’ve resumed writing poetry and creating other art?
I had an Animal Welfare Approved operation on forty acres, diversified with pigs, cattle, sheep, bees, chickens, etc. More than a hobby farm, less than a commercial operation. Then divorce happened, so terrible the word acrimonious was invented for us. I got the children, and he took and closed the farm, spent our retirement, and all of our assets wiped. He left the kids and me homeless, so I decided to take a big risk, and I moved to where it is warm first, and to find work, second.
I bought an 1875 foreclosed-on house on four acres, restored it and me. It was a family project, and my kids were all in. I sold it as a bed and breakfast, and I regret that move sometimes. That house was more than a house.
Please tell me about the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat. When and how did you first get involved? Please tell us about your current work as assistant director with the retreat.
This is a longer story — I pretended to be a writer to have access to the island so I could better study Ossabaw pigs (the same I raised in Iowa and also the same pigs that inspired Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake). The island was private and only allowed artists and DNR employees with very specific times and programs. I had a “mommy blog” (which is basically what Substack is but rebranded so it’s acceptable for professionals and men to use the form), but I couldn’t call myself a writer.
I went and it was the first time away from my children except to have more of them. Ten years of intense 24/7 motherhood, and this was my first break. I rode a Megabus cross-country because my (now ex) husband had cut off my credit card before I bought plane tickets. It was a 72-hour hero’s journey to get to Georgia from Iowa. Once there, it was small — just five writers and four faculty. Intense, intimate, and isolated on a wilderness island on the East coast. I brought poetry from my high school years to prop up the sham, but the generative workshop raised my poet voice from the dead.
I studied wild pigs and furiously wrote new work. It changed my life. I returned as an intern with ideas the next year. This retreat is for non-academics and people who feel out-of-place in that world, but also for people who want to gain a different focus. It’s not competitive and we have everyone from a grandma who is self-publishing their memoir to an NYT bestseller who needs a break from reality, to a big-tech exec who writes sci-fi, to a college student just discovering poetry and identity — all walks, all levels, all welcome. We dislodge imposter syndrome and ask writers to leave it with their shoes on the porch.
The island is magic, out of time, and the silence of the wilderness is healing. There’s no spa, the bunk beds are military grade, and there are no private rooms. Alligators the size of small dragons and mosquitos that rival the wild pigs in size and appetite. Spanish moss and vintage cars and pirate treasure. Cohorts become support systems and friends for life. Now we have full-tuition scholarships (which are competitive, but blind) so more people can access the experience. I want the magic that the island gave me to be passed on to others, over and over.
Who are some of your top favorite authors and poets? What it is about their work which speaks to you?
I cut my teeth on Edna St. Vincent Millay at age 11 and then came of age on Allen Ginsburg and the Beats, and then the MTV poets like Maggie Estep and Dennis Leary. I read nothing else for my teen years. Post-motherhood I started to read the Poets.org poem-of-the-day and Garrison Keillor, daily. From there I favored farm poems, poems with stories and simple language. From that point I began to study form – sonnets, mostly. A. E. Stallings and her mastery of form is something I aspire to, but I also love what Joan Kwan Glass and Jennifer Franklin are doing with their work right now, speaking to grief and breaking silences.
What are you currently reading?
Tony Hillerman mysteries. It’s more than a good mystery, it is also packed with anthropology and geology, and it has me rabbit-hole traveling into Native American mythology and taboos. As for poetry, I have Joan Kwon Glass, A. E. Stallings, Jennifer Givhan, and Steven Dunn (the Potted Meat one) in my carpool lane bag right now.
What are you currently writing?
I am working on a collection of poems based on the myth of Icarus, but told from his mother’s perspective. Naucrate was a slave gifted to Daedalus to bear a child (Icarus), so to think about being left behind and then watching the death of your child from the prison window …? To be without name in most of the accounts, without a say in her own pain …?
But I set it both today and then, in Greece and here — death as attempted suicide, drug addiction, and depression. Watching her child transform under abuse at the hands of another, then drugs and alcohol, then mental illness — and unable to do anything but watch and have her own voice erased over and over again. It’s heavy but full of love, too.
I’d love to hear some interesting tidbits about you and your life – apart from creative writing.
I joke with my students that I have a classic ADHD resume — but really, I have followed and leaned into my passions, even as they change or shift. Just all in, every time. Sometimes I fail or pivot or lose interest, sometimes my ethics get in the way, and I have to choose a different path.
So: performance poet, architectural studies, photography, museum management, professor, farmer, always a mom, farmers market vendor, and now writer. At 37 I decided to go to Prague on my own instead of re-doing a bathroom. I’m approaching Empty Nest era (aka I want to downsize, flee suburbia, and buy a houseboat) and while I thought I would welcome it, I actually enjoy my children most of the time and it is breaking me in ways I didn’t see coming.
I have weird phobias — like John Travolta’s face and bugs in oven mitts — and not-so-weird ones, like other people’s spit touching my food.
What is it you aim to accomplish with your writing?
To not feel so alone in this world and hold for a moment pain, but transform it to sublime. Or, to just tell a good story and connect for a moment.
Poetry can build a wall or break down a prison. It is a cherished moment, a privilege to touch another person with words and move that emotional part of their being.
What advice would you give to others—perhaps new and emerging poets—seeking to publish their work?
Let someone else (a poet you admire) read your work, trust them 80%, trust your own self and voice 100%. You don’t have to and also shouldn’t take every suggestion. Usually, if you have the right mentor, they will help you sharpen and refine your own voice and skill. Also, Duotrope.com.
You’re also a professor at University of South Carolina (Bluffton campus), correct? What type of courses do you teach?
I teach Eng 102 and at my current part-time post, they let me teach it as a poetry seminar. Using close readings of short form to grasp and understand research methods. I use the poem-of-the-day and a collection of only living poets. Right now my students are reaching out to these poets for interviews and when they get one to respond, it feels like they are meeting celebrities. Poets love to talk about their own work!
I understand you’re additionally a fine art and architectural photographer. Please share with us some insight into that passion and your experiences with photography.
I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer, but my first job out of college was as an intern for the State of Iowa Historic Preservation Department, taking site inventories and documenting historic buildings all over the state. That specialized training and the purchase of an historic home led me to pursue a graduate degree in Architecture.
I admire the fine art of the working builder class. The ordinary mason and carpenter created our built living environment, and the hand-turned and carved elements of historic sites are so impressive that I tear up sometimes. I’ve restored five homes, but going back to photography keeps me in the beauty.
How might you compare and contrast the art and craft of poetry with that of photography? How do you view your own relationship to both art forms? Does one tend to influence the other in any particular way?
They are both short forms. A frozen moment in a frame. Whereas a movie is more like a novel. Poetry and photography both have context outside the frame that we can guess at but never know for certain. Both play with blank space and light. What is there — and what isn’t.
Where might our readership find more of your creative work?
I have a gallery on FineArtsAmerica, but my website is also growing. I do custom work sometimes, too. My photography has been on six Southern Poetry Review covers. It pops up here and there. I have a Substack that is as random as I am, and I publish playlists on Fridays, inspired by random conversations from the previous week. I even have a playlist for when I thought Helene would be gentle, more of a prayer to rain.
Any exciting projects on the horizon? Anything else you’d like to share?
Yes, the poems featured here in MSR will be part of a book coming out in June of 2025! I hope to do book readings at observatories and in conversation with astronomers. I want to take it and read it from beginning to end at the rim of the Grand Canyon, under the wide-open night sky.
I also have a full length I am finishing that is a story arch about the range of domestic violence, fictionalized but based on real events in rural Iowa, told as a murder mystery, poem by poem. I hope to capture the subtle pain, the diversity of harm, the impact of a community and silence. So many DV stories are set in urban settings, and we picture wife-beater drunks in trailer parks, but the reality is professors, middle class, working class, farmers, neglect by absence, by doing nothing, by setting up situations with livestock, medical care withholding, economic restriction, and also just distance.
You can’t flee on bare foot to a neighbor’s house to call for help when it’s five miles, or the middle of winter. A broken-down car is a locked prison door. Shelters and help are an impossible distance to reach. These poems interrupted my science writing, so eventually I gave in and gave them room to speak.
