Getting Back to the Page: An Interview With Julie Marie Wade

JULIE MARIE WADE is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014), Small Fires: Essays (Sarbande Books, 2011), Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), When I Was Straight (A Midsummer-Night’s Press, 2014), Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer-Night’s Press, 2018), Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (Mad Creek Books, 2020), and Skirted (Word Works, 2021). Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest project is Fugue:An Aural History, out now from Diagram/New Michigan Press.

JOHN HODGEN is the writer-inresidence at Assumption University in Worcester, Mass. He won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (U of Pittsburgh P, 2005). His fifth book, The Lord of Everywhere, is out from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for Poetry, the Bluestem Award, the Balcones Prize, the Foley Prize, the Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in Poetry. His poem “Certain Things” was included in Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2017.

Joh n Hodgen : Such a joy to read and re-read the poems in your chapbook Out Here from the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of New Letters. This interview grew out of a kind of editor’s delight in seeing how each poem in the chapbook has its own integrity and impact, and in many ways how each poem has its own structure as well. The poems seem like sculptures, each displaying an individual and unique command and style of its own, and yet each revealing a mastery of composition that, collectively, makes the chapbook even more of an achievement. Such genuine energy, uncompromising honesty and fierce delight in virtually every word. In “Blue,” for example, the single-spaced twopage poem presents as an organic block structure built with a series of seemingly ever intensifying

anaphoric, unpunctuated statements all beginning with the word “Because.” The poem could easily be separated into ten poems or more that anyone would be proud to have written, but presented as it is, the poem seems to blossom into a passionate, moving examination of love that almost demands to be read aloud and that strengthens and rewards re-reading with its spectacular accomplishment.

Reading it I thought of Dianne Seuss’s remarkable 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets from last year that were distinctive for so many reasons but partly because of their similar contained structure.

I also thought of another poem, “May to December” by Megan Fernandes in The New Yorker last year that caused a stir with that same strategy. I found myself

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thinking that you had found those organic creations, been similarly intrigued by them, and then mastered them. Then I noticed that your “Blue” was originally published in Versal in 2007—you perhaps invented that form. Could you give us the background on the making of “Blue”? It’s fascinating thinking of all the decisions you made building such a preciselyshaped, two-page block-shaped poem consisting entirely of anaphora statements all beginning with the word “Because.”

J u lie Marie Wa de: Well, first, thank you! I devoured Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets over the winter holidays in 2022 but would never have thought to connect “Blue” with them! That is simply the highest praise.

I actually wrote “Blue” as one of seven poems in a sequence that was never published as a sequence. This was back in the fall of 2002, and my partner Angie and I had only been together since the summer. As we began our second year in the Master of Arts in English program at Western

Washington University, we both enrolled in Bruce Beasley’s experimental poetry workshop.

Bruce was (and is!) a brilliant poet and a brilliant teacher, one of my first and certainly among my greatest role models for practicing what you teach and teaching what you practice.

I remember one day walking out of poetry workshop feeling so inspired—the way that Bruce always made me feel so inspired.

We had been reading poems

by Harryette Mullen and Rae Armantrout, and I suddenly knew that I wanted—really needed—to write a series of poems called “ROY G BIV Is Dead.” Back in our little apartment on North Garden Street (oh, how I miss that place, with its stunning view of Bellingham Bay!), I started writing in a kind of frenzy. I couldn’t explain exactly what I was doing, but I knew there would be one poem for each of the seven colors in that acronym.

Newly out, newly discovering the complexities of being out and having to keep coming out to people who didn’t know,

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

the sequence gave me a way to desire or orientation, and certainly meditate on identity. I knew I not love. But all those “Becauses,” wanted each poem to inhabit the by accretion I thought, might show page differently, so “Red” wouldn’t something of the intersecting and look or sound like “Orange” layering of identity, the prismatic or “Yellow” or “Green” and so nature of desire and orientation forth. Of that sequence, the only that had crystallized in my love for Ang ie—who prose poem is “Because” emerged simply does have such “Blue.” By the from the fact that people astonishing time I arrived seemed to keep wanting me blue eyes. at that color, to explain why . . .

My friend, I was ready the writer to get more personal about love—which yes, Karen Salyer McElmurray, has happened to be same-sex love, but been teaching that poem for years, more than that, I wanted the poem which is such a gift to me—the fact to be a paean to Angie, including that she teaches “Blue” at all and the fact that she shared that fact her keen blue eyes.

That anaphoric refrain of with me! One year she told me “Because” emerged simply from about a student in her class who the fact that people seemed to had a line from “Blue” tattooed on keep wanting me to explain why his arm, and I have always carried I was gay, why I loved a woman, that knowledge with me as the especially people who had known truest sign of a poem’s potential me when I dated men before. reach. It could have been just a Desire is so complex, of course, poem for Angie—and it is a poem as is orientation, as is love—what’s for Angie, first and foremost— more complex than love?—so but I love that my love poem “Because” is a rather deceptive also reached beyond our love refrain. I don’t have a singular story to resonate with someone answer for anything, certainly not else, someone I have never met

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AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

and likely never will, to leave a permanent and deliberate mark on that person’s skin.

JH : The next question is maybe the oldest one for all writers: When did you first know that you wanted to write? And when did you know you had achieved your goal, made true your own belief, definitively, that you had become a poētē, as the Greek have the word, “a maker,” that you could make this magic, that you had found your self, that this was your true vocation?

JMW: I’ve always known I wanted to write, that I was a writer. It has always been the truest thing about me, a truth that precedes the others, but it’s also something I rediscover each time I come to the page—that joy of making! It’s perpetual and self-perpetuating!

The more I write, the more I love writing!

My mother was a reading specialist, and she taught me to read at a very young age. I had a firm sense of the alphabet and was sounding out words and reading simple books by the time I started

three-year-old preschool. And as soon as I knew about books, as soon as I was conscious of my parents reading to me and of my mother teaching me to read, I wanted to write. I would sit up in my little bed at night and turn on the light and look at my books and feel hungry to make books of my own. I can even remember thinking about the people who wrote the books I read and wondering if they felt so happy, ecstatic really, to have written books that others could read.

I made my first book when I was four or five—The Bunnies in the Strawberry Patch. Nothing too profound, I’m sure, but that feeling of making it—the words, the pictures, folding the pages together at the kitchen table— has been with me forever. It’s the same feeling I have now, nearly 40 years in the future, composing in a notebook or on a computer.

The medium doesn’t matter, the setting doesn’t matter, only that tidal pull toward a tactile or digital page. I’m always trying to get back to that page, often dreaming about it when I’m not sitting in front of

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it, and certainly conjuring it in my mind when I teach and read what my students have written.

Strangely, I called myself a “poet” as a child, even as I persistently wrote prose—mostly narrative fiction—well into high school. I just felt like a poet. To me, it wasn’t about particular techniques or the use of lineation that made someone a poet. It was a disposition toward the world, a certain kind of attention, and a love of the musicality of language.

Before I knew the word prosody, I was obsessing over the sentences in my mystery novels (the Krystal Jordan Mystery Series, which I began in second grade!) and a host of other short stories, novellas, and novels, always reading out loud and trying to refine my sentences to make them sing.

In high school, when I started reading Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost in AP American Literature, I began to want to write actual poems, which I see now were emulations of these writers’ very distinctive styles. They were familiar to me, somehow, these poets, even though I had only read in school

much older poems—mostly by British writers like Donne and Shakespeare—up until that point.

With Dickinson and Whitman and Frost, though they weren’t contemporary, they did feel closer to something I knew, to a language whose nuances I recognized, and it felt clear to me that I was going to need to read a lot more poetry to figure out how to become the poet I already knew I was! Thankfully, there were so many poets ahead to guide me deeper into that paradox.

J H: What can you say about your learnings about what you have come to teach with such power and acclaim, the varied processes of hybrid writing, lyrical essays, cross-genre pieces, and memoir?

In particular, what have been the joys and challenges, pitfalls and surprises of collaborative writing that you’ve undertaken, for example, with Telephone: Essays in Two Voices with Brenda Miller and with The Unrhymables, with your colleague and dear friend Denise Duhamel?

J MW: I went to school for such a long time, and one way or another,

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I’ve been in school—studenting, of myself as a poet all along, but teaching, or both—since 1982! In I happened to be mostly writing fact, I’m still in school, and I plan prose in high school and even as to be in school forever! Along the an undergraduate in tandem with way, I kept loving words and being the prose-centered creative writing intrigued by how people used courses I took in college. But all them, even in subjects that weren’t along I saw—or more precisely heard—poetry explicitly or I guess you could say in prose, and so even implicitly I kept looking for “poetic prose” literary. I think and finding poetry in any context my love of everywhere, so I never felt called out to me “hermit crab” confined to poetic forms, as something I writing, the e.g. poems that looked wanted to keep metaphor for like poems or were reading and adopted-forms obviously recognizable as something I literature which poems, in order to create. also wanted to comes from write. I guess my beloved teacher-mentors Brenda Miller you could say I kept looking for and Suzanne Paola (sometimes and finding poetry everywhere, so I known as Susanne Antonetta), is never felt confined to poetic forms, rooted in a fascination with forms e.g. poems that looked like poems that aren’t literary—“shells” if or were obviously recognizable as you will—but lend themselves to poems, in order to create. In fact, literary possibilities. I like to think the more I discovered poetry in places—billboards, I was watching for “hermit crabs” unexpected long before I had that concept in pamphlets, menus, bathroom stall mind or any language at all to talk graffiti, et al.—the more I also about borrowing forms across wanted to use those non-literary various discourses and rhetorical “shells” as sites for innovation.

In the spring of 1999, in a modes.

Maybe the phenomenon is a Contemporary American Poetry bit akin to found poetry. I thought course offered at my university

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(it was a literature credit, not a creative writing credit, so we did not write and submit our own poems for class), I was delighted to encounter William Carlos Williams’s iconic plum poem, “This Is Just to Say.” And of course, like most of my peers, I had no idea at the time that it was iconic.

To me, it was new and fresh, and I recognized it as a memo masquerading as a poem—or a poem masquerading as a memo.

Either way was true! In retrospect, this was my first official “hermit crab” poem, even as it wasn’t presented to the class as a hybrid of anything. I pictured the poem’s speaker, maybe even the poet himself, leaving that little memo— perhaps a Post-It note, though they hadn’t been invented yet!— for his beloved on their kitchen counter after eating the last of the plums. And then, after the fact, I imagined the poet re-discovering his own memo as a poem, and then creating the symmetrical stanzas and deliberate enjambments that would help others recognize the poem in it as well.

I guess what I’m saying, in my usual, long-winded way, is

that my attention to the poetry in everything has made all the genres seem rife with hybridity from the very start. In fact, I’m surprised when a text doesn’t have notable elements that mix-andmatch across the various sets of literary drawers. I’m expecting and looking out for and hoping to create meaningful genre hodgepodges wherever I go.

But collaboration—that was a surprise! I started reading Denise Duhamel’s poems when I was an MFA student. They weren’t assigned for a class I was taking, but a fellow grad student in an elevator (this was the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, so even the setting was grand) suggested to me that I should read Denise’s work since, the student said, “she’s a cheerful feminist—like you!” I had never heard of Denise Duhamel before that moment, but I immediately headed to the library to look her up. And as I began to immerse myself in her capacious catalog of single-authored poems, I discovered several collections Denise had written with another poet named Maureen Seaton.

These poems were extraordinary,

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

too! How did they do that? How did the find that fabled “third voice” to create poems that harmonized so seamlessly?

For a long time, I read the poems of Denise Duhamel, the poems of Maureen Seaton, and then the poems they had written together before my serendipitous arrival, nearly a decade later, in South Florida, where both poets lived and taught! Denise, my mentor and colleague at Florida International University, soon drew me into the world of collaboration. I thought of myself at the time as an appreciator of collaboration, but I hadn’t ever considered becoming a collaborator myself. Maybe it’s that only-child thing, that growing up in a relatively isolated way.

Writing had been my lifeline and my rope-tow toward the future.

It never occurred to me it might also be a chair lift I shared with someone else.

Denise and I began collaborating in the summer of 2014 when I sent her a prompt Amy Krouse Rosenthal had included in her beautiful (also hybrid/ “hermit

crab”!) memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. The prompt invited readers to say something new about the moon, to make it feel fresh instead of clichéd. I thought Denise, who has written some of my favorite images regarding the moon and some of my favorite images in general, might like to respond to AKR’s invitation, and I was planning to do the same.

Instead, Denise sent back to me by email—she was in Portugal at the time, and I was in Miami—the start of a collaboration titled “Why the Moon Matters.” I was nervous for about five minutes—my literary hero wants me to write with her!— and then I started writing. The nerves dissipated, and I never looked back.

Denise said collaborating with me opened the door to writing creative nonfiction for her, as our collection The Unrhymables is a series of feminist essays with, as the title suggests, considerable word-play involved. And our collaborating opened the door for me to the possibility that art could be made with others. Of course this should be obvious—think of

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all the bands where a group of musicians come together to create a gestalt of new sounds, new lyrics—yet somehow in writing, I hadn’t entertained the possibility of being part of a partnership, a member of a team.

Soon after, Brenda Miller, my first teacher of the lyric essay (I took her life-changing lyric essay seminar the same semester as Bruce Beasley’s experimental poetry workshop at WWU!) and long-time mentor in this hybrid genre, invited me to collaborate with her. Brenda and I have similar writing styles, so I think we pushed each other in new ways, outside our own boxes, our own sense of “this is what I do” or “this is how I make a lyric essay.” As with Denise, the element of surprise was essential to my collaborations with Brenda in Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, a project that began with a reunion coffee date in 2015 in my home state of Washington where we were reminiscing about landlines and the long cords on the telephones in our childhood kitchens. Before long, we were back on opposite sides of the country writing a collection of

lyric essays that felt like that long cord stretched across 3000 miles. Somehow we could hear each other perfectly despite the distance.

J H: You also write essay collections, as in Just An Ordinary Woman Breathing, which Phillip Lopate has called “smart, languagerich,” and “self-knowing,” and which he further states, “fulfill our contemporary longing for an embodied literature.” Can you comment on Lopate’s assessment that our culture seems to seek or need a literature that embraces disparate voices and styles as a means to transform and bring us together?

J MW: Oh, Phillip Lopate! How I love his work and his dedication to the many possible permutations of the essay! In my English 101 course in college, Lopate’s “On Shaving a Beard” was one of the first pieces we read and one of my first encounters with a living writer. I’m not even sure I realized he was a living writer at the time.

But what struck me then—and the reason I now open my Writing

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

Creative Nonfiction survey course to it. I connected with it. How was with that essay by Lopate—was this possible? I had never grown or the way his approach to writing shaved a beard. I didn’t know what that felt like. I hadn’t experienced transcended subject position.

I was eighteen years old, a evaluations of my masculinity sheltered, suburban kid from the from others in relation to my Pacific Northwest enrolled at a facial hair. Yet what should have been entirely Christian school I could only conclude that foreign to me (in fact, I had this was the gift of wellfelt so intimate, never attended crafted literature, perhaps and I could only a public school especially well-crafted conclude that in my life!), just creative nonfiction— this was the gift coming into an drawing a reader into of well-crafted awareness of the writer’s deepest literature, myself as an ruminations on their p e r h a p s autonomous own identity, memories, especially wellperson, the formative experiences, crafted creative concept of and ultimately their nonf iction— myself as an embodiment. drawing a reader adult, a woman into the writer’s and not a girl, and this was an essay by a middle- deepest ruminations on their own aged (at the time) man, a New identity, memories, formative Yorker through and through, with experiences, and ultimately their different generational references embodiment.

Lopate held open that door and an entirely different experience of embodiment than my own. The into the essay form for me with unifying conceit of the essay is, his own “smart, language-rich” and “self-knowing” work, which after all, shaving a beard.

Not only did I love the essay is why, more than 20 years later, for its elevated diction, elegant I wrote him a fan letter sharing sentences, engaging sound-play my long affinity for his essays— and rangy allusions, I also related and my inclusion of them in my

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survey course—and while I didn’t expect him to say yes, inquiring if he would consider reading and blurbing Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, he wrote back the same day and said he would— another gift to me beyond his own embodied art-making!

J H : Describe your best writing day, its routines, patterns, needs.

J M W: Probably the best writing day is always the day after teaching a particularly invigorating class. It might be a day like today, in fact, as I have just finished teaching my summer poetry intensive at FIU, all those pedagogical endorphins surging through my bloodstream, and all those poems—read with my students and written by my students—fresh in my mind.

Get up early, do the Wordle, Spelling Bee, and New York Times crossword with Angie—a practice we started when we began quarantining in March 2020 without missing a day since!—so words are already the centerpiece of the day, often before the sun. Have some coffee, read the Academy of American

Poets poem-a-day—more words!

Then, sit down and write for a few hours before taking a break for some physical exercise. (Or, alternatively, run at the beach around sunrise and then return for the coffee, poem of the day, and writing time.)

The best writing day is essentially interval training, toggling between writing and other activities but always looking forward to getting back to writing, having something in-progress and exciting to return to. For me, reading is a part of the interval, cross-training model; teaching is a part of the interval, cross-training model; and all the word games Angie and I enjoy are yet another part of that joyful routine. Also, psychologically, it’s about getting to write for a designated amount of time, never having to write.

Writing is never a chore. It’s the thing I get to do when I finish my chores or when I’m avoiding my chores! Writing is always a pleasure, but never a guilty one.

J H: Just hearing about your full professorship being granted at Florida International University.

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Deep and joyous congratulations to you and to FIU for honoring you in these politically fraught Florida times. With the recognition of your excellence in teaching in mind, can you share how well you balance teaching and writing? Do they pull at each other or augment and support each other? I suspect we already know the answer to this, but are teaching and writing one and the same for you?

JMW: Thank you! It is an honor to graduate to this new rank in my field, though it’s funny to think of myself as a “senior professor” when there are so many more years ahead than years behind in the teaching career I envision for myself. There’s a part of me, the conscientious student part, that always knew I wanted to move through the ranks of academia at a steady rate. Put a ladder in front of me, and I’m going to climb it rung by rung. But I think about tenure and promotion much the way I think about letter grading: an external mark of progress that doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story of what was actually learned

or what is actually possible.

I tell my students that the grades I assign them for their work have more to do with objective factors, as outlined on the syllabus—consistent, timely attendance, paying attention in class (e.g. putting phones and other sources of distraction away), submitting work on time, following assignment guidelines.

That’s how students in my classes can earn an “A.” But meeting the requirements of a class is merely a version of jumping through hoops. Doing the work checks the boxes, but loving the work, being dedicated to the work, isn’t something a grade can—or should—measure. Tenure doesn’t do that. Promotion to Full Professor doesn’t do that either.

The most dedicated writers and teachers in the world wouldn’t even be granted tenure or promotion if they didn’t complete the copious (and let’s be honest, mostly tedious) paperwork required to document that they had done the writing and teaching and service in question. But did they do it with a full heart—did they love it

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as nothing else—that really can’t be measured, can it? Competence at a job, competence in a class, is different from the immeasurable and even ineffable ways we might treasure the work that we do and grow as a result of it.

I tell my students the heart of the class for me is our collective conversations and our individual dialogue through the page. Giving feedback on student work is about developing a correspondence with each student over the course of the semester, and maybe longer, if they’re a graduate student writing a thesis with me serving as their director. They send words, and I send words back. It’s an act of trust that deepens over time, ideally, and it’s not something a grade or any kind of quantitative assessment can truly measure.

My teaching is about relationships I develop with writers at all stages of their writing life and with plenty of students who don’t identify as “writers” but are testing the literary waters in an elective, a just-to-see-what-it’s-all-about kind of class or even this-was-theonly-class-that-fit-my-schedule roll

of the dice. There’s a place for everyone, and there’s room for everyone to have a different level of appreciation for the possibilities writing affords. I can measure what my students did, but I cannot measure what they truly learned or valued or might go on to use in their futures. Teaching writing is the longest game, just like writing is the longest game.

I think my academic promotions measure what I’ve done, but like letter grades, not what I’ve truly learned, what I value, and what I’m going to use in my future. So what matters most to me is where those academic rungs have taken me—where I get to climb beyond the ladder of official titles. More documented experience means more (I hope) latitude for developing new classes, taking new creative risks, broadening what I can do in my deeply interconnected writing, teaching, and service.

These are indeed hard times in Florida, where academic freedom is under such overt threat, but nothing and no one will intimidate me into teaching less diverse syllabi

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or into closeting myself within or what they mean but for how they beyond the classroom. Angie and I sound), I love incandescence, I love have already talked candidly about sobriquet, I love cricket, I love guru, this, and if my job is threatened I love swish and a vast assortment for being an out gay writer and of onomatopoetics, I love fervent professor (we see this happening and litany and marmalade (not all around us), for refusing to the thing itself but the taste of the word!) and conform to Words are like people: I’m chimney. Words the governor’s a fan in general, and I’m are like people: racist, sexist, fond of most of them. I’m a fan in homophobic, There are very few I general, and I’m transphobic, actively dislike or avoid. fond of most and ultimately of them. There xenophobic ideas about whose voices get to be are very few I actively dislike or heard in our classrooms, then so avoid. And now that I’m thinking be it. I would rather lose this job about it, I realize there are long I love and seek another one than strings of words I love (like beads change who I am or how I teach on a perpetual string) in my new to accommodate a repressive, collection, Fugue: An Aural History hateful, and fear-mongering (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023). It’s one of the first texts agenda. where I’ve started to explore my JH : You’ve said your favorite word synesthesia more explicitly, so the was “periwinkle” when you were a colors of words, as linked with their sounds, led me to create kid. Others, newer ones now? alphabetical litanies (that lovely JMW: Oh, so many! I love cozy, I word!) that serve as transition love soffit, I love miscellany, I love passages throughout the book. hodge-podge, I love capacious, I And also like people, many words love imbricate, I love anaphora and are enhanced by their interactions epistrophe and prosody (many poetic and collaborations with others! terms and techniques, not only for

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J H : Fearlessness and focus are your keynotes on the page. Are there certain fears that you haven’t focused on yet, or limits to your focus for now as you find yourself “at the threshold of mid-life,” some places where you don’t go in your writing?

J M W: I would say that I’ve cordoned off certain parts of my most personal life from public view.

Years ago, my mentor and former English professor from undergrad, Tom Campbell, made a distinction in our correspondence between what is “secret” and what is “private.” I use this distinction as a touchstone all the time. Tom is gay, as I am, and has a long-term partner, as I do. He was getting to the idea that being out and living an out life is about resisting making or allowing one’s core identity and primary relationship to be or become a secret. There are countless ways that just saying “I’m gay” or acknowledging my partner is a woman has made others around me uncomfortable.

I wish that wasn’t true or that it didn’t (still) happen, but it does. If

I make those core truths of my life a secret, then I’m courting shame in a way I simply cannot permit.

And the same is true for my work in the self-referential arts. But Tom’s distinction also pointed to the ways that sometimes being “out” is conflated with being “graphic” or “oversharing” or “having no boundaries,” and that’s where resisting secrecy can cross over into violating privacy for self and others.

I’m interested in writing about all the big facets of identity, including gender and sexuality, and I’m interested in relationships, including the complexities of partnership and marriage. I write about those things, and I will likely always write about those things, but there’s a veil I’ve drawn over the most intimate parts of my life with Angie that isn’t about keeping us secret but is about keeping some parts of our life just for us. I’m not a tell-all writer; I’m a show-someas-vividly-as-possible writer. I want to make sure I’m respecting our privacy as a couple, which I’ve learned is entirely possible to do without closeting myself or hiding

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

the fact of us. But it’s also a matter to enter into more egalitarian of comfort level. I tend to go deep relationships with others, is not rather than wide, plumbing a what I restrict myself from writing small, specific encounter or even about but how I approach writing exploring the multi-valence of a the most difficult parts of that single word rather than giving a past. I want to better understand play-by-play of everything that the people my parents are, the people those happens in my I tend to go deep rather than from my first life. wide, plumbing a small, world are, and I I guess I specific encounter or even think as long as should also exploring the multi-valence I’m writing to say that as a of a single word rather than learn, to make memoirist, I giving a play-by-play of more sense of, have shown everything that happens in their values, a lot of my my life. their choices, childhood and and their pain, adolescence on the page. I feel somewhat not just my own, then nothing is differently about how much I need really off-limits. But if the writing to shroud what happened in the ever turned toward revenge or past, that first life I did not choose some kind of mean-spirited exposé for myself, from others’ viewing. aimed at mere shock value, then I My parents were adults, and I hope I would catch myself doing was a child, so what happened that—sensationalizing or indicting in my house growing up—those instead of exploring—and would formative experiences—feel like pull myself back from a dangerous mine to write about without having ledge. to negotiate with my parents concerning what they would want J H: In “Out Here” you speak me to reveal or not. The standard powerfully about “Anaphora” as I use for the past, before I came the child you do not have in a poem into my own autonomy and chose that goes in and out like endless

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waves, the word “When” landing again and again on a metaphoric shore. You’ve written profound things as hybrid, as memoir, that seem endlessly interwoven and indelible from your own childhood, its richness and its pain.

Can you speak to that?

JMW: That poem you’re referencing—“Anaphora is the Name We Give the Daughter We Do Not Have”—actually comes from my Master’s thesis, written around the same time and for the same project, ultimately, as “Blue.” The thesis itself—The Lunar Plexus—is my first collection of poems, but it doesn’t exist in the world as a whole because I realized it was the primer for my future collections, the more world-ready collections, I was one day going to write. I did publish many of the individual poems, but as a whole, the book wasn’t as strong I felt it needed to be.

When I wrote that poem, back in 2002, it was called “Poem from Your Perspective.” At the time, I thought it was a poem that reflected how Angie saw me—

as someone frenetic, always in motion, always doing a great many things at once, someone who wasn’t very good at being still or slowing down. Years later, I came across the bound copy of my first thesis and started flipping through it. I had forgotten all about that poem, and when I read it again, I thought the poem had something new to say, something that spoke to our partnership now as opposed to our partnership then, back when it was just beginning.

The poem didn’t seem so much about Angie’s perspective of me. It seemed like a foreshadowing glimpse of our life together and a certain spirit of making it new (which anaphora does!) in continuing to choose each other again and again.

Pound’s famous canto in which the emperor inscribes MAKE IT NEW on his bathtub was one of the poems we studied for our comprehensive exams. Even then, I thought how relationships are about recommitting to the other person every day, to renewing the commitment you have made to someone in deliberate perpetuity.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

And since we didn’t have the option of legal marriage for so long—it took the first 13 years of our relationship before marriage equality became the law of the land—that “making it new” imperative felt even stronger for us. We had to keep choosing each other even without any legal binding in place.

When I changed the title and sent the poem out into the world, I was also thinking about a number of other things. Anaphora is the technique that best describes a relationship where recursion is prized but redundancy is resisted.

This is how it’s meant to function in a literary context as well. And over time, by accretion, that anaphoric pattern is meant to intensify the reader’s experience, just as love intensifies over time in a relationship that is working, that is growing. Angie and I chose not to have children, and children, as we know, bind partners to each other in specific ways. For me, the practice of making our life together new and growing together by accretion is the way I understand our bond. I pictured “Anaphora”

(plus, I’ve always loved “A” names) as a particular force at work in our lives, a presence almost akin to a living being. Our anaphora has become our symbolic child.

J H: Influences from “Out Here,” the title poem from the chapbook, include and pay homage to Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare and Whitman. As your own influence burgeons and grows, are there other writers who have served as avatars for you?

J MW: Oh, so many! One of my great touchstones for deep writing, plumbing experience and examining the self in relation to others, is Toi Derricotte. Her memoir, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, was the most psychologically rich and probing volume I can remember reading— and it’s the reason I wanted to go to the University of Pittsburgh to pursue my MFA. I was hoping to study with her, and in fact, she directed my poetry thesis there in 2006. Toi was also a model, like Suzanne Paola/Susanne Antonetta

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from my first graduate program, of a poet who was writing prose and of course, a prose writer whose prose was deeply infused with a poetic sensibility.

Like the favorite words question, it’s hard to think of any writer I’ve encountered who hasn’t taught me something or extended to me some kind of invitation, permission, or prompt. In addition to writers I’ve already named, I’m thinking of James Allen Hall (also a treasured friend as well as a literary role model!), Aaron Smith, Rick Barot, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Eula Biss, Jenny Boully, Rivka Galchen, Joy Castro, Stacey Waite, Neela Vaswani, Gregory Orr, Lia Purpura, Ann Lauterbach, followed by a string of ongoing ellipses.

Right now I’m in the preliminary stages of developing a couple new graduate seminars, one organized around singular, book-length works (not genrespecific) and one organized around contemporary ekphrasis (also not genre-specific). For the book-length works, I’m interested in exploring in the company of my

students projects like C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Ross Gay’s Be Holding, Maggie Smith’s Bluets, and any number of books by Claudia Rankine, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Just Us: An American Conversation.

Those are four writers whose work has consistently challenged and compelled me. For the ekphrasis course, I’m thinking about Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oyster and Lemon, which made a formative impression on me as a new graduate student when his former student Brenda Miller invited him to come and read to our class at Western (the book wasn’t even out yet, so it was a rare glimpse of new work in progress), Ander Monson’s Predator: A Movie, A Memoir, An Obsession, which I have become completely obsessed with despite the fact that I’ve never seen Predator (and don’t really feel I want or need to still— Monson has given me everything I need!), Patricia Smith’s new hybrid of text and image, historical and contemporary, Unshuttered (extraordinary—I’m

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

still digesting and re-reading it as I write this!), Hanif Abdurraqib’s aural ekphrastic wonder, They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us, and Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies, which also took the top off my head with its braiding, hybridity of subject and form, and her deft toggling between internal and external worlds. So all those writers, yes, and then some! Then, many!

JH : As someone who, despite Lou Grant’s disapproval, has a lot of spunk, have you seen the HBO documentary about Mary Tyler Moore? Can you speak to her iconic influence?

JMW: Why, yes, indeed, I have! In fact, in a twist that defies even my own highly calibrated serendipity meter, my new book project, The Mary Years, was selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize just two weeks after the documentary premiered—in early June of this year!

I started watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1992, when I was 12 years old, the year the show

was added to Nick at Nite’s classic TV roster. I was immediately riveted, and Mary Richards became a touchstone figure for me—a woman who didn’t seem to be unshakably brave, but a woman who faced her fears regardless.

This was what impressed me so much about Mary. She wasn’t cocky. She wasn’t even overtly daring. But she was hard-working, dedicated, and would do what needed to be done even when she was palpably rattled. Fear didn’t stop her from pursuing the life she wanted or from trying to do the right thing in any number of emotionally fraught situations.

For 25 years, Mary Tyler Moore, the person and the actor who portrayed Mary Richards, served as a guidepost for my personal bildungrsoman, my pursuit of a career that doubled as vocation, and my desire for meaningful friendships with coworkers and non-co-workers alike.

In 2017, when Mary Tyler Moore died, I was just about to go up for tenure at my “WJM”—Florida International University. That’s when I knew I needed to write the

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AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

story—and plumb it for myself— of just how pervasive her influence over my personal and professional coming-of-age was. So I wrote The Mary Years, mostly in my friend and co-worker John Dufresne’s writing room while cat-sitting for him that summer. There isn’t a one-to-one ratio between my work colleaguefriends and Mary’s, but I have certainly found at FIU my own version of what Mary describes in the final episode—a “family.”

Or as Lou Grant says, in that same, heart-rending final scene, “I treasure you people.” How lucky am I to have found Mary and to have let Mary guide me toward the people and the work that I treasure most in my own life!

JH : You write about love better than most writers, wonderfully saying in your dedication to Angie in Out Here that you both are “the music while the music lasts.” The statement seems open-ended and capable of being read differently, seeming to say that music and love can last forever and yet suggestive of a sense of foreboding too, like that Elizabeth Willis line that “this

is what we sing when the ship goes down.” With all the stresses on love and relationships during the pandemic how important was it to write about love, as you do so remarkably in every single poem in Out Here? How essential was it to recognize as you say in “No Picnic” that “the picnic, the ancillary picnic, the anti-picnic, and once in a while, “the cross-hatch basket / & the clearing far back from the road” /. . . was the ardent, impossible secret of love.”

J MW: Well, I definitely think it’s important to write about love, even as a simple practice of gratitude—even if who and what we love isn’t a primary subject in the work we share with the world.

I don’t think any of the poems in Out Here were written during the pandemic, as I’m considering them now. Most were written before and a few after, closer to the post-pandemic (though I’m not sure if we’re ever really post) of the present. The most recent poem is the subjunctive reverie, “In the Dream, Dolly Offers to Officiate.”

(I should also say that another

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beloved mentor and former professor of psychology from undergrad, Dana Anderson, is the person who actually officiated our wedding, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way!)

I wrote that poem because a friend and fellow South Florida poet, Dustin Brookshire, asked me to write a poem for the Dolly Parton anthology he was coediting. I’m a huge Dolly fan, and Angie was born and raised in Tennessee, living for some of her formative years in East Tennessee near where Dolly is from, so there are many natural confluences in my life with Dolly Parton—it had just never occurred to me to write about her directly.

While the pandemic became an occasion to treasure what we have more consciously and more intensely, too, including who we spend our days with— sometimes, honestly, I felt guilty for how much domestic joy I found in my life during that time, working from home with Angie, always in each other’s company and the company of our cats—I also found new invitations

growing out of the pandemic.

Dustin moved to SoFlo during that time, and I think inviting someone to write something, to contribute something that they may have never thought to do otherwise is a gift. My thesis student, Ana Maria Caballero, whose work is blossoming in the world across multiple genres, asked me to contribute poems to her post-pandemic project, the VerseVERSE, pairing poets and visual artists to create audiovisual NFTs. This isn’t something I would have sought out on my own, but once again, I was invited to consider other possibilities and other potential audiences for my poems. And it was Ana, in the process of asking me to record selected poems from my own catalog, who alerted me to a free recording app called PocketMemo.

In another serendipitous twist, when Dustin asked me for a Dolly poem, I was short on time and working on a lot of other projects simultaneously, so I ended up composing the poem out loud in my car while commuting to campus, recording and revising

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

aloud using PocketMemo. I believe it was the first poem I ever wrote, start to finish, simply by speaking out loud. The experience brought me back to the essential orality of poem-making and to foregrounding the “out loud” of the poem rather than composing on paper or screen first and then reading the draft aloud as part of my revision process.

I’ve wandered away from your original question, John, but you prompted me to consider how the tight strictures of the pandemic also deepened a sense of openness in me—of wanting to try new things, or to approach familiar things in new ways. That’s a kind of love, too. And as always, the credo from Pound returns: MAKE IT NEW. On the domestic front and the artistic front, it felt more urgent than ever to make things new during, and as we emerged, from that time.

JH : What was your pandemic experience? What surprised you?

Can you quantify any of it and sort through those tea leaves that stood out? There was the mixed blessing,

of course, of all the added time to write, but what else emerged? Did you binge unashamedly? How did you grieve? What changed in you?

What deepened?

J MW: I did write a lot, and for the first 90 days after our university closed and our teaching moved online, Denise Duhamel and I wrote back and forth every single day. These exchanges became a manuscript we’re calling In Lieu of Flowers: A Quarantine Collaboration, a book that grew exponentially, day by day and week by week. I haven’t re-read it in its entirety yet, but we have published several sections in literary journals, and we reached 150,000 words in record time.

That was my “binge,” I suppose, that real-time documentation and reflection I likely wouldn’t have done on my own but that collaboration elicited from me.

Writing with Denise in that way kept me grounded and sane during the most restrictive three months of that era.

I also learned I didn’t need the YMCA for exercise, even though I’m grateful for the many

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friendships I formed there. In many ways, I started taking care of my body more holistically, not just going out and working out so hard (running, spinning, etc.), but learning to really appreciate stretching, yoga, hand weights, my own version of meditation, being more present in my own skin. And, while it may sound quite the opposite of what I’ve just said, I started boxing during the pandemic (with a heavy bag— no punching people!), which was something I had dreamed of doing since I was a teenager.

Angie bought me a heavy bag and a stand for my birthday, and I began to practice this gloriously integrated sport that uses the whole body. What I thought was that I would punch at things I hated or feared—the coronavirus, most notably, the rising death toll, the pervasive sense of helplessness that rounded out the corners of those days—but that, too, turned out to work against my own expectations. I ended up punching toward what I hoped for, what I wished and longed for: punching toward peace, punching toward

healing, visualizing good things that the force of my fists might symbolically enact. It sounds strange—it is strange—but I’ve never been able to punch my heavy bag with hate in my heart. I can only punch with hope.

Since it was first published in 2015, I’ve taught Andrea Gibson’s beautiful list poem, “Things That Don’t Suck,” in virtually every class. I love it! I love the invitations it extends me, as a person and a writer, to focus on the positives, yes, but they don’t have to be “perfect” positives. It’s quite a low bar to start, even for skeptics— which admittedly I am not!

Just find what doesn’t suck. Stay specific. Stay concrete. And keep going. As a poetic practice and as a life practice, this works well. So I kept coming back to my TTDSes, a tag I often use on Facebook when I’m chronicling good and inspiring things, as part of my pandemic routine. What doesn’t suck? What isn’t terrible? Sometimes I only got as far as “the fact that I’m stuck with someone I love during this time” or “the fact that I can write my grief, that I have the tools to

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

write my grief ”—but those both turn out to be quite enormous blessings (things that emphatically do not suck!) on their own.

And finally, another strange thing that I’m still unpacking about the pandemic: Zoom. It was never my desire to teach anything but in-person classes. I didn’t imagine that teaching online was even possible for someone like me, someone who enjoys being in the physical presence of others so much. But I found Zoom valuable in ways that surprised me: the ability to connect with people across great physical distances (once I became competent as a Zoom teacher, of course, there were other opportunities—and still are—to read on Zoom, to participate in Zoom panels, to deliver Zoom craft talks—I even delivered a keynote address for a graduate program on Zoom during peak pandemic and found the experience deeply satisfying); the ways my quieter students, often reluctant to speak in class, were willing to share via chat, to post their comments and questions, even to cut and paste their free-

writes for me or someone else in the class to read aloud (I learned how to become a better teacher for these students precisely because of that new modality); and I also found myself growing more comfortable in my own skin by facing myself in the simultaneous mirror that is Zoom.

For most of my life, I’ve avoided mirrors. My mother was obsessed with my physical appearance and highly critical of it. When I reached adulthood, I thought the secret to turning down my internalized beauty critic was simply to expel her from my life. No time spent in front of mirrors, no make-up or styling products, no self-conscious time spent on appearance. But with Zoom, I literally had to face myself every day—that self with no make-up or styling products, no self-conscious time spent on her appearance—and I discovered I actually liked how she looked, her expressions, her way of presenting herself. It wasn’t that Zoom made me beauty-conscious or appearance-obsessed; rather, Zoom made me realize that what

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AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

I had assumed must have been so awful about my unadorned face, why my mother fretted so intensely about it and why she insisted I begin wearing make-up when I turned eleven, was actually all in her head, not mine. You would think a woman in her 40s would know that already, especially after all the years I spent writing about my fraught relationship with my mother and her beauty ideals, but Zoom showed me myself, the face I present to the world, and I feel like I finally saw and accepted that face, maybe for the very first time.

JH : What music sustains you now?

(Please say The Be Good Tanyas.)

What songs led your end of the year Spotify playlist? Your poems have so much music in them already, but does music prove helpful when you actually write?

JMW: I don’t know “The Be Good Tanyas,” John! I’m so sorry to disappoint you and promise to rectify the situation promptly! (I do love their name.)

I grew up in a musical-loving family, so I find show tunes and

musical soundtracks almost inherently irresistible. My parents were fans of the Big Band era, so there’s something there that’s formative for me as well. The radios in our house were all set to AM 880, “hits of the 40s, 50s, and 60s,” so I was a child of the 80s who wasn’t familiar with Madonna or Michael Jackson—a child who never saw MTV or even knew it existed. But I did know the words to every Frank Sinatra song!

Angie still can’t get over the fact that while we were pre-teens and teenagers in the 1990s, she was listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam in rural Tennessee, music being made where I lived, and I had never even heard of Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder, let alone listened to their music. When I got to college later in the 90s, my friends were aghast that I didn’t know any of the music or musicians of our time—or any music by the Beatles, a startling omission for all!—so in many ways, I’ve been playing music catch-up ever since.

I discovered I love the sound of an acoustic guitar and lean toward folk, folk-rock, and alternative

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music, often what might be termed “music with a message.”

I recently saw the Indigo Girls for the second time in concert and got to meet and talk with Amy Ray at some length afterwards, thanks to my friend Gregg. I would say the Indigo Girls epitomize a certain kind of music that speaks deeply to me—and where I recognize the lyrics for the poetry they are.

I feel a similar reverence for Dar Williams as a poetic storyteller. I have a project that was accepted for the PANK “Little Books” series called Meditation 40: The Honesty Room. In 1999, for my 20th birthday, a friend gave me Dar Williams’s album (as a CD), The Honesty Room. I listened to it nearly nonstop for a year and never got over the concept of an “honesty room.” What would that look like? What might that include?

When I turned 40, just before the pandemic began, I was writing my annual meditation essay for that year of life—essentially asking myself what being 40 meant to me—and I realized that one of my greatest challenges in life is honesty. Not being honest with

myself, necessarily, and not being what I like to think is a genuine person, an authentic person, but the ever-growing conundrum of being honest with people in a way that is also, simultaneously, kind.

I’m fascinated by honesty— and dishonesty. I’m fascinated by the idea of the “little white lie.”

When is it kinder to lie than to tell the truth? Is it ever? For instance, what happens when a student asks you if you think they’re ready for graduate school, and you tell them you don’t think they are. You’re being honest, but what if you’re wrong? Sometimes honesty is just an opinion, and now you’ve potentially hurt someone’s feelings, made them doubt themselves. Or maybe you haven’t at all. Maybe that assumption is arrogant on your part, presuming you have more influence over someone else than you actually do, or maybe you’re being unkind by presuming that others can’t “handle” the truth. If someone asks for your honest opinion, should you give it? Always, unequivocally? Maybe you can say anything to anyone as long as you

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

say it a certain way? Maybe there is a kind way to frame even the most difficult truths—but what if there isn’t? Or what if you aren’t sure of the way?

These are just some of the questions I’ve found myself wrestling with in recent years, which have led me back to Dar Williams’s “honesty room.”

The album doesn’t directly address honesty, but I had the idea to use of the 13 tracks on the album as sections for my 13-part, booklength essay. Each section is titled after a Dar Williams song from that album, in the order in which they appear on The Honesty Room. This was a way I could pay homage to Williams, one of my favorite singer/songwriters, but also push myself into new territory as a writer. The first song is “When I Was a Boy”—a perfect opportunity to consider gender anew, and in this case,

boxing comes into play!—and the last song is “Arrival,” which was a chance to look back on the 20 years since I first began listening to the album and to consider what I’d learned about honesty in those 20 years—where I had “arrived” in my life to date.

Mostly, what I learned is that it got harder to stay honest and also stay kind. In the end, in order to be honest about who I am, I had to let go of my parents, to become estranged. For a long time, I thought maybe that was a temporary state of affairs, but I think ultimately it was kindest to myself—and probably kindest to my parents, too—to draw a hard line about what I would and wouldn’t hide, what I wouldn’t lie about. But just like lying, notlying also has consequences. I’m far from done with my struggles with honesty, but I also keep a line from Jorie Graham’s poem

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“Disenchantment” close to my heart: “Teach me from scratch how to love. Keep me kind.”

J H : What will you write next? Can you give us a hint about what’s stirring in you and what you find interesting that you haven’t named yet?

J M W: It turns out this question dovetails a bit with your previous question about music. So, earlier in the interview, I mentioned my collection, Fugue: An Aural History, which is organized around the musicality of language itself and tracing my own relationship with sounds, often synesthetically. I don’t write to music or seem to require music in my day-to-day, even as I like to run and spin to big, bright, bubblegum pop—the poppier, the better! I like music as music, but really, I think, my craving for music is satisfied most by poetry, in poem-form, in prose-form, and in any other place I find it. Poetry is my favorite soundtrack.

Fugue is essentially a 10,000word essay that I didn’t realize I

was writing until it was clearly too long to publish in most literary journals. But it was also one file of six on my desktop in a folder simply titled JOHN CAGE PROJECT. Among the myriad sources of inspiration in my life, John Cage is a figure with whom I’ve felt a special kinship throughout my adulthood. We share a September 5th birthday, a love of artistic experimentation and hybridity, a long love story with a single partner (his was Merce Cunningham), and of course, queerness! Cage also loved cats, as do I. During the pandemic (wow— it turns out a lot happened during the pandemic, even more than I realized!), I ordered the newly released compendium of all John Cage’s lectures and writings and began to read them before bed.

This fueled my idea of writing a highly unconventional biography of John Cage that braided together my own history as a composer of hybrid/experimental work and my years of training as a pianist.

I haven’t written much about the nine years I studied piano

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

and music theory, or the years I taught piano during high school so my piano teacher didn’t have to work with beginning students (he had reached a point where he much preferred working with intermediate and advanced

love teaching—as long as I taught something I truly loved.

Cage’s deconstructed pianos were far more appealing to me than any actual piano I ever played, and when I began learning about John Cage in a Black

musicians), and beyond that, I haven’t really explored why I didn’t love the piano, couldn’t perhaps love the piano, because my heart was already promised to another kind of composition. Nonetheless, teaching piano did help me begin to conceive of a future where I might

Mountain Poetry class during my first year in the MFA program at Pitt, I felt I had found a kindred spirit. Cage broke all the rules of traditional composition. He didn’t play the piano; he reimagined the possibilities of the piano, often by transforming the physical

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instrument and then by bringing the aleatoric to bear on the sounds he made. I first learned the word “aleatoric” in a lyric essay context, and suddenly I could see how controlled randomization was important to many of John Cage’s projects with piano and to many of my own projects creating music with language.

To honor the aleatoric, I decided I would compose in six separate files, each capped at around 10,000 words, and then roll dice to splice together work from the various files, perhaps creating multiple versions of the same 60,000-word manuscript. I “composed” relatively randomly as well—and am still composing this way—just writing things down as they occurred to me and placing them in one of the six files to which they corresponded. But one file—the one labeled SOUNDS— grew at an exponential rate.

There was so much to say about sound! And when that file reached 10,000 words, my arbitrary limit, I realized I had accidentally written the contents of the file as an essay that could stand alone, unspliced.

So that’s the long-form essay I sent out into the world and which was lucky enough to find a publisher through Diagram/New Michigan Press.

I’m going to keep working on that project, but there’s no clear timeline for it—which I like.

As with composing out loud in my car using PocketMemo, I’m discovering another new way to make art, to assemble a hybrid collection.

I also want to tackle a project I’ve been preparing to tackle for years: a memoir organized around food. I realize I haven’t written much about food, and yet, it served as such a defining feature of my childhood—the way we ate, how money/class influenced our diet, all the ways food was used that had nothing to do with nutrition, and how Angie and I built a different relationship with food over time, one that looks so different from either of our childhood meals or understanding of food as sustenance. I’m a vegetarian now, which I wanted to be for years but which my family didn’t support. It took a long time

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIE MARIE WADE

for me to understand that I did in fact have the freedom to choose a meat-free diet. (Mary Tyler Moore, nota bene, was also a vegetarian, even as Mary Richards was not!)

It also took a long time for me to realize that I don’t enjoy drinking and often felt pressure to consume alcohol in my 20s because people said that’s what “English majors,” “graduate students,” “young people” did. Now I don’t drink at all and haven’t for years, not because I’m recovering from addiction but because—there’s that honesty theme again!—I could finally admit to myself that I don’t like how alcohol makes me feel.

I don’t know the form this memoir will take yet, but I suspect it will be hybrid, non-linear, all the usual suspects, and I’m anticipating some recipes on simulated index cards will make appearances as well. I also want to celebrate the pleasures of food, the rituals of food, and to consider food and family as mirrors for each other— first in the family into which I was born and now in the family which I have chosen for myself.

What does our diet teach us about who we are and what we value as well as what is available to us and what we can afford? How has our increasing eco-consciousness about packaging, about sourcing both food and the materials that contain it, influenced what we will and will not eat? And perhaps even, how has the pandemic changed our diets—when we had more time to cook, if we did, when we had limited access to restaurants, when carryout was celebrated as a way to support local eateries, and of course, even in the wake of the pandemic, how have ongoing shortages of certain products changed our diets? These are some, but of course not all, of the questions I’m beginning to reckon with.

Thank you, John, for such a capacious (there’s that word I love again!) and deeply considered set of questions. I’m honored by your care in composing them.