AN INTERVIEW WITH MEGHAN O’ROURKE
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You had a busy 2011, it seems, with your memoir, The Long Goodbye, and your second collection of poems, Once, coming out in quick succession. Were you working on both at once? Can you talk about that process? Actually, for the most part I worked on them at different times. About three-fourths of Once was done before I began The Long Goodbye, and before my mother died at the end of 2008. I had wanted to write about two or three more poems—and I had a sense, given the book’s preoccupation with illness and preparing for a death, that the book in needed to tackle the aftermath of loss, not just its antechamber, as it were. But after my mother died, I found I couldn’t write poems—they were simply too open, demanded too much art; art I didn’t yet have at my fingertips. However, I could form sentences, which had the advantage of connecting one to the next, like a rope along a tricky mountain path. So I started writing the pieces that became the early sections of The Long Goodbye. When The Long Goodbye was done, I went back to Once, to write some poems that the book seemed to me to want—the poem “Still,” and “After Her Death” (which I had actually drafted in fragmentary form right after my mother died), and “My Mother,” and a few others. Is there any common ground between your processes for writing poetry and non-fiction? Can you characterize the difference? Hmm. The common ground is making myself sit at the desk, even when I don’t want to. Agony? Agony is common to both. But the mental/creative processes are very different—there’s a thread of continuity to prose that is extremely satisfying and less terrifying than the chaos of writing poems. With poems, there is so much indeterminacy, so many choices to engage with. And many more blank pages to face. Writing The Long Goodbye almost felt like an enjoyable vacation from that chaos: I liked that I could wake up and know what I had to work on next. When you’re writing a hefty piece of narrative nonfiction, there’s a lot of ground you know you