by Sam Campbell
Photo by Rachel Kincaid
You are an alum of the University of Arkansas MFA program. Many of our readers are writers themselves, and an MFA program is either a dream or a reality to them. Rarely, though, do we think of what comes next, once the MFA dream is achieved. Could you speak a little on what life is like after the MFA?
My time at the University of Arkansas was so pivotal. I discovered there a sense of writing as a way of life, a freedom to write, to live toward sharper ideas and finer expression. You would be hard pressed to find a finer faculty or a more fun place to write than Fayetteville.
Everyone I’ve seen exit an MFA program has transitioned in their own way. For me, it took a year or so to decide I wanted to return to academia. I worked in the back offices of an Arkansas bank for a bit, processing loans. I secretly kept a notepad in my top drawer to jot down stray lines or thoughts or interesting exchanges in between phone calls. My main advice is to trust that you can’t get it wrong. You just live it and get as much out of it as you can, whatever it is. If we never made any mistakes, we’d have little to write about. Grow where you’re planted is the advice my southern mother offers. It’s corny, like all advice, but what’s the better alternative? Stay curious and keep writing. Ignore the advice of others and do it your way.
Of all the jobs a creative writer can have, most writers often narrow in on the two most obvious options: starving artist or Stephen-King-like-mega-star. But you’re balancing a successful career as a writer with being the director of a creative writing program! I would love to hear about your job as the director, how you came to have that position, and what it entails.
“One thing you can always do as a writer needing to make ends meet is give back to the community you hope will support you in return.”
Actually, I’m wrapping up my last semester directing the University of Idaho’s undergrad and grad programs, aiming to take some time off to finish a second collection of poems and some other translation and prose projects. Being a writer is often a fairly peripatetic existence, but that works for me. Idaho’s program is fantastic and uniquely suited for folks who want to invest in a concentrated and supportive community of artists. My colleagues and students there taught me so much.
One thing you can always do as a writer needing to make ends meet is give back to the community you hope will support you in return. I see the heft of my work beyond the writing desk as building creative community, whether that’s an academic program, a reading series, or a community workshop. You can write reviews of books you think deserve more attention. You can tweet out your love for new poems. You can translate work that hasn’t made its way into English. Making room for other writers and lending that support is a surefire way to figure out how to access those communities yourself. The art world revolves around volunteerism, which is both lamentable and convenient for folks starting out. Turn toward that community and you’ll find it supports you back.
Your debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, is forthcoming this fall from the Cleveland State University Press! I’m sure you’re excited, as I would be. Tell me, what has the publication experience been like behind-the-scenes? I know many writers think that publication is the end of the author’s work, but oftentimes it is just the beginning!
Yes, poets have to hustle with their first book quite often (and for subsequent books too, no doubt)! I remember a list Nickole Brown once shared with a group of us MFA students, highlighting the networking and event participation poets should start doing long before their book is in the world. Once the book is snapped up, she stressed starting a good six months in advance of the launch, planning readings, social media posts, website updates, that kind of thing. Planning ahead helps—it’s a lot of work, of course.
I’m lucky to have fantastic editors at Cleveland State University Press in Caryl Pagel and Hilary Plum. They’re doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting on my behalf. Being choosy about which press to trust your first book with is ideal. Do a generous amount of research to figure out where that might be. . .and aim high.
Let’s talk a bit about your upcoming poem, “Turing Tested." It is one of my favorite poems I’ve read in a long time. I love the shape of the poem, the way it plays with the concepts of science, mathematics, and computing all while going through the biography of Alan Turing and intertwining his life with the myth of Snow White. I’m dying to know the story behind how this poem came to be.
“Turing Tested” started in a completely different form, as numbered prose blocks which counted down to the final stanza, all interlaced with lyric fragments. Here’s the very beginning of the first draft, then titled “Inevitable Machine”:
10/ In the comforter dark of the deep, executioners called to subs on rotary cogs, an enigma machine. At 3,000 feet, a trash compacter of salt water, yes. World war held every big word in its teeth. For every eye, a lid. For every war, a new machine.
The knot slips into purpose
That was written around 2015 and was the first to inspire a series of poems that now thread the book. A lot of that noisy structure fell away, but Turing became a queer guide, a fathering force, leading me to almost all of the other poems, most of which were written after. This poem, though, tells his tragic story most faithfully. Some details are imagined, others stem from research. A lot of those insights are owed to David Leavitt’s biography The Man Who Knew Too Much (2006). Poems always pull from some kind of knowledge and research is only another applied narrative. My poet’s atelier is filled with notes. Stray limbs. Here are some of the ones that shaped this poem:
Turing’s 1952 article “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” describes how natural features such as spots and spirals arise from a homogenous state. These are now called Turing patterns.
The notion of contrary sensations as a description of same-sex desire is drawn from Karl Westphal’s diagnosis described in “Contrary Sexual Feeling” or “die conträre Sexualempfindung” (1870). Westphal, a central figure of 19th century sexology, is credited with one of the first medical accounts of sexuality as a psychiatric disorder giving way to the “discovery” of male homosexuality. Michel Foucault claimed Westphal’s article marked the birth of homosexuality as a category.
This poem also contains the collection’s eponymous line. “No doubt I will return a different man” is adapted from a letter Turing sent just prior to his final ordeal:
“I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me… I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.”
The other poem The Arkansas International was kind enough to take, “Queen Samson,” is also foundational. Randall Mann, the judge for the contest the book won, wrote a poem whose last lines inspired mine called “Colloquy Between A and B.” It also borrows from John Milton’s last work, his closet drama Samson Agonistes. “Tragedy, anciently composed: / the gravest, most moral and profitable,” is taken from Milton’s introduction:
“Tragedy, as it was antiently compos’d, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr’d up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.”
I am always impressed by writers who use allusion so confidently in their work. How do you delineate between when you should use a specific reference (such as your use of Regal Cinema, Ginger Rogers, etc.) and when you should remain more general in your descriptions?
“The world alerts me to its presence and whatever sharpens my attention tends to stick with me, tends to make it into a poem at some point. ”
The poem makes all those decisions, I’m afraid. That’s one answer, as Jericho Brown might say.
But another answer: thinking back to that notepad in my top drawer, specifics are what drive description. And we’re surrounded by specific stories, histories, insights. For me the goal of a poet is to pick up on received patterns in interesting ways. The world alerts me to its presence and whatever sharpens my attention tends to stick with me, tends to make it into a poem at some point.
After all, we have to fill the birdfeeder if we expect that structure to draw any attention of its own.
The birdfeeder outside my office window is actually little more than a dangling cage, a rectangle filled with sky and suet that hangs from a very Atwoodian hook. Mostly, the dark-eyed juncos come to peck at it just enough to feast more easily from the ground below. Watching them I think of bird signs, auspices, or I think of dinosaurs and the constantly changing forms life inhabits. Or I imagine myself in the woods, in a fairy tale where the birds gather around me. Allusion originally comes from a sense of active play, and while specific references might not be as playful, they play into a kind of pattern making that I’m drawn to, attaching a poem to a web of other narrative images.
Finally, what are you looking ahead to in your work? Are you working on anything now?
I love this question because it forces me to reimagine what I’m working on, especially when it is new. Currently, I am laying the groundwork for a hybrid project focused on the painter Keith Vaughan, linking personal essays to lyric landscapes and dramatic scenes. This is a diptych-like companion to my first collection, as Vaughan was also a twentieth-century queer Brit who committed suicide, though he lived a very different life from Turing. An ardent diarist, Vaughan took barbiturates to end the pain prolonged by cancer and who knows what else (he was called reclusive in the end); he recorded his last breaths in his journal’s final pages.
The working title is Close Relative, a poetic sequence that reimagines what links us, what makes it possible for us to embrace and honor impermanence, vulnerability. How we must change if we are to endure change. So far, these poems are loose and highly associative. My favorite stray limb from the work-in-progress thus far is about the South African hyrax, a stubby rock dweller that superficially resembles a gopher or a marmot but is actually much more closely related to the manatee and elephant. What are poems if not enormities reimagined in the smallest clothes possible?
Tobias Wray’s debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, won the Lighthouse Poetry Prize (CSU, 2021). His work appears in Bellingham Review, Blackbird, Hunger Mountain, and Meridian. Poems also appear in The Queer Nature Anthology (Autumn House, 2021) and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures (Seagull Books, 2021). He directs the University of Idaho's Creative Writing Programs, where he lives on the Palouse with his hiking partner. Find work at www.tobiaswray.com.
