I Tell Henrietta: an Interview with Tina Barry

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The Mackinaw: Tina, tell us about your new collection, I Tell Henrietta. What’s it
all about? Who is Henrietta?
 
Tina Barry: Well, thanks for asking, Lorette! 
 
The book started in early 2022, after a young family member suffered a medical crisis. We’re a pretty close-knit group, so the experience shook us badly. I couldn’t write for a few months afterwards. I just couldn’t get anything on paper. When they began to recover, and the shock started to ease, I was able to start a few pieces. Many of the darkest works have fallen out of the manuscript. They were pieces that I needed to write but not to publish. As I wrote them, though, themes emerged. The first was water, its pleasure and peril. An early piece, “Questioning the Lake,” focuses on that turmoil, and was the first poem that introduced Henrietta:
 
“…Why did Henrietta’s question evoke the lake,
its image lodged now like the shadow of a lover’s hand?
Perhaps to cling to pleasure after months of famine,
to feel the lake’s fleecy bottom,
how its cool fingers circled my neck
but never let me drown.”
 
As the writing progressed, the pleasure of water became more important. And then swans swam in, which brought back memories of a year-long obsession that I had with drawing them.  
 
There is a real Henrietta but my Henrietta – confidant, sometimes skeptical kind spirit – is a fictional character, a kind-of portal to funnel my stories through.
 
The Mackinaw: Your book is mostly prose poems, a form you are known for writing. Can you tell us why prose poetry? How did you get here? What are some
things you’ve discovered or learned along the way?
 
Tina Barry: Well, I write in a lot of different forms, but I’m happiest and most inspired in that gray area between poetry and prose. What I love about prose poems, is the way the form encourages leaps in time and experience. My narrative doesn’t have to follow a linear path, the way short fiction might, and because it leans toward poetry, it demands the same attention to word choice, sound and imagery. 
 
Getting into prose poetry was a kind of reductive journey. When I first started writing creatively, I began with memoir pieces that were a few pages long. I got up my courage to read at an open mic that had strict time limits: no more than eight minutes, and my story was a good ten to twelve. I edited out all the parts that I had been hanging on to but I knew needed to go, cut and cut, and the piece was better—a lot better. And from there, the challenge of creating a narrative in few words became an addiction. It still is. 
 
Around that time, I started graduate school and began to write poetry, and then I’d toggle back and forth between lineated pieces and the prose form, until they came together in prose poems. 
 
The Mackinaw: Many of your prose poems also work as microfictions. How much stock do you put in the distinctions between genres and their labels?
 
Tina Barry: The only time I really think about how to label a piece is when I submit it to a literary magazine. There are times when the writing really could go either way – a prose poem or a micro, but as I’m writing, I don’t try to push the work one way or the other to fit a particular criteria. Nathan Leslie, who kindly blurbed the book, called the pieces “vividly unclassifiable,” and I like that description a lot. 
 
The Mackinaw: You collaborated with artist Kristin Flynn in this collection. Tell us
something about the experience of working together on this book.
 
Tina Barry: I met Kristin in 2018, when I created The Virginia Project, an exhibit of fourteen women artists who responded to my writing. Kristin wasn’t in the show, but she brought her college class to see it, and we became friends. I loved Kristin’s art right away. It’s unapologetically narrative, like a visual diary of her life and the people in it. Her images are so beautifully rendered, with moody coloration and a dark viewpoint, that she balances with humour. She found my writing had similar qualities. We wanted to collaborate on a project, so when I started working on the Henrietta pieces, I mentioned the work to Kristin, and we were off. 
 
I’d send her a few poems and she’d pick the ones that resonated for her. Our back and forth was pretty exciting. And surprising. I have a visual arts background; I was a designer for a couple of decades, and when I write, I envision every moment. Kristin would send me an email with her attached sketches, and it was always, Wow! That’s not how I imagined it at all. But I loved her interpretations. Her image “Why Mermaids Upset Me,” that responds to my piece with the same title, though, was literally plucked out of my head. She really caught the man’s cold leer. 

The Mackinaw: Do you have a few favourites here? Tell us about some of the poems that are especially meaningful to you, and why?
 
Tina Barry: Well, “I Question the Lake,” which I’ve mentioned, touched on my family’s emotions during our darkest time, but there’s hope there, too. “Lily World,” because it pays tribute to my mother’s love for visual art, her desire to share it with my sister and me, and its impact on our lives. And “Rusty,” about the worst kind of boyfriend, was fun to write.

The Mackinaw: Were any of these prose poems especially difficult to write? Why? How did they eventually come together?
 
Tina Barry: “Why Chinchilla is my Favorite Fur,” brought back memories of how my mother struggled after my father left. That chinchilla-edged dress became a metaphor for the before and after of her life during that time, and how my father’s leaving impacted my sister and me. “I Mention the Deer,” for the horror of the animal’s killing, but also for the realization that people could surprise me in ways that hurt. “Her Life Now,” about my mother’s decline, was a hard one to write. The poem speaks to loss of youth, both mine and my mother’s, how she’s now at the end of her life and needs to be cared for as one would care for a child. The kind of role-reversal that neither of us wanted, and yet it’s inevitable. 

The Mackinaw: Who are some prose poets that you find especially inspiring?
 
Tina Barry: There are a lot! When I teach prose poetry workshops, I usually start with one of Charles Baudelaire’s pieces. Oh, let’s see…Russell Edson, Francine Witte, Mikki Aronoff, You (and I’m not just saying that!), Meg Pokrass. I read all of your work, and think, I wish I had written that. 

The Mackinaw: What are you reading right now?
 
Tina Barry: I read Kim Noriega’s Naming the Roses (Aim Higher, Inc.) a few poems at a time, and then put the book down for a day or three. The poems were that complex, seductive, a gut-punch to the heart.

I’ve read Christine Coulson’s One Woman Show several times, and I love and admire it more each time. As a former visual artist, the form – a story revealed in a series of museum labels – appeals to me. But the narrative goes far beyond that conceit. It’s the life story of a particular porcelain figurine, its status in an elite social circle, and its demise, that I found pitch perfect and surprisingly moving. ​

The Mackinaw: What’s next for Tina Barry?
 
Tina Barry: I have a couple of chapbooks in the works, and I’d love to collaborate with an artist again, maybe a musician. I also have a book of fiction and poetry that I started in 2020, right as Covid struck, that I’d like to return to, so lots of irons in the fire.

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Tina Barry is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024), Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019) and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic Review, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Rattle, Verse Daily, trampset, Gone Lawn, A-Minor, the Maryland Literary Review, SoFloPoJo, MER, and The Indianapolis Review.  Tina has several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She teaches poetry and short fiction at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.


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Scroll down below to read samples of Tina Barry's new collection.

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Read some of Tina Barry's prose poems in the second issue of The Mackinaw:
https://www.themackinaw.net/tina-barry.html

Aim Higher, Inc., 2024. Click on image to see or buy on Amazon.