0 Comments
 Son of a Bird, by Nin Andrews, Etruscan Press, 2025. Click image to view or purchase on Amazon. Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry The Mackinaw: Tell us something about your relationship with prose poetry. When and how did you become interested in this form? What was its appeal to you? Nin Andrews: I’ve always wished I could stop time. Even as a child. Or maybe especially as a child, living on a farm. I remember one of the first times I had this thought—I was given a pure white calf for my eighth birthday. I was smitten. I want to keep her like this forever, I wrote in loopy script in my journal. Calves, after all, are like puppies—sweet and affectionate, galloping in circles when they see you and sucking your hands and pants. I named her Nathalie after myself. A week later she came down with bovine pneumonia and had to be put down. After that, I was Nin. Nathalie was dead. Reading books, I had the same wish to stay in one place. I’d find a paragraph I loved, a moment in the story, and read it over and over. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for example, I ear-marked the page where Lucy first steps out of the wardrobe into snowy Narnia. Less interested in the plot, the battle between good and evil, I was fascinated by the idea that there are portals to other worlds. I liked to think about the instant when magic happens, when the impossible becomes a reality. When everything shines—as when a matchstick bursts into flame. I wanted to linger right there, in that moment. At the high point. Maybe that’s why my first book of poetry was The Book of Orgasms. Also, my parents were major influences on my literary development. My mother, a dairy farmer, studied Ancient Greek and Archeology at Bryn Mawr College. She raised me on the Greek myths and was forever reading aloud to her children. I used to think nobody could read as beautifully as my mother. But she read what she wanted to read—the Odyssey, for example, translated by Richard Lattimore, her favorite college professor. She also read aloud the original Grimm fairy tales, the Bible, fables and the Legends of King Arthur. We named our animals after characters from books. Merwin was a canister of prize bull semen. His offspring included Medusa, Methuselah, Moses, and Muse—the first letter of a name helped us keep track of bloodlines.
My father, from Tennessee and North Carolina, was a gifted raconteur in the true southern style. He loved to tell stories to entertain guests, beginning his stories with sentences like: “It happened on a day like no other day. Not a bird singing, not a leaf fluttering . . .” Every time he told a story, he added or subtracted salient details, occasionally changed the endings. The truth was of limited importance to him. My mother liked to correct him. “That’s not the way you told it last time.” Or, “There was nothing unusual about that day.” My father would flush with anger and tell her to hush up and listen. “Who cares what I said last time?” he’d ask. Sometimes I hear his voice when I’m writing, as in the poem below.
I came across prose poetry when I was assigned Michale Benedikt’s anthology, The Prose Poem, an International Anthology. I was instantly mesmerized. Here was a form that did what my mind naturally wished to do—it stayed on one page, often one paragraph. It could tell a tale in no time at all. It sometimes tipped its hat to myths and fairy tales and fables. It sometimes twisted the truth in order to entertain the reader and offer yet a different kind of truth. It offered surprises at every turn, and small moments of bliss and insight. It was something extraordinary masquerading as the ordinary. I thought, This is something I want to do . . . And it turns out, it’s something many of my favorite poets wanted to do as well. Poets like Rick Bursky, Charles Simic, James Tate, Russell Edson, David Keplinger, Peter Johnson, Gary Young, Kathleen McGookey, Amy Gerstler, Mary A. Koncel, Sally Ashton, James Tate, Louis Jenkins, Meg Pokrass, Jeff Friedman, and I could keep going. I’ll give a special mention to Peter Johnson who has always been one of my guiding lights. He continues to write and edit prose poetry collections that I return to again and again. The Australian prose poet, Cassandra Atherton, brings a whole new magic to the form, especially with her ekphrastic prose poems. Claire Bateman is a mystic from another world. And Shivani Mehta—she also has a unique and surreal voice, unlike any other poet I know. Her book, The Required Assembly, is coming out in March, 2025. How did you decide to write your memoirs? And to use prose poetry as a vehicle? Tell us about the journey to Son of a Bird. I can’t remember not wanting to be a writer. And I always thought I would one day tell my story. I love putting words on a page, the physical act of composing a list, a thought, a dream, a memory, a letter. Every aspect of writing is magic. As a child, I collected ink pens, crayons, chalk, paint, lined paper, unlined paper—I had a special attachment to the fat-lined paper we used in first grade, paper so thick and grainy, it looked like oatmeal and banana peels were ground into it. I remember Elly, the girl who sat in the desk beside me, liked to eat it. She’d stick out her tongue to show me a wad of spit-soaked paper. I’d look cross-eyed back at her, first with one eyeball looking at my nose, then the other, then both. “Do that again!” she’d say, and I would. Writing, art, and Elly were things I liked about first grade. There was also Tommy, who was usually bald. His stepfather wouldn’t take him to the barber. Instead, he shaved his head. Elly, Tommy, and I were three weirdos. Three future writers. But I digress. I loved penmanship, script, drawing. I loved words, pictures, clay. Anything that I could use to represent what was in the mind. But words were my favorite. My mother would ask, “In the beginning was the word? Or was it the apple of discord,” meaning does a story begin suddenly with God or in a flash of light, or does it begin with a conflict? I always voted for words. “Apple is a word,” I’d answer. “A shiny red word.” (I didn’t know then that she was quoting the New Testament and comparing it to the Iliad, that this was a variation on a question from one of her college exams.) My mother chose discord. Why discord? I would ask. Why does every great story include a poisonous apple? An evil king or thirteenth fairy or a fall from glory? Why did King David have to see Bathsheba in the bathtub? Why did Odysseus take so long to get home? Just as, why did my white calf have to get sick and die? But my mother argued that discord was key. It was character-building. Without it, there is no story. She liked to add that most once-upon-a-times end unhappily-ever after. It was years before I fully understood she might have been thinking about her own life. It was also years before I gave up on the idea that I could write a memoir that only talked about the memories I wanted to frame, the funny stories I love to tell—the light in my life and not the shadows. Years before I fully understood and wanted to talk about how much “character building” I had endured. And why my father hoped I would never write about my childhood. A therapist, too, advised me not to look back. As lucky as I was to have the educated and unusual parents I had (and I do think they are ideal parents for a writer), I was equally unlucky. I grew up as a feral cross-eyed farmgirl, the last child of six born in nine years. By the time I was born, my parents were tuckered out. “I was 41, like an old heifer by the time you were born,” my mother explained. “And you were such a sickly child. My gene pool must have been wiped out.” On the spectrum, my mother told it like it was. And she always compared our family to cows. Also, by the time I arrived, my parents’ marriage had begun to fray. My father was a gay man, and my mother had never had any other marital prospects. She wanted children, and he wanted to pass as heterosexual. In their early years of marriage and parenthood, they put on a good show, a show I never saw. My happiest times with them were when they were not in the same place at the same time, like the summer I stayed at home with my father when my mother was in Maine, when my father and I drank whiskey and watched the sunset night after night. My parents left me to my own devices. I was raised by farmhands, siblings and the wind. My name, Nin, came from a southern ditty, Where’s Nellie Paw Paw? She’s down by the river picking up pawpaws putting them in her pocket. According to my father, I was always wandering off into the fields and woods and getting into trouble. They often didn’t know where I was. One day, when they couldn’t find me, one of the farmhands discovered me by the creek, a pawpaw in one hand, a copperhead sunning on the rock beside me. “She’s a little ninny, that one,” the farmhand said. “A little Ninny Paw Paw.” I was three years old. Thanks to parental neglect, I almost died on several occasions. At four, I ate two bottles of children’s aspirin and had my stomach pumped; at six, I was swept away by a riptide on a family vacation and almost drowned. At twelve, I was hit by a car on a bike and delivered to the ER by a stranger. I was in the ER for hours before a doctor recognized me and called my father to ask if he was missing a daughter. And I’m not including the times I was bucked from ponies, butted by a young bull (okay, he was my pet, and I was playing matador), bitten by a stray dog. Or the eye surgery I almost didn’t wake from, and the surgeries that followed when I was sure I would never wake again. I spent time alone in hospitals, either waiting for or recovering from tests or surgery, wondering where my mother was.
But, according to my parents, I was also lucky to be operated on by a world-class eye surgeon, lucky that one day my eyes would be fixed, and I would pass for a normal girl and maybe attract a man. Not surprisingly, I became hospital-phobic and was haunted by nightmares and visions of death. Death appeared to me as a giant bird. It was a presence I saw at night, and I felt it during the day. Am I crazy? I wondered. An insomniac, I paced the halls of sock feet and suffered from bouts of nausea and high fevers. My mother slept soundly, no matter how sick her children were, but my father stayed awake and bathed me in ice cubes. He gave me so much aspirin and Sominex, after a while the pills didn’t work. Nothing did. I used to pray on my knees for the vision of death to go away. Try as I might, for years I could not write about these experiences. I didn’t understand what had happened to me. My story felt overwhelming, inexplicable, and embarrassing. I didn’t want to talk about what my mother called “my weakness,” my physical and mental illnesses—my apples of discord. And a part of me wondered, Who would want to hear all this? Then, in 2020, my son became seriously ill. Several times he came close to death. For two years he was in and out of hospitals. He spent nights in the ER, days in doctor’s offices, a week in the ICU, and weeks and weeks in hospital rooms. Sitting by his bedside, I remembered my own childhood medical experiences and brushes with death. Also, in our many hours together, my son asked me about my childhood, about the farm, my parents, and siblings. And I began to write this memoir. Perhaps it’s cliché to say this, but I felt, as I sat beside my son when he was hooked up to tubes and IVs in hospital rooms and ICUs, when I insisted on accompanying him to surgeries even during Covid when it was a battle to be allowed to so, that I was also sitting beside my childhood self, the girl who slept alone in hospital rooms. Initially, I tried writing a memoir in straight prose, but I find prose boring. Slow. Like writing in pencil. There’s something about the prose poem that holds the intensity of my memories. In your book, you recall telling your father you would be a writer, and getting a list of things not to write about. Does writing and sharing a memoir make you feel vulnerable or liberated? My father gave me all kinds of instructions on what and how I should and should not write. He didn’t want me to smear our family name. But, what was not on his list, what he really wanted to ask, that I not to write about his homosexuality. In order to dissuade me from trying, he often opined that no one can really write about the past.
My father believed in privacy. In hiding your true self. He taught me to be Nathalie in the world, and Nin at home. To be polite and mannerly in public, always say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” and “I’m just fine, thank you so much.” But if he asked how I was, he didn’t want me just to say, “fine thank you” to him. “Don’t bore me with pleasantries,” he’d say. He presented himself as heterosexual pillar of society in, but he invited gay “friends” to our farm. He would ask my mother not to talk about heifers at cocktail parties, but at home she could discuss whatever she wanted. Once, at a party, much to my father’s chagrin, she compared my father to a good bull—said she timed every one of her children’s birthdates. And yes, I feel vulnerable. I have exposed our family in exactly the way my father feared I would. People still remember and respect my parents and talk to me about them. But I didn’t write this book to expose anyone. I wanted to gain some clarity about my past. What kind of revelations, epiphanies, or understandings did you come to while writing your book? I thought if I wrote this memoir, I’d come away disliking my parents. Instead, I realized how much I love them. My mother taught me about nature, plants, farm animals, Greek mythology, fables, fairy tales, words—so many profound loves she passed on to me. And my father, thanks to his homosexuality, was unlike other dads. Artistic and imaginative and funny and irreverent, to see the façade of society. “Pretensions,” he once said, “is all we are.” He also taught me to love whiskey.
You write frankly about eternal human issues like gender, race, sexuality, and family dynamics. Were there specific parts of the book where you had trouble finding the words? Tell us about some of the challenges you faced in telling your story. I find it very difficult to write about the past, but not because of any eternal human issues. It’s hard to bring what feels as huge as the sky onto a single page or into a prose poem. Race, gender, sexuality, family—they are the air I breathe and breathed. They are the vocabulary of my life. What was hardest? I felt my parents watching from the other side, especially my father. “Don’t write that down,” he’d say, and I would. Both parents wanted the family to be as unreal and unknowable as the words, happily ever after. Were there other poets, writers, or specific books that inspired you to write yours? I wish. I tried to find books to use as models, but I didn’t find them. I saw other books that were supposed to be memoirs in prose poetry, but they seemed to be collections of prose poems or memoirs. Not both. I suspect I was influence by my earliest loves: southern women writers like Eudora Welty, Flanner O’Connor, Harper Lee, Frank Stanford. And later Dorothy Alison. But I didn’t read them while I was writing this book. What’s next for Nin Andrews? I am taking a little break and letting the dust settle after writing Son of Bird. This book took the wind out of my sails. But I have been working on a few loose ends and occasional poems and writing blog posts for Best American Poetry. I am waiting for my next theme to announce itself. 
Jumpy I don’t know why she was so jumpy, but it got to a point where I couldn’t say a blessed thing before she’d be at me. This morning took the cake. “Well, my dear, you do look lovely today, lovely as dawn.” and what I got was, “I’ll give you lovely, so all of a sudden I’m lovely, after years of ignoring me, not paying me the slightest compliment, deceiving me with those underage tramps, refusing to part with a couple of dollars, like last week, so I can buy a new pair of stockings, so why, tell me why, out of the blue, am I lovely? I’ve heard it all, now really heard it all.” “But my dear darling.” “But, but. You’re always with you but buts. How much more of this do you expect me to listen to? How much more can I take? And your calling me a cow the other day! What unbridled nerve!” “My sweet, you misunderstood. I know I may have been too forward in my reaction at the time of our disagreement but all I said was the I’d rather not be cowed. But my honeypot, what’s making you so jumpy?” And here she let it all out. “Jumpy? I’ll show you jumpy, you failure, you dirty tissue, you undercooked woodcock.” And at that she began to physically jump. “So, you want to see jumpy, do you?” He was stunned by her vehemence and couldn’t guess what brought on such a tantrum. He stepped forward, extended his arm to calm her, to offer solace but tripped on her skip rope. The minute she saw him down, flat on his back, she jumped on his belly, taking the wind quite out of him, and didn’t let up, up and down, up and down. “But, pumpkin,” he gasped. “The nerve, calling me jumpy, you lout, you poor, poor excuse for a trampoline.” And she kept at it until the cows came home. ** Any Moment Now The conference ballroom jam-packed, anxious expectation in the air, 5 minutes to showtime. What would he say? How would he stir their souls? But showtime came and went and the stage remained empty. A massive blue screen displayed, in an ornate but miniscule, and almost unreadable, font the white-lettered words, Program to Begin Momentarily. After 15 minutes of nothingness, we began looking at each other uncomfortably. Had something happened to the speaker? A young kid with a mop over one shoulder came up to adjust the mic. Aside from annoying buzzing sounds and echoes and his coughing into it, intentionally it appeared, he brought no news about the missing speaker. People gradually started to leave. After ½ hour, only ½ the audience remained in their seats, fidgeting. The lights were finally dimmed, and everyone applauded, assuming the show was ready to begin but through the sound system, a distinctly Irish-accented voice boomed, asking people to hold tight for a few more moments. The exodus continued. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I jumped up on the stage, “Welcome, friends,” I said, “forgive the delay. I was just making some last-minute notes.” ½ the remaining people applauded and ½ booed but I was not deterred and continued at length about The Great Alternative, the advertised subject of the evening. The heretofore apathetic crowd began perking up their ears, nodding their heads, interrupting me frequently with applause. How outsiders different from the people who abandoned their seats got wind of what was happening, I don’t know, but the ballroom filled up again, and to overflowing. Although I thought I carried it off passably well, I was astounded by the favorable reception I received. I was rushed by well-wishers. My wrist is still sore from giving autographs and my shoulders from being slapped in congratulations. The bouquets of roses were more than I deserved but I gladly accepted all. On my way out with several hangers-on who insisted on feting me at a five-star restaurant, the announcement on the screen changed to We are Ready to Begin. We all had a good laugh at that one. ** Winnings Seated around the table with an empty spot at its head, four players anxiously awaited the tall no-nonsense shuffler, a welder’s visor concealing his eyes, who finally arrived and slid into his designated spot without delay. He was accompanied by a young boy with a leather satchel over his shoulder. The boy removed and opened a collapsible stool and took a seat next to the shuffler who impassively said “red.” The boy pulled out a fresh deck of red cards. The shuffler ripped the seal off the package with his teeth. He shuffled slowly before gathering steam, quickening the pace, and interleaving the cards so quickly that no more than a blur was visible. The players eyed each other nervously. All at once, he squared up the deck and slapped it smack in the center of the table, reverberating from the impact. Up went his visor. “Cut,” he ordered. No one knew whom he was addressing. The confusion was laid to rest when the boy cut the cards. “Ready, gents?” he asked, though there was a woman in the group. Silently but in unison they gulped and, all of one mind, started to bolt for the door. “Pansies!” he derided them, “get back to your positions,” and they did. “The boy will deal.” He relinquished his seat to the youth, and everyone relaxed. The game proceeded as he retired to a workbench in a corner where he sharpened and honed an ultra-sharp, case-hardened knife. “Won’t be but a moment” he shouted over the din and sparks. Everyone was dealt two cards face down, instructed to look at them, put one in each hand, and place their hands behind their chair backs. Lickety-split, the boy circled the table and handcuffed them all. “All right, chaps, let’s have at it,” announced the shuffler. It was a festive scene as he went from one to the next, slitting throats and watching them slump forward on the table and drop their cards behind them. He flung away his visor and emptied their wallets one by one. As he added up his winnings, the boy crept up behind him and used a length of copper wire to strangle the shuffler. He tucked the ace of spades behind his right ear, pocketed the cash, wished everyone a pleasant eternity, and whistled with youthful delight as he shuffled off. ** The Pineapple Under the Umbrella or He’s Shy I was concerned, as any sympathetic passerby would be, seeing the slightly dented and off-balance pineapple on the ground, under the open but bent, tattered, and leaking umbrella, the both of them unprotected from the pouring rain flooding through the abandoned elevated tracks. “What’s the news, friend?” I asked the pineapple, “you look soaked to the bone. You must be chilled. I’d rescue you, you know, but I’m homeless myself. Is there anything I can do to help? I can spare you a towel.” The pineapple didn’t say a word. “Don’t hesitate, please. I see you’re losing your juice. That must be painful. Should I call 911? Please, say something.” The pineapple was silent. “Tell you what. I’ve got a pal. He’s got a tent. Let’s me sleep in it now and then when it’s not filled with the junk he gathers to sell. I bet he could find a spot for you. Just give me your okay. Why don’t you say anything?” At that, the umbrella interjected, “Don’t take offense, sir, he’s shy.” I scooped it up and held it against my body, under my frayed raincoat. Inside the dry tent, it gained enough courage to thank me and even ask why I didn’t bring along the umbrella while I was at it. It’s true, I put a lower value on the bumbershoot, a manmade construct, and also assumed it was comfortable in its element but answered sincerely that I would have rescued his friend just as well. I wondered why the umbrella didn’t ask for my assistance. “Well, you see,” the pineapple stuttered, “he’s shy.” ** Squirrel Dilemmas A dead and a live squirrel were conversing. From the branch of the maple, the live squirrel shouted down to the stiff, splayed squirrel next to the storm drain, “How did it happen, friend?” “Food poisoning,” I think, answered the dead squirrel. “This kid threw me a peanut butter cracker. God knows what it was laced with.” “You must mean Freddie down the street; I’ve been wise to that 10-year-old for quite a while. “I wish I had the sense to resist,” said the dead squirrel, “but you know how it is …” “Anything I can do for you?” asked the live squirrel.” “I guess a proper burial is too much to ask for?” “I’m afraid so, given our cultural climate,” said the live squirrel, “but I should be able to manage something.” So, he climbed down, off the tree, and nudged the dead squirrel into the storm drain. “My eternal thanks,” he heard its voice echo on the way down. Just then, Freddie was meandering down the street and casually taking peanut butter crackers, one by one, out of his coat pocket and dropping them onto the street every fifty of so paces. “But I’m so hungry,” reflected the live squirrel. ** The Teeny Tinies They were neither people nor animals nor anything one could grasp or lay hold of, neither spirits nor sprites, but real, nonetheless. An individual one is too small to see with the naked eye. It’s in their conglomeration as they glob together, one overlapping another, and spread out, in their multitudes, and swell in their vastness, only then do they turn from teeny tiny to just tiny. At that point, if certain meteorological conditions are favorable, they turn visible, but just barely with the help of an electron microscope. And yes, their movement, when viewed with such an aid, is not entirely negligible. Indeed, to them, at their diminutive level, though you wouldn’t know it, they might be swirling with devotion. And wait, is that music they are cavorting to? The audio equipment seems to be detecting a faint buzz suggesting, on top of everything else, that they may be desperately trying to communicate from their teeny-weeny cosmos. They may be in danger, threatened, on the verge of collapse or extinction or, maybe, they just want to say, “Greetings, we come in pieces.” ** Philip Wexler lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Well over 200 0f his poems have appeared in magazines. His poetry books include The Sad Parade (prose poems), and The Burning Moustache, both published by Adelaide Books, The Lesser Light by Finishing Line Press, With Something Like Hope (Silver Bow Publishing) and I Would be the Purple (Kelsay Books), the latter three all published in 2022. Bozo's Obstacle is due for release later in 2024 by In Case of Emergency Press. He also organizes and hosts Words out Loud, a monthly spoken word series convened at the Compass Art Center in Kensington, Maryland. |
2025The Mackinaw is published every Monday, with one author's selection of prose poems weekly. There are occasional interviews, book reviews, or craft features on Fridays. Archives
April 2025
|
