Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry

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.  ​

If I were sick or recovering from eye surgery with one eye patched, my mother would enter my room without a hello or a how are you, sit in the corner rocking chair, and begin to read aloud. She didn’t read children’s stories or fairy tales (unless they were the original Brothers Grimm)—she couldn’t tolerate “those ghastly saccharine endings.” Instead, a Classics scholar, she usually chose a passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey, a Greek myth, or a tale of Ancient Athens and Sparta. “The Greek gods were just as unreasonable and cruel as our own,” she would announce happily as Odysseus sailed further and further from his beloved Penelope who spent her life weaving and unravelling her husband’s burial shroud. “Now that’s a woman’s life for you,” she would sigh, adding “devotion is clearly over-rated.” Sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t listening, she would recite passages in Ancient Greek, the strange words like insects crawling into my thoughts and nesting in the dark hollows of my bones. ​

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. 

There hadn’t been a drop of rain since April when a hot wind blew into town after the dogwood blossom festival and coated the streets in white petals. If you had been riding in a plane and just happened to look down, you might have thought it was snow, but in a few days all the petals turned brown and smelled like rotten apricots. I’d never smelled rotten apricots before then, but when I smell them now, I think of that year when I turned twelve, when everything went south, the year I first understood my parents’ marriage wasn’t like everyone else’s, the year the chickens stopped laying, the cows’ milk soured before it reached the table, and the corn barely came out of the ground before the earworms and the Japanese beetles moved in, and all their tassels turned to slime. It was year folks called a good year to die since no one was having any fun being alive. In fact, the local paper had to hire extra staff just to cover the obituaries. Or that’s what my father said. My mother said, “The man exaggerates. You can’t believe a word he says.” My father just sat in the corner chair, rocking, staring into space, the rhythmic squeak-squeak of the screws coming loose, his only response.

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.
 

According to my mother, her children were much stronger than their suburban classmates—just as her Ayrshire cows were healthier than the Holsteins on neighboring farms. Never mind that I suffered from frequent fevers, flus, sore throats, night sweats, hallucinations, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, mumps, measles, pin worms, chicken pox and some unidentified illness that kept me home from school for weeks at a time. Or that I was “a bit accident prone,” as she put it.  I was stung by swarms of bees, bitten by stray dogs, clawed by feral cats, bucked from horses, butted by a bull, and one morning, found unconscious on the side of the road by a truck driver who delivered me and my bicycle to the hospital.  That afternoon, a doctor called my father and reported that an unidentified girl, who looked suspiciously like one of his was out cold in the ER. Was he, by chance, missing a daughter?

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.

 “The past is gone and you can’t get it back,” my father always said. But I want to tell him, you can still visit. The farmland is there, and my mother’s shadow lingers in the doorway of the stone house. I can see her now, tilting her head, as if listening for the songs of the heifers in the fields, the horses in the stalls, the Rottweilers and beagles in the front yard under the tulip poplars, the thirty stray cats in the hayloft or sleeping in the sun, the six sows in the sty before we ate them, one by one, the bantam rooster and his nine hens before the red fox picked them off, running across the alfalfa field each morning with a fresh kill in his mouth. Gone, too, is the parakeet my father kept in the tack room, the parakeet that died from heatstroke or lack of water and once, a peanut, and was always replaced by an identical yellow-green budgie who dehydrated or was cooked on a July day so hot, the barn was a frying pan with the lid on tight. (After a while, I never knew which parakeet was in the cage—Tony or Tanya or Tina or Teensy or Tallulah.) And the bees my father kept in wooden hives that flew through the holes in our screens and drowned in our cocktail glasses. The black racers and rat snakes that slithered across the floorboards in our attic. Snakes, according to my mother, were better than the Orkin man at keeping the rodent population down. I lay awake at night, listening to the swish-swish overhead, the sound like ladies’ skirts sweeping the floor as they danced.  

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.
 

Whiskey on the rocks, my father’s evening drink. Mine, whiskey sours: whiskey, lemon, sugar. “Lots of sugar,” I’d say as my father poured and stirred it in with his finger. My first drink, I was four. “Just a small glass,” my father said as my mother looked on. I pressed the cold tumbler against my forehead and held it up to see the light coming through the liquid, golden like the meadow in August, like Triscuits, like the halo in paintings of Christ.  I tilted my head back and sipped. It was love at first taste: the sweetness, the burn, the glow inside my head.

 
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. 
 
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