PC: You’re also a prolific book reviewer, and have written a number of reviews for The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. How does your life as a book reviewer, as a critic, complement, inform, and add to your life as a writer?
Polly: Right after college, I began a Ph.D. program in English literature at the University of Washington. Four years later I dropped out. (Actually, I went on leave so I could keep my email account and library privileges, but I had no intention of returning.) I couldn’t see trying to write a dissertation and stories at the same time. Some years later, in my MFA program at The New School, I was back to writing about books. This time I really enjoyed it. I was looking at books as a reader and a writer, rather than attempting to make arguments I wasn’t equipped to make, in a scholarly voice that didn’t sound like my own. I decided to try my hand at book reviewing and realized that I’d found my critical form. I like the limited word count: usually only 700 words or so—both a challenge and a relief. I like that reviewing allows me to engage with contemporary fiction and non-fiction as an active reader (I have a reason to underline again!). And I like the opportunity to immerse myself in the work of a particular writer, if only for a brief time.
PC: Yet another one of the many lovely and fancy hats that you wear: you’re also a teacher, currently at the college level, but you also were a Writer-in-Residence in the schools and worked in after-school programs teaching creative writing. How has teaching writing—with adults and with youth—informed your own writing and your life?
Polly: Teaching writing has been such a big part of my life, but whenever I try to pronounce upon it, I feel like a tongue-tied student. I find it hard to speak about in broad terms. What I think of are the moments I’ve watched students react to a poem we’ve read aloud, or come up with a great line, or stand in front of an audience of their peers, presenting this thing that they’ve made out of words. I’ve been tremendously lucky to have the opportunity to teach creative writing to elementary and middle schoolers through organizations like the Richard Hugo House and Seattle Arts & Lectures. To encourage kids to be playful with language and to take pleasure in all its possibilities is to remind yourself (your world-weary adult writer self) of the great fun of it. A seventh grader I worked with in an afterschool creative writing club wrote an ars poetica poem called “Wish Upon Poetry” that begins, “May we not lose our imaginations / to the mascara, the gloss, and everything in between / to math, or gym, or the lawyers in court,” and ends, “Let poetry be grumpy, energetic, and even loopy /May poetry fall upon many minds like moonlight shines.” Wherever she is now, I thank her for these lovely and inspiring lines.
As a prose writer, I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud teaching poetry, but I actually enjoy that segment of my introductory creative writing classes at Eastern Michigan University the most.
So many of my students come into class with the idea that poetry is inherently intimidating, impenetrable. It’s greatly satisfying to challenge expectations of what poetry is and does, and to see students fall in love with particular poems and become involved in the process of tinkering with words. As for teaching fiction, it’s a good reminder that—whatever I find myself pronouncing upon—I’d better hold my own writing to those same standards.
PC: In addition to being a fiction writer, teacher, book reviewer, critic, journalist, essayist and so much more, you’re also a mom. Can you talk more about how motherhood coincides with your writing, and how you try to balance your writing life and home life? And, if this balance is hard to strike, how will this residency help with that balance?
Polly: When I get grumbly about not doing enough writing-wise, my partner likes to remind me that I’ve accomplished more in the past few years since my daughter was born, in terms of publications anyway, than in the preceding years. My grumbly retort is, "Well, okay, but I should have gotten much more done earlier." The truth is I’ve always been a slow writer and my mode is to take baby steps until I finally finish something. When she’s coloring, my daughter likes me to write various names down on the page amidst her scribbles—her name, my name, her dad’s name, her dolls’ names. Once, I suggested she do it herself. She stood with her crayon poised on the page for a moment and then said plaintively, “I don’t know how to write.” I often feel the same way. I won’t say that motherhood has made me more patient (though it certainly has made me more aware of how impatient I am). But I like to think it’s made me more joyful about small triumphs, which can keep one pressing onward in spite of difficulty. How wonderful it will be when my daughter puts a pencil to paper and begins to form her letters, however misshapen and clumsy they may be.
Also, I don’t recommend this as a financially sound get-to-work strategy, but the fact that I’m literally paying for my writing time (childcare isn’t cheap) does act as a motivator. As for your question—how will the residency help with the perpetual writing life/home life balance? Well, it will, for two weeks anyway, tip the scale 100% in favor of the writing life!
PC: What are you currently reading? Who are some of your favorite writers?
Polly: I just finished Marisa Silver’s great new novel, Mary Coin. Silver managed to accomplish something I’ve always wanted to do—to fictionalize the life of an artist (and her subject) without sounding pretentious about the artistic process, or leaving the reader with the feeling that writing about artists and art is best left to critics and biographers. In telling a story about Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph, “Migrant Mother,” Silver builds excitement around the history of that image, and personalizes the question of what photography can and can’t do. I’m in the middle of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn, the story collection that won this year’s Story Prize. After pointing out some problems in the draft of a story I’ve been working on, a friend assigned me one of Watkins’ stories to read as homework. By the time I’m done reading the collection, I hope to have fully absorbed her brilliant lessons. And I’ve also been reading a new poetry manuscript that my partner, Cody Walker, is finishing up now. (Incidentally, he completed his first manuscript, which became his book Shuffle and Breakdown, during a Poetry Center residency in 2006.) To steal a joke from Wendy Cope’s poem “Favourite,” Cody’s my favorite poet, and I like his poems too.
Other favorites? For short stories, Lorrie Moore, Aimee Bender, Anthony Doerr, Alice Munro, George Saunders. For reviews, the New York Times’ fantastic Dwight Garner.
PC: And, since you’re coming to Tucson for a whole month, what would you rather write: a short story about a man who turns into a saguaro cactus, a children’s story about a misunderstood Gila monster, or an interview with a Suburban pool?
Polly: I wish I had the inventiveness and wherewithal to produce all of these. I’m hopelessly trapped in realism. Could I conscript an imaginative kid to write them and then pass them off as my own?