Sally Rosen Kindred’s chapbook Says the Forest to the Girl came out in 2018 from Porkbelly Press. This beautiful collection explores the intersection of fairy tale with domestic life and the human body. Sally has graciously answered some questions about her writing process and the chapbook as a form.
Stacey Balkun: Says the Forest to the Girl is your fourth published book! You’ve already published two full-length collections and one chapbook. How/why did you decide that this manuscript would be a chapbook in form, as opposed to a shorter series or longer collection?
Sally Rosen Kindred: While there are writers I know who think a chapbook should be a poet’s first foray into publishing a collection—a “starter” project only, before writing a book—I’m not one of them. My first collection was a chapbook, but I’ve also returned to chaps twice now, between full-length collections, because the poems have dictated the shape of the project. For me there’s an organic process that happens—a messy one!—that determines the length and emotional pitch of a set of poems.
I think I also haven’t stopped writing chapbooks because I haven’t stopped reading them. I love the intimacy and intensity of the relationship with a collection of poems this length, one you can sit down and read all at once. I think authors often take thematic and formal risks in chapbooks that they don’t in full-length collections. There are some ideas that poets may not be ready to explore for the duration of a full-length book, that they can fling themselves into for twenty wild pages!
SB: How did you come to the subject matter for this manuscript?
SRK: I started by writing a few persona poems from fairy-tale characters’ perspectives. I was rereading Grimm tales, really for my own pleasure, and, inspired by poets I admire like Anne Sexton and Louise Glück, started drafting without a plan. These initial poems looked at domestic life.
Then life interrupted these exercises with my own “once upon a time” moment, I guess. I got sick with a chronic illness and began a journey to, or really through, diagnosis. Now when I sat down to write, my interest in Grimm tales intersected with this new struggle, and I wrote Little Red, the chapbook’s second poem, which considered the path through the woods as a path to a changed body. That experience deepened and complicated my interest in fairy tales and the writing I was doing in conversation with them.
SB: Did you plan for it to be a chapbook all along, or did the poems surprise you when they came together?
SRK: I definitely didn’t plan for it to be a chapbook until maybe the final third of its evolution! It was a set of poems…then a set of longer poems. It was, for a while, going to be a section of a full-length manuscript—but as I wrote more of those poems, and that collection itself changed shape, I felt like it grew away from what the fairy-tale poems were doing. Ultimately I realized there was a chapbook emerging—a narrative arc lifting out of a broader set of fairy-tale poems. So to arrange this, I had to excavate it from a larger set of work.
SB: What do you want your reader to gain—or what experience would you like your reader to have—from reading this chapbook?
SRK: Writing poems that engage with fairy tales means increasing the odds that a reader may arrive at the page with some investment in them. I love the idea of readers bringing their childhood familiarity, even intimacy, with Little Red’s woods and Sleeping Beauty’s spindle to this chapbook, and having their feelings enriched—affirmed in some ways, surprised in others. The chapbook’s length lends itself to reading in one sitting, which has the potential to charge the reader’s relation to the poems, and to see them in conversation with each other—as a single journey, an organic emotional experience. I hope that happens sometimes with these poems.
SB: Says the Forest to the Girl is such a mysterious and beautiful title! How did you come up with it?
SRK: I wanted Says the Forest to the Girl (the title of a poem near the book’s center) to foreground the element of voice, because the chapbook features persona poems, and because the notion of personal identity, built into the act of “telling,” is thematically so important to the work. This title also offers “forest”—the atmosphere in many of these poems, suggesting wildness and danger—and “girl,” putting gender and the notion of girl-versus-woman out there on the cover as well. So I felt like this particular poem title represented some of what’s happening in the poems, including the magic of a forest speaking; in the title, I hope the reader gets a first breath of the whole chap.
SB: What has been your favorite part of the chapbook process?
SRK: My favorite part is always the writing. When I’m writing the kinds of poems that end up in a chapbook, where the poems are so knit together, I love how each day spent on it continues the work of the last in a way that adds to the excitement and momentum of the process. I also loved working with Nicci Mechler at Porkbelly Press on choosing the cover art (from a painting by Alexandra Eldridge), and seeing Nicci’s amazing vision at work as she designed the whole chapbook (and let me choose colors for note paper and thread!). The responses from readers to this chap have been amazing, too; their insights about the terrible beauties of fairy tales have taught me so much, and continue to do so.
Sally Rosen Kindred’s poetry collections are Book of Asters and No Eden (Mayapple Press), and her most recent chapbook is Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). She has received two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is a poetry editor for the Baltimore Review.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Eppur Si Muove, Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak, & Lost City Museum. Winner of the 2017 Women's National Book Association Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, and other anthologies & journals. Chapbook Series Editor for Sundress Publications, Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches poetry online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft. Visit her at www.staceybalkun.com.