By Rachel Swearingen
Laura Donnelly’s second book of poetry, Midwest Gothic, is an eerie and fantastic meditation on childhood, on inheritance and artifacts that are passed down by largely invisible, sturdy and self-reliant women. Garden flowers, trees, and the natural world figure strongly here, and there is tension between the wild and the cultivated, a reverence for the undervalued roles of everyday plants and trees and pets. Donnelly revisits the themes of music and family prominent in her first book, Watershed, but focuses on the edges of memory to unearth what she refers to as “matrilineal history.” In many of the poems, there is a reclaiming of a feminine brand of Dutch Midwestern pragmatism as the speaker tries to redefine mother and father and self and home. Perimeters, boundaries, and tempos shift and change throughout. These poems seem to erase and rewrite themselves line by line.
You included an epigraph from Lorine Niedecker’s “Wintergreen Ridge” that reads “Who saved it?— / Women / of good wild stock.” Women, especially ancestral women, appear through Midwest Gothic. Can you tell us a bit about how the book, and this larger theme of women of “good wild stock,” came into being?
My maternal grandmother passed away in the early 2010s, and I began dreaming about her old house and her belongings, which were packed away in boxes. I’d been close to her, so the grief wasn’t a surprise, but the direction of those dreams—back and back again to the house she’d long lived in, and where I’d often stayed in childhood—haunted me. I started writing poems that went back to childhood memory in that place. Many of these didn’t end up in the book, but they started things off. And I gradually realized the book was as much about a matrilineal history as it was about my own immediate memories.
The manuscript initially had an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” but in 2016 I immersed myself in reading Niedecker, and in January 2017 I pulled her lines into the book. This was, of course, shortly after the 2016 election, around the time of the Women’s March. I began feeling more keenly what had been carrying the book all along, and then I revised towards that.
In “Wintergreen Ridge,” Niedecker describes women gathering to fight back against developers that have come to level a field in Wisconsin. The next lines of the poem describe how women “Stood stolid / before machines / They stopped bulldozers // cold / We want it for all time / they said / and here it is —.” I feel some friction as I hold these lines; Niedecker, like my Dutch ancestors in Michigan, is not native to the place with which she’s deeply associated, and I think it’s important to remember that. But she’s speaking to a way of being in a place that sides with the earth, with something generative and communal instead of exploitative. It’s a poem that speaks to the resilience of the land, too. There’s a kinship between the women and those plants and the ways both keep on, which was also emerging as a major theme in Midwest Gothic.
That sense of resilience ripples throughout the book, but it’s never romanticized. It comes at a price. The title poem offers a vision of matrilineal history that has an undercurrent of violence: nylons tying back a broken lilac branch; a basement flooded with a mother sitting on the stoop holding a spoon; bread rising and being punched down. Did your understanding of the Midwest change or evolve through writing this poem? When did you first begin to recognize that you were working with a gothic sensibility?
The title poem was one of the first I wrote for the book, and it initially seemed like a one-off poem where I explore this gothic understanding of the place I’m from. But the poem ended with the mother’s directive to “find your way back,” and I realized the poem was only scratching the surface of something more I needed to write about.
I think of the Gothic as a genre that digs into the hidden, and while that may manifest in hauntings or horrors, those hauntings are rooted in bigger anxieties about identity, culture, history, religion…. The area of the Midwest that I’m writing about still has a heavy dose of the Puritan ethos that influenced early American Gothic. As a child, I believed the rapture might happen any day. Like, maybe next Tuesday? There’s much of the gothic to be found in childhood memories steeped in this worldview, and in the violence of the systems of patriarchy and white supremacy that were similarly embedded in this culture. I’m also interested in the lineage of the feminist Gothic (a la Charlotte Perkins Gilman), where something as seemingly simple as a woman in a room with some strange wallpaper can be harrowing and revelatory.
While I’ve titled the book for the region, I know I don’t speak for all of it unless it’s to say there is more here than meets the eye. The surprise, for me, was that in finding my way back to my mother’s story in this place, I encountered a wild sort of resilience, not the bootstrap variety but something much different, a counter narrative from which I might begin to build.
I love how this counternarrative develops as the book progresses. One of the earlier poems in the book, “Charlotte Sometimes,” deals with a lost and unfinished book from childhood and ends with: “The white eyelet dress / a figment, one of the first / fictions left behind.” Throughout this collection, there’s a cataloging of family artifacts towards re-examining family lore. Can you tell us more about this? Was there much research involved in the book? Were there any particular artifacts or interior spaces that were especially important?
Around the time I started Midwest Gothic, a lot of my grandmother and great-grandmothers’ possessions made their way to my mother’s basement in a series of cardboard boxes (probably why I was having those dreams!). I felt simultaneously enrapt and horrified by their arrival. Horrified because there was a bit of a feeling of the walls closing in, enrapt because it felt like the ghosts of these women were there. There were boxes of clipped recipes and balls of used twine. Some of my grandmother’s belongings had been picked up at garage sales thinking she’d return to them in her retirement – like a bunch of dolls and doll parts she thought she’d restore. But then there were the letters my grandparents wrote in WWII, and so many photos.
I think my grandmother’s tendency to keep things stems in part from her growing up during the depression. For several years of her childhood, her family lived in a chicken coop they called “the shanty.” Growing up with that kind of deep need had to have an effect. The belongings (such an interesting word, belongings) find their way into a number of the poems in Midwest Gothic: “Inheritance,” “Underworld,” “Rheum Rhabarbarum (Rhubarb),” “The Jack Loom,” several others.
I began putting lives behind the objects by returning to an unpublished memoir my great-grandmother wrote of her childhood, which was invaluable, giving me access to her own voice. And then, near the end of my work on the book, my mother and I visited my ninety-one-year-old great-aunt who still lived in the farmhouse where my grandfather was born. It was an unseasonably hot day in October, and we sat around my great-aunt’s kitchen table eating tomatoes and corn and beans from her garden and listening to her stories. Over the years, I’d felt a sort of exile from my mother’s history in this place (we left here when my parents divorced, whereas my father stayed and became a prominent figure in the community), and this trip healed something. After visiting my great-aunt, we went to the cemeteries where my grandmother and great-grandmothers were buried. That day of being fed and visiting bones and sweating through a sudden late summer made me understand research in a way that demands the body’s presence, not just the mind’s.
How wonderful that you found a way to reorder and make sense of these things, and to recover, to some degree, your grandmother’s story. I appreciate how sounds are resurrected here too: a rocking chair that leaves grooves in the hardwood, a playhouse that calls out, creaks in the dark, the sound of pines that grow as a poem lengthens. You’re also a musician, and many of these poems play homage to composers or compositions. How, if at all, has your relationship to sound and music changed since your last book? I sense an even stronger emphasis on listening and attention here.
Oh, I love how you’ve picked out these sounds! You’ve just helped me see the book in a new way. While there are poems in the collection that respond to specific pieces of piano music, and I’m always interested in the music of the line, I hadn’t realized how much I was turning to literal sounds. But now that you mention it I’m going back and seeing it throughout the book. I’m thinking now about how this connects to the Gothic mode, how sound is one way of picking up on things not immediately seen or understood, and in perceiving sound, whether it’s clear or distorted, we might find ourselves making a mental map of something hidden. While there aren’t actually chains rattling in an attic here, that rocking chair creak and the playhouse calling and the pressure cooker’s rattle are intimations of a history I’m trying to uncover.
Can you tell us a bit about the connections between gardening and other themes in this book? Are you a gardener? How did you happen to write erasure poems from The Secret Garden?
When my parents divorced, my mother went back and dug up her perennials to move them to our new home. Several of these flowers had originally come to her from her parents’ and grandmother’s garden. So, the garden became a through line from one life to another, which led to it being a through line in the book.
In writing about these gardens, I thought about H.D.’s Sea Garden and Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, both of which work at the border between cultivated and wild spaces. In my mother’s gardening philosophy, especially after the divorce, the wilding of plants is welcomed rather than discouraged. The gloriosa daisies seed out in unexpected areas, the violets take over the lawn. No pesticides, no onslaught against the dandelions.
The result of this kind of gardening is utterly gorgeous, and I’ve been delighted in recent years to see professional gardeners (shout out to Monty Don and Gardeners’ World!) engaging more with the natural approach my mother has long practiced. My mother talks about being in partnership with the garden, listening to where it’s going, being newly surprised every year. Gardening is not unlike the writing process, really—trial and error, revision and discovery. A similar impulse was behind my erasures of The Secret Garden, thinking of the text itself as a garden and finding new places to dig there.
I’m still a very amateur gardener, but every year I’m transitioning more of our suburban-feeling lawn into garden, digging in compost, adding more native plants and pollinators. It’s been one of the major things to keep me going during the pandemic.
This is your second collection of poetry, and I see earlier strains of your work here, and yet something entirely new and somehow dangerous feeling, as if the lines are both being erased and rewritten as I read. Was the process of putting this book together different than your previous books?
I love your comment on the simultaneous erasure and rewriting, which resonates with how I hoped to re-see a family story in this book. Doing so takes digging. Scratching out some lines in a familiar text or shifting the focus to the edge of a photo can be a generative act, a way to get beyond the louder voices of our histories to find the hidden understories. Speaking of which, I think Sara Lupita Olivares’s new book Migratory Sound does this gorgeously, and I encourage anyone interested in writing and place, writing and the Midwest, to check it out.
In terms of my earlier work, this book is both more personal and more thematically arranged. Working on Midwest Gothic took some leaps in vulnerability, both in the writing of the poems and then in the decision to publish them. I’m very grateful to Jennifer Sweeney for encouraging me, early on, to include some poems I felt concerned about, and to my friend Katherine Bode-Lang for our ongoing conversations about our poems being out ahead of our own knowledge, leading us towards some new understanding. Katherine’s book The Reformation was important to my being able to claim my own story here. Some of the pieces I wrote 3-4 years ago I didn’t expect to put in a public space, but now they feel integral to the collection.
There’s a variety of forms at work here, and each of the four sections of the book has a different kind of mood and tempo. Was this something you set out to do? Do you have a favorite form you tend to gravitate towards? How did you decide on the final four-part arrangement?
Mood and tempo, yes! I studied classical music before turning to poetry, and my relationship to form, including book structure, often goes back to that. This has me thinking about your own background in visual art, and how beautifully that works into your fiction. My friend Donna Steiner talks about the value of having a “second art,” and while music was technically my first art, what it taught me keeps finding its way into my poetry.
In broad strokes, pieces of music (sonatas, symphonies) are often divided into movements; each movement calls the same key home, but the mood and tempo shift dramatically between them. Poetry book sections strike me as a natural corollary to this structure; like sonatas or symphonies, poetry collections are often divided into 3-4 sections, and as with a symphony they let you have beginnings and endings within the bigger structure of a piece. I think my first book, Watershed, works more poem by poem, where a person might open the book to any page, but I envision Midwest Gothic being read from beginning to end in the way you’d listen to a piece of music or read a novel.
For me, the biggest difference between the sections is the way time works. The first and final sections shift back and forth between present and past, but the second section, which I see as the heart or hinge of the book, zooms in on a particular moment in the life of my family. Looking back at my childhood, I think of everything as happening either before or after this moment. And the erasures in the section right after that are a sort of tunneling back through deep time.
Such brave work, Laura, tunneling back through deep time, as you say, to give us these poems. Thank you, and thank you for this very thoughtful conversation.
Laura Donnelly is the author of Midwest Gothic, selected by Maggie Smith as the winner of the Richard Snyder Prize and published by Ashland Poetry Press in fall 2020. Donnelly’s first book of poetry, Watershed, won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, and her poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Mississippi Review, Passages North, and as the Poem-a-Day feature at Poets.org. Originally from Michigan, she is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego.
Buy Midwest Gothic from your favorite indie bookstore or find it HERE.
Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.