“Things are often tough and awful, and maybe our best defense against that is to resist with joy.”
Postscripts (Wild Ink Publishing, 2024)
Could you tell us a bit about your growing up and your path to becoming a writer?
Growing up, I was always a reader, but, truth told, I was obsessed with becoming a ballet dancer, which I did for a short time. I intensively trained in dance. Once, a high school English teacher said I might consider becoming a writer one day, and I was horrified (couldn’t she see I was supposed to be a dancer?). But rheumatoid arthritis sidelined me. So, I started to look for other things I might do, and I took Intro to Creative Writing with Susan Neville at Butler University. She opened up so much for me. Although I feel like I came to it late, maybe I found writing when I should have, which maybe is the important part. It’s easy to feel like you should have been born knowing you wanted to live pen in hand. The wisdom in coming to writing later, for me, is always learning from other writers. I hope I’m always growing into what my next writing will be.
A question from Anna Laura Reeve: Do you understand your role in society—as a poet—to be influential, critical, observant, or something else?
It’s a tricky question to think of the poet’s role in society, because when I’m actively writing I try to tune it all out—to be in the moment of crafting whatever I’m working on. But I do think there is a role poets play. Being observant feels like an important role. As technology blazes, there’s been this feeling of everything ramping up, going faster. We live in this age that valorizes productivity, and we have come to see that only as doing what we do faster. But poetry—both the reading of it and the writing of it—really forces us to slow down. Maybe that’s a shift in what productivity is; instead of faster, we seek to be better.
I also work in the area of narrative medicine, which is a way to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories of illness. And I think poetry can be important in capturing the experiences of people grappling with illness—patients, caregivers, health professionals, and so on. Reading these experiences can be transformative, too. A person can be sick, but also have a sense of well-being, and that’s something that I think a poet can help with. I try to honor that lived experience.
How do you contend with saturation? The day’s news, the disasters, the crazy things, the flagged articles, the flagged books, the poetry tweets, the data the data the data. What’s your strategy to navigate your way home?
We are just bombarded with stuff. It can feel quite overwhelming. I try to limit the amount of news, social media, etc. I consume in any one day. I do at least 30 minutes of exercise a day, and sometimes that stretches into an hour-long walk. I try to eat good food, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. These are all things we can do to fortify ourselves.
But also, I lost my brother to metastatic colon cancer in 2019. He was only 42 years old. If I start to feel overwhelmed, I think about him. I spent a lot of time with him when he was on hospice care. He never said, “I wish I read one more news article,” or “I wish I could tweet one more thing.” He was very in the moment. And maybe that was his last gift to me—a reminder to live in the moment. Things are often tough and awful, and maybe our best defense against that is to resist with joy. I actually find joy really difficult, but like all difficult things, it’s really worth trying to cultivate. Right before my brother went on hospice care, Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights came out. I bought it on a trip to New York where I was attending a workshop in narrative medicine at Columbia. I found a copy in bookstore near campus, and read that book all through my brother’s last days. It saved me from despair, and often, if I’m feeling overwhelmed, sad, angry, or generally out of sorts, I dip into it again. Or his wonderful poetry collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He’s such a generous writer, and reading his work is such an antidote to a swirling world.
A question from Shome Dasgupta: How are you doing?
I love this question! Mostly, I’m doing okay. I recently resigned my position at a university that’s going through significant changes, mostly because of poor financial management, but also a real loss of identity. I kept giving up more and more of my time and talents for diminished returns. This summary doesn’t capture nearly what it was like, but the important part was stepping away. I’m at a point where I’m focusing on writing and narrative medicine. Crafting a life like this is hard work, but feeling tired at the end of a day is different than exhaustion, especially existential exhaustion. I already feel my creative process opening up, instead of being squeezed and compressed.
Of course, I’m still concerned about so many things: the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the state of the nation, the well-being of my loved ones, the undervaluing of art. This list could go on and on. I should be worried about things like this, but I try to balance it with those activities that inspire wonder, joy, connectedness, compassion, and a fragile sense of hope.
A question from Karisma Price: Do you have any self-care practices you include when writing about something heavy?
In studying narrative medicine, I came across some work on expressive writing by the psychologist James Pennebaker, who found that people who wrote about difficulties or trauma felt worse in the moment of the writing, but better after it. That’s another crude paraphrase, but you get the idea. This made a lot of sense to me. I write a lot about my brother’s illness and death. I write about trying to figure out how to be a sister without a brother in the world with her. I cry. Often and a lot. But I let myself feel the fullness of the sadness and grief as I write about him, and other difficult subjects. I think giving myself that space to sit with sadness and grief is ultimately a form of self-care. I feel better after that initial grief, and then that idea of capturing it and sitting with it helps me process complex and difficult emotions.
I also try to delight in being with my friends and family. I try to be in the moment with them, which is something that I learned from my brother. So, when I’m not writing, not in that solitude that writing demands, I look to balance it with connection.
Our culture doesn’t really focus on how to be gentle with yourself. That’s something I’m working on, too. Can my self-talk be gentler? I’m notoriously hard on myself. I always chide myself on not being good enough. I tend to focus on improvement—which can be good but also can become obsessive. Tempering that tendency with being gentle and compassionate towards myself has been a difficult path, but ultimately a good one. Not every poem is going to turn out. That’s okay. Not every opportunity will be my opportunity. That’s okay too.
A question from Toni Ann Johnson: Why are you writing about what you’re writing about?
I’m writing so much about my brother these days, but really, writing about the dead is really writing about how I’m living without them. I have a series of poems titled “Dear Nate,” and these are ways of talking with him now that I can’t talk with him. Those have been helpful to me in dealing with his physical absence, a different way of keeping him near. I also write a lot about travel, which I love to do, and I love the idea of the journey, both physical and otherwise. I also keep writing about West Virginia, where I live. It’s a complicated place. We have some physical beauty in this state that takes my breath away. But politically I feel out of place here. Most of my family is here. I’m a forty-minute drive from my favorite cousin, which I love. We get together to go boating on a lake in one of our state parks, or have dinner at locally owned restaurants. Those times are starting to make it into my work, too. But also shuttered coal mines, the way the opioid crisis has touched almost everyone in this state.
Also, I have a series of poems about local cryptids, like the Mothman, and such. West Virginia is full of and fully embraces its monsters. These aren’t in the new book, but will be collected into their own chapbook. I’m working with an insanely talented visual artist, Sally Jane Brown, on this project. It’s so cool to see her visual take on my textual one. Sally’s such a generous collaborator, which has really opened up the way I work, too.
What obsessions led you to write your book?
I feel like Postscripts is really all about journeys, both external and internal. I’ve talked about how my brother’s illness and death inform the book very specifically. During this time, I also happened to travel internationally quite a bit, so there are poems from Barcelona, Ecuador, and Amsterdam. But also, I travel around West Virginia and the bordering states, and other places in the US. So, lots of different types of travel.
My relationship to West Virginia is also an important thread in this book. My family goes back generations in West Virginia, and my father grew up in Vienna, West Virginia, but like many first-generation college graduates from Appalachia, left the region to pursue work opportunities. All our family gatherings and many vacations at the state parks were part of my own upbringing, and now, as an adult, I’ve chosen to be here. I moved around a lot as a kid and as young adult, and now I’ve lived in West Virginia longer than any place else in my life—twenty years. So, the book is about place, and one of the most specific places is West Virginia, with trying to understand its beauty and its warts, and its complicated relationship to me.
How did you decide on the arrangement and title of your book?
Arranging a book is crazy difficult! I find that I want poems to bump up on one another, so I often look at the relationship of the last word of one poem to the first word of the next. A little friction there can be useful. I also didn’t want to group poems by locale or theme—that felt a little too cutesy or something. I tried to have some interplay between places and emotional states.
As for the title, postscripts are additional information at the end of a letter or message that doesn’t relate to the main topic. They spoke to the idea of being on journeys (side note: I love sending postcards while traveling), but also this end message that maybe doesn’t relate felt right for these poems. Poems are always working towards saying the thing that can’t be said any other way, and that plus the travel and journey aspects of many of these poems had that postscript-like quality.
What’s the oldest poem in your book? Or can you name one piece that catalyzed or inspired the rest of the book? What do you remember about writing it?
The first poem of this collection is “Boy Killed on the Grafton Road.” I wrote it not long after my first poetry collection came out. I’d been writing mostly essays at this time and wondered if I’d ever write poems again. And then, there was this terrible story about a kid who got struck on a busy road while waiting for his school bus. The community was just wracked with sorrow. It seemed so senseless to me, and the poem was me working out this communal sense of grief. I didn’t know the boy or his parents personally, but many of my friends and colleagues did, and so the grief filtered all through our community. It reminded me that sometimes, as you’re trying to work something out emotionally, the poem finds you. It also reminded me that I could still write poems, which was a relief. It was selected for an anthology of West Virginia writing, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, which was the first time I’d really been categorized as a West Virginia writer, which was a milestone for me, too.
Which poem in your book has the most meaningful back story to you? What’s the back story?
“Eucalyptus” is a poem about my brother’s chemotherapy. At the time, I was working on a grant project where I wrote once a week with patients getting chemo. I often thought about him as I worked with these patients, helping them capture their stories. I wanted to capture his, and remembered his favorite stuffed animal as a kid—a koala. He never gave it a name, but it was both his favorite stuffed animal and his favorite animal. Because it was his favorite, we went to see a koala exhibit at a zoo, and I started to twine this memory to the experience of getting chemo. It helped me tell a tiny bit of his story, but also helped me understand what he, and all those patients I was writing with, were going through.
Which poem is the “misfit” in your collection and why?
So, I LOVE the musical artist Prince. I listen to at least one Prince song every day. I have all his albums, some in multiple formats (vinyl, yes please!). So during the time my brother was on hospice, I gave myself writing challenges that had nothing to do with anything just to keep writing. This spawned the poem “Pop Life” which is a song title, too, and the entire poem is made up of Prince song titles. A great diversion, but also obliquely related to many other poems in the book.
What was the final poem you wrote or significantly revised for the book, and how did that affect your sense that the book was complete?
I ended up adding a poem, “Doctor, Doctor” to this collection, a poem about the Covid pandemic. During the pandemic I could no longer write with patients, so I was cut off from narrative medicine, and it had not even been a year since my brother died. After things began to open up again, I connected with a doctor who had a podcast he started during the pandemic called Healthcare Is Human. He partnered with a high school friend who is now a portrait photographer, and she captured amazing photos of healthcare workers during Covid in Martinsburg, West Virginia. “Doctor, Doctor” is ekphrastic, as it speaks directly to one of Molly Humphrey’s photographs of a doctor, Ryan McCarthy, holding two of the early vials of the Covid vaccines. I felt it paired with many of the poems about my brother’s illness, and in a slanted way, pointed to a more hopeful future.
A question from Leona Sevick: Do you ever find yourself hiding something in plain sight in your work? What is it? (Don’t tell if you’re still hiding it!)
“Hiding in plain sight” is a phrase I’d use when revising my own poems, because I often see themes, repetitions, and so on only after I’ve written a swath of poems and go back to revise them. The idea of a “dreamland” comes up quite a bit in these poems. Of course, the postcard and postscript are in many of them. I use “postcard to” or “postcard from” in many of the titles, so that’s pretty obvious “plain sight” in this book.
A question from Caroline M. Mar: What was the soundtrack of your book? Were there specific songs, musicians, or sounds that helped you access your writing?
Well, I definitely was listening to Prince, as I always do. But many genres of music inform my poems. As a dancer, I developed a taste for classical music, and I often write to it. I also love jazz—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Lucky Thompson are a few that come to mind. My favorite West Virginia-based band, Hello June, is one that I listened to often, and, fun fact, the band’s frontwoman, Sarah Rudy, is also a talented visual artist who designed the cover of the book.
Is there a question you wish you would have been asked about your book? How would you answer it?
I’m never sure what question I’d like to be asked about the book until someone poses it. These questions have been wonderful because I’m unpacking my own creative process by answering them. But, in the spirit of this question, maybe: what are you hopes for this book? My greatest hope for Postscripts is that it finds an audience with patients, caregivers, and health professionals who might find it helpful as they navigate illness and healthcare. It feels like a book that comes from a narrative medicine tradition.
A question from Lucien Darjeun Meadows: I’m always fascinated by ancestral lines, inheritances, and legacies. So, I would love to ask: What three (or so) authors, creatives, or works most influenced your collection? And/or, if readers are moved by your collection, who would you recommend we next seek out?
I love this question! So, one of the biggest influences on this work is John Hoppenthaler. John has been a friend and mentor, and his collections always inform my work. The book of his that most influenced mine is Anticipate the Coming Resevoir, and especially his 9/11 and West Virginia facing “A Jar of Rain.” I would also recommend his new collection, Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, which really blew me away.
Another friend of mine, Randi Ward, influences my work. She writes tightly compressed poems, many set in the natural world. Her book Whipstitches is stylistically different than mine, but taught me so much about how image and grief work together. Randi is also a terrifically talented photographer, and a multi-lingual translator.
I also love Steve Scafidi’s work, especially Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer. Steve once described one of his poems as “the union of disparate things,” which I think both applies to many of his poems, and was incredibly instructive to me as I was writing Postscripts.
Although I think he writes from a different tradition, I would always recommend every book by Ross Gay. I love both the prose and the poems, and I love the associative quality of his work, which helped me loosen up and still keep emotional resilience in my work. I also love the work of the late Aleda Shirley. Hers is an understated fierceness that always wows me.
A question from Summer J. Hart: Do you work in any other artistic media? If so, how do the varied disciplines intersect, overlap, if they do at all?
I write a lot of essay and memoir, and I definitely see overlap in theme, and sometimes in style. My go-to in prose is Joan Didion, but I don’t see her influence in the poems per se. I dabble in photography—a curious amateur—and this has helped me understand framing in a whole new way. You have the image within the frame, but there’s a whole world outside that frame influencing what is in it. I like also what it is teaching me about texture, color and light.
Visual art is something I’m interested in, but I don’t draw, paint, etc. I did, however, go to Amsterdam to see the Vermeer exhibit, which brought together 28 of the 30-some known paintings. Vermeer speaks to me on an essential level, especially his pictures of solitary women reading and writing. I spent nearly five hours with his paintings, and it was transformative. I feel light just talking about it, so I’m pretty certain that his work will influence my writing to come.
A question from Noreen Ocampo: What is something that fuels you as a writer, your writing practice, or just you as a human being?
I love visual art, and am lucky to have friends who are working artists. They fuel me on all levels, and I cherish those collaborations I have with them. Sally Jane Brown and Sarah Rudy especially. I also like to go to art exhibits and museums. I just like to spend a long time looking at a painting and see what it might tell me.
After my brother died, I learned how to cook. He was a fabulous cook, and I was a lazy one. But cooking unleashed a whole other realm of creativity in me. I make all sorts of things now. My favorites are butternut squash soup and coq au vin. The colors and textures of good food strike me much the same as art. Taste opens up different sensations, too, and that has to be good for writing.
I’m always experimenting with learning new things, so I hope what will fuel me next as a writer and as a human is something around the corner I’ll discover and learn from.
A question from Susanna Lang: How do you find the next poem?
I used to get very worried that I’d have nothing to write about. I don’t know why, but that was an anxious quality I’ve been working to shed. Mostly, I try to be present, and to read a lot. Reading other poets often leads me to what I might want to work on. But reading in general also does this for me. I don’t know what I’m into until I’m into it. And that wandering is healthy for me, as it tends to help me find small bits of wonder. I also just try to keep up writing about whatever comes to mind. Most of it will come to nothing—it’s just my mind sifting. But that sifting sometimes turns up a raw gem.
However, I would also say that I enjoy revision most. Playing with the poem until I get it right, until I feel satisfied with it, or even if it just frustrates me, is where my best work comes from. Maybe I like to tinker? Or, maybe it is the dancer still in me—as a dancer you work on your pliés and tendus every single day in class. It’s endless repeating, but with purpose. You might never perfect it, but that’s hardly the point. Just working on being better over time feels more genuine.
A question from Talia Lakshmi Kolluri: What tools do you use to remain uninhibited in your writing?
In my early drafts of work, I just write blocks of text. I don’t worry about if the piece is prose or poetry yet. I just get it down—by hand. It’s not efficient, but it is effective. Sometimes very early I know if a piece is prose or poetry, but not always. I move it from page to screen, which is usually when I realize, “Ah, this is a poem,” or “hey, this is an essay,” and so forth. I usually then work with it, save, and print. My next edit is pen to printed page. I feel like different aspects of the process come up on screen or on the page with a pen, the latter the more uninhibited aspects. It’s kind of an unruly process, but it works. Sometimes I’ll re-handwrite the whole poem but play with the order—maybe start with the end, or in the middle and refasten or discard lines, add things. I like to play with drafts. We don’t talk about play enough as adults, but I think it’s play that keeps the process fresh for me, which hopefully spills over to the finished poem.
A question from Cathy Ulrich: What Is the last dream you remember having? Do you remember the feeling your dream-self had while you were in that world?
I rarely remember my dreams, which strikes me as unfortunate. But I will sometimes meditate and have that half-dream like state where I feel very loose and light. Listening to music I’ll often lose the hum of thought and just be in the music, letting it take me where it wants, which is quite lovely. But oh, to remember dreams!
A question from Amy Barnes: What is your favorite fairy tale and how would you modernize it?
I kind of love Thumbelina, which starts with a woman wishing for a child, and then this tiny digit-sized girl appears one day. The woman takes care of her, using a walnut as a crib. She gets kidnapped by a toad, and is helped by or hindered by various animals. Given the current issues with IVF, I could see an interesting retelling. Or, a tiny girl dropped into AI, sort of Thumbelina meets the Matrix.There is something about feeling or being small in an overwhelming and large world that seems relevant to our modern world.
A question from Monica Macansantos: Do you ever find yourself inspired or guided by your childhood in your work?
I certainly do see myself inspired and guided by my childhood in my work. I’ve written often about my training in dance, but also in my shared childhood with my brother, which helps me remember him in some of his best moments. But also, there’s an innocence from childhood I always wish to reconnect with, which, in a weird way may be why I love travel and trying new things, which also inspire my writing. Wonder, I think, is something we need to hold on to from childhood and let it be more a part of our adult existence. Wonder is great for my writing process, the wellspring of my best work.
A question from Monic Ductan: Who are your literary heroes? Why?
My first literary hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. I fell in love with Gatsby, as many do. This was before I ever thought I’d want to be a writer. I just remember his line “Her voice is full of money,” and I felt like it just captured the sense of both longing for Daisy, but longing for what Daisy represented and what would never be his. When I first started writing I wanted to be like Joan Didion. I loved the beginning of the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which is “The center is not holding.” Wow.
But now my heroes are all over the place. So many. I love the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Also a painter, Bishop’s poems capture a sense of scene the way a painter might. And she often chose ordinary subjects, but somehow transformed them into more than ordinary scenes. I’ve already mentioned Ross Gay. I also adore Diane Seuss! First, what she can do with form is a real feat of imaginary powers. I think her poems balance the evocative and the tangible or visceral. Nothing feels off limits in a Diane Seuss poem, but there’s also a discipline to them. They’re like balancing a sonata and punk rock, and making it all work.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing the cryptids book, What We Do In the Hollows, with Sally Jane Brown’s artwork, and am in the last revision stages of a memoir. I like having both a prose and a poetry project simultaneously.
What question would you like to ask authors featured at Speaking of Marvels in the future?
What about your process brings you the most joy?
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Renée K. Nicholson is the author of Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, co-editor of the award-winning anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine, and the poetry collection Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. She is a creative partner in Healthcare Is Human, a nonprofit dedicated to authentic storytelling in healthcare; she was a past Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona, and the recipient of the 2018 Susan S. Landis Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the West Virginia Division of Arts, Culture, and History.
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