An Interview with Hannah Gamble
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Hannah, thanks so much for participating in this interview! I am pleased to have you join me, and to have the opportunity to learn more about you. What do you enjoy doing when you are not writing? What fills you with joy? What fills you with displeasure?
Hannah Gamble: Hi, April. Thanks for having me! When I'm not writing (which is most of the time) I like going to my gym (the Wicker Park Athletic Club) and taking yoga classes. I started going regularly in December, and within just a couple weeks, I got way better at arm balances, which is satisfying. I've also been taking ukulele lessons at the Old Town School of Folk music (a beloved institution here in Chicago) and so I wander around my (and other peoples') home(s) playing a G and then a C and then an F and then an Am and then a C7 and then a D and then a C again. [and I just found uke tabs for a Sam Cook song!] Another thing is that I'm trying to be friendlier, so I've been making conversation with people other than my closest friends. [Over the last couple of months I had really fallen out of the habit.]
I'm filled with joy whenever I sing with my bandmates Andrew and Matt. We made this EP last year and also this video, wherein you'll notice I have painted-on mutton chops.
My family fills me with joy. They are really interesting/ complicated/ multi-talented people:
Susan (mother): former home educator of her 5 children, potter, painter, art teacher at a private christian school dedicated to underserved families and racial reconciliation and also at a women's prison where she works with the criminally insane
David (father): Director of Compliance, avid reader/journaler/ thinker, tao enthusiast, gym devotee, learner/ grower/ changer/ conquerer
Lisa (stepmother): business woman, skillful manager of people, Master's in Psych, dog lover, former caterer (which means holiday meals are awesome)
Lydia (sister): Yoga instructor, chef/ candy-maker, beautification expert, artist specializing in photography, needlework, and installations (like piles of cigarette butts wrapped in embroidery thread)
Josiah (brother): Chemical engineer, reader mostly of non-fiction, comedy enthusiast, black belt in tai kwando at age 12, ultimate frisbee overachiever
Daniel (brother): Research and development for Habitat for Humanity, travels to lots of developing nations to be helpful, acro-yoga practitioner, rock climber
Jessi (sister): the first in our family to love metal music and get immersed in the Nashville underground music scene, in school for massage therapy so that she can eventually provide massage therapy to race horses, communes deeply with animals
A lot of things fill me with displeasure, so I'll just make a brief list here: "Tell-me-I'm-pretty" selfies, humorless people/ poets/ poems, incompetence, waiting with nothing to do, pettiness, and being deprived of my autonomy/ full agency in job situations.
UTSQ: I first came across your work by way of your book, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, which I received as a gift. It is a gripping book of poems that I felt was deeply personal to you, the writer, but was emotionally intense for me to read it as well. I found I could relate to your work, which is not as common in poetry as one might hope it would be. I was pleasantly surprised with the connection felt to your words. Can you tell me a little bit about your writing process for this collection? Which pieces of yourself were you pulling from during the writing of this book? Which experiences led you to write about the stories within? Were the poems selected over a period of time, or were they written close together? Were you consciously setting a specific tone or scheme for these works, or was the process more natural?
HG: I'm glad you felt you could relate to my poems; that's very important to me. I want my meanings and my feelings to be accessible.
I wrote the poems in the book over the course of about three and a half years. I wrote the oldest poem in the book ("The Birthday") in December of 2006 when I was applying to grad programs. I wrote the newer poems in the book ("Light Excesses," "Biotic/ Abiotic," and "We Can Walk Towards the Future as Towards a Luminous City," for example) in September of 2010, after having graduated with my MFA from the University of Houston. All the other poems happened in grad school.
As far as I'm concerned, any part of my life (inner world, outer world) is fair game for poem-stuff. The parts of myself that I see in this book are my: skepticism in people and institutions, loneliness/ trying to be okay with aloneness, interest in other people's histories/ preferences/ motivations, my identity as a daughter/ [for lack of a better term] agnostic, sexually desirable person, and possible academic.
I wouldn't say I was consciously setting a tone, but I do think that while I was in graduate school I worried about my poems not being "smart" or "socially aware" enough. I wasn't thinking very much about being entertaining, and I didn't want my personal views/ ethics/ convictions to be too apparent. Somehow, I thought that would be the opposite of artful. [Things are different now, and I'll talk more about that later when I tell you about what I'm working on these days.]
UTSQ: How did Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast become published? Where can Up the Staircase Quarterly readers find it (they really should!)?
HG: YITAMB was selected by poet Bernadette Mayer (read some of her very good poems here) for the 2011 National Poetry Series and was released in late 2012 by Fence Books. You can find it in independent bookstores in big and little cities (my sister Lydia took a picture of my book on the shelf at a little bookstore in Jackson, MS where she was attending art school last year) as well as places like Barnes and Noble. You can also order it online through Powell's, Amazon, Ebay etc….
UTSQ: Do you have any other books or chapbooks published or in the process of publication? What are you currently working on?
HG: I don't have any chapbooks, but I do have a new poem in a chapbook anthology that'll be coming out with coldfront mag that features poems from poets who wrote readers' favorite books of 2012 (and maybe 2013?).
I am working on my second book now-- I have about 35 pages of poems and I need about 10 more. I think this book is going to be different from my first in that the poems will be more conversational, funnier, nastier, a little less inspired by what I read/ my life as a student, and a little more focused on social-sexual politics/ dynamics.
UTSQ: Aside from writing, you also help edit poetry for the journal Catch Up. How long have you had that gig? What do you find the most challenging about editing a literary journal? What do you find the most rewarding?
HG: I think it's been about a year and a half? I was published in their 2nd issue, joined them as a guest editor for the 3rd issue, and then came on board as a full-time editor for the 4th issue, which just came out this past fall. Honestly, Catch Up's (co)founder and head editor Jeff Hipsher makes my work with the journal easy as pie. That is to say, I don't have to read slush or do anything, honestly anything, I don't want to do. I get to solicit the poets I want to solicit, take what I want and then just do some proofreading etc, no big deal. I think getting the authors to actually send work probably requires most of my effort (like, continue to hound them as graciously as possible. Poets are usually busy--I am too, and I really appreciate when people graciously hound me for work because sometimes I have totally forgotten that I said I'd send that thing or I've mistakenly thought I needed to send it by June when I actually I need to get it to them by May etc).
I think it's really rewarding to get to present the world with a poem that I think is great that might have been written by a person that (proportionally) very few people in the writing world have heard of.
UTSQ: Speaking of journals, this is the first issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly for the year 2014. I am about to celebrate 6 years of its awesome existence. Although it is already a high quality zine, in my completely biased opinion, I am always seeking new ways to improve it in any way I can. Looking back on 2013, which literary journals and magazines did you find yourself reading the most? What made them your favorites? What makes a great literary journal, online and/or print?
HG:
1. POETRY [I loved the September issue: it featured a section by Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket on poems that were not written for children but that children never the less might enjoy. I used to teach young kids in different classrooms around Houston with a program called Writers in the Schools and, though some of my kids were as young as eight years old, I never wanted to teach (or encourage them, in their own poems to emulate) "children's poetry." I shared with them poems that I loved, and I trusted that I'd be able to help them connect to something in the poem, and I never came to feel I'd erred.]
2. jubilat [This magazine is so beautiful. In grad school (maybe 2009) I remember that it was first journal that I ever had read more than 40% of without getting bored. Almost every poem hit me just right. I was amazed.]
3. Fence [In addition to a bunch of great poems, this issue has a really great non-fiction feature where writers (poets and prose writers alike) write about their conservative christian upbringings. And they do well with it! It's not just a bunch of essays saying "The ideas with which I was indoctrinated were so fucked up!!!" (though, believe me, I'm sure they were) or "The day of my baptism was really special and I really felt loved {…description of sunlight…}" (though, believe me, I bet it was and that you did, because I still have a lot of fond memories of my Pentecostal days); the essays are, instead, a little less polarizing, a little more like other good essays that talk about growing up, being people, thinking about stuff. You know: nice. Worth your time.]
UTSQ: What was your first significant literary encounter? How has it shaped you, guided you, into the writer you have become?
HG: I think my first literary encounter was an encounter with an (at the time inexplicable) terrible feeling upon finishing a John Irving novel. I had loved the book so much, but I felt this awful, sick, hot, angry, despairing feeling. I recognize it now as a jealousy, and a sadness that I wouldn't (I thought) ever be able to participate in this thing that I loved so much and made me feel so many feelings. I think my experiences with books as a kid/ young adult shaped me more than interacting with any writer ever has, though my writing teachers throughout the years have provided brilliant insight/ advice and much-needed encouragement that, while perhaps not seminal, have certainly been invaluable.
UTSQ: Which contemporary writers are your favorites? Which books, besides yours, should we be buying? What in particular about these writers makes them special? What importance and uniqueness do they bring to the literary world?
HG: I am smitten with Mary Ruefle (her poems and her book of short prose, The Most of It); I feel like she never fails me. Maybe that's because she makes me forget what the word "fail" means-- or makes it impossible to believe that everything in the world isn't just failing all the time; no one walks into a a room and is shocked that the room has a floor, right? So maybe the concept of failure is just a straight-up redundancy when discussing human existence? Anyways. I also love love love the book POEMLAND by Chelsey Minnis.
As for why they are special, I would say it is their honesty and their willingness to really really explore inner life. When I read their poems I feel like both of them have done a great job of turning their brains into fascinating rooms I can spend lots of time inside of.
UTSQ: Finally, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
HG: If all the things that people (and other living things, maybe?) have caught glimpses of or sensed or dreamt of and called God/ Father/ Mother/ It/ Help/ Thank you/ Light/ Love/ Truth could assume a singular form or at least occupy a single place (the place where I was) then I would want to have dinner with that thing. I have no idea if there would be any talking. I'd probably offer to let it eat my face, and it probably would, probably being the most terrifying thing with which I'd ever shared space, or maybe being the most gracious in accepting vital/ intimate gifts such as a human face.
Hannah Gamble is working on her second book of poems. She lives in Chicago, where she is developing an arts-based learning workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry for a team of innovators seeking to address the city's problem of urban nutrition.
Hannah Gamble: Hi, April. Thanks for having me! When I'm not writing (which is most of the time) I like going to my gym (the Wicker Park Athletic Club) and taking yoga classes. I started going regularly in December, and within just a couple weeks, I got way better at arm balances, which is satisfying. I've also been taking ukulele lessons at the Old Town School of Folk music (a beloved institution here in Chicago) and so I wander around my (and other peoples') home(s) playing a G and then a C and then an F and then an Am and then a C7 and then a D and then a C again. [and I just found uke tabs for a Sam Cook song!] Another thing is that I'm trying to be friendlier, so I've been making conversation with people other than my closest friends. [Over the last couple of months I had really fallen out of the habit.]
I'm filled with joy whenever I sing with my bandmates Andrew and Matt. We made this EP last year and also this video, wherein you'll notice I have painted-on mutton chops.
My family fills me with joy. They are really interesting/ complicated/ multi-talented people:
Susan (mother): former home educator of her 5 children, potter, painter, art teacher at a private christian school dedicated to underserved families and racial reconciliation and also at a women's prison where she works with the criminally insane
David (father): Director of Compliance, avid reader/journaler/ thinker, tao enthusiast, gym devotee, learner/ grower/ changer/ conquerer
Lisa (stepmother): business woman, skillful manager of people, Master's in Psych, dog lover, former caterer (which means holiday meals are awesome)
Lydia (sister): Yoga instructor, chef/ candy-maker, beautification expert, artist specializing in photography, needlework, and installations (like piles of cigarette butts wrapped in embroidery thread)
Josiah (brother): Chemical engineer, reader mostly of non-fiction, comedy enthusiast, black belt in tai kwando at age 12, ultimate frisbee overachiever
Daniel (brother): Research and development for Habitat for Humanity, travels to lots of developing nations to be helpful, acro-yoga practitioner, rock climber
Jessi (sister): the first in our family to love metal music and get immersed in the Nashville underground music scene, in school for massage therapy so that she can eventually provide massage therapy to race horses, communes deeply with animals
A lot of things fill me with displeasure, so I'll just make a brief list here: "Tell-me-I'm-pretty" selfies, humorless people/ poets/ poems, incompetence, waiting with nothing to do, pettiness, and being deprived of my autonomy/ full agency in job situations.
UTSQ: I first came across your work by way of your book, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, which I received as a gift. It is a gripping book of poems that I felt was deeply personal to you, the writer, but was emotionally intense for me to read it as well. I found I could relate to your work, which is not as common in poetry as one might hope it would be. I was pleasantly surprised with the connection felt to your words. Can you tell me a little bit about your writing process for this collection? Which pieces of yourself were you pulling from during the writing of this book? Which experiences led you to write about the stories within? Were the poems selected over a period of time, or were they written close together? Were you consciously setting a specific tone or scheme for these works, or was the process more natural?
HG: I'm glad you felt you could relate to my poems; that's very important to me. I want my meanings and my feelings to be accessible.
I wrote the poems in the book over the course of about three and a half years. I wrote the oldest poem in the book ("The Birthday") in December of 2006 when I was applying to grad programs. I wrote the newer poems in the book ("Light Excesses," "Biotic/ Abiotic," and "We Can Walk Towards the Future as Towards a Luminous City," for example) in September of 2010, after having graduated with my MFA from the University of Houston. All the other poems happened in grad school.
As far as I'm concerned, any part of my life (inner world, outer world) is fair game for poem-stuff. The parts of myself that I see in this book are my: skepticism in people and institutions, loneliness/ trying to be okay with aloneness, interest in other people's histories/ preferences/ motivations, my identity as a daughter/ [for lack of a better term] agnostic, sexually desirable person, and possible academic.
I wouldn't say I was consciously setting a tone, but I do think that while I was in graduate school I worried about my poems not being "smart" or "socially aware" enough. I wasn't thinking very much about being entertaining, and I didn't want my personal views/ ethics/ convictions to be too apparent. Somehow, I thought that would be the opposite of artful. [Things are different now, and I'll talk more about that later when I tell you about what I'm working on these days.]
UTSQ: How did Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast become published? Where can Up the Staircase Quarterly readers find it (they really should!)?
HG: YITAMB was selected by poet Bernadette Mayer (read some of her very good poems here) for the 2011 National Poetry Series and was released in late 2012 by Fence Books. You can find it in independent bookstores in big and little cities (my sister Lydia took a picture of my book on the shelf at a little bookstore in Jackson, MS where she was attending art school last year) as well as places like Barnes and Noble. You can also order it online through Powell's, Amazon, Ebay etc….
UTSQ: Do you have any other books or chapbooks published or in the process of publication? What are you currently working on?
HG: I don't have any chapbooks, but I do have a new poem in a chapbook anthology that'll be coming out with coldfront mag that features poems from poets who wrote readers' favorite books of 2012 (and maybe 2013?).
I am working on my second book now-- I have about 35 pages of poems and I need about 10 more. I think this book is going to be different from my first in that the poems will be more conversational, funnier, nastier, a little less inspired by what I read/ my life as a student, and a little more focused on social-sexual politics/ dynamics.
UTSQ: Aside from writing, you also help edit poetry for the journal Catch Up. How long have you had that gig? What do you find the most challenging about editing a literary journal? What do you find the most rewarding?
HG: I think it's been about a year and a half? I was published in their 2nd issue, joined them as a guest editor for the 3rd issue, and then came on board as a full-time editor for the 4th issue, which just came out this past fall. Honestly, Catch Up's (co)founder and head editor Jeff Hipsher makes my work with the journal easy as pie. That is to say, I don't have to read slush or do anything, honestly anything, I don't want to do. I get to solicit the poets I want to solicit, take what I want and then just do some proofreading etc, no big deal. I think getting the authors to actually send work probably requires most of my effort (like, continue to hound them as graciously as possible. Poets are usually busy--I am too, and I really appreciate when people graciously hound me for work because sometimes I have totally forgotten that I said I'd send that thing or I've mistakenly thought I needed to send it by June when I actually I need to get it to them by May etc).
I think it's really rewarding to get to present the world with a poem that I think is great that might have been written by a person that (proportionally) very few people in the writing world have heard of.
UTSQ: Speaking of journals, this is the first issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly for the year 2014. I am about to celebrate 6 years of its awesome existence. Although it is already a high quality zine, in my completely biased opinion, I am always seeking new ways to improve it in any way I can. Looking back on 2013, which literary journals and magazines did you find yourself reading the most? What made them your favorites? What makes a great literary journal, online and/or print?
HG:
1. POETRY [I loved the September issue: it featured a section by Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket on poems that were not written for children but that children never the less might enjoy. I used to teach young kids in different classrooms around Houston with a program called Writers in the Schools and, though some of my kids were as young as eight years old, I never wanted to teach (or encourage them, in their own poems to emulate) "children's poetry." I shared with them poems that I loved, and I trusted that I'd be able to help them connect to something in the poem, and I never came to feel I'd erred.]
2. jubilat [This magazine is so beautiful. In grad school (maybe 2009) I remember that it was first journal that I ever had read more than 40% of without getting bored. Almost every poem hit me just right. I was amazed.]
3. Fence [In addition to a bunch of great poems, this issue has a really great non-fiction feature where writers (poets and prose writers alike) write about their conservative christian upbringings. And they do well with it! It's not just a bunch of essays saying "The ideas with which I was indoctrinated were so fucked up!!!" (though, believe me, I'm sure they were) or "The day of my baptism was really special and I really felt loved {…description of sunlight…}" (though, believe me, I bet it was and that you did, because I still have a lot of fond memories of my Pentecostal days); the essays are, instead, a little less polarizing, a little more like other good essays that talk about growing up, being people, thinking about stuff. You know: nice. Worth your time.]
UTSQ: What was your first significant literary encounter? How has it shaped you, guided you, into the writer you have become?
HG: I think my first literary encounter was an encounter with an (at the time inexplicable) terrible feeling upon finishing a John Irving novel. I had loved the book so much, but I felt this awful, sick, hot, angry, despairing feeling. I recognize it now as a jealousy, and a sadness that I wouldn't (I thought) ever be able to participate in this thing that I loved so much and made me feel so many feelings. I think my experiences with books as a kid/ young adult shaped me more than interacting with any writer ever has, though my writing teachers throughout the years have provided brilliant insight/ advice and much-needed encouragement that, while perhaps not seminal, have certainly been invaluable.
UTSQ: Which contemporary writers are your favorites? Which books, besides yours, should we be buying? What in particular about these writers makes them special? What importance and uniqueness do they bring to the literary world?
HG: I am smitten with Mary Ruefle (her poems and her book of short prose, The Most of It); I feel like she never fails me. Maybe that's because she makes me forget what the word "fail" means-- or makes it impossible to believe that everything in the world isn't just failing all the time; no one walks into a a room and is shocked that the room has a floor, right? So maybe the concept of failure is just a straight-up redundancy when discussing human existence? Anyways. I also love love love the book POEMLAND by Chelsey Minnis.
As for why they are special, I would say it is their honesty and their willingness to really really explore inner life. When I read their poems I feel like both of them have done a great job of turning their brains into fascinating rooms I can spend lots of time inside of.
UTSQ: Finally, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
HG: If all the things that people (and other living things, maybe?) have caught glimpses of or sensed or dreamt of and called God/ Father/ Mother/ It/ Help/ Thank you/ Light/ Love/ Truth could assume a singular form or at least occupy a single place (the place where I was) then I would want to have dinner with that thing. I have no idea if there would be any talking. I'd probably offer to let it eat my face, and it probably would, probably being the most terrifying thing with which I'd ever shared space, or maybe being the most gracious in accepting vital/ intimate gifts such as a human face.
Hannah Gamble is working on her second book of poems. She lives in Chicago, where she is developing an arts-based learning workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry for a team of innovators seeking to address the city's problem of urban nutrition.
