Interview with Emily O'Neill
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Emily, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us for this interview!
To begin, I would like to discuss your full-length poetry collection, Pelican (YesYes Books, 2015). You start the book with a stunning quote by Guillaume le Clerc, in which a male pelican kills his young, then guilt-ridden, brings them back to life with his own blood. How did you discover this quote, and what attracted you to its concept? How did it help shape the conception of Pelican?
Emily O’Neill: I don't remember where I came across the quote originally, but its discovery followed my finding out from some book that during medieval times the pelican was a symbol for Christ similar to the lamb of God. I grew up Catholic and am obsessed with all the weird imagery of blood and suffering that occur in Catholic rituals and storytelling, both because I spent decades entrenched in that world and because while I was growing up Catholic, my father was quite literally bleeding. He suffered from a constellation of complications from Type 1 diabetes (amputations, transplants, infections, etc) and was forever healing from something. The whole "I bleed for my children" concept was really viscerally represented to me from a very young age. And at the same time that these immense sacrifices were being made on his part, he was also a really angry, scary person to me for much of my life. There was also this really strange phenomenon where he would get all the way to the brink of death and make these miraculous recoveries that were medically inexplicable. Like he had willed himself back to health. Most doctors who interacted with him couldn't believe how much his body had been through while continuing to function.
While all this health drama was happening, there was this other side of my dad where he was angry and also gigantic in his anger. To say that my father suffered from bouts of extreme, barely rational rage is putting it lightly. I spent so much of my childhood doubly terrified of him: terrified he would die, but also terrified of his presence. When I was in college I finally confronted him about this terror. He had just had a massive heart attack and subsequent sextuple bypass surgery against medical advice. He came out of the surgery alive but weak. Certain things in him had disappeared because of the heart attack--he had been clinically dead for a time, and I think it affected his brain somehow. He complained of not being able to make sentences as easily, but to most people he seemed mostly the same as before: formidable. We got into an argument about respect in our family and I confronted him about his rage, told him that if he wanted to keep pretending his mistakes as a parent out of existence that we couldn't have a relationship anymore. Against expectations, he broke down and apologized. We spent the last year of his life very close, trying to salvage what we could of our relationship.
The pelican is him, but it's me too. There are ways I have died to feed myself, ways I have harmed what I know is good in me to help someone else. He was hard on me my whole life, and there are times it feels like that went on because we are so similar. The world caused him a lot of pain beyond the physical, and one of his fears was that I would suffer in the same ways. So he tried to toughen me up by being harsh. I gave us a bird between us because it made the most sense. He was a sailor when he was young, so finding an image from the ocean to circle for the book felt right.
UtSQ: The main themes in Pelican deal with loss and grief, primarily with the death of the speaker’s father; however, the book also touches on the dissolving of romantic relationships. Was this your first foray into creatively writing about grief? What was your writing process like for Pelican? Was this a long-term project that spanned several years, or did it come together more quickly?
EO: I didn't ever plan to write about grief, nor did I plan to write this book. Many of the poems in Pelican were written over the last few years of my father's life as I was grappling with what his death might feel like. Very rarely, we get advance warning that we are going to lose someone who is huge in our lives. I would say this case was one of the rarest because my dad dying was always a very near thing. My little brother was fourteen when our dad went into the hospital for what would be the last time, and one of our uncles asked if Owen needed anything or if he needed to talk about it, to which my brother responded, "He's been dying my whole life; how is this any different than it's always been?" I'd say that sums up my writing process pretty well. I've been writing about my father dying since I've been writing. The book crystalized around the occasion of his death but that occasion was one I'd prepared for since childhood. Some little girls imagine their weddings. I guess I imagined a funeral.
So, the poems just kind of accumulated. The oldest poem in the book was first drafted seven years before the manuscript was finished, but most of the poems were written in the two years on either side of my dad dying. The year leading up to it when he was growing weaker, and the year after, which I spent writing all kinds of letters to him and burning them and dropping the ashes into rivers, which is what we did with his cremains.
UtSQ: Pelicans and many types of birds are referenced throughout your collection, as well as several other animals. I often found that when animals were referenced, there was also an intimation of violence:
but I’ve died on a mammoth’s tusk
in the river, when my car erupts in flame
as a tulip in between doe’s teeth.
(from “Teeth Dreams”)
There are several other examples throughout the book, including the line “The horizon is a donkey when it kicks us in the teeth” from your poem “Born to Die”. Was the relationship between nature and brutal imagery intentional in these poems, or did you find the imagery came, well, naturally? What is violence’s role in these poems?
EO: Nature is brutal in how it takes from us. That's something that is absolutely throughout the collection. I grew up very aware of that brutality, and when I finally moved away from home it was to a rural area where I spent a lot of time looking for comfort and only finding more brutality. The images come from feeling close to nature while also terrified of how it moves. I'm going to quote my brother again, because he's a lot smarter than I am about these things. He's studying to be a zookeeper, but before he was doing that, he worked at an animal hospital all through high school. I remember telling him a story about a breakup I went through years ago, and he sat and listened very thoughtfully, and when I was done talking he said, "Em, why do you think I work with animals? They can't lie about what they want." I believe that really seriously, and it absolutely guides how I write about animals. If there's an animal in a poem of mine, it's because that animal is more straightforward an image than any picture of a person. People try to obfuscate their intentions or trick themselves into believing their motivations are one thing or another. Animals are honest. If they're violent, it's because they're threatened. There were many times when I was writing these poems and wished I could be that honest, be violent because of how threatened I felt.
UtSQ: You also included a lot of pop culture references throughout Pelican. This is an aspect of contemporary poetry that I am fond of, so I was thrilled to see references to I <3 Huckabees; Girl, Interrupted; Smashing Pumpkins; Lana Del Ray; and Nico, among others. How important to your work was employing these pop culture references in regards to evoking memories and nostalgia? On a larger scale, what significance does pop culture bring to the poetry world as a writing tool?
EO: I include pop culture references as mile markers. Ways to locate the stories in time, to give them a greater texture. My writing is almost always in conversations with what's surrounding me culturally. I watch movies while writing, I listen to music, I surround myself in bed with books and magazines. There's a lot of mythology in the way we're taught to think about pop cultural figures. Everybody knows stories about the Velvet Underground or has opinions about blonde Angelina Jolie flailing down a psych ward hallway. By bringing images people are already familiar with to a poem, you ask them to bring your poem with them to the next time they think about that thing. There's this video game called Katamari where you roll around collecting objects that stick to you until you're just a giant mass of everything you've ever touched and it becomes difficult to move. That's how I feel writing poems. That I need to bring everything I've touched with me so that nothing gets forgotten in the retelling.
Poetry has the luxury of very few formal rules anymore. You can call literally anything a poem, for better or worse. One of the benefits of that broadness is calling on whatever canon of information you choose to. I'm of the mind that poets who are on in conversation with other poets are wasting everyone's time. No one really cares how you feel about your fiftieth rereading of Howl or The Wasteland. I'm more interested in what you have to say about things that are still alive culturally, and pop culture is a really immediate conversation most of us are participating in on a constant basis. We watch TV, we listen to music, we go to the movies, we read books bought in a train station. All those things inform our personal languages of engagement with our experience. If anything, pop culture influences us more than we acknowledge, or at least admit. Bringing it in poems just feels natural. It takes far more energy to detach the way I speak/write from what I consume.
UtSQ: You have a new chapbook, You Can’t Pick Your Genre, out on Jellyfish Highway. Tell us a little about this project. How would you describe the book to someone who typically does not read much poetry?
EO: You Can’t Pick Your Genre is comprised entirely of poems written in response to the Scream movie franchise. A lot of the titles or the bodies of poems themselves lifted dialogue from the films, and the poems are meant to function as mini essays about rape culture, suburbia, the anatomy of fear. I've always loved the movies, and I think the thing that's remarkable about them is that they're all metatexts that exemplify the genre they're commenting on. They also have the distinction of being the only film series to maintain the same writer and director through four films, which as far as I know if unprecedented in horror. I wrote the poems on a dare, all in the span of about a month. There are a lot of rhetorical questions that interrogate the reader while also interrogating the filmmakers. They're fun and mean and unconcerned with whether or not you take them seriously, which is a thing I wanted them to have in common with the movies.
Scream is great in that you can watch it as a horror film and get scared and that experience is rewarding. You can also watch it as a comedy (especially now that it's around 20 years old) and laugh at the camp and earnest performances and ridiculous killer running around the suburbs with an Edvard Munch mask. In their best moments, the poems are also doing double the work. They are playful, but in that play there's a lot of serious interrogations of power dynamics and ideas of who can be held responsible for a violated body.
UtSQ: Now let’s jump to the beginning. What was your first significant literary encounter? How did this experience inspire you, or shape you, into the writer you have become?
EO: I used to work at a restaurant in Cambridge where Junot Diaz was a regular, and he was incredibly kind to us. It was a tiny place and easy to eavesdrop and he had the best dinner conversations, moving really seamlessly from talking about "normal" things to talking about literature and politics and economics. Seeing that in the wild made me feel less strange for wanting to talk about what I wanted to talk about, for not limiting my writing to just one genre or topic or theme or concern. Also in Cambridge, I had a really unpleasant interaction at a book signing with Nick Flynn that I won't bother going into, which made me really committed to being kind to other writers, especially people who say thank you for my work or want to talk about my book.
But if we're talking significant books, I read The Bell Jar too young and that can likely be blamed for everything. I bought a copy with my allowance when I was 11 and that's the copy I still read once a year. It has a bunch of underlining in pink pen from that first reading. As a result, I'm really fond of chatty writing, stories that seem easy and conversational that sneak up and bash you over the head when you aren't paying attention. I like to think my poems and stories and essays do that sometimes. Confession is also incredibly important to me. And parties. And running away. And throwing things out the windows of tall buildings. And baths. And Boston. That book did more than shape my writing, it seems.
UtSQ: What do you find exciting, hopeful, or promising about poetry and/or the literary community right now?
EO: The most exciting thing about poetry and literature right now is small press publishing. There are so many truly fantastic presses out there (all of my homes included / hi YesYes, Fog Machine, Jellyfish Highway) that have cropped up specifically to fill the gaps where mega-publishers fail us. Presses where editors work really closely with authors on producing books that look and feel as beautiful as their content. Also, organizations like Button Poetry that are getting high school kids excited about poems in astonishing numbers.
I also think people talk a lot about needing an MFA to get a book published or get a residency or fellowship, but there are definitely more opportunities now for writers like me who live and work outside the academic bubble. And more attention in general. You've never had to be an academic to be a poet, but it feels like more and more people are on board with that now, probably because of small presses working hard to make it possible for working class writers, writers of color, queer writers to be visible and successful.
VIDA makes me hopeful. Magazines like The Offing make me hopeful. Seeing writers like Franny Choi or Rachel McKibbens or Angel Nafis, writers I know from slam, talked about by folks I know from the academic side of the world, makes me hopeful.
UtSQ: Aside from writing, you are also the poetry editor at Wyvern Lit. How long have you been with WL? What is your favorite thing about being an editor? What is the most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal?
EO: I've been with Wyvern about two years. My favorite thing about my job there is reading work by writers I've never heard of, people who put words together in ways that feel exciting and strange and push my brain to new places. I've made many lovely new internet friends this way. The hardest thing about my work there is making time to read submissions without getting fatigued. Digging through what I refuse to call the slush pile is tough sometimes, as I'm the only person reading for the poetry section and the format I want to publish in requires authors to send us three to six poems per submission (we only publish suites). I don't get to just lock onto one poem and say YES THAT ONE because I'm specifically searching for a group of poems that have a conversation with one another, a conversation I think will be as enjoyable for our readers as it is for me when I read it the first few times.
UtSQ: Finally, Emily, 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?
EO: This one is harder than I thought it would be. My first impulse was oysters with Stiva Oblonsky, but I don't eat oysters anymore. I think it would have to be steak tartare with Gene Kelly, but only if he agreed to give me a tap lesson afterwards. Whenever my gram and I watch his movies she quite literally holds a hand to her heart and exclaims, "What an athlete!" every time he's dancing. So yes, Gene Kelly dinner date, and then girl talk about it with my gram immediately following.
but I’ve died on a mammoth’s tusk
in the river, when my car erupts in flame
as a tulip in between doe’s teeth.
(from “Teeth Dreams”)
There are several other examples throughout the book, including the line “The horizon is a donkey when it kicks us in the teeth” from your poem “Born to Die”. Was the relationship between nature and brutal imagery intentional in these poems, or did you find the imagery came, well, naturally? What is violence’s role in these poems?
EO: Nature is brutal in how it takes from us. That's something that is absolutely throughout the collection. I grew up very aware of that brutality, and when I finally moved away from home it was to a rural area where I spent a lot of time looking for comfort and only finding more brutality. The images come from feeling close to nature while also terrified of how it moves. I'm going to quote my brother again, because he's a lot smarter than I am about these things. He's studying to be a zookeeper, but before he was doing that, he worked at an animal hospital all through high school. I remember telling him a story about a breakup I went through years ago, and he sat and listened very thoughtfully, and when I was done talking he said, "Em, why do you think I work with animals? They can't lie about what they want." I believe that really seriously, and it absolutely guides how I write about animals. If there's an animal in a poem of mine, it's because that animal is more straightforward an image than any picture of a person. People try to obfuscate their intentions or trick themselves into believing their motivations are one thing or another. Animals are honest. If they're violent, it's because they're threatened. There were many times when I was writing these poems and wished I could be that honest, be violent because of how threatened I felt.
UtSQ: You also included a lot of pop culture references throughout Pelican. This is an aspect of contemporary poetry that I am fond of, so I was thrilled to see references to I <3 Huckabees; Girl, Interrupted; Smashing Pumpkins; Lana Del Ray; and Nico, among others. How important to your work was employing these pop culture references in regards to evoking memories and nostalgia? On a larger scale, what significance does pop culture bring to the poetry world as a writing tool?
EO: I include pop culture references as mile markers. Ways to locate the stories in time, to give them a greater texture. My writing is almost always in conversations with what's surrounding me culturally. I watch movies while writing, I listen to music, I surround myself in bed with books and magazines. There's a lot of mythology in the way we're taught to think about pop cultural figures. Everybody knows stories about the Velvet Underground or has opinions about blonde Angelina Jolie flailing down a psych ward hallway. By bringing images people are already familiar with to a poem, you ask them to bring your poem with them to the next time they think about that thing. There's this video game called Katamari where you roll around collecting objects that stick to you until you're just a giant mass of everything you've ever touched and it becomes difficult to move. That's how I feel writing poems. That I need to bring everything I've touched with me so that nothing gets forgotten in the retelling.
Poetry has the luxury of very few formal rules anymore. You can call literally anything a poem, for better or worse. One of the benefits of that broadness is calling on whatever canon of information you choose to. I'm of the mind that poets who are on in conversation with other poets are wasting everyone's time. No one really cares how you feel about your fiftieth rereading of Howl or The Wasteland. I'm more interested in what you have to say about things that are still alive culturally, and pop culture is a really immediate conversation most of us are participating in on a constant basis. We watch TV, we listen to music, we go to the movies, we read books bought in a train station. All those things inform our personal languages of engagement with our experience. If anything, pop culture influences us more than we acknowledge, or at least admit. Bringing it in poems just feels natural. It takes far more energy to detach the way I speak/write from what I consume.
UtSQ: You have a new chapbook, You Can’t Pick Your Genre, out on Jellyfish Highway. Tell us a little about this project. How would you describe the book to someone who typically does not read much poetry?
EO: You Can’t Pick Your Genre is comprised entirely of poems written in response to the Scream movie franchise. A lot of the titles or the bodies of poems themselves lifted dialogue from the films, and the poems are meant to function as mini essays about rape culture, suburbia, the anatomy of fear. I've always loved the movies, and I think the thing that's remarkable about them is that they're all metatexts that exemplify the genre they're commenting on. They also have the distinction of being the only film series to maintain the same writer and director through four films, which as far as I know if unprecedented in horror. I wrote the poems on a dare, all in the span of about a month. There are a lot of rhetorical questions that interrogate the reader while also interrogating the filmmakers. They're fun and mean and unconcerned with whether or not you take them seriously, which is a thing I wanted them to have in common with the movies.
Scream is great in that you can watch it as a horror film and get scared and that experience is rewarding. You can also watch it as a comedy (especially now that it's around 20 years old) and laugh at the camp and earnest performances and ridiculous killer running around the suburbs with an Edvard Munch mask. In their best moments, the poems are also doing double the work. They are playful, but in that play there's a lot of serious interrogations of power dynamics and ideas of who can be held responsible for a violated body.
UtSQ: Now let’s jump to the beginning. What was your first significant literary encounter? How did this experience inspire you, or shape you, into the writer you have become?
EO: I used to work at a restaurant in Cambridge where Junot Diaz was a regular, and he was incredibly kind to us. It was a tiny place and easy to eavesdrop and he had the best dinner conversations, moving really seamlessly from talking about "normal" things to talking about literature and politics and economics. Seeing that in the wild made me feel less strange for wanting to talk about what I wanted to talk about, for not limiting my writing to just one genre or topic or theme or concern. Also in Cambridge, I had a really unpleasant interaction at a book signing with Nick Flynn that I won't bother going into, which made me really committed to being kind to other writers, especially people who say thank you for my work or want to talk about my book.
But if we're talking significant books, I read The Bell Jar too young and that can likely be blamed for everything. I bought a copy with my allowance when I was 11 and that's the copy I still read once a year. It has a bunch of underlining in pink pen from that first reading. As a result, I'm really fond of chatty writing, stories that seem easy and conversational that sneak up and bash you over the head when you aren't paying attention. I like to think my poems and stories and essays do that sometimes. Confession is also incredibly important to me. And parties. And running away. And throwing things out the windows of tall buildings. And baths. And Boston. That book did more than shape my writing, it seems.
UtSQ: What do you find exciting, hopeful, or promising about poetry and/or the literary community right now?
EO: The most exciting thing about poetry and literature right now is small press publishing. There are so many truly fantastic presses out there (all of my homes included / hi YesYes, Fog Machine, Jellyfish Highway) that have cropped up specifically to fill the gaps where mega-publishers fail us. Presses where editors work really closely with authors on producing books that look and feel as beautiful as their content. Also, organizations like Button Poetry that are getting high school kids excited about poems in astonishing numbers.
I also think people talk a lot about needing an MFA to get a book published or get a residency or fellowship, but there are definitely more opportunities now for writers like me who live and work outside the academic bubble. And more attention in general. You've never had to be an academic to be a poet, but it feels like more and more people are on board with that now, probably because of small presses working hard to make it possible for working class writers, writers of color, queer writers to be visible and successful.
VIDA makes me hopeful. Magazines like The Offing make me hopeful. Seeing writers like Franny Choi or Rachel McKibbens or Angel Nafis, writers I know from slam, talked about by folks I know from the academic side of the world, makes me hopeful.
UtSQ: Aside from writing, you are also the poetry editor at Wyvern Lit. How long have you been with WL? What is your favorite thing about being an editor? What is the most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal?
EO: I've been with Wyvern about two years. My favorite thing about my job there is reading work by writers I've never heard of, people who put words together in ways that feel exciting and strange and push my brain to new places. I've made many lovely new internet friends this way. The hardest thing about my work there is making time to read submissions without getting fatigued. Digging through what I refuse to call the slush pile is tough sometimes, as I'm the only person reading for the poetry section and the format I want to publish in requires authors to send us three to six poems per submission (we only publish suites). I don't get to just lock onto one poem and say YES THAT ONE because I'm specifically searching for a group of poems that have a conversation with one another, a conversation I think will be as enjoyable for our readers as it is for me when I read it the first few times.
UtSQ: Finally, Emily, 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?
EO: This one is harder than I thought it would be. My first impulse was oysters with Stiva Oblonsky, but I don't eat oysters anymore. I think it would have to be steak tartare with Gene Kelly, but only if he agreed to give me a tap lesson afterwards. Whenever my gram and I watch his movies she quite literally holds a hand to her heart and exclaims, "What an athlete!" every time he's dancing. So yes, Gene Kelly dinner date, and then girl talk about it with my gram immediately following.
EMILY O'NEILL is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her recent poems and stories can be found in Cutbank, The Journal, Minnesota Review, Redivider, and Washington Square, among others. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books' Pamet River Prize. She is the author of two chapbooks: Celeris (Fog Machine, 2016) and You Can't Pick Your Genre (Jellyfish Highway, 2016). She teaches writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and edits poetry for Wyvern Lit.
