Haley Bradshaw and Morgan Erickson Interview Steven Wingate
Steven Wingate is a multi-genre author whose work, ranging from fiction to criticism and digital media, includes the award-winning short story collection Wifeshopping (2008) and the prose poem collections The Birth of Trigonometry in the Bones of Olduvai (2013) and Thirty-One Octets: Incantations and Meditations (2014). His print work has appeared in such journals asMississippi Review, Gulf Coast, American Book Review, Witness, and Puerto del Sol. He earned an MFA in Film/TV from Florida State University and is now an assistant professor of English at South Dakota State University. His digital lyric memoirdaddylabyrinth premiered in 2014 at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore and has also been exhibited in Korea and the UK.
Bradshaw & Erickson: How did you choose to write Thirty-One Octets? Was there a particular driving force?
Steven Wingate: I would mostly describe myself as a fiction person, and the publications that have made the biggest splash for me have been in fiction. But I have a strong experimentalist streak that wants to throw itself into language for its own sake, to shuck off everything that sounds like a convention and simply work with words in themselves. When I stumbled into the Octets I was in an ugly careerist phase where I’d gone through a protracted multi-year revision process on a novel with a super high-profile agent at a big agency in New York. When the novel bottomed out, I wanted to get away from anything that sounded the least bit like a conventional book. So I went back to that experimentalist self, to that writer who simply wants to put words together and see what happens, and I threw open my reading list to new things just to shake my tree. I think it’s supremely important for writers to shake their trees every now and then, or else we keep on writing the same thing over and over.
One thing I read was T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and when I finished it. I said, “Hm, if Eliot wrote four quartets, I should write eightyoctets.” It gave me a constraint to play with, a language puzzle of sorts. I didn’t know at first what an octet would be for me, since it’s not a form I’d run across before, so I went about life for a while wondering what the form might be. Then I stumbled onto anaphora, the poetic repetition of words or phrases, and bam!—I knew that an octet would be an eight stanza poem with the same opening phrase. Prose poetry has always been one of my sidelines, so it was natural to do these as prose poems. They’re influenced by the long, breath-centered lines of Allen Ginsberg, and once I got the horse hitched up to the wagon—the idea of the eight stanza anaphora hooked up with the breath-centered prose poem—they stared to write themselves. I think a lot of creative projects are like that. You have ideas rustling around in your imagination, and suddenly you find this form that sets it free. I ended up writing all eighty, like I’d promised myself, but some didn’t stand up to revision. The thirty-one in the book are the survivors.
B & E: Many of your octets illustrate how smaller pieces create something much larger than we realize. What would you like your readers to take away from your illustration of ingredients?
SW: I’m really glad that comes across, because it’s crucial to the theme of the work. (It didn’t start from the theme, but it certainly came across very early in writing the book.) Our lives are made up of tons of tiny moments that, if we really look at them, resemble other moments or collide with them to form the fabric of our lives. We’re made up of so many different stories about ourselves, so many “ingredients” as you say, and the minutiae of what we do and say and observe add up to incredibly complex selves that I want to celebrate. They’re often completely self-contradictory, which I think is wonderful. We ought to be internally conflicted, you know? There’s so much in human life to be conflicted about.
Walt Whitman (another influence on the lines and rhythms of the Octets) wrote “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” at the head of his most famous poem, and with the interconnected way we live in the world today I think that feeling extends beyond the self. I want to celebrate ourselves, sing ourselves, and this mosaic-like assemblage of small impressions into a larger whole that you see is exactly what I’m going for. If I can get readers, through the poems in this book, to see patterns in the tiny pieces of their lives that seem so spread out and disconnected, that’s perfect. Finding those patterns, whether in our own lives or in the fabric of all human life set around us starts with the poetic ability to perceive things as related, even if their relationship isn’t apparent. To me, that’s what good poetry does—so that’s what I’ve tried to emulate.
B & E: You go back to the ways of farming, the senses the earth emits, and the nostalgia attached to it. How has South Dakota and the Midwest impacted your writing?
SW: I’ve been in South Dakota for just over four years now, and in some ways I still don’t get it. I come from a part of New Jersey where almost everybody is confrontational, and I spent a lot of my life in the very “huggy” city of Boulder, Colorado. South Dakota is neither confrontational nor “huggy,” so trying to “get it” and fit in is hard. I’m in constant dialogue with the place, although—in true South Dakota fashion—sometimes it keeps its mouth shut and says nothing at all. I’ve had more time to think about myself here than I have at any other time in my life, and I’ve been able to reinvent myself creatively. A lot of my new work has been digital, and I’ve traveled all over the world with it—Singapore, Korea, England, Norway. All of that has unfolded here in South Dakota, which makes the place special to me, but I haven’t engaged it very much in my creative work. I don’t have stories set here, or even poems. I think it takes a while to know a place well enough to write about it; the place has to settle into your bones in ways you don’t know consciously, and I haven’t been in the Midwest long enough for that to happen. I can see and respect the relationship that people have with the land here, but I don’t feel it myself—it’s back to that uprooted feeling I always have. South Dakota is full of very “rootsy” people, and it will probably take me a while to understand them.
Steven Wingate: I would mostly describe myself as a fiction person, and the publications that have made the biggest splash for me have been in fiction. But I have a strong experimentalist streak that wants to throw itself into language for its own sake, to shuck off everything that sounds like a convention and simply work with words in themselves. When I stumbled into the Octets I was in an ugly careerist phase where I’d gone through a protracted multi-year revision process on a novel with a super high-profile agent at a big agency in New York. When the novel bottomed out, I wanted to get away from anything that sounded the least bit like a conventional book. So I went back to that experimentalist self, to that writer who simply wants to put words together and see what happens, and I threw open my reading list to new things just to shake my tree. I think it’s supremely important for writers to shake their trees every now and then, or else we keep on writing the same thing over and over.
One thing I read was T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and when I finished it. I said, “Hm, if Eliot wrote four quartets, I should write eightyoctets.” It gave me a constraint to play with, a language puzzle of sorts. I didn’t know at first what an octet would be for me, since it’s not a form I’d run across before, so I went about life for a while wondering what the form might be. Then I stumbled onto anaphora, the poetic repetition of words or phrases, and bam!—I knew that an octet would be an eight stanza poem with the same opening phrase. Prose poetry has always been one of my sidelines, so it was natural to do these as prose poems. They’re influenced by the long, breath-centered lines of Allen Ginsberg, and once I got the horse hitched up to the wagon—the idea of the eight stanza anaphora hooked up with the breath-centered prose poem—they stared to write themselves. I think a lot of creative projects are like that. You have ideas rustling around in your imagination, and suddenly you find this form that sets it free. I ended up writing all eighty, like I’d promised myself, but some didn’t stand up to revision. The thirty-one in the book are the survivors.
B & E: Many of your octets illustrate how smaller pieces create something much larger than we realize. What would you like your readers to take away from your illustration of ingredients?
SW: I’m really glad that comes across, because it’s crucial to the theme of the work. (It didn’t start from the theme, but it certainly came across very early in writing the book.) Our lives are made up of tons of tiny moments that, if we really look at them, resemble other moments or collide with them to form the fabric of our lives. We’re made up of so many different stories about ourselves, so many “ingredients” as you say, and the minutiae of what we do and say and observe add up to incredibly complex selves that I want to celebrate. They’re often completely self-contradictory, which I think is wonderful. We ought to be internally conflicted, you know? There’s so much in human life to be conflicted about.
Walt Whitman (another influence on the lines and rhythms of the Octets) wrote “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” at the head of his most famous poem, and with the interconnected way we live in the world today I think that feeling extends beyond the self. I want to celebrate ourselves, sing ourselves, and this mosaic-like assemblage of small impressions into a larger whole that you see is exactly what I’m going for. If I can get readers, through the poems in this book, to see patterns in the tiny pieces of their lives that seem so spread out and disconnected, that’s perfect. Finding those patterns, whether in our own lives or in the fabric of all human life set around us starts with the poetic ability to perceive things as related, even if their relationship isn’t apparent. To me, that’s what good poetry does—so that’s what I’ve tried to emulate.
B & E: You go back to the ways of farming, the senses the earth emits, and the nostalgia attached to it. How has South Dakota and the Midwest impacted your writing?
SW: I’ve been in South Dakota for just over four years now, and in some ways I still don’t get it. I come from a part of New Jersey where almost everybody is confrontational, and I spent a lot of my life in the very “huggy” city of Boulder, Colorado. South Dakota is neither confrontational nor “huggy,” so trying to “get it” and fit in is hard. I’m in constant dialogue with the place, although—in true South Dakota fashion—sometimes it keeps its mouth shut and says nothing at all. I’ve had more time to think about myself here than I have at any other time in my life, and I’ve been able to reinvent myself creatively. A lot of my new work has been digital, and I’ve traveled all over the world with it—Singapore, Korea, England, Norway. All of that has unfolded here in South Dakota, which makes the place special to me, but I haven’t engaged it very much in my creative work. I don’t have stories set here, or even poems. I think it takes a while to know a place well enough to write about it; the place has to settle into your bones in ways you don’t know consciously, and I haven’t been in the Midwest long enough for that to happen. I can see and respect the relationship that people have with the land here, but I don’t feel it myself—it’s back to that uprooted feeling I always have. South Dakota is full of very “rootsy” people, and it will probably take me a while to understand them.
B & E: Adventure, love, and art form the base of your octets. Was this your intention or did this all fall into place?
SW: A little of both, I guess—it falls into place because it’s what I believe in and what I’m drawn to. I think life is all about adventure, love, and art, both for the species in general and me in particular. Without those things, my life would be terribly boring and I don’t know if I’d want to live in it. If I didn’t have those three things, I’d immediately go out in search of them. The people who have meant a great deal in my life are constantly discovering little bits of adventure, love, and art wherever they go, and that’s where their satisfaction comes from. I guess that’s my tribe.
My adventures in life aren’t extreme at all. I don’t go cliff-diving or take photographs in war-torn countries, though both of those things sound intriguing to me and I respect the heck out of the people brave enough to do them. My adventures are small and constant because I’m always exposing myself to the world, and I’m vulnerable because I don’t know how it’s going to make me feel. I don’t even have to leave my house for this because I’m a parent—that’s one of the greatest adventures of them all—and if you do it right, you’re always learning something new about human life. Love is a huge adventure, even if you’re married to the same person for sixty years because that kind of commitment is a risk. It’s completely crazy. Art is an adventure because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out when you start.
B & E: Many things fell into place with help from your muse; can you describe your muse a little further and how it continues to inspire your writing?
SW: The muse, to me, is a relationship between my conscious self and my creativity. If I’m in tune with the muse, then I write first drafts of things without straining too much, without putting too much thought into them. And when it’s time to revise I’ll do it freely, not worrying too much about whether my first draft was any good or not. I’ll come up with new ideas and not think about careerism, and I’ll let myself create what I want to create. If I love what I’m working on and invest in it, then the muse is supportive and helps me out. But the muse doesn’t like it when I try to write things only because I think they’ll make me money, which I’ve tried on several occasions (including a stint in Hollywood, which I couldn’t hack at all).
Ultimately my muse is an expression of the idea that the creative life will never let you down, whether there’s money in it or not. The art and literature business is another thing entirely, but you don’t have to worry about that if you have the muse on your side because the art is its own reward. It’s all you ever need. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of proposals to either get my digital work into exhibitions or create new digital work on a larger scale, so I haven’t been doing as much creatively as I’d like. The muse understands, though, because this is work that I love. When I’m in a good groove and in tune with the muse, nothing can bother me, but when I try to put the muse to work like a horse to get me somewhere, it rebels and abandons me. I’ll pay it back, though. I’m feeling an urge, when I finish up this round of proposals, to write something utterly unpublishable simply for the joy of it.
B & E: Along with the help from your muse, places seem to be of great importance to your writing. Can you describe how they inspire you and continue to influence your writing?
SW: Almost everything I write starts from a sense of place. It may not be a “big” place that carries a lot of meaning with it (like New York or the desert), but in the “small” places where I’m more likely to have realizations about myself and who I am or about life and how it works. If your mind and heart are open to them, epiphanies will find you everywhere. And I believe that going from one place to another helps epiphanies locate you because they like to be free and they don't want to track you down behind the closed door of your writing room. They want you out and about, seeing things you haven’t seen before and letting your mind rove around. Epiphanies don’t want to crawl through your personal B.S. and all the junk you have at home just to find you. They want to leap on you when you’re out in the open and make you see the world in a way you haven’t seen.
You also come to terms with places, or you don’t. I still haven’t come to terms with some of the places I’ve lived or visited, like Louisiana—which I write about in one of the octets—because I never felt I belonged in the place. And looking for that sense of belonging has motivated me my whole life, as I’ve been fairly nomadic. I suppose one could say that I’m tuned into place because I don’t feel like I have a place anymore. I’m from New Jersey—about seven miles outside of Manhattan—and spent my teen years in Colorado before moving all over the place. New York, Boston, Florida, California, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Massachusetts again, now South Dakota, with a few more stops in Colorado in between. So place has always been about change, and not all of it good. I don’t have the feeling that some have of truly being of a place. Being rooted in the land, and a product of it, is foreign to me. And I have to admit I’m pretty jealous of the people who have that. Maybe my constant search for meaning in places is a result of some deficiency in myself.
B & E: Something ties you to the American West, though. No matter how much you travel, you always return there in your octets. What is it about the west that you feel so tied to?
SW: I moved to Colorado when I was thirteen, and for two years prior to that a move had been in the works. Colorado and the west were my “dreamscape” as a child, and I think that’s true for an enormous amount of Americans. We think of the west as a wide open space where everything is possible, where we can reinvent ourselves. It’s a part of the mythos of America that we have a place we can go specifically for rebirth and renewal. It is that way because, as a culture, we’ve imagined it that way for so long.
But having lived there, and having seen it develop until it’s incredibly overcrowded and just as suburban as New Jersey in places, my feelings for the west become more complex. There’s a sense of loss, of innocence that sold itself to the highest bidder and will never come back. I go back to Colorado at least twice a year and I’m always thinking about the west I used to know versus the west I knownow. It was my dreamscape, and then it was my home, and then it became my dreamscape again in an altered, nostalgic kind of way. I wish I had that rooted feeling for Colorado and the west, this feeling that I’m really of the land, but I don’t, and I never have.
B & E: Returning to the base of your octets, each piece encourages readers to relax their thoughts and let the deeper meaning strike them; was it difficult to write in this way? Was it always your intention?
SW: That’s completely the intention. Again, I didn’t have that intention when I first started but it came out of the writing process pretty quickly. Writing on the same subject from eight starting points definitely gets you thinking in a different way, and I’ve always hoped that would come across to readers. I chose Incantations and Meditations as a subtitle because the poems struck me as both. Incantation as a form of prayer has been around for millennia, way longer than our contemporary religions. For probably as long as we’re been human, we’ve connected ourselves to our history—and to the world we don’t understand— through incantation. Meditating on ideas, turning them over in our minds, is also a process of self-understanding.
But today’s Western consumerist culture doesn’t offer time for either of those things. We’re all too busy enjoying ourselves or being productive. We want results, we want to get the things we think we deserve; we want recognition. We don’t spend enough time sinking ourselves into what the world is, and what we are, and I believe poetry can be an avenue into that. There’s a tremendous amount of poetry these days that’s outwardly directed, that’s focused on political activism, but I think we’re missing out by putting too much emphasis on that and not enough on the way we change ourselves by looking inward and seeing who we are. Both the internal and the external matter.
B & E: What advice can you give your readers who have finished reading your book? How can readers continue to carry its meaning with them?
SW: If I could pull together the ideal take-away for my ideal readers, it would be to focus on the subtitle and carry that incantatory, meditative spirit into your observations of the self and of the world. By looking inward and seeing who we are and looking outward and seeing how we live, we gradually find a nuanced and non-categorical understanding of life and our part in it. For me, that’s very liberating—the feeling that I actually have a place in life, regardless of what my place in the physical world is. I didn’t used to know that, but I know it now, and I think writing this book was a part of that understanding for me.
So my ideal readers would have that same experience. They’d follow the Octets into a practice of walking meditation, examining the minutiae of their worlds from multiple perspectives. If we all look at the little things in our world and in our psyches, and spend a bit of time thinking about the patterns that make up our lives, we’re going to become more peaceful people who are aware of the crisscrossed, conflicting selves inside us. My ideal readers, I guess, live octettishly. They look at what they stumble over, where they came from, and what they wish for. Then they turn those things over and look at them from every angle for the pleasure of seeing what they can find.
SW: A little of both, I guess—it falls into place because it’s what I believe in and what I’m drawn to. I think life is all about adventure, love, and art, both for the species in general and me in particular. Without those things, my life would be terribly boring and I don’t know if I’d want to live in it. If I didn’t have those three things, I’d immediately go out in search of them. The people who have meant a great deal in my life are constantly discovering little bits of adventure, love, and art wherever they go, and that’s where their satisfaction comes from. I guess that’s my tribe.
My adventures in life aren’t extreme at all. I don’t go cliff-diving or take photographs in war-torn countries, though both of those things sound intriguing to me and I respect the heck out of the people brave enough to do them. My adventures are small and constant because I’m always exposing myself to the world, and I’m vulnerable because I don’t know how it’s going to make me feel. I don’t even have to leave my house for this because I’m a parent—that’s one of the greatest adventures of them all—and if you do it right, you’re always learning something new about human life. Love is a huge adventure, even if you’re married to the same person for sixty years because that kind of commitment is a risk. It’s completely crazy. Art is an adventure because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out when you start.
B & E: Many things fell into place with help from your muse; can you describe your muse a little further and how it continues to inspire your writing?
SW: The muse, to me, is a relationship between my conscious self and my creativity. If I’m in tune with the muse, then I write first drafts of things without straining too much, without putting too much thought into them. And when it’s time to revise I’ll do it freely, not worrying too much about whether my first draft was any good or not. I’ll come up with new ideas and not think about careerism, and I’ll let myself create what I want to create. If I love what I’m working on and invest in it, then the muse is supportive and helps me out. But the muse doesn’t like it when I try to write things only because I think they’ll make me money, which I’ve tried on several occasions (including a stint in Hollywood, which I couldn’t hack at all).
Ultimately my muse is an expression of the idea that the creative life will never let you down, whether there’s money in it or not. The art and literature business is another thing entirely, but you don’t have to worry about that if you have the muse on your side because the art is its own reward. It’s all you ever need. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of proposals to either get my digital work into exhibitions or create new digital work on a larger scale, so I haven’t been doing as much creatively as I’d like. The muse understands, though, because this is work that I love. When I’m in a good groove and in tune with the muse, nothing can bother me, but when I try to put the muse to work like a horse to get me somewhere, it rebels and abandons me. I’ll pay it back, though. I’m feeling an urge, when I finish up this round of proposals, to write something utterly unpublishable simply for the joy of it.
B & E: Along with the help from your muse, places seem to be of great importance to your writing. Can you describe how they inspire you and continue to influence your writing?
SW: Almost everything I write starts from a sense of place. It may not be a “big” place that carries a lot of meaning with it (like New York or the desert), but in the “small” places where I’m more likely to have realizations about myself and who I am or about life and how it works. If your mind and heart are open to them, epiphanies will find you everywhere. And I believe that going from one place to another helps epiphanies locate you because they like to be free and they don't want to track you down behind the closed door of your writing room. They want you out and about, seeing things you haven’t seen before and letting your mind rove around. Epiphanies don’t want to crawl through your personal B.S. and all the junk you have at home just to find you. They want to leap on you when you’re out in the open and make you see the world in a way you haven’t seen.
You also come to terms with places, or you don’t. I still haven’t come to terms with some of the places I’ve lived or visited, like Louisiana—which I write about in one of the octets—because I never felt I belonged in the place. And looking for that sense of belonging has motivated me my whole life, as I’ve been fairly nomadic. I suppose one could say that I’m tuned into place because I don’t feel like I have a place anymore. I’m from New Jersey—about seven miles outside of Manhattan—and spent my teen years in Colorado before moving all over the place. New York, Boston, Florida, California, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Massachusetts again, now South Dakota, with a few more stops in Colorado in between. So place has always been about change, and not all of it good. I don’t have the feeling that some have of truly being of a place. Being rooted in the land, and a product of it, is foreign to me. And I have to admit I’m pretty jealous of the people who have that. Maybe my constant search for meaning in places is a result of some deficiency in myself.
B & E: Something ties you to the American West, though. No matter how much you travel, you always return there in your octets. What is it about the west that you feel so tied to?
SW: I moved to Colorado when I was thirteen, and for two years prior to that a move had been in the works. Colorado and the west were my “dreamscape” as a child, and I think that’s true for an enormous amount of Americans. We think of the west as a wide open space where everything is possible, where we can reinvent ourselves. It’s a part of the mythos of America that we have a place we can go specifically for rebirth and renewal. It is that way because, as a culture, we’ve imagined it that way for so long.
But having lived there, and having seen it develop until it’s incredibly overcrowded and just as suburban as New Jersey in places, my feelings for the west become more complex. There’s a sense of loss, of innocence that sold itself to the highest bidder and will never come back. I go back to Colorado at least twice a year and I’m always thinking about the west I used to know versus the west I knownow. It was my dreamscape, and then it was my home, and then it became my dreamscape again in an altered, nostalgic kind of way. I wish I had that rooted feeling for Colorado and the west, this feeling that I’m really of the land, but I don’t, and I never have.
B & E: Returning to the base of your octets, each piece encourages readers to relax their thoughts and let the deeper meaning strike them; was it difficult to write in this way? Was it always your intention?
SW: That’s completely the intention. Again, I didn’t have that intention when I first started but it came out of the writing process pretty quickly. Writing on the same subject from eight starting points definitely gets you thinking in a different way, and I’ve always hoped that would come across to readers. I chose Incantations and Meditations as a subtitle because the poems struck me as both. Incantation as a form of prayer has been around for millennia, way longer than our contemporary religions. For probably as long as we’re been human, we’ve connected ourselves to our history—and to the world we don’t understand— through incantation. Meditating on ideas, turning them over in our minds, is also a process of self-understanding.
But today’s Western consumerist culture doesn’t offer time for either of those things. We’re all too busy enjoying ourselves or being productive. We want results, we want to get the things we think we deserve; we want recognition. We don’t spend enough time sinking ourselves into what the world is, and what we are, and I believe poetry can be an avenue into that. There’s a tremendous amount of poetry these days that’s outwardly directed, that’s focused on political activism, but I think we’re missing out by putting too much emphasis on that and not enough on the way we change ourselves by looking inward and seeing who we are. Both the internal and the external matter.
B & E: What advice can you give your readers who have finished reading your book? How can readers continue to carry its meaning with them?
SW: If I could pull together the ideal take-away for my ideal readers, it would be to focus on the subtitle and carry that incantatory, meditative spirit into your observations of the self and of the world. By looking inward and seeing who we are and looking outward and seeing how we live, we gradually find a nuanced and non-categorical understanding of life and our part in it. For me, that’s very liberating—the feeling that I actually have a place in life, regardless of what my place in the physical world is. I didn’t used to know that, but I know it now, and I think writing this book was a part of that understanding for me.
So my ideal readers would have that same experience. They’d follow the Octets into a practice of walking meditation, examining the minutiae of their worlds from multiple perspectives. If we all look at the little things in our world and in our psyches, and spend a bit of time thinking about the patterns that make up our lives, we’re going to become more peaceful people who are aware of the crisscrossed, conflicting selves inside us. My ideal readers, I guess, live octettishly. They look at what they stumble over, where they came from, and what they wish for. Then they turn those things over and look at them from every angle for the pleasure of seeing what they can find.
Haley Bradshaw graduated from South Dakota State University with a major in English and a minor in professional writing. She spent her childhood in Plano, Texas before moving to the great Midwest. Her passion for writing stems from her everlasting love of endless years of reading. Haley plans on continuing her life in South Dakota with a full-time career in writing and marketing.
Morgan Erickson graduated from South Dakota State University with major in English and Honors Distinction. She grew up in Gayville, South Dakota, which is where her love for writing began; she found inspiration for her poetry and nonfiction writing through her experiences on her family’s farm. Morgan hopes to further her education by attending graduate school, where she can continue to pursue her love for writing.
