{"id":36094,"date":"2007-07-16T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-16T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36094"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:01:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:01:56","slug":"issue-62-a-conversation-with-tess-gallagher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-62-a-conversation-with-tess-gallagher\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 62: A Conversation with Tess Gallagher"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview in Willow Springs <\/em>62<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works in Willow Springs 58<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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July 16, 2007<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Shira Richman and Maya Jewell Zeller<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH TESS GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Tess<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Bryan Farrell<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, <\/strong>Washington, to logger parents\u2014her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Washington, where she studied with Theodore Roethke in his last poetry workshop. She has taught at the University of Montana, Syracuse University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, and St. Lawrence University in New York, among other places, and has made regular trips to Ireland since 1968. It was through friends in Ireland that she met Josie Gray, her \u201cIrish companion,\u201d with whom she has co-authored Barnacle Soup<\/em>, a collaboration of stories Gray has crafted through years of their telling, which Gallagher has captured and preserved on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gallagher has participated in other collaborative e\ufb00orts including translating the work of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, and writing plays and screenplays with her late husband Raymond Carver. She has published eight books of poetry: Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, Willingly<\/em>, Amplitude, Moon Crossing Bridge<\/em>, Portable Kisses<\/em>, My Black Horse<\/em>, and Dear Ghosts<\/em>; two books of essays, A Concert of Tenses<\/em> and Soul Barnacles<\/em>; two collections of short stories, The Lover of Horses<\/em> and At the Owl Woman Saloon<\/em>; and a book-length interview with Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, Distant Rain<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gallagher\u2019s work is \u201csubstantial yet lambent, earthy and spiritual,\u201d writes Donna Seaman of Booklist<\/em>, and \u201cevokes the power of the unseen as well as the seen with breathtaking clarity, creating metaphors so surprising, radiant, and apt that the world seems to expand in their wake.\u201d In a way not unlike Wordsworth, Gallagher manages to enshrine not only the mundane, but the tragic, by seeing the world as her holy place. She was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran mu\ufb03ns and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over co\ufb00ee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAYA ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your connection to the land is apparent in your work. Do you think this connection is ampli\ufb01ed because of your roots in Port Angeles?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TESS GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two things were very important. One was that my mother was actually from farm people in the Missouri Ozarks. They had a thousand acres, and I had access to that land when I was a child and I could range over that acreage\u2014walking and on horseback\u2014and explore. I don\u2019t know how many children really get to explore vast amounts of territory like that; it builds something else in you. I went into caves where the Indians had lived and I was out in the \ufb01elds planting the grain crops and taking hay to the cattle and helping my uncle deliver calves, and was there for the sheep shearing. My father came from itinerant farmers. They were poor and they rented land and farmed it and made gardens. My mother made her own garden as long as she possibly could and I used to garden with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My parents decided they wanted to give us something nobody else would give us and that was the experience of farming. So when I was about ten, they bought a little piece of land, out west of town at a place called Dry Creek, about fourteen acres. We learned milking cows. We had chickens, pigs, and raised calves we fed on the bucket, and we also did planting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those two things are important, my grandfather\u2019s land and the acreage my parents bought, and maybe a third thing would be that my mother and I ended up being widows together here in Port Angeles. She had that farming gene deep in her\u2014that need to dig and make outdoor spaces. So she and I gardened together. When I was having trouble with my garden, she would come over and in ten minutes she could make things right. She had a real knack for using tools and improving, and she was strong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One time we were planting a rose over here on this side of the house before the trees got so tall and we hit a boulder. I said, \u201cOh Mother, let\u2019s not plant it here. This is a boulder. Let\u2019s just choose another place.\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cThe boulder is coming out.\u201d For two hours we dug this boulder. When we got it all dug around, I said, \u201cWell, how in the world are we going to get it out?\u201d She said, \u201cGet a plank,\u201d so I went and found an old board. We stuck this down in under the edge of the boulder. I mean, it was the size of\u2014I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s anything in this room that I could tell you. About two of those dog beds. Huge. She says, \u201cPush down on the plank and we\u2019ll see if you can budge it.\u201d I couldn\u2019t budge it much so the two of us got on the end of that board and we rolled that stone up out of that hole. We got another plank, so the two of us were on two di\ufb00erent planks and we managed to pry it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was really an incredible feat, but when I go back to that, I ask, What was happening there? Okay, we moved that stone, but there was something about her will that was aptly demonstrated. I hope if I got anything from her, and I know I did, that one of the things I got is, Just don\u2019t give up. Find a way. She could always \ufb01nd a way, and she was often proving that the way is close at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIRA RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does gardening \ufb01t into your creative process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well you know, you have the body\u2014the whole body. You cannot be there writing the poem hour and hour and day and day. You\u2019re not just this walking head. So you have to \ufb01gure out some things to do with the rest of the body, things that make your body a whole thing instead of just a head running everything.
Gardening integrates my intelligence without my having to think about it. I love digging. I like to plant \ufb02owers. I like to water them. I like to feel the sustenance of the water going onto the plant. I like to come over to Mother\u2019s land, which I purchased after her death. I can see where the deer have been sleeping. I like to notice that this plant grew or that the deer snacked on it\u2014all those little things of having a garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to worry about something that\u2019s not making it, and to think what I could do to help. I like lifting \ufb01fty-pound sacks of mulch, slamming them down, and \ufb01guring out how to do the hard thing of getting it spread. I like digging weeds, which I was doing over at my cottage in town yesterday, the place you stayed, and not using\u2014as much as I can manage\u2014any chemicals, because you don\u2019t want your baby playing in it, don\u2019t want it going into the aquifer. When my workman says, \u201cLet\u2019s put weed killer around these apple trees\u2014Roundup,\u201d I say no, because I\u2019m going to eat those apples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I fell in love with an orchard over at my mother\u2019s. People can fall in love with other people and they can fall in love with towns, and cities, and other countries, and languages, and poets\u2014but can they fall in love with an orchard? My lawyers were very curious after my mother died, and her land and house were going to just be sold, and I said, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t think so. I\u2019ll try to buy it. I will take the money I had coming from the estate and put some more with it and try to buy it.\u201d The lawyers said, \u201cBut you already have enough property.\u201d I said, \u201cYes, but, I\u2019m in love with the orchard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I prune it every February with a young man named Josh Gloor, who comes from Sequim, and we have three glorious days where we\u2019re pruning those apple trees and chatting. I love that time. The sun will be shining, or it might be raining. We might have to take shelter at intervals. I will pick up all the limbs so he doesn\u2019t have to bend over, \u2019cause I\u2019m close to the ground, a nice way of saying \u201cshort.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I like doing is to get my body real tired. I want to go to bed with a tired body and I sleep really well when I do that. I used to su\ufb00er from insomnia\u2014when I couldn\u2019t get that physical exhaustion from working in the garden. I\u2019m now taking care of three gardens, so I sleep \ufb01ne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Sky House there is no garden because I arranged it that way. I didn\u2019t want a garden there. I wanted a place where I didn\u2019t have to worry about anything, and at Sky I don\u2019t garden. There are ferns and salal there. Things that grow naturally. But I\u2019m glad I have Mother\u2019s now. I can dig there and make spaces. I\u2019m in the process of reclaiming her garden because it got out of control when she was sick and when I had to take care of her, so I couldn\u2019t work on the garden at the same time. She was my garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, now I\u2019m picking out blackberry bramble and other invasive plants that come into the garden. At the cottage in town that I got for Rijl and Tiernan to live in, there\u2019s a very beautiful garden because it\u2019s compact and you can see the di\ufb00erence you make. At Mother\u2019s, it\u2019s hard to see the di\ufb00erence you make because it\u2019s too big really to be a display garden. It does have the delight of encouraging you to wander, which lets you meditate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have writing rituals or habits?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Really, if a poem is coming to you, you will \ufb01nd a way to get it. When I\u2019m writing I don\u2019t have any appointments that day. It is hard to keep people out of that morning space. You\u2019d think\u2014I have no husband here, I have no children\u2014that I could arrange that time, but there are many other things that can want to come in. Especially workmen. They always want to come in the morning. They are great despoilers of the day. So I try to make all the appointments at what I call the teatime hour, which is three or four o\u2019clock. That allows me my day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to be at Sky House when I\u2019m writing, because people don\u2019t call me there. That telephone is a monster and unless you take it o\ufb00 the hook, you\u2019re going to get calls. Somebody is going to think they need you. They\u2019ll want to ask you something. The computer is a terrible villain, too. I try to save those morning hours. And if I have anything that I should take care of, any business, I get it done the day before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then you don\u2019t necessarily expect to write every morning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right. I make that time. If you get into a run of poems, that is the most anguishing time because you\u2019re going to run into these impediments. I can remember being really angry at certain people during the time I was writing Moon Crossing Bridge<\/em>. They were interrupting and bringing fractious things into my life. But that marvelous rippling of poems, you don\u2019t get into that often, so you can\u2019t depend on it. You have to really work most of the time and just hope and expect that something will come. The expectation helps. If you sit down and you don\u2019t expect anything, you might not get much. I know that that\u2019s away from what William Sta\ufb00ord said\u2014to have low expectations, but I am of an opposite view. I think something wonderful is going to come and I\u2019m going to put pressure there. I\u2019m going to ask for that something special to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kind of like meditation or prayer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I really get out of the world when I\u2019m intending to write. I also assume that all the spirits of the writers I have loved and have read and been with are available to me, that I have access to those energies. Just like invisible apples, I can reach and pick, can bring the images down to me. I might fail, but the expectation is, to me, helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you read while you\u2019re waiting for the poem to come?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I try not to watch myself very much at the beginning of this process. I\u2019m very casual with myself at the same time I\u2019m expecting. Now, how you can do the two things, I don\u2019t know. As I\u2019m expecting and hoping, I\u2019m also very sideways with myself. These things are coexisting, because if I look too directly in it\u2014at it\u2014I will jinx myself. Isn\u2019t this a crazy way to think? But in fact, this is how it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I will have a lot of little distractions. I might light some incense. I might drink some co\ufb00ee. I might take Peggy, my dog, out for a quick walk. There will be books lying around, and these will be all manner of books\u2014non\ufb01ction, \ufb01ction, poetry. I might pick up any of those and read, just to get some language, to kind of prime the pump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now I\u2019ve got an assignment from Ciaran Carson, who was my old friend from Belfast and we exchange work. I read all of his novels and his poetry and he reads mine. In fact, he\u2019s very much responsible for helping to \ufb01nd a press in Belfast for Josie\u2019s and my book, Barnacle Soup, the book of Irish stories. When I was reading recently at the Seamus Heaney Center in Belfast\u2014that\u2019s where I used to live for a short time, Belfast, in 1976\u2014he suggested that I was such a wild child, why didn\u2019t I try writing in some kind of form? And I said, \u201cWell suggest something.\u201d He said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you write fourteen fourteen-line poems with half rhymes.\u201d So I\u2019ve started to write those. And it\u2019s really hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did write a lot of stu\ufb00 in form when I was a student of Theodore Roethke. And Nelson Bentley, also at the University of Washington, had us writing in form. I did some things in form even for David Wagoner, but I never really liked writing in form. I didn\u2019t feel like I got from form what I needed to get in writing poems. I hadn\u2019t revisited it, so I thought, Well, okay, I\u2019ll go back there. My Belfast poet friends are very much deeper into form and using form, in the belief that you will get some things using form you might not get otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you \ufb01nding that to be true for yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I \ufb01nd it very awkward. I think it\u2019s all a failure so far\u2014but I\u2019m not going back to look at it. This is another thing that is di\ufb00erent for me this time. Usually, I will bulldog the poem right down and I will be very intense with it for however long it takes to get it right, but this time I\u2019m just writing and not judging. I\u2019m going to accumulate these poems and then I\u2019ll go back. I\u2019m not too sure they\u2019re going to amount to much\u2014but maybe I can bring them around later. I\u2019m going to reserve my judgment about them. I have a sense that I don\u2019t know what I\u2019ve got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How soon after starting a poem do you usually begin revising?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would continue to write that entire day. And then I would work the next day and the next day until I got it just right. The poems are coming with such surety now. It\u2019s like being a tightrope walker\u2014you have your balance after a while. I don\u2019t have as much revision as I had at the beginning of my writing. Maybe I\u2019m a less good writer, I don\u2019t know, but I feel that somehow I have gotten into my way and that it is very helpful to me. I can trust it a lot more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we were to go to Sky House and look at your writing area, which books might we \ufb01nd lying around?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just got Michael Burkard\u2019s last two books from Sarabande. I had not kept up as well with him since I taught him last, at Bucknell University. Of course, he was my husband for four years and we were at Iowa together. During that time we exchanged poems and we had a relationship that really lived poetry. It became kind of the pattern for what I wanted and which I \ufb01nally got, in a comfortable reciprocal way, with Raymond Carver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a great pity that our timing\u2014Michael\u2019s and my timing, for our relationship\u2014was a bit o\ufb00 because you really need your life well in hand for that whole thing of two writers together to work. We were both trying to \ufb01nd ourselves during that time. It was a very confusing time, early in our poetry lives. We had just come directly from Iowa to our \ufb01rst job at St. Lawrence University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An unfortunate part of the public life of the poet is that some poets reach the public in magazines that are more national, and others will be publishing more in the poetry venues that poets read, and Michael became the latter kind of poet. A poet\u2019s poet. I so admired the courage in his work, to choose that path, but I don\u2019t know if it was really a choice or just how he was, really. Probably that\u2019s how he is. He was always going to write that way. He has become a bit more accessible, at least in these newer poems, I feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you choose a di\ufb00erent path?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if the word \u201cchoice\u201d is correct, because what one does is governed by talents, by necessities\u2014in the language. I wanted a wide readership, so maybe that determined the way I moved in a poem. Michael would allow a lot more ambiguity and unknowns in his poems, things that would be unresolved. I loved to read that and, as I said, I \ufb01nd his poems now much more accessible than the early poetry he was writing. I love to get close to them again. We\u2019re in contact, which we hadn\u2019t been for quite a while\u2014for no reason, just that I moved o\ufb00 the East Coast and we didn\u2019t meet anymore. It\u2019s such a big country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We used to meet occasionally, and I, in fact, had wanted Michael to have a job at Syracuse\u2014which is so ironic. I argued hard for him to be able to teach with us because he was friends with Ray and me after Ray and I were together at Syracuse. Ray was instrumental in helping Michael to get sober. Michael has written about his sobriety battle so it\u2019s okay to mention that. He talked with Ray about this. I couldn\u2019t get him in to teach there at the time. Conditions weren\u2019t right with the people he would be working with, but now he\u2019s teaching there and I\u2019m so happy about that. The students were wonderful. One of my \ufb01rst students was Alice Sebold. She took about three classes with me and also took \ufb01ction writing from Ray. Lucia Perillo was one of my students there and Jane Mead. Both wonderful poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Might you talk a little about your relationship with Lucia Perillo?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucia came out west and she worked at Mt. Rainier as a guide. She had studied biology in California, but she had also written poetry there with Robert Hass, and then she returned to Syracuse. Her parents were from New York. She became my student and got her MFA from Syracuse. I used to have all my classes in my living room, so it was very cozy. We got to be friends, and Jane Mead was in that class and Lucia and Jane got to be friends. So when Lucia came out West, Jane would come from Iowa or California and the three of us would have girls\u2019 night over at Sky House. It remained a wonderful thing that the three of us could stay close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Lucia got this diagnosis of the MS, it happened the year that Ray died. I was, of course, devastated by that loss and she was devastated by her news. I remember us going out to Cape Alava with my sister and her family and we hiked out to the beach across those plank boardwalks through the forest and sword ferns. We made a camp\ufb01re and I remember staying up the night with her talking about going on despite really di\ufb03cult and soul-wrenching circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, for me, a very helpful conversation that night, to see what she had to struggle with and to get her also to understand that I had really made the choice to go on in the best form possible\u2014that if I could go on, maybe she could go on. We actually had that conversation. I don\u2019t know if she remembers it, but I felt it was a very special conversation, both of us talking like disembodied souls under the stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does a person have to experience pain or adversity to write purely?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know about the word \u201cpurely,\u201d what that is, because everything is so mixed\u2014your pain with your sorrow with your joys. I don\u2019t think you can even experience your happiest times without some dimensionality, and how are you going to get that if you\u2019re not open to really going down with the di\ufb03cult things? You can\u2019t just be Miss Bubbly all the time. You have to let the hard things come into you and be with them and understand their dimensions and live through them, fully. For me the way to live them fully is my writing. That\u2019s a very big help to me. You can\u2019t escape sorrow. It\u2019s here for us and anyone who thinks they\u2019re going to get out of this life without pain or sorrow\u2014you will be avoiding so many things that could be cherished and interesting and soul-building, so we say. I like to be with my friends when they are in trouble. And I want them to be with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had this experience of breast cancer, which began in August of 2002 and it was instructive\u2014how my friends came to me like I was the little bird that had fallen out of the next tree and they were all around me calling, saying, We\u2019re<\/em> with you. We\u2019re with you. You can do it, and that really helped me. They came from as far away as Japan. My Japanese translator, Hiromi Hashimoto, \ufb02ew all that way. Haruki Murakami \ufb02ew from Tokyo\u2014he and his wife, Yoko. They came to Seattle where I was going into my chemo. I was already bald as an onion. I had put a water-based hummingbird tattoo on my bald head and Yoko was photographing it. It was just one of those rub-o\ufb00 kinds of tattoo. We giggled together over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The companioning of your friends can do so many things medicine can\u2019t. Medicine is not going to be able to save you at some point and while it is not saving you, you have to have something else. The reason my kitchen is so full of photographs is that I\u2019m keeping all these people with me. I consult their images in the morning when I\u2019m looking around, at the beginning of the day, thinking, Where are you now? How are you doing? I will, at intervals, be in touch consciously and unconsciously by glancing at their photos with a lot of those people. But yes, you are going to write out of those hardships. Ray used to say, \u201cIf there\u2019s nothing going wrong, there\u2019s no story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean that in your poems you won\u2019t \ufb01nd the joys and you won\u2019t \ufb01nd the light. But sometimes you\u2019re just going in darkness, and you think, Oh, I never will get there. You have to be very patient with yourself and with the poems, to hope they will bring you back round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with Daniel Bourne, you mentioned the \u201cintuitive magician-mind\u201d that allows us to create the \u201cleaping of poetry.\u201d How do you keep that intuitive magician-mind alive, active, and accessible?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been di\ufb00erent at di\ufb00erent points of my life, but Tiernan, my grandnephew, has been a big part of that during this phase of my life. He is so bright and so wonderful\u2014just the exuberance of him\u2014it teaches you what you could have. I surf on him like he is a great rolling ocean. I love to see what he\u2019s going to think of next and to bask in that and try to be in some kind of lively dimension with it that\u2019s not an Old Fogey Girl thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was nursing Mother in the last year of her life here at Ridge House, where we are, I was at that far end of the life skein in tending to her. She had congestive heart failure and she had Alzheimer\u2019s dementia. I would have the day here and then I would go over to Rijl\u2019s\u2014my niece\u2019s\u2014and see Tiernan and the whole day would be so refreshed. I\u2019m glad, looking back, that I could allow myself that. That I could say, Where can I get refreshed? and to realize that I could go there to be a child with Tiernan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you know if an idea will be a poem or a story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a poem, you may have some characters, but if you get too many you\u2019ll write a huge, rollicking book of one narrative strain. Then you need to go to \ufb01ction or you\u2019ll lose concentration of energy in the poem, make it scatter and fragment. I \ufb01nd myself cutting out characters in poems in order to preserve that concentration. I think of poetry as having a higher emotional density than prose. I want that in my poems, anyhow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In prose, you have to be willing to put up with details that are not poetic; they don\u2019t have that strength. These go into writing the kind of \ufb01ction I write, which is a kind of realistically based \ufb01ction, and these details help establish the grounding for the lives you are going to tell that make up the story. That\u2019s the fabric, the warp and weft of the weave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I want a story, I start collecting a lot of details and listening very carefully to what people are telling me and making notes. I\u2019ll usually be working from the template of somebody\u2019s story. I feel like prose comes much more from outside me than poetry does. Poetry is intimate and more generated in my own theater, shall we say. But in prose I have to be responsive to that story that\u2019s coming to me and there has to be some part of me that goes out to meet it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my poems I\u2019ll have little snippets of stories that all of a sudden zoom in like a mad hummingbird into the poem. For instance, in the poem, \u201cSah Sin,\u201d the hummingbird poem, the detail about the mother who has her dead child with her on the bus\u2014I had no idea that detail was going to come into that poem. I had stored it away when someone told me that story, years before, and here it came like a comet falling into the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s very helpful in either process to maintain a great openness and freedom to admit whatever wants to come in. That\u2019s what I do and one of my students gave me the best compliment I\u2019ve ever had. He said, \u201cTess, you taught me how to be free.\u201d What he meant was probably that openness to be receptive to anything. Even your old working methods\u2014throw them out\u2014and allow yourself to have access to all those things that may come to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you considered writing a memoir?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I kind of feel maybe like Ray did about this. He didn\u2019t write a memoir either. Of course, he died at age \ufb01fty, but he felt, I think, that his life was very well contained within his \ufb01ction and his poetry. His poetry was more alive to his life than the stories. He said that his work was all he had, also, of religion. I kind of feel that way, too, that to come straight on to my life I might drive out the mysteries of it. I love what Emily Dickinson said: \u201cTell all the Truth but tell it slant.\u201d The memoir\u2014it can ask you not to tell it slant. That is worrisome for me. I like to tell it slant. I like to be cloaked and a bit hidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as open as you may feel my poems are, they also are mysterious in some elements. Some books more so than others. I think that Moon Crossing Bridge<\/em> is quite an oblique book in some ways, although one can have deep access to it emotionally. You may not know line to line exactly what I\u2019m saying, but you will have emotional access and that is something I love\u2014to give a person the ability to understand with their emotions what they can\u2019t understand with their heads, their reasoning. To be able to do that in language\u2014because music can do that and painting can do that\u2014this is the attempt I make in poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We talked earlier about your birth name, Theresa. I wonder, because you use Tess for your publishing name, how much of your identity is a self-construct and how much is imposed from without?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a combination. Within your family and your private life maybe, more of that birth identity is still available. I remember my mother in the last years calling me Tess and really disliking that, but she began to take on the terms of my life away from the family at some point because no one around her knew me as Theresa\u2014the name she had given me. They all knew me as Tess so they were all calling me Tess\u2014the people helping me with her care. That was kind of an annoyance, frankly. Some of my nieces call me Tess and I don\u2019t like it much, but I don\u2019t correct them. They have to do what they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tess was a name that I took on at the very beginning of my writing and it was a curious event where an actor from Durbin, South Africa, said to me, \u201cTheresa Gallagher\u2014no, it doesn\u2019t sound like a writer.\u201d He was very aware of image, because he had acted with Sir John Gielgud. He had a folder with his own picture, looking gorgeous, that he had to show when he went to get an acting job. He said, \u201cYou should be called Tess\u2014Tess Gallagher, now that\u2019s a name.\u201d I was beginning to send out my poems and I sent some under that name and, magically, all the poems were taken. So I thought, He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that time, of course, I was in the military zone. My \ufb01rst husband was in the Vietnam War preparation. He was a pilot and the people around me didn\u2019t know me. When I went to them, they asked my name. I said, \u201cTess Gallagher,\u201d so that began to be what I was called. Theresa Gallagher is still very much alive though. When I write my poems, I draw on that persona, too. Over the years it\u2019s gained its own veracity, its own powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your father called you Threasie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a very dear name. I like that a lot. Josie Gray, my Irish companion, has great names for me. He calls me Scut, which means the tail on a rabbit. I call him Master and he calls me Slave sometimes. I like that Slave because we are making this book, and I have to do so much of the drudgework of it. I must have read this manuscript for Barnacle Soup<\/em> 150,000 times to get it all right. Josie has no idea of all that is involved in getting a book ready for publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019ll call me Miss American Pie or just Pie. We\u2019re always renaming each other. It\u2019s a bit of fun in the day. I call him Buddha-lugs because he has these lovely big earlobes like a Buddha. Lugs is Irish for ears. He was sixty-nine when I met him, but he was very young in his spirit and he\u2019s still very young. He\u2019s eighty-two but he\u2019s still one of the youngest people I know. Because he\u2019s ready for anything. Any wild notion I have, why, he doesn\u2019t make fun of me. He tries to come on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I became a vegetarian in 2000, and he\u2019s a man who loves meat and potatoes, but he makes room for this. He\u2019s concerned about me getting my protein and he starts to read about how I can get it. When I want to save the sheep in Ireland out of his herd, he humors me. He let me have this sheep and the sheep\u2019s baby lamb. Now I have four sheep and lambs in Ireland. Josie saves the wool for me and I\u2019ve been able to get this made into raw roving, cleaned and ready to weave with. He\u2019s an adventurer and that\u2019s why he became a painter, and his storytelling is coming into written form in our book, Barnacle Soup<\/em>, from Blacksta\ufb00 Press in Belfast, and eventually, in 2008, by Eastern Washington University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What else are you working on now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I talked about these fourteen-line poems. Of course, I\u2019m always carrying Ray and di\ufb00erent things have come to the surface there\u2014 Jindabyne<\/em> just came out. That was the \ufb01lm made by Ray Lawrence, based on Ray\u2019s story, \u201cSo Much Water So Close to Home,\u201d and it\u2019s \ufb01lmed in Australia in Aboriginal country. I\u2019ve followed that along as it was being proposed and as it was being made. I kind of became friends with Ray Lawrence on e-mail. He was so nice to keep me involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m reading\u2014I forgot to say earlier, when we spoke of her\u2014Lucia Perillo\u2019s non\ufb01ction book, which is fantastic: I\u2019ve Heard the Vultures Singing<\/em>. It\u2019s about her MS and what that has brought to bear on her art and her apprehension of life and the ways she has steadied herself with her poetry, with her own writing. It\u2019s a powerful book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve been a mentor for her and she\u2019s become a mentor to you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re lucky, a wonderful thing happens in that your student becomes your friend and they\u2019re working in ways that inspire you. She has always been that way for me. Lucia always gave as much as she got, I have to say. The same with Katie Ford, who was another of my students. Katie was just here at Ridge House before she moved back East. She brought her manuscript, Coliseum<\/em>, about Hurricane Katrina and we looked at that together. You get to participate later with those writers that you\u2019ve nurtured\u2014that\u2019s a big gift that teaching gives you, that you just don\u2019t get, I don\u2019t think, anywhere else.
I can\u2019t believe I fell into this life where I get to be around so many intelligent, wonderful people\u2014really just interesting and vigorous and searching and courageous people. It\u2019s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZELLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your essay, \u201cMy Father\u2019s Love Letters,\u201d you write, \u201cI began to see poems as a way of settling scores with the self.\u201d What scores do you have left to settle?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GALLAGHER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t know them really until the poems start to reveal them. If I ever lose my curiosity, I won\u2019t be a writer. Poetry is like a witching stick. It\u2019s telling you what\u2019s there, where the water is. That\u2019s how I use it, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t know when I wrote \u201cApparition\u201d how strongly those stories that my uncle had told me had a\ufb00ected me, or what they meant. The poem tries to give the moment its full due, give that story its full due. I couldn\u2019t work it out in life\u2014I couldn\u2019t say to the uncle, I believe you, what you\u2019re telling me. I believe you saw or somehow encountered the spirit of your dead brother. I couldn\u2019t tell him that directly, and again it\u2019s that slant thing, that if I spoke this in the moment, then I would somehow invade the mystery and there is this curious decorum that we maintain with the mysteries. In writing the poem, though, I can come closer to it than I could in life\u2014in my actual, walking-around life. But unless your inner and outer life is very vigorous, your poetry is not going to be very vigorous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet, that I don\u2019t feel in a place of judgment a lot of my day, although I know very well how I feel about things. I was out visiting an old childhood friend of mine, who actually was with me when Ray was very ill and in fact the night that Ray died. He was my childhood badminton partner, Jack Estes. We read a kind of Zen poem that said something to the e\ufb00ect of how wonderful life is if you don\u2019t read the newspapers. We were laughing about this poem and then I thought, I should have corrected myself and really let him know how politically engaged I am\u2014that I am looking to see what\u2019s going on in this country. I\u2019m dipping in all the time to \ufb01nd out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s great to be oblivious in times like this. We all need to be doing whatever we can about the huge trespasses upon our Constitution that this Bush administration has brought down upon us. We ought to be enraged and \ufb01ghting in every molecule. At the same time, we can\u2019t drink poison all day from it. You have to take in the amount you need to know to inform yourself, but don\u2019t drink the poison. The Buddhists say something like what I was saying in Instructions to the Double<\/em> so long ago. Ages ago! They say, \u201cDon\u2019t drink poison at the poison temple. Go to the golden temple.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

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Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents\u2014her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36094"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36734,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36094\/revisions\/36734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}