An Interview with Poet and Memoirist Sarah Messer

The author of Bandit Letters and the forthcoming memoir Red House discusses the ‘trick of anachronism’ … what it’s like to grow up with someone else’s history … how she creates slippages of language, history, and gender … her muse, Stan … and that child of the essay and poem, the lyric essay.

Sarah Messer attended Middlebury College in Vermont, received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, and has been published in journals including the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West, and in anthologies. Albert Goldbarth praised Bandit Letters for having “the risky allure of the riverboat gambler, the alleyway drifter, the black widow eater-of-men.” “For all its clever historical romping,” he went on, it’s “a book about us, now, about our very human and very American need to flirt with the nameless and dark stranger. It is smart, saucy, and dangerously good.” Messer’s memoir of place, Red House, will be published by Viking in Spring 2004. She has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the NEA, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and teaches creative writing in the BFA and MFA programs in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where Creative Nonfiction Editor Brad Land caught up with her by phone.

Claudia Rankin called Bandit Letters “a book-length love affair with the Wild West.” She said you “wed our outlaw past to present day America.” Tell us about some of the figures from the Old West who interested you.

They were mainly figures from up until and a little after the Civil War. Folk hero outlaws — Jesse James, Black Bart, Billy the Kid, the Dawson Brothers, Quantrill and his raiders. I mainly focused on Jesse James. Michael Ondaatje had already written The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which is one of my favorite books of all time. I got really interested in Jesse James; he apparently once cross-dressed to escape being caught. The people in the book aren’t real people — the first poem in Bandit Letters, “Starting with that time,” is sort of based on Quantrill. There are poems based on Jesse James — his legend is interesting, he was very much against the railroad, and progress. He was smart.

I’m also interested in gun culture — the west, how the gun is tied to the west and America’s ideas of gender and freedom. But, just for the record, I am for gun control. I’m not a member of the NRA. I do think some guns are interesting as objects — like a Navy Colt, it’s a beautiful object, it’s a weird object. Guns (in writing and otherwise) are a symbol of power and I’m interested in inverting them, examining them, putting them in the hands of women, but I also want people to examine their relationship to guns, to violence, to history, to people of another gender. It’s also subconscious. Everyone, I feel, has their own storehouse of imagery. The gun stuff comes from my own past; my father collects antique guns, but meanwhile he can’t hit the broadside of a barn. My mother, however, she’s a skeet shooter, a really good one. And my sister was in the (first) Gulf War; she is an amazing rifle -woman. My images of guns, definitely, are strongly connected to women.

You’re very much a fact- or object-junkie — you’re attracted to quirky figures and quirky objects. Aesthetically, where does that come from?

It’s kind of like a collage thing, and in some ways it comes from the notion that I only have one trick: anachronism — putting one time period next to another, like placing a cast iron Betty lamp next to a microwave, or a Civil War musket next to a Hoppity Horse, a flower sifter from a general store next to a Foxy Lady belt. That’s the house that I grew up in — it was built in 1647. My parents really wanted to be like that show Frontier House, they wanted to live with everything from 100-plus years ago. The whole house was decorated from the period. I slept on a horse-hair mattress held by rope, no box spring. When I left home, I immediately got a water bed – tacky, I know. But at home we pretended we were Pilgrims. It was very cold in the house, outside of Boston, and we couldn’t really heat it well. My breath would freeze on the sheets. It was like 1600 and 1980 mashed together, that was the aesthetic. Everywhere around me there were really old things next to modern things. Red House tackles this: the idea of growing up with someone else’s history. I do it in both my books, really. The first poem in Bandit Letters describes “bullets in the freezer.”

I’m really interested in slippage. I started reading books about the witchcraft trials in Salem, then about the American West, then about the colonial period. I got really interested in the language that was in the trial transcripts, words that were just floating around; they were English, but they were words we don’t use anymore, and I wanted to place them alongside more modern language and see what that would do. It’s borrowing or stealing vocabulary that existed in a different time period. I became really interested in dime novels and things like that; the way the language differed even from colonial language, and our language. I became interested in the slippage of history – a poem that could travel back and forth in time – but also gender-slippage. I would write a poem in one gender and then go back and switch it, to test the reader’s assumptions—the outlaw is a woman, the person waiting is a man, the person wearing a corset is a man. I learned that from Alice Fulton. I wrote a poem from a newspaper article I found about a man in a park beating up a blow-up doll, and Alice said, it’s a cliché, this is expected, why don’t you switch the gender? So I did that, and it became a poem called “The woman almost blows up.” Gender is a construct, and like any construct, it can be dismantled.

One more thing about slippage — I had been writing a bunch of poems from the point of view of a woman, about a man who was absent, off somewhere, and the woman was hanging around waiting for him to come back. The tone seemed whiney and stuck. One day I thought, what would it be like to be an outlaw? That started the whole question, and all these different poems came out of that. And then later, I thought, well what if the outlaw is a woman?

Speaking of slippage, how does a poet come to write literary nonfiction?

I dropped out of Middlebury College for a year and when I went back I took the first writing class that I could. It was a nonfiction class called “Writing About Houses,” and we spent most of our time reading about houses, interviewing people in Vermont about their houses. We read about construction, like how to mix cement. My teacher was trying to put together this book called Thirteen Houses for Yankee magazine, and it was comprised of profiles of people and their houses. The piece I wrote was about a man who built a half-subterranean house in a hillside. Yankee decided they didn’t want to publish the book, but they wanted to publish my article. When I was getting ready to graduate, Yankee started a magazine called Yankee Homes, and I took an internship for a year there after college. I wrote profiles about houses in New England. But I left after a year and went to Michigan for an MFA, because I wanted to be a poet. But then when I was in grad school, I got a job writing about music, doing profiles, reviews, from L7 to Kool and the Gang.

As far as becoming a student of nonfiction, I just broke it down. I was writing a memoir of sorts, but mostly I just read a lot of creative nonfiction, contemporary, and then canonical, like Mary McCarthy, Nabokov, Frank Conroy, Tobias Wolf, Mary Karr, et cetera. I really like to look at the genre historically, at its evolution. I also got interested in the nonfiction novel — Truman Capote, Tom Wolff, Norman Mailer. Now I just try to keep up with the genre. As far as new memoirs and new creative nonfiction, Paula McLain’s new book, Like Family [March 2003], is really beautiful, similar to Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth. I really like City: An Essay by Brian Lennon; it’s a book that makes me want to write. Halls of Fame by John D’Agata, and Seek by Denis Johnson are some others I really admire.

I’m really happy right now with my bi-genre status. It took awhile, because I had a big split between creative nonfiction and poetry, one being done for money and the other for artistic reasons, and there was a way I felt like I was hiding in poetry. Hiding, say, from the people in my home town. For example, I’m thinking about Stan, the guy who works at the post office. Stan would probably not read my book of poems, or be able to find it, but he’d probably read my nonfiction book. So when I sold Red House, I felt exposed, and went through an identity crisis. “When’s that book coming out?” Stan would ask every time I went to the post office when I was home. I wanted people to remember that I was a poet and not just a nonfiction writer. But eventually, I made Stan my muse, I kept Stan in mind as my ideal reader to get over my literary snobbery. Now, I like being both poet and creative nonfiction writer, and maybe that’s because I’m done with the nonfiction book.

You’re interested in the lyric essay, I know. Tell us how poetry and creative nonfiction come together in that form.

I am interested in the lyric essay. It’s a phrase promoted by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in the Seneca Review; they sort of named it, highlighted it. There are other people who write lyric essays, like Albert Goldbarth, Michael Martone, Lia Purpura — basically everyone who’s won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction lately. I’m interested in the lyric essay because every genre has their sub-genre — fiction has the short-short, poetry has the prose poem. The project of the essay is really a transition of thought, but the lyric essay doesn’t really rely on that, although it can contain those elements. It moves through associative leaps, through poetic devices. Its project is more along the lines of a poem’s project – a lyric moment — it’s about language, concepts, and it can include found elements. Formally it can use things like line breaks, fragments, white space. I’ve found that when I use it in class, students get really excited to write. It’s liberating, I think, because it’s a different way to approach creative nonfiction that’s more language and image based. Lyric essays don’t walk you through all the associations – they just make them -- that they make, and in that way they’re a lot like poems.

Care to recommend a particular compilation of lyric essays?

The thirtieth anniversary edition of Seneca Review, because that has a whole sampling of different types of lyric essays. D’Agata has also recently edited an anthology of essays for Graywolf. In addition to the writers I’ve already mentioned, I’d include Terry Tempest Williams, Ann Carson, Chris Mazza, Thalia Field, David Shields. Brenda Miller has a great piece about the lyric essay called “A Braided Heart” in Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insight from Readers of the Associate Writing Programs. Poet Nick Flynn has a memoir coming out sometime next year which will certainly have lyric elements. People were always writing lyric essays, but now it has a name.

Let’s back up and talk a bit about when you first figured out that you wanted to write...

It was definitely better than the other choice – a mediocre ballet dancer. The story, the “day I decided to be a writer,” is really sappy, actually. When I was nine years old, I had this old horse that my sister had received for free along with her younger horse – kind of a bonus prize. He couldn’t chew his hay, and he got colic a lot but I loved him of course. One night he was very sick – we had to keep walking him in the paddock to make sure he didn’t lie. Finally my dad said that he just couldn’t stand to see the horse in pain anymore (my dad is a doctor) and he went and got some Demerol and shot the horse up. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone hallucinate. He was standing in the middle of the paddock, shaking, his eyes rolled back, sweat pouring off him. He wound up living for a while longer but eventually he died. We buried him with a backhoe. After that I decide that I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to tell everyone how great my horse was. He makes an appearance in “I am the Real Jesse James” – the night paddock, he’s kicking his stomach and rolling over, the needle in his neck – that’s my horse.

Ironically the words Bute and Demerol are the only words from my MFA thesis that made it into Bandit Letters. There isn’t very much autobiographical in my work except for that. I know who I’m talking about in the poems, but I’ve morphed it so much and changed the gender, you can’t trace it back.

But as for how you came to actually study writing?

I dropped out of Middlebury College for a year and was in Ballet West, in Utah, and when I decided that I couldn’t do that anymore, I took a creative writing class with Christopher Merrill, and he told me I should be a poet. He said go get an MFA, apply to Provincetown, he basically told me everything to do. So I got a new plan. Honestly, at that point, if I’d had an artist that told me to go and be an artist, I’d probably have done that, because I was so lost at the time, and my whole life I’d done ballet, and when that was no longer there, I needed something to fill that daily work. I went back to Middlebury and started to concentrate on writing.

There comes a point when we say to ourselves, “I am a writer” instead of “I want to be a writer.” When did you cross that point?

For me it was really practical — when I got paid, when I got my first book published. Maybe a little before. I started winning awards — a fellowship at Provincetown, a grant from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an NEA, but I still hadn’t published my first book of poems. I had some publications, but it’s so hard for a poet to publish their first book. Until that happened, I still had my doubts. But with the nonfiction stuff, it was easier, because I was paid right off the bat. I wrote all through graduate school — music reviews, articles about houses — it was sort of a split between writing nonfiction for money and my identity as a poet.

Any last thoughts for now?

I’m mainly interested in where the genres intersect, not how they’re different. I want to know where they intersect and how they borrow from each other. How a sub-genre breaks the rules, why it breaks rules, how successful it is at breaking the rules.

Very outlaw of you.

Yeah, I guess you’re right. Now where’s my horse?

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