Grub Street Online

by Regina Waters

Matti Ben-Lev is a queer nonfiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He has been published by McSweeney’s, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Jake lit mag, and more. Matti was a part of Grub Street staff for Volume 72 and has contributed to Volume 74 and Grub Street Online. He is currently pursuing his MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University where he is the assistant nonfiction editor for their intersectional feminist literary magazine, So To Speak. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matti about how his creative nonfiction work “Phosphene,” published in Vol. 74, came to be. 

This interview was conducted over Zoom by Regina Waters and was transcribed and edited for clarity and length.

Regina Waters: What inspired you to write “Phosphene”? 

Matti Ben-Lev: I have been working for the better part of three years on a memoir that largely centers my mom and our Greek and Jewish heritage. I tend to write in vignettes, regardless of the size of my project. I write in sections and collect memories, and a couple of the things that I wrote for that memoir I really liked and pulled them out to create flash pieces with. “Phosphene” was one of them. 

For the arc of the memoir I’m working on, I was trying to show moments where I could pack context into a scene, rather than context dumping. “Phosphene” was a pretty foundational piece because I realized I can capture so many things. The original piece was longer because it was meant for this other work of capturing something about heritage, something about my grandfather, and the idea of passing something down. 

My grandfather taught my mom how to take a picture with her mind. Originally, I had it in there, but with flash I could capture the context of when this was happening and the context of myself in relation to my sister and my mom, and convey such a vivid memory. So many memories are subjective that we can doubt them, and that memory, because of how my mom taught me to remember it, stands out so vividly—I feel like that memory is stronger than something I experienced a month ago. That’s the inspiration for that piece: It was a way to fit context into a scene. I love vivid imagery and language, and when I was editing it to flash, because it was such a limited space, every little piece had to do something for the work. 

When it comes to flash, you want there to be a turn and every single sentence and word to serve the piece and the subject to fit in such a tight container like that.

RW: You shortened “Phosphene” for publication. Can you tell us about your writing process? 

MBL: I went through and made sure that every single sentence served what I was trying to say. I also had a couple more section breaks because there was more context in the original. I was really asking myself, “What can I delete that will allow me to still tell the same story of this memory?” When I got down to a certain point, I asked myself, “What context is in my larger project that contextualized this piece that I need to still do that work in this piece?” 

I was mainly stuck where there was a little bit more explanation about certain things like Varkiza, but I essentially just tried to capture that moment with as little context as possible. So, it’s trying to be one powerful scene where there’s a little context as is necessary to understand the piece. 

I’ve heard this from flash fiction seminars I’ve been in: the narrator or the protagonist is supposed to be different from the one who started the narrative. I was thinking about that a little bit as well, like, “how can I imply that there’s a difference?” That implication is zooming out. Some people would call it the turn. Like, “oh, this is a memory that I still have very vividly, where I can remember the sounds and the smells.” You look at the name “Phosphene,” something that when I close my eyes I can still picture, and so I was trying to do that work in a flash piece because that work was already done or going to be done in a longer work. 

RW: What craft elements did you implement in Phosphene after learning them from your time with lit mags? 

MBL: This piece was written before I started working for So To Speak, but I was leaning on the imagery. One of the things I learned from a bunch of different sources—like Grub Street, being a poetry editor—is the reliance and importance of really strong imagery that sticks and really surprising language in that imagery. I don’t think that this piece was heavily influenced by what I saw. I think if I were to write flash today, it would be very influenced by what I’ve read in So To Speak. 

RW: “Phosphene” relies on nostalgia and imagery. How do you typically write nostalgia? Did this piece require a different approach? 

MBL: I think with nostalgia it’s very easy to wane into the overly sentimental and overly emotional. While writing should be emotional, you need to understand what’s going on, and it needs to be able to make the reader develop that emotion you’re writing. Especially in flash, where so much of it happens in the action. You want the reader to kind of come to this specific emotion or sense on their own. 

George Mason has this book festival every year, and fiction writer Lydi Conklin came and someone asked them, “What was one of the things you wanted the reader to feel?” Lydi said they wanted their readers to cry. And so, somebody asked a follow-up question of, “How do you make a reader cry?” And Lydi said that telling a reader “This character cried,” will never be as impactful as that character holding in all of their emotion and desperately trying to not cry and bottling it up. The action of crying isn’t particularly surprising, and the reader won’t need to cry because the character is doing that work for them. Lydi’s like, “How do I make the writer do the work for the character?” When I was writing “Phosphene,” I didn’t want to wane into the overly sentimental. I wanted to establish the importance of this memory by highlighting its vividness, not by telling you how I felt. There’s room for that interiority in longer nonfiction, but not much when you have a limited space. I was thinking, “I want to hit hard, I want to hit quickly, I want the reader to feel a certain emotion, and I don’t want to tell them this is what I felt.” For example, with the line, “we’re getting some time together, we haven’t had much since my sister was born,” I’m establishing the context of the importance of this memory without leaning into the overly sentimental or telling you I am being nostalgic. 

RW: In the first sentence, you set the scene and introduce the main characters as you and your mother. Why did you introduce these two main characters in the first sentence, rather than the second sentence? 

MBL: When you’re writing in such a small space, you need to give all of the context up front as quickly as lyrically possible. I wanted to establish where we were and who we were early, because I’ve read loads of flash, a lot of which I thought was pretty unsuccessful. One of the big pieces that is missing is not establishing context really early. Context needs to be really early, even in longer pieces.  

I recently submitted a standalone essay to one of my professors, and in the second paragraph I give introductory context. He literally drew a circle around it and said it needed to be in the first few sentences. This was a full 20-page essay. He’s like, “no, first paragraph.” I’m not saying I wholeheartedly agree with that, but in a piece like “Phosphene,” you want the reader to want to spend time with the narrator, even in such a small space. It doesn’t mean they have to root for the narrator, but you want them to feel like, “this is someone that I want to spend the next 500 words with. I’m going to spend the next couple pages with them.” Part of that is giving that context up front. So, I was intentional when I said “overlooking the rocky beach in Varkiza.” I’m not saying a rocky beach, I’m saying the rocky beach. I’m already setting context, I’m already trying to indicate, “this is a place that I have gone with my mother previously.” 

I’m trying to give you my age, and then sensory details to ground you before I go into the narrative, and I want to give that information as quickly as possible so I don’t lose the reader. I had to edit a piece for it to be a flash piece, and I asked myself what context needs to be given. I thought I should put that context in the first two sentences. That was the technical thinking. 

I always think of that poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” It could be “my family depends upon…,” “my livelihood depends upon…,” but it is “so much depends / upon / a red wheelbarrow.” I always think of those lines and the idea of the specificity of the red wheelbarrow and the abstract of the words “so much.” So much depends on it. I think about that a lot when I’m writing: “How do I leave that space open for the reader to fill and seek with their own mind?” That’s what I was thinking when I was writing “the rocky beach,” rather than “a beach in Varkiza.” I wanted to ground the reader and invite them to imagine there is one rocky beach in Varkiza, even though it’s not true.  

RW: You’ve personified the ocean by writing, “the azure waves pulling in so fiercely it appeared they’d never release, and then thrusting water toward the rocks like a hug—holding tight and letting go.” Your imagery is evocative and imaginative and resembles the coming and going of memory and images. How did you know that you wanted to use the ocean as a vessel to convey this feeling? 

MBL: Pretty immediately I realized I wanted to personify the ocean. Emotion between child and parent is not surprising. You can do it really well, but it doesn’t really subvert expectations. So, I was thinking about some of the work that I would do between my narrator and myself and my mom, and how I can put that relationship in imagery. I think when you’re working with flash there’s not as much room for that exposition or interiority. So how do I put that power and meaning onto something bigger? For me, and I think for a lot of people, there’s already something parental about the ocean, even maternal.

The waves receding and pushing back can mimic a lot of relationships. And I was thinking, “Does it mimic this relationship? How can I make it do that work?” It’s almost like the giving and pulling back of affection and love and connection and all the other things that go into any relationship. There is a push and there are moments where we’re on, moments where we’re off. So, I wanted to do that work and demonstrate that relationship without telling you, “Here’s what it felt like when I was a child, here’s this, and this and this happening.” How can I put that work on something much bigger than us that I can use imagery to paint in a beautiful way? 

So, personifying the ocean came pretty much the moment I started writing this. I realized I wanted the ocean to represent parts of this relationship, so I don’t have to say it. Even down to the end, “thrusting toward the rocks like a hug—holding tight and letting go,” I was thinking that would be more impactful than, “like a hug from my mom—holding tight and letting go.” If I just went with that image, I want the final image to be the water crashing on the rocks and pulling back and repeating this cycle, and then to connect point A to B. The ending also came really early for me. I wanted to put this feeling on this water, and this motion, and this action. The last image that I leave readers with is not my mom and I hugging, it’s the water crashing and saying, “This is what it’s about. This is what I’m pointing to.” 

RW: Since you established the sea as a main image, what is your relationship with the sea and what does it represent to you as a writer? 

MBL: This particular beach represents a lot to me as a human, rather than the sea. When I was a kid, I would go to Varkiza, my grandparents lived there; my whole mom’s side of the family is Greek, and pretty much every summer up until I was 13, we would go and stay in Varkiza. Sometimes for a month or two. I would go to this beach every single day. And there’s no sand—it’s all rocks and it’s free and it’s hard to navigate, and there are so many memories there. 

I recently wrote an essay, which I hope to get published soon, about my grandfather. He would take me to that beach every single day. I would stare at that water, and I would jump off this huge rock that you can kind of launch yourself off. My mom really did not want me to do it when I was a kid. I did it anyway. She ended up telling me she did the exact same thing as a kid: Her mom did not want her to jump off that rock, and she did it anyway. And so it’s really this beach in particular. I have so many powerful moments with this beach. I look at it as a setting that can do a lot of work for me because in my life it’s done a lot of work for me.This is a meaningful place where a lot of my connection with family and heritage comes in. So, I think whatever setting we can use as something that’s impactful to us and our story, I think we use. 

RW: You have a lot of dialogue for a flash nonfiction piece. How did you decide to incorporate this dialogue, and did you remember it as you wrote, or did you move things around? 

MBL: I hate writing dialogue, especially in nonfiction. I’ve seen dialogue done really well in fiction, but as a reader, I have a really hard time suspending disbelief when reading dialogue. Even in fiction, characters don’t have unique voices, and more often than not, they do. It’s a personal grudge. This is probably the most dialogue I’ve had in anything I’ve had published. Usually, I don’t even like quotation marks. I like using italics for dialogue. I find dialogue unconvincing, and writing dialogue is very, very hard for me. 

This piece wanted dialogue. It felt like I’m centering this relationship, so there needed to be some dialogue, for my mom to have a voice. And I was also thinking, since the voice is a 9-year-old, I want you to take a step back with me, away from Matti as a writer who’s 30, and sit in this 9-year-old’s memory, which is why I use the present tense. One of the ways I do this is by establishing a voice via dialogue. Honestly, knowing more about dialogue and voice and character now, I would probably change some things to make the voices a little bit more unique. 

The truth is, with nonfiction, unless you’re writing about your life, there’s really no such thing as nonfiction because memory is so subjective. When I wrote this piece and sent it out, I read it to my mom and she remembers this differently than I do. She remembers some of the things that were said, where we were, what was happening, and the emotion differently. So, really, when you’re constructing dialogue in nonfiction, all of it is an approximation of the truth, and the internal question we have to ask ourselves is, “Is what I’m conveying honest?” I think we have a duty as nonfiction writers to uphold a type of emotional honesty. “Is this true to the story? Is this true to the emotion?” Rather than, “Does this dialogue map exactly what happened?” 

This was 21 years ago. The dialogue is not exact, but this is how I remember it for the most part; it’s an approximation. I have that line, “I can tell you how to take a picture,” and I cut my mom off. That really captures my 9-year-old voice with my mom. Like, the me know-it-all, “I know what you’re gonna tell me,” and her saying “you’re wrong, that’s not what I’m gonna tell you, let me finish.” That feels authentic to our personalities and our voices as people, rather than, “Did every line of dialogue get said like that?”   

Regina Waters is a senior at Towson University pursuing a degree in English. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street Online.

by Regina Waters

Matti Ben-Lev is a queer nonfiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He has been published by McSweeney’s, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Jake lit mag, and more. Matti was a part of Grub Street staff for Volume 72 and has contributed to Volume 74 and Grub Street Online. He is currently pursuing his MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University where he is the assistant nonfiction editor for their intersectional feminist literary magazine, So To Speak. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matti about his experiences with working at lit mags and writing. 

This interview was conducted over Zoom by Regina Waters and was transcribed and edited for clarity and length.

Regina Waters: You served as the social media editor and an assistant poetry editor for Grub Street. Now, you are the assistant nonfiction editor at So To Speak, an intersectional feminist magazine run by George Mason’s MFA. What did you learn from these experiences?  

Matti Ben-Lev: Mainly, I learned a lot about how lit mags operate. I learned about the slush pile, I learned about weeding through submissions, I learned about when edits need to be made, and how you have that conversation with the writer. For example, we had a poem that looked like a prose poem, and our EIC was trying to fit it on the page in InDesign, which was crazy difficult. In the end, we wrote to the author and asked, “Are you okay with us changing the line breaks?”  

And another poem that I still love, “How to Deal with a Brick,” looks like a wall of text with chunks missing, forming the appearance of a brick wall. We accepted it because we loved it. Our GS advisor sat with a TA for something like 8 hours trying to format this one poem!

So, I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making a good lit mag. Something I saw while working for Grub Street that I carried into my work as assistant nonfiction editor at So To Speak is the impact of my voice and opinion. I loved how I could champion a piece that I wanted to accept, and seeing that my voice makes a difference. For example, when I was a reader for So To Speak, there was a really good piece that I liked called “Mushroom Clouds” that others were on the fence about, and I convinced them to accept it, and it got published in our last print issue. It was a similar experience with Grub Street. 

Through my experiences at Grub Street and So To Speak, I learned a lot about developmental and copy editing. I did not realize the vast difference between developmental edits and copy edits, and how you go about making those edits and communicating with the writers. Of course, writers have the ultimate say in those decisions. It’s a fine balance between editors knowing that changes can make a piece better and making sure the writers still have agency.

I also learned how frustrating it is when you’re about to accept a piece, and the writer pulls it because it got accepted elsewhere. 

At So To Speak, for each genre, we have one “panic-button” acceptance, where we can just snag one piece immediately before it is published somewhere else. So, for our upcoming issue, we found a piece, and we just snagged it in a day. Now, we’re all bouncing back and forth and talking about the edits that need to be made. I also like the fast pace and being around art. Being exposed to art I wouldn’t otherwise read is really neat. 

RW: How would you define developmental edits? 

MBL: I see developmental edits as anything that goes outside the box of punctuation. I even consider changing a line break in a poem to be a developmental edit. 

A big edit changes the meaning of the piece. You can argue punctuation does the same thing, especially in poetry, but punctuation usually shifts how you read something or how a specific line lands. Developmental edits work differently. Take the piece we snagged—we’re suggesting we cut the last line because the penultimate line hits harder. I’d call this a major developmental edit.

I, and So To Speak, believe that if we accept a piece, we’re willing to publish a piece as is, and any edits that we suggest, the writer can veto. 

RW: What advice do you have for aspiring lit mag editors?

MBL: Be a reader first, if you can. It was helpful for me to be in a backseat role for a while. I read for George Mason’s two lit mags—So To Speak and Phoebe—before applying to be an editor. I think it’s helpful to observe people who know what they’re doing. And of course, when you become an editor you realize that actually none of us really know what we’re doing! I guess that’s the mirage of working with art. What I didn’t realize when I was submitting to mags—before working at one—is how chaotic the backend is. 

That’s my advice: become a reader first. There are lots of good magazines that anyone can apply to read for. I have friends who read for Ploughshares, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, Jake lit mag. It’s not hard to become a reader for a decent magazine. Just don’t expect to get paid for it; you get paid in the experience. 

It’s an immensely rewarding process, and the truth is—and I think most people will admit this—we don’t necessarily read every word of every piece that comes in. We get works that are 5,000 words. If by the fourth page we know we’re not going to take it, we won’t keep reading. A lot of magazines are like that. There’s a flash magazine that I’ve submitted to 7 times before I got published called HAD. They usually cap at 150 submissions, so pretty much within a minute of them opening, they hit the cap. They go through subs within 3 hours, so their rejection process is quick.

RW: In reading submissions for any genre, what craft elements did you decide to incorporate in your own writing or try to emulate?  

MBL: A lot of my essays and poems start by mimicking what other writers are doing. That goes for pieces I read at Grub Street and So To Speak, and my peers’ work. I ask myself, “Can I borrow their form? What are they doing that I admire?” This often resulted in unique pieces that look nothing like the original work that inspired me. 

So To Speak accepted a piece that plays with a Greek myth and uses mythology to stand in for a situation in the narrator’s life. That’s something that I read and asked myself, “How can I play with that idea in my own work? What myths can I use to stand in for a situation in a meaningful way?” 

When I worked for Grub Street, there were some pieces we accepted that I definitely tried to mimic or borrow from. Borrowing form is very generative for me. So I often think, when reading: What can I borrow from this form? What inspires me about this piece? 

RW: In your 2023 interview with Professor Jeannie Vanasco, a memoirist and this year’s faculty advisor, you asked her what GS meant to her. She said she loves it when students find meaning in the lit mag and everything that goes into producing it. What did you enjoy about working on Grub Street? Has that meaning changed for you? 

MBL: The sense that my voice really mattered and doing work in a way that felt not-performative. I’m sure there’s a better way to state that! I also just like being around art. I like having conversations about art, I like questioning it and hearing from our readers about what stands out for them in a given piece. 

On the more stressful days, it can be like, “Okay, let’s look at this piece” and, “Okay, we have 10 more pieces to get to in this hour. Let’s see where we’re at.” When you slow down, you get to read pieces you wouldn’t otherwise read, which makes you think outside the box as an artist, and getting to participate in art and it passing through your hands is a really magical and powerful experience.

RW: How would you describe your writing niches, if you have any? 

MBL: I think I can be really funny, and this memoir and what you just read, and the poem that y’all accepted does not fit with this, but I like writing about politics, and I like humor. I think those are some niches that I’ve discovered more recently. I wrote a short story recently that got published that has a lot of humor in it. I’ve written a lot of political satire. I like that kind of stuff. I like writing about politics to point out the absurd. Outside of that, I think it’s strong imagery, writing about people and relationships, and trying to do that work without telling you I’m doing the work. “Phosphene” is a perfect example of that. “How can I do the work that the ocean is doing without telling you what it’s talking about?” You just kind of infer. 

I’m a sucker for lyrical writing. I think that lyrical writing is the niche that I hope I fit. I like flash, although I’ve kind of taken a step back to invest time in longer works. And political satire is almost like a much-needed comedic relief from the harder writing, which is very emotional, and, also from the world we live in, it feels I can almost take a break by pointing out the absurd. I wrote a piece that got published in McSweeney’s. It was written as a letter from the Department of Homeland Security to send in Optimus Prime to combat protesters. McSweeney’s took that. I was overjoyed. But I’m literally watching democracy crumble, and that’s a way that I can find a light in the absurd. It is not the same as actually taking action and going out there and protesting and organizing food drives. I’m not gonna compare the two, but it does feel like an act of artist resistance because I think all art is inherently political. Even if you’re not talking about it, you’re creating art within a political world, and so all of it will be political. 

RW: How much verisimilitude do you think a writer should aim for, especially as time passes and our understanding changes? I define it as how real the truth can actually be.  

MBL: The memoirist Mary Carr wrote this craft book about memoir, and she talked about when she was teaching creative nonfiction at a university. On the first day of class, she would stage an incident where another professor would come in and scream at her, throw her stuff on the floor, start this loud argument, and then walk out. And the whole class is shocked. She’d be like, “That was staged, I want you to take out a piece of paper and write out everything that you saw happening when you thought it was real.” She collected them and then a month later, she had them recount the exact experience they saw, and then handed them back the sheet of paper. They all basically wrote different things like clothing and items being broken, except for a couple people who had photographic memories. I think there’s no such thing as pure honesty. We can both agree that a table is a table, and a chair is a chair, (that’s a Jeannie line), but outside of that, truth is so subjective. I think we owe it to our readers to be emotionally honest.   

I’ve written some things during the pandemic when I was living with my parents for a while that I’ve recently gone back and read, and I’m like, that’s not true or real. Like, now that I have the remove, I can see that’s not really how that happened. So I think we have that duty to be as honest and close to the truth emotionally as possible and not change a situation.   

You can have that kind of speculative sense in memoir and nonfiction, and in poetry since you have more room. I don’t think there are those lines in poetry. I’ve definitely written poems that are more confessional and more non-fiction-adjacent, but I’ve also written poems where I’m just trying to convey an emotion and what happens in them isn’t true. 

I think with nonfiction, we do have that duty to be as honest as we can be, and just acknowledge that truth is also very subjective. I shared the original draft of “Phosphene” with my mom, who’s a central character in that piece, and she explained, “I remember this moment, that didn’t happen exactly like that.” We have a lot of latitude by using words like “maybe” and “perhaps” and a duty to the people that we’re writing about to be as emotionally honest as we can be, especially if they could get hurt by what we write. 

RW: What makes a work successful?

MBL: I took this flash course with this really awesome flash writer, and I asked, “How do I know when this piece is done? I’ve been editing it, and it’s something that got published a while ago.” I wrote it for the memoir and took it out, and realized this is a flash piece, and it works really well. She quoted this director who answered, “How do you know when a movie’s finished?” He said, “When it gets released.” So, I think it’s kind of the same thing with this. “How do I know when a piece is done?” Because it is published. 

So, whether it’s successful or not, I guess I hear from people their thoughts and know if it’s successful, is it conveying what I want it to convey? There are times I’ve written poetry and prose, and someone goes, “wow, you really indicated such and such.” And I’m like, “Not my intention, but I’ll claim the credit.”  

I think a lot of the decisions we make in writing we make because it feels right and then justify them later. So when a piece feels successful, it’s like, “Did I make you feel something? What did this mean to you? Did you read it?” If you read it, that’s successful. Even if you didn’t like it, if you read all of what I wrote, that’s a success. 

 

Regina Waters is a senior at Towson University pursuing a degree in English. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street Online.

by Regina Waters

Matti Ben-Lev is a queer nonfiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He has been published by McSweeney’s, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Jake lit mag, and more. Matti was a part of Grub Street staff for Volume 72 and has contributed to Volume 74 and Grub Street Online. He is currently pursuing his MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University where he is the assistant nonfiction editor for their intersectional feminist literary magazine, So To Speak. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matti about how his poem “Of Jamie” came to be. 

This interview was conducted over Zoom by Regina Waters and was transcribed and edited for clarity and length.

Regina Waters: Can you give us a quick overview of what “Of Jamie” is about? 

Matti Ben-Lev: One of the things I love so much about poetry is that you don’t really have in nonfiction is the luxury to obscure meaning. When I’m writing for or thinking about publication, there are topics I won’t go into because I know that anyone I bring it to will say, “You need to go more in-depth on this topic.” I feel like, as writers who write about things that are true, including fiction writers who also write about true things, we have some duty to try to protect the people that we’re talking about who don’t necessarily have a voice.  

So, for me, this poem was about setting an emotion about a friendship that kind of fell apart when the person in the poem started to get really sick and unwell. I wanted to convey the depth of that relationship and convey his experience without claiming it. Instead of saying, “oh, I know all about it, let me write nonfiction about it,” I wrote what I observed in images, and then what it meant to me. I wanted to use language as the vehicle to get you to feel this tension and breaking apart and power in this friendship, rather than explain exactly what happened and what the meaning is.

 I tend to write poetry as a mostly nonfiction writer these days. My poetry is pretty confessional and straightforward, and you can kind of tell what it’s about. So about 6 months ago, I started reading some other work where a brilliant poet wrote a series of images, and then made meaning out of them. I thought that was really interesting. And so, I started trying to write poems that were more image-based and more based on conveying emotion through sound and form and images and language, rather than just through story. I think that’s how this poem and a series of other poems I’ve written since then have come to be. 

RW: What inspired you to write “Of Jamie”? 

MBL: I have a lot of experiences. I write a lot about these experiences, I have a history of addiction, I got sober 6 years ago, and it’s pretty open—it’s all over all of my writing. There are a lot of experiences that I’ve used writing to make sense of. So, I think a lot of the poems and pieces I write, especially poems, are trying to make sense of something from my past that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t have an answer and almost convey that on the page. I think “Of Jamie” came from me trying to make sense of this. 

Four years ago, I basically wrote a version of it which had only a couple of the images. When I really started writing a lot of nonfiction, it was for me to basically make sense of this. I don’t necessarily know what I’m gonna write before I sit down to write. I can have a general idea that I want to work on a project that I’ve been working on, but when it comes to a poem or starting a piece, sometimes I’ll sit down to work on one specific thing and write something else. Sometimes it feels like I don’t have a lot of control over that creative energy, although I have some. So, I read a bunch of those poems from that poet. I didn’t realize that this is the poem I was gonna write until I was sitting down and creating these images. I realized, “Oh my god, I’m creating images of this time in my life with this person.” 

RW: What was the process of writing “Of Jamie” like for you? 

MBL I started by collecting images. I wanted the images to show a change. I wanted them to start a certain way and show change as a situation specifically got darker. I’m watching some negative things happen with this person, I’m watching our relationship deteriorate, and I’m watching his relationship with his family change. I wanted to show that change happening over time in images. So first, I started by collecting images and starting a certain way, and the pieces that come at the end of each section appeared last where suddenly I’m piecing these things together to show a change, and then I’m trying to almost make sense of those images in that situation in those lines. 

Originally they were not indented that way. There weren’t sections. I just had a space in between each section. The sections came from showing this poem to a dear friend of mine who suggested breaking this into sections. It will make each piece stand alone, stand out more as more impactful when you utilize this space. I don’t think space is always the answer. I think it’s really tempting to play with space, and then a lot of us end up just taking it out when we’re editing unless it fits the subject or theme we’re talking about. And I thought the space worked really well here. The numbered sections were probably the last edit I did, where I was adding the numbered sections. At first it was collecting images, making sense of the images, and playing with space, which came in at the very last minute. 

RW: What does your poem mean to you, and did the meaning or goal change as you wrote? 

MBL: I think I’m never really thinking about a goal when I’m writing. I guess the goal would be publication or finishing the piece. In a broader sense, the goal is conveying what I want to convey in as meaningful a way as possible. I think that’s different for me with poetry. Because really, I’m trying to convey and capture an emotion or a situation, or just how something felt in a sensory sense, rather than the story and everything that happened. For the goal of that piece, I was thinking, “I want these images and my meaning-making to allow the reader to have an experience that follows the emotional experience that happened in the relationship.”

RW: “Of Jamie” is an emotional timeline of what happened to Jamie, and how they changed as things occurred. How did you make space for your feelings as you wrote? Were there any techniques you developed or adapted for yourself? 

MBL: I think this comes up in nonfiction a lot, like, “How do we write about these experiences that are really difficult to write about and think about?” I was at a conference, I think it was the Baltimore Writers’ Conference around two years ago, and this brilliant nonfiction writer, Athena Dixon, was leading a panel. She was talking about having a drawer—I think she had a physical one, but at least metaphorical—when writing about these really difficult, traumatic, challenging experiences in the past. When you’re starting to work on a project and realize “I’m not ready yet,” you can almost put it back in the drawer. I think that’s very, very true in nonfiction, and I think it’s similar in fiction.  

When these situations that I wrote about were occurring maybe three or four years ago, I was writing to make sense of it, and I was saying, okay, that’s not gonna see the light of day. I wrote a poem called “Of Jamie” at the time that I kept working on and off, and was continuing to stash it in the “Do Not Disturb/not ready yet” drawer. And I sat down to write a piece that borrows a form or a style that another writer’s using, and this kind of just came out. So it’s almost like I didn’t know that I was ready to write this until I wrote it. 

Once it was written, I would say because I was ready, the space I needed to make for myself was putting it down on the page and looking at it objectively, and trying to make it the best that I could. 

For me, there’s an amount of emotional processing that happens in writing, and then there’s, “Am I writing in a way that’s almost unhealthy?” Anything I write, I tend to write pretty obsessively. This goes more so for essays because I can spend longer in them. I obsess about it—it’s what I think about, it’s what I dream about. I’m researching what I’m writing about, even if there’s not necessarily a research component. I’m reading and thinking about things that other people are doing. It’s almost like it starts to occupy my day. It’s like I’m living my day with that piece of writing that I’m working on. And I think there are times when I’ve needed to put that down and give myself a break. When I was writing “Of Jamie,” I called Jeannie and asked about her experience of writing her second book and how she processed emotion, and we’ve talked a lot about that. She said going on walks and swimming, and being willing to put it down and pick it back up as needed. I think with poetry, because I had processed this, I didn’t have that experience. 

RW: What did you have the most difficulty with when writing “Of Jamie” and why? 

MBL: I think picking images that were not repetitive, picking images that I loved, and playing with image patterns. I think I refer to the Tonka truck and the toys in the playroom twice. I wanted to make sure that I noted the change in an image without making it repetitive, stale, or boring. 

The biggest challenge was at the end. I walked away with this poem, and I was honestly thinking, “my past poems are very confessional, very straightforward, you can tell what something’s about.” And I took this to my friend who’s a poet, and she said, “Matti, this is a little too cryptic. I want to get a little bit more of a sense of what this is about,” which made me laugh. As a prose writer who was experimenting, that made me chuckle. So, there were a couple lines toward the end that I added because I wanted the perfect amount of the reader knowing enough to understand the power of the poem and the images, but not so much that I was telling a story and spelling this out for them. I guess it is, in a sense, telling the story, which is something I liked about indenting the lines. I wanted there to be this movement through images.  

I think the hardest things were how much to actually give the reader in regard to context, what’s really happening, and what this is really about. Also, how to move somebody through the piece and make the images repetitive enough that you can see meaning in them, but not so repetitive that they’re stale. And honestly, I used to be so ashamed to admit this, I’m a thesaurus guy. I will look up synonyms. If I feel like, “I’m using this word too many times,” I will find synonyms online. Word choice, the fine-tuning is something that I really like doing, but it’s always a little bit challenging. 

RW: Was there anything you had to sacrifice when writing or updating “Of Jamie”?

MBL I had to sacrifice what I wanted it to be. I either wanted this piece to be much shorter or much longer. And so coming to where it is, I intended for this piece to be shorter and to take up less space. I think working in the lit mag world, as I’m thinking about submitting, and especially when I’m submitting to print magazines, I am thinking about how much space I may take up. When it comes to things online, I don’t think it’s as pertinent, but even if we’re writing a nonfiction piece, and the word count fits what a magazine wants but we play with space a lot, if it’s gonna be in print, that space, that economy, means a lot to editors. I don’t really think about it when I’m drafting new work. I don’t think it’d be productive for me to think about that, but when I was kind of coming backwards with this piece, I think those are some of the changes I made. Originally, there was much less white space in this piece. And I was thinking about lit mags when I was doing that, and I only added more space at the encouragement of a friend. 

RW: Spirituality and trust is a recurring motif in your poem. What does spirituality represent to you in the poem? How do you see it interacting with trust? 

MBL: When I was incorporating this piece of spirituality, I was trying to get at the spirituality of trusting somebody, but I was also trying to communicate the idea of worship almost as a way to look up to another person and how every human is incredibly fallible. When I said God in brackets, as the person who experienced it, that is what I meant, but I also wanted it to be a stand-in for something to worship, which is why it’s in lowercase and in brackets. I wanted to convey that sense of trusting, looking up to somebody almost as a form of worship. That’s why I also had the images of the statue there, because I was thinking about worship and looking up, and a statue kind of does that double meaning of somebody turning to stone emotionally, or someone turning away. There’s that emotional stone-turning, and there’s the bottom of worshipping something bigger than you and finding out that whatever you’re worshiping is fallible. 

RW: You incorporate nature and statue imagery, connoting life, restriction, and frozenness. What choices did you make when introducing these motifs? Especially in the ways they lent themselves to the poem’s structure? 

MBL: I feel like there’s some things that I love in my personal life that I don’t like writing about. And funny enough, nature is one of those things. Nature writing does not enthuse me as much as I wish it did. But for this piece, I had this image of the forest somewhat taking somebody. I’m imagining an illness as a force outside of somebody, and I’m thinking about my experience touring abandoned places and seeing vines wrapped around statues and things. Almost like seeing time eat this thing that once was used.   

I really liked that image as a metaphor for a relationship. This piece is not so much just about the person as it is about that relationship. Today, everything is good in that person’s life. I was really writing about this relationship and this dynamic and the image to me, which is kind of why I brought in the image of God. God is something that is static. God is something that means something very different to me than it might mean to anybody else, so I kind of was looking at this sense of worship, looking up to and imagining this outside external force taking that thing away as nature does naturally. Pun intended. 

RW: You have a lot of wonderful imagery that helps set the scenes and bring your audience in. How did you or your poem decide what images belonged? Were there any that did not quite fit that you had to tweak or shelve? 

MBL: Yes, there were a lot. When I write anything, minus some of the fiction I’ve written, I tend to write in vignettes of text. That goes for poetry. I’ll write lines, I have notebooks full of lines that have never become poems, and lines that have gone into a poem. And so, when I started writing this, I really was collecting images. Until I started collecting images, I didn’t actually know what this really was about. Then I was collecting more images, and I was thinking about our relationship, and I was thinking about nature and how nature demonstrates time, how nature changes over time, especially when people don’t interfere with nature—it will grow around things. There were a lot of images that I felt represented myself and my subject and this relationship that didn’t belong here. For example, I had a bunch of imagery about coffee cups and coffee because that felt like a totem in this relationship in a weird way, and it didn’t make it into the piece. In Section 6, “chair folded out at the room’s tip / seat kissed ash green / like the greenery around your waist, swollen,” that’s the first section that directly jams into the next section. That “chair-folded / ash green,” I tweaked that like crazy but I’m still not super satisfied with it. There are a couple other places, too. “painting in your foyer / bruised at its folded edges.” I had a friend strongly encourage me to actually remove that line and replace it with something else, and I really liked it, so I kept it. 

RW: You use limited punctuation in your poem: comma, brackets, ampersand, and periods. Do they have ascribed meaning in your poem? 

MBL: I think the way we play with punctuation in poetry is extremely important. I participated in a workshop Professor Leslie Harrison did about punctuation in poetry, and it blew my mind. Line breaks are punctuation. When it comes to poetry, I think we think punctuation tells the reader how to read it. From what I understand, poetry was never intended to be written. It was originally spoken and memorized, but I was really thinking about how I could teach the reader to read this poem. So, I was thinking about line breaks and about how I can make the reader pause, and I thought the image of “a seat / a seat,” was something I really wanted people to focus on. I wanted the pause to be there. And the change being “a seat / a seat,” and then the next section, “a seat / an empty seat.” I wanted that pause to be really strong. That’s why I included punctuation there. The brackets in God, I just wanted to be a stand-in that different people can relate to and ascribe their own meaning. 

RW: Were the events told linearly, or did you go anachronistically? If you change the way that your poem proceeds, would its meaning change with it? 

MBL Yes, it’s a chronological telling. I recently wrote a piece that was similar to this, that shows the change in a relationship. I workshopped it with somebody, and she said, “Why don’t you basically flip it around? You can still play with chronology, but start at the end, start with the change, and then kind of work downward.” That totally changed the meaning of the piece, but it worked better, in my opinion. So, I would be curious if this hadn’t been published, maybe that’s something I would have played with in this piece. 

I really like how it ended. I feel like as someone who mostly writes prose, I tend to think chronologically, but it’s cool to break out of that space.

RW: You pay a lot of attention to tangible items that further bring your readers into the poem and senses. What influenced and validated this decision for you? 

MBL: I think it goes back to the poetry I was reading over the summer. I think reading in general really pushes us to write in different forms and think differently. I was reading more image-based poetry rather than story-based poetry. I’m thinking of Ocean Vuong, for example. Brilliant poet. I consider him to be someone who more or less conveys a story and movement. For me, the power is telling a story in beautiful language, and not a strict telling of the story. Conveying a story, basically. Some of the other poetry I’ve been reading focuses on conveying meaning through imagery. That was what I was thinking about as I wrote this piece.

Regina Waters is a senior at Towson University pursuing a degree in English. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street Online.