SmokeLong Quarterly

The voice here is stunningly intimate because the second-person point of view is directly addressed to an ex. How did you decide on and develop this narrative approach?

It was more of an accident than a conscious choice. As often happens when I’m writing something, I set out to write about one thing and ended up writing about something else. I wanted to write about wolves, and the piece became about the disintegration of a relationship. When I’m mourning the loss of someone in my life, I build up this backlog of all the things I want to say to them but can’t, so second person is a natural extension of that inner monologue. Referring to an ex in third person comes with distance, with healing.

This summer you published a poem, “Metamour,” in Rust & Moth. I was struck again by your mastery of the second-person point of view. Was your creative process similar in both these pieces?

It was similar in the sense that, again, when I’m in love with someone I have a running list of things I want to share with them at all times, and so they’re often “you” in my mind. It was different in the sense that I more intentionally set out to address the poem to a specific person because I wanted to write a love poem, and second person is common for love poems.

Speaking of metamours and second persons … when you publish nonfiction, how do you navigate the challenges of revealing details about real people in your life?

It helps that I’m lucky enough to be on good terms with a lot of the people I write about, so I like to let people read the pieces before I let other people read them, or at least give them a heads up about the subject matter. But I am also of the school of thought that everything that happens to a writer is fair game for them to write about. I try to write with empathy so that when I write about real people, they won’t feel like the portrayal is unfair.

What is different when you switch genres, say from writing a poem like “Metamour” to writing a flash piece like “Wolf Hollow in February”?

This is a bit of a silly answer but it’s the honest one—I still don’t really understand what constitutes a poem. I usually just sit down and write what’s on my mind, and then if it ends up too short to be anything else, I call it a poem. I think we’re in an era in which, as the popularity of flash and micro and prose poems rises, the boundaries between genres are blurring. And I love that—I love a weird piece that doesn’t fit neatly into a particular genre, because it challenges our conceptions of what is possible.

Any cool wolf factoid that ended up on the cutting room floor that you’d like to share with us?

This wasn’t cut from the piece, but I recently learned that wolves can hear each others’ howls up to fifty miles away. That’s about the distance between my parents’ house and where I live now. I wonder what it would be like to be connected like that. Wolves really are amazing.