CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Millicent Borges Accardi and Luanne Castle

December 19, 2022

Millicent Borges Accardi talked with Luanne Castle about her poetry collection Rooted and Winged. Revel in their conversation about wolves, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Liberty Wildlife, MFAs, and more below.

Millicent Borges Accardi: Your first collection of poetry, Doll God, won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Do you have any advice for poets looking to publish their first book?

Luanne Castle: What did I learn from picking my way by myself through the process? Choosing poems for the collection, ordering the poems, and finding the right title are all important as first steps.

Ordering the Storm by Susan Grimm can help with these tasks. Once you have your manuscript ready, you may want to try for contests first, but remember that it’s very very expensive as the prices tend to range from $15-$30 per contest. Then know your small presses. There are many that only publish a handful or fewer titles per year.  

If you are 25, you might want to try for those. If you are significantly older, you might want to increase your odds of getting published by sending to small presses that publish a larger number of books per year and that look like good fits for your work. Also, be ready to promote your book.

Books like Jeannine Hall Gailey’s PR for Poets or The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Book by Tupelo Press gave me ideas for promotion of Rooted and Winged.

MBA: For your latest poetry collection, that debuted in October, Rooted and Winged. How did you land on the title?

LC:  It never occurred to me until after I began shaping the new collection. As I read through poems and put them into separate piles, I also took note of words and images that were repeated across the poems. I was astonished to discover the importance of roots and wings in most of my work over the last few years.

MBA: Would you classify your work as eco poetry?

LC: In the sense that ecopoetry is an interaction between human and the non-human environment—which includes animals and vegetation—the poetry in Rooted and Winged and my first collection Doll God is absolutely ecopoetry.  Nature isn’t a stand-in for humans and human endeavors in most of my work, although there can be a correlation. That said, I’m working on a chapbook of Little Red Riding Hood inspired poems, and while there are a couple of poems edging more toward ecopoetry, for the most part, Our Wolves is interested in the elasticity of mythologies, just as my chapbook Kin Types was engaged with family origins and stories.

MBA: So many writers follow the MFA path. What inspired you to get an MA and PhD also?  What impact has studying literature had on your writing?

LC: In some ways I have been a lifetime student. Also, I must have a greedy streak that is satisfied by taking on a lot at one time. As an undergrad I majored in both history and in business. When I was accepted to the MFA program at Western, I decided to add on an MA so that I could take more literature courses in addition to the MFA curriculum.

Going for the PhD was a little different. A poem I entered in The MacGuffin Poet Hunt contest was selected as an honorable mention by Diane Wakoski, and I met her at the reading. She took me aside and gave me advice to go for the PhD because she was concerned that an MFA might not be enough of a terminal degree to do well in academia. I wasn’t a hard sell because I love reading and discussing literature. Writing papers for class, and later for conferences, was my me-space when my kids were very young. Studying literature and literary theory has deepened my understanding of what I read and what I write. Besides, I could go to school every day of my life, and I still would believe that I am ridiculously ignorant.

MBA: There is a lot of angst and debate over “day jobs” If I can ask? Do you teach or hold a day job outside of academia. Has that supported your writing career? Or been a challenge?

LC: For years I was a university lecturer, working on the edges of academia but in the middle of the classroom. At the same time I worked in the family business of dental marketing with my husband. During those years I was very involved in raising my children, too. This meant that I had no time to write. Wherever I went with my kids I hauled a heavy tote bag full of papers to grade and would read them in the car or waiting room while my kids participated in activities and had medical appointments.

During this period, I almost ceased reading for pleasure because I could barely keep up with the reading for my courses. I had a serious medical issue at the time that I retired from teaching which took much effort.

As soon as I saw some time for myself, I threw myself back into writing with at least as much gusto as during my MFA program. Although I still work for the business part-time, I am able to juggle that with writing.

Back to your question: has my job(s) supported my writing career? Participation in the family business has given me the financial freedom to pursue writing for the pleasure of writing. Teaching strengthened my education in literature, widening and deepening my understanding of the written word and how readers interact with it.

MBA: The newly minted Pulitzer prize winning poet, Diane Seuss “blurbed” your book. If I can ask? How did it happen?

LC: I have heard stories about Di’s generosity to other writers, and now I have experienced it myself.

We had never met in person to my knowledge, but I’ve followed her career because she’s another southwest Michigander who has lived for a long time in my hometown Kalamazoo—and because I love her no-bullshit poetry. Before she won the Pulitzer, I wrote and asked her if she would be willing to blurb my book. And she so kindly and promptly did so.

MBA: Is there a poetry book that “speaks to you,” that resonates with your own work? Can you share a passage? 

LC: Oh my. There are so many poetry books that speak to me. As soon as I think of one book, three more crowd into my head. But if I can choose one that resonates with my own work, especially what you might think of as my ecopoetry, it would be Chera Hammons’s book Maps of Injury. In this collection, she writes about living close to the land and animals of the Texas panhandle and negotiating her own health troubles. Reading her book thrills me with the familiarity of loving the creatures of a difficult environment.  I love these lines from her poem “imagining horses on the quail canyon trail”:  “I didn't feel like telling you / / horses are not the same as we are / they do everything they can to keep / from lingering over bones.”

I recently wrote a review of Justin Hamm’s new book, Drinking Guinness with the Dead. His poems are peopled with both the dead and living characters of his life, much as my grandparent poems in Rooted and Winged and my cousin poems in Doll God. Reading his poems felt like coming home.

MBA: You have two full-length poetry collections. Can you talk about how publication came about?

LC: The MFA program at WMU was fairly new when I attended and did not address submissions, how to put together a collection, or what to do with a poetry manuscript. Then, I went right into the PhD program in literature at UC Riverside and moved my family with young children from Michigan to California, so my thesis/collection of poems (I never thought of it as a manuscript, and it wasn’t) was set aside for many years. When I started writing again in earnest, I took online workshops where I felt particularly nurtured by Caroline Goodwin and Matthew Lippman. It was Caroline who asked why I hadn’t put together a manuscript yet. It hadn’t occurred to me until she mentioned the idea. Caroline helped me arrange Doll God, and I researched sending it out. 

I was thrilled when publisher Karen Kelsay accepted it for publication under Kelsay’s Aldrich imprint. I sent an earlier version of Rooted and Winged when it was still a chapbook to a handful of contests. It didn’t win the Finishing Line Press prize, but publisher Leah Maines offered to publish the manuscript. By that time, I had expanded the book into a full-length, so I sent her the longer manuscript and she accepted it.

MBA: You have ties with wildlife centers and animal shelters. How does your volunteer work and activism feed your poetry?  Has your passion for animals and wildlife shaped your poetry?

LC: You might have asked me this question because of the poems about wildlife and mention of my cats in Rooted and Winged, as well as the donation of a portion of the presales of my book to Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Phoenix.

I might be a cat whisperer, but I also feel a kinship and deep respect for all other animals. I volunteered for years at animal shelters, and I’ve taken in or found homes for many many stray dogs and cats. I’ve rescued orphan and injured rabbits, quail, pigeons, and hawks. Sometimes I think animals are so important to me that it’s strange I don’t write about them more than I do. There is a lot of unexplored terrain inside me that is devoted to animals. I expect that eventually I will write a collection that more fully explores this internal territory.

MBA: What are you working on now?  Is there an excerpt you can share with us?

LC: The chapbook I’m working on right now explores characters in the Little Red Riding Hood stories. Here are a few lines from a poem called “Human Origin”:

It’s all about blame.

The wolf, her mother, grandmother,

the girl, the hero if there’s one.

            Her gran was a real shit-starter.

That cap red like a lipstick.

Red like the tip of the tongue,

a fresh bloodstain, stiletto’s sole.

In these poems, we meet a Red who is complicit, one who is innocent, one who sees danger elsewhere than the wolf. The wolf is dangerous, semi-innocent, a metaphor, representative of real endangered wolves, and inside our human selves.