CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: Finding Escape Hatches—A Conversation Between Kelly Schirmann and Claire Tuna

May 22, 2023

It’s been about a year and a half since I met the poet-artist Kelly Schirmann in Missoula, Montana, where, blessedly, she was teaching teaching to my cohort of graduate student TAs. As I got to know more about her, the range and depth of Kelly's artistic practice started to dawn on me. The bright, cosmic paintings on her office wall, she painted. The sensuous ceramic mug she was drinking from, she threw. She has written two books, hybrids of prose and poetry, and her latest book, The New World (Black Ocean, 2020) is also a piece of visual art, segmented with photographs taken by Kelly and her partner, the artist Jay Fiske, with whom she runs a studio called Omo. The New World is an intimate and reflective book that “refracts, explores and investigates . . . global themes through the realm of the personal and private” (Black Ocean). To read this book is to journey into the interior, where Kelly, as the poet Danniel Schoonebeek writes, returns language “to a wilderness of its own ungovernable energy.”  

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Claire Tuna: Reading your book, The New World, I notice a pointed lack of naming. You write: 

We were at a sunny brunch spot in a gentrifying part of the city. It was one morning of a typical bad-feeling summer—record-breaking temperatures and teenagers dying in police custody.  

As a reader I want to know, What brunch spot? What part of the city? Which summer? How hot? Who is dying? What goes into your decision to leave certain elements in the world of the book unspecified?  

Kelly Schirmann: I tend to resist explicit social or cultural markers for a lot of reasons, some aesthetic and knee-jerk and some for actual purposes of craft. On the surface I just feel like a lot of those markers, especially "nowadays," have an obliterative, garish, neon kind of quality to them that make the surrounding prose feel jagged and unnatural. Throughout The New World I was also explicitly trying to capture that neon garishness in a soft focus: to salvage and preserve any poetic characteristics of an ugly cultural moment, if only to prove to myself that it was still possible to do. To me this meant sanding down the edges of the moment's language — all of its infantilizing adspeak and tech jargon and apocalyptic fervor — and reducing it to its base suggestive elements. Like I could find some version of writing that felt the way driftwood looks.  

But I also resist naming because names change. Proper nouns are weighted by ever-accumulating context until they're symbols, not words. Then they can be imprisoned in an era, a "phase," and forgotten—the way all our protests and tragedies and social justice slogans are. New names become old and then irrelevant names, while the fundamental concepts rarely change at all. The book is about this, too. I like the idea of readers finding the book in any cultural moment and recognizing the thread of continuity that runs through actual, shared time: the struggle of individuals to define their lives, return to their bodies, and make sense of an ever-gentrifying, ever-warming, ever-militarizing world.  

CT: You write that you took “extensive notes for a book about walking; extensive field sketches of clouds.” Elsewhere, you write: 

I got so high 

I wrote a book about walking 

Because I think we’ve forgotten  

How to do it 

I really think we have 

I find admissions like this one so full out in their exasperation that they make a full circle, emotionally, and become—somehow—funny, while also being everything else that they are. What’s your approach to emotional balance when you take on, among other subjects, “social upheaval, political corruption, and environmental consequence”?  

KS: I think you nailed the articulation of the approach: to push through and beyond the self-seriousness that "being a writer" seems to require, especially in times of great environmental and financial and political consequence, and into the humor that's always available when we can witness ourselves getting snared in someone else's framing of those subjects. Writers love to, and have to, exert control over the world of their book; but accepting that the book and the world are two different things, that the writer will never have control over the actual world in any real sense: this is a line I wanted to walk throughout The New World. The lines above, to me, represent that writerly conundrum of wanting control and ultimately knowing you have none: knowing all you can do is write your poems. Finding escape hatches from the dead-ends of contemporary despair by way of making light, making jokes, is how I keep my balance in my daily life. I guess it's how I balance it in writing, too.  

CT: Does “book about walking” refer to this book, The New World? Or is there the possibility of a separate book, entirely about walking?  

KS: I have a short list of books I would love to write, and one of them is “about” walking. Even if I never write it, I hope the desire to write it stays. 

CT: Throughout the New World you interact with your own notes as a source material. You write:

Money is the stick we’ re beaten with I’d written, in slanting letters with rich green ink. I read it again, unsure of what it says. 

How did this book come together from your notes? How do you think about engaging with these parcels of thought, keeping them in tact rather than pureeing them into the text? Did you have a project or prompt guiding your note-taking or did it happen spontaneously, day by day?  

KS: I don't take notes every day and I generally don't revisit my notes once I've written them down. I'm not a very consistent writer in this way—I have to push myself to write, even if I feel like writing, and know that no amount of pushing can get me to write when I don't feel like it. I like thinking. But thinking is wispy and unstable and you can (I can) really get turned around. Note-taking is more emotional, and only happens when I have a backlog of thoughts and feelings to process, or when I feel totally lost. When my partner Jay encouraged me to return to my notes, as he regularly does, my first reaction was to kind of scoff—I felt so certain there would be nothing substantive there. But when I did return to them, I found evidence of the opposite—fragments and drawings and phrases that reasoned out solutions to the problems I thought I was currently experiencing for the first time. Evidence that I had stumbled upon the same cyclical patterns of despair and resolve time and again. This felt comforting to me, even as it betrayed a kind of amnesia, and it became one of the themes of the book: having forgotten, as a collective and as individuals, that we'd been in states and situations like this one before. It helped me. I included them as their own fragments because that's also how I encountered them—as something totally apart from me, that allegedly came from me, though I have no memory of it, and could only study it for clues, or hope. 

CT: You are a writer, yes, but I see you as an artist and a maker, too. You paint, you make music, you make ceramics. You write that you are in pursuit of “a life governed by creativity.” 

Was there anyone in particular who modeled for you what it meant to be an artist/to foreground creativity?  

KS: There weren't really artists in my family, at least not in the literal sense. My parents were workers—I don't know how else to say it. My dad worked as a logger for his dad's logging company, and my mom worked full-time for the phone company, then for the cable company, then for an energy company. Their goals were the goals of their generation—houses, kids, vacations. I think they’re mostly worried about me. It's taken them a long time to come around to the idea that art, or seeking to remain in a state in which I could admire and produce art, could be a goal in itself. There are definitely times I’ve wished for someone who had gone before me, who could tell me what to do next. But it’s freeing, too, and enlivening, to have to navigate for myself. What my parents did show me was how to work at something. That, plus intuition, has taken me a long way. 

CT: A couple of my earliest models for creativity were women who made stuff: who sewed and fixed things, painted their walls, grew their own vegetables, fed stray cats, made sun-shaped bread for the solstice or out-of-control cookie assortments for Christmas. Their homes were places to gather, and sites of destruction, mess, trial, repair, and all kinds of activity I see as creative.  

For some, this type of investment in daily, domestic life might sound really traditional or old-fashioned. It compels me anyway, how we live and what we consume. 

I would call the home this book’s home base. How do you think about the domestic and/or its role with relation to art and culture?  

KS: I think the domestic is the only space in which we are allowed to create and maintain our own realities, our own communities and systems. We cannot control the world, but we can control our own. The reality that we build and maintain with our families flows out into the wider world and changes it. I want to believe that any effort to introduce something good into that watershed—whether it's making special solstice loaves or writing your poems or composting or feeding people—carries beyond our individual domestic realities and into the shared one.  

CT: Given the move described in The New World from the city to the country and the line you walk between coziness and cabin fever, it’s rather freaky to me that this book wasn’t written during the pandemic.  

KS: I know. By the time lockdowns began it was already on its final editorial rounds. But its fixation on my own tiny world, and the moments in which that world was punctured by the bigger outer world, and the fluctuating weather of my thoughts about and reactions to both, weirdly portended (I think) the collective experience of isolation and revelation that we've all passed through during the past few years.  

CT: The year that The New World came out, you also graduated from the University of Montana with your MFA in Nonfiction.  Let me get this right. You wrote a book of poetry while also teaching, while also completing your MFA in a different genre? [Wtf?]   

KS: Haha. I was also making and selling pottery to supplement my grad student wages! Admittedly I am kind of insane about work. I did arrive to the program with at least the skeleton of the book in place, so I had a big head start. I was also a complete recluse who never went to parties or bars or readings, which helps a lot in getting books written. 

CT: Prior to that, you had also studied poetry at Portland’s Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC). What is the IPRC? What effect did your time there have on your writing life? 

KS: The IPRC is a book arts and independent publishing organization that offers writing classes and lots of space and materials to make letterpress posters, zines, chapbooks, that sort of thing. In 2012, after lots of seasonal jobs and a really awful breakup, I resolved to move back to Portland to become a poet. I enrolled in a year-long class at the IPRC where I met my future poetry collaborator, Tyler Brewington, and studied poetry with Emily Kendal Frey. It was a totally life-changing experience! It felt like I was really committing to writing for the first time, with my own time and money. I wrote, printed, letterpressed, and stitched up my first chapbook in that class, found a community of writers and began to attend readings, then read and publish my own work. It was and is a really special place, and the time I had there absolutely set me on a path of writing, publishing, and teaching. 

CT: How did it feel for you to move between the nonfiction people and poets? Which tendencies of yours feel nurtured by/drawn into/repelled by/expressible in these genres?  

KS: I love the poets because they are weird and indulgent and resistant to explanation. I love the poet-essayists because they want to spend a hundred pages talking about a single color. The nonfiction people, the straight-up memoir crowd, don't have a ton of patience for that stuff. So while I encountered resistance to some more indulgent essays I found that resistance to be really informative in retrospect. Poets, as readers, tend to arrive to the page ready to work, or at least to meet the author  halfway. I'd like to find that line for the nonfiction folks and pitch my lil tent on top of it. 

CT: Are there any other essayists or poet-essayists you admire who have made camp in that same territory? 

KS: Yes, lots! Chris Kraus, Anne Boyer, and Claudia Rankine come to immediate mind. Sheila Heti, too, though some of her things are fiction or auto-fic hybrids. Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, Dottie Lasky's amazing essay "Why I Am Sad." Also !!Brian Blanchfield!! Charles Bowden, John Berger, Didion and Sontag and Maggie Nelson of course, and probably lots of other people that I haven't found yet.