the editors
NAMING THE TERRORS AND WALKING AHEAD WITH A FULL HEART: AN INTERVIEW WITH JAN BEATTY
We knew we had to interview Jan Beatty last spring when one of our Great River Review editorial meetings turned into a full-on praise-fest for her genre-defying work. We’re thrilled to be publishing several new poems from her collection, Dragstripping (out this fall from the University of Pittsburgh Press.) But, as you’ll see, we were just as excited to discuss her prose, including her memoir, American Bastard.
For many years, Beatty worked as a waitress, a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and in maximum-security prisons. She is the managing editor of MadBooks, and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow University. She directs creative writing at Carlow, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and is Distinguished Writer in Residence of the MFA program.
We believe her work represents some of the most skillful, daring, and necessary writing in contemporary American literature today.
—The Editors
Editors: Your voice has been described as “tender and broken, at times angry and fierce,” (Richard Blanco). How do you balance these dualities in your poetry, particularly when writing about personal experiences?
Jan Beatty: I don’t think I do balance them. Many of my poems are more angry than tender, or more broken than anything. I’ve always resisted the concept of “balance”—in writing and in life, although it’s something that I’ve had to work for to stay alive, both as a poet and a recovering addict. The poem always gives me the answer. I would hate to write a poem without dimension or without awareness of self-indictment on some level. None of us gets through life without brutal mistakes and transforming moments—and to talk about that with an looking to do.
EDS: Both your memoir and your poetry address your adoption. We tend to have one cultural idea/ideal of adoption, driven by film and myth. But you had a different first-hand experience. You speak to a few different issues: adopters’ savior complexes; adopters being driven by religious and/or financial motivations; phenotypes, bloodlines and legacy. What else do you want readers to know—or, perhaps to question—about the difference between how adoption looks in the movies/pop culture versus how it really is?
JB: Well, I’m hoping that a lot of that is in American Bastard. It took me twenty years to write the memoir, partially because I needed to do more work in therapy focused on adoption. Also, I needed to grow as a writer to learn how I could approach this loaded material. But another element at work was the massive cultural “story” about adoption that whitewashes it, makes the selling of babies a “beautiful” thing, when I knew in my body that these were lies. How could I speak against the “sacredness” of the mother, the “perfect” new families of adoption, knowing that the power of church, government, and popular culture has been successfully producing this PR campaign as the way of life for centuries?
EDS: Can you speak to the hybrid nature of your memoir American Bastard? What drove the choice to compose in a way that incorporates both poetry and memoir? What sort of possibilities does the hybrid form allow for that, say, a more traditional verse wouldn’t? And do you see yourself writing similar books in the future?
JB: I don’t consider American Bastard to be a hybrid memoir, but, rather, a work of nonfiction. Of course, I realize that the book includes a leaping framework and a few poems. Truly, this was the only way that I could imagine writing it. In 2000, I had sent out a book proposal, but never followed up. At that time, I published a few pieces of the book in Creative Nonfiction. Then, I ran into the emotional and writing roadblocks that I mentioned earlier. So, for many years, I kept notes in journals on anything related to adoption: a few lines, images, books on adoption, quotes, ideas for poems, etc. These ideas make their way into many journals over time. When I finally felt ready to write the book, I knew that I couldn’t write a chronological memoir, since I didn’t re member most of my childhood, and I didn’t want to write in any kind of traditional structure.
The short version: I was at a residency in Wyoming called Brush Creek Ranch, and I had taken a topographical dictionary with me, Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. I’ve long been traveling West, even before I knew that my birthfather was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I’d met Barry Lopez in Alaska many years ago and had kept in touch. The only way I could seem to start writing the memoir was to use some of the definitions of land from that dictionary: infant stream, huérfano, floodway. I would write down a definition and then leap to a metaphorical moment of memory. I continued to do that for two weeks at the residency and came up with a rough first draft that included some poems about adoption. I would work on nine revisions during the following four years that I was sending out the manuscript.
I’m currently working on a book of essays that uses a similar leaping structure, and I hope to write more books in this style.
EDS: Reading the poems that are running along with this interview, I’m struck by many things, but especially the ferocity of “If You Slice the Moon,” which makes a very tall order—a poem about the moon—and not only totally fulfills that big challenge, but also speaks to why we need poetry. I wonder if you could speak about this poem and how it came to be.
JB: Thanks—I’m glad that you saw ferocity in the poem. I feel a lot of sadness and terror in there. It’s a very strange poem in its develop ment. It lived in one of my journals as bits of inexplicable thoughts for a long while. When I went back to my journal, looking for poems, as I often do, I felt that something was moving around in these lines that was odd and energized. So, I worked on it to see what might rise from it, and what it might be about. It still feels mysterious to me, and, of course, who could explain the moon? It came to be a poem about the violence of change, the fading of the way things were—but then, how do we find our life force in the midst of something so much larger than us? How do we stay honest about the difficult things when the world wants us to make things joyful? How do we name the terrors and walk ahead with a full heart? It’s a supplication to the moon, a love poem.
EDS: These new poems of yours have such intense lyricism while they portray and speak from suffering. I’m thinking of the devastating and yet somehow perfectly apt ending of “Scarline”: “I am the scarline.” Could you tell us how these poems figure in your current work—are they part of a new book?
JB: I need to give credit to the amazing Diane Glancy, who used the term, “scar line” in one of her books. She’s a friend and writer whose work has inspired me for many years. I’ve written a lot about adoption, in poems and in my memoir, American Bastard, but I’m driven to write about the markings on the body—how unknown history and trauma relates to splits, upheavals, lines in the earth/in the earth of the body.
These new poems are part of my new book, Dragstripping, which is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall, 2024 or Spring, 2025.
EDS: You mentioned that you are currently working on a book of essays that uses a similar leaping structure. Can you tell us more about this project and how it relates to American Bastard? Do you see yourself continuing to write in a similar style in future works?
JB: I’m working on a book of essays called, The Unknown Bodies of Women. It’s in a very early project stage, an unruly mix of leaping story regarding the invisibility, rages, disappearance, and daily knowing inside the bodies of women. It leaps from lyric essay to interview notes— from prose including bits of poetry to craft essays to performance pieces in Paris and the Warhol. It relates to American Bastard in that the lifelong trauma of adoption and the engine of survival compels me to write the cultural markings, the violence against women’s bodies. I don’t know if I’ll continue to write in a similar style in the future. It depends on what I’m writing about, and I always want to grow and develop as a writer. That may or may not mean a shift in style.
JAN BEATTY’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. The Body Wars was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020, and a new chapbook, Skydog, was just released by Lefty Blondie Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: “Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters.” Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For years, she directed Creative Writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program at Carlow University.
Want to read more great poetry and prose from Issue 70? Great River Review now offers individual issues for sale. You can purchase a copy of GRR 70, or a number of other back issues, here.