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This podcast is for anyone who loves a good story. Board now for interviews and writing samples from talented authors!
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Every story is a ticket to somewhere extraordinary. No need to pack a bag, just settle in and let the words transport you. Now boarding: an insight to an author's mind. This is The Story Station.
Emma: Love it or hate it, there's one thing that's undeniable. Poetry allows for complexity and depth of expression in even simple phrases. Bethany Schultz Hurst, author of award-winning poetry collections Blueprints and Ruin and Miss Lost Nation, is here in the studio with me today. Bethany, why do you write?
Bethany: That's a great question. Daily life so often feels like it's about one task after another. There's so much about what we need to do and what we need to buy that's necessary or what we've been told is necessary to buy. And my brain is really susceptible to that kind of busyness. And so I can draft to-do lists that go on for weeks. And as soon as I pick up my grocery order, five minutes later, I'm already filling up my online shopping cart all over again. And while completing those tasks can feel satisfying momentarily, I feel like if that's all my brain is engaging with, then ultimately it feels pretty hollow.
So poetry for me provides a space where I can disconnect from language as just a form of transaction and can allow my brain to make different kinds of connections. So for me, it's kind of a refuge. And in that refuge, I can start to ask questions about the kinds of systems that I might inadvertently let myself get swept up into. And that's why I think poetry is important culturally, or art is important even more broadly, because I think we need that space and that permission to stop engaging in just the quickness of consumption all of the time and take some time to step away into a different kind of consideration.
Emma: I like that. It's a form of exploration and, like you said, a refuge.
Bethany: Yeah.
Emma: I feel kinda bad, too. I just jumped in and was like, "hey, why do you write?" But tell me a little more about yourself.
Bethany: I am a professor at Idaho State University, and I've been here in Southeastern Idaho for twenty years. So I feel like Idaho is home now.
Emma: As a professor, is it a struggle to get your students to see the value of poetry sometimes?
Bethany: Initially, it is.
So I teach all levels of creative writing for undergraduates, from introductory to the advanced level workshops. Often in the introductory creative writing classes, students have not had much experience with poetry, or if they've had experience with poetry, a lot of them have not had super positive experiences. So a lot of students will seem really unenthusiastic initially about poetry. But I like to think that I win quite a few people over by the time we finish a poetry unit.
One thing that I think is helpful in thinking about poetry is that it's just a tool to help us see the world differently. So we spend a lot of time talking about the ways that poetry can shift our perceptions of the world and our relationship with it. I think a lot of people end up finding some value there. And finding fun poems or interesting poems or poems that kind of speak to our current moment, I think that helps students see how it's not just some ancient artifact, but something that's kind of living and breathing and evolving too.
Emma: That's true. Just because you don't like some poems that you've read doesn't mean you don't like all poetry.
Bethany: Right.
Emma: Maybe you just haven't discovered the poems you like yet.
Bethany: That's right.
Emma: But writing poetry, that could be really challenging because you might have something that you want to convey or express, but sometimes it's hard getting that out there or knowing if it's really doing what you want it to do... Or maybe it doesn't need to do what you want it to do because everybody can have their own interpretation.
Bethany: Right. Yeah. And I think that's where classrooms where there's a workshop, that's where that can be helpful because students can share what they've written and just see how other people are receiving it. And like you said, sometimes it's useful to check like, oh, this is what I meant for it to be. Is that coming across?
But in other cases, it might actually be more exciting to see what is in a poem draft that you weren't even aware of that other people can recognize. And once they start pointing it out, you might realize too that there's something richer that the poem is developing into that you could pursue a little bit more.
But I think there's kind of an interesting relationship between your intent with a poem and then also allowing it to become something different than just what your narrow first idea of it might have been.
Emma: Workshopping is so important. My husband's a poet, and he was telling me that he was writing a poem... He saw this longhorn skull once out in the desert, and he was writing about that.
And then everybody in his class that he was workshopping with thought that it was a human skull, and he's like, "oh, that is definitely a very different feeling than what I was going for."
Bethany: Right. And so in that case, we might revise by getting some more longhorn specific stuff in there. Or, you know, you could embrace the creepiness of the human skull and see what kind of poem that might turn into.
Emma: Do you have any other tips for ways that you can convey the certain tone or mood that you're going for?
Bethany: I think tone and mood for me come largely through image, and I guess language choice as well. But I think one danger in poetry, and it's a reward too, is that it can be this kind of abstract imagined space. But if it gets too abstract and too far away from the physical world, that's when I think things start communicating less. So if you're trying to convey a particular mood or emotion, I think trying to tie that to some sort of physical image might be a good approach because then you're dealing with the stuff of the world rather than stuff that's completely intangible. Right? And then I think all that great abstract stuff comes with the image.
But I think word choice can do a lot too, right? Just subtle work with sound can create different effects. So I think primarily work with the image and then coming back to it, really thinking about what kinds of sounds might evoke different kinds of responses too.
Emma: Oh, I like that. Just going through several drafts and tweaking little things to get different emotional responses.
Bethany: Yeah.
Emma: If that's, like, the process of once you have an idea and you started a poem, how do you come up with your ideas or get inspiration?
Bethany: That's a great question. If I sit down to write and I'm putting too much pressure on it, like "I will write a very important poem," then nothing, nothing good is going to come of that.
My writing process, when it works best, is kind of a mixture of informal writing and then more formal writing. So I'll start off—for several days at a time, I'll just write completely informally. I won't worry about if it sounds good or makes any sort of sense. And I'm just trying to get down different thoughts that I've had or different images that are haunting me. And I won't even read back over what I've written. And I'll try to collect a few pages of that kind of writing.
And then at some point I'll look back through what I've written and kind of pick out what seems the most interesting. And I'll start moving that onto a different page in a different document. And I'll see if there's any resonance between the things that have stood out to me. And then that way it's kind of... I'm listening to what's showing up rather than trying to boss it around on the page. So I can see what kinds of interests are there and what kinds of overlaps.
And then I can start the work of pushing that toward a draft and seeing if those different pieces might work together in some interesting ways. But if I come at it thinking, "here's my poem draft," then that's just too rigid for me, I think. And I need to stay in that state of exploration and discovery as long as possible to get interesting things to happen.
Emma: The best way to write is just to write, it seems.
Bethany: That's right.
Emma: Do you have any poems that were more difficult for you to write than others?
Bethany: Yeah. Absolutely. And there's some poem drafts that I've just completely abandoned because they never really shaped up into anything. But I still learned something from them, going through the process of trying to work with them.
But there was one poem that I'm thinking of where I had been reading about mining and asbestos contamination at the same time that I had learned that one of my college friends died of mesothelioma. There's a lot of emotion going on there that was hard for me to deal with as I was writing about these issues. And for some reason, The Wizard of Oz kept coming into my mind, like just different images of Wizard of Oz. And then as I was reading more about asbestos, I read that the snow that fell on Dorothy and everyone in the poppy field in the movie production was actually asbestos, that they were just shaking asbestos down on them. So I brought in The Wizard of Oz into this poem too, as if it wasn't challenging enough to be talking about these other things. And I really struggled to get all of those different threads to speak to one another.
And finally, I realized that there were places where I wished I could rewind, like when you're watching a movie. And so I just started bringing that into the poem, like stop, rewind. And once I started thinking about arranging time differently, then those different threads started coming together. That was a tricky one because I couldn't quite figure out how to get everything to speak to each other. But then kind of thinking about different devices and arrangement, I finally felt like I made a breakthrough.
Emma: It's like each poem has a story of its own, like a behind the scenes.
Bethany: Yeah. And they are like puzzles. And I think that's one reason I keep coming back to poetry because even if you're working with a particular form of poetry like a sonnet or a pantoum, there's still some particular kind of puzzle you're trying to solve in a particular draft. And so the nerdy part of my brain that wants to fit words together like a crossword puzzle, that's working at the same time that more image-based and emotion parts of my brain are working too. So just all sorts of different things are happening at once, which is exciting.
Emma: On that note, do you have any favorite forms of poetry either to read or to write?
Bethany: Well, lately, I've been very into repetition and repeating forms. I've been really interested in the pantoum. This summer, I read Sarah Henning's book Burn, and she has some pantoums in her collection. And she makes them look so effortless, and I had actually never written one before. So I thought I would try my hand at it, and it was extremely difficult to do, but I had so much fun working on it. So that's a form that I've really enjoyed turning to lately.
Emma: And what makes a pantoum a pantoum?
Bethany: It's a Malay form, and it has four line stanzas. The second and fourth line of each stanza becomes the first and third line of the next stanza. So it interweaves like that. And then at the end, there's different options of how you could conclude it, but you can go back to the beginning lines and bring those back in again. So even though you're kind of moving forward with maybe a narrative, you're also constantly moving back to those lines that appeared in the previous stanza. So it feels like you're moving through a little maze.
Emma: That sounds tricky.
Bethany: Yeah.
Emma: But really cool too.
Bethany: Yeah. And it seems easy because you think, "oh, I already have these two lines. So my next stanza is already 50% written," but then trying to get it to work with the new content and do some surprising things at the same time... That's what makes it tricky because repetition, I think, works best when it's also balanced with surprise, right? You don't just want the same thing over and over again. Unless you're chanting, that serves a different purpose. But I like the balance between anticipation and surprise.
Emma: Do you have any advice for aspiring poets or maybe even poets who are just hitting a wall right now?
Bethany: That's a good question. I think this works for poets who are just starting out or for poets who are feeling kind of stalled. I would recommend—that sounds really formal, "I'll recommend." But I find it helpful when I feel stalled out to turn to other forms of art. Sometimes that might just mean that I'll turn to reading poems rather than writing my own. And often that's how I began my own writing sessions is I need to read for a while just to kind of commune with someone else's work and hear some different language and approaches.
Or maybe I'll look at some paintings or I'll learn about an artist I didn't know about, or... I'm terrible at painting, but I love watercolor. If I'm in kind of a stagnant place in my own poetry, then I'll try some different kind of artistic approach, just so I'm still touching something related to the art world without putting a lot of pressure on poetry specifically. And I think that helps because it's keeping those pathways open to artistic experiences without putting the stress of, "oh, I need to write a poem." Right? I think the more engaged we are with different kinds of artistic expressions, the more it will actually feed our own work too.
Emma: My mom said that she had a band teacher who every time he got sick of music, he would go and listen to his favorite pieces again, and that'd remind him why he was doing what he was doing and why he loved music so much. If you're tired or frustrated, just go back to the basics then of why you're writing or...
Bethany: Yeah.
Emma: Creating.
Bethany: Yeah. What does art mean to you? What do you get from it? Where's that enjoyment? Right? And tapping back into that pleasure, hopefully, will kind of give you a little push.
Emma: So I asked you about a poem that was really difficult to write. Do you have a poem that was your favorite to write?
Bethany: Well, I think talking about the pantoum, that was really fun to write. And actually, I wrote one draft of it, and I felt so proud of myself for having completed a poem in the form. And then somehow, I lost it. It didn't save, and somehow, even though I have backups everywhere, I couldn't find it anywhere.
So I was despondent for a few days, but then I came back to it. And I rewrote as much as I could remember, but then I had to go off in some different directions the next time through. And it was a great process. Like, I felt like I had even more fun the second time through. And just feeling that sense of accomplishment and doing a form that I hadn't worked with before... It was pretty fun for me.
Emma: That is a tragedy, but good job for, like, getting back on the horse.
Bethany: That was pretty sad.
Emma: Yeah. Oh, that would be so disheartening. Is there anything else you'd like to share before we get to your reading?
Bethany: No. Thank you for the great question.
Emma: Thank you for the great answers.
Bethany: This is the pantoum that I wrote this summer. And mine, I didn't repeat the lines verbatim, but I used key phrases or key images in the positions where they're supposed to appear in the form. So there's your fun fact about the behind the scenes look at this poem.
Hospital, Maze and Minotaur.
O the Russian Olives, baring their pale yellow stars.
Though in the dark parking lot we couldn’t see them
they offered their perfume. We’d lost the car.
We doubled back through the rows—labyrinthine—
straining to see in the dark parking lot. For weeks
we’d come and gone and come in pre-set three hour
intervals. Through each asphalt row we doubled back.
Observe my half-done blouse. We’d barely showered.
Time rearranged itself into pre-set NICU visiting hours:
all exodus and return. All baby IV-and-monitor-tethered
as I undid my blouse to try to nurse him. At the baby shower
under my flowing dress we’d housed together—
now he was made strange by IV and monitor. How
those cords tangled though I tried to be careful.
O milk-raggled dress. Laundry piled at ghosted house.
My robe unravelling through maze of ward and hall,
thread tangling around the corners. I tried to be careful
when I half-held him in the hospital’s center,
then unravelled into the maze of ward and hall
and out through whooshing automatic doors.
Dark parking lot. Me, half-monstrous. At the center
the baby left where we couldn’t see him. We’d lost the car.
O ghostly whoosh of automatic doors. Unseen,
the Russian Olives bared their pale yellow stars.
Emma: Snapping, that's a poet thing, right?
Bethany: Sure.
Emma: Oh, thank you so much for sharing. I wasn't familiar with pantoums, but now seeing that, it's it gives a whole new look at that.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. And this is thinking about when my son was born and we did have to leave him in the NICU and just... I was reflecting on the confusion of that time and how we had to be there at certain times to feed him. And I didn't want to miss those times and those clocks didn't work the same way, like normal life clocks work. And then with sleep deprivation, I couldn't tell one day from the next. And so it really did feel like moving through that maze and moving forward a little bit and then backward and losing track of everything.
So I felt like that pantoum form, with its repetition and variation, it felt like it was a good fit for that kind of disorientation that I felt. But my son's eleven. It took me eleven years to be able to look back at that with enough distance, I think, to talk about it in this way. Like at the time, I wrote different kinds of poems sort of about this experience, but I never wrote anything directly about him being in the hospital like this. So I think the form and also the passage of time helped me be able to revisit that in a different way.
Emma: The form doesn't dictate. It lends to the emotions.
Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great way of looking at it.
Emma: I do wanna ask for an encore.
Bethany: So this poem I wrote this this summer, and all summer I had that image from Pinocchio stuck in my head where Geppetto's been swallowed by Monstro the whale. And he's just kind of hanging out in there. Like, "I guess this is where I live now." He's just resigned to being there. And I never liked Pinocchio the story, but I made myself go read the actual book. I'd only seen the movie before. And that's an interesting book. But one part I thought was funny was that Pinocchio and his companions go to a tavern called the Red Lobster.
And so thinking about Geppetto and thinking about the Red Lobster led me to this poem.
Letter to Geppetto, Written on the Back of a Red Lobster Menu
O how humpback whale CDs looped over the nature store’s speakers
during the shifts I worked slightly hungover one summer
at the mall during college. The store was dim and fake-tree forested
and I usually worked alone because they couldn’t afford more
staffing. Anyways no one really came in except unattended kids
to riffle spendy windchimes, flip the mass-produced rainsticks
before darting back out to the corridors where it was brightly lit.
Management seemed resigned that the store was going under. I loved it
there, indulgently air conditioned, but knew I’d soon bail. At shift’s end
I’d pull down the storefront’s metal gate and lock it, then step
out into the larger container of the mall—which was also failing,
though I didn’t yet know it—then outside to America, another kind of listing
ship. All of this to say, Geppetto, that I recognize this:
how you nested inside your wrecked vessel, inside the giant fish
that swallowed you, inside the terrible ocean. How you made yourself
at home beneath the cathedral ceiling of its ribs. How that felt
a little like mercy. In the dark parking lot, cars were moored around Red Lobster,
which is bankrupt now because America kept heaping plates with globs of
Endless Shrimp, kept pounding Bahama Mamas, bottomless, from ridiculous
stretched-out glasses. O, Geppetto, how fake portholes made us feel as if
we were sailing. The restaurant patrons were braying by the time
they stumbled out the door. My car marooned under sodium arc lights.
Geppetto, you said some nights when the fish opened its mouth,
you could see the stars framed between its teeth.
But that feels a little like a fib. A cassette stuck in my car’s deck
had been playing itself for months. When I at last extracted
it, the shiny tape unspooled. I could not wind it back in. Geppetto,
should I tell you now the oceans are overfished? Whale bellies—for real though—
stuffed with plastic? Or let your pretend boy pull you from the deep
again and back up to the surface? The tape kept unspooling. I keep
looping back through an artificial forest. Dark interior of my car.
The holding tanks shimmering with rubberbanded lobsters
waiting to be lifted out and plated in Seafood Medleys. My own
hands tangled in unplayable songs I tried to convince myself were holy.
Emma: You know, I read that poem a couple of times before you came, but I noticed new things now even as you read it out loud. And I think that's one of the really cool things about poetry is like, every time you read it, you notice new things and different things.
Bethany: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think even the experience of hearing it is different than just reading a poem on the page. The different times that you revisit it or the different ways in which you visit it always yields something new.
Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop: your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it. Email us at storystation@riverbendmediagroup.com. Submission guidelines are not shy; they can be found in the podcast description. The Story Station, hosted by Emma, is a production of Riverbend Media Group.