An Interview with Beth Ann Fennelly
Oxford, Mississippi
from
Poets on Place: Tales and Interviews from the Road
by W. T. Pfefferle
Beth Ann Fennelly has just finished a fifteen-page poem about kudzu, the climbing and unstoppable vine that covers millions of acres in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, etc. 
Kudzu is a southern touchstone; and when my wife and I lived here in the mid-1980s, it seemed an exotic and frightening natural world element, too spooky and mysterious to ever fully understand. We left Mississippi after only about eighteen months, so its reappearance as we drove into the state last night set us thinking about the South, a place, a way of life, a varied and multifaceted landscape vastly more intriguing than the easy and lazy stereotypes that abound.
But Fennelly is from the North – suburban Illinois, specifically. So I wondered how she came to be here in Mississippi, and – more importantly – how she got so in touch with the evil vine.
We park alongside her home's huge corner lot, and Beth Ann greets me and lets me into her delightful and airy home just minutes after putting her daughter down for a nap. I sit opposite her, my back to an entire wall of book-filled shelves, white cupboards with glass doors.
She met her husband, the fiction writer Tom Franklin, in Arkansas, the furthest north Franklin had ever traveled (he's from Alabama) and the furthest south for her. After some years in Illinois, they've settled in Oxford, a hip and wonderful Mississippi town, home to the venerable college where Fennelly teaches, Ole Miss.
Fennelly tells me a little about kudzu, an Asian vine that grows best in the climate of the southeastern U.S., where it is free of its homeland's variety of pests and bugs. In the summer, the vine can grow a foot a day; and it does, obscuring fences, trees, power poles, sides of houses, etc. Most folks see it as a nuisance, but for Fennelly, it represents one of the things she loves about the South, its places, and people. The kudzu is mysterious. It covers up some things that would normally be too in the open, too easily seen. Like her favorite elements of Mississippi, the kudzu conceals some of what's underneath, leaving rich stories for writers to unearth. She believes that in her own work she's doing the same thing.
How has place had an impact on your work?
For a long time I thought I was interested in place in my writing, but what I was interested in was places where I was not. 
I'd go to Krakow and write a poem about the salt mines or go to Japan and write a poem about the tea ceremony, but I never engaged with my native landscape of the Midwest; home was the negative. Then I went to the University of Arkansas for my MFA; and I fell in love with the South, the landscape, the mountains so old they're only hills, the lushness, the decay, the seething semitropical humidity, and giant blossoms and giant bugs. Although this landscape felt exotic, it also felt like home. I'm not sure why this is; my life prior to that point was mostly spent in a suburb of Chicago. It might have something to do with the fact that so many Scotch-Irish settled that part of the South. And many of the things I like about Irish heritage I also love about the South – the importance of storytelling, music, family, and celebrations. So I started writing about the landscape that I was in for the first time.
After I finished my MFA, I went back to the Midwest for three years, one at the University of Wisconsin, where I had a fellowship, and two years teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. That's a prairie town, and I thought I would continue to write about the landscape around me, but I didn't. I remember making an effort to study the landscape and make myself love it. But I failed. People said it takes a while to see the beauty of the prairie, but I never did. Maybe it's too subtle for me.
We came down here to Mississippi, and I fell in love with landscape all over again. I just think it's something about the South that calls to me.
It may be that I'm so interested in writing about the landscape now because I really feel like I've finally found my long-term home. Other places where I lived, I knew it was just for a year or two. I wasn't going to get to know the neighbors or the neighborhood or the woods behind my neighborhood. But I think we'll stay in Oxford until they make us leave. We bought a home, and it feels so good not to be renters anymore – not to have checks with low numbers, not to have the phone number for U-Haul scrawled on the fridge. When I walk to the university past the graveyard and see Faulkner's grave, I imagine my own plot there some day. Graveyards never seemed comforting before.
And the final reason that the roots we've put down seem strong is that we're raising a family. The pace of life in the South is slower and more old-fashioned, and that's why it seems a good place to bring up Claire. I'm very conscious, however, of the downside of that. The South still feels twenty years behind the rest of the country in terms of human-rights issues. I've found more sexism and racism here. So my love of the place becomes problematized and challenged.
You've already noted that you come from a much different physical landscape. How different are the natural world elements of, say, Illinois and Mississippi?
Everything in the prairies was flat and straight, even the prairie-style architecture, which is really beautiful and features wide doorways and large fireplaces and big horizons, free of rococo scrolls and finicky flourishes. And I think that contributes to the character of the people there, who are very open, forthright, honest, practical, and down to earth, unironic, and pleasant. But I confess, I've always loved flourish, sequins, and boas, always loved the theatre and costumes; and that's what the landscape provides here. There's more room for mystery and convolutions. Skeletons in the closet. Even the way things are always draped with vines. There's a great sign outside of town that says, "Trespass," because the kudzu has covered the "No" and the "ing." And to me that just seems a metaphor because the landscape provides its own masquerade and doublespeak; it covers and reveals. There's a sense of play in the landscape.
Over the years, have you noted anything about the kind of physical or mental space or place you are in when you're writing?
When I was a real beginner, I would sometimes read in an interview where a writer would say things like "I can only write with a sea view" or "I can only write with a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad." I remember thinking that those writers sounded glamorous and had some secret knowledge; "If only I had a sea view and number two pencils...." But now when I hear people say things like that, I think, "Oh, they have a trust fund and a maid." With teaching full time and traveling a good bit and raising a toddler, I can't allow my preferences to harden into necessities. I'd write with my Revlon Fire and Ice lipstick if I had to.
That being said, I've noticed I've moved progressively to quieter and quieter places. And that makes sense with the process of getting older – becoming an old married woman (laughs) – and having a baby. But I do think it's allowed me to find a kind of silence in myself that I've needed to nurture in my poetry. Maybe you can't write loud poetry unless you have a silence in yourself as a gauge.
•
from The Kudzu Chronicles
The Japanese who brought the kudzu
didn't bring its natural enemies,
those hungry beasties sharpening their knives,
and that's why kudzu grows best
so far from the land of its birth.
As do I, belated cutting, here
without my blights, without my pests,
without the houses or the headstones of my kin,
here, a blank slate, in this adopted cemetery,
which feels a bit like progress, a bit like cowardice.
When I die here,
for I sense this, I'll die in Mississippi,
state with the sing-songiest name
I remember learning to spell at six,
my singular stone will stand alone
among the Falkners and the Faulkners, the Mizes and the Avents,
the Neilsons and the Howorths, these clans which spill down hills,
angled and directional as schools of fish.
I'll be a letter of a foreign font,
what the typesetter used to call a bastard.
And even when my husband and daughter
are dragged down beside me,
their shared name won't seem to claim my own,
not to any horseman passing by.
Well, I wouldn't change that, I suppose.
It's just another compromise where no one fully wins.
Listen, kin and stranger,
when I go to the field and lie down,
let the kudzu blanket me, for I always loved the heat,
let its hands rub out my name, for I always loved affection
from the locals.
— Beth Ann Fennelly
•
Poets on Place: Tales and Interviews from the Road
by W. T. Pfefferle
Utah State Univeristy Press
Logan, Utah
© 2005 Utah State Univeristy Press.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books by and about W. T. Pfefferle:
Poets on Place: Tales and Interviews from the Road — Paperback
Beth Ann Fennelly has just finished a fifteen-page poem about kudzu, the climbing and unstoppable vine that covers millions of acres in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, etc. Kudzu is a southern touchstone; and when my wife and I lived here in the mid-1980s, it seemed an exotic and frightening natural world element, too spooky and mysterious to ever fully understand. We left Mississippi after only about eighteen months, so its reappearance as we drove into the state last night set us thinking about the South, a place, a way of life, a varied and multifaceted landscape vastly more intriguing than the easy and lazy stereotypes that abound.
But Fennelly is from the North – suburban Illinois, specifically. So I wondered how she came to be here in Mississippi, and – more importantly – how she got so in touch with the evil vine.
We park alongside her home's huge corner lot, and Beth Ann greets me and lets me into her delightful and airy home just minutes after putting her daughter down for a nap. I sit opposite her, my back to an entire wall of book-filled shelves, white cupboards with glass doors.
She met her husband, the fiction writer Tom Franklin, in Arkansas, the furthest north Franklin had ever traveled (he's from Alabama) and the furthest south for her. After some years in Illinois, they've settled in Oxford, a hip and wonderful Mississippi town, home to the venerable college where Fennelly teaches, Ole Miss.
Fennelly tells me a little about kudzu, an Asian vine that grows best in the climate of the southeastern U.S., where it is free of its homeland's variety of pests and bugs. In the summer, the vine can grow a foot a day; and it does, obscuring fences, trees, power poles, sides of houses, etc. Most folks see it as a nuisance, but for Fennelly, it represents one of the things she loves about the South, its places, and people. The kudzu is mysterious. It covers up some things that would normally be too in the open, too easily seen. Like her favorite elements of Mississippi, the kudzu conceals some of what's underneath, leaving rich stories for writers to unearth. She believes that in her own work she's doing the same thing.
How has place had an impact on your work?
For a long time I thought I was interested in place in my writing, but what I was interested in was places where I was not. I'd go to Krakow and write a poem about the salt mines or go to Japan and write a poem about the tea ceremony, but I never engaged with my native landscape of the Midwest; home was the negative. Then I went to the University of Arkansas for my MFA; and I fell in love with the South, the landscape, the mountains so old they're only hills, the lushness, the decay, the seething semitropical humidity, and giant blossoms and giant bugs. Although this landscape felt exotic, it also felt like home. I'm not sure why this is; my life prior to that point was mostly spent in a suburb of Chicago. It might have something to do with the fact that so many Scotch-Irish settled that part of the South. And many of the things I like about Irish heritage I also love about the South – the importance of storytelling, music, family, and celebrations. So I started writing about the landscape that I was in for the first time.
After I finished my MFA, I went back to the Midwest for three years, one at the University of Wisconsin, where I had a fellowship, and two years teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. That's a prairie town, and I thought I would continue to write about the landscape around me, but I didn't. I remember making an effort to study the landscape and make myself love it. But I failed. People said it takes a while to see the beauty of the prairie, but I never did. Maybe it's too subtle for me.
We came down here to Mississippi, and I fell in love with landscape all over again. I just think it's something about the South that calls to me.
It may be that I'm so interested in writing about the landscape now because I really feel like I've finally found my long-term home. Other places where I lived, I knew it was just for a year or two. I wasn't going to get to know the neighbors or the neighborhood or the woods behind my neighborhood. But I think we'll stay in Oxford until they make us leave. We bought a home, and it feels so good not to be renters anymore – not to have checks with low numbers, not to have the phone number for U-Haul scrawled on the fridge. When I walk to the university past the graveyard and see Faulkner's grave, I imagine my own plot there some day. Graveyards never seemed comforting before.
And the final reason that the roots we've put down seem strong is that we're raising a family. The pace of life in the South is slower and more old-fashioned, and that's why it seems a good place to bring up Claire. I'm very conscious, however, of the downside of that. The South still feels twenty years behind the rest of the country in terms of human-rights issues. I've found more sexism and racism here. So my love of the place becomes problematized and challenged.
You've already noted that you come from a much different physical landscape. How different are the natural world elements of, say, Illinois and Mississippi?
Everything in the prairies was flat and straight, even the prairie-style architecture, which is really beautiful and features wide doorways and large fireplaces and big horizons, free of rococo scrolls and finicky flourishes. And I think that contributes to the character of the people there, who are very open, forthright, honest, practical, and down to earth, unironic, and pleasant. But I confess, I've always loved flourish, sequins, and boas, always loved the theatre and costumes; and that's what the landscape provides here. There's more room for mystery and convolutions. Skeletons in the closet. Even the way things are always draped with vines. There's a great sign outside of town that says, "Trespass," because the kudzu has covered the "No" and the "ing." And to me that just seems a metaphor because the landscape provides its own masquerade and doublespeak; it covers and reveals. There's a sense of play in the landscape.
Over the years, have you noted anything about the kind of physical or mental space or place you are in when you're writing?
When I was a real beginner, I would sometimes read in an interview where a writer would say things like "I can only write with a sea view" or "I can only write with a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad." I remember thinking that those writers sounded glamorous and had some secret knowledge; "If only I had a sea view and number two pencils...." But now when I hear people say things like that, I think, "Oh, they have a trust fund and a maid." With teaching full time and traveling a good bit and raising a toddler, I can't allow my preferences to harden into necessities. I'd write with my Revlon Fire and Ice lipstick if I had to.
That being said, I've noticed I've moved progressively to quieter and quieter places. And that makes sense with the process of getting older – becoming an old married woman (laughs) – and having a baby. But I do think it's allowed me to find a kind of silence in myself that I've needed to nurture in my poetry. Maybe you can't write loud poetry unless you have a silence in yourself as a gauge.
•
from The Kudzu Chronicles
The Japanese who brought the kudzu
didn't bring its natural enemies,
those hungry beasties sharpening their knives,
and that's why kudzu grows best
so far from the land of its birth.
As do I, belated cutting, here
without my blights, without my pests,
without the houses or the headstones of my kin,
here, a blank slate, in this adopted cemetery,
which feels a bit like progress, a bit like cowardice.
When I die here,
for I sense this, I'll die in Mississippi,
state with the sing-songiest name
I remember learning to spell at six,
my singular stone will stand alone
among the Falkners and the Faulkners, the Mizes and the Avents,
the Neilsons and the Howorths, these clans which spill down hills,
angled and directional as schools of fish.
I'll be a letter of a foreign font,
what the typesetter used to call a bastard.
And even when my husband and daughter
are dragged down beside me,
their shared name won't seem to claim my own,
not to any horseman passing by.
Well, I wouldn't change that, I suppose.
It's just another compromise where no one fully wins.
Listen, kin and stranger,
when I go to the field and lie down,
let the kudzu blanket me, for I always loved the heat,
let its hands rub out my name, for I always loved affection
from the locals.
— Beth Ann Fennelly
•
by W. T. Pfefferle
Utah State Univeristy Press
Logan, Utah
© 2005 Utah State Univeristy Press.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books by and about W. T. Pfefferle:Poets on Place: Tales and Interviews from the Road — Paperback
