Rose McLarney’s collection of poems, Its Day Being Gone, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2014 and her book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, was published by Four Way Books 2012.  Its Day Being Gone is the 2013 National Poetry Series winner. Additionally, Rose has been awarded The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ biennial George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry, Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize, and the Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College.Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, Orion, Slate, New England Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and dozens of other journals. Rose earned her MFA from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers and has taught writing at the college. She is currently is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Oklahoma State University.



Rose, first let me say congratulations! Your next book of poetry, Its Day Being Gone, won the National Poetry Series award and will be published by Penguin in spring 2014. What can you tell us about the process? How did you learn of your book’s selection? What were/are your thoughts about this big step ahead?


Thank you. I so appreciated winning a contest in which submissions were judged anonymously because it let me be sure that it was the writing all on its own, regardless of any qualification or connection, that earned the attention.

I received the phone call letting me know I’d won while in line in the library, between teaching classes. I didn’t know what to do other than go on and lead my next workshop, which I’m sure I did distractedly. I was too surprised to say anything for the rest of the day, and that ended up being good practice because I had to wait many months before the official award announcement came out. In the meantime, I did collect myself to tell close friends—and buy some Scotch.

I try not to think of writing poetry as a part of a career with steps. I think of it as something I have a compulsion to do, which has beneficial professional side effects. Of course, I have a tenure track job now, and have found there’s nothing I want to do more than to keep teaching, so I have to be practical about continuing to publish, to a degree. But I’ve been strangely blessed by immunity to writer’s block--and by academia--so far. (Numerous writers I know who are of equal or greater talent still haven’t gotten their first books published and so can’t begin to apply for permanent jobs with benefits, in our unjust system which exploits adjuncts.)

Meanwhile, and unfairly I suppose, I’ve done everything career-wise utterly un-strategically and have survived. I was working in agriculture when I received a teaching fellowship. I hadn’t sent out my poems to any journals and had my first book accepted. I went on the academic market when I was living without electricity, hiking 17 miles to use the phone or internet, and found a job. The year I entered book contests, I lucked out. I say this not to brag—and I may well jinx myself—but because I find the seemingly increasing careerism of writers distressing. I have to believe that what success I’ve had comes, in part, from putting poetry first and living a life based enough around the things for which I authentically care that I can keep writing in this way that a sufficient number of people seem to want to read. And that other writers need not resign themselves entirely to lives spent networking and CV building in ways they resent.

Of course, this is not to say I’m not terribly grateful for providence. (There are other realms of life in which I have been markedly unlucky, so I do think writing is my avocation.) And I am even more grateful to people who have helped me. My point is to try to offer some encouragement. In no way do I pretend that making a living as a writer is easy and that I haven’t been scared and exhausted by it plenty of times, think struggling writers aren’t justified in trying any angle available, or advise laziness or passivity in regards to anything one undertakes. I try to be courteous and professional and ambitious in every way I can. In particular, I try to give as much as a teacher as possible, with the wish that that generosity will, abstractly, be my repayment for what I’ve received.



Your first book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, was published by one of the fine small, independent presses we’re lucky to have, Four Way Books.   I guess every poet on an independent or university press has the dream to step up to a major New York house, as you just have, yet the move comes with its own set of complications. There is added pressure to sell a lot of books, and the first run of books for a New York house is typically in hardcover, which makes it hard to sell a lot of copies to college kids at readings. There is also added scrutiny. Could you weigh in on these things? Have you thought about it at all?

Well, Four Way, though a nonprofit, is a New York house and handled my first book nicely (and changed the course of my life for the better by choosing to publish it).

But working with Penguin is an opportunity and has been nothing but a pleasure. My editor has made some astute suggestions but no substantial changes to the manuscript I submitted; they are getting the book to press remarkably quickly; and they purchased the rights to just the cover art I wanted. I’d think that any press that participates in a contest like the National Poetry Series has to do it with the best of intentions.

And anyone who is too concerned about sales would be misguided to become a poet. It’s sad that poetry doesn’t have a bigger market, and we poets should not cultivate obscurity and inaccessibility. But the upside of making a product that doesn’t make money is that you have to be moved by some other interest. (Also, a small note: It looks like the book is coming out in paperback only, according to Amazon, where it’s up for pre-sale.)

All that said—and I’ve already been too preachy about schmoozing—I’ll reiterate that I believe in hard work. I’ll make whatever meaningful efforts I can to promote the book. I love to give readings and teach classes and travel and try to reach out to nontraditional poetry audiences (and participate in thoughtful interviews).

As for scrutiny, I imagine the broader exposure this book could receive could result in some negative reviews, which I didn’t have to deal with when The Always Broken Plates of Mountains was published. (Maybe reviewers will think an award-winner ought to be edgier? But I just write with ideals such as endurance and compliments such as that my poems are “outside of time,” in mind, without any hope of being trendy. ) Also, even though they are a small press, Four Way was effective in distributing my first book and I would get emails from an old lady in Ohio or an artist in SoHo speaking well of the poems--great rewards. Broader exposure might also mean I get to exchange more of those kind messages.



Many Appalachian writers have found that, as a natural extension of being from the region, activism has necessarily become part of their language’s fiber. Barbara Kingsolver, Irene McKinney, Denise Giardina, Silas House, some of the Affrilachian Poets, all come immediately to mind, as does one of my favorites, Ann Pancake. In a 2011 interview in the American Literary Review, you say, “I’m still trying to figure out how to write responses to environmental degradation that are as valid as Rick Bass’s or Ann Pancake’s, among others’.” Have you begun to find a way to incorporate this particular impulse in your more recent work?

Fortunately, the area I’m from isn’t being destroyed by mountain top removal mining. But, because Western North Carolina’s geography has long made it difficult to exploit, we have natural areas that are just now facing their worst threats—and that there is still a chance to protect. Whether it’s cutting a mountain down (as is happening in other parts of Appalachia), or building a big vacation house on the top of one where no human-made thing belongs (like happens around my home), the arrogance is tremendous.

I confronted development in The Always Broken Plate of Mountains. In Its Day Being Gone, I’ve tried to reach farther and show the impact our energy consumption is having in other areas of the world, particularly Latin America, where hydroelectric damming is drowning out whole sections of the earth and indigenous cultures. Now that I spend the academic year in Oklahoma, I will certainly be writing about oil.

But, to be honest: There are other poets far more skilled in addressing environmental degradation. The poems I write, as much as they say what is wrong, end up admitting my complicity. As a poet, I’m too concerned with nuance and complication to speak with the certainty of an activist. After all, my students’ family members work in the oil industry. I drive through Oklahoma, the horizon all lined in agreeably nodding derricks, in my (though hybrid, half gas-powered) car. I remember men I’ve loved who left western North Carolina because, like me, they couldn’t find jobs there, and ended up fracking. And what I often enjoy most these days, living in a city for the first time, is wandering in art museums and staring up art deco architecture built by oil barons.

Right now, I am fascinated by a Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper out in the Oklahoma plains. Sure, it’s arrogant, standing up taller than anything else, yet not in the same way as an uninspired, vinyl mansion falling off a ridgeline. No, the skyscraper’s not a model of sustainability, and I don’t mean just because Wright’s buildings tend to leak. All the effort and material that went into this incredibly engineered, copper-covered spectacle could have built many more basic, affordable shelters. But that seems neither here nor there when something has been created that shows humans they can generate beauty. To take the analogy down a notch to safer territory, there’s no utilitarian reason to put a lattice top on a pie or give someone a pair of dangling earrings, yet to do so can still be a fine action. So can writing a lyric poem.

Maybe I do my due by teaching students and encouraging audiences to be perceptive and empathetic, since that’s what reading and writing are all about. (I don’t see how anyone could sincerely appreciate the arts and encounter the diverse characters they present, as well as see all that women and people of different ethnicities and sexual orientations have contributed, and go on doubting social equality.) Developing rigorous standards for your own words and giving complete attention to the expressions of others seem like good lessons in ethics.



The last poem in the sequence, “Glossing the Image,” seems to suggest a reimagining of Appalachia, not only for those from outside the region, those who have certain, stereotyped, negative ideas about the place, but by those who are themselves Appalachian. The last lines read, “On some negatives, / the photographer has penciled directions: Take off that shadow.” What do you see as Appalachia’s future, say, in the next 100 years? What role can/will literature play in how the region moves forward?


If the move towards homogenization continues, regional literature might be a way of preserving memories of an otherwise diluted culture. Meanwhile, if a breakdown of economic and transportation systems occurs within that time frame, regionalism will again have to become more pronounced and literature might be one of the sources from which we relearn our former self reliance. That’s all I’ll venture on that first subject.

My new collection is less definitively regional. When my mother looked at the cover she had one comment: “That’s not the kind of boats we have around here.” True, regions and their distinctive waters develop their distinctive boats, and that’s not the shape you see on the Little Tennessee. But, in my opinion, the image, “Jettison” by Anthony Goicolea, complements the poems themes of water and a shape shifting sort of magic, or at least the imaginativeness that fuels superstition. I’m alright with making some broader references now. The collection allows that I’ve been to and observed other notable places, at the same time that mourns that I’ve had to leave home.

Just about every one of my poems says I am thankful for coming from an area with such a strong heritage that never lets me imagine I am alone with my story. My style is more indebted to the subtlety of old mountains and the indirect way in which people from them speak than any literary influence. So, I’ll keep letting my carefully crafted poems do the tribute-paying.

However, I’ll use this prose as an occasion to say what can trouble me about regional writing. You know how it’s easier to lose your temper at the people you love most? Similarly, there’s nothing that frustrates me more than falsely folksy Southern writing that deals, even affectionately, in clichés. Poems prompted by or set in a particular locale need not be clannish or self-referential or suggest that any one place is inherently superior to another.

I’d be pleased if Appalachian culture evolves in such a way that locals remain aware of their distinctive origins while they continue to overcome the economic and social disadvantages that once restricted them. (And that people won’t, for instance, feel like they ought to unlearn their accents in the way I did so they’ll be perceived as literate.) At the same time, regional cultural riches aren’t reasons to be any less inclined to study the larger canon or foreign cultures. (I’m always working to catch up on the literary knowledge those who are more educated already have.)

The quote—“Take off that shadow”—really was a photographer’s pragmatic direction written on a photo I looked at in an archive. I’m better able to deal in details like that than to imagine whole futures. Still, that’s worthwhile isn’t it? To take the mark a past person left and make it into a metaphor? (Though, notice I don’t say “elevate” it to metaphor.) Whether you’re talking about art or sustainability, reusing materials, giving them evolving meanings, has got to be good practice.





























































































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photo credit: Travis Hall