Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook,  All Day, Talking(Dancing Girl Press, 2014), a selection of which won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship (2013). Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. Her debut full-length poetry collection,Hands That Break & Scar, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications (2017). She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologiesPolitical Punch: The Politics of IdentityandBared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts, as well as the journals North American Review, Acentos Review, North Dakota Quarterly,andThe Boiler Journal, among others. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching Ethnic American literature and creative writing at Marshall University. She is also the interim coordinator for the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series and a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Her website can be found here.



What drew you to the epistolary form for these poems?

At the time I wrote the first “Dear Carole” poem I hadn’t made this connection, but thinking on it now, it seems that I’ve always been drawn to the epistolary form. When I was a sophomore in high school, I discovered Alice Walker’sThe Color Purpleand sort of fell in love with Celie. Despite the horrific circumstances in which she lived, even in the height of her loneliness, there was a tenacity in her relentless letter writing which resonated with me. There was a hopefulness that if she just kept appealing to someone or something, life would get better. The act of communication, even when her letters weren’t answered, was enough to keep her humanity and sanity.

People lament the loss of letter writing in the age of computers and smart phones: emailing, texting, and tweeting. And I would agree that letter writing in that respect has changed, but really only in form and medium. Instead of a three to five page narrative of life’s happenings and inner thoughts, now people send out three line “updates” or a couple phrase-long texts. As a culture, the drive to connect and share remains strong, we just seem to have less patience. There’s an urgency to current communications.

I think in the “Dear Carole” series there is a mixture of that early to mid-20^thcentury narrative and 21^stcentury urgency. Epistles by their very nature highlight loss and desire, and as a genre are directed to people who are or seem far away. Either physically the person is out of reach or emotionally there is a disconnect which causes verbal communication to fail. The speaker’s loss and desire are not only directed to Carole who is no longer with her, but also to the life they might have had, and the person she was when they were together. In retrospect, I can’t imagine these poems existing in any other form.
 

In one poem, the speaker wants to release Carole’s “phantom pressure,” and I find this a very accurate description of the way a person’s presence remains with us in our daily lives. The speaker addresses Carole when recalling a domestic setting, while sitting on an airplane, even in the middle of performing what might be a bad habit. I wonder if, like Celie in The Color Purple, the speaker addressing Carole in her daily life gives her hope.

I have never thought of the speaker’s consistent desire to address Carole as being hopeful, but I certainly like that idea. I guess, as with Celie, the letters act like a kind of lifeline, a need to reach out, and in a way I suppose the speaker’s and Celie’s reaching out is an entreaty for divine intervention for the situations they find themselves in. Celie’s is specifically divine, while the speaker’s is more supernatural or other-worldly; quite literally other-worldly in the sense that Western culture often thinks of death as another plane of existence or as a separate realm, but also because Carole is of the world the speaker used to know, but no longer feels connected to. When the speaker is remembering and reaching out for Carole, she is also reaching out for a part of herself that feels lost. Rather than understanding the letters as primarily grieving for what once was, maybe they can also be read as hope that the intense (if sometimes dysfunctional) love they had for each other that represented belonging and feeling home is something the speaker will be able to someday feel again.
 

One of my favorite poems in this sequence is “Dear Carole, in my dream last night.” It takes place in the kitchen of a house where the speaker once lived. One part of the poem reads,

" ‘Open concept’ is a funny phrase fancy people use / to mean no boundaries, as if it’s healthy or desirable / for everything in life to converge in one wall-less mess.” We find out that speaker insists on walls, even having her mother’s boyfriend “put up / particle board from ceiling to floor.” This idea of boundaries arises again in “Dear Carole, I’m waiting in the Houston airport for my connecting flight,” but in this poem, the boundaries are broken and the speaker welcomes the closeness of the person in the neighboring seat on an airplane. Could you talk about this change in boundaries for the speaker?

I think about boundaries and borders (borderlands and borderlines) a lot. Partly because as I got older and spent more time away from my family and the people I grew up with, and more time in, well, “nicer” professional circles, I discovered that I had a problem with boundaries; which was that I didn’t have any. I mean, I didn’t grow up feral, but in a small mobile home with insulation-less walls and two moody females, there is nowhere to go. Not having physical borders which dictate this room is yours, this mine, can also translate to a kind of borderless, boundary-less mental and emotional state. When there is little to be had, everything is shared, whether that is the last box of Hamburger Helper or anger at being catcalled on the walk back from the bus station, the one bed, or joy over a small kindness.

When I began writing the “Dear Carole” series, I had recently moved away from the only home I knew and my loud, chaotic, always-in-your-business family, to a place of politeness. There were polite street conversations, polite distances in the grocery store, and even politeness amongst new friends. In this new space there were things you weren’t supposed to talk about, like money. I didn’t realize it was rude to ask how much money people made or what they paid in rent. I’d begin to tell a story about something in my life before moving only to find the new people mildly horrified. A story I thought was funny and “normal,” others found dysfunctional or embarrassingly personal.

When I was a kid, I always wanted privacy and my own space (physical and emotional), but when I got it after moving away, I found myself missing the closeness that “wall-less mess” fosters. Growing up and entering more normative spaces, I found out people don’t hug as much. They don’t sit close together or touch hands or arms in a friendly fashion. It became easy to say the wrong thing and saying that wrong thing didn’t just end in a cathartic yelling match, but would quietly fester until it poisoned a work environment. I think it’s that tension between the desire for space and personal agency and a grieving over the loss of physical and emotional closeness that the speaker in those two poems is experiencing. In the series overall—from the chapbook, All Day, Talking, to the newer poems which will be comprising the full length manuscript—I think the issue of boundaries and closeness becomes more complicated by the speaker’s movement from the working-class environment and intensely-emotional world she shared with Carole, to a more socio-economically privileged space she hadn’t really imagined being in, like the plane rides the speaker takes. That space is liminal because it can only be accessed by the kind of people who have the money to travel, who would normally keep polite differences, but the physical reality of the cramped space forces intimacy that mimics what many working class people live in.  


Are these poems part of a larger sequence? If so, how do they connect to and expand upon these poems?

These poems are part of a larger sequence, one I’m working on making into a full-length manuscript, currently titled This Dark Shining Thing. When I first wrote the “Dear Carole” poems that became the chapbook, I thought I was done writing them, as if I’d worked it out of my system. The reality ended up being that I couldn’t stop writing them, even when I wanted to. So instead of fight the impulse, I gave in. As they stand now, the poems expand on a lot of the issues that are represented in the poems Connotation Press is graciously publishing. There’s a lot about dreaming of the dead and the past, grappling with desire and grief and acceptance, and more about trying to negotiate one’s past self with the present self and how it’s possible that life keeps going after such tremendous loss.