(WordTech Editions, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW THORBURN

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There’s an interesting tradition of poets writing collaborative books—books in which two writers have a creative conversation, writing poems back and forth to one another or sometimes writing each poem together. This kind of dialogue on the page seems especially well suited to poets. Braided Creek by Ted Kooser and Jim comes to mind, as does Ghost/Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher, as well as Little Novels and the other collections that Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have written together.

I’ve been interested in how this works—how two poets decide to set out on such a journey together, and how they make their way along that road. So when the opportunity came up to talk to Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry about their new collaborative book, Cross Country (WordTech Editions, 2019), I couldn’t resist. Cross Country is a collection of epistolary poems that Justin and Jeff wrote back and forth to each other during 2016 and early 2017. These letter-poems are wide-ranging, encompassing thoughts about the nature of art, religion, family, and politics. I caught up with them over email—from New Jersey to Georgia to Utah and back—during the busy back-to-school season to get the backstory on Cross Country.

 

Matthew Thorburn: So—let’s begin at the beginning: How did you decide to write a book together? How did this project get started?

Justin Evans: The idea to write a book together began with me. Several of the writers I admire, and two specific mentors of mine, David Lee and William Kloefkorn, had collaborated on several books of poems, so I always had it in my mind that collaboration on a book of poems was a viable creative option.

When the itch hit me some five years ago to write a book with someone else, it became increasingly clear the only person I would want to collaborate with was Jeff. I mean that. I admire so many poets, but when I thought about who I wanted to write with, Jeff was the one. My feelings paid off because almost every critical decision and direction the book required was a result of Jeff’s abilities and intuition.

 

MT: How would you describe Cross Country to prospective readers? What do you want them to know about it?

Jeff Newberry: It’s a dialogue about life, fatherhood, and faith, a conversation between two men who are trying to better understand their pasts and the turbulent world they inhabit. From a craft perspective, it’s a book about the intertwining of poetic voices.

JE: I would describe it as a real conversation between two people who are somewhere in the middle of their lives, still trying to figure out what it means to be parents, teachers, poets, and people who are aware of the madness which surrounds them. I would want readers to know that everything in the book is sincere, and not jump to the conclusion that the poems are merely confessional. The admissions we make in our poems are starting points, not the results of exploration.

 

MT: The poems in Cross Country cover a lot of ground—from family life to what it means to be a parent, to memories of childhood and life lessons learned, through to the state of the nation. They also feel very personal—and very candid—about some difficult experiences for each of you. How did you decide what you would write about? Was anything off-limits?

JE: This may sound like a put-on, but the decision to write personally and candidly was a very organic process. I had several ideas for the direction of the book which were wisely rejected, and somehow our focus began to rest on the ideas of faith and hope. I think it was Jeff’s poem about his daughter which really opened things up. He exposed something vital in that poem bigger than itself, which was what good poetry is supposed to do.

From there we started sharing stark reflections of our experiences. He would write a poem and I would write a response. I would write about something that happened and Jeff would write his response. With national events, there was a sense from both of us that something needed to be said.

JN: I know that a lot of poets in our world snoot at and dismiss the idea that poetry can be a kind of therapy. For me, it is. I don’t mean this in a fatuous way. To understand the world, I have to write about it. As such, the ground covered in the book pretty much tracks with what was obsessing me between 2015 and 2016, when the majority of the poems were written.

I find it difficult to write about my daughter. I want to write about her because I want to understand her. The poem “Four Attempts at a Letter about My Daughter” came together from my various attempts at trying to write about her. What that poem showed me—what that poem taught me—was that there is a line between the Madi of this world, the daughter I see every day, and the Madi of my imagination.

 

MT: This book is a dialogue—a sequence of poems that feels like a conversation or letters you wrote to each other. Did you decide from the outset to shape the poems and the book this way? What drew you to this form?

JE: As I said before, every major decision about form and theme was a result of Jeff. I just wanted to write poems with someone else. I thought it would be cool to emphasize the role that place has in American letters, and write poems about places we were familiar with and write about places we had been assigned to write about by the other person. I thought this kind of noodling around might lead to some interesting work. Jeff, knowing we both shared a love for Richard Hugo, suggested we write letters to each other. That went through one or two iterations before we settled on what is in the book.

JN: Justin says that the letters were my idea. I am convinced that they were his. Either way, the epistolary form had never really attracted me. I was familiar with Richard Hugo’s 13 Letters and 31 Dreams, of course, and I’d read some letter poems here and there. However, the form never interested me—until I began writing them. Having a willing, open audience who was not only going to listen but also respond made the form perfect for the kind of personal issues we explored in the letters.

 

MT: How did you navigate the pull to have each poem respond to the one that came before, versus striking out in some new direction?

JE: First, let me say that Jeff’s ordering of the poems—he reversed the order in which some of the poems were written—truly made a huge difference. As for new directions, that is also an organic creation. What I mean by that is we never directed each other by saying, “Your next poem should be about….” I think we wrote poems for two reasons. We were having a sincere conversation through our poems, and we wanted to know how each other would respond to what we thought of something. I also think we kept one foot in the real world, never completely giving in or allowing ourselves to become untethered from the real world. Everyday life is not a novel, and it can’t be plotted.

 

MT: Would you talk a bit about your experience publishing and promoting the book? How did you go about securing a publisher? What has the reception been like from readers?

JE: We divided up the workload. I would be in charge of individual submissions for poems, and Jeff would try to find a publisher. I do not normally submit to contests, but I supported Jeff in whatever fashion he saw his task. I think it also shaped where our poems were seen outside of the manuscript. Jeff found a published very fast, which was both a pleasant surprise and a daunting revelation for me.

Readers I know personally have enjoyed the book. I thought I was going to get a lot more support from family, as has been my experience. While my family still supports this endeavor, so many more readers have expressed their enjoyment. I had a teacher ask if she could read some of my poems in her class, which blew me away.

JN: Unfortunately, the book has not found a wide readership. We’ve had a few people show interest. The poetry market is crowded, and if you’re not in the MFA world, like Justin and I aren’t, it can be hard to find someone who will teach or review your book. I’ve sent out review copies to several magazines. We also promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.

 

MT: What would you say to other poets considering collaborating on a book? Any good advice—or words of warning?

JE: It is an enlightening experience, to say the least. I would say to go into the process with very few immutable expectations. Most of my ideas about what I wanted to happen had to change into something else. It was all for the better, but if you are set on something happening and your allegiances are in the wrong place, your ego will take a beating. You simply have to keep an open mind, and you need to have patience.

JN: My only advice is this: Find someone you trust. That’s a very important aspect.

 

MT: What are you working on now? What’s next for each of you? And do you think you might collaborate on another book project at some point?

JE: After reading Battle Dress by Karen Skolfield and Mothers Over Nangahar by Pamela Hart, I am revisiting my military/wartime experiences in a series of short poems.

I think it might be very interesting to collaborate with Jeff again. I am torn between thinking that if we did, it would need to be completely different in order to make it interesting, or trying the impossible by writing letters again. I do know that I need some time to recover and see myself as a poet in the singular for a while before I could even consider collaboration.

JN: I’m working on a book of experimental mini-memoirs. I’ve also got another book of poetry in progress. As far as collaboration? Perhaps. Right now, however, my own projects are keeping me busy.

 

 

JUSTIN EVANS was born and raised in Utah. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended Utah schools and has been teaching in rural Nevada for the past 21 years, where he lives with his multi-media artist wife, Becky, and their three sons. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Four Way Stop, Gathering Up the Scattered Leaves, and Working in the Birdhouse, and four previous books of poems, including Town for the Trees, Hobble Creek Almanac, and Sailing This Nameless Ship.

 

JEFF NEWBERRY is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. His previous books include the novel A Stairway to the Sea and the poetry collection Brackish. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, Sweet, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is on the core faculty in the Writing and Communication Program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two children.

 

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MATTHEW THORBURN‘s most recent book is The Grace of Distance, published by Louisiana University Press in 2019. He’s also the author of six previous collections of poems, including the book-length poem Dear Almost, which received the Lascaux Prize, and the chapbook A Green River in Spring. He works in corporate communications in New York City and lives in small-town New Jersey with his wife and son.