10 Questions for Michael Lee
- By Franchesca Viaud
There is an old joke I heard one winter,
one popular among the farmers
from Trøndelag to Nord-Norge:
two deer run along the railroad.
One says to the other, we have to get off
these tracks and into the forest.
—from Michael Lee's "Norway's Iron Road," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece of any significance (we’ll leave the middle school poems about elves and such out of this) was a poem called The Taking of Lead, (it would become my first published poem in 2013). I was living in Bergen Norway in 2012 and was very sick with Mono. I couldn’t leave the house and spent every day just reading and writing poems and looking out the window at the mountains through the fog and rain. I was reading everything I could find in English from the library down the street. They happened to have a great deal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. The poem was as concerned with violence as it was magic. It was very much a product of those two writers and the magic of Bergen. In many ways, that poem set a course for my concerns and aesthetics for the rest of my writerly life (at least so far).
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Perhaps unsurprising to readers, but Larry Levis altered forever how I write poems, how central narrative became in my work. Otherwise, Gabriel Garcia Marquez as mentioned and Zora Neale Hurston. Fiction was my first love, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Their Eyes Were Watching God changed (and continue) to change and breathe life into my work. I return to them both often and teach them as often as I can.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I had no idea. One of my best friends was murdered when I was thirteen which sent my life into a tail spin, I struggled with mental health and addiction throughout my teenage years. I wanted to be “ok,” and spent most of my youth trying to figure out how to be that and what that meant. Poetry was the only thing for a long time that really seemed to work toward that goal with any kind of consistency. I have always been somewhat of a storyteller, it wasn’t until I got sober when I was twenty that I realized I could (and had to) be a writer and storyteller rather than writing and storytelling just being something that I did.
What inspired you to write this piece?
This piece came together across several years. The joke told to me about the deer trying to outrun a train was told to me by my friend Bjørgulf, a dairy farmer in Eastern Norway, while I was working for him and his wife Karianne that summer. That was probably in 2013 or 2016. The joke existed in the back of my mind for years. Then, in 2019 while in Kristiansand touring Stiftelsen Arkivet, which had been a Gestapo headquarters and torture center nicknamed “horror house” during the Nazi occupation of Norway, I learned about the railroads built by Russian slave labor from my friend Mats Jakob. The torture center was run by Rudolf Kerner, who ended up being set free in 1953 (the Norwegian government no longer wanted to pay for housing German war criminals and so simply let them go), banished from Norway and sent to Germany where he lived out his life as a shoe salesman. I spent two years trying to write a poem about Kerner and his freedom and Russian POW’s being worked to death simply because I had learned about them both at the same time. It was random morning in 2021 that I finally made the connection between the joke about the deer and the rail line between Trondheim and Bodø. I realized Kerner had no place in this poem, rather the real piece was interested in the infrastructure left behind by the Nazi occupation and how it had been reappropriated after the war. Often times the beneficiaries of that infrastructure knew nothing about the violence which produced it. When Mats Jakob was telling me about the railroad, he stressed almost no Norwegians even knew about the story and nothing on the trains or stations along the line told the story. It was buried in the scenic view and the comfort of the ride. The piece ultimately sought to then examine how all luxury, the very concept of luxury, is dependent on violence and in particular exploitative and exterminationist labor.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Norway, and in particular my friends’ farm in Eastern Norway as well as the mountains and fjords of Western Norway. I rarely write while I’m in Norway (other than the six months in 2012 I was too sick to do anything else), but without the land, my friends there, Norwegian folklore and the lesser known histories of the Second World War, my writing would look nothing like it does now. Perhaps I would not still be writing at all.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I have a very hard time writing to music, I have hard time tuning out distractions. I like the silence of my home office and the white noise of the air purifier. This has become more and more the case as I’ve gotten older.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
The most important is that I’m up early. I need a good stretch, full breakfast and coffee before I’m functional. My best work happens between 8am and 3pm. After that the magic is gone outside of some unexpected bursts on winter nights from time to time.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I’ve always wished I could sing, I used to love writing lyrics and playing guitar but when it came to singing I never so much hit the notes as strangled them. I love being on stage and performing though, it’s very freeing and for me far easier to be in front of a crowd than in one. Perhaps in the next life I’ll be an itinerant folk singer or the frontman of a punk band.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working on several books at the moment, a book of poems tentatively entitled Iron Roads, which draws its name from “Norway’s Iron Road.” The book examines the effects of modern war on the environment and natural world with a particular focus on the Second World War and Norway. It looks not just at modern war’s impact on climate change, but how the material remnants of war alters a people’s social fabric as well as their relationship to the natural world. Secondly, I’m working on a hybrid book, The Milling Rooms, which maps a constellation of industrial (and cultural) violence across time and space. It begins with the guillotine in 1792 and ends with the first tank at the battle of the Somme in 1916. In between, it examines the colonial peripheries of empire being acting as laboratories for new modes of violence: barbed wire and concentration camps, the Maxim gun, the idea of an “enemy people” rather than an opposing army. Too often we think of war as simply an extension of politics by other means (to paraphrase Clausewitz), but before it is a political act expressed through technology it is a cultural act. A means of cultural expression mediated by the body (in the context of violence, especially modern war, Anton Blok would consider the body a cultural medium). That’s what the book really investigates. What kind of stories about aggressors and victims/defenders, nations, sates, empires and cultures are told through forms of modern violence? What belief systems animate these forms? The machine gun and the lance are very different as cultural objects and each tell very different stories about who wields them and who is on the other end of them. Wars aren’t simply about land, resources and the military tactics used to acquire them, they’re also processes of identity formation. They’re racializing projects. Beyond those books, I’m dabbling with a short story collection and some historical essays as well, but those are in their earliest and most private forms.
What are you reading right now?
At present I’m reading Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany by Isabel V. Hull, Poilu: The World War 1 Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker 1914-1918 and a regular re-read Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins. Not as much poetry as I would like (my current writing projects require immense research), but when I do I’m often returning to A Treatise on Poetry by Czeslaw Miłosz and Olio by Tyehimba Jess. Both have been tremendous guides.
MICHAEL LEE is a Norwegian-American writer and educator. Author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), he has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, Michael’s poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others. He lives in a cottage with his dog Levis.
