10 Questions for Chelsea Dingman
- By Franchesca Viaud
Cut yourself on the refrigerator
light in the kitchen, & tell no one that you meant to
unsheath the rain.
Cure your thirst by swallowing the bath
-water inside the baby.
—from Chelsea Dingman's "Protocols for Assessing Depression" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My father died in a car accident in a blizzard when I was nine. The next winter, my mother took my brothers and I to the Baja, where we camped on the beach for a month or so. My fifth-grade teacher tasked me with keeping a journal while I was gone. Instead, I wrote her a book of poems about snow that eventually became my first book years later, though I no longer have it for reference.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
There are so many! I always hesitate before making a list like this because of what it necessarily leaves out (i.e.) all the work I’ve encountered over time and the kind attention that others have paid my work. Mentors and friends like Jay Hopler, John A. Nieves, and Heather Sellers whom I owe a debt to for all I’ve learned from them and their work. My PhD supervisor, Jordan Abel. The work of artists such as Li-Young Lee, Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Larry Levis, Tomas Tranströmer, Louise Glück, Fady Joudah, Pablo Neruda, Patricia Smith, and Paul Celan, to name a very few. I’m currently working on a hybrid project which includes a prose component and I’ve been spending a lot of time with the work of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Anne Carson, and theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed.
What other professions have you worked in?
I was an office administrator for a manufacturing company during the year-long pandemic lockdowns in Canada. I continued in that job until I started my PhD in 2022. It was a difficult and disappointing workplace in many ways, so I was happy to transition back to the classroom and teaching.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I wanted to be a writer—or a reader of books, if that could be a real job. Perhaps I considered being a librarian at some point as well.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I had a baby in late fall 2019. She was barely four months old when the lockdowns started. I was having a hard time getting out of bed, though I was required to help keep the business I was working for going (and I couldn’t take a real maternity leave for reasons related to this). I wasn’t sure if I was suffering postpartum depression or if the fears and isolation of quarantine caused me to feel the way that I did, and we were not allowed to visit a doctor at that time, so I had no one to ask. I was also overwhelmed by fear for my newborn’s health and safety. I ended up going to the poem to ask questions, to recount the concrete details that contributed to the way I was feeling, to find a structure amid chaos that would refute simplicity and closure where there was none.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I used to think it was my childhood hometown of Revelstoke BC. Then, it became my adopted city of Tampa where I lived for almost 17 years. But I now think that it’s always been an imagined place. Somewhere that seems familiar but never existed. A representation of memory, or the many places that I’ve lived combined to be somewhere that I’ve never been and yet miss all the same.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I always have music playing in the background when I’m writing because it functions like white noise with three kids in my house. My fifteen-year-old is living away from home for the first time and he creates playlists on our shared family account which is what I’ve been listening to lately. It not only allows me to feel closer to him, but it also feels collaborative in the sense that each of us can contribute music to it. My other son does this as well. It runs the gamut of musical genres. I don’t care what music it is at this point. It’s a family gathering point. I stop hearing it when I start writing anyway.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Not really. I write in the morning when I’m fresh. If I must write or read something difficult and my four-year-old is home, I wait until she is gone. I’m not present when I’m writing, so I try not to do that work when she is with me.
If you could work in another art form, what would it be?
I am terrible with my hands—I took a comics class once and the professor told me that everyone can draw, and I think I proved him wrong—but I wish I could draw or paint or sculpt—or make furniture even. I also love photography. I would love to be able to study photography as an art form and explore story through image that way.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on a book of poetry and prose concerning intergenerational memory transmission which consists of poems and a non-traditional glossary of terms related to the research in the poems. Right now, the conversations being had between poem and glossary inhabit the form of a verso and recto. It is part theory, part poetry, part memoir.
CHELSEA DINGMAN's first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press). Her third collection is I, Dived (LSU Press). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press). She is pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.
