10 Questions for Chelsea B. DesAutels
- By Edward Clifford
All day the sun moved over the rock I say on.
All day I tried to think like an elk.
I'd been drinking bad wine
from a thermos and counting the blades
on little bluestem. It was nearly dark
when they finally appeared under the gnarled oak,
brown legs in prarie grass. And there's the bull—
—from "Ghost Child," Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In college, I was fortunate to take a workshop with Frank Bidart. I was an English/Pol Sci major but hadn’t taken any creative writing courses. I remember so clearly my first poem for that workshop! I wrote about my great-grandparents and the cabin they build by hand in the Black Hills in 1929. The poem was in four-line stanzas. It included an end rhyme. I was thrilled. I carried that poem in hardcopy around with me for years, as evidence I might someday be a poet, even though it was a long time before I wrote seriously again.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Where do I begin? While I love to read collections and watch how they climb and sway, it’s probably individual poems that most influence my writing. When I come across a poem that knocks me out, I try to spend a lot of time with it—figure out how the rest of the poem sets up the moment that leaves me breathless. Here is just a very small sample of those poems: Alberto Ríos’s “Rabbits and Fire,” Linda Gregg’s “There She Is,” Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” Larry Levis’s “God Is Always Seventeen,” Jenny George’s “One-Way Gate,” and Ada Limón’s “The Vulture and the Body.”
What other professions have you worked in?
I spent about 8 years studying and practicing law. When I left the law, I was working as a litigator in regulatory and white-collar defense, with a good amount of pro bono work. It took me a long time to realize that while I loved the acute focus on language and legal analysis—and I worked with some great people and lawyers—I was deeply unhappy. My ambition was waning. Still, it was hard to walk away from the security of career I’d spent time and money on.
Before that, I was an aspiring book publicist, and before that, a server, hostess, and college art museum security guard. I’ve cleaned motel rooms and worked the front desk at a rural campground. I’ve taught ballet to kids.
What inspired you to write this piece?
When my daughter was six months old, I was diagnosed with gestational trophoblastic disease, a cancer caused by my pregnancy. We figured out I had cancer thanks to a false-positive pregnancy test. (The cancer caused high levels of hcg, the same hormone used to test for pregnancy.) So, for a brief period of time, I believed that I was both a brand-new mother and, somehow, pregnant again. I was scared and the poem (“Ghost Child”) is about that struggle. The poem is also about my dear husband, who faced his own loss when we learned we would not be having another baby, and that instead, I would begin a multidrug chemotherapy. The other poems (“City Lake,” “After the Diagnosis,” “Annual Migration,” and “Covenant”) also take up facets of disease, marriage, and motherhood.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Definitely. I write a lot about the Black Hills in South Dakota—a place my family has lived for generations and where I lived from seventh grade through high school. I also write about Minnesota, and particularly, Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis, a place I walk to almost every day.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I like quiet and coffee, when I can get them. I tend to light eucalyptus and lemon oil before I begin. Something about using the same scent each time helps get my brain in writing mode. I also generally start by reading closely and annotating a couple poems that have grabbed me lately.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
If I’m being honest, probably my daughter! She likes to see what I’m working on and write her own poems to share. Otherwise, my husband or a friend.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I would love to be a painter. Or an architect. Or a landscape designer.
What are you working on currently?
I think I’m working on a collection about relationships—about what we owe each other, believe we’re owed in return, refuse to give, can’t give, keep trying to give, etc. But the truth is, what I need to do right now is write a bunch of poems and then, later, sit down with the ones I like and find the patterns. When I set out with a project or defined goal for a project, I tend to clam up. I do better when I just write freely because, it turns out, my brain is asking the same questions in different contexts. And discovering what those questions are is such a pleasure. Once I reach that point, then I can begin to find a shape, uncover gaps, and direct my writing further into particular questions and tensions.
What are you reading right now?
A few books I’m reading (or rereading) right now are Ellen Bass’s Indigo, Vievee Francis’s Forest Primeval, Su Hwang’s Bodega, Craig Morgan Teicher’s We Begin in Gladness, bell hooks’s All About Love, a handy little book called Roadside Geology of South Dakota (John Paul Gries), another one called Successful Gardening on the Northern Prairie (Eric Bergeson), and I’m just about to dig into Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
CHELSEA B. DESAUTELS’s work appears in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, Adroit Journal, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Chelsea earned an MFA from the University of Houston, where she received the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and served as Poetry Editor of Gulf Coast. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.
