10 Questions for Darla Himeles
- By Marissa Perez
When Jesus casts demons into pigs,
they leap from steep banks
to sea. Some translations suggest
lake. The water, salt or fresh,
muffles a mania of snouts.
—from “Pigs that Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I started writing in earnest, in middle school, I wrote by hand in journals and spiral notebooks that are likely currently decomposing in a Los Angeles landfill. That time in my life was tumultuous and difficult, and I journaled and poemed to carry myself through it. Because trauma does strange things to the brain, I don’t remember anything I wrote then; probably I was bouncing between articulations of anxiety, love poems to crushes, and mundane records of my days. The earliest pieces I have access to are from when I was a community college student at Santa Monica College, taking poetry workshops taught by Mario René Padilla. In most cases, these were persona poems in which I tested out masked versions of my story and voice.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My list could quickly fill pages, so I’m going to take this question very narrowly: the writers whose voices have most been swirling in my mind in the past 30 days are Shira Erlichman, Patrick Rosal, Lynne McEniry, Marina Carreira, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Ross Gay.
What other professions have you worked in?
Barista, bookseller, and music specialist at Borders (RIP); after-school literacy teacher; private tutor for algebra, biology, history, English, and verbal SAT-prep; curriculum and instruction manager at a private tutoring company; ice cream scooper at Ben and Jerry’s; phone representative for a health savings card program; post-production program assistant for Unsolved Mysteries at Cosgrove/Meurer Productions; film and television extra (favorite gig: Ally McBeal!); assistant prep cook; nanny; babysitter; summer writing program teaching assistant; higher education administrator; adjunct instructor; freelance writer, copy-editor, and proofreader; writing center administrator.
What did you want to be when you were young?
A writer, a teacher, an Olympic figure skater, and/or an astronaut.
What inspired you to write “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of”?
I’m going to make a list and pretend these influences came separately, as opposed to the truth, which is that they were all swirling around at once.
First, the Mountain Goats. I have a chapbook-in-process of poems inspired by lines or song titles by the Mountain Goats, and this poem is named after a song on their 2004 album, We Shall All Be Healed. The poem comes from the first section of my poetry book, Cleave, which explores the trauma and domestic violence of my childhood, my father’s imprisonment, and my mom’s (and our family’s) survival. (The book explores other themes, but section 1 focuses on childhood.) If you listen to or read John Darnielle’s lyrics for this song, you’ll encounter images and place names that are also significant in my own life and that also appear in other poems from Cleave, including my poem “Claremont, California, 1989,” which explores a formative moment in my emotional development, and “Chino, California,” which recalls picking my dad up from prison as a young adult.
Second, a 30/30 poem-writing challenge I participated in with a bunch of beloved poets in April 2016. It was my turn to offer a writing prompt on day 26 of 30, so I shared a passage from Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery in which Washington reflects on farming and raising up animals, writing, “I think the pig is my favorite animal.” I suggested gardening and/or pigs as a place to start with the day’s draft. Later that day, Cara Armstrong, one of the poets in the 30/30, sent a photo in the email thread of seven piglets nursing from their mother that very day in Vermont—the first local piglets that spring.
Third, the Bible story from which the Mountain Goats song takes its title.
Fourth, my love for my mother.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Most of my writing follows from reading: something I read opens a window, and I usually start my draft on the back of my receipt/bookmark or inside the back cover of whatever book I happen to be reading. If it’s a borrowed book or a book I think I might lend out soon, I will grab a notebook, open my laptop, or open up an email draft on my phone. I often write early drafts of poems while hunched, with a leg contorted oddly or partly asleep beneath me, with tight neck and back muscles, poor posture, and poor breathing. If it weren’t for running and yoga, I’d be some kind of gremlin by now! Later drafts find me upright and breathing more deeply. Sometimes I carry a printed out draft around in the woods, on the train, or to a doctor’s office. My favorite way to edit is by pen, though most of my revisions happen in Word or email drafts.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Elizabeth Catanese. Since 2006, E (which is what she often goes by) has read every draft of virtually every single creative or academic thing I’ve written: that’s an MFA and a PhD worth of writing, plus tons of poems, personal essays, abandoned projects, high-stakes emails. . . It’s beyond lucky, our friendship. Her insights make me better.
If you could work in another art form, what would it be?
Any of them! I miss film photography and figure skating and singing and guitar and being a dancer. I miss drawing and painting and collage. I want to learn again, and better, how to garden and how to design outdoor spaces.
What are you working on currently?
Aside from that chapbook project, I have a couple of manuscripts worth of recent-ish (the last decade) poetry that I’m trying to figure out. The one I think I want to break open, revise, and write new work for first is a love song of sorts to the migraine brain, the anxious brain. I don’t yet know how to talk about it, but hopefully the poems do. I’m also working on a collection of essays—book reviews, lyric essays, personal essays—and I’m revising my dissertation, The Jewish Animal in Post-Holocaust Jewish American Poetry, into what I hope might be a book.
What are you reading right now?
More than I should admit! This week, the week that I’m answering these questions, I’m spending time with Mihaela Moscaliuc’s Cemetery Ink and Patrick Rosal’s Atang: an altar for listening to the beginning of the world, and I just brought home two books by Victoria Chang that I’ll be diving into later today.
DARLA HIMELES is the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough (2017) and the fulllength collection Cleave (2021), both with Get Fresh Books. A poetry editor for Platform Review, Darla holds a PhD in English from Temple University and lives in Philadelphia with her wife and daughter. You can read her work in recent or forthcoming issues of NAILED, Lesbians are Miracles, Atticus Review, Off the Coast, and Talking River. Tweet her @darlaida or read more at darlahimelespoetry.com.
