Dwelling in the Unknown and Doing the Dishes: An Interview with Marlys West
Marlys West’s second book of poetry, The Vital Function of Constant Narrative, delves into the many roles women can play—daughter, mother, stepmother, wife, artist—and into the contradictory emotions that accompany them. As a nurse, Marlys also borrows from the language of anatomy and physiology, so that poetry and medical terminology are juxtaposed in surprising ways. This is particularly moving in poems about her youngest child, who was born with a heart defect.
I met Marlys two decades ago in Austin, Texas, when she had just left the Michener Center for Writers and I was just entering it. We’ve been friends and collaborators ever since. In the course of her career, she has been a Hodder Fellow, an NEA Fellow, and a Michener Fellow. Her first book, Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr, was published by the University of Akron Press, and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and the Boston Review.
For this interview, we connected from our separate coasts via Zoom to discuss Howl’s Moving Castle as a model for domestic life, the ethics of portraying people we care for in poems, and the craft of writing about women’s lives. – Ginny Wiehardt
MUTHA: I love that this book shows so many roles that women can play. It’s very different from your first one. What was your experience of putting it together?
Marlys West: Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr was more chronological, and this book was more thematic, more to do with how the poems talked to each other. I had these threads: motherhood, poet-writer, nurse, etc., and I thought of them as a braid that I was weaving. At the end they all come in together, in one tail, like the end of the braid. These different roles are all informing each other, and sometimes they’re opposing each other. But a lot of times they’re supporting each other.
MUTHA: And so many of them are domestic. There’s a great urgency in how you write about domesticity in this collection. It’s almost as though you’re trying to dissect it and figure out what it is, especially in relation to your art. How do you think about domesticity and your poetry?
Marlys West: The domestic sphere is a combination of cozy and concrete, and our role as artists is to dwell in the unknown. For example, I know how to cook dinner. I know how to load the dishwasher and talk to three teenagers who are having a hard time. But the kind of capability you have as a manager, as a mom, is different from the vulnerability of being an artist.
Sometimes I fight how alluring the idea of being an excellent housewife is. Because I know how to do it. I have a good skill set for it. But that’s not really what matters. It’s better for me as an artist to go forth into something I haven’t done before, and go forth with gentle curiosity. How do I balance that vulnerability with the structure of domestic life and the bottomless demands—all the things I could do and which would be appreciated, but that don’t necessarily connect me to myself?
MUTHA: That makes me think of some lines in the poem “Regret and Other Bodies,” where you write: “Who gave us consciousness? // Enough of this, I have to shower and go to work and put / my children in the care of the nanny.” You have these big questions you want to grapple with, but you have to come back to the practical.
Marlys West: Yes, and there’s also something comforting in the fact that you’re not going to sink into madness contemplating consciousness because you do have to make grilled cheese and you do have to pay your bills. I really like writers’ retreats because you have a whole week or two where you don’t have to think about the dishes. But then I’m always happy to get back to it.
So it’s like an anchor, but then the anchor becomes oppressive. I used to think I was going to get to a place where everything was balanced. But now I always think of that image of Howl’s Moving Castle, from the movie, where it’s just this pile of scrap metal, wood, pieces of a house, some laundry, some wheels, some feet, and it just goes. And bits get left behind, but it keeps moving.
MUTHA: And it’s also feeding your art right now. You managed to make a lot of art out of domesticity.
Marlys West: I was lucky that I could keep writing while the kids were little, but I also look with sympathy on people doing it now, because goddamn it’s hard. Things are complicated in a different way now that they’re older, but I have the time and I know what I want to do. And then writing is sort of like visiting a friend. I know it’s going to happen.
MUTHA: I love that all this nursing language, this anatomy, comes into your poetry. Even when you talk about personal things, like Sylvie’s heart surgery or your pregnancies, you are able to use very technical language. Did that language come in consciously or did it just creep in?
Marlys West: I think that crept in unconsciously because consciously, the patients couldn’t come in. As a nurse, you see and hear some of the most compelling drama, the joy and grief and trauma. But because my patients were people I worked with over and over again for years, I didn’t ever want them to see themselves in my poetry. So the physiological aspect came up in my writing because the bodies and the illnesses are universal and so much else wasn’t allowed in. And I love that there’s nothing out there that someone would read and think, “That’s what happened with my mom.”
And the same with our kids. I think it was Sharon Olds who made a conscious decision not to write about her son Gabe. It wasn’t her story to tell. I do think there are people who write their patients’ stories well. For example, Oliver Sacks does it in a way that’s so enlightening. But I would be mining my patients’ stories for the emotional depths, and it would be disrespectful.
MUTHA: Yes, there’s an ethical difference. He’s a doctor, and he’s helping a larger population in a different way.
Marlys West: Exactly. A lot of what comes into our lives is not ours. But a lot of other things are. For instance, Sylvie doesn’t mind if I write about his time in the hospital because it’s also become folklore for him.
MUTHA: Because he’s older?
Marlys West: He’s older and he’s really lucky that we’re not in the midst of an ongoing health crisis. I wouldn’t be writing about the heart valve looking like a little twig if he were still sick. You can’t make metaphors in the middle of a crisis.
MUTHA: Even when you write about your kids, there’s a sense of remove. You respect their personhood in how you write about them.
Marlys West: Respect is part of it. But, honestly, the other part is that teenagers—and our kids—are very much empowered. I get called on my shit all the time. If I were to write a poem about my teenager dealing with fill-in-the-blank, they would have no problem calling me out. They would say, “You’re using my life to further your own career. That’s fucked up.” So some of it is that I’m respectful, and some of it is that I’m scared!
MUTHA: I wondered if the self-referential moments in your work tie into domesticity and motherhood, too. For instance, in “Regret and Other Bodies,” you begin, “The electrocardiogram showed one of the heart valves, / I don’t know / which one and this is the longest setup for one tiny image / to the point where I have to question why I bring it up.” It feels very intimate and self-deprecating and maybe very female, at least in our culture.
Marlys West: Yes, I was at this party yesterday with some other writers, and everyone was being so apologetic about their work. But I thought, this is what we do. We’re writing in the tradition of Homer, but we’re also writing about spit-up. So there’s room to break down the fourth wall. You can say to the reader, “I’m not preaching to you. This is just something that I’m sharing with you.”
MUTHA: There’s also the sense that as a mom, so much is going on, so the poem is a little messy, the way life is. I know in actuality you put a lot of work and revision into your poems, but you preserve the illusion that you’re just tossing the poem out there in the moments you have available.
Marlys West: Yes, and as we age we might get back to a more singular focus. When the kids go off to college, the house will be quieter, and I’ll be able to focus—and I’ll be really fucking sad.
Though I have to say, the idea of getting enough sleep and the house staying clean is good. I’ll never regret that.
About the Author
Ginny Wiehardt is the author of Migration, winner of the Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the Harvard Review, PN Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Subtropics, and Willow Springs. She has written about books and creative writing for MUTHA Magazine, the Austin American-Statesman, the Strand Magazine, and Scholastic.com. Her children’s fiction is represented by Tracy Marchini at BookEnds Literary, and she lives in New York City with her husband and son. Learn more about her work at www.ginnywiehardt.com.
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