All This Divide
A Conversation with Jory Mickelson and Michael Garrigan
It’s one thing to interview a writer whose work you deeply admire, but it’s an even better feeling when you share ideas and worldviews with two writers you can’t help but learn from as your conversation develops. Jory Mickelson and Michael Garrigan are two stylistically different poets and the landscapes that occupy their work share, at best, a few similarities (Mickelson lives in the Pacific Northwest, and Garrigan lives along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania). Nevertheless, despite the stanzaic and geographic differences, Mickelson’s and Garrigan’s work speaks across every type of environment to remind us of a common truth: we are of this earth, and we must learn to appreciate it before it is too late.
I had the privilege of discussing Mickelson’s new book, All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil 2024), and catching up with Michael and his current work.
Jory and Michael, thank you immensely for your time. Michael, when we last spoke for EcoTheo Review in 2023, you said that you wrote “in order to connect with the world,” and I couldn’t help but feel hopeful hearing that, even long after the interview. The world since then has changed drastically, and not always for the better. Nevertheless, I feel optimistic about what writing and poetry have to offer. This question is posed to both of you: How has your writing sustained your well-being in the midst of so much uncertainty? Has it allowed you to “connect” with the world more?
Jory Mickelson: My writing practice changes, just like I change over time. What sustained me during the early pandemic was looking back into US Western history to see what it might tell us about our contemporary lives. When time felt so elastic, especially during rolling lockdowns, it didn’t seem too hard to think and dream myself into the past. This was the germination of my second book of poems, All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2024).
Currently, my writing practice is rooted in risk and surprise. I’ve been consciously letting the poems take me further than I would dare to go on my own. Then, I see if I can push them even further. There is a great joy in writing for me in the present because a draft or a poem might fail. And that’s okay. I am seeing where the writing leads and am not concerned if the path leads to a dead end. I get to start again with the next draft.
Michael Garrigan: Esteban, thank you so much for giving us this space to share! I think back on our conversation a lot, and I am so grateful you allowed me to explore the roots of River, Amen with you. My practice of writing has been consistent, as much as I can make it so. I try to write every day; however, I have started to use little pocket-sized notebooks more and more, which allows me to write during the day and “in the moment” while I’m hiking or standing on a rock in the middle of a river, not just when I’m sitting at my desk. This has helped me stay more connected to both the world and my writing. In turn, the poems that I’m working on have seemed to become quite different from my first two books. They are working their way intentionally towards joy and gratitude (those two things are linked, I think) and are full of new voices. And animals! Every poem I write now has an animal in it or has an animal as its focus. I have no idea why, but I’m loving it, and it’s fun. I’m also trying to let my writing find laughter, which seems to be what I need right now.
Esteban Rodriguez: Jory, you have a new poetry collection out, All This Divide, which is a fantastic meditation on the natural world and how we come to terms with the inexplicable. How do you see your book interacting with Michael’s latest work, River, Amen? Michael, what relationship do you see your book having with Jory’s? How do you all see your work contributing to the environmentally conscious literature that is out there today?
JM: Well, we were both early readers of one another’s second books. I keep trying to tell Michael that short books of poems are the way to go, and he smiles and adds another 10 pages. But in all seriousness, I trust Michael as a reader of my work–his praise and his criticism are deeply valuable to me, even if we have diverging poetics or aesthetics. All the water in Michael’s River, Amen, worked its way into my own book, especially in my poems like “To the river.” Water is both a resource and a route or course by which humans lived and continue to live.
In my view, our books intertwine around our concerns for how we as people have historically dealt with and currently deal with the resources at our disposal–natural, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. I would also say there is a longing in both our books, a desire on the part of the speaker in the poems to reach out beyond themselves and attempt to find connection with the other–a struggle to interweave themselves into the complex and bewildering world the speaker encounters.
MG: What? I can’t hear you, Jory. Did you say something about cutting poems and keeping them short? You’re breaking up… You know, in all seriousness, I think I’m going to finally heed your advice. I think the collection I’ve been working on is actually two different books and I’m going to try my hardest to keep them under 100 pages. No promises.
Yeah, I love how Jory and I have, as they put it, “diverging aesthetics” in our writing, but we can still look to each other’s work for guidance and inspiration. I absolutely love the way Jory weaves history into their poems. That really helped me look at the landscape around me through different lenses throughout River, Amen. Their ability to create different voices and build narrative threads with them, which they do masterfully in All This Divide, has also helped guide me as I build my next collection.
Jory and I were talking on the phone the other day, and they mentioned something about their Little League team winning some championship and getting a big pizza party as a celebration and I was so jealous because my team was always in last place. We were absolutely terrible. Anyway, I swear this connects; even though we had drastically different childhoods (Jory in Montana, me in Pennsylvania, etc.), we both were, I think, one or two of the worst players on our Little League baseball teams. I couldn’t hit a pitch for the life of me, incredibly scared of the ball. I always felt so alone and had such a strong desire to connect with those around me. A longing, as Jory put it, that still exists today. Thankfully, I’ve found a way to reach out to the world and to be part of a community of others, like Jory, who want to share the experience of living our authentic lives with each other.
JM: (I was a spectacular T-Ball player. I don’t know what Michael is talking about.)
ER: Ha! I was in Little League, too, and I had the experience of being on good and not-so-good teams. I learned different things throughout my time on each, and although I’ve long since hung up my glove, I still have vivid memories of the dugout, the field, the bleachers filled with family and friends.
For us poets, it’s the small moments that make up the larger narrative/message we are trying to convey with our work, and perhaps that’s why place becomes so important to the pieces we present to readers.
Michael, you mentioned how Jory and you had upbringings in two different states (Montana and Pennsylvania), so I wanted to ask you both how you go about making a place that is so specific to you universal for the reader? How are you able to make us care so deeply for the places you call or have called home?
JM: Thank you for this great question. When I think about place, I also think about poet Richard Hugo’s fantastic and sometimes problematic book on writing The Triggering Town, where he says, “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” When I write about places or the past, it doesn’t matter that a reader might not know exactly what a Ponderosa Pine looks like or how big a Yellow Stonefly is. What makes a place accessible for both the reader and the writer, for me, is the emotional tenor. If the feeling is communicated well, then I have access to many places and experiences beyond my own.
Currently, home is less a physical place for me than a locus of emotional tenderness. I might even go so far as to say that home carries a bit of the sacred for me, whether it’s a geographic location or a memory. I spend a lot of time on the page trying to excavate what I am tender toward, and maybe that gentleness or consideration is what draws a reader close as well.
MG: “Emotional tenor.” I really love that, Jory. Great question! This is always something I’m working on or at least aware of. I used to try to name as much of this place as possible, sure that if I were able to identify every plant or geological feature, then this “place,” this “home,” that is so ingrained in me would come alive for the reader. I quickly realized that I need to do more than that. I’ve been reading this wonderful book of essays by Richard Nelson titled The Island Within, and in it, he writes, “There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.” The more I can interact with and let this place I call home shape me, the more I am, hopefully, able to connect the reader to it as well. Moving beyond just my experience and perspective and writing from other points of view has helped me wade in the same river hundreds of times but see it hundreds of different ways.
ER: Michael, I love that quote about climbing the same mountain a hundred times. It really shows how poets and writers, in general, often return to the same subject, ready to tackle it in new ways. Is there a theme beyond place that you interact with repeatedly in your writing or that you’re finding yourself venturing into?
And Jory, speaking of work that we find ourselves coming back to, can you speak about the “Plunder” poems in your book? Where did these poems find their genesis and how did you choose to order them within the collection?
JM: In dealing with the historical record, it was important for me to acknowledge almost everything that we read from history comes down to us from the conquerors and the colonizers. There are many different perspectives on what we call the “historical facts,” depending on who is speaking.
In All This Divide, I wanted to be very careful and respectful not to appropriate other people’s stories. I also didn’t want to perpetuate the narrative of “trauma porn” or to capitalize on a person or group of people’s suffering, whether that be the U.S. government’s reservation system for Indigenous people or a vigilante lynching.
What happened in my research is that objects began to speak to me with their own voice. I tried to get those voices down on paper to speak their own truths and to tell us the truth about ourselves. The “Plunder” poems each look at a different aspect or perspective of the word. A gold deposit speaks with its own voice, a revolver, even history itself. These poems serve as a backbone or spine of the entire book. As far as ordering them, they found their own places among the other voices and narratives–with “Plunder: gold before its discovery” starting us out as something about to be unearthed, to “Plunder: history” finishing the sequence with the long view and the ongoing view of plunder.
MG: Jory, I’m curious when those “plunder” poems came to be. Did you begin with them and build the collection around them, or did they “show up” later in the process? If so, did that push you to rethink your work in progress? I’m always fascinated with how collections of voices start speaking to each other and build a conversation that becomes a book.
Esteban, a few months ago, I was listening to the Life of a Record podcast about Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s album I See a Darkness. In it, Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) was discussing how many of those songs were him exploring what it meant and looked like to be a good friend. That has stuck with me and has become a thread that I just can’t let go of lately. What does it mean to be a good friend? What does it look like to connect with another person or a hermit thrush or a thistle fern? How do I build relationships in my poems (and in my own life) based on wonder, empathy, and love?
JM: Michael, I had a pile of poems, and the “Plunder” ones started showing up here and there. While working on my manuscript at a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, I realized that the “Plunder” poems were the spine on which the manuscript would hang. In my casita in Taos, I had a grand piano. It became a magnificent table on which to arrange and rearrange All This Divide. I finished ordering the book in December of 2020 but didn’t start sending it out until May of 2021. I got feedback from trusted readers about the book as a whole.
ER: Jory, I love that you mentioned that you had this grand piano that was used as a table in which to arrange and rearrange your poems. I love that physical aspect of this, and this got me thinking about the ways in which writers approach their work on a physical level. Lately, I’ve found myself writing on a Google Doc on a computer during the day and editing the work at night in the comfort of my bed. What does a day of writing look like for you both on a physical level? Do you find yourself following a routine? What does your environment look like?
JM: In my life right now, I can’t imagine a whole day devoted to writing. My day job requires a great deal of thoughtful writing from me. In addition to that, I am managing the release of All This Divide and the assorted poetry business.
I’ve used a number of strategies to help me generate new work. First, I’ve given myself permission to not submit any work to journals or contests. I’ve taken about six months off so far and will probably keep that trend up until the end of the year. I am also part of a writing group where I have to turn in something every month. I’ve taken a few poetry writing classes, and I also try to schedule time to write or do research in one or two-hour blocks.
This is what I am able to do for myself and my writing at present. I do my best not to beat myself up about how much I could or should be doing. As someone who aimed for a minimum of 100 lit journal rejections a year and did that consistently for the past four years, productivity is its own trap.
MG: Jory, I also took a break from submitting to journals after River, Amen came out. It felt really good not to think about that part of the process for a while. A year after publication and only now am I slowly getting back into submitting again.
During the school year, when I’m teaching, I usually find myself writing in a little room off of my garage in the evenings that I’ve slowly turned into a creative space for me. My desk looks out a window into our backyard, so whenever I get stuc,k I can just look up and watch the birds or trees. During the summer, I find myself outside a lot, and this is where I write. In the mornings, I like to sit outside in the midst of really loud birdsong and write and drink coffee. In the evenings, same thing. I also carry a little notebook with me on my river trips and hikes, so I end up doing a lot of writing that way. The physical spaces and landscapes I find myself in are a very large part of the writing process for me. Last night, I took a walk along a spit of land out into Lake Huron as a storm front moved, and the way the wind shuttered through the quaking aspen and red elderberry showed up in the poem I was actively revising when I got back to our little cabin.
ER: Strangely enough, I’ve also taken a break from submitting to journals. Well, I don’t submit as vigorously as I used to when I was younger. I still feel an urgency with my work, but I feel that I don’t have to share it with others so quickly that I can live with it longer before it becomes someone else’s. And I feel, in some strange way, that when these poems do make it out into the world, they are that much more special. It feels like they are ready to be a part of someone’s life. This got me thinking: is there a poem that you’ve written that you love sharing with others? And speaking of publications, is there a poem that never quite made the cut for a journal but that you hold dear to your heart?
MG: Esteban, over the past year of doing readings in support of River, Amen, I’ve grown to love reading and performing certain poems. “Liturgy of Carp Becoming a God” and “The Poet Sits on a Ledge and Writes a Letter” are two of my favorites because both are really easy for me to slip into and embody. And yes, there are a few poems that have yet to make it into a journal that I hold close. “Dead Elk Saunters Through a Reclaimed Strip Mine” is one that I absolutely love and is still looking for a home.
ER: Jory, can you talk about “Sister Self” a bit? Michael, can you speak about your interaction with the poem?
MG: I remember when Jory asked to use that first line of “Sister Self” from my poem “The River, Dark,” and I was honored and couldn’t wait to see what they would do with it. I love “Sister Self” for so many reasons, the main one being that I feel like it extends and explores some of the things I was trying to get at in my poem. I love how they feel like they are talking to each other, in some ways, like maybe Jory was in my world and I was in theirs long before we knew each other. I love how, at least for me, these two poems, each in their own way, explore growing into? out of? through? boyhood and into something else.
JM: I think “The River, Dark” was the first poem of Michael’s I ever read, and I absolutely loved it. I still love it. “Sister Self” is speaking to several things at the same time. As part of the collection All This Divide, it has something to do with the collapsing and telescoping of time. How we, as writers, write ourselves and carry the reader into the imaginative past.
Around the time I was writing this poem, I was also publicly changing my pronouns. I’d identified as non-binary for a long time but had been quieter about it. “Sister Self” is also about the person who was waiting to emerge inside of me, inside the body that was outwardly identified as he/him/his. In the “we,” is the speaker speaking to the reader? Themself? Is it a lyric addressed to someone possibly unknown to both the reader and speaker? Possibly yes to all three.
ER: A poem in this collection that I kept returning to was “I Am Aware,” and if you don’t mind, I’d love to show it in its entirety below (the title leads into the poem):
of how careful
these last days
of summer are,
but remain uncertain
whether I
am driven
or being drawn.
I thought
I heard an unknown
bird calling me.
What makes a place
holy? Can a song?
What then,
when the last note
leaves?
Immediately, the idea of endings came to mind, and what gets left behind when we have moved on. Jory, what do you hope remains after readers finish your collection? What notes do you think will be sung? Michael, how did you experience reading All This Divide?
JM: I know each reader will take something different with them when they are done reading the book. What I hope remains is how close personal and collective history is with us in the present, how paper-thin the partition is between what we, as individuals and groups, have done, and how it leads to what we will do.
MG: I think it was about a year and a half ago when Jory sent me a draft of All This Divide for me to read and offer comments on. We had been writing letters back and forth for a few years by that point, so reading each other’s poetry just felt like the natural next step. I was honored that they would ask, and it was great to see another poet’s process both in writing a poem and sorting and organizing a manuscript. The way in which Jory explores the interaction between personal and collective histories has definitely stuck with me and is something I’ve been thinking about while writing new poems.
ER: Jory, where does All This Divide go next? Where do you go?
JM: I am currently at work on something completely different, a book-length project about a 20th-century artist. Again, there is research and history, but the work feels like it has less at stake or at least less pressing concerns. I am working on expanding my own poetics and attempting to stretch what poetry can do in terms of interacting with the readers of a book of poems. It feels a little reckless, which is a nice change.
Michael, you mentioned Jory’s way of exploring personal and collective histories will stay with you while writing new poems. What else will you carry with you as you venture into new poetic territory?
MG: Esteban, first, thank you so much for facilitating this conversation. I am really grateful to have this opportunity to speak with both of you about our poems and the writing process. I am trying to stay open to the world and to the voices that are speaking into these poems as much as possible. I think being a writer is, in some ways, constantly reminding myself that everything I do is part of the writing process. I’m trying to wake up each day with that intention — be open to wonder and moments of joy and give space to the poems that want to be written.
JM: Esteban, thanks for this conversation with Michael, it’s been great fun.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He loves exploring the Riverlands with a fly rod and the Pennsylvania wilds with his wife, Jess, and their dog, Whitman. He enjoys watching water move over rocks and feels strongly that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and the recipient of the Shippensburg University's Outstanding Teacher Award. Michael is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Robbing the Pillars, and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Gray's Sporting Journal, River Teeth, The FlyFish Journal, Water Stone Review, North American Review, and The Hopper Magazine. You can read more of his work at www.mgarrigan.com.
Jory Mickelson's first book, Wilderness//Kingdom, was winner of a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their third book, Picturing (End of the Line Press), is forthcoming in Canada. Other publications include Court Green, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, Terrain.org, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, Dear Butte, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They live and write in the Pacific Northwest.