Lace and Pyrite
An Interview with Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Jason Myers: Do you remember the first time something from a garden - flower, fruit, worm, whatever - showed up in your writing? How does your practice of gardening affect the way you write, and vice versa?
Aimee: Oh definitely–it began (as it so often happens for me) with my mother. In grad school, I wrote about a time planting flowers with my mom before I left for college and something just clicked, you know. And (as it so often happens for me) of course it wasn’t “about” gardening, but rather it was one of the first times I was writing about my relationship with my mom. Gardening is another way of noticing & remembering– with daily reminders that revision is my very favorite part of both writing and gardening.
Ross: Oh I don’t know if I do...although maybe something about some of the brambles and trees in the area, in between the apartments and the highway or up at the school, where there were trails that we built ramps and stuff in for our bikes--so many hours in these trails, building and jumping and learning--and there would be wild raspberries. Still a wild raspberry or blackberry patch makes me kinda giddy...just found one in an alley a couple blocks away. Anyway, attention, change, wonder, curiosity, love--all the stuff a garden teaches us.
JM: What is growing in your garden right now? What have been your biggest surprises? Disappointments? What do failures in the garden and in writing have to teach us?
Aimee: Well I just moved across town here in Oxford, Mississippi and while our front and backyard look extra neat and tidy–everything, I mean every thing– in the new place’s garden is not native to Mississippi, much to my dismay. Except one thing: we have a lovely sweetbay magnolia in the front yard with its otherworldly red seed pods. We have about an acre now so that is both exhilarating and intimidating to have that space and desire to redirect the health of this piece of land. But in my former garden, we have a ton of native flowers that I will miss--I planned it so that something is in bloom from basically February till Oct/early November. So many tomatoes and okra this year. We just finished the best blackberry season we’ve ever had. Bee balm in 3 varieties and 3 colors growing so easy and so thick, so fragrant. The first thing I’m going to do is make sure my favorite native plant–the beautyberry– has a place in our yard. As for failures, the trying is always more exhilarating to wait and see. I get impatient sometimes with both. But I never fear a do-over in either writing or gardening, bc you have so much to gain.
Ross: Our greens are getting kinda tired, this is when they rest and wait for the cool it seems to me. But the peppers love this time of year, about 10 or so plants, too many, always too many, but we got friends. Huge squash climbing a fence that I brought back from a market in Pennsylvania! Ground cherries and ground cherries and ground cherries. Long beans, not long beans, chard, a beautiful dandelion crop (both the wild and cultivated, our new favorite!). Beets have been good this year. You know, goji coming on a lot, pears, our okri have been nibbled by deer so they’re late, and so many sweet potatoes oh oh!
JM: How does gardening show up in your teaching? Do you ever take your students on field trips?
Ross: I’ve gardened with students before, taught class in the garden, brought students over to help me in the garden, etc. And we like to go to the persimmon tree on campus (which will be coming on soon!), and we’ve done things at the pawpaw grove. But there are surely lessons from the garden, ways of the garden, that have shown up too, whether I know it our not.
Aimee: Only metaphorical gardens thus far. But there’s a magnificent “tree trail” right on campus and I’ve walked parts of it with my students--many of whom had never noticed these trees or knew the names of them before I had them download the tree map. We sketch them, research them, learn how they grow, and before long, trees are showing up in their writing in fresh and surprising and tender ways.
JM: I love that W. S. Merwin’s poem drafts ended up in his compost bin. How much of Lace & Pyrite didn’t make it in the book? Are there B-sides we might see one day? A sequel?
Aimee: I think on my end there were maybe just 1-2 seasons were just totally cut and reworked into what made it into the book. Because these were epistolary, and I had a vision of writing to my friend first and foremost over ever making a book together, I was able to focus a bit more with less revision than what I normally utilize. We have written another collaboration on trees (that is still ongoing) so who knows what will happen or how that will shake out.
Ross: Agreed!
JM: These poems seem haunted by climate change - the frogs vanishing, yet still audible, in the Midwest; the peach blossoms in February; the garden saying “you’re fucked, friend”. You both speak of joy and wonder as essential parts of your being, your writing; what role do you think these qualities have in our present moment of planetary peril?
Ross: I think one question that seems relevant to me these days, and those poems on my side anyway were wondering about them, is, in addition to how might we survive together, how might we die together with love.
Aimee: Oh my stars. “How might we die together with love.” That’s it right there, isn’t it? That is the praxis, the syllabus, the central question of not just my writing, but of the best version of myself.
JM: There are also more personal hauntings in the poems - the loss of a parent real or imagined, a dead friend’s cameo in a winter flower. What is the relationship between grief and growth?
Ross: I don’t know, but change and grief seem related, don’t you think? And for sure a garden teaches us that there is death, and from the death comes the living, and on and on like that. Which, to me, is precious teaching.
Aimee: That question reminds me of one of the greatest lines to come out of the Marvel universe: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” When I first heard Vision say that line, my jaw just about hit the floor. Along these lines, I think being reminded of death and grief while being in a garden is only natural–intertwined, really– even when there is so much bounty and abundance to gain.
JM: Aimee writes “Each fruit is a singular memory.” What fruits have a particularly Proustian effect on you, open up portals of time for you to travel?
Aimee: Oh gosh--so many! Growing tropical fruit has been a tether and a lifetime of love work for my parents ever since I could remember, especially since we lived in many places not conducive to this work: Chicago, Iowa, the ultra-dry suburbs of Phoenix. Today, right now, my answer will be so different than what it would be when this interview is published, but: jackfruit fresh from my grandmother’s garden in India, picking cherries in western NY by myself, just before I started my first teaching job before I got married & had kids, autumn brings to mind the smell of concord grapes from the highway, mangoes & oranges from my parents’ yard, and even persimmons Ross once knocked down for me with an umbrella in Bloomington.
Ross: Serviceberry or juneberry, which grows all over the place here. Pawpaws too, also known as the Indiana (etc.) Banana. Persimmons are special. They are kind of around. I love a fruit called goumi too, a little tartish fruit that is delicious and glassy red and evidently with a lot of omega threes, maybe the most of any fruit? Maybe?
JM: The invitation to “let us stop explaining” Ross offers on p. 10 feels akin to William Carlos Williams’ famous maxim: no ideas but in things. What ideas, i.e., things, are nourishing you at the moment?
Aimee: green herons, a box of half used oil pastels, seeing my sons’ wet footprints around a pool deck, flamingoes, the last of the fresh peaches from the community market, ZZ plants, washi tape, the Spanish word almohada, which means pillow.
Ross: Tithonia, stepback jumpshots, Aretha Franklin’s version of “Mary Don’t You Weep” on her album Amazing Grace. And “Wholy Holy”, on the same record.
