On Myth-Making, Spiritual Awakening, and the Possibilities of Acceptance
A Conversation with Emily Stoddard
In Emily Stoddard’s debut poetry collection, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, the speaker in “It embarrasses me, to see myself” says at the end of the poem, “Every other hour is darkness, but you can still hear the river.” Darkness, in its metaphorical and literal renderings, might be seeping through various facets of the speaker’s life throughout this collection, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to listen to the waters of the past blending with those of the present. With poems that oscillate between the personal and the sometimes folkloric, and whose rhythmic observations linger long past the turning of the page, Stoddard questions the dynamics of marriage, examines the nature of faith, listens, as a daughter and as a woman, to the assured voices of the past, and attempts, at every turn, to accept what is within the bounds of control and what isn’t.
Esteban Rodriguez: Emily, thank you immensely for your time. I love how the collection’s speaker openly and honestly navigates faith, in both the questioning of it and the longing for it. There is a critical/satirical lens faith (and more specifically religion) is filtered through in a poem like “Gallows Humor— or, The Trouble with Kingdoms,” where the collective “we” tries to proclaim that their beliefs are founded on better principles than other people’s beliefs (their messiah hung on the cross longer; their virgin mother performed her own hysterectomy to remain pure; their gospel has, quite literally, more bread).
But in a poem like “Where did I leave my god,” we see the desire for a more personal connection:
I sometimes wished he would not be found, wished
he would slide away into the pleated pants, far quieter
than how he arrived. Sometimes my god disappears like that,
and I become a woman stalking the river—
Have you always written about faith? What platform has poetry provided to write pieces like the ones mentioned above?
Emily Stoddard: Thanks so much for the chance to share, Esteban! And I’m grateful to EcoTheo for having published one of the poems in the book a few years ago.
I love that you touch on questioning and longing here. Those two pull on each other a lot for me. I think tension like this is generative as a writer, and in terms of spirituality, things get more interesting and expansive where there’s creative tension. The phrase that came up for me late in working on the book is “insider-outsider,” which might be another way of naming the questioning-longing dynamic.
That dynamic has been true for me for a long time. I’m not entirely sure which came first, my spiritual curiosity or my writing practice. I might have started writing because it was the only way to get after the questions I had. I’ve just always needed to know what things mean and why and how people connect (or alienate) through the meaning-making.
This can make for an odd relationship to the word “faith.” I get restless easily, right alongside the questions, so “faith” doesn’t feel like my natural habitat. Poetry is one place where I tussle with that, but I don’t necessarily start with the questions and turn them into poems. Nearly all the poems in the book came after an unusual image or a strange phrase that fell in my ear. Language followed the image or the sound, and there were often delays in the following.
I’m sure that’s because I was not meaning to write this book and did not want to write it. I was writing a different book tied to nature, mythology, and my Celtic roots. I was in the realm of spirituality but I wasn’t getting specific. That’s when the images and phrases that became this book started showing up—and they were very specific, not just in terms of Catholicism but also in terms of animals, words and numbers that kept repeating, and so on.
I understood these things to be part of who I am and what makes me tick, but they weren’t supposed to be what I’d write about. They weren’t supposed to be the material itself. I wasn’t ready for Catholicism and my spiritual questions to be so present, especially in my debut book. At that time, only a close circle of friends and strangers I met at retreats knew how much I learn and wonder about religion and different traditions.
So the spiritual lens has always been with me, but this book is the most overtly I’ve written about faith and spirituality. It was a tussle for most of the process. Eventually I told the poems they could visit, if they agreed to be my second book. I lost the argument on that one.
ER: As you say, you started writing in order to unearth answers to questions you had, and I hope it’s safe to say that in this collection you seek to return to the past with the hopes of finding something that you didn’t see before. In “Revisionist History,” you explain this quite poetically:
History is water,
easily rerouted
Memory is a willow,
slice it clean
and still
the roots
regenerate.
Can you talk a bit about this poem and about how you contend with the often fleeting nature of memory in your work?
ES: “Revisionist History” is one of the earliest poems I wrote for the book. It’s one of the first where a speaker tried to confront history and memory as living spaces. I was doing a lot of genealogy research and ancestral work, thinking about story patterns in my family. So much gets revealed by the stories we choose to repeat, forget, or rewrite. (“Choose” sometimes being unconscious, making memory even more slippery.) Families and religions seem to count on the fleeting nature of memory to keep certain people or narratives at their center.
It can be unsettling to shift the focus to the edges, where other possibilities live. It destabilizes things to suggest the past is never settled. Even the idea of “settled” is a tell, especially as I consider my white and colonialist ancestry.
In the process of writing the book, I learned how far back a tradition of ministers and missionaries goes in one line of my family. It’s the line I’ve felt intuitively connected to, but at first, I had no idea they were also spiritually restless. Some of them left Cornwall to bring Methodism to Australia, New Zealand, and Tonga. When I started reading their letters and finding comments others made about them, I was knocked sideways by their intensity (which sounds a lot like my own) and the impact of their work, for better and worse.
It hit me that the compulsions I have about spirituality aren’t uniquely mine—on some level, they’re an inheritance. On some level, they’re memory. That shifted my relationship to the poems and the past. In a way, it felt like those ancestors were “in on” the book with me. It also made me ask if the work I was doing was any different from theirs. We’re all narrative makers. We’re prone to deploying metaphor and passionate language.
So where was I susceptible to repeating a pattern? How can a book question history without giving the speaker too much credit just for asking questions? If you spy a savior-hero relationship to memory in your ancestry, how do you stay alert to that?
As I revise my writing and read other people’s work, I often ask: where has the speaker been implicated or not? That’s definitely a result of contending with memory in this book.
ER: It’s always fascinating knowing the origins of a poet’s path toward poetry. Some start because of love. Others because of the need to tease out the emotional uncertainty they don’t quite yet know how to express. Before we dive further into your collection, what brought you to poetry in the first place? What has kept you returning to this endeavor?
ES: Poetry was the last form I got into when I was younger, but once I connected to it, it felt like home in many ways. Home in part because I felt safe in it—I could tell the truth while also hiding. I could make a poem a tight, spring-loaded artifact, without having to set a table of context or explain myself. I’ve sometimes wished I would have been a painter instead, to see how it feels to gesture toward things instead of naming them explicitly in language. Poetry feels like the closest I can get to that.
Image-work is what makes me return. It’s where my real love for poetry started. I dabbled with poems until I got to Michigan State as an undergrad. Diane Wakoski was my poetry professor there for three years. She modeled what it means to follow an image into the poem, to turn that into a kind of myth-making. She was relentless about whether our images led to revelation or fell apart as clichés. I was hooked. It was the first time I appreciated what poetry could do that other forms could not. I’ve always had an image-driven, head-in-the-clouds, surreal kind of imagination, but until then, I had no idea how much that could drive poetry.
ER: You’ve spoken about how myth-making can be rendered in a poem, and in the first poem of your collection, “More & More,” your speaker outright proclaims their desire for it:
Tell me it is only human
to wish for someone to believe
in the myth of you.
The myth that we create for ourselves would, ostensibly, be full of grandeur. At the same time, there is no denying that our myths, even the ones we forge ourselves, can be enshrouded in narratives that are less than dignified. As the speaker says earlier in “More & More”:
The wolf pursues the bear,
splits the shadow of pine and flashes
yellow teeth—and I do not turn away,
pursued by my own violent
reverence.
The human condition is complicated, but you don’t shy away from its complexity. How do you approach the intricacies of others in your poems? How do you approach it with your speaker?
ES: This is an interesting question—it makes me wonder about the ways myth enables or holds complexity, while history or the “accepted” narrative can often oversimplify and avoid complexity (and often because it’s protecting a power dynamic of one kind or another). Maybe the want for myth, or the act of myth-making, is on some level a refusal to forget complexity.
This also makes me think about the voices of women who have been reclaimed or expanded through myth-making. Lucille Clifton’s poems with Adam and Eve don’t exactly aim for grandeur. They’re so earthy and have a sparseness, or directness, that I’ve always admired. Even in the way they look on the page, it’s like they’re trying to get to something essential. They’re a kind of myth-making, but they point to something true, something important that’s missing in the story as we’re told it was.
The work that’s been done to reclaim or re-mythologize Mary Magdalene (who was mis-storied as a prostitute) also comes to mind in that vein. There’s a feeling of her story getting restored to its true place, and in the process also having space to get more complex.
In terms of the book, it was important to me to follow complexity, follow the possibility of myths, without forcing whatever came next. This was especially true for my work with Petronilla, St. Peter’s daughter. I didn’t want it to feel like I invented her on the page and then used her like a mouthpiece—I didn’t want to be another person using her like Peter had, as a kind of teaching tool. Early on, I felt clumsy as I tried to be sensitive to that. It’s one reason I resisted these poems. By the end, I just kept thinking: I hope I’ve listened well. My best guess is that if you’re listening—listening perhaps with questions, but listening without a final design in mind—then you’re leaving yourself and your poems and your speakers open for complexity.
ER: You mention Lucille Clifton’s poems prompting you to think of certain topics further. What other writers provide a source of inspiration and/or motivation for your own work? Is there anything outside of writing that reinforces your need for poetry?
ES: This could be a long list, but I’ll try to focus!
I owe a lot to Pat Schneider, who wrote Writing Alone & With Others and created the Amherst Writers & Artists Method. I stumbled onto her books as I was trying to return to writing after some tough years. Her work, and the Amherst Writers & Artists community, is all about meeting the creative act as a generous possibility. I decided to get trained in the method in 2015 and have been part of that community ever since.
Other companions as I wrote: Absolute Solitude by Dulce María Loynaz, Mirabai Starr’s wonderful translation of The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila, Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton, Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates and Women in Praise of the Sacred, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho (If Not, Winter), Sharon Olds, Rilke… I also did deeper work on myth and archetypes with Sharon Blackie and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, through their books and in workshops with them. That grounded my creative/spiritual practice, especially when uncertainty showed up in the writing.
A book I wish I could have read before even starting mine, but it was being written at the same time: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. I recommend this book constantly, especially to writers falling down the rabbit hole of a murky history… the self-questioning and feeling of obsession in the book resonate so much with my experience of writing into Petronilla’s story.
Beyond writing, nature, native plants, and trees reinforce my need for poetry. I’ve tried living elsewhere, but I’m a Michigan girl at heart—I need the four seasons to find my rhythm. I need time with Lake Michigan to feel like myself. I also lucked out to have a dad who is a forester—he gave me a sense of nature being specific and diverse, of the trees having names and stories and being something more than “the woods.” Writing this book showed me how important that’s been for my poetry.
ER: One poem I particularly enjoyed reading and rereading was “Passion Play.” In the poem, the speaker, in deciding what ingredients to use to make blood for a Passion Play, details how her father has to play the role of Jesus every year in church because he couldn’t, for reasons not mentioned, play the role of Peter:
Like Jesus of Gethsemane, my father did not want
to be Jesus. He said he wanted to be Peter.
The parish priest knew better: my father has never
not wanted to be the hero.
We all want to be the hero at some point in our lives. Often, however, the world has a different reality for us, but I’m curious to know how you define acceptance, both within this poem and in your life? How necessary is it for you as a writer?
ES: One way I could answer this is that my restlessness has a way of outpacing the kind of acceptance that might come easier to others. It’s that questioning-longing tension again, making me averse to settling or accepting things as they are. As a writer, this can be good for generating possibilities and going deeper with poems. But it can also make it tough to live with yourself when you’re trying to finish a book!
Related to “Passion Play,” maybe acceptance is seeded by getting honest about what you really want, what you actually need and are hungry for. At least that’s part of what came out in this poem. By the end, the speaker admits a want, something she needs within the experience. I don’t know if the speaker was owning up to that directly until this poem was drafted—I kept thinking I didn’t need or want to write about the Passion Play. But the Karo syrup and the red dye showed up anyway, so I had to follow them. I might trust images more than anything else in my writing—I accept images long before I accept what my voice might be trying to work out on the page.
ER: There are two great poems centered on marriage in your collection, “Every marriage is a series of smaller marriages” and “Later Marriage Poem (To sing over and over the same thing as a new thing). Can you speak further about these poems and what prompted their inclusion?
ES: Sure, and thanks for calling these two out. To me, marriage is its own myth. The Catholic Church attaches it to sacrament and projects all kinds of meaning and morality onto it. It starts at a young age, especially for women. In “Magpie Says,” there’s a line about the church playing “holy on the white veil,” for instance. I come from a tradition that says a woman “earns” her white veil (via virginity, modesty, etc.)—I was told as much when I got married the first time. That alone makes marriage a loaded thing. It’s this living metaphor that’s supposed to be symbolic of your faith not just to another person but also to a moral center, a spiritual tradition, a religious institution, an idea of family, and on and on.
So in that sense, marriage needed to be in these poems not just as its symbolic ideal (the purity/promise ring, the virginal veil) but also in its reality, which sometimes feels like the opposite of holy, can feel almost bankrupt (or exploited) as a promise.
I also think marriage is important in how it’s tied to having a family. That threads into Petronilla’s story in the book. Peter’s prayer for her paralysis would have been, in those days, interpreted as infertility. Dr. Meghan Henning has done terrific work on this. I found her research after I’d been writing these poems for a while, and it affirmed something I just felt, or recognized from my own experience, intuitively.
As someone who has unexplained infertility and who never saw myself in the church’s centering of motherhood as the path for women, Petronilla holds another kind of space. There’s something in the way Peter viewed her that’s still alive in the church today. Women who don’t fit the traditional ideal of marriage and family don’t have a space to land. Women who are deemed “too much” can’t move freely within the church.
We have Mary, The Mother. We have Mary Magdalene, the hidden apostle who challenges the definition of who’s called to be a priest. To me, Petronilla rounds out this trio. She’s the hidden daughter, holding a key to how the church has sidelined or silenced the daughters who say too much, see too much, know too much. A witness.
ER: If your book could end up in the hands of anyone, whether alive still or long since passed, who it be and why?
ES: Probably the ancestors I mentioned earlier: my third great-grandparents, John and Jane Vercoe, and John’s uncle, Walter Lawry. They were Methodist ministers and missionaries. From what I’ve read, they were pretty convicted and sometimes had run-ins with authority. John had a deep dislike for Catholicism, or “the popery” as he and other Methodists called it. In Tonga, he caused a stir when he convinced the local chief not to let the Catholic missionaries come on shore. He referred to the Catholic mission as “the coiling (slow but sure) of the deadly Boa around the emerald Isles of Oceania.” It seems we might both have a thing for images and a tendency toward hyperbole. There are so many questions I’d love to ask them, and I wonder what they’d make of a distant granddaughter tussling with these things more than 150 years later.
