The Daily Reckoning: An Interview with Makenna Goodman

Vermont poet Michael Metivier speaks with Vermont novelist Makenna Goodman about her debut, The Shame (Milkweed, 2020). With humor and vivacity, the book charts the internal struggles of its narrator, Alma, as she navigates and wrestles with both the expectations and realities of motherhood, art, and what it means (and doesn’t mean) to live ethically on the land. 

Michael Metivier: One image/moment among many that have stayed with me after reading your book, is so brief that it was almost hard to find again. It’s the start of a breathless section of chapter two where Alma runs through what the seasons are like on her family’s Vermont homestead, and she mentions having “to fish out the [sheep] shit with cold fingers” when the animals inevitably foul their own water trough. There are other scatological references throughout the book, but this one I found to be particularly illuminating, and I find that when I think about Alma, this is how I picture her. I guess in other words I found the literal poop in this book to be important and wondered what was behind that moment, and others like it.

Makenna Goodman: I like how your first instinct is to start with the shit. It’s a good entry point! Because like death, shit is central to being human (and animal), and the daily reckoning with it as something soiled or profane is part of getting closer to the root of the narrative of “civilization”, where it seeks to exclude, or how it perpetuates certain mythologies around what is clean or dirty. In this case, fishing the sheep shit out of their drinking water is Alma’s duty as a homesteader (or “animal husband,” as it’s also called). Who has soiled the water? You could say the sheep, because they shat in it. Or you could say Alma, because she mis-positioned the water trough too close to their feeder, and sheep shit when they eat, as part of their natural grazing pattern, to fertilize the grasses as they nip them back.  Similarly, do our governments consider the shit in the water of certain citizens over others? Do we understand this soiled water as “natural”, as inevitable, and who is in charge of the cleaning and soiling? Alma reckons with these larger questions on a subconscious level as she goes through her righteous performance of mundane tasks.

MM: For me it also felt emblematic of the dissatisfaction and unease Alma feels that is revealed throughout the book to have come about in part from social media. Is that fair to say? The difference between the image of a life that’s presented on Instagram for example, and the reality. I remember in the past talking with you about Instagram influencers, particularly those in the small farm/homestead world. There are lots and lots of pictures of egg menageries, for example, but very few of killing cones or sheep shit. And maybe we’re missing something big and setting ourselves up for disaffection by avoiding that daily reckoning or pretending it doesn’t exist to others…

MG: Definitely there’s a filter on farming in social media that censors the shit and death, as well as the deeper truths about profitability and agrarianism as a viable pathway to financial stability for those who aren’t already wealthy. And yet there’s also a presence that’s countering these mythologies, it just depends on where you’re looking and what you’re paying attention to. I’m not really on social media much, so my interest in The Shame was more about how the internet exists as a template for us to project our own moralities and use as stages for the drama of our psychic development. Alma believes she is ethical by living close to the land, but what are her ethics, really? She thinks of herself as anti-capitalist, but is that even possible? Her struggle is less about image and desire (that’s on the surface) and more about the deeper question of how to exist within the contradictions of capitalism and the history of back-to-the-land agricultural movement that is historically rooted in a very American rugged individualism that likes to think of humans on the land as being “one with nature” as opposed to an expropriating system of power where people with access have used nature as an object for their own moral rationalization. 

MM: It does feel like the conversation about both the roots of the “back-to-the-land agricultural movement” and its potential to displace commodity agriculture, for lack of a better word, is coming into question more and more. This is something you’re continuing to explore with your next book, I understand? Can you talk a little about how your own thoughts have progressed on this movement, both as someone who grows and husbands, and who has also spent a lot of time as an editor in communication around agriculture?

MG: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about narrative, who has had historical control over it, and how that has affected the way history and ideas of “expertise” have evolved. For example, a lot of conversation in the environmentalist movement has been around the narrative of the roots of American wilderness as an untouched, “virgin” forest that we must somehow preserve. But indigenous land stewards had been implementing viable systems of agriculture within wild spaces for centuries. The narrative of either/or (agriculture or conservation) is a relatively new and Eurocentric one. An environmentalism that fails to embody anti-capitalism at the same time holds within it the contradictory questions of “for whom” and “at whose cost”. 

In the aftermath of World War II, for example, there was a systematized effort to make use of excess chemicals from bombs, resulting in the shift into chemical, commodity-based agriculture in the US. This meant land-grant universities, formerly bastions of what we’d now call “ecological” soil analysis and agricultural research, became laboratories  for chemical companies to procure data which supported their new direction. (I’m totally summarizing here.) Most people think of commodity farming as a natural iteration of agricultural progress, that we need it to “feed the world”. But the narrative of “an agriculture to feed the world” is based on many contradictions, which I’m interested in exploring.

Dearfield, CO, for example, was one of the most well-known Black land-owning communities during the early 1900s, a town of nearly 700 people, mostly farmers, who were implementing a viable and really effective system of dryland agriculture. This story of Black land-owning agrarianism is less embedded in the “good life narratives” that were idolized by so-called progressive agrarians of the 1960s and 1970s. But why? Partly it’s due to a corporatized publishing industry that has historically valued certain stories over others. 

You and I are former editors at a publishing house which puts out mostly white-authored books (except for a couple, including Leah Penniman’s groundbreaking Farming While Black, which you acquired and edited). Do you think it’s fair to say there’s a certain level of Blind Spot Strategism inherent in the agricultural publishing community?

MM: Oh, without a doubt, 100%. And the acquisitions pipeline for most publishers is also part of a self-reinforcing, white-dominated system. If acquisitions editors’ personal networks are all or mostly white, if they’re attending conferences or reading print journalism, etc., that are also gate-kept by mostly white decision-makers, then it’s no surprise that a staggering amount of agricultural history and expertise from Black and Indigenous authors isn’t being acknowledged, listened to, or duly paid for. And the result is as you say, the predominance of a white homesteader narrative that systematically excludes people of color and the working poor. It also positions itself as the alternative to extractive, destructive agriculture though many (I’m thinking in particular of  Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua farms but there are many others) have argued that the two are mutually dependent. Without giving anything away, can you say anything about how these questions and subjects are influencing your next book similarly or differently than you explored them in The Shame?

MG: I seem to be embedded in an inquiry of the “good life” and how systems of philosophy or morality — the search for an ethics rooted in place — are tied up in our psychologies and how we interpret our choices. I guess I could say if The Shame was about exploring awareness and acknowledgement (as in, seeing the entanglements we have in the story of our lives we’re trying to tell), my new novel is more about responsibility (as in, what one does after the acknowledgement has been made). But it’s also about a search for truth, a story of three people’s quest for transcendence that intersect on one piece of land.

MM: I cannot wait. Not only for the subjects and questions you engage with that are near and dear, but also because I admire your prose so much. You had shared a short story with me a couple years ago so I knew I was going to enjoy your novel, but I have to say I was not prepared for that wild opening. After two paragraphs I was completely pot-committed and fascinated by Alma’s voice. I know novelists can fret heavily about how they start their work, down to the first sentence. Was that the case with The Shame? When and how did you find such an almost hallucinatory hook?

MG: Thanks, that’s really nice of you to say. The beginning of the book was based on a conversation I had with my young niece who asked me the question one day over ice cream: what is your favorite food and what is your least favorite food? Pasta and undercooked egg whites, I said. She then laid out a scenario of lava and escape based on those foods, moving away from “least favorite” to “most favorite”, which I found to be brilliant, and I wrote it down word for word, morphing it later to suit my needs. Children are a big source of inspiration to me, because of their inherent ability to think philosophically and to navigate the surreal with ease. My own inspired me a lot while writing The Shame—their ability to draw connections from a completely intuitive place, that has nothing to do with intellectual vanity.

MM: What a wonderful origin for that opening. That surreality was and is so appealing and fresh to me. I also find myself writing down things my children say and some of them have turned into poems or worked themselves into essays. I once taught some poetry classes to middle school students, and the fifth graders were leagues less self-conscious than the eight graders, and produced some mind-bending stuff. I feel like my adulthood as a writer has been spent trying to tap back into that ease and lack of vanity as you describe. Are there other writers you admire that you feel are particularly good at that kind of playfulness? Could be fiction, poetry, music, any genre. 

MG: Mieko Kawakami is a Japanese writer whose work I adore. She traverses the difficult territory of philosophical depth and playfulness, all while retaining precision and gravity. Her latest novel to be translated into English, Heaven (comes out in May), takes on the rather harrowing subject of teenage bullying, and yet it still retains this sparkling essence somehow. I love Ross Gay’s poetry; he has the ability to combine the beauty and pain that lives inside of joy with such lyrical deft, it touches me deeply. Sheila Heti is a master at a kind of childlike wonder that plumbs depths that might otherwise be so dense and yet she crystallizes it so well, she’s a real philosopher; I love her work.  Agnes Varda, the French filmmaker, is another favorite of mine: she has this quality in her films, a kind of soulful authenticity that glitters like a diamond. Caryl Churchill’s plays, too, I love. Pedro Amodóvar’s films. Joan as Police Woman’s music. There are so many others…

MM: And I am writing them all down. I have heard from a lot of creative people who have felt like they haven’t had the focus or attention span to read as much and as deeply as they did prior to the pandemic-induced isolation, or who have had their relationship to their art altered in some way by the past year. It doesn’t sound like your reading habits have diminished at all from what I remember when we worked together, but have you felt any change recently in your relationship to writing?

MG: My reading habits haven’t changed that much, except that I have more books on my “to be read” list and it keeps growing, which means I have less attention for books that don’t grab me right away, probably because of the growing number of books I have on deck to read. I also have some writing assignments about certain books, so I’m reading with an attention to interviewing the author or writing about their work in some other way, which means I’m reading their work really closely, and I love that. This involves an element of research and I love research: who is the author, where are they coming from, what was the sociopolitical context during the time they were writing, etc. I’m also teaching for the first time (high school English), so preparing for my classes involves reading in an entirely different way, including a lot more poetry.

MM: By “different way” do you mean alertness to what/where to extract for a specific lesson or something/s different?

MG: I guess I mean in the context of a larger curriculum, with its own internal framework. How work is positioned next to other works, what it has to do with the larger question of “what literature is for”, why it matters now, etc. It’s exciting.

MM: Are those questions that you ask or  have asked yourself about your own writing? Do you think about where your work fits beside contemporaries or within this specific cultural time, or is that completely separate from your impulse to create? I guess this is another way of asking about your impulse to write as much as such a thing can be defined. 

MG: I don’t think that much about contemporaries, mainly because I’m not sure who that would be. Although I am influenced by writers who I’m in touch with and whose work matters to me, as much as I’m influenced by the people I’m in conversation with on a daily basis. But a lot of work flies past me without becoming internalized, although who knows what gets digested into the unconscious and the reasoning behind it. I’m attracted, probably, to things that touch a button of interest or seem to answer a question I’ve been asking myself, but it’s answering it in a different way than I ever would. And yes, I do think a lot about what literature is for. For me it’s about understanding the systems around me, and about talking to other people. I think of fiction as a kind of philosophy or social theory, a way of looking at the world. I always think of myself as holding this large bag and pulling things out of it, one by one, examining them and laying them out on a table, like sorting groceries. Except the objects are more interesting than my groceries. I also believe that humor holds within it many possibilities!

MM: Okay, switching gears completely because I want to get to music. Am I hallucinating that you or someone else came up with a soundtrack for your book? Whether or no, do you listen to music while you write, and if so are there songs or albums you will always associate with The Shame? 

MG: Yes! There was a playlist made by a book club in Texas who chose The Shame for their monthly pick. It was really flattering and fun to see what they put together. Almost none of the songs I would have associated with my book directly but that’s beside the point, it was their interpretation. As far as listening to music when I write, I don’t. At least not during the mechanical part, when I’m transcribing longhand into the computer or editing. I listened to Bach’s Goldberg Variations a fair bit while The Shame was percolating, and Alma, the narrator, is listening to public radio jazz and classical in her car during most of the book. For me, music is integral to thinking and living. But there is a time and a place for it in my writing process. I remember listening to Fatoumata Diawara, Joan as Police Woman, and Sylvan Esso, which were kind of on loop a bit, and lots of Hip Hop, as my husband is a bit obsessed. We always have jazz on at home in the evenings—Miles Davis, Theolonius Monk, Getz and Gilberto, etc. When I saw Agnes Varda’s film Le Bonheur for the first time when my book was going to print, I couldn’t handle the brilliance of how she worked Mozart into the film, it was so awe inspiring. I remember thinking, if my book were a film, I would have done just that.