ISSUE 15 - Spring 2023

the heartwood interviews: featured writer series

AN INTERVIEW WITH Mary Carroll-Hackett

conducted by Larry D. Thacker, Interviews Editor

For anyone having the pleasure of a workshop or class under the caring, knowledgeable eye of Mary Carroll-Hackett, you’ve undoubtedly emerged from the experience not only an improved and changed writer, but, dare I say, a changed human being as well. Mary teaches from the inside-out, considering the who and the where-from, as well as the what. It seems to me, she begins with the premise, who is learning, before answering the question of what needs learned. 

My fortunate experience with Mary was a full MFA graduate semester of prose poetry under her tutelage where I learned everything I didn’t know about the mysteries of prose poetry as well as how to make a little dent in the style on my own. If you’ll do yourself the pleasure of reading some of Mary’s gifted and prolific writings, you’ll get an education on the grace and artfulness that is poetry’s prose form, a style so few writers dare to tackle. Join me for a conversation with Mary in this issue of Heartwood Literary Magazine.

P.S. We have to add, of course, that as a regular visiting faculty of the West Virginia Wesleyan College low-residency creative writing MFA program, Mary was essential in establishing Heartwood as the program’s flagship journal.  

LT: We often write on a few themes, over and over, striving for that continued insight or breakthrough. What’s the one poetry topic that continually eludes or most challenges you?

MC-H: I tell my students: Writers don't write because they have answers; they write because they have questions. And I'll ask them: What are your questions? What do you keep asking again and again? I find myself still asking the same questions I was writing into—or trying to write into—as a very young poet. The violence of poverty, the damage and gifts of growing up poor and othered, for me, particularly as experienced by women. I also write a lot about women and cultural expectations, women and sexuality, but as I matured as a writer, a mother, a widow, an educator, and now a woman gloriously grateful to be turning sixty, what I've realized is that nearly all of my work is exploring women in various power structures: women in poverty; sex, gender, and gender identity as power used by and against women, even the cultural role of women feeding people, all of this is the ongoing challenge for me: the historical, structural powerlessness of and yet—the beautiful, indomitable, resilient power of women.

LT: What’s one thing about yourself that gets in the way of your writing?

MC-H: I overthink. I can kill a great start in a hot minute by getting impatient, by trying to see where it's going, rather than letting it unfold organically, allowing it to reveal itself to me in its own way, in its own time. I'm better at it now than I was as a young writer, but I still have to trick myself into slowing down sometimes. I write prose on an old electric typewriter, to slow my hands down, and to prevent me from line-editing. This was suggested to me by the incredibly generous novelist, Barry Hannah, twenty years ago, and it's something I still do. I draft poems by hand first, for the same reason. My brain will outrace my hands and make a real mess of things!

LT: Have you learned, or trained yourself, to write just about anywhere by now, or do you have some ideal writing situations / environments for your best work?

MC-H: It's kind of a mash-up of both. When I quit my corporate job and went back to school for writing, I was a single mom of three kids, so I started out, by necessity, writing wherever I was. I still do a lot of that, writing wherever I am. I always have a notebook with me (I use Rocketbooks now—the erasable notebooks? Doing what I can to cut my paper-based carbon footprint :-) )  But I also will write in the Notes function on my phone, or on the back of whatever sheet of paper is at hand.

Writing for all those years, too, while raising kids, I got in the habit of getting up at four in the morning, staring into my coffee for thirty minutes, then writing from four-thirty to six-thirty, before I had to wake my kids for school. I don't have to wake anyone up anymore, but I'm still an early riser, and still tend to love working in those pre-dawn hours. I love the stillness of the world at that time, makes everything seem open and possible.

LT: There are writers and there are teaching writers. You are obviously the latter with a great love for your students and their writing journeys. How did this mentoring relationship of compassion develop?  

MC-H: I had incredible teachers, people who, starting all the way back in middle school, up through my MFA program, believed in me as a writer, made time for me, opened their hearts and doors for me. Jackie Little, my sixth grade English teacher was the first person  who said, “You are a poet.” Elizabeth Morris, the high school English teacher who made space for the angry, defiant, lost teen I was, being all Breakfast Club in the back of her class, my face shoved into volumes by Nzotake Shange, Tolstoy, and Whitman. She pretty much kept me from quitting high school. Then in college, the brilliant, incisive poets Peter Makuck and Julie Fay, Luke Whisnant with his endless patience at my endless revisions. In my MFA program, the strength and glory and power of Southern women Jill McCorkle, Betsy Cox, and Rebecca Godwin, all of whom made space for—and honored-- my poverty-class Southernness. And the poets there! Ed Ochester, Ethelbert Miller, and no mentorship meant more than the blessing I had in my relationship with Liam Rector, founder and Executive Director of the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College. I rode Liam's belief in me, his big-bear confidence that my work mattered—until I could believe in myself. With my own students, I'm just trying to pay it all forward. To play any role in helping a writer discover their work, their voice, their questions, their unique and glorious take on our world—that's a sacred honor to me.

LT:  One glance at your writing workshops shows a comfortable writing and teaching life with the spirit and esoteric inspirations. Has that always been the case, or did you grow into a life of spiritual writing?

MC-H: I grew up in a home and in a blend of cultures that, fortunately, honored all of the range of how a life of faith, a life of the spirit, can be lived. My mother's faith remains, to this day, the most profound influence in my life. She and Daddy didn't preach. They lived their faith, through their actions, and that included an unwavering commitment to loving one's neighbor, and a lack of judgment when others' paths didn't mirror their own. I've always been a person with a spiritual life, but for a long time, it wasn't something I talked openly about, particularly not in academia. If my spiritual life had been more traditionally Christian, maybe that would have been different, but I'm not so sure. After having gone through a period of intense loss, eight people I love dying in just four short years, an experience I would not have survived without my relationship with Creator, I began writing much more openly about my own faith life. My collection The Night I Heard Everything I think of as my spiritual-coming-out. Life is too short and too sacred to worry about what other people think. I have always lived this spiritual life, but yeah, it took a while for me to be comfortable sharing it so openly.

LT:  You’re one of the most prolific and talented prose poets in our part of the world. When did you realize you were transitioning to a heavily prose style poetry in your work? What influenced that transition? Or, did you lean mostly to prose poetry from the first?

MC-H: I started out as a poet, very young, with Whitman being one of the earliest influences, but I'm really a cross-genre writer, working in poetry, fiction, and screenwriting. Before I really knew what flash fiction or prose poetry even were, I was writing these odd, lyric, hybrid pieces without even knowing what to call them. I wouldn't call them anything when I was submitting to journals even, LOL. It was, “Please find enclosed for your consideration three pieces....” Sometimes editors published them as flash fiction, others as prose poems, so I began really studying both, reading as much prose poetry and flash as I could find. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was something I was doing already, intuitively, organically, and to be honest, this liminal place felt, for me as a writer, the most like home. Still does.

LT:  Knowing you’ve been interviewed on several other occasions – in print and in live sessions – what’s a question you wish readers, writers, listeners would ask more often?

MC-H: What—outside of the usual suspects—other writers, etc.—inspires of influences your work? There's so much out in the world, and writers are so often driven by curiosity, so I'd love to hear what other areas of interest writers have. For example, one of my undergraduate degrees is in anthropology, and I still keep up with reading in that   discipline, and still get crazy excited about the news in the field. For example, just today, I read an article about how along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever    found to butcher hippos and pound plant materials, what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals.  How cool is that? So much we don't know about our past, and our ancestors. Yeah, I wish    interviewers would ask: Name something that has nothing to do with writing that makes you completely happy-geek out!

LT: Now for the question established writers can sometimes dread, but I consider an essential question, so let’s ask it a little differently. How might the advice you offer an beginning writer and a seasoned writer differ?

MC-H: To young or beginning writers, I always want to remind them that their voice, their lived experiences, matter enough to write about. Too many beginning writers underestimate the power of their own experiences, and kind of Hollywood the work, believing bigger is better. Your own experiences are valuable and powerful enough to write about. For a seasoned writer? Well, probably the first would be—remember what it was like when you were just starting and be kind whenever you can. The other would be to never lose your curiosity. I've seen some established writers, especially in academia, kind of seem to find a safe space, where they seem to quit taking the kind of emotional risk that art requires. Stay curious. Keep learning.

LT: What would change about the submission / publication process of small regional presses? What advice would you offer writers regarding those challenges?

MC-H: I wish there was more support for small presses and journals, and I just want to remind writers that many of these smaller regional publications and presses are labors of love for the people who staff them.  Do what you can yourself to support regional literature. Lots of people want to sit in this house called writer, but we need folks who are willing to roll up their sleeves and climb up under the house when a pipe breaks too. Be patient. Be kind.

LT: What are you working on now? What can we expect to see from you soon?

MC-H: The pandemic slowed my own work down a bit, but the poems have returned. I'm also back at work on a reincarnation novel that I had put away when the pandemic hit. I've been on and off this novel for four years, so I'm determined to finish a draft this year. But poems—there are always poems.