AN INTERVIEW SERIES WITH CONTEMPORARY POETS
Susan L. Leary
Our final poet in the Interview Series LET’S KNOW OUR POETS BETTER in celebration of National Poetry Month, is Susan L. Leary. Susan is a poet and educator, and is the author of the poetry collections: A Buffet Table Fit for Queens, winner of The Washburn Prize (Harbor Review / Small Harbor Publishing); Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Tahoma Literary Review, Superstition Review, JMWW, Cherry Tree, Maudlin House, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Christian Century, Pithead Chapel, Posit, Jet Fuel Review, and The MacGuffin.
Susan’s most recent collection, Dressing the Bear, has received a great response from early readers. I had a chance to chat with her about the book and her writing.
Congratulations on Dressing the Bear! Tell us a little about your latest collection.
My most recent collection, Dressing the Bear, was selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award and is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2024. The collection is a book-length elegy to my brother who died by overdose in September 2020.
What themes/motifs/symbols appear most commonly in your work? Do you think there’s a reason (or reasons) behind?
Flowers, certainly. My MFA thesis was titled “In Lieu of Flowers, More Flowers,” and I know I’m drawn to flowers because of the strength and beauty they retain alongside their fragility, in addition to their correlations, at least in my mind, with girlhood and girlmaking, which I write about often. God also figures heavily in my work, usually as a stand-in for the idea that despite the undeniable fact that one day each of us will die, everything will have been worth it. In many ways, I think poetry figures as a retaliation against time for me, and I know I’m desperate for meaning, whatever “meaning” even is. In Dressing the Bear specifically, images of nature abound—birds, deer, snow, lakes, rivers, oceans, flowers, sunrises, sunsets, stars, the moon—mostly because nature was a respite for my brother, a version of solitude that continually made him feel safe.
[Interviewer’s Note: Talking of flowers, check out the cover of Dressing the Bear — A beautiful flower!]
When did you start writing? Can you name poets who absolutely inspire you?
Although I was first fascinated by poetry while taking an introductory creative writing course in college, I didn’t take my own writing seriously until my late twenties—and somewhat accidentally—after learning of a death on my mother’s side of the family. In short, my mother never knew her father and was told by her mother (and my Nana) that he died of a heart attack in his sleep when she was only two years old. Fast forward fifty years to my Nana’s funeral, when a distant cousin approached my mother to let her know her father, in fact, died by suicide. I spent the next few years researching this part of my family history because when you come into information like that, the entire axis of your world shifts a bit, and you want to do the impossible. You want to retrieve this man from the past and let him to speak to you. You want to understand how he could leave the people I can only imagine he loved in the way he did, and you want to love this person through that. All this research and reflection resulted in my first chapbook, This Girl, Your Disciple, published with Finishing Line Press in 2019, and which I never could have anticipated. Some of my most beloved poets and early influences include Marie Howe, Mark Irwin, and Chelsea Dingman.
How did the collection happen? How did you find your publisher?
I began writing Dressing the Bear immediately after my brother’s passing. In fact, I started reciting the poem, “Clean,” in my mind the morning I got the call he died, and looking back, I’m grateful poetry didn’t abandon me in that moment. I also want to credit the poet, Nathalie Handal, who insisted I write at every turn, that I would never again be five days or one month removed from my brother’s death, and that there would be thoughts and feelings I’d have that would not be knowable or accessible to me in the future, from a distance. Without this permission and encouragement, I don’t think the collection would have come together in the way it did.
Please let us know where we can purchase your collection.
You are pre-order Dressing the Bear directly from Trio House Press at https://triohousepress.myshopify.com/products/pre-order-dressing-the-bear-by-susan-l-leary
or through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.
How would you describe yourself as a poet?
I think the poet version of me is very peaceful, or at least I find the activity of writing to be peaceful, even if the material I’m working with is difficult, because with poetry, I’ve cultivated a relationship with language that honors the child in me who was always quite unnerved by it. Growing up we moved around a lot, so I was the perpetual “new kid.” There was pressure to make friends, to put myself out there, to have the confidence to speak up. My mother is also very talkative and a great conversationalist, and I quickly learned to survive was to be gregarious. Even teaching requires a stamina with words: to hold the students’ attention, to validate their views, to make connections across their comments, to offer spontaneous wisdom, etc. There is always a pressure but with poetry, language is patient with me, and that patience culminates in an honesty I didn’t know I was capable of.
Anything else you’d like to share with our readers? Let us know where we can find you. (website/social media)
I want to add that much of Dressing the Bear is meant to preserve my brother’s language and unique wisdom. He was very humorous and creative, and he had these wickedly smart one-liners he’d continually pull from his pocket. He was a real teacher to me, and given his particular struggle with addiction, he dealt with a lot of shame, though he always believed he had something to say. In this collection, I want to honor that part of him he really valued as well.
Website: http://www.susanlleary.com
Twitter/X: @susanlleary
Instagram: @susanllearypoet
Thank you so much, Susan. I’m sure readers will be as delighted as I am, to know more about you and your work. Wish you all the best with your latest collection.
GENTLE REMINDER: My craft essays, posted month-end, and usually focused on flash fiction, will resume in May, because here we were taking a break all through the month of April to look at poetry instead.
FURTHER READING FROM THE BLOG
- Lights, Sound, Action as vital undercurrents of the narrative
- Mistakes We Make and How to Deal with Declines
- One-Sentence Stories
