Faith Ellington: I think with poetry especially there’s a conception about it—sometimes a misconception—that there’s, you know, a certain type of person who’s very proud to be a poet. 

Tyler Robert Sheldon: Just because we wear turtlenecks and sit in coffee shops—

FE: And drink red wine by the bottle and talk about our issues with our parents—

TRS: Doesn’t mean that’s all of it.

~ ~ ~

Editor’s Note: In the late summer of this year, I sat down with MHR poet Faith Ellington to discuss academia, poetry collections, the political act of writing poetry and the nuances of the writing process, and defining the writerly self. An excellent conversation to kick off a promising November.

Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief

~ ~ ~

Tyler Robert Sheldon: So, Faith, how’ve you been? 

Faith Ellington: Busy with school. How have you been, Tyler?

TRS: About the same. Editing and writing. I’m excited to get to talk to you today because I’ve heard about your newest project, and you’re always in the middle of something that’s exciting and fun, and different. I want to know, before we get started: tell us about this new book.

FE: I feel like before we get started, though, should we tell our wonderful readers about how we know each other? The lawyer in me thinks we should disclose that fact. [Laughs]

TRS: It can’t hurt! You and I are in the PhD program in English at LSU.

FE: Yes. 

TRS: And you’re in the middle of year four, which is crazy—[at that point] you can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel, which may or may not be a train. [Laughs]

FE: One hundred percent.

TRS: And the journey at LSU has been varied for each of us, but I feel like we’ve gone through the same sort of small traumas and milestones for the whole thing.

FE: For example, we met in a class that I found very difficult.

TRS: Yes! The Marxism class. I think that the levity brought by you and [fellow PhD student] Laura Creekmore to that class really helped.

FE: Yes, and we became friends via the Zoom Chat feature. Which is a weird way to start a friendship, I think.

TRS: And there was so much of people being careful not to put conversation in the “Everyone” chat, but every so often people would see this random, unconnected comment…[Laughs] But here we are, and you’re in the middle of getting your general exam prepared, and you’re feeling gung-ho about your dissertation…

FE: Yes. Well, for now!

TRS: I’m currently editing my own, and had been feeling a little apprehensive about the process. I mention that because it’s funny how, no matter where you are in the writing process, the “Proceed with Caution” sign never really turns off.

FE: No! I keep waiting for an opportunity to relax, and it has not happened. 

TRS: I know! That phrase “You can sleep when you’re dead”? I feel like it really applies to PhD programs.

FE: I was just thinking that as I was taking out the trash this morning—it’s really always something!

TRS: So you and I have talked about your new book manuscript a little bit here and there. You’ve been sending it out. Tell us a little bit about it.

FE: The manuscript is titled Fortuna Redux, which is an old Roman goddess who was supposed to protect soldiers and travelers on their journeys home. It’s a long story…I have an older sister, a wonderful, wonderful human, and she did her undergraduate degree in England. So I was visiting her and we were at this old Roman excavation site. They had found a bunch of Fortuna Redux coins up in northeast England, and there was a little sign there at the archeological dig, and I was reading that. I don’t know why, but I found myself drawn to that sort of motif; that sort of status of protection. So I kept in in a notes folder in my phone, and I had started writing around that time—I didn’t start writing poetry until I took a poetry class in college. I feel like I came to [poetry] a little later than most people. I had written all these poems, and I realized one day that I had enough to tie them into something, and I needed a name. I felt like the title just sort of reflected what I was writing about, which is, I guess, what it means to have a body and exist in violent spaces; to go on these journeys and not feel like you have a safe place to land at the end of the day. 

TRS: Right. It’s a classic idea, and in our late-capitalist, very difficult world, it takes on this new permutation; it’s very modern, it’s very urgent, and it’s very concerned with how technologically fraught everything is. We just talked about being in a PhD program where protective space is elusive.  Has writing this book been a means of protecting the self, or investigating a part of yourself you weren’t aware of yet?

FE: I think that’s part of it, where I always struggle with how personal or confessional to be. I don’t think good poetry needs to be about the person who’s writing it, or about their own experiences.

TRS: Right.

FE: But I do feel like, at times, poetry calls for vulnerability and honesty that can only come from revealing a little bit of what’s going on with the self. I don’t want my writing to be limited to myself. For me, writing is about sharing and connection—I feel like if it’s too much about me, I run the risk of alienating the reader. Whoever’s reading [your work] should be able to map themselves onto whatever you’re talking about, even if you’ve had different experiences. I think that mapping happens best when you pull yourself back.

TRS: Right, and there’s this long history of the separation of the narrator and the poet, from World War II-era poetry with Robert Lowell and William Stafford, and even back into dramatic characters like those of William Shakespeare. Though these authors are mapping little bits of self onto their characters (and narrators), they’re still withholding the vast majority of their authorial self. I wonder if there’s a dialogue with the reader regardless [in poetry].

FE: I think there has to be. There’s no money in poetry—we met in a Marxism class, we’re familiar with these ideas. And because of there’s no money in poetry, there’s always the question of, “Why are you still writing this? Why are you still publishing, reading it? What is the point?” I think part of the point becomes this acute dialogue that happens in poetry that’s harder to find in fiction and nonfiction.

TRS: And it’s a different sort of value exchange. Novelists sometimes get six-figure advances; that very rarely happens in poetry. It’s almost as if the value has to take a different form.

FE: I think that’s right.

TRS: That intimate connection, in small bursts, that can happen with poetry almost becomes that value—a tethering to the reader that might not happen in other genres.

FE: Sort of art for art’s sake.

TRS: Not to get to sentimental, but yeah! Absolutely.

FE: You’ve published…how many books have you published at this point? Six? You’re working on the seventh?

TRS: Right, I’m working on my seventh [entitled Everything is Ghosts]. Kind of like you have a book out to a press, my manuscript is out right now with a couple places, and we’ll see. It’s a little bit more abstract, I suppose, in the current manuscript. It’s all about an interrogation of possibly supernatural experiences that I went through in college, or heard about from others who went through them, or was a party to in some other way. My college town, Emporia, Kansas, was said to be haunted. The library was supposed to have been haunted by the ghost of the town newspaper editor’s daughter. There were all these locations on campus and other places that were haunted, but I heard all of these stories, and I experienced things that seemed just a little too creepy to be coincidental. And so with no personal proof of anything ghostly or otherwise, I thought it was a great subject to explore. 

FE: So you’ve been out of college for about a decade. What do you think it is that’s drawing you to these ghostly, spiritual stories now?

TRS: Well, I think I needed to give it time to percolate. I had other things to write—

FE: Of course.

TRS: And, as happens with almost everything in my life, this took forever; people will tell you it took me way too long to even be comfortable wearing sandals. So writing something like this took a while.

FE: Sure.

TRS: Out of college, maybe, but I’ve never really left colleges generally, being in grad school now. So that mentality is still there. I think for any writing project I’ve undertaken, I have to give it that space, or else it feels like it…comes off the press to quickly, maybe.

FE: So what is it about the college or academic space that lends itself to ghosts and haunting? 

TRS: Well, not to be too cynical—I do think there’s a certain amount of pressure that gets put on folks in an academic space that might lead you to have unfinished business, should you die.

FE: [Laughs]

TRS: But in truth, I think there are just so many people going through these academic spaces. I’m not a ghost hunter—or a ghost researcher, really—but the odds of somebody having unfinished business on a campus might be greater [than in the general space] because there are just so many people who pass through that space. It feel like just a numbers game, really. Why a town like Emporia Kansas would be haunted? It’s a tiny blip of a place. You hear about New York and London [being haunted], but you don’t hear about these small places very much. It seemed intriguing because of that remoteness, too.

FE: So you mentioned research. Do you find yourself doing research when you write poetry? I know we both research a ton for our academic writing. 

TRS: Oh yeah. It depends on what it is. You mentioned not liking to write too much about the self.

FE: Yes.

TRS: I tend to write a lot about the self, and I guess I do research there, in the form of introspection, looking through photo albums talking to family. But if I’m writing about subjects outside myself—which I’m doing more and more as I get more disgruntled and political—yeah, I find myself doing a lot of research. And often, the academic work that I’m dealing with dovetails pretty neatly with my poetry. 

FE: Do you find that—I guess this is a chicken-and-egg question—but do you find that your academic research helps you generate poetry, or that your poetic interests help you generate research?

TRS: I think it’s both. My academic research is mostly on poetry. Because of that, I’m constantly doing the work, whether I’m researching somebody that I’m writing about, like William Stafford—and in MockingHeart Review you can find one of my essays on Stafford. Or, if I’m simply in the business of writing, I might find an idea that would go well with that academic research. So it’s kind of recursive, all the time. How about you?

FE: Yeah, I think when I first started writing, I was using ekphrastic poetry as sort of a crutch, because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about myself and my personal life…and then one of my professors sort of pulled me aside and said, “I think that technically there’s something here happening [in your poem], but I have no idea what you’re actually saying, so you need to be a little bit more about the speaker, and the circumstances, and the situation.”

TRS: [Laughs]

FE: Of course I went home and cried, because it was a professor I really looked up to…and then I started untangling that, and now I feel like I use ekphrastic sources not as a crutch so much, but just as a way to explore broader themes in my work, and broader questions. But yeah, I use the Wikipedia random article and random image generators all the time. I pull from a lot of paintings, a lot of places I’ve never heard of, just be virtue of trying to research something new. I have a couple poems about Thomas Eakins Portrait of Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), and I spent a lot of time delving into the history of that painting, and the painting itself, and I got to go see it at the Philly Museum of Art, which was wonderful. But I love research—it forces me to look at something foreign and try to relate it to my own poetic world. When we write and publish poetry, I think that’s what we’re doing. 

TRS: I love that you’re focusing on writing about art. 

FE: I love writing about art! [Laughs] Which is weird because I don’t know that much about it. I’ve never taken an art history class. I can’t draw, paint, or sculpt, but there’s something about art. It lends itself very well to poetry.

TRS: I think being outside of the visual art sphere makes it all the more intriguing, because it’s something that writers can’t quite always access, right? 

FE: Yes, and there’s still that shiny novelty to it. I’m not looking at a painting and thinking, This is the Dutch Golden Age, I’m looking at it and thinking, Wow, I love that painting. Let’s write about it. [Laughs]

TRS: Right, Let’s find out why. You talked about getting inspiration everywhere. To put it in a different way, having this kind of global focus—if you’re focusing on art, you’re focusing on different parts of the world, different times in history—do you find yourself gravitating toward any certain period, or style, or…?

FE: As my older sister has said about me, I just like anything that’s sad. [Laughs] So, not intentionally, but I often find that when I’m writing poetry (as opposed to anything else), it’s because there’s some sort of tiny little heartbreak going on that I’m trying to exorcize in some way. 

TRS: Ooh, I like the word exorcize as we’re also talking about ghosts.

FE: Yeah, it’s always ghosts and demons, and the past, and tragedy and all that.

TRS: We talked about the contemporary moment—or at, I keep bringing it up. The urgency of the current moment is vested in the fact that we are in late capitalism. We’re seeing a disgruntled populism that’s risen on the right side of the political spectrum; some would argue that we have an ineffectual left—

FE: Unfortunately. [Laughs]

TRS: Yeah, and we have this kind of enmeshing of popular interest in politics with the fact that we’re living in a world in [climate] crisis. Ten, twenty years ago, people seemed to care differently about that. Has that been influencing your work?

FE: I tend to not think about the political world as much as I can, or I get so insanely depressed that I can’t function. Not to say that I don’t care, just that if I’m using my writing to connect with other people, I’m more inclined to work from a different angle. That’s a long-winded way of saying no, but I also don’t really think you can avoid the global climate crisis or the US political situation, or income inequality or housing instability, or healthcare in this country being a joke—and not even a funny one, you know what I’m saying.

TRS: And yeah, it’s not funny at all. We are the butt of this joke.

FE: Yeah, and I’m not laughing anymore.

TRS: In talking about your book, I’m curious: this has taken—as these projects do—a little while to take shape, and you’ve gone through different versions. What has been, for you, the coolest part of the process?

FE: Whew. Well, I ran my entire through a word cloud, where if you were to put in a work like Hamlet, it would pull out the words used most often in a bigger font; words that occur a slightly less frequent amount are in a medium font; and the words that occur multiple times but not as much as in little baby font. 

TRS: Wow!

FE: So I ran my manuscript through one, and I was really surprised by the connections that I was seeing. I didn’t realize that on the whole, I tend to write about similar things. I spent so much time on it that it feels like a discrete unit. When I ran my manuscript through, I noticed that I do talk about revisiting things over and over. I guess the coolest thing, then, was just to see—even though I feel very disorganized and chaotic—that I’m centered in some way.

TRS: Finding that sort of crux is so difficult, so having an external tool to help is great. 

FE: Everyone should try it, just for fun. It was interesting to see even the verbs I used a lot in the manuscript.

TRS: I do have another question about the book: this has been a project that has taken up a not inconsiderable amount of your brainspace and time—

FE: Years!

TRS: So it’s been brewing for a while. 

FE: I mean, I have versions of poems that I wrote in my first-ever poetry class, when I was a Freshman in college—and now I’m a fourth-year grad student—in the book. I don’t want to dox myself, but yeah, it’s been years.

TRS: I don’t think it’s a doxxing thing, it’s just a retrospective thing. We’re just interrogating the self, is what we’re doing. I guess I’m interested in the way that it presents this kind of time capsule of you as a person. It starts off—the process starts off with work that is way back in your past, and I’m sure you’re still revising and coming up with new ideas. Have you noticed anything about you, through looking at this manuscript, that you didn’t expect?

FE: That I didn’t expect…Yes. It’s a very personal question! My manuscript is divided into parts one and two. Part one is about a very specific and limited part of my life that was very difficult, and to me that felt like an isolated incident where my own actions and behaviors and responses felt as if they were isolated to a specific agent, a specific aggressor. When looking back at my whole manuscript, I started to see—as one often does—patterns of this power dynamic that had happened earlier in my life. So I guess it was helpful in a way, where I felt more whole as a person, as opposed to sort of split…but it was also helpful in coming to terms with how it wasn’t as isolated an incident as I thought, and I had a lot more work to do on myself to move past it.

TRS: You talked a little bit ago about identifying patterns in writing. It’s funny how our writing can help us identify patterns in our lives that we might not see otherwise. It’s as though we’re creating our own sort of personal anthropology.

FE: I love that. And it is a little bit like archeological excavation, I think, especially as you go back through old drafts and see that, Oh yeah, I was trying to talk about something, or grapple with XYZ question and I couldn’t do it then. And years later I have tools to add nuance to it and make it a successful poem. 

TRS: It’s almost as though what we’re trying to grapple with is technology that we don’t have access to yet, but we know we will someday. We create these little time capsules in the hope that future us can do something with them.

FE: Yeah—and sometimes I really can’t, and it goes to the graveyard at the bottom of my Google Docs. Somedays something good happens, or I hear a song, or have a good discussion with my therapist, and you kind of punch it again. So, tell me about how you write. Are you a Google Docs person? Do you use Microsoft Word, or pen and paper? All of them?

TRS: I’m a little bit of everything. I bring a notebook and pen with me everywhere I go, and I have notebooks scattered throughout my apartment. I have them in every bag, several stashed in the car…this trail of blank pages waiting for me. But, lately, I just bring my computer everywhere and I type everything. Kind of like you, I have a document of spare parts that I just add most of my writing to. Sometimes I compile a sort of Frankenstein’s monster out of all these different pieces, but more often than not I’ll just write an entire draft, and then later take it apart and rebuilt it. It’s not as common as it used to be that I have a first draft end up being the final draft. But when that happens I’m really grateful.

FE: It’s the best feeling. So have any of your Frankenstein pieces turned into a polished final draft that you’re really happy with? Or is it more like the monster becomes the first draft that you either keep for later or throw away?

TRS: Well, it’s a little bit of both, but what happens most often is I’ll go through that document full of cast-offs and I’ll find a line or two that resonates, and I’ll usually build something around that line. Most often, it’s not what the original line had as a purpose, and it’ll go in a completely different direction. Usually I’m pretty happy with that; it’s a different sort of spontaneity, starting with a discarded line. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a cast-off line and used it for its original intention. It’s normally repurposed. 

FE: Do you write every day?

TRS: I do. I’m not always successful at it. I at least draft every day, and lately a lot of that’s been academic writing. But I’ve forced myself, I think, to keep poetry writing as part of my daily practice. I know a lot of people who completely shelve creative writing in favor of some other doing…I can’t do that. It makes me itch, I suppose, to put away the creative writing for too long. It’s a necessity for me. That said, a lot of my daily writing is a lot of bits and pieces, patches that are eventually gonna go onto some sort of quilt. If I have a day where I can get half a poem done, that’s not bad. But it’s usually toward some certain prompt. And it’s not as common as I’d like. How about you?

FE: No, I definitely don’t write every day. I know some people do, and it was always the advice when I was in undergrad. I don’t have an MFA, but the advice I got was similar: to always create a regular routine of writing. I call creative writing my dessert writing, where I don’t have it every day, and sometimes that’s because I’m too lazy to do it. Sometimes it’s because I don’t feel like it. But I’m always writing academically, every day. It’s my meat-and-potatoes writing, how I’m earning a living right now. But you said you felt like creative writing was a necessity?

TRS: A lot of people know do what you’re doing. They have a lot of self-control about when and where they creatively write. But for me, that’s always been the primary interest. I started in our PhD program focused on composition and rhetoric, and it quickly to being about poetry. So it’s just this impulse I can’t ignore. Some days, the only writing I do is creative writing. Don’t tell my advisor…but it increasingly feels like a day where I’m not doing some sort of creative writing is a day where I’ve missed an opportunity. 

FE: Have you always been a creative writer?

TRS: Well, my parents are English teachers, and because of that I was always exposed to this kind of impulse, where you’re reading something, you’re being read to…I remember being a little kid on my parents’ old green-screen Macintosh typing out some story about cows one keystroke at a time—I think they put it on the fridge. You know. Ever since then I’ve wanted to be a writer, not noting how economically foolhardy that is. And not really caring! How about you?

FE: [Laughs] Oh no, not at all. I didn’t really even think about poetry until taking that poetry class.

TRS: In college, right?

FE: In college, because it fit in my schedule. I’d been interested in reading literature—novels—but I had never thought to write it.

TRS: I was thinking about William Stafford, one of the figures I’m writing about, and how he published his first book [West of Your City] in his forties.

FE: Yeah, and William Carlos Williams also wrote later in life, and he was a doctor.

TRS: A pediatrician, exactly. 

FE: So you and your dad cowrote a poem together?

TRS: We did.

FE: Can you tell me a little bit about that process, and what it was like?

TRS: It’s always interesting to cowrite anything, with anybody, because as a writer, so often you’re stuck with just your own ego at work. Not ego in the sense of wanting to control everything, but being in your own head all the time. And to share that with somebody else is surprisingly difficult, I suppose, even if the person you’re writing with is someone you know really well, just because you have to get out of that mode of isolation. But that’s also something that I find rewarding, because if you’re writing a poem with somebody else, you’re sort of imbibing their creative impulses, their own strategies, and you are—just as when you’re reading anything—taking what you feel is best from that, and incorporating it into they way that you work. So we wrote this poem called “For Kansas Poets.” It was a free verse sonnet, and it dealt with a lot of the nature and human-made landscape of the state. Both of us know a lot of Kansas poets and they all have had an influence on the way that we think and work. But we dealt with that in different ways. My dad hunts for paleolithic artifacts on the river—he goes out looking for flint arrowheads and hide scrapers, or pottery, petrified wood, bison teeth, and so on. My experience with that was pretty tertiary. I would go along with him to hunt for arrow points, but I had a very different experience with the Kansas landscape. So we each brought our own perspective into this, and edited it through three or four drafts, and eventually came away with something solid. Which, of course, you then continue editing even after it’s published. 

FE: Of course.

TRS: It was a rewarding process! And later, I cowrote a book with the poet James Benger about this fictional road narrative. We each took a composite of one of our lengthy cross-country road trips and put it together into this fictional piece, where we were going across the country together. That process was sort of the macro level of that collaborative work. It didn’t end up where either of us expected, but I think it was richer for the experience. Do write collaboratively too?

FE: I have not…I don’t know if I would be good at it. I think I would really have to trust the other person, and that’s not always my strong suit. 

Here we pause as a chorus of police sirens erupts and passes nearby.

TRS: It’s weirdly intimate when you’re writing with someone else.

FE: I don’t think it’s weird. It’s very intimate, and that’s not weird at all.

TRS: Fair enough. It is almost like letting someone else read your diary, or go through your sock drawer, because it’s so rare, with writing being such an isolated, singular type of activity, that anybody else gets insight into that.

FE: Absolutely. When you publish, you’re choosing that this is okay to put into the world in the form that it’s in, but when you’re drafting, you haven’t consented necessarily for anyone to see that, unless you’ve chosen to write with someone else.

TRS: And you might only send the finished version to that other person to see, but they might ask for drafts, and what do you do then?

FE: I guess give them to ’em! [Laughs]

TRS: Hemingway—and this is so cliché—Hemingway’s old quote about writing being sitting down at the typewriter to bleed. Sometimes it feels like that, because you’re exposing parts of yourself to others that you normally wouldn’t.

FE: Absolutely. It can be raw, I think, at times.

TRS: Especially because there’s so much drama that goes into the writing process. Writing is a form of therapy, and to let other people into that takes trust, like you say.

FE: I don’t know if you ever have, but for a while, when I first started thinking, Oh, I could publish, I thought about choosing a pseudonym, a pen name, just so that my own name wouldn’t be linked to it. Have you ever published anything under a pseudonym, or thought about using one?

TRS: I think I considered it once, but I couldn’t commit to the bit. I think I got too lazy to maintain two personas. 

FE: It’s a lot, it’s exhausting. 

TRS: And plus, where’s the…a lot of people write under pseudonyms, but for me it was always, where’s the risk in not letting people know who wrote this? If I’m exposing my deepest, darkest secrets, but it’s under an assumed name, how am I growing from that? 

FE: What was your pseudonym?

TRS: I don’t even remember. I’m sure I had one. But I like the concept…Dr. Seuss for a while wrote under the name Theo LeSieg—an anagram of Theo Geisel, which was his name—for some of his work that he didn’t consider the same as his normal caliber. Of course that’s ridiculous, because everything he wrote is incredible. Dr. Seuss, maybe our best poet.

FE: Honestly, I don’t disagree!

TRS: So now that your book is in the world and you’re shopping it around, what’s next?

FE: I’ll think that far ahead once somebody takes [this manuscript]. I think to write and publish poetry, you have to be a little bit delusional, but I really stand behind this work. So I will keep tinkering with it until somebody takes it. But it really is my project for right now…and in a lot of ways, it’s even more important to me than my [doctoral] thesis is. If and when somebody takes it, I guess I’ll move on, but for now I’m drafting a little bit while still trying to edit and revise and send it back out to places. We’ll see what happens.

TRS: That’s great! I can’t wait to find it on bookshelves, it won’t be long. 

FE: We’ll see! It’s kind of like dating. Using Submittable is kind of like dating where it’s flop after flop after flop…

TRS: “Who’s gonna swipe right on this today?” 

FE: But you only need one person to say yes, and for it to be a good fit one time, and then it’s smooth sailing.

TRS: Sure. And to keep going with your analogy, dating requires rejection in order to calibrate what you need in a person.

FE: I think so too, because it’s the way you eventually find someone that doesn’t make you want to tear your hair out and start eating drywall. [Laughs]

TRS: That’s specific. Is there a story there?

FE: The hair, maybe! I haven’t started eating drywall yet. 

TRS: I won’t knock it ’til I’ve tried it.

FE: What about you, what’s next? You’re working on your book…

TRS: I’m working on my book, and I’ve started a series of very short, fairly intimate poems about my grandmother. There’s a whole adventure and story there, but…

FE: Would you care to give us a sneak peek at that?

TRS: Well, I can’t reveal too much yet, but it has to do with the way people change over time and the way that can be difficult sometimes. But I guess…that’s really all poetry is, but in this case it’s fairly new, both in terms of the events themselves and the way that I’m writing. When it’s more solid, I’ll share it then.

FE: Keeping us in suspense! I have one final question for you, if you don’t mind: would you self-title as a poet?

TRS: I think I would, and I think that there’s a certain amount of taking responsibility in doing that. And not just because you have to claim ownership of the poems that haven’t gone right, but because if I’m not calling myself a poet—in the least pretentious way possible—I’m kind of lying. I think that there’s an apprehension about calling yourself a writer, or a poet, because of the pretention attached to these labels. People want to be known as a Writer, capital W, without putting in the work; they want to be Hemingway without the issues. To drink because they think it will make them Hemingway, when in reality that was Hemingway coping with his demons and the self that he’d become. Combating that strange space, while also saying Yes, I’m a poet…it’s an interesting row to hoe. What about you?

FE: I don’t think so. I suppose in a specific context, yes. For example, if I were in a room with a bunch of other people who wrote, to distinguish myself from writing other genres, I would say that I write poetry. I had a professor, Robyn Schiff, and she always said you should call yourself a poet, even on your tax form when you’re writing your occupation, and own it. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had a lot of publications come out; I haven’t had as many books as you, and you’re such a prolific writer—

TRS: That’s not going in the interview.

FE: It should go in the interview, keep it in, don’t cut that out. But I don’t think so, at least not right now. I think with poetry especially there’s a conception about it—sometimes a misconception—that there’s, you know, a certain type of person who’s very proud to be a poet. 

TRS: Just because we wear turtlenecks and sit in coffee shops—

FE: And drink red wine by the bottle and talk about our issues with our parents—

TRS: Doesn’t mean that’s all of it. Even if sometimes it seems like it is. Okay, thanks for talking. I’ve had the best time talking with you today, this has been fun.

FE: Thank you for talking too!

TRS: And I can’t wait to read your new book, Fortuna Redux, when it comes out. Let’s make sure that our readers can take a look at a poem from the manuscript.

HELP//ENCLOSURE//HELP

Poor little Lazarus who had to die
Twice. Who had to walk through that cold
Room and into the dark all over and over
Again. Twisted proportions of a second life
Birthless, singular. What could he have asked
Of God instead? Synoptically unrooted could never
Die—He re-lived and never breathed, Lazarus.
What breaks your heart.

From Fortuna Redux, by Faith Ellington

~ ~ ~

Faith Ellington is a PhD candidate at Louisiana State University. Her work has been published in Sierra Nevada Review​, Passengers Journal, Prometheus Dreaming (Spring 2022), and is forthcoming in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State UP, 2025).

Tyler Robert Sheldon’s seven poetry collections include Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review, and his work has can be found in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pop Culture and Pedagogy, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Charles E. Walton Essay Award, Sheldon earned his MFA at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge, where he teaches and writes.