Meg Kearney’s body of work includes a picture book about a three-legged dog, a trilogy of novels in verse for teens, and several books of poetry. Collectively her work has won a multitude of awards—including a PEN New England LL Winship, a Kentucky Bluegrass Award, and the Washington Prize—and has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies as well as on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series. In addition to her writing, Meg is the founding director of a very popular masters-level creative writing program, a former associate director of the National Book Foundation (which sponsors the National Book Awards), and a teacher of poetry.
We had the great pleasure of speaking to Meg about her newest poetry collection, All Morning the Crows, about how her understanding of birds and their metaphors helped her to talk about a topic that had previously seemed taboo, how a psyche constrained (by the rules of formal verse) can be a psyche freed, and so much more.
All Morning the Crows is your second book of poetry featuring birds in its title, An Unkindness of Ravens being the first. Tell us what these two books have in common and how they are different, and about your relationship with birds generally.
Really I have been a lover and observer of birds my entire life; that said, I do not consider myself to be a birder with any sort of expertise. Like so many of us, I do seem to have a “thing” about corvids especially, though All Morning the Crows considers all sorts of birds. The two books are very different, perhaps the main reason being the poems in Ravens were written in the 1990s—a long time ago now. That was my first book, for the most part, written as my creative thesis when I was a grad student studying at The City College of New York with a poet named William Matthews.
The title is taken from a sequence of raven poems in the book’s center, most of which were drawn from and inspired by dreams. At that time I had a break-through of sorts when I discovered that the raven could serve as a metaphor, as a mask, that enabled me to speak for the first time about a subject I’d long worried was taboo: the fact that I was adopted as an infant, and was clueless about the identity of my birth parents. By the time I wrote All Morning the Crows, which I began working on in 2012, I had truly “come out” in my work (and my life) as an adoptee, and had learned quite a bit about my first mother. Though that is one subject I continue to mine in this new book, I also felt free to be more explicit and to branch out further in my explorations, so to speak.
The title of each poem in All Morning the Crows refers to particular bird species: robins, swifts, penguins, and so on. And each poem goes on to honor the bird species it specifies and simultaneously illuminate a narrative that can have little or nothing to do with birds. Can you talk about this pairing and why you chose it?
It’s true that some of the poems have little to do with the birds in their titles—that in some cases, the bird serves as a launching point as the poem weaves its argument. The poems in All Morning the Crows began as a sort of project I gave myself, which was to write 100 poems inspired by a wonderful book titled 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells. During that process, the “project” was left behind as the poems seemed to be taking on a life of their own. The birds allow for an engagement beyond the self—beyond the “I”—while at the same time they are also a vehicle for diving deep into some very personal material.
One might think that embedding a narrative in bird insights would dilute the narrative itself. How did you prevent this from happening?
Your question makes me relieved, as it implies they are successful in that regard! But I’m not sure how to answer it. It did take years for the narrative, or narratives, to emerge; the poems that wound up not serving some sort of purpose for the book as a whole were thrown out—in the end, I was left with fifty-one. I hope that whatever insights each poem might contain about birds serve the story being told and/or the experience being recreated on the page.
All Morning the Crows is divided into four parts. Please talk about the shifts in subject matter between the sections.
There are a few narrative threads that hold the book together and recur throughout. But before the preface, there is an epigraph from the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives the definition of “bird” as both one of the “feathered tribes” as well as, in modern usage, “a girl, woman (often used familiarly or disparagingly).” This dual definition pretty much describes the collection’s central metaphor. It actually took a very astute writer-editor friend to point out to me how there is a migration, if you will, from what is now the first section through to the fourth. In the first, the book’s themes emerge—the two mothers, the violence inflicted throughout history by some men against women (though references to 9/11 must include fellow men in that violence), and against other creatures like birds, as well as their survival instincts. So the book explores birds and women as prey and yet also as powerful beings. One reviewer said about section two that “disorders pile up like an Interstate 20-car wreck,” which might not be far off! Section three begins a move away from that wreckage, though what takes its place might be described as a certain aloneness mixed with wry humor as the women and bird figures gain back some agency and control. In this way, I think of the book as an act of witness, which offers a path toward redemption. Overall perhaps the book is about survival—though it does go beyond that; by the time you reach the end, there is love and peace and song.
Your poetry book The Ice Storm is written in sonnets. To some ears, that might sound like a kind of creative torture. What are the benefits of the constraints sonnets impose?
It might seem odd to say, but sonnets—and really the constraints offered by all structures of formal verse—provide freedom of expression not often found in free-verse poems. The poet Molly Peacock says that form provides a “safe house” for exploring emotionally difficult material; she gives Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” as an example, as that villanelle contains a world of loss. When we are paying attention to the “rules” of a form, say counting beats or syllables, or working toward a specific rhyme scheme, it enables our psyche to explore the possibilities of language we might normally avoid or not allow ourselves to use. Often we wind up surprising ourselves by what we say, as the form led us to a place we could not have reached on our own. And, as Robert Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” So I don’t think of writing a sonnet or any formal poem as a kind of torture—it’s all about play and word puzzles, even when the material is harrowing. Once it stops being fun, why write?
Novels in verse written for a young teen audience are especially valued by teachers and librarians. Can you talk about the three novels in verse for teens that you have written and what the response has been to them?
Back in the mid-1990s, I was encouraged to write for young people by my friends Norma Fox Mazer and Jacqueline Woodson. They were already established fiction writers whose novels were primarily for young adults. As a poet, I couldn’t yet imagine how one sustains a work as long as a novel! Jackie would joke with me: “Meg, you want to make money? Take out the line breaks!” Knowing Jackie had a huge respect for poetry—she had her fiction students reading poems all the time—I simply laughed. Then one day Jackie sent me a manuscript that she wanted me to look at before she sent it to her editor; it was a novel made of poems titled Locomotion. Of course, I had suggestions for her, but also “of course” it was brilliant—this is Jacqueline Woodson we’re talking about. While I had read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, it didn’t dawn on me that it could serve as a model for my own work until I read Locomotion. After all of Jackie’s joking around, it felt as if she had thrown down the gauntlet. I had to try writing in this form. Almost immediately I knew that my protagonist was a girl around fourteen years old who was the youngest of three adopted children; and that she was an aspiring poet, growing up in a loving house filled with certain silences surrounding most things adoption-related. Her name was Lizzie McLane. So the first novel, The Secret of Me, is written in her voice. It received very positive reviews—it still sells—and so my editor at Persea encouraged me to write two more Lizzie McLane books, The Girl in the Mirror and When You Never Said Goodbye, which form a trilogy. All were well received, though I don’t think books two or three have done nearly so well as that first one. Writing books for teens as well as a picture book, Trouper, has opened up a whole new world for me—young people’s literature is such a friendly, thriving community—and earned me many school visits and other opportunities to teach and speak with children and teens that I would not have had otherwise.
As the founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts, you have helped many writers to enhance their skills and garner recognition for their work. Please talk about how Solstice differs from other MFA programs. And if you could alleviate just one hurdle for your students, what would it be?
The Solstice Program is something I am very proud of—and yes, it is unique among low-residency MFA programs. When we launched in 2006 we were already committed to nurturing the diverse voices of America; diversity, equity, and inclusion aren’t catchphrases we’ve latched onto recently, but foundational tenets that make us what and who we are. Having a diverse faculty is the number-one way we live our mission, but also those faculty members are amazing writers who love to teach and want to be part of a community where mentors and students mingle and share meals and don’t dwell on hierarchies. Community is everything to us. As emerging artists, students need to feel safe among fellow writers—they need, for instance, to be able to bring pieces to workshop that they’ve worked hard on but feel unsure of, knowing they won’t be torn down or stabbed in the back for it. As one of our alum said, “At Solstice we are in a community, not in competition.” Some people thrive in a competitive atmosphere, where envy is a driving force—but we are the opposite of that. What we are doing at Solstice seems to be working, too: 30 percent of our graduates have gone on to publish at least one book so far! And a majority of them are publishing in literary magazines and landing teaching jobs. (We offer a pedagogy track for those who hope to teach at the college level.) If there were one obstacle I would alleviate for my students, it would be finances! We do our best to keep tuition and fees low, and offer need-based scholarships as well as fellowships—but in an ideal world, students would receive full funding.
Please tell readers where they can learn more about you, your work, and the Solstice MFA program.
The best place to learn about me, my work, and my events are through my website, https://megkearney.com/. The Solstice MFA Program is actually in a time of transition as its host institution, Pine Manor College is closing in summer 2022. We are actively seeking a new home—I hope we’ll have good news in that regard before fall 2021! But meanwhile, anyone interested can both email me and visit www.pmc.edu/mfa.
Photographer- Gabriel Parker
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