CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Walter Holland

Rappahannock Review Poetry Editors: We love how “Atlanta” celebrates the city and also acknowledges how it’s contributed to racial and economic injustice, in both its past and present. How did you go about creating this balance throughout the piece?

Walter Holland: The balance was almost handed to me by the actual flow of events over the course of my four-day visit with old friends last year. In the span of those several days we toured all over the city. One day we had breakfast at a greasy diner and then that night dinner at a Thai restaurant. My friends’ house had a pool and was a cozy spot near “Cabbage Town.” I kept my pocket notebook with me at all times as I always do and my trusted pen. In down moments I recorded in a stream of consciousness what I saw and felt from the backseat of their car, and on the streets as we walked to visit various sights and parts of the city.

Because the city struck me as so varied, so large, and chaotic—sometimes frighteningly so—I could see no other way to capture it than through a collage process. I thought a bit about Ginsberg’s “Howl” and his other on the road poems, which provide broad descriptions of America with his characteristic long lines, as well as William Carlos Williams’ “Paterson”, an amazing epic. Atlanta by its very nature seemed to demand a fragmented style to express its dense complexity and the glimpses I was getting in real time as it flew by out the open car window.

I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia in the fifties so I was familiar with southern history and the South’s disparities of race and economic injustice, and I was also aware of the revival of Atlanta as an economic powerhouse and destination for northerners in the past few decades.

I tried to seize upon the images I saw from the car, of people who seemed to represent its stark racial differences and economic divisions. Like a documentary maker I took reels and reels of visual observations and later realized that the city narratively spoke for itself in what I had jotted down and in the order I had noted it. It was all there in my momentary “snapshots.” But to be honest it was the imbalance that most shocked me. It presented an America terribly conflicted, being pulled in so many contrary directions at once, and it scared me.

RR: We were really taken by the rich and vivid language in the poem. What was your process like in finding the language to capture the essence of the city?

WH: I have for better or for worse a gift for list poems with long streams of images and sentence fragments. My fellow poetry friends are always trying to reign me in and to challenge me on punctuation and simple sentence structure. I am also a very visual person. I grew up in the golden age of television and Hollywood films in the fifties and I wrote plays when I was younger and grew adroit at setting discrete scenes with characters, dialogue, and set design. Also, American culture today feels high-definition to me, saturated with millions of pixels of detail and information. Everything seems streamed in my head and I feel assaulted everyday by a world of streamed information. This fragmentation, this division, this contrast, and its speed of focus is overwhelming to me at times as a poet of place and memory. I have a cinematic sense when I write, that’s usually how my poems or short fiction begins. To be honest Atlanta had something disturbing in the air and as I said above, almost a city like a country in overdrive.

I found my time in Atlanta rather dystopian. The city held a grim fault line of southern myth, pressured against a frontier ethic of old and new ideals, undergoing a rumble and rift of politics, anger and rancor. I’m not sure if it was the weather which was muggy and overcast, or the anxiety about the up and coming presidential election, but the city felt like a mass of contradictions, abandoned inspiration, words of great civil rights leaders bannered in empty exhibition and museum halls–deep historic pain mixed with ugly indifference–all colliding with music, anger, and an undercurrent of violence and menace. The early promise of some type of fusion, some American tolerance and enrichment promised by our previous government, seemed out of control.

In short I felt estranged and perhaps that made the images nightmarish almost. Definitely there was a pulse of energy and self-invention that I liked. But for the most part my vision of Atlanta was like Ginsberg’s hallucinatory vision of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco as the monstrous face of Moloch, god of all things greedy in America materialism, which supposedly inspired him to write Part II of “Howl.”

RR: What drew you to Atlanta? Was there anything in the history or culture in particular that inspired you to write about that city?

WH: Again, I grew up in Virginia so I had a handle on southern life. I’d only been once before to Atlanta when I was fifteen and that was only for one day and one night. I wanted to see it again. But I would add that something about my visit to the Margaret Mitchell apartment and learning the truth about her writing of Gone With the Wind, and how for the film version Mitchell’s vision was distorted and completely manipulated by Zanuck and his screenwriters at the studio, troubled me greatly. It made me confront a certain dispiriting underpinning of the veneer of Atlanta’s culture and history. I had a premonition that a new threat was upon the land, like General Sherman, ready to begin a fiery ride of retribution at any moment, and I sensed uncomfortably that the city like our country was about to smolder. The city seemed emblematic of the country at large, a very unstable place of rare tension, which I hope above hope will change course, and embrace a bond and equanimity between all these disparate fragments. There was so much promise of an inventive and truly creative joining together there for a new America, but I saw it slipping away as well, with a calvary right outside the city limits.

RR: You’ve published many written works ranging from poetry to short fiction, and even theatrical pieces. What practices have you developed over the course of your career to help you get into that creative headspace and avoid burnout?

WH: The trick I guess for me is to write every day and to carry a pocket notebook and a pen with you everywhere you go. I also find silence helps, avoiding phone calls, not looking at texts or social media all the time, and taking walks outside every so often. I just give myself a free slate to write and permission to write raw drafts of great length, which I transcribe into my laptop and tinker with later. Yes I bring the computer when I travel, but so often I try to note down a phrase or an image or a scene I’ve witnessed, as soon as I can, even when I’m on the run. I let myself go deep into my past and to write memory poems. No one understands a writer who is not a writer themselves. You will appear selfish and irritable when interrupted from your writing. And permit yourself to explore different types of writing, essays, critical writing, fiction, poetry. You’ll know soon enough if it’s your cup of tea.

The only real form I ever somewhat mastered was for the sonnet. I’m not very disciplined as far as form, though early on I did my homework, but free verse worked better for me. I accept now that after a large project of writing there is a period of fatigue and depression. As you get older you need to learn to pace yourself. When you are young you can go full out. Late, after the postpartum, exhaustion and sadness are sure to set in, but understand in a matter of days or weeks withdrawal returns, and you start writing again.

I did a lot of community theater and I wrote one-act plays and had some local success during high school. I pursued acting and modern dance in my youth even at Bard College in upstate New York, before I went to New York City in the seventies to pursue a dancing career. All experiences may be mined and used for later work.

I’ve been stingy most of my life over my free time, protective of my solitude, often retreating into myself. I never had children. And I had a day job as a physical therapist which gave me security and privilege to travel widely and to lead a comfortable life in later years. I must credit my husband Howard as well, for he has been an understanding partner. He’s not a writer but was in medical management. We both are now retired. His toleration of my moods and my long sessions writing at my desk, or on the bed of a hotel room, or on a train, or while visiting friends out of town, has been truly a blessing, and I love him dearly for it.

RR: As a published writer, what’s the best piece of advice you have for those just starting out?

WH: Write often if time allows. If you write every day it sharpens your reflexes between the written word and your mind and heart. This connective pathway once cleared and these synapses once strengthened will make the process of writing more facile for you and electric. It makes you quicker in expressing things, capturing images, catching ideas before they evaporate. Work hard, by that be disciplined to a degree, and be productive. I don’t mean in a harsh, rigid, punishing way. We all have different methodologies and personalities, so mind you, this is just my schtick. I just mean that life is short, get writing, but experience the world as well.

At the same time, go easy on yourself. It takes a while to find the genre of writing that suits you best, and the style of writing that plays to your strengths, or maybe fits your temperament and lifestyle. A poet friend of mine said he chose poetry because he had to work nine to five and poetry was quick to write and was all he could do in his short amount of free time. Fiction seemed too time consuming for him, and I can attest to that. And yet you may find fiction easier for you and the concision of poetry elusive.

Accept that in time you will find your voice and you will find your style and your individual comfort zone, and then dive in, stick to it, drill down. Perfect what is innately yours to perfect. Become more ‘you.’ Accept this is ‘you’ and that ‘you’ might write this same way over and over again with the same themes and in the same form for the rest of your life. There is nothing to be ashamed about.

You will study others and say to yourself have I grown too predictable? Why are they so different? But know that this is because you are different and remarkably ‘you.’ Remember life has a way of changing your writing over time. As you age and experience more it will inevitably happen. You don’t have to force yourself to write like someone else. It won’t work.

Writing is not a means to an end. There is no end to the writer’s life. You are going to die, let’s face it. There are few ah-ha moments. There are big highs and exhausted lows. By that I mean it always takes courage to write, and being published has never saved someone from physically dying. Being appreciated by a few friends or many people, or getting an award, while nice, is not the end all and be all. It often will feel empty, or a letdown. Editors are subjective, publishers are subjective, judges are subjective, and all are human like you, so you cannot let their rejection throw you into the depths of despair. Because most of the time that’s what you get, and you just press on because you love to write or must write.

Writing is perpetual failure but if you cannot do anything else but write, even when you try to walk away from it, or think you have renounced it, then you just keep doing it. If it gives you joy, if it gives you a sense of wonderment, if it is an intricate exercise and escape for your mind, it is all good. If it is psychologically tortuous, addictive, weird and unsettling, stirs your insecurity to a fever pitch, that is also okay. After all it is just putting hieroglyphics on a page to convey and communicate to others. Yes, the magic is an alchemy often unexplainable, but the process is as old as time.

Be professional about it and not sloppy when you submit your work. Do your homework so that you put your best foot forward. Do not get caught up in the addiction game to be published. It becomes like a drug, a high, like seeking charms on a charm bracelet, or racking up points on a dart board. Do not publish for publishing’s sake. I don’t mean don’t submit, that is your duty, to every few weeks sit down, and do the business work of sending things out, things you feel are ready and you have vetted. Have a friend or two take a look-see. Listen to their feedback, but know that they are only one or two readers in a vast sea of readers.

I like setting my writing aside. Let it sit for a day or two or three and then pick it up and read it again. It may strike you as horrible. That’s common. Or it may seem amazingly finished and powerful, or you may find yourself noticing ways to enhance it. Do so.

Accept that some writers have a natural talent. They have a unique voice, a style. They are innately gifted with language and craft. Read them and seek them out for the richness and artistry they bring to their work. Part of being a writer is to enjoy the writing of others, to love what literature gives back to us all, to remind you why you love words in the first place. Yes, jealousy is normal. But support your writing friends, lend them your congratulations if you feel it is merited. Listen to them read. Read them and buy their books, if you have the funds, or get them from the library.

There are writers of the mind and intellect, and writers of the heart and emotion. No one approach is better than the other, nor can they really be separated as I am suggesting. But many writers do write from the outside to in, and others from the inside to out. That’s why we have journalists or historians or biographers or essayists or poets, or short fiction writers, or long fiction writers, or mystery writers, or romance writers, or speculative fiction writers. All are compelled to write for different reasons. Be curious about the world and about different types of literature because ideas for your next work may come from what you’ve just read the previous day.

Good writing is a craft. Writing a book review or two is an invaluable exercise in the business of writing. You get a set word-count. You must learn to meet it. You have to master a clarity in saying what you’re saying. You must endure a million edits and learn how to be diplomatic. You have to watch your grammar and most of all meet deadlines. Writing under pressure like that ultimately can make you more flexible, more agile, and gives you more humility and toughens you up and makes you just get it done. It’s not for everyone, but who knows, you might be good at it.

Finally understand that most published work goes unread and sits in a journal in a library or in a basement somewhere. Books go out of print. There is so much published these days that we can’t read it all. It’s humanly impossible, and the readership in America is slim, slim for certain genres. In the grand scheme the number of times you are published here and there as I said has no bearing on whether you are a writer or not, whether you are a “success.” That is the brutal truth. As I said all writing is failure to begin with. It does not promise immortality. Only time will tell long after you are gone whether what you have written speaks to another generation. So focus on the intimacy and the joy of the process and enjoy that wonderful chemistry you can find with other like-minded writers.

Writing is a message in a bottle floating out on the sea of time. Make sure the message is succinct and clear and engaging and as powerful as it can be. For who knows where it will land, and who knows who will come to rescue?

And to thy own self be true! And good luck.