CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn

Rappahannock Review Poetry Editors: Something we really liked when reading “Fig Tree” was how rich and plentiful it is in its language and imagery, especially with it being only twelve lines long. Can you describe your process in finding this sweet spot?

Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn: Finding the sweet spot—that’s a nice way to word it. “Sweet” itself is a tactile thing—it’s a flavor, a taste, with a range of positive associations. For me, I think that’s how the process of most poems like this start—with some sort of trigger that your brain just won’t let go of. “Fig Tree” started after my wife (then-girlfriend) and I were picking figs at her grandparents’ house to make jam. When you tear them from the tree, a sticky, almost milk-like substance leaks out from the stem. It disgusted and intrigued me, especially the tension between the sweetness of the fruit and, as I learned the worst way possible, the sourness of that stem-liquid. But to the practical point of a short poem like this, some of it is just arbitrarily demanding something of myself—I wanted to write a short poem, one that felt like “This is Just to Say” or “The Red Wheelbarrow,” so I said I’d only give myself a couple syllables per line. Putting myself in a corner like that, I think that sends the mind reeling a bit—a little bob and weave to cut out the excess words we really like to say when we’re rambling—like I am now—to sort of condense each word into its own jab.

RR: Another thing that stood out to us was the last line and its half-rhyme of “love” with “leave”—and how it really encapsulates the entire piece. How did you land on that final moment?

COH: The ending took some revision, to be honest. I had initially written two completely different lines and left them to soak, unsatisfied, but having to go to work. I didn’t find them until a few months passed and I came back to it. I read a lot of haiku, and one of the tactics Basho utilizes is placing two images next to each other and trusting the reader to make a subliminal connection. In the poems that I’ve felt it works best, maybe like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” there’s also a physical connection, there it was the slant rhyme of “crowd” and “bough.” So I quite literally stood up and started reading “Fig Tree” over and over sans the last two lines—I think I even recorded it and listened to myself say it back—until the real feeling—the “what happens after?”—came out, which was the departure of the experience in the present, but not of the experiential memory in the body. From there it was about picking the right sensation in the sound. I liked “l” for this poem especially, since it requires you to activate your tongue, which, in the poem, is the experience of the reader. I reread the poem again with “then leave” and held my tongue on the end of that sentence for a moment. The rest practically toppled out. The second “v” in love worked nicely—it feels to me like a cradling, and the juxtaposition between leaving and loving, both being bodily experience seemed to leave enough space for someone to feel the same experience I had felt, but left enough room to distinguish its relation to their own personal experiences as well.

RR: In reading some of your other works, we love your knack for creating tangible emotions by weaving in more lyrical, sensory details that often tie into the natural world. In what way is the natural world an inspiration for your writing, and why did you choose to focus on a fig tree specifically?

COH: Ah, that’s a big question—how long do you have? I think maybe the fig tree is a better place to start, since the answer is pretty simple. It was there. We hear a lot of cliches about nature and we like to romanticize it, but actually going up to a tree and hugging it is a different experience. You get bark on your cheek, or a squirrel pees on you, or the neighborhood kids look at you a little funny when you make eye contact. Maybe these are a little personal for examples, but I really believe that’s important to understanding not just “the natural world” as you’ve put it here, but how we are, indistinguishably, a part of it. When I walk my dogs in the morning, I pass by a row of crepe myrtles with the same row of cars parked beneath it. There’s a school bell ringing, I can smell the McDonald’s deep fryers warming up from two blocks away, maybe a horn and a shout at the stop sign. It’s all sort of the same and boring until…zoom, there goes a hummingbird, or bap, a seed pod falls on my head. In the summer, those myrtles drop a mist of sorts whenever you pass underneath them. I think it’s important to capture those things, not just for what they are, but what about it sunk in, personally, to make me open to experiencing it.

RR: While doing research, your website Orha Writes came up! I wanted to ask how you got that started and what’s it been like running this platform?

COH: I can remember the day—partially because WordPress gives me an anniversary notification every year, but also because I was at a particularly odd time in my life. I was in the latter half of my undergraduate program at Cal Poly Pomona and was looking to better develop my creative writing skills—something that, unfortunately, few undergraduate programs nurture with the same fervor as academic essays. I was living in my late grandfather’s house, sitting at his desk, which was situated in a Great Room overlooking the Pomona Valley, and eating a blood orange, which were among his favorite fruits. I was frustrated with the state of the economy, the prospect of work, the political sphere that had developed in America in 2015-2016, and decided what I could control was the direction of my own efforts. I started writing on a pretty rigid schedule, not really for anyone but myself, just to get the repetitions in. After a while I branched out to other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook—I’ve never really tried to be “good” at the whole social media blogger writer thing, so to speak, so running it has been more for the fun experience of it—I love writing, but in this day and age where so much is pulling for our attention, I often feel that little extra push is necessary to keep me as focused on my own work as I can be on all the other creators in the world.

RR: Do you have any advice for any aspiring writers or Hawaiian-shirt enthusiasts?

COH: Ha! Ah, you found that, love it. I think the key to both is an understanding of texture. The best Hawaiian shirts, in my opinion, are worn not because they’re pretty—even the cheapest shirts have designs that pop—but ones that let you breathe a little, the ones you feel yourself wearing. Figuring that out is a lot like figuring out your own writing—most people don’t really start writing with their own style fully formed. I certainly didn’t and even this many years later I’m still developing it. Which is to say, to aspiring writers, that you have to get in the practice—try on shirts, not just for a few minutes at the department store, but get one or two you like, wear them till you know exactly what you like about them, then get a couple more. Do the same with your writing. Get it ingrained in your body so that picking out a word for your poem is as natural as choosing the right material for the weather. Maybe throw in a pair of sandals, a sunhat if you burn easy, and, hey! You’re pretty much dressed for a day on the beach!