CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Mary Herrington-Perry

Rappahannock Review Interview Editor: “After Burying Your Ashes” focuses on the change in a garden after the narrator’s lover passes. Why is the narrator speaking to their lover?

Mary Herrington-Perry: She’s asking for permission to move on. She can’t find happiness by replicating their life together now that he’s no longer part of it.

RR: In the fourth stanza, the narrator describes habit and gravity as “two of the saddest words” they know. Would you describe here, in depth, the importance of these words?

MHP: In long relationships, the mattress shapes itself to the bodies of those who’ve been sleeping on it; it doesn’t care that one of them is no longer there. What used to be proof of a loved one’s habitual presence is now an unavoidable reminder of their absence.

RR: The stanzas’ shapes reflect the change of the plant’s positions. How did you come to this format choice?

MHP: Oh, you want to see behind the curtain! In its early incarnation, the poem was too blocky. I had no luck “fixing” it until I came across a poem whose strategically placed indentations inspired me. That poem was Cecily Parks’ “December.”

RR: You frequently write about plants in many of your works including this one. What inspires you to include nature in your work?

MHP: I’m a master naturalist who lives on a small Midwestern farm that my husband and I are working to restore to the native prairie it used to be—i.e., before the Indian Removal Act forced Indigenous people to move west and freed the U. S. government to sell their land.

RR: Do you have any upcoming works focused on nature?

MHP: Yes! My memoir-in-progress, “The Area of Disturbance,” includes essays about reclaiming farmland to outwit the agro-machine; revisiting the ghosts in a Peabody Coal Company strip mine; living under the North American waterfowl flyway; and staving off the new legions of solar farm land-grabbers.