The Fare Forward Interview with Danielle Chapman
Danielle Chapman is a poet, nonfiction writer, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots (2023) and her second book of poems, Boxed Juice (forthcoming, 2024) are published by Unbound Edition Press. Her debut poetry collection, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015.
Chapman was an editor at Poetry beginning in 2003, as well as a consulting editor to The Poetry Foundation. From 2007 through 2013 she served as the Director of Literary Arts and Events for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, where she created programs to serve Chicago’s writers, publishers, and literary community. Since 2013, Chapman has taught in the English Department at Yale. She currently teaches Shakespeare and the Craft of Writing Poetry, a hybrid literature/ creative writing course that pairs poetry from Shakespeare’s plays with contemporary poems. She lives in Hamden, CT, with her husband, Christian Wiman; their twin daughters, Eliza and Fiona; and their rescue dachshund, Rosie.
Interview Conducted by Whitney Rio-Ross
If I was going to tell the story I’d been given—including the hope that it contains—I’d have to accept that it was about complex human beings who could not be reduced to political or social caricatures.
Fare Forward: When we announced a call for submissions for an attention-themed issue, we got a wide variety of pitches that approached the topic from many different angles. When you hear the word “attention,” what do you think about first?
Danielle Chapman: Attention is what I’m always seeking (not in the sense of being “attention-seeking,” I hope, though that’s probably a double meaning a poet always needs to be aware of!). But getting to a state of writerly attention—and then attending to where it leads—is the daily, practical goal of my work. I don’t just mean being able to concentrate or “pay attention” (though that’s a first step that is challenging in itself), but rather excavating my own mind so that I’m in the state where I know what I know and am able to learn, perceive, and receive something new. I definitely don’t always get there, but I believe that it’s worth the effort.
FF: You begin your memoir about your childhood in Tennessee by confessing that you initially didn’t want to write a memoir but rather a response to present-day political and social evils. What ultimately pushed you to write the memoir?
DC: Partly, the characters from my childhood wouldn’t leave me alone. They were haunting me, demanding to be resurrected. In retrospect, I can see this may have been because of the difficult, and often dire, circumstances my current family has faced with my husband’s struggle with cancer. Present life was overwhelming—and, fearing that it would disappear, childhood started shrieking at me, “it’s now or never!” (Though “now or never” lasted for the decade, at least, that it took me to write the book.) But also, the story that’s in the fifth chapter, about my family’s relationship with the descendants of George Singleton, a man who was once enslaved by my ancestors, has pressed on me urgently since our reunions began, almost 25 years ago. As a writer, I’ve felt it to be a huge gift and a huge responsibility. In some ways, it testifies to the stories we tell about “present-day political and social evils,” but in others it cuts against some of the pieties that we progressives hold about race. While grappling around in this (often enraging) Southern material, I sometimes felt called to be a Leftist prophet, but I was gradually humbled into the awareness that, if I was going to tell the story I’d been given—including the hope that it contains—I’d have to accept that it was about complex human beings who could not be reduced to political or social caricatures.
FF: Your memoir is less than 200 pages but manages to span from your early childhood to the present. How did you choose which moments to explore and which to exclude?
DC: The book began with memories that had existed in my mind for a long time, and already had a shape and force to them. They arrived the way poems (and short stories) often do, in a kind of burst, and with a beginning and an end. But they weren’t chronological at all, and not necessarily equally weighted. And when I tried to fill in the timeline, creating a memoir-ish “arc” or some kind of “coming of age” story about myself, I ended up just writing dead prose that I could not live with. My memories couldn’t mold themselves into the memoir form. Eventually, however, the material started coalescing around ideas that the memories brought up, and specifically around different aspects of American history, so that the chapters organize themselves, roughly, around America’s wars. Using that framework, I could make each chapter stand somewhat alone, as a meditation on both the memories and the questions that one American life raises.
FF: Your grandfather, a Marine Corp General from Tennessee, is a fascinating character in your story. While you recount many frustrations and arguments with him, especially over issues of racism, your love is palpable. How did you approach writing about him and the tension in that relationship?
DC: My grandfather was a tremendous influence in my life—not only a source of unconditional love, but also, I’ve realized since, a profound teacher of history, philosophy, and character. He was also, as I say in the book, a “historical personage” so, in the writing, I had to balance my own powerful sense memories of him with his persona and what he meant to others, especially in the Marine Corps, where he was beloved. But I also had to try to square him against my own ideas of history, particularly in regards to America’s racism. When writing about these issues, our disagreements were my starting point, but since my side of the disagreements was often adolescent and reactive, the writing also enabled me to press further into the issues themselves (which included research into topics like anti-discrimination in the military). In doing so I was surprised to learn that my grandfather held more egalitarian—and even progressive—views than I gave him credit for when he was alive. Loving him, and getting more curious about him, and simply wanting to spend time with him on the page, gave me the patience to discover this. But it also became an imperative of the book to see how much we flatten people when we disagree with them—often for the sake of our own self-definition.
While Lear might seem a bleak way of finding connection, it worked, because it offered an example of the psychological, spiritual, and linguistic complexity—and need for clarity—that such an event can project into a life.
I’d love for my attention to expand to include the dynamism of the event or the person or the thing observed.
FF: I was fascinated by the way you use history and literature as frameworks for your personal memories. Did you always associate your father’s death with King Lear and your teenage partying with the Vietnam War, or did those connections reveal themselves as you wrote?
DC: Most of the texts in the book I discovered late in the process. In the case of King Lear, I think I’d been teaching it for four years before the connection finally occurred to me. The texts offered me a way through the question of “what’s the point of writing this?” The first chapter, which tells about my father’s drowning, and my mother’s story about it, is obviously about a primal trauma, which is also my origin story. However, no matter how personally important it was, I found it hard to believe in the utility of writing (or reading) about it for its own sake. In order yank it out of myself, I needed to be able to connect my story to something recognizable (in this case, the dynamic between Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear), to give it meaning and definition beyond the inchoate terror of the event itself. While Lear might seem a bleak way of finding connection, it worked, because it offered an example of the psychological, spiritual, and linguistic complexity—and need for clarity—that such an event can project into a life.
With the Vietnam War, that was a bit different. I still marvel at the feat of unconsciousness that it took for me and my fellow ravers to not pay attention to the historical situation that was staring us in the faces. Though maybe that’s what being a teenager in the Nineties was all about!
FF: How do you think writing about the past has affected the way you inhabit and pay attention to your daily life now?
DC: I think that, since writing the book, I feel more convicted that the story in the house means something bigger than myself and my own memories of it. I feel the futurity of the story, the fact that it is always changing—and now that I’ve been able to get some of the details of childhood down on the page, it’s easier to let the house in Tennessee and the stories around it evolve and change. And maybe that extends into the rest of my life as well. I’d love for my attention to expand to include the dynamism of the event or the person or the thing observed, so that, rather than trying to fix things in place, or to elegize them, I could begin to see where they’ve been and where they’re going.
