Inside the Heads of Writers:
A Conversation between Ilyse Kusnetz and James Thomas

Listen to the conversation.

Ilyse: Again, I’m Ilyse, and James and I are going to have a conversation and ask each other some questions about our work and get to the heart of the matter. So, James, the first thing I want to ask you is about the story itself, that idea of kryptonite as a metaphor. I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit.

James: Yeah, well, you know that metaphor, for me, is something that is never planned, that when you start writing images come up and something might fit in a certain line, and then as you get further into the work, and then especially with the onset of drafts and revising and people reading your drafts and saying I really like that, and that then you start playing with metaphors, and you start saying I’m going to use a symbol or metaphor before getting into the work, it never rings true, and so kryptonite just happened to fit that and I stayed with it and I just kept with it.

Ilyse: And so it evolved in an organic way, and you kept weaving it into the story more and more.

James: Which is pretty much how I write--I might have an idea like kryptonite I was driving home from class one day and I had worked at a couple of dog tracks after school, and one time I worked up in the judges’ box, and we were right next to the control room for the rabbit, which was this huge handle that controlled the speed of the rabbit, and it just popped into my head that, uh, I had this idea of this girl, this young girl, this woman running with the rabbit, which I didn’t know. I knew this guy at the time I was working there, but I just had this image of the girl running the rabbit and so this idea took off from there.

Ilyse: And so that leads me to the next question. How autobiographical is the story?

James: Well, like any writer, it’s you. Every word is out of you, but as far as, you know, is that me, or am I talking about a relationship? I don’t think that’s an answerable question--you know what 60% is me? It’s just a story that came from my experience and people I’ve known in working at the dog track and experience at that age and relationships and innocence and, but as far as that being me and something I specifically experienced, no, I just took it from a lot of things that, you know, I am.

Ilyse: Sure, well in a different sense of autobiography, you grew up in Alabama, so how did that influence the writing of this story and your writing in general do you think?

James: Well you write from who you are. And of course for me I‘ve lived most of my life in Alabama. I was born there and grew up my first twenty five years there. I lived in Alabama and then moved out to California for a little bit and then back to Alabama and then down here in Florida for the last fifteen years, but all my stories, all my fiction is set in Alabama because I know it so well. And so you write about what you know, I mean the old cliché, but I know the culture, know the people, so for me to try to write a story, say about New Yorkers, I couldn’t do it. I’ve never lived there; I don’t know the people. I’ve known New Yorkers, and I’ve read stories about New Yorkers, but I don’t know it well enough. I’d have to do a lot of research, you know, and that’s a whole different realm of writing that I don’t do. I just write kind of organically like I was talking about, just from who you are.

Ilyse: So do you find the kind of resonance with the southern writers who’ve come before you?

James: Yeah, well, I think anybody from the south has been influenced by Faulkner, maybe one of the big books, As I Lay Dying. I never could get into Faulkner, and then I read that book, and then that really drove home a lot of stuff for me: understanding and admiring his brilliance and what he did in that book and, of course, Flannery O’Connor, who was the short story writer of the south. The southern writers, yeah, I read anything and everything like most writers, and you take what you need or what you want and admire, and Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Irving, I’d even say Hunter Thompson, people that you admire things about them and you kind of incorporate them in your own work and you take these techniques that they’ve used.

Ilyse: Fabulous.

James: Okay, so now I’m going to ask Ilyse some questions about her work.

Ilyse: Okay, shoot.

James: Yeah, one thing that I’ve always noticed about your writing is the European kinds of connection, and since you’re not European, where does that come from? You know, for me, I couldn’t write that because I’ve never been to Europe, so I just wondered what is that? There seems to be a big influence there.

Ilyse: Well, like you said, you write from who you are and what you know. I lived overseas for ten years, about half of my adult life. I started as an exchange student and kept going back for schooling, and then did my Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, which Edinburgh appears in a couple of those poems. So, yeah, I mean Edinburgh infiltrated my writing in a lot of different ways: place definitely, and the natural world there is so incredibly beautiful. The cities are beautiful architecturally, but the natural world is just outside the city, so you don’t have to go far, and it’s lush and green and that and also content, form wise. There is a particular style of writing in Britain, which very concise, and I wouldn’t go so far as to call it manicured, but every word is kind of measured, and there is a lot of emphasis on the music of the language there, which very much resonated with my own aesthetic, so I think between those two things you find that European influence in the content but also in the form in a subtler way. And since I came back here to the states about five years ago, I started writing longer lines, more conversational style, and that was an influence of the place and the vernacular.

James: So you mentioned nature, and nature obviously is a prominent part of your writing – where does that come and you mentioned the nature of Europe and the lushness of everything, but, I mean, Florida is lush, so where does the nature come in for you?

Ilyse: Well, that is something that I have found in common with the two places, and for me, nature is very redemptive and we go and our faith is stretched by life in the modern world, and it’s easy to lose faith, to lose your belief in things, and nature is one of those things that, I think, you can turn to and see that it’s the cyclical process that even when things die, they are going to return in another form or return again if you wait a season, and I think that kind of rhythm is really a balm to the kind of linear rhythm that we tend to fall into in our daily lives. So I think that’s one of the reasons. And just the small details of nature are so beautiful that if you can concentrate on them, then that’s a way of finding redemptive beauty as well.

James: And the inevitable: how autobiographical is your work?

Ilyse: That’s a hard question for a poet because I guess one of the definitions for both fiction and poetry is lying to tell the truth, so I guess there are details that are very true, but whenever at a certain point the poem takes over and the poem needs you to go in a certain direction, and it might not be what actually happened. It might not be--maybe the ferns were only six feet high instead of eight. But for the effect, or for the rhythm of the poem, or for the words that it needs for the music, you have to find alternatives, and after awhile, not when you start out, when you don’t really know what the poem is going to turn into, as you say, you don’t know where you’re headed, I find that if you already know where the poem is headed--it is going to be a bad poem. You know that it is going to be too forced and too conscious, and so if you start out and let it grow organically to where it needs to go, it’s those details, a lot of them may reflect reality, and lot of them just may be what you need to fill in the gaps to make the poem mean what in the end it’s supposed to mean, or the array things it’s supposed to mean.

James: Well, as kind of a follow up to that, the idea that some people I’ve known, fiction writers say, “I can’t write unless I know where I’m going. I have to have the ending to get there.” For me, I don’t know where I’m going--a dialog or character--when you sit down, are you just piddling with words or do you have an idea or an image? What starts a poem for you?

Ilyse: Well, I think, like you there is that moment when you were were driving home and something struck you, and for me, I never know when it’s is going to hit. You have to get a degree of isolation from the world. You have to kind of clear a space really, and a quiet space for awhile, and then things come to you in that quieter rhythm of time and, you know it may be a conjunction of things. Suddenly, A and B and then C comes along and makes you see the relation between A and B and that little triangle turns into a poem. Or there may be the other kind of thing I want to write about, but I’m biding my time and things are percolating at a level that I’m not in touch with at a day-to-day conscious level. I know it’s there and I’m going to write about it, and then, you know, maybe months will pass, sometimes years, and so I think the moment comes, and you just know it, and you have to pay attention because that moment will pass, and if you have to get it down, you will have to wait for the peristaltic rhythm.

James: Are you talking about a specific purpose or are you talking about an experience? You say sometimes you just want to write about something. Are you talking about you want to write about--for me, the only time I’ve written about race, a whole story on race, was that I just wanted to write on relationships; I mean black-white relationships. I didn’t know what, but I knew that’s what I wanted to write about. So I mean, is that what you’re talking about?

Ilyse: Well, more like when my mother was dying in the hospital, back in December, so fairly recently. And there was a moment when I realized that the woman I knew was only a very small part of the whole woman--the mother part of her was actually very small--so I wanted to write about that and somehow express that. That was the kernel of it. And I didn’t know what form exactly that would be in, but I had certain images that knew would be in that poem because they had struck me so deeply at the time. But it wasn’t until I went away to Vancouver and was sitting in my hotel room on the last night of this conference I went to, just sitting on the bed, I thought, “It’s time. There’s quiet right now, and I’ve had a lot of other things come through my head, and I am away distance and time-wise enough for me to sit down. Now is the time.” And I just knew and had to sit down for the next couple of hours and hash this thing out, the first draft.

James: The well was full at that time.

Ilyse: Yeah, exactly. It happens differently, slightly differently with each poem.

James: Thanks, Ilyse.

Ilyse: You’re welcome, and thank you, James.

Contact Ilyse Kusnetz or James Thomas, Professors of English.

up | contents