How often had you sent out Ghost Gear before it was chosen as a finalist for the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize?
Man, I sent it out for a
while. I “finished” my first workable draft of Ghost Gear in the winter of 2007/2008, a year and a half after
entering the MFA Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I of
course believed it really was finished finished at the time and sent it to
fifteen prizes that year and sent to the same fifteen prizes for the next five
years until it finally got picked up in the winter of 2012/2013. I revised it
every single time it got rejected, and it got better every time. While all the
rejection was heartbreaking (the book wasn’t a finalist or honorable mention or
anything like that for any of the prizes until the winter it was taken), the
process worked. It’s a much better book now than when I first started
submitting to prizes, and I am grateful for that. Could it have happened a
little sooner? Sure. But that’s life.
I’m now closing in on
finishing my second book. I have what I like to call my first “non-shitty”
draft, which means it’s not bad but it’s not particularly good. I’m not sure
how to proceed. Send it to contests again and revise it every time it gets
rejected until, at long last, it gets picked up? Or revise it on my own like
crazy for several years and then send it out? The writing and publishing of
books is a mysterious craft. I’m excited to see what it teaches me this
go-round.
Tell me about the title. Had it always been Ghost Gear? Did it go through any other
changes?
The backbone of Ghost Gear is five versifications of
stories my father told of his childhood (and, in the final two poems, of my childhood and his fatherhood). “Ghost
Gear” recounts his near-death by tidal wave while tramell-net fishing in Alaska
when he was in college. Ghost gear is a term for dilapidated nets and riggings
and other such gear deep-sea fisherman used to discard in the ocean. All that
gear drifted down into the ocean and caused all sorts of havoc. It was really
big in the news ten years or so ago and the practice was made illegal. This
notion of that which we believe we’ve discarded continuing to do its work below
us is the controlling metaphor of the book: each poem an artifact of the past
and present and future tangled up in the mind and body. I have to give my
friend and colleague Curtis Hessel credit for making this connection for me
after I told him I had changed the title to The
Ever-chamber,” the second father-story poem. That title would work too, but
Ghost Gear is infinitely better. I
owe him a kiss on the lips for that and a punch in the gut for just about
everything else!
It seems like there’s a possible misconception
among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they
must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point?
What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding
contests versus open reading periods?
I only sent to contests. Contests
I really, really wanted to win.
Contests that had published awesome books before me, books that taught me how
to write poems. I did this because I felt it would give the book a little
something to stand on. Who knows if this makes any difference or not. I didn’t
actually win the Miller Williams. I got close but not quite. Luckily, Arkansas
publishes the Miller Williams Finalists as well. I haven’t noticed that the
contest makes any difference but being able to say I was published by the
University of Arkansas Press clearly
makes a difference. So here’s what I can offer: send your book to presses who
have published books you love. Contests. Open submissions. Whatever it takes,
it’s the press that makes the difference. I suppose that if I’d won the National
Poetry Series, I might see things a little differently. But there are only a
few prizes out there for first books (the Miller Williams is an open prize)
anyone really cares about, and Ghost Gear
is getting out there because I’m putting the work in and because it was
published by an established and beloved press, not because it almost won a prize.
What was the process like assembling the book? How
many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
I just went back in my
files. There are 97 drafts of Ghost Gear.
I didn’t realize it was that many. Each was completed after the book was
rejected, and I often revised more than once between rejections. Sometimes it
looks fairly similar; sometimes it looks radically different. The poems themselves
“look” more or less the same on the page, but the lines themselves are pretty
radically different every five drafts or so, and the order of the poems is all
over the place. I started chronological, then played with themes, then put the
longest poem at the opening of the book and then moved it back to the end.
“Singing” was always the first poem.
“Ghost Gear” was always the second, third, or fourth, but everything after that
was up for grabs it appears. The greatest amount of revision is in the poems
themselves. Boy did they get better over time. I honestly can’t recall what it
was like putting the book together that much. I remember swimming in the dark a
lot. I sort of did it with a blindfold on. Sure, I had some idea of how the poems worked together, but I don’t think that
became clear until two or three years after that initial draft. I had the
backbone of the book in the father-story poems, thank goodness, and placed all
the other poems around that backbone in an almost infinite shuffle. I also
remember having a lot of help from Judy Jordan and from friends at my MFA like
Jenna Bazzell, Martin Call, and Alexander Lumans. I owe them more than I can
ever repay. I think understanding how to put a book together is probably a
life-long pursuit for someone like me. I am at all times perplexed by…virtually
everything around me. That’s why I write poems I think, to try to understand
this life and the things in it a little better. I think I have a better grasp
of how my second book works. Maybe the third will be a little easier, but I
don’t put too much pressure on myself in that regard. I trust the process and
just stumble forward and backward and in circles from there until things start
to make sense. I think the process of assembling Ghost Gear was more the product of rejection than knowing what the
hell I was doing and not know, this may sound strange, what I wanted to do. In the end, I settled on a
more or less chronological structure. There’s a story told via the arc of the
book that isn’t told in the poems themselves and people are catching on to it.
But damn it took a long, long time to find that arc.
How involved were you with the design of the
book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?
I was lucky enough to be
given almost 100% control of the cover, which is beyond perfect. If you’ve read
the book, you know the cover is exactly what the book is about. It’s an
original piece of art I commission from Siolo Thompson, an artist out of
Seattle who was a friend of a friend at the time. When I contacted her with the
request for the cover, she asked me to send her three poems. I sent “Singing,”
“Ghost Gear,” and “The Ever-Chamber,” and the cover, more-or-less as is, was
what she sent back. I was just blown away. How someone I didn’t even know could
read those poems and come up with that cover seemed impossible, but I think
it’s a testament to the words and to her skill as an artist and reader. I
couldn’t be happier with it. As for all the other design aspects, I had no
input and really didn’t want to interfere with the good folks at Arkansas. It
was the right move. They made a beautiful, flawless book.
What about the publication of the actual poems in
journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a
concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were
sending out your manuscript?
Nah. I just wanted people
to read my shit and sent out like crazy until all the poems were taken. I
didn’t feel the need to publish the entire book in order to get it published.
That’s the nice thing about prizes: most of that info is omitted from your
submission. Some of the prizes do require this information. While I respect the
presses that do, that doesn’t make much sense to me.
How much work did you do as far as editing the
poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its final proofing
stage?
I went back and forth
with my editor, Enid Shomer, quite a bit on the final poem, “First Catch,” but
the rest of the book was pretty easy to finalize. She has a great eye, and most
of her suggestions made perfect sense, including cutting a monstrous poem that
I wrote for the second book but felt compelled (for reasons I’m not entirely
sure of) to include in Ghost Gear.
The second she said we should cut it, I agreed, which I think helped ease the
rest of the process for both of us. I am so very happy Arkansas actually edits
their books. Some presses send off finalists to a judge, the judge selects a
winner, and they publish that book without any further editing and even without
copy-editing/proofreading. This is obviously a bad idea. I think I probably
would have hired an outside editor to look at Ghost Gear if it were selected for a prize sans editor.
What do you remember about the day when you saw
your published book for the first time?
I remember that entire
day. It was long as all hell. I knew the book was incoming on a UPS truck but
had no idea when it would arrive, so I employed a few friends to distract me,
hopping from bar to bar in my current home place of Denver, Colorado. When my
designer texted me “Did you see the book yet?” and I texted back, “I’m waiting
for it to arrive.” and he replied, “It’s waiting for you at your door,” I left
the bar without paying the tab or telling my friends and raced for home.
When I got home, I took
my time opening the slim vanilla envelope only to find the book wrapped in
paper like a gift. I took even more time opening it from there. When it finally
emerged from the packaging, I didn’t cry like I expected. I just held it and
thanked it for coming and apologized to it for not making it sooner.
Then I went back out to
show it to my friends who were waiting for me at the bar. Then I cried, right there in the middle of an NBA game, and
received a lot of pats on the backs and lots
of booze from lost of people I didn’t know and a few I did. There are two
days in my life I’d go to war for: meeting my wife in a dive bar and meeting Ghost Gear for the first time.
If you struck up a conversation next to someone
seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that
you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer
their next question: “What’s the book about?”
Ghost Gear is a book about survival. The father-story poems tell the story of my
father’s rural survival while the
rest of the poems tell the story of my more urban
survival. I grew up in a very rough neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee.
I’ve got matching scars underneath the fur of each eyebrow and countless scars
on my knuckles from all the fights I was in as a kid. My dad’s scars include
rope burns from the fishing nets in “Ghost Gear” and a burn on his knee from a
forest fire he fought with his brother in Oregon. The book is about how we earn
such scars and how they make us who we are. It’s a bildungsroman, a
coming-of-age book of tall tales that are often true but are more true on an
emotional scale than a factual one. Based on actual events but not factual in
every little detail. You know…big fish stories. I suppose most first books are
like this. But I really don’t care about doing something new; I care about
being original in my own right. I wrote Ghost
Gear. Not someone else. If it sounds like other books, I wear that as a
badge of honor. It is definitely doing things in its own way, and I think there
are people out there who see that.
What have you been doing to promote Ghost Gear, and what have those
experiences been like for you?
Lord, what haven’t I been doing? I’ve been on a
surprisingly large book tour since
the book came out. Something like 35 readings in ten states so far. I really
didn’t see that coming, but I work cheap, and I’m excited to visit classrooms
and work with poets of all shapes and sizes and to share my work with people
wherever they’ll have me. I’ve also work with quite a few writers as an editor
and publisher and, thus, have relationships with writers all over the place who
I think are excited for me and the book.
My first reading from the book was at AWP on the day the book was
technically released. Afterward, at the book signing, I gave away buttons with
either an image of the cover or an image of a badass unicorn on it. Most people
took the unicorn button! It was a joke, of course, and people though it was fun
and picked up a copy o the book as well. Who knew?
I also threw a big ass
book release party with an open bar at a swanky art gallery where I live in
Denver on my own dime and am throwing a release party in my hometown of
Nashville in mid July at Parnassus Books, the only independently owned bookstore in Nashville that exclusively sells
new books.
If someone asks me to do
an interview (thank you, Keith!) or
a reading or a radio show or a workshop, I always say yes, but I never try to “sell” or promote the book. I
just share my excitement about it and finally having something to show for all
this work I’ve been doing since, hell, virtually since puberty.
I’ve been writing poems
since I was 13 years old and turned 33 a month after the book came out. It took
20 years to make this thing. 20 years. That’s a lifetime for most species on
this planet, and many people never realize their dreams. I get really emotional
when I think about that. For a long time there I was terrified I’d never
publish a book, and I think I had good reason to fear this. Now that it’s
happened, that’s all I really care about: it
happened and now I’m having fun with it, which naturally translates into my
promoting the book. I have a ton of energy, I love to travel and meet new
people, my wife is awesome, and I love, love, love to talk about poetry, be it
mine or anyone else’s, so this is really the best time in my life. I’m having a
great time.
What advice do you wish someone had given you
before your first book came out?
Honestly I got great
advice the entire time. Countless people have been in my ear for years: poets,
fiction writers, carpenters, chefs, politicians, family members, people I meet
on the light rail, students, friends, voiceovers, Kevin Garnett…the list goes
on an on. I believe that anyone doing good work is an artist and actively seek
out artists every single second of my waking life, even if I never actually
meet these people, even if I just see them in a movie or dunking a basketball.
The message is always the same: WORK. Don’t talk. Work. Talk ONLY when you
work—not if you work, when you work. If you put the work in,
if you’re persistent, if you don’t give up, you will get there.
That said, here’s what
I’ll say: Learn to take a break. You have time. Most people don’t just
up and die out of nowhere. Statistically, most of us live long lives. I
overworked in grad school. I literally wrote every weekday for three years. It
was too much. I should have listened to my mentors who said I needed to
breathe, that my brain needed oxygen, that my heart and soul needed a vacation
every few months. Now that I have a book out and another almost finished
(again, whatever the hell that means), I finally feel that I have time to, you
know, not write. This is not
sacrilege; this is common sense. I get a little tired of writers saying you
have to write everyday to be a writer. That’s kind of like fighting fire with a
bazooka. The sentiment is fine, but the reality isn’t quite there. Taking time
not to write doesn’t mean I’m not writing. Of course not! I have to write to
feed my body and soul. I write every other day on average, but I’m learning to
stop worrying so much about not working, something I wish I’d known more about
when I was working like a dog. Sure, it worked, but I can’t prove the book got
published because I worked my fingers to the bone. So work hard but don’t work
so hard you hate yourself or start gaining weight or have to do drugs to sleep.
Listen to your body. Take a break when it demands one and trust the page will
speak to you when you come back.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in
the world?
Anything can.
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Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s
first book of poems, Ghost Gear, was released in 2014 with the University of
Arkansas Press. His anthology, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of
Days, was released in 2012; he is series editor of the Floodgate Poetry Series:
Three Chapbooks by Three Poets in a Single Volume; and co-editor of Warning!
Poems May Be Longer Then They Appear: An Anthology of Long-ish Poems,
forthcoming in 2015. Andrew is also a freelance editor, Founder and Managing
Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, Acquisitions Editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books,
Contributing Editor for Southern Indiana Review, and teaches college writing in
Denver, CO. Andrew's work recently appears or is forthcoming in journals such
as The Writer's Chronicle, Blackbird, Glimmer Train, InsideHigherEd.com, and
Missouri Review. Read his work at AndrewMK.com.
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