Jacqueline Berger’s first poetry collection, The Mythologies of Danger, selected by Alberto Rios, won the Bluestem Award and was published in 1998. It went on to win the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) Award the same year. Her second book, Things That Burn, selected by Poet Laureate Mark Strand, was the 2004 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize and was published through the University of Utah Press. The Gift That Arrives Broken won the Autumn House Poetry Prize was published in 2010, and some poems from the book were featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. She is a professor of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California and lives in San Francisco with her husband.

Bruce Snider, author of Paradise, Indiana comments about your latest book: “Everything has a place in Berger’s concise and compelling narratives as she examines intersections of memory and loss, exploring the infinite ways the past shadows the present.” Please tell us how your fourth book, The Day You Miss Your Exit (Broadstone Books, 2018), came about:

This book was tricky. I spent more years writing and then completely discarding the contents than I have with any of my other books. My parents died four months apart and so initially that’s what I was writing about. The work poured out of me, but most of the poems were not very good, though I didn’t know this right away. The whole experience certainly drove home the point that I use writing, need writing, to understand my life. The other point it drove home is that there’s no hurrying the process. I couldn’t write these early-grieving poems any faster; there was no skipping over to the next stage. In the end, very few death poems made it into the book. I was surprised to find myself, instead, at some point writing about sex.

I enjoyed reading your Wikipedia entry and was intrigued by your comment about writing: “It’s a very strange and mysterious and unconscious process.” Could you please expand on this:

I generate all of the raw material for my poems through freewriting, which is, in essence, a way of tricking the brain into forgetting what it knows, what it thinks it wants to say, and going free fall into some, hopefully, unexpected territory. This kind of generating, for me, relies on writing fast, keeping the hand moving. I love when I really don’t know, afterward, what I just wrote. Of course, following the generating phase, I switch to my laptop and the slowness of crafting begins. Sometimes the final poem retains very little of the freewrite, but it doesn’t matter. Generating is sacred, and it can’t happen simultaneously with editing. That would be like driving with the brakes on.

What is your educational background in writing? What poets have had the most influence on you?

I studied writing first at Goddard College in Vermont. Olga Broumas and Jane Miller were my teachers, so of course also early influences. I was bowled over, coming from L.A., writing in a converted silo with snow falling outside while Olga played the drums. This is where I developed my taste for freewriting. Later I studied with Chana Bloch at Mills College where I earned my MFA. Other writerly influences include Robert Hass, Deborah Digges, Jack Gilbert, Louise Gluck, Eavan Boland, Mark Doty, Anne Carson.

Does being a teacher of writing help your own writing? What have you found are the major obstacles in writing with students?

You know the old joke: “What are the three best things about teaching? June, July, and August.” Well, certainly, the schedule is compatible with the writing life, and that’s not insignificant. But I just love the work itself; what can happen in the classroom continues to excite me, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years. Teaching helps me focus my thinking, read more deeply, stir the pot, all of which are enormously helpful for writing.

Students struggle to use writing as discovery rather than documentation, a distinction I first heard articulated by Joan Didion. If writing is just getting down on the page what we already know, then what’s the point? Plus the writing itself tends to be flat and predictable. Students doing creative writing as well as critical writing easily lapse into writing not only what they already know, but worse, what they’ve inherited as true from the culture at large. This, of course, is not a problem that we necessarily outgrow, but hopefully one that we become better at recognizing in our own work.

Your poetry has appeared in such anthologies and journals American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon), On The Verge (Agni Press), Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Nimrod, and The Iowa Review. Do you have another book in the works?  How long does it take you to write one?

I do have a new manuscript and am just now going to start sending it out. I typically write the first iteration of a book in about a year or year and a half, but I’m always changing it, adding new poems, removing weaker ones, over the course of months and years of sending and being rejected.

How early did you become interested in writing poetry and when/where were you first published?  What fiction or nonfiction have you written?

I became interested in writing poetry in college, or, rather, I started writing poetry then. I suppose I was interested well before that. My favorite book as a very young child was The Tall Book of Make-Believe. Mildred Plew Meigs’ “Moon Song” made me wild. I had a fine case of beginner’s luck when I sent out my first poem in my early twenties and had it accepted by the Northwest Review. 

I can’t see myself ever writing fiction, but creative nonfiction interests me. I always think I will when I have more time. And I did publish, years ago, an essay about poetry and shame in a small journal called Fish Dance. I have to say that I enjoyed being explanatory, maybe even emphatic, on the page, something that prose seems much more at home with than poetry.

Does living in California have any influence on your work?

Not necessarily California in general, but growing up in Los Angeles has had a great influence on my recent work. Many of the poems in The Day You Miss Your Exit are set in L.A. and make use of the landscape, geographical and personal, to address the loss of not only my parents but their generation and of our shared cultural framework.

– Carol Smallwood