Andy Young‘s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2024. (You can order it here.) She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. – Alanie Lacy
Alanie Lacy: You have a book coming out in October 2024, Museum of the Soon to Depart, could you talk a little bit about what this book is and how the idea came to be?…
As we entered our friends’ garden, Irmgard and Alfred were ready for the walk Irmgard had promised.
Irmgard and Alfred had lived in London during the war, where Alfred manufactured accessories for clothing. As my father-in-law made all the uniforms for the Canadian armed forces, he became a customer of Alfred’s company. After the war — fearing that World War III might erupt — the Irmgard and Alfred emigrated to Canada, living in Montreal where they became friends with my in-laws. Once these fears subsided, they moved to Vence in the south of France. After Jane and I married, Irmgard and Alfred befriended us, calling us “the children”. Before we began living nearby, in Saint Jeannet, Jane and I would visit the Irmgard and Alfred once or twice a year.…
Joy Ride by Ron Slate (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
A poet of ideas and emotions, Ron Slate comes as close as anyone to the phrase in Roethe’s villanelle, “The Waking,” “we think by feeling.” While his poems embody ideas and convey feelings, they evoke experiences, they are experiences. They are about boats, gulls, travels to Istanbul, to Brazil, to France. They are about family, friends, and acquaintances, doubt, certainty, grief, joy, imagination, baseball, jazz, and drums, also, airports, hospitals, a neighborhood bar, and a joy ride in a black and white (patrol car) with two women. There’s an investment of self and an absence of ego. They evoke solitude and life with others, experiences borne out of passed down stories, memories, and images embedded in thoughts. …
It was almost two am. I was in the common room of my college dorm, reading The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. It was Saturday; I had given up a night of partying and fun with friends to sit alone and read. Three of my friends came in and I was so engrossed in the book that I didn’t notice until they were a foot away from me. Two of them were visibly tipsy, eyes narrowed by tiredness. K leaned in and hugged me, relaxing all her body weight onto my shoulders, limbs loosening into sleep.
“Okay let’s go” the other two said and hoisted K up from me.
“Get high with that yet?” one of them says, looking at the battered copy lying in my lap.…
In most novels that have beautiful nature writing, nature only acts as a backdrop, a pretty painting and landscape to hold the real stories between people. I’d be spellbound reading those well-drawn details of beauty, of peace and green and spring. But The Overstory by Richard Powers takes it to another level, making those descriptions seem inadequate and superficial for something so grand and miraculous: trees. In response to the Overstory, the trees would say to the Romantic poets– Shelley, Byron, Keats, “You only like me for my looks? Nothing else?” Powers gives us that something else. He illuminates for us their history, biology, personifies their desires, fears, hopes, and very soul, beyond merely their commercial or aesthetic appeal. It brings forth the forest as an alive, dynamic system that’s buzzing with life and its own dramas at every moment, inside and underground.…
I take deep breaths, regulating my heartbeat after my child has a tantrum. I can stay calm until naptime when I will sit down to write or curl up to read. The ceiling has water damage, despite three roofers failing to find a leak. Miller Moths keep appearing in the bathroom, taking a break from their annual migration just to swoop at my face. When I write, I often focus on moments of wonder and discovery, but in the chaos of these days when my toddler barely sleeps and the house feels littered with unfortunate surprises, my dark side craves a scotch and about six hours alone. I dream of writing. I dreamed of this child. While balancing the two, my collection of Shirley Jackson books calls to me from the shelf in my workspace.…
Don’t remember how I found out, but I may have stumbled on it trying to find a classroom in my freshman year many decades ago. And it was the only thing that kept me going.
It wasn’t in any of the orientation booklets or pamphlets about adjustment to college life meant to make you feel at home that were displayed in the counselor’s office. It wasn’t referred to in the interviews or introductory talks or added to the list that made this college so much better than others. And I never heard anyone talk about it.
But the college sleeping room was always open, at least every time I went. You entered through a normal wooden door in one of the buildings, just like any other classroom or professor’s office door.…
