Interview by Diane Gottlieb
“If You Think the Way to Learn,” the first poem in Ana Maria Spagna’s Mile Marker Six, takes us right to the heart of this collection: it moves from Spagna’s past to her present, from her childhood home to the land, from what is, to what was, to what can and can never be. Spagna, an award-winning author of nine books of essays, nonfiction, and fiction, touches us again and again with each poem in her debut collection of poetry. A former backcountry trails worker, Spagna shares her deep respect for the natural world through the eyes of one who knows it intimately. Her poems, like her prose, call on readers to take notice of—and responsibility for—not only what we stand to lose in nature, but what we have already lost.
It was my great pleasure to speak with Ana Maria Spagna on Zoom about Mile Marker Six, the differences between writing prose and poetry, and how loss and the environment show up in her work.
Diane Gottlieb: Congratulations on Mile Marker Six. How does it feel to have a poetry book out in the world?
Ana Maria Spagna: It’s a big change. It feels like being exposed all over again. I sort of got used to that with nonfiction, but this is a different kind of exposure and vulnerability. Like, “Who knows if I’m a poet? I just made some poems.” It makes me feel insecure, but wonderful. It’s amazing to have your work in the world.
DG: You have been writing for a long time. What made you jump into poetry?
AMS: It was time for something new, to stretch a little bit. I’ve read poetry for a long, long time. I try to read it in the morning as a spiritual practice. Something to put me in the right brain space, better than looking at my phone. A long time ago, I let go of trying to understand poetry. I told myself, “Whatever it brings you, whatever it makes you feel, that’s what it is.” That kept poetry in a very different place than my writing brain, my analytical brain. It felt scary to enter that realm. And I like doing scary things. There’s something to the little shiver that comes in.
DG: Are there things you can say in a poem that may not lend themselves to either nonfiction or fiction?
AMS: I think they just come up in different ways. Poetry goes straight to the heart, or to places I don’t expect, really fast. I’ve always liked when an essay swerves, when it takes me someplace else. But poems do it faster. Sometimes they take me to similar themes or places, but faster and deeper in surprising ways.
DG: Can you say more about being taken back to similar themes in your writing?
AMS: It’s my father’s death. It’s been forty years, but it’s what comes, and I’ve learned to let it back in. Like, “Oh, you again, come on in. What do you got today?” And of course, the wonder of nature, the small wonders of nature, the coyote pups.
But also, there are things I will not write about in essays. I do not want to expose people. Or there are those ethical lines we draw. And the poetry kept taking me there. Carol Ann Davis, a wonderful poet, led me to the work of Larry Levis and his collection Winter Stars. What she said about his work was really helpful to me. “You don’t have to name names. You don’t have to explain anything. You can write to the feelings. You can write in the images and let them take you there.”
DG: Nature and the environment informs much of your prose writing. You have lived in remote (with a capital R) areas for over thirty years. You, more than many, know nature—as much as such a thing is possible. Do you see yourself as an ecopoet, your work ecopoetry?
AMS: While I’m not a big fan of labels because of the way they separate subjects I’m passionate about (queerness, for example, from nature—lyricism from advocacy), I am absolutely writing ecopoetry. Not so much because nature figures prominently, but because of the conflation of loss and nature. In my thirty years in the North Cascades, I’ve watched climate change happen in real time. I’ve seen glaciers disappear firsthand. I’ve seen wildfires grow larger and hotter and more frequent every year. I’ve seen wildlife in decline, too, from salmon in the Columbia River to pikas (an alpine rodent) in the high country.
These losses naturally meld with the personal losses in my life…and, I think, in all our lives. I definitely feel urgency to address the frustration and sadness and confusion that come with the destruction we have wrought and continue to wreak—alongside the pure wonder of watching, say, coyote pups or cutthroat trout or swallows in flight.
Somehow poetry, for me, allows me to get closer to these feelings, to expose them raw. A poem can hold all of it in a way that prose, or me trying to explain it here, never can.
DG: Loss is prominent in Mile Marker Six.
AMS: Yes, loss on several levels. Loss of my father, loss of friends. And I think a huge part of confronting climate change is not just what we can do to stop it, but acknowledging what we’ve already lost, and what we’re going to lose. Loss is part of love, isn’t it?
You carry that loss forward even as you love anew. So it seems important to go there. I’m analyzing that now, but I didn’t analyze it when I went in. I just wrote the poems, and that’s where they took me.
DG: When you write a poem about loss, do you feel any different when it’s finished?
AMS: Yeah. To me, it feels like a release, like a relief just to say it, to speak it, to acknowledge it. And in a poem like “Ode to a Second Baseman,” which is an ode to someone I loved who is gone, just getting to spend that much time trying to remember that person, trying to precisely describe everything about that person, felt like being with that person. So, there’s that gift. But some of the other poems are just confronting hard things. There’s something to saying it that feels right to me. I don’t want to say healing, because the wound still exists. I don’t want to say it makes the wound go away. But of course, you can heal and still have the wound. I just don’t want to make it sound too easy.
DG: In terms of the broader scope of your writing, are you spending more time on poetry?
AMS: I am spending more time on poetry right now, but I’m also always writing essays and have a book I’m doing edits on.
DG: Can you tell us more about the book?
AMS: The new book’s coming out fall of 2022—it’s called Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre, about a supposed massacre of Chinese miners along the Columbia River in 1875. It takes me into the history of the place I’ve lived for thirty years, into Indigenous history and xenophobia broadly in our country. So a very different kind of book. But boy, it’s been a journey, too—about five years on that one.
DG: Congratulations. Is there a new poetry book in the making as well?
AMS: There are poems coming. I don’t know if they’ll be a book. And then I have an essay I really like coming out in River Teeth Magazine early in 2022 called “On the Hairline Fringe,” about living way up here near the St. Lawrence River.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several books including Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going, Reclaimers, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Pilgrimage, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, and What Rough Beast, and are collected in Mile Marker Six, which appeared from Finishing Line Press in 2021. She lives in the North Cascades and teaches in the MFA programs at Antioch and Western Colorado Universities.
Diane Gottlieb’s writing has appeared in Atlas and Alice, Bending Genres, 100-Word Story, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and Entropy, among others, and has been anthologized in And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing. She is the winner of Tiferet’s 2021Writing Contest in nonfiction and was the 2021 Dancing in the Rain fellow at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Diane is Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. You can find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and on Twitter @DianeGotAuthor.