Contributor Spotlight: Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe’s hybrid essay “Ballast” is part of Issue 76 of Bellingham Review. Subscribe or purchase a single issue through our Submittable page here.

What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?

I drafted the piece at a two-week residency at the Whitely Center at Friday Harbor Laboratories. It was the first piece I drafted for—and after developing the scope of—the manuscript.

Tell us about your writing life.

I’ve spent much of my life naturally at odds with a binary way of thinking and being. I moved to a new place every three or four years growing up and as such did not always have the ease of safety, acceptance, and belonging within defined group boundaries. Over time I think I resisted easy social identification because that social identification was what I saw disconnecting human beings from one another.

Whether between family or in relation to broader communities local and global, I have spent a good chunk of my adult life trying to build rather than blow up the bridges, trying to connect people and ideas across chasms social, political, and cultural. This more than anything else shapes my writing life.

In this current political context in our country, 45 repeatedly reflects back to us the part of our society that’s broken, including the inability to see beyond binary dichotomies. A growing and very troubling number of news outlets drive binary-reinforcing news that serve the privileged few rather than the diverse individuals and country that we are. And they have actually been brutally and depressingly effective at convincing at least 20-25% of our population that caring about the well-being of other human beings is only something you do if you are a liberal do-gooder. Caring about other human beings has become a partisan issue. As a citizen in this country, certainly I must do my part to elect people that are these kinds of examples—committed to non-binary ways of being and to seeing constituents as more than a demographic summary to be worked around with gerrymandering and voter suppression.

But as a writer, I know my modality or kind of tactics must change—change by necessity. Change in desperation. Change by means of context. I’ve been so consumed with the geographic and professional upheaval that I’m still thinking about what this means and how it will translate in terms of my life as an artist, a writer, and advocate.

What I do know is that by using language to attempt to drive cultural shifts, we shake the latent politics of language up, regardless of medium, perhaps inspiring change, even if it’s not change in our lifetime. Writers innovate, provoke, incite through language. I don’t believe language is itself revolutionary, but I do believe writers can shake the foundations, driving long-term transformation.

As writers, we need to at least attempt to write ourselves out of this. We need to disrupt and challenge binary ways of thinking and being. We must radicalize ways of thinking and using language—a language that is bereft or unable to allow us, as a country, to live in connection. A binary way of thinking and being causes us to miss the beauty and possibilities of the lives in all of us.

Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life most influences your writing?

My resistance to binary ways of being probably inhabits my work more than anything else.

What writing advice has stayed with you?

I don’t remember word-for-word advice, but my workshop with Arthur Sze around 2006 at Port Townsend Writers Workshop stuck with me. It was basically to take more time for reflection and drafting—in particular to write beyond what I thought the manuscript’s end was to see what surfaced.

What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? Favorite writer(s)?

At the moment, I would say Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.

What are you reading right now?

Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion; Duriel E. Harris’s No Dictionary of Living Tongue; Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev; Selah Saterstrom’s Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics; Lauren Ireland’s Feelings; N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

A manuscript about climate change and migration.

Anything else our readers might want to know about you?

I just moved back to my heart’s home of Seattle. In April, I joined the Sierra Club Executive Committee for Seattle. I am so grateful to have this means through which to translate a lifelong preoccupation with social and environmental justice into even more substantive action.

Where can our readers connect with you online?

Featured Image: “Chem Pollux in ballast on her way between the breakwaters” by Mark de Bruin