Interview with Dayna Patterson

Dayna Patterson’s creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, POETRY, North American Review, Western Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Zone 3, and others. She is the author of If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020), a hybrid collection of poetry and lyric essay that explores her Mormon ancestry and upbringing, her mother’s coming out as bisexual, and the author’s eventual apostasy from the faith she was raised in. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019).

Patterson is a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal dedicated to publishing literature at the intersection of faith and doubt. She earned a BA in English from Utah State University (2004), an MA in Literature from Texas State-San Marcos (2008), and an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University (2017), where she served as the managing editor of Bellingham Review. She has also served as the poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine.

Patterson was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention poetry prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky, and she has been a Sustainable Arts Fellow at Mineral School Artist’s Residency.

ALLIE SPIKES: First of all, I just love your new book, If Mother Braids a Waterfall—a poetry collection that’s widely textured. I stayed up all night reading it the first time I opened it. I know you had another book you’d been working on before this one came out. And correct me if I’m wrong, but you seemed sort of surprised that If Mother Braids a Waterfall was published first. It deals deeply in identity and Mormon heritage. In family relationships and the sacred. Can you talk about its early conception and the urgency to write this particular book?

DAYNA PATTERSON: I was, indeed, a little surprised that If Mother Braids a Waterfall came into the world before another book I’d been laboring over, the manuscript of my MFA thesis. I put so much effort and attention into that ms; I was sure it would be published first, and that publication sequence felt safer to me. There is a similar loose narrative underpinning IMBAW (my mother’s coming out, my subsequent faith crisis), but in my MFA thesis those details are relayed via the comfortable mask of persona. Shakespearean persona. IMBAW’s poems still have a speaker, but that speaker has no neck ruff and doublet to hide in.

Some psychologists compare faith crisis to the death of a loved one or the trauma of divorce.

My faith crisis was such a harrowing experience that I ended up writing about it from various angles and in different genres throughout my MFA. (Let’s be honest–I’m still writing about it.) The skeletal structure of this book came about when I took Brenda Miller’s creative nonfiction course and started experimenting with lyric essay. I read Carole Maso’s stunning “The Intercession of the Saints” and immediately thought of Latter-Day Saints. I wrote “The Mormons Are Coming” and “Post-Mormons Are Leaving” with Maso’s work in mind, particularly her resonant, vivid images, and afterwards Brenda recommended I write a third piece in the sequence. After completing my MFA, I did end up writing a third lyric essay, which I later broke into lines, “Former Mormons Catechize Their Kids.” I arranged those three pieces into three sections, and that provided the initial architecture of the book. “Still Mormon,” the envoi, came much later.

SPIKES: Your collection opens with “The Mormons Are Coming,” which I think does a lot of work to orient the reader in Mormon culture right up front. And you continue to do this work throughout the book with poems like “May Day” and “Post-Mormons Are Leaving.” How did your idea of audience interact with your instinct to continually orient and re-anchor your reader in these cultural manifestos and explorations?

PATTERSON: I was the only Mormon in my MFA cohort, so I knew that for my writing to make sense in the intimate space of the writing workshop, I needed to provide enough information that my peers and future readers wouldn’t get lost. I guess I’ve always hoped that my work would be meaningful for Mormon and Post-Mormon readers, but also for anyone who’s experienced a significant internal shift, whether as the result of a loved one coming out or some other perspective change that requires a radical reorientation to ways of being in the world.

SPIKES: “Pioneer Day” and “Founder’s Day” and the various letters questioning ancestors about polygamy achieve a very delicate balance of how you tie the personal to the cultural and illuminate how the personal is political. Can you talk about finding that balance?

PATTERSON: Whenever I’ve tried to write a poem that is purely cultural without the personal, those poems have failed, in my opinion, because I haven’t done the work of making the speaker trustworthy. “Founder’s Day” was a really difficult poem to write because I had to acknowledge my family’s own complicity in settler colonialist attitudes and actions, but without that acknowledgement, the poem, which implicitly criticizes a sham battle between people dressed up as cowboys and Indians, would’ve come across as didactic and hollow. Some of the last poems I was fiddling with before publication were “Founder’s Day” and the second “Dear Susannah” because I was (am) beginning to interrogate the narrative of the noble pioneer that I was fed in Sunday School. When I realized that my ancestors were some of the first people to “settle” Wellsville, Utah, and that the Western Shoshone had lived in Cache Valley for thousands of years, and that there was this ghastly sham battle still going on up till 2017, well, it was sobering, to say the least. Hopefully, through the speaker’s honesty and fallibility, readers can absorb the criticism embedded in the poem.

SPIKES: I often think of Natalie Diaz’s quote, “if I write a poem, the poem is the least of what has happened.” I’m thinking of your letter series embedded in this collection. In writing this series, what happened for you beyond the poem on the page?

PATTERSON: As long as I can remember, I’ve had this desire to travel back in time and witness things for myself or talk to people about their lives and motivations. When I was younger, it was mostly my mom I wanted to go back in time and visit. I wanted to convince her not to divorce my dad and leave us. Later, that time-travel ache broadened. I still fantasize about dropping in on Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Would I succumb to his charisma, or would he give himself away as a charlatan? I wish I could sit down over tea with Ellen Jane Robbins Bailey, the “Dear Ellen” in my book, and ask her why she converted to Mormonism, why she felt the desire to leave England and take her children on a dangerous voyage to the West, where Brigham Young was gathering the Mormons. Was she shocked when her son, my three-greats grandfather, became a polygamist? Writing the letter poems to her was part wish fulfillment, and it also put some flesh on her bones, made her and others I write to feel more like real, complex people rather than static 2D characters in a story. I feel closer to and more empathic towards my ancestors after researching their lives and voicing my questions in the epistolary poems.

SPIKES: I’ll have to admit, I’m really starry-eyed fangirling over “Our Lord Jesus in Drag.” I’m thinking of this poem, of “Eloher,” and of “I Could Never Be a Jehovah’s Witness” together. These three (among others) deftly shift into the spiritual subjunctive, that is, into possibility beyond pre-established options. I’m also thinking about the Susan Elizabeth Howe epigraph to your collection, “I had no saints, so I turned to my ancestors.” Can you talk about how or whether these things might work together for you?

PATTERSON: I absolutely love that phrase, “the spiritual subjunctive.” Emily Dickinson wrote “I dwell in Possibility.” She was talking about poetry vs. prose, and I think the possibilities of poetry and “the spiritual subjunctive” make wonderful bedfellows. I enjoy exploring alternative inroads to spirituality in poetry’s generous and flexible spaces. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss anything about orthodoxy; it mapped a path for me that led across mountain ridges with lush vistas. Poetry has become a kind of surrogate for orthodoxy, except instead of one beaten path to the peak, there are manifold deer trails, switchbacks, creek beds. Swards of green to ford.

Regarding the epigraph, I hope it is sufficiently mysterious to be read in several ways in relationship to the text, but one way it relates to the spiritual subjunctive is in conjunction with the epigraph to the “Dear May” letter poem: “You choose your ancestors.” Ralph Ellison. In this poem, I write a letter to the poet May Swenson, who was born and raised in the same town as me: Logan, Utah. If we can choose our ancestors, if we give ourselves permission to map our family trees according to a varied and rich series of connections, we open ourselves to a broader sense of inheritance, spiritual, artistic, etc. Who would you claim if you could?

SPIKES: “Pon Farr” is a great example of your work in language feasting. Every word is alive, and each line is an experience: cheek bone’s arch. I want / to close my eyes and exit nerve’s blue shoots / channeling through your Jeffries tubes... You have other poems in here such as the ones I mentioned before, “The Mormons Are Coming” and “The Post-Mormons Are Leaving,” that are brilliant and do a lot of work for the collection. They are narrative (if litanied), but super concrete, a gesture of narrative generosity to the reader. “Revision” feels like a real turning point, and “Dear Mom” is a white-hot spot. I think collections that are textured in this way are most successful for me as a reader. Not only do I feel let in, I feel I have a choice between reveling in linguistic bliss and complex world building and feeling the world in a way that makes immediate sense to me—or in a way that the logic of the poem closely maps onto the logic of discourse, casual conversation, or traditional narratology.

So then in your collection, I have poems for different occasions, different levels of interrogation, excitement, and fatigue (I mean fatigue in a positive way—in a way that says, we’ve been exploring this together, and there’s been a happening in my mind because of it). Can you talk about your process and what leads to lyrical bliss versus more straightforward inquiry? Or anchoring?

PATTERSON: I’m glad you felt those moments as “narrative generosity” and as being “let in.” I think part of the texturing that you’re describing comes from the fact that I wrote this book over the span of ten years. Towards the end of those ten years, I pursued an MFA, and I think my writing tended more towards a kind of lyrical bliss and experimentation during and after those intense years of graduate study. (Thank you, Gertrude Stein, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Jorie Graham!) I still included some earlier work in this collection, though, and resisted the temptation to significantly revise those pieces. (I have “Dear Quandary” to thank, in part, for that, the letter in which Quandary talks about not doing violence to a poem, not letting Tuesday you stomp all over Sunday you. I didn’t want post-MFA me to stomp all over pre-MFA me, so I mostly let those early poems be.)

I also think it is important to provide some relief, moments of respite to a reader, so I tried to arrange the collection with longer pieces followed by shorter, perhaps quieter poems. Pieces that, in Wallace Stevens’ words resist the intelligence / Almost successfully, followed by plain-speaking poems in overalls. Or a section break. Or white space. Or a photograph to sit with. I think these breathers, these palate cleansers, can help readers appreciate the next piece more because of those intervals of easing the mind.

SPIKES: “Study for Belief with Lines from Star Trek” takes that moment with the speaker’s mother in “Dear Mom,” and blows it wide open—to the edge of the galaxy. It seems your Mormon upbringing is something that bled into every moment, big and small. It seems that that upbringing was as emotionally demanding of you as a writer as it was of you as a disciple. Can you talk about the kind of energy that produced this terrific range of interrogation?

PATTERSON: There’s a phrase bounced around in Mormonism: “All in.” I’m not sure other religions use that phrase (or need it), but Mormons talk about being “all in.” And for the first 30 years of my life, I was all in. I woke up at 5 am every day so I could take seminary classes in high school. I served an 18-month mission in Quebec and Ontario. In college, I took religion classes every semester. I became a seminary teacher for a while and later taught adult Sunday School classes. I was a classic TBM, a “True Believing Mormon,” and my faith shaped my social life, my education, my family life, my career choices, and on and on. I am still coming to terms with how much Mormonism continues to mold my worldview.

When my mom told me she was bisexual and in a relationship, I compare that moment to a seismic event in “Revision” because it felt that big. I knew I wanted to be loving and accepting of my mom, but I didn’t know how to reconcile that with Mormonism’s pronouncement that acting on homosexual desire is a sin. I thought I could contain the cognitive dissonance that the leaders of the LDS Church were right about everything except homosexuality, but what actually happened is that my faith slowly fractured the moment I gave myself permission to disagree with church leaders. I began asking the questions I’d shelved, and the answers were too heavy or messy to be reshelved. Eventually, I dismantled the shelf. The poem “Study for Belief with Lines from Star Trek” expresses a version of me in those post-orthodoxy years who finds herself at the edge of deep space, and all the stars have disappeared. How to orient oneself in the utter darkness and not give in to fear? How to live with that unknowing and not extinguish possibility?

SPIKES: “Stained Glass” is a stunning microcosm for what this book is doing—she sweeps her hand/ over the table’s surface / and snags the fabric of her skin. / A hazard of the profession, / a few cells in exchange / for the privilege of dying light. This is a delightfully bewildering image that stays with me beyond the back cover of the book and kind of makes my mind bounce–I have so many questions about what those cells in exchange for the dying light are and the logistics and magic of such an exchange. Can you talk about why you chose to place this poem where you did? Do you see the poem in this collection as the hooks that snag your skin?

PATTERSON: When I was a missionary in Ontario, the bishop’s wife made stained glass. When I told her I’d love to learn how, she cautioned me with the first line of the poem, “You can’t be afraid of cuts.” Originally, I had this poem in the second section of the book with the other missionary poems, but I realized later that nothing about the poem actually pegs it to a specific time or place. I moved it so that its meditative inquiry “whether you believe or not” and images of glass would hopefully resonate with similar gestures later in the book.

All artforms make certain demands of an artist, and poetry is no exception. There are risks to sharing personal details, not just about faith crisis, but about family, sexuality, etc. I don’t think I’ll be excommunicated for this book–the current M.O. of the Mormon Church seems to be only to excommunicate those who are being vociferous in their opposition to the Church, and a poetry book is quiet as a bat on a summer night. But if certain family members read the book, it could strain relationships. It could cause hurt feelings. No blood, but possibly tears and heartache. That’s part of the risk I accepted when this book came into the world. These were not easy pieces to write and they are not easy to share.

SPIKES: Many of your poems push cultural boundaries, in a wonderful way. Moving beyond a high-demand religion can be so difficult. How much was fear part of your process in these interrogations? How did you decide what you could include? “Our Lord Jesus in Drag,” “The Disposal of Mormon Garments,” and the title poem, “If Mother Braids a Waterfall” are the three that come to mind. But please draw on others if they feel more relevant to you in this way.

PATTERSON: I have been very fortunate in writing mentors (Star Coulbrooke, Suzanne Elizabeth Howe, Christine Butterworth-McDermott, Bruce Beasley, Oliver de la Paz, Susanne Antonetta, and Brenda Miller), as well as writing groups before and after my MFA experience. These mentors and writing communities have infused me with courage where I might have faltered on my own. Over the years, they’ve encouraged me to write about and lean into uncomfortable spaces, difficult moments. To wrestle with what unsettles me, those emotions that pull in several different directions. They promised that the inherent tension would lead to the kind of writing others would want to read, and their permission and feedback and affirmation has been vital to me over the past decade.

SPIKES: You did a lot of research for this book. Can you talk about your experience incorporating research into your poetry? What was it like? How to establish the right voice?

PATTERSON: At first, I tended to include too much historical information, particularly in the letter poems. It took several rounds of workshopping and garnering feedback from trusted mentors to hone in on the salient details, the elements necessary to the poems. I had to sacrifice stories and lines I loved in order to maintain clarity or pace at times.

Voice was also tricky. I wanted to include enough information that readers knew what was happening in an eavesdropping way, but I had to balance details and hints without explaining the addressee’s life to her. It was a multilayered rhetorical space to occupy, and, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I pulled it off. Maybe that’s why I kept on writing letter poems. To fail better.

As far as research goes, the main text I resorted to was a giant book called Charles Ramsden Bailey: His Life and Families. It’s the out-of-print work of amateur historians, Jay and Betsy Long. If I remember correctly, Betsy and my grandma are cousins. Jay and Betsy are deceased, but her children were kind enough to give me permission to reprint some of the photos from the book, since the originals seem to be lost amid the Long’s boxed research.

In addition to photos, there is a transcription of Charles’ diary, now held in Utah State University’s historical archives. My polygamist three-greats grandfather, Charles Ramsden Bailey, wrote this brief account of his life, fifty-something handwritten pages, because he wanted to leave a testament behind, his witness to future generations that polygamy was God’s will. His words had rather the opposite effect on me than the one he intended, but it was still a fascinating experience to read, in his own handwriting, his side of the story. Kind of like time travel. Time travel in which I’m mute and can only listen.

The Longs gathered historical accounts and other pioneer journals to publish with Charles’ to give context to his narrative. There is also a short interview with Susannah Hawkins Bailey, the wife I descended from. I owe a great debt to the Longs. Not all of their information was correct, but the book is 800+ pages, a massive undertaking. Most of my letter poems incorporate or react to information I first encountered in that tome.

SPIKES: If you could choose three verbs for what your collection, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, is doing, what would they be?

PATTERSON: Doubting. Revising. Searching. In that order.

SPIKES: What are you reading right now?

PATTERSON: For poetry: Jen Stewart Fueston’s Madonna, Complex, Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, Jenny Molberg’s Refusal, Kathryn Neurnberger’s Rue, Elizabeth Vignali’s Endangered [Animal], and Kathryn Smith’s Chosen Companions of the Goblin.

For nonfiction: Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes.

For research: Margaret Barker’s The Mother of the Lord.

With my kids: Donna Jo Napoli’s Greek Myths and Adam Gidlitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale.

For fun: Lucinda Ganderton’s Embroidery: A Step-by-Step Guide to more than 200 Stitches.

SPIKES: Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you wish I would have asked?

PATTERSON: You asked so many astute questions, Allie. I’m going to be mulling over the artistic relationship between staining glass and writing poetry for a long time. Thank you for affording me this space! It’s been a deep pleasure and honor.

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