Jory Mickelson’s second book All This Divide uses the lens of the Western US’s 19th century history, to ponder and reflect on what the past has to say about our present time of crises. Each layer of history has its own story to tell and also touches upon the stories that come before and after.
Michael Garrigan’s second book River, Amen uses rivers and wilderness as a way to reimagine religious rituals. River, Amen was selected for the Weatherford Award for Poetry by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association.
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Jory Mickelson: Michael, thanks for agreeing to talk with me about our books and our friendship. It’s hard to believe that we met on Zoom deep in the pandemic in 2020 at a writing “retreat” put on by The Freeflow Foundation in Missoula, MT. It is wild to remember how experimental that seemed to me at the time. It is even wilder to think how we’ve become friends, penpals, and commenters on one another’s poems even though you live in Pennsylvania and I live in Washington state.
During the FreeFlow retreat, you read some of your poems and I was immediately captivated by your poem “The River, Dark” which appeared in the online journal Rust+Moth and your first book Robbing the Pillars. I’ve been admiring both the diversity of your poems and their seemingly casual grace ever since.
Your new book of poems, River, Amen, came out this past year, and as poet and flyfisher Geoffrey Davis said about you, “Like a true convert of nature and member of the church of possibility…” Could you tell us about your conversion to the church of nature?
Michael Garrigan: Jory! Have we really been exchanging letters that long? Wow! I’m so glad our paths crossed during that virtual “retreat,” and am so excited about your new book, All This Divide, that was just released! I remember reading an early draft of this collection and being blown away by the narratives of people and place that you were weaving together.
So, my conversion to the church of nature really started when I wanted someplace to smoke cigarettes as a teenager without being caught. That was right around the same time that I quit being an altar boy because I absolutely hated tucking my shirt in and having to ring the bells at just the right time during the Eucharist. I discovered that I could rock jump out into the middle of the Susquehanna River and pretend I was fishing, and smoke as many cigarettes as I wanted. Thankfully, I quit smoking a few short years later, but I never quit that river. It’s called to me ever since, even when I was off doing trail work out west for a few years trying to follow in the footsteps of Gary Snyder (the disciple who probably led me the most through my conversion). I’ve only stepped into a church a handful of times since for funerals. Rivers are enough for me.
I remember being enamored with how you navigated spirituality in your first book, Wilderness//Kingdom and am curious how you approach it in All This Divide. Did you find the poems taking you into unexpected, spiritual places?
JM: One of the things I struggled with in this new collection is how to talk about the often traumatic and violent events in 19th century US Western history. All This Divide uses these stories as a lens to look at our turbulent present. In navigating this material, I often needed to read between the lines to see what wasn’t being said or what voices may have been erased. Additionally, I needed to find a way not to co-opt other voices (especially Indigenous ones) or to fall into the trope of trauma porn. By that, I mean reducing or essentializing an identity around the trauma they may have suffered.
What emerged in my searching was that often, instead of people speaking from the past, I began to hear the voices of objects–museum pieces, if you will. All of the “Plunder” poems in the book look at a different aspect of the word and often in the persona of the inanimate object. Is this spiritual? I am not certain, but it was definitely surprising and seemed to emerge from outside myself.
Much of what might be identified as “spiritual” in my work might be in the gaps and cracks, the silence and the pauses. “Slowly Now the Shadows Lengthen” uses some of the words of a popular hymn from the 1800s to give voice to a homesteader on the prairie longing for their beloved instead of God. “Beautiful Country” grapples with violence and reconciliation, both of which are inseparable from the landscape it happens in. “Convergence//Conversion” tells two separate accounts of the same historical events as they come crashing together on the page. We might simply say that spirit is what is moving among the text or maybe even what moves us–emotionally, experientially–in the poem.
So, Michael, why rivers? Why not lakes or streams or seas or the ocean? What is it about rivers, aside from a convenient place for adolescent larceny, that keeps you coming back to them again and again?
MG: Yes! I write about ledges, edges, and the seams that are created between fast and slow water as places where the “spiritual” shows up for me as well. It’s those gaps, those thin places, that let worlds and selves interact with each other.
Why rivers? Well, rivers are made of streams and creeks and cricks and they all flow to the sea, so it’s not just rivers that fascinate me, but water in general. I think this summer will be a lot of time spent around lakes. We’ll see. It’s the wilderness that fascinates me the most, and it seems like water leads me to those places most naturally, whether it be some alpine lake or river in the middle of Montana or stream behind an abandoned factory that holds wild trout. I’m just always looking for those edges and ledges.
Rivers will always show up in my work because they are such an essential part of my writing process. However, I’ve been moved and fascinated with the animal world more than anything lately. It seems like every poem I write is about or from the perspective of an animal. Dead Elk has become a central character that keeps taking me into worlds and both literal and physical places. Salamanders, salmon, my dog, muskellunge, have all been guiding me into that unseen in-between.
What has been moving you lately? Are you still writing about that time period and location, or have you been exploring something else entirely?
JM: I finished the manuscript for All This Divide in the summer of 2021. It took two years for a publisher to pick up, so I’ve moved on to new topics since then. My third book of poems Picturing is being published in early 2025 with End of the Line Press in Toronto, Canada, and it deals with visual art, queerness, and historical erasure.
I am in the middle of a new book-length project about a specific artist. It revolves around looking and being looked at, perception and perspective. I am also thinking my way back into the history of the West. So, I guess I am writing some poems and just thinking about other poems? The poems for the future project circle a specific historical figure in the West who is viewed as a hero and villain at the same time–which has some very uncomfortable parallels to current events! It isn’t a new phenomenon, admiring a complicated person or even loving the work of someone who was actively harmful toward others.
I think in much of my work, I am trying to hold space for how complex, complicated, and nuanced the world is. We live in such a polarized, divisive, and us versus them time that the work of remaining open and curious is very difficult. We should always name and work toward ending abuse, injustice, and oppression. But, and I am speaking solely for myself here, I don’t believe that anyone can be dismissed and treated as “other” without enacting the same sort of violence we claim the other side is perpetuating. I am for the liberation and flourishing of all people, grounded in our common humanity.
I am curious, the animals you are encountering in your work–what are they teaching you?
MG: I think your ability and willingness to hold space for complexity is one of the many things I’ve always admired about your work. I can’t wait to read your new work and this person!
I think, in some ways, I’ve grown so confused by “us” that I’ve moved into writing poems from the nonhuman voice. Well, not completely. Inevitably, the human always shows up. I like the freedom that it offers. Writing from the perspective of plants and animals has, more than anything, offered me a chance to get out of the way of my poetry, and to move away from the “self” in ways that I’ve needed. What have they taught me? Hmm. In some ways, how to live? I know that sounds so big and ambiguous and grand and possibly really hollow, but trying to see the world through the eyes of the spirit of a dead elk or my dog or an ouzel crunching on salmon bones has helped write towards places of joy and gratitude, which for some reason, is harder for me to do when the voice of the poem is a human.
There’s also an incredibly complex world that these voices are drawing me into. They are forcing me to alter my perspectives, to kneel in the dirt and bend really close to the ground, and even to dip my head completely underwater when I’m fishing in order to see the world from a vantage closer to theirs. Earlier this spring, I took a weekend and camped up in the northern part of the state just so I could saunter through a reclaimed strip mine where elk have returned to because, for some reason, Dead Elk wanted a poem about that. I came across a beautiful maple leaf viburnum miles back in the woods, away from any trails, along a stream full of native brook trout that I’m planning on bushwacking back to later this week just so I can sit under its canopy and finish the poem it had started for me as I bow-and-arrow casted a caddis fly into a slim runnel of water next to it.
I think this will be the last question. I’ve always been curious about how you weave your strong connections to the natural world into the services that you lead now that you are a pastor. Does nature show up in your sermons? Even though I don’t go to church anymore, I hope that, when we meet in person, I get to attend one of your services, just as long as there’s a poem somewhere in it.
JM: I’ve always been mindful of not mixing my day job with my writing life. I don’t want to go to the pulpit to promote a reading I am giving or a new book. On the same hand, I want people to be able to come to my poems with the understanding that I am a writer, without any assumptions or baggage they would have with me being a pastor.
Recently, a religious person said to me, “It must be so nice to have a medium [poetry] in which to work out your spiritual life.” It really took me aback. I replied, “We wouldn’t say something like that to a landscape painter. When I write, I am serving the art of poetry, the best I know how. Sure, my inner life comes out in my poems, but for me, it is about discipline and the struggle to make the best poems I can, like a painter might make the best picture they can.” I think the person was taken aback by my reply.
Things aren’t as neatly divided as that, but that is my statement of faith about poetry. The joy about writing liturgy, prayers, and sermons is that I have a poet’s associative mind. Many people use stories, but I use metaphors and parallels. Thankfully, someone else in the New Testament also used a lot of metaphors for things unseen, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”
My earliest memories are being outdoors in the natural world. Whether you want to assign a Creator to it or not, we can’t help but be moved by the glory of it.
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Jory Mickelson’s first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their second and third books ALL THIS DIVIDE (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and PICTURING (End of the Line Press) will be out in 2024. Other publications include Court Green, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, Terrain.org, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and were awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Winter Tangerine, Desert Rat Writers Residency, Dear Butte, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They live and write amid the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He is the author of two poetry collections — River, Amen (Wayfarer Books, winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry) and Robbing the Pillars (Homebound Publications) — and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Water~Stone Review, and North American Review. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and he believes every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. You can find more of his work at www.mgarrigan.com.
Image: Pine Watt
ID: Stream and fog in Sierra Nevada mountains.
Psaltery & Lyre 