Terrapin Book Interview Series: Geraldine Connolly Interviews Dion O'Reilly

The following is the third in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings.

Geraldine Connolly: What central themes haunted you in the writing of this book?

Dion O'Reilly: The mind grappling with a world full of both exquisite beauty and also unimaginable evil pervades Ghost Dogs. I seek to balance these stark elements almost in the way a painter balances light and dark in chiaroscuro. I believe such juxtaposition of supposed opposites ignites the lyric moment, an experience of deep connection with the Living World. So I guess I would say connection haunts the book—how to connect, which, I think, might be at the heart of  lyric poetry.

A motif that emerged is the way animals function as inspiration and solace. I knew I wanted my book to be called Ghost Dogs because the entire arc of the collection reflects a haunting—the past whispering in my ear. I grew up on a ranch, isolated and often in peril: mastiffs, horses, pigs, fish, and raptors were a solace, a source of wisdom. This animal motif emerged naturally because, on the ranch, I spent more time with animal-animals than human-animals. As I say in my poem “Rivervale,” Herons lifted their great bodies from the streambed,/ shining fish caught in their beaks,and the agony/ twisting in the air made sense.
 
Gerry: The California landscape is very vivid in your work. How does the landscape of your childhood inform the poems?

Dion: Well, as I say, I grew up (and still live part of the year) in a beautiful place—the Soquel Valley, on an eighteen acre ranch with two streams running through it. So I write what I know. Portraying connection with The Living World is a theme I borrow from eco-poetry, and just another way to engage the lyric moment of connection. A landscape is a self-portrait; a self portrait contains a world.

For some reason, as a child, I was able to pay attention to The Living World, and it lifted my thoughts to a different plane. That kind of focus was redemptive, and I’m grateful. It’s the same process when I write, paying attention helps me transform. For example, early in the book as a child, I watch the heron’s prey—the fish struggling—but as an adult I identify with raptors. I admire their hunger and their agency:

          The sun, a muzzle flash,
          turning the meadow bright, burning
          off the haze. I soar in, see it magnified,
          everything itself only more so.

Gerry: Can you tell us about your writing process?

Dion: The most important tool for me is reading regularly. Reading all sorts of poets. I start my day, preferably before sunrise, with reading poetry.

Other than that, I would say that really looking at my life is key to my process: Ghost Dogs contains stories I carried for decades. The difficulty was in seeing the narratives differently. For example, writing about my sister led me to express a new compassion for her. I struggle not to be the heroine of the tale, not to write revenge poems, not to reinforce tired grudges or viewpoints. If the poem does not create a connective moment of insight, it doesn’t satisfy me, doesn’t provide the poetry fix I seek. I guess that’s what we call discovery, which is often the hardest part of the process. But that moment of discovery might be what makes a poem a poem. It’s a thrill

But sometimes I wonder what discovery really is cognitively. It might be a  moment where, suddenly, I see my thoughts at work, almost like meditation, a meta moment where I catch myself identified with my thoughts, rise above, and connect with a different Self—a moment where I say, This isn’t the same old story. It’s a song. It’s a sonnet. It’s a chant. It’s a moment where I did wrong. It’s not what I thought it was. It’s not the voice in my head anymore. We all have voices in our head, from childhood, from middle school, from MFA workshops. I would hope my process sees these thoughts, these running inner dialogues, and transforms them. My poet mind is like a kind adult shaking my suffering, self-involved, or just blithely unaware self and saying Hey, things aren't what you think they are!!!

Nowadays, I work less from my old narratives and more from prompts, word lists, rhyme, and form. I think that's a common evolution for poets. Still, word lists and prompts often excavate memories related to those in Ghost Dogs, but they force me to express them differently.

That being said, I write about whatever obsesses me. Whatever voices are in my head! I love to give myself that freedom and permission. It’s a kind of self acceptance. I think of the painter Chagall who never stopped painting flying goats and Russian villages. All the paintings are different yet the same. I don’t care if I write about the same thing for the rest of my life. The magic of poetry is that it’s a portal to infinite perspectives.

Gerry: Did you find it difficult to organize the book or did the poems fall easily into place?

Dion: Yes! I found it very difficult! Danusha Lameris, Ellen Bass, and Diane Lockward helped me organize Ghost Dogs. Ordering the book was its own discovery. I realized the poems traced my experience in a cohesive way I hadn’t seen before. The arc goes something like the following: reveling in the beauty of the Living World, the bad stuff that happened, the struggle that ensued, the redemption of adulthood.

Gerry: Do you think of yourself as a poet of the body? It seems that your work is so truthful about the body, both its suffering and its pleasures. Overcoming the suffering seems like a central concern, also you dare to write about the aging body in such a  frank and accepting way. I wonder how you came to this stance. Do you think of it as stoic?

It’s true my body has experienced extremes: the constant beatings as a child, enduring third-degree burns over most of my body, but life is beloved and joyous too with its many physical pleasures. I’ve had a lot of fun in my life and taken my body on many adventures! I just want to talk about it all. I don’t want to leave anything out. True sadness, for me, is to ignore part of my own experience.

I'm not afraid to talk anatomically about a woman's body, to break taboos or broach certain topics. I don’t understand why talking frankly about the aging female body, both its pleasures and its decay, is not a subject for polite company.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in such an isolated place, grew up in a barn as they say, I have always found it difficult to adhere to social conventions, so I’m just more open about my body. Dorianne Laux said of my writing, You're willing to say anything, and that can’t be taught. I agree, that at best, it’s difficult to teach a willingness to break silence. But whenever I read someone like Sharon Olds, Diane Seuss, Rachel McKibbon, Francesca Bell, Alexis Rhone Fancher, or Denise Duhamel, I see any subject is worthy of poetry. Singing the body electric has a long history in American poetry. It’s time for women to sing it too. Funny how people never stop being shocked yet intrigued by these violations of taboo. I guess that means we still need to talk about it.

I don’t know if I’m stoic. Maybe resilient is a better word. I think stoics suffer in silence, and I like to belt it out!

Sample poem from Dion’s Ghost Dogs:


Ghost Dogs  

Two hundred pounds apiece,
with strong bodies, great black heads,
and sad, sagging faces, they were my companions
through the long years of childhood.
Mastiffs. Herds of them—
studs, a handful of bitches, scores of puppies.
Bored, in dusty clumps, they guarded the driveway,
pulling themselves up
onto oversized padded feet
to trail my horse through the hills,
then—with surprising speed—racing
up deer trails in futile pursuit
of coyotes or bobcats.

My friends risked stitches in their thighs   
by knocking on the door,
and when the proud cars of boyfriends pulled up—
a gleaming ’68 Camaro, a convertible Bel Aire—
the pack ambushed them,
ferocious muzzles breathing steam,
drooling on the windows.

Now, all these years after leaving home,   
I miss the dogs,
how formidable they were,
negotiating between me
and the world. I have
no silent creature at my side
to touch on her wrinkled brow,
no coiled animal to summon,   
in love and ready to die.

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Dion O’Reilly has lived most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Her writing appears in such journals as The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, and Bellingham Review. Her work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Terrapin Books anthology A Constellation of Kisses. Her work has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. An earlier version of Ghost Dogs was a finalist for the Catamaran Poetry Book Prize. She received her MFA from Pacific University. Ghost Dogs is her debut full-length collection.
website


Geraldine Connolly is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press), Hand of the Wind (Iris Press) and her latest book, Aileron, published by Terrapin Books in 2018. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review, and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection. She has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize.
website

The Story Behind the Cover

As the publisher of Terrapin Books, I like to ask each of my poets what they have in mind for a cover. Although I reserve the right to turn down suggested artwork, so far that hasn’t happened and each Terrapin poet has had input on their cover art. For example, Neil Carpathios’ cover for Confessions of a Captured Angel was done by his wife, a graphic designer. Christine Stewart-Nunez’s cover for Bluewords Greening was designed by her former student. Patricia Clark’s cover art for The Canopy was contributed by her husband, a painter. Hayden Saunier festooned her own black coat with greens from her yard and a set of antlers, then hung the coat on a wall and took a photo of it. I extracted the background and replaced it with a solid blue background. The result is a cover much like a piece of surrealistic art.

When I asked Geraldine Connolly what she envisioned for the cover of her forthcoming book, Aileron, she suggested a farmhouse. I began to hunt for one, but didn’t find anything special enough. Then one day while wasting my time on Facebook, I saw some unusual pieces of art coming down the feed—“feather art” by feather artist, Lewis Mark Grimes. I sent several images to Gerry and asked what she thought of them. Following is a discussion of what transpired from that point on in our search for the perfect cover.


Diane: Tell us what the word “aileron” means and why your first thought for your cover art was a farmhouse?


Gerry: An aileron is a small hinged surface—a flap—on an airplane wing, used to control balance.

 It was difficult for me to think of a way to incorporate that technical concept into a concrete image for the book cover. Airy images are hard to translate into solid pictures.

A photo of an airplane wing didn’t seem quite right because the reader might see only the wing and not see or understand where the small flap was and what it meant to the flight of the plane.

The main theme of Aileron is the loss of a cherished family farm to a large company and how to deal with that emotional loss, to rise above it. So that’s why I thought a photo of a farmhouse might work. I spent a couple of days looking through stock photos of farmhouses, but something was always wrong, the setting, the color of the barn, the crops in the field were not quite right. And I couldn’t find a photo of our particular farm, so I felt a little frustrated.


After weeks of obsessing over commas, capitals, misspellings, spacing issues, the acknowledgments page, the title page, the author’s page, all of a sudden when you asked what I had in mind for a book cover, I was kind of panicked. Vague thoughts of airplane wings and photos of farmhouses were floating in my mind, but I was actually floored. I knew that I really liked the Terrapin covers I’d seen, so I hoped you might be helpful there, and thankfully you were!



Diane: When I sent you the pieces of feather art, you wrote back that you’d stick with the farmhouse or a barn. Why?

Gerry: When you first sent ideas for cover art, I think there were seven images, five pieces with feathers plus one barn and one abstract painting. Seeing all seven together confused me a little because they were so different, so I clung to the idea of something that was an exact representation of a farm, which was a farmhouse or a barn. And the barn had happy associations for me, of safety and security. When I looked out the windows of our farmhouse, that’s what I often looked at, the big white barn and the silo next to it, the fields beyond. As a child, I loved the soft hay, the smell of the bales and oilcans and the animals, the texture of the old beams and the wood floor, the patterns of light and shadow. So yes, I clung to the idea of the farmhouse or barn. But I’m glad we found something more upbeat and visually exciting.


 
Diane: A few days later you emailed and said that one of the pieces was “haunting” you. What was responsible for that haunting?

Gerry: When I again looked over the seven art pieces that you’d sent in one file, I could see that the barn was, in fact, boring. You sent a print of one single feather, a couple of images of dream catchers (those nets with trailing feathers) and at the very bottom, two pieces of artwork done with molted feathers by Lewis Mark Grimes. I liked those two pieces best because they seemed unique, but I still had the barn idea fixed firmly in my head. I spent another day looking at stock photos of barns and feeling less and less satisfied with that idea. I looked at all of the images again that evening and decided, as they say, “to sleep on it.”

I woke up the next morning with the image in my mind of the white feathers exploding from a sea of blue dots. If it was strong enough to wake me, I thought, that’s a good sign. All day the image stayed with me. It “haunted” me in a very good way, so I decided to seriously consider it. The covers of my three previous books were lovely, but very conservative and representational. I thought a departure to something more abstract and mysterious might be refreshing. I showed the image to my husband and he loved it too. “Feathers,” he said, “which remind me of flight, of wings, of airplane wings, that’s perfect.” And when I looked at it metaphorically, I saw in that explosion of wings, a suggestion of Hiroshima, a tragedy, which suited the theme of losing the farm to a mining company.




Diane: I was similarly haunted, so I tracked down the artist to find out if we could get permission to use the piece. He said yes! While Lewis and I then worked out the licensing agreement, I did a sample front cover layout, that white feather image shaped like a fan against a black background. What was your first response to the initial design? Did we make any changes to it?

Gerry: The background was black and I’ve always liked black covers with a brighter color for the images and typeface. When you isolated that image and did a sample first cover, I was convinced that the image was perfect. Not representational, and so radiant and striking. Everyone I showed it to had strong positive reactions. Comments about the cover included words like “mysterious,” “vivid,” “engaging,” “spectacular.” I felt more and more sure that it was the right decision, and I was very happy that the artist gave us permission to use the piece.


The only change I suggested was making the print of the title a little larger. There was no doubt in my mind that this was exactly the right mood and message that I wanted to convey about my book. The design was so compelling and so suitable that very little change was necessary.



Diane: The cover we ended up with isn’t even remotely similar to the initial idea of a farmhouse, yet it strikes me as metaphorically perfect for your book. How do you see this cover as fitting your book?

Gerry: Sometimes your first ideas are your best ideas. Sometimes, they’re your worst. I trusted myself on an intuitive level with the decision to use the feather art and, after my initial reluctance, it turned out extremely well.

The elements of air rule this collection: birds, wings, trees. The central metaphor of the aileron on an airplane wing, which controls balance, suggests the importance of not surrendering to sadness but finding new direction, staying aloft above the blue dots which suggest sadness so that the white feathers lifting upward as in a fan connect with the theme beautifully. A lot of the book is about staying in balance even amidst trouble and an immense sense of loss. It was important to me that the final poem lift upward. When we discussed the ordering of the poems, there was thought given to ending the book with a poem that contains the image of a horse pulling freight into midnight’s darkness, but that seemed entirely wrong. The decision to end on a pleasing memory of a swing from my childhood that elevates the mood up and out into the world seemed fitting.

The collection is firmly rooted in the natural world, the landscapes of a Pennsylvania childhood, of Montana summers and a move to the Sonoran Desert which offers a strange but healing landscape, a mixture of oddness and wonder that, in fact, Lewis Mark Grimes’ work of art also conveys. It was a beautiful synchronicity and I couldn’t be happier with the cover. So much time is put into crafting the poems, revising them, arranging them in the best way for an effective narrative, but so little thought is given until the very last moment about the cover which is, of course, the reader’s first impression of the book. I like the idea of the reader being introduced to my book with this beautiful and original design. Thank you, Diane, for helping me find the way to it.


Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of three previous poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue University Press), Province of Fire (Iris Press), and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press) as well as a chapbook, The Red Room (Heatherstone Press). She is the recipient of two NEA creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.


Gerry’s book, Aileron, will be released on March 1. It is now available for Pre-orders.