Visiting with Stacy Heiney

by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor

What inspired your poem “Alone After Death”?

“Alone After Death” was written for my grandmothers, both of whom died in the same year not long ago. Their passing, and the months leading up to it, occurred during a time when I was in school and working intensely on my manuscript. My grandmothers showed up in my dreams often at that time (at the end of their lives and at the time of their passing and just after). My dream life acts as memory-keeper and reminder, and I am convinced that when I sleep I am furiously trying to recall and set to memory… everything. Through the language and meanderings of this poem I am reinventing every dream I experienced during and after my grandmothers’ deaths. I think the poem even hints at dreams I haven’t yet had. Many of the poems in my manuscript deal with death in some way, and conversely, I guess you could say, life. Death is my biggest fear, therefore my grandest subject.

Raymond Carver said a writer should follow the command “No tricks.” Do you keep any quotes or reminders at your desk? Or just in the back of your mind as you write?

I have little notes everywhere. On torn envelope flaps, coffee-mug-ringed index cards, any paper I can find. I used to have them all literally hanging on a line in my living room. Each one is very important to me. I have three at my fingertips right now: One is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke (tucked into a package sent to me by a dear friend) that says “…and the happiness of being a beginner, which I hold to be the greatest, is small beside the fear of beginning.” Another is a reminder about essential language (a response to over-writing, which I’m forever fighting), from one of my writing mentors. It says simply, “Get out of the way and let language do the work.” Sometimes I am my poem’s worst enemy. The third says “We write poems because we’ve read a poem (or poems) that changed our lives forever.” One of my favorite poets told me this in a letter. I read it often to cheer me up when I’m wondering why I choose to break my own heart over and over again. Everything I keep is a reminder, like my dreams.

What does your writing space look like?

On a regular day, my writing space looks like the kitchen counter. Sometimes it looks like the driver’s seat of my car at a stoplight, or the ratty coffee shop couch. On other kinds of days it is a shabby desk with drawers of all different sizes that hold my things. It houses an ivy plant; a key made of balsa wood; a piece of slate from the quarry at Sabin’s pasture in Montpelier—on it, a line from a poem; a lamp with soft sepia light, whose base is a statue of a large aproned woman peeling apples. Her basket is the place where I set my pencils. Every single thing has its place, though it rarely appears that way. It is where my cat takes his naps and watches out the window, waiting for me to come home.

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*Contact Claire with any questions or suggestions for Hunger Mountain’s Art + Life section at hungermtnal@gmail.com.

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