A poet's mind.
"My head is like a crockpot and I’m constantly putting things into it to simmer."
I walked into the Green Toad Bookstore in upstate New York. There, on the table, was a poetry book titled Mustard, Milk, and Gin.
“Intriguing title”, I thought. “But I don’t read books of poetry.”
I’m a lazy poetry reader; the kind who searches for poems on the Poetry Foundation website using keywords that match my mood or what’s on my mind.
“Winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize,” I read aloud. “Hmmm…..”
I picked up the book, flipped to the middle, and stood there reading page after page. I had to will myself to stop so that I could buy the book. I got home and devoured it. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. Wanted more.
So I thought, What the hell?, why not try to interview her.
And here we are, with an interview and fascinating conversation with the poet, Megan Denton Ray.
Enjoy,
Erin
Name: Megan Denton Ray
Hometown: Knoxville, Tennessee
Current Residence: Chattanooga, Tennessee
Living Situation: House with husband and three cats
Age: 31
Occupation: Poet, Adjunct Professor at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Writing Tutor at Chattanooga State Community College
Photo caption: This is me with my old gal, Mona.
Mary Oliver wrote in “Staying Alive,”
“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
What does writing mean to your personal well-being amid a pandemic?
I couldn’t agree more with that Mary Oliver quote. It sounds very dramatic, but reading and writing has been the only thing that’s kept me afloat. I started reading in a way that I never have before, really devouring it. I realized that as somebody who’s in education, I have no idea what's going to happen, and as an adjunct professor, I'm completely last on the totem pole--as far as my job is concerned.
I realized at the beginning of the pandemic that there were two options for me: either I'm going to be super depressed or I’m not. This whole situation is a petri dish that could send me into a deep depression, but I took control of that. I just started filling my brain with other people's words, almost obsessively, but then it allowed me to create some of my own new worlds.
Your debut, Mustard, Milk and Gin, was the winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. When I reached out to you for this interview, you said, “I'm still amazed that I have a book in the world and that a stranger has read it.” Can you talk about that?
Mustard, Milk, and Gin deals with my family’s issues surrounding addiction and my experience growing up in a household with two addicts. There’s a lot of twin things with my twin sister, and there’s a lot of reckoning with sexual assault. So, there’s a lot of dark material, but I like to juxtapose it next to beautiful things. It's complicated because it's like, “I know that what I'm writing is sad and dark and depressing, but it's also strangely beautiful and vibrant.” Those things are allowed to co-exist in a poem.
I remember somebody in one of my workshops at Purdue commented on a poem of mine and said, “I'm just not convinced that the speaker is depressed because everything else in the poem is too beautiful.” But I don’t know, I think that’s the point. The way I learned to cope with those dark depression moments was to find the beauty everywhere I could. It sucks and it’s sad, but look at what came out of it. When I look at Mustard, Milk, and Gin, I see it as a book written by someone who went through a lot of pain but triumphed at the end. I wrote it from a place of necessity, from a place of trauma and pain. But I hardly recognize that girl anymore. I'm tired of writing those poems. I’m tired of writing out of trauma and pain. Now I’m trying to write out of joy. And abundance. When I look at that book I see a person who was hurting very much, and this is how she coped with it. For 30 years! It's not just poems about me as a teenager and young adult. This is an entire life's worth of memories. It feels really good, actually, because it feels like a closure, like I can finally move on from this stuff. It literally feels like a closed chapter in my life.
I felt like if my story went out into the world and one person read it or one person found something about it that made them happy, I would be okay.
That was my expectation for it. Anything else is just a bonus.
I’ve already started on a new project with new obsessions; it has a name and a shape. But I’m still in the collecting phase. My head is like a crockpot and I’m constantly putting things into it to simmer, to marinate, to cook on low for a long time, to see what happens. Right now, it’s still a very warm goo.
Photo caption: My debut.
What are your new writing obsessions?
Right now, my obsessions are mythology because I started reading Circe and Song of Achilles, and the modern-day telling of mythological stories is very dramatic and juicy.
I’m also really obsessed right now with colors and color experiments.
I was walking down the aisle at the grocery store and passed a green light bulb, a blue light bulb, and a red light bulb. And I was like, “I don’t know why yet, but I have to have these.” It makes no sense, but they sat on the table for like a week, and then a couple days ago I knew what the green one was for and put it in the bathroom because I wanted to travel to Emerald City every time I showered.
I’m also experimenting with form a lot. I wrote a sestina mostly because I told myself I couldn’t do it. I had to color-code the words while I was writing it because it was so complicated, but it’s really fun. I like to set challenges for myself, to trick myself into getting things done, and that’s what happened with the sestina.
What have you been reading?
I got lost in Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury for a while. And Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch. I read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I read a book called Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which is about memory skills and training yourself to remember facts or feelings. I went on a mind journey with that. Another one is Wordslut by Amanda Montell, and it’s basically a linguistic history of how the English language has always been patriarchal. She goes into some very cool linguistic detail about the origins of insults for women, but it’s also a tool for how to discuss language with other people. Another good book that I just can’t not talk about is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Very timely, that one. So many Nancy Drew mysteries.
Here are some more from my list: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West, The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking. There are a lot. Ok, one more and maybe the most important: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay is a book that everyone needs to be reading right now. I really think that if everyone read this book, it would change the world.
My issue is that I want to read books that I know nothing about. Because once I find out what they’re supposed to be about, I decide before I read it whether I’m going to like it or not like it. I hate that I do this, but I can’t help it. I think I’m like that because I love poetry, and poetry is so fast and pocket-sized.
I’m going to steal a question from Marianne Boruch, a poet and essayist — If the poetry you’re writing right now lived in one room of the house, which room would it be? And what does the wallpaper look like?
So my poems right now definitely exist in a bathroom, or like a spa, and it’s very green. It’s like an Emerald City Wizard of Oz room, where everything’s green, but it’s actually a spa with soothing eucalyptus and steam and bamboo. The wallpaper is a deep green mixed floral, but only foliage, like with monstera and ferns. Very jungle-themed.
You’ve used dreams in your work for a really long time. What dreams have you been having during this strange time?
I’ve been having really weird dreams. I’m having lots of dreams of being trapped, that I’m being held prisoner in a house or a building that I can’t get out of. I have this one image from a dream where I was crawling through ductwork in the ceiling, and I was peering down to see who was in particular rooms because I was trying to find an exit.
Your poem Traveling Broke and Ugly has a line in it that, as a fellow Southerner, I love so much:
They say when a spirit leaves a room
you’ll feel a sudden calmness or maybe you’ll feel cold,
a kiss on your cheek. I felt hot and full of brisket.
Only a Southerner would weave in a mention of brisket to a poem!
The line about brisket came from this recurring dream that I had for years when I was living in Indiana. In the dream I constantly had brisket, or some sort of stringy meat, stuck in my teeth and mouth. It was in my teeth but also tucked up into my cheeks and all the pockets in my mouth, and I kept trying to pull it out and it never ended, like a magician with those scarves that keep going and going and going. I haven't had that dream since I moved back, and I haven't eaten brisket since, honestly.
You’ve said that “pulling weeds is the best free therapy there is.” I couldn’t agree more.
I'm in a spot now where I just see how many there are and I’m almost mad at myself, and I beat myself up constantly about their existence. So I'm trying a new approach, which is to not do that, and to say, “There are lots of weeds. I will feel better if I go and pull them, but if I don’t that’s ok too.” I still haven't. I’m overwhelmed because I feel like my garden should be perfect right now. If there is a time to be doing yard work it should be right now. But also it's like 98 degrees.
But I would rather be reading and writing! I'm inside when I feel like I should be outside, so I'm trying to accept that it’s okay to have weeds right now. Be a little bit kinder with yourself, like what is your body saying that you need? My body is saying that I just need to do the things that I've been doing. I have some sunflowers that I planted from seed, and they're like 10 feet tall right now and haven’t even bloomed yet. Right now I'm just watching them grow through the window, and that’s enough.
You grew up in Tennessee and left in 2015 to attend Purdue University in Indiana. At that time, you said you left home ashamed of the South. But the racism you witnessed growing up was just as prevalent in the Midwest. Given the racial reckoning that America is grappling with right now, how are you assessing your home — the South — yet again?
I'm really proud of the South right now. I'm proud of the South because I'm most familiar with students, the people who are going to be future voters and the actual future. I hang out with them, maybe not now during the pandemic, but I used to hang out with them more than I hang out with other age groups. Teaching writing is basically just having a conversation all the time. Asking them questions like “Why do you think that? Why do you believe that? Tell me more about that” and then letting them decide. So much of my teaching is letting them decide what they're going to write about because writing is so much more enjoyable if you care about it. Some of the things they come up with are brilliant and extraordinary. They’re so much smarter than I am. They make me proud.
I want them to know that they're so smart. They literally trolled Trump for that rally on TikTok, and it was brilliant. These are 14 year olds, and soon they're going to be able to vote. Young people in the South are starting to reclaim their heritage with unapologetic hospitality, and other good things we're known for.
I listened to this Morning Edition about a guy from Kentucky that started a group called “Rednecks for Black Lives.” He did an interview that was amazing. He’s just a middle aged white guy from Kentucky who wanted to let other rednecks know that yes, you can be a redneck and be for Black lives. That gave me hope for the South. Mississippi is getting a new flag. That also gives me hope.
You’re an Instructor of Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and you’re set to teach three classes this fall in-person. Did you make any changes to your planned fall semester curriculum based on the pandemic?
Mostly I’m just trying to be as understanding as possible and adjust my expectations to what they can realistically do right now. I tend to be really honest with my students, to let them know when I’m having a hard day and don’t have energy for class, and just communicate with them as fellow adults. I think that’s going to continue to be really important this semester. They are real people who are also trying to deal with the grief of the world. Many have lost their grandparents. It’s going to be tricky, but kindness is the key.
Photo caption: Roses from my garden.
What do you want to take to the other side of this?
I feel like quarantine is turning me into an extrovert; not having the quality time with my coworkers and friends has made me really need to have conversations, and I want to take some of my extroversion to the other side. I feel more confident in the things that I have to say lately, and I’ve found more ways to join conversations that I maybe wouldn’t have joined before this pandemic. I’ve started to trust myself to produce good ideas. I’m learning to not censor myself in terms of what I think is important and smart. In terms of what I think people want to hear or don’t want to hear. When I have a good thought, I tend to tell myself “no one cares about that”... but the more important question is: what if they do?
I also want to take forward this sense of joy. It’s been really hard to stay positive, but joy in very tiny things like the green light bulb or the sunflower that’s getting tall. I’ve always tried to find joy, but right now life depends on it. Without joy there’s nothing else.