Prose author and poet Matt Mauch chats with me today about his new book, A Northern Spring.
Bio:
Matt Mauch is the author of five books of lyrical prose and poetry, including A Northern Spring, We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., Bird~Brain, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, as well as the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the journal Poetry City, and has organized and hosted many other poetry readings and events. A recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, Mauch’s work has been recognized as a finalist for National Poetry Series and other national and international contests, and has appeared in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Journal, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College.
Welcome, Matt. What inspired you to write this book?
In March 2020, I was in Northern Ireland researching the Troubles for a study-abroad course that uses the Troubles as a lens through which to better see and address divisions, conflicts, and violences in the US. While there, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and then-president Trump announced a travel ban from Europe. My travel party and I weren’t sure if we were going to get back home (were not sure if we wanted to—we seemed safer from the virus in Ireland). We made it back the same weekend thousands and thousands of others made it back en masse. As the Washington Post described it: “Harrowing scenes of interminable lines and unmasked faces crammed in confined spaces spread across social media. The images showed how a policy intended to block the pathogen’s entry into the United States instead delivered one final viral infusion. As those exposed travelers fanned out into U.S. cities and suburbs, they became part of an influx from Europe that went unchecked for weeks and helped to seal the country’s coronavirus fate.”
I began writing as soon as I got home. In the North of Ireland, I hadn’t paid for an international phone plan as somebody else in our traveling party had, so I could connect to a signal only when I had wifi. Save for one or two, I didn’t receive any text messages while there. They all arrived (en masse) we when landed back in Minneapolis. Borrowing from that reality, I recreated the time from the announcement of the travel ban until we landed back home in the form of text messages to a friend from whom I receive no reply. They aren’t real text messages, then, but a kind of diarist-who-loves-prose-poetry’s facsimile of such.
At the same time I started writing poems about the new world we were in—poems about lockdown and the something-new-every-day aspect of the pandemic. I researched past pandemics and wrote about ours. I’m one of those for whom that first pandemic year was a fruitful time. I wrote tons and tons.
Then George Floyd was murdered about 18 blocks from my home is South Minneapolis. The world saw on TV much of the aftermath that we lived. I am one of those who believe/feel/sense that the global uprising that the George Floyd murder sparked would likely not have been sparked had it not been for the conditions created by the pandemic and lockdown. So I wrote about that, too—it felt like the natural bookend of what I’d begun a couple months earlier.
This book is literally a documentation of a particular spring at a particular time of confluences I’ll likely never experience again. The arc was set and the title—not the original title but a great editorial suggestion—brings together symbolically the unresolved but hopeful state of mind and body so many of us found ourselves in, wondering how will X, Y, and Z (and all of the other letters) turn out?
Excerpt from A Northern Spring:
A house in SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS—the last week of May 2020
A dumpster is burning in the center of an intersection a block south of Lake Street, like it’s a distributary channel, Lake Street being, reports indicate, the primary thoroughfare of flame. It’s the kind of dumpster a landlord sets behind an apartment building to collect the weekly trash for all the renters whose initials and last names fit in the small rectangles above the rows of mailboxes up front, mailbox setups that have always reminded me of mausoleums. I watch from a three-season porch with all the windows, double-hungs, open wide. On the various screens where I watch it—television, laptop, phone—the dumpster-fire scene looks like a party. There’s a general sense of joy. It is not unlike the sort of misbehavior and property damage that revelers would think long overdue on the streets here if the Vikings ever won a Super Bowl.
The revelers remain a block south of Lake and are thinking not campfire but bonfire. There seem to be actors and watchers, those setting fires, those who don’t want to miss it, FOMO types thinking, This is history. A filling-in-the-blanks part of my mind is trying to see the people still inside the apartments, trying to see those in bedrooms? in basements? in the single-family houses and duplexes from which the receptacles have been repurposed? is it better to keep all the lights on or turn them off? is this like a tornado such that one is safest in the lowest interior room with thick walls and no windows? I imagine the children, the adults trying to calm them, the older children joining the effort, already changed. I think of the fear that perhaps only the refugees among us have antecedent for, the inheritors of transgenerational trauma trying to understand a vaguely tingling sense of déjà vu.
What was a block south of Lake Street is moving further south. A handful of motorcycles are now at the head of the channel of flame, circling it, a halo of cc’s. I have heard the motorcycles all night, on the move, east of me, west of me, south of me, north of me. I imagine the needle on a tachometer hard-bounce to the right and remember what it feels like to have my hand on a throttle, and wish I had a motorcycle still and the barely-populated, hot-summer-night streets of a town with a single stoplight upon which to ride it. The time it takes for the revving to travel from the screens to my ears is less time than it takes for the sound of a bat striking a ball in an MLB stadium to travel from home plate to the outfield, upper-deck cheap seats.
Everything I have read from Belew regarding the desire of the white power movement to foment strife and eventually civil war, to come together when the time is right, feels like it is happening here, like Minneapolis has become a gathering place. The street that the traveling bonfire—that seems less and less like a party—is coming down is mine.
What exciting project are you working on next?
Working in hybrid forms has kind of consumed me. I taught a class in hybrid forms a few years ago, when I was dabbler. I’m teaching the course again this year, but as an avid practitioner. Flash fiction, flash CNF, prose poetry, and so many other hybrids seem to be gaining traction for a reason that I think has to do with our increasing unstable world, with the untenable ways we’re living it it, with the rest of its inhabitants, human and other. I tell my students that consciously or subconsciously, artists respond to their times, and I think the rise of hybrid forms is one of those responses.
The manuscript I’m working on explores the dystopia of a slowly burning and increasingly polarized world—both the current reality and the growing anxiety at the understanding that all will be worse—through the lens of utopia, that is, through the lens of those/that which will benefit as opposed to those/that which will suffer. One of the things I’m trying to do is to provide a portrait of “the realized promise of a return” for those/that who/which are displaced. I’m trying to add nuance via a diasporal lens to one of the oldest and most sustained areas of polarization—in literature going back nearly as far as literature itself—that between the rural and the urban.
I think that in order for us to progress it’s essential that we recognize, acknowledge, and attempt to understand by experience the existence of those outside of one’s various identities. I’m hoping to merge the practicality of realpolitik with the philosophy of cosmopolitanism, with the aspiration that understanding will lead to the conditions for solidarity. The human response to the increasing fluidity/liquidity of our world is a tendency to retreat to the fixed solidity of ideology and identity. The diasporal and liquid use of genre and convention—the hybridity I’m talking about—is a subversion intended to spur necessary change, just as the physical realities of place compel an individual, sojourning or more permanently relocating, to adapt.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I suppose I first knew I could write to some effect when I was thirteen and entered an international essay contest and was named of the winners. I lived in a small town in Iowa and did what a lot people there do: I hunted ducks, geese, pheasants, and partridges. I belonged to Ducks Unlimited, the nonprofit wetlands and upland habitat conservation organization, and wrote an essay on the topic, “Why Is Wetland Habitat a Valuable Natural Resource.” My essay—750 words max—was named one of the winners. I joined eleven others so-named from the US, Canada, and Mexico (you had to be fourteen to make the trip, and I turned just in time) on summer trip to Calgary, where we banded geese and did a whole bunch of other conservation-related things (and also fun things) for a week.
In college, though, is where I first began to understand what in meant to have control over the written word. I went to college to study engineering and then switched to law before finally realizing, in my junior year, that what writers did was something I wanted to do—that I saw the world the way writers see it. I remember the day it hit me. I had driven back to the small Iowa town where my family lived—for break or something—and pulled into a mom and pop grocery by the town’s wooded central park. Before I got out of the car, I couldn’t help but fixate on a big, melting icicle hanging from the corner of the building, refracting the bright sunlight every which way. The temp was above freezing, and so the icicle was melting and was glossy and the water over the ice made the light even more show-stopping. I didn’t know how to capture what I saw in words, but knew that what I felt at the time must be how writers felt when they saw natural phenomenon that, via words, they could capture as imagery.
I still have trouble with calling myself a writer, though. When I get introduced as a poet or a writer, I don’t fight it and can navigate any conversation that follows with the fact that “I am a writer” or “I am a poet” being the shared understanding. But if I introduce myself, I prefer the verb version. “I write,” I say. Poems and prose. Emphasis on the lyrical.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I consider writing the work that matters most in my life, but writing per se is not the job that pays my bills and way in the world. I teach English and writing at Normandale Community College in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, where we have a great AFA in Creative Writing program. It’s hard work and—for those who don’t know about the workload at community colleges—a lot of work.
I’m a night person. It’s my circadian-rhythm destiny to stay up late, to want to wake later than most. The world in which I have to have a job to pay my bills and way in isn’t one that tends to cater to we night owls. When I was apprenticing myself to the craft of writing, I did almost all of my writing at night—into the wee hours. But I made a decision that better aligned with my priorities a long time ago when I decided that I’d get up with enough time before I had to be at work, and I’d work on my writing during then. It’s important for me to work on my writing every day—or nearly every day. If I don’t write before staring my job that pays my bills and way, I feel like I’ve cheated myself. I feel guilty all day. I have a hard time fully concentrating. But if I get up early enough to work on my writing before I have to engage with my job that pays my bills and way, then I don’t hate capitalism as much as I otherwise would and feel better about everything. So I became a kind of morning person against the grain of my natural tendencies, because I decided that writing was that important to me.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
This may be a by-product of me forcing myself to write in the morning, but I’ve found that when I work on a piece of writing late at night—which I still do—I see it differently than I see or saw it in the morning. This isn’t just a fresh-eyes thing, either. I substantively see whatever I am working on in a new way when I work on at midnight or later versus when I work on it at 8 a.m. It feels kind of like magic, which makes me more than kind of afraid to admit to it.
I like how art and artists and their intuitions so often precede the kind of science that, once peer reviewed and duplicated, “make a thing so.” Take the psychological phenomenon of sudden insight (known also as “aha moments” or “eureka moments”). It seems like magic, right? How you’re in your bathtub like Archimedes or are in your backyard removing some invasive species of bush and suddenly a problem or issue you’ve been working on is rendered clear. The answer, like magic, presents itself to you. Well, along comes great leaps in brain science and sooner or later the magic is deconstructed and image-mapped and sudden insight is a thing we can predict and court. All the magic is gone. And I don’t want that to happen with my “I see things differently at night than I do in the morning” trick. We need all the little moments of magic we can get.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Most vividly, I wanted to be the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings. Fran Tarkenton—I wanted to be him—or at least to do what he was doing on the television screen Sunday afternoons. I had a number 10 purple jersey and Tarkenton, his eponymous autobiography as told to Jim Klobuchar (father of Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar). I still have the book, hardcover first edition with the original dust jacket. My mom and dad got it for me for Xmas 1976, inscribing the date and occasion and the fact that they loved me in the front of the book. This was before I wrote in books as I read them, and so, unfortunately, I can’t read an old map of who I was or how I thought when I first read it. It probably wasn’t too long after that that I had the realization most kids have, that they won’t be professional athletes. After that I wanted at various times to be a taxidermist, a hunting guide, a resort owner.
My aspirations were largely due to context, to nurture rather than nature. I grew up in very small towns of 10,000 and 3,000. After I grew beyond the dream of being the next HOF QB of the Vikings, what I thought I could do or become was heavily influenced by what I saw those around me doing and becoming. In college I started to envy those who grew up in cities. They had done and believed they could do a whole host of things that it had never occurred to me normal people could realistically be or do or become. College—higher education—was a new context that provided me with new options. I decided, almost as deliriously as I’d decided that I wanted to quarterback the Vikings, that I wanted to be a US Supreme Court justice. Given my abilities and the limits thereof, becoming a US Supreme Court justice, although statistically less probable than becoming and NFL quarterback, was actually statistically more probable. I got past the delusion pretty quickly.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Before the internet, I used to take time now and again to write (via typewriter—my penmanship has been a detriment, according to my teachers, since it first emerged from my pencil in the second grade) to my literary heroes—to the poets I loved and wanted to write like. I sent the letters to their publishers and some wrote back. My favorite was writing to Tomas Tranströmer, long before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and receiving a typewritten letter back from Monica, his wife, who wrote on Tomas’s behalf, as he had recently suffered a stroke. She said that Tomas was delighted to hear from me, that not many in the States knew his work, and that he “very much liked” a poem I sent. She reported that Tomas said. “Matt send me one your books . . . !” I didn’t have a book out to send then. If he were still alive today, I’d him A Northern Spring. Monica included a picture of Tomas at his piano, from one side, playing with one hand. It’s one of those photos from the era in which every photo had the date printed along the bottom right in orange, computerish numerals. There’s a painting on the Tranströmers’ wall, a full bookshelf, sculptures and a small lamp lined up below a not-quite-bay window. I have since imagined that every Swedish apartment looks like this. The internet and social media make it even easier to reach poets and writers whose books we love. Everybody should send these kinds of letters—maybe one a month. It’s a way to use the internet for good.