An interview with Kate Gaskin

failbetter editor Audrey Walls has conducted an interview with Kate Gaskin to accompany "Retrieving the Guns," published in September 2018.

FB: What does the writing process look like for you? How do you get started? When do you know you're done?

KG: My writing process is basically holding my breath and hoping for the best. For a long time I felt bad about not being an every day writer, but like most parents of small children, I have to write in the margins of parenting. When I do find time to write, I like to read other people’s poems to get myself in the right headspace. For me writing is always an exercise in failure. I write so many bad poems! It’s demoralizing! But every so often I write a good poem, and then I remember that the good poems are built on a large foundation of bad poems. I have to learn that lesson over and over. I know that I’m done with a poem pretty quickly, actually. I tend to do most of my revision as I write, or else I’m prone to obsessive overwriting. One thing that has surprised me over the years is that sometimes I write a short poem, feel dissatisfied with it, and then I keep writing until I’ve written a long poem. Kaveh Akbar tweeted once about his partner Paige Lewis saying that when non-male poets write long poems we’re pushing back against the expectation that we take up less space, and that really resonated with me. When I write long poems, I’m writing past the voice in my head that tells me I can’t or shouldn’t do it.

FB: Much of your work incorporates an intimate perspective of military life. How do you balance such a personal view into national or often international events? 

KG: I find that balance to be elusive and morally tricky. The voices we should really be listening to are the people who have been displaced and disrupted due to our military’s actions overseas. At the same time, I see a gap in contemporary American war writing, which is that we have a lot of the traditional male soldier POV, but what’s missing are female and nonbinary soldiers and the spouses and families of active-duty soldiers. War causes so much disruption on the home front, and those perspectives are not as extensively published. There are exceptions to this—Karen Skolfield, Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton, and Siobhan Fallon are all doing wonderful work—but a handful of female war writers is still not enough. As far as national and international events, it’s depressing to know that the current president is my husband’s boss. We’ve had a lot of sort-of/not-sort-of joking conversations about how my spouse is not allowed to commit any war crimes. Still, he does not have any disillusions about his role in all this. He’s a navigator and purposefully asked to be placed on a plane that doesn’t drop bombs, but he sees himself as equally complicit as someone who flies a B-52 or F-15. It’s all part of the same system. I went to an air show on his base recently, and I’m touring all these giant planes—weapons of mass casualty—and the responsibility inherent in this kind of work is sobering and troubling. I am always writing into the troubling aspects of it. I see myself as being just as complicit as my spouse. 

FB: You mentioned that your family recently completed a cross-country move from Alabama to Nebraska. How does traveling or moving impact your sense of place? What’s the best place you’ve lived so far?

KG: Thank you for asking me about place! There is nothing that influences me more. Everywhere we live, I get hyper-focused on local ecology and wildlife. I joined a snake identification group on Facebook after seeing a copperhead on a hike in Tennessee. I once read a book that detailed every recorded death in Florida due to sharks, alligators, and panthers. I got really into mountain lions when we lived in Boulder, Colorado. I grew up in Alabama, so I think my obsession with place comes from the giant Alabama-shaped hole in my heart. I have very complicated feelings about the complicated region I’m from, and so I press on those tender spots obsessively. My spouse’s plane is based in Offutt Air Force Base just outside of Omaha, so we’ve lived in Nebraska a lot over the past 13 years. Midwest winters are alien to me, so I get a lot of pleasure about writing about the snow and ice. The place I’ve enjoyed most is, hands-down, Pensacola, Florida. We lived on a bay and were a five-minute drive to the Gulf. The beauty of northwest Florida is just unworldly, especially those still-wild places that are underdeveloped. Florida’s history of environmentally devastating development is legendary, and it leads, again, to tensions that are interesting and painful to write into. We still own our house there, thinking we might retire there after my spouse separates from the Air Force, but honestly I’m always thinking about what a ridiculous idea it is to live near any coast in the age of climate change. 

FB: What are you reading right now? Who should we publish next?

KG: In fiction I’m reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras. In poetry I’m reading Megan Peak’s Girldom, Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages, William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind, Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song, and Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw. As far as who you should publish next, Erin Adair-Hodges’s work is super fresh, blistering, and clever. I can’t recommend reading her book Let’s All Die Happy enough. Kwoya Fagin Maples has a new book, Mend, coming out soon about the racist history of gynecology. Her poems are emotionally difficult and amazing. For writing that is always lyrically gorgeous and technically impressive, I can’t recommend Brandon Courtney enough.