Q&A with Jeffrey Greene
/
Jeffrey Greene has published five collections of poetry. He is the author of the memoir French Spirits and four personalized nature books. He is also the author of Shades of the Other Shore, a book of mixed genre writing: sketches, prose pieces, and poetry written in collaboration with painter Ralph Petty. His writing has been supported by the NEA, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Rinehart Fund, and he was a winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Randall Jarrell Award, and the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Agni, Southwest Review and the anthologies Strangers in Paris, Intimacy, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to Flash Sequence.
Dr. Melanie Almeder spoke with Jeffrey Greene about his book, In Pursuit of Wild Edibles: A Forager’s Tour, in October 2016.
Melanie Almeder:
This is Melanie Almeder; I’m here in the reading room of the Roanoke College Creative Writing program with Jeffrey Greene, who is on campus as part of our Roanoke Writes celebration. Today we’ll be talking about writing across the genres, but first, here’s a little bit about Jeffrey. Jeffrey Greene is the author of numerous collections of poetry, dialogues, and prose sketches. His memoir French Spirits has appeared in eight countries, and he has written three personalized nature books, the most recent being In Pursuit of Wild Edibles: A Forager’s Tour, out earlier this year. His most recent collection of poems, Beyond Our Means, just came out this week. He is currently a professor at the American University of Paris. Welcome, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Greene:
It's a huge pleasure to be here with you, and at Roanoke.
Melanie Almeder:
It’s great to have you here. Jeffrey, you originally trained as a poet and then have made this transition into writing nonfiction. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that transition.
Jeffrey Greene:
Well, actually originally, I started out as a songwriter. I wasn’t a great musician, and I became more and more involved in the independence that you have with writing poems, and how it creates its own music…so the poetry really came out of being a songwriter when I was younger, something I’d like to get back to, but ironically, my poems have been set to music by Mirror Visions Ensemble, so it’s sort of come around full circle. But then I [started] just writing purely poetry, and then the writing of nonfiction took place much later in my career—I’d already published a few books of poetry. Then I’ve been teaching honors essay writing, a lot of essay writing when you’re a professor, and I became very interested in the techniques, and thought, “Well, I’m teaching these things, maybe I ought to try it.” But I wrote this book, French Spirits, for the pure fun of it and it’s about a house that I renovated in Burgundy—an old priest’s house—and I said, “I’m just going to write fifty pages and see what happens, see if they’re any good, and if they came out well, then I’ll just finish it.” And basically, I thought it was just going to be a book that I put in the guest room, because people asked me, how did I end up having a house in Burgundy, and I’ve been asked that question so many times and I thought, “Well here’s the story,” and so I had no idea it was going to turn out to be a book that was out in the world, bestseller in Australia, things like that.
Melanie Almeder:
That’s fantastic. How did your experience and your history of writing poems influence the form of the memoir, in the case of French Spirits?
Jeffrey Greene:
Well, one of the things that is central to lyric poetry is the first person, and so almost all lyric poems are, in a sense, songs. But they’re written from a first-person perspective, and one of the characteristics of creative nonfiction, I’d say, is that it’s limited to a first-person perspective, and in a lot of ways, it doesn’t have some of the tools that fiction has, in terms of seeing around a situation. But from first-person there’s also an immediacy and a warmth with the reader, that the reader identifies with you as somebody, in a sense, like a friend, or a guide, or you take them along, and so poetry has that “in” quality. Prose can use a number of devices that the lyric uses—rhythms of language, repetition, reflection, even assonance, consonance—so when you write a kind of resolution or an ending or something like that to a chapter, you can have a very poetic quality and you can have a very provocative ending, which you hope for in poetry.
Melanie Almeder:
Wonderful. And it’s been quite a busy and successful few years for you; you’ve had these three books come out that in some way are an excellent manifestation of writing across genres. You have this book of poems, Beyond Our Means, that just came out, you have the In Pursuit of Wild Edibles: A Forager’s Tour, and then this book that you did in collaboration with the artist Ralph Petty, Shades of the Other Shore, and so I’m wondering, what was it like to work with an artist?
Jeffrey Greene:
Well in some ways—it’s kind of joking—but in some ways all these books came out of various failures [laughter].
Melanie Almeder:
I think that’s important for readers and writers to hear!
Jeffrey Greene:
And so, I was given the assignment by The Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris; it’s a very prestigious series that they do of cahiers with Nobel prize winners and writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson and people like that. They started this wonderful series and… all the writing for this series is based on translation, some aspect of translation, either a very literal approach to translation, or it can be conceptual. And I’m not really a translator, but my take was much more from more of an abstract approach to translation. And essentially, what I was asked to do was to look at my country, place, the layering of history, in the environments around it through an American lens, so that what I’m seeing is so different from what the French people see. And they see the house that I restored, the old presbyterian, they can remember the old curés that were there and their catholic training, the history that goes along that – that church was started in the 9th century and was finished in the 11th, so it’s like, this old, this interesting layering and so on. And it’s very different from the American experience where, even though I came from New England where there are colonial houses, pre-revolution, but you’re talking about, you know, 1600s at the earliest [laughter], you know, it’s like - whereas this other place you’re talking about, going back to paleolithic times. So I started a narrative, my first idea for The Cahier Series was a narrative, and I was kind of having fun with the idea, sort of taking the view of the French woods – I learned mushrooming from the locals – and taking a view of the French woods from an American idea, and I was fooling around with Emerson, and Thoreau, and people like that, what we see in the new England woods and what American transcendentalism was. As opposed to what the French people see, this was an aristocratic land, anything you did on it was poaching and you’d go to jail, or lose a hand or something-
Melanie Almeder:
Right, pick an apple and- yeah.
Jeffrey Greene:
And I had French friends that I went into the woods with and doing mushrooms, so I made this kind of… I was having fun with it, just playing around with this idea. And the editors said, “Oh, well this is too conventional, you know, you can send this to Gourmet Magazine or something,” they didn’t want something that was “commercial,” they wanted to break it up, and fragment it, and start sticking poems between the text. I said I just didn’t want to do that to the writing, and so I sent that original text, the narrative text to a book publisher, and they loved the idea, they gave me a contract, and so-
Melanie Almeder:
So, you found a good match for you.
Jeffrey Greene:
So then I went on and wrote Shades of the Other Shore with poems, and prose sketches, and dialogues, and then wrote In Pursuit of Wild Edibles, where I go back to my childhood and then got into the whole subject of wacky- the subject of “wild edibles.” And at the same time, the writing on Wild Edibles was influencing my book of poems of me writing about oysters and mushrooms and things like that in the book of poems, so the three things were going on at the same time.
Melanie Almeder:
And it’s interesting too, to bring in kind of the act of translation and a broader definition. Understanding of translation, and to think about writing across genres, right?
Jeffrey Greene:
Translation is fascinating. The whole operation of it, I mean, what words mean in one language to those people and how do you capture the whole cultural aspects, so translation in a sense is not just word equivalence trying to come up, but it’s also taking into consideration the other culture and the resonances you’re trying to get from that other culture. So, I’ve been around translation quite a bit, but it also comes up with translating what you see through what your training is. And it is just very different to be an American in France, and what I see as opposed to what the French see in their own country. And the interesting point about this is the French, what they take for granted, you know, all of the sudden… they can be reinitiated to it. So I’d write about- French people will read a book that I’ve written, and they’ll all of the sudden say, you know, they’ll see it with fresh eyes, and so that’s often what writers from other countries coming to another country can do. They can take something that’s everyday to us, but all of the sudden you see it in a new… through a new prism, right?
Melanie Almeder:
And then that act of translation is actually circular, it’s not just you being there, translating experience, it’s the reader speaking back to you again after reading your pieces.
Jeffrey Greene:
So a French person, they were looking at different programs, they had different singers, you know, when they were growing up, their whole experience of the eighties is like, different, I may say [laughter].
Melanie Almeder:
Might expand our national consciousness a little [laughter].
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, you can live in France forever, but you’ll never have that, and same, vice versa when people come over here, they’ll never have the childhood experiences, growing up in the space.
Melanie Almeder:
One of the passages that interests me the most in In Pursuit of Wild Edibles and in your talk last night, you were speaking about a sort of mysticism of foraging, or the mysticism of being in nature, and America, and in France, and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about mushrooms and the cosmos [laughter].
Jeffrey Greene:
Well the funny thing is, as I said last night, Thoreau had this idea that—he says that men spend their lives fishing, and they don’t realize it’s not the fish that they’re after, and so that’s where a kind of “getting out of yourself” idea comes from. Actually, with Wild Edibles, it is the fish that you’re after [laughter]. I mean you become very excited when you-
Melanie Almeder:
Especially when you read these recipes that you’ve created!
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, it’s like a treasure hunt, but at the same time you’re there, the trees are making noises, the leaves are almost applauding if there’s a wind, and the light- anybody that, you know, walks in the woods, and the way the light filters through. But it is what Thoreau says, in that it is this “getting out of yourself,” getting out of that internal chatter that’s often damaging, you know, because you’re in argument all the time with certain things in your life. And so it’s just beautiful to be able to spend some time dreaming about finding things, and you get instincts about nature, instincts about where you’re going to find things. And so you’re sort of observing nature in a much more precise way than just sort of taking a walk, you know; you’re seeing and you see the relationships between mushrooms and trees, some of them are very symbiotic, they feed each other, others are turning logs into soil or leaves into soil and you see the creatures, you’ll see something like a Cèpe or Porcini as they say, you see little gnaw marks, you know [laughter].
Melanie Almeder:
Someone’s been there eating before you have.
Jeffrey Greene:
Some mouse has been at it, you know, or it’s a limace, French for “slug of the heaven” or, you know, things that are after it too, sort of like in a race to beat those things out of it. Which, so you see so much, just going around, looking for mushrooms.
Melanie Almeder:
Wonderful. I wonder if you’d be willing to read to us from In Pursuit of Wild Edibles a moment of your seeing, a moment being out in nature and describing what you see.
Jeffrey Greene:
It’ll take a minute to find something like that but maybe go back to your original question about, you know, the relationship of mushrooms with nature and how far out this idea can get and people taking it. Because mushrooms do play a huge role in the health and the functioning of a forest, and also purification and so some people have developed this whole theory about how mushrooms can essentially save the world, or become part of the nerve center of nature, so I’ll just read that part. And this is like, when I was walking with a mycologist who’s teaching us what’s what and he says:
“Our talkative mycologist advisor informs us that there are scientists and farmers that believe in a myco-utopia (often fused as mycotopia), achieving a balanced environment through innovative use of mycelia’s healing powers. Some contend that mycelia can be engaged in ‘mycorestoration’ through which oil spills can be metabolized, radiation contamination absorbed, and new medicines produced. Paul Stamens, mycologist and author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World, writes: ‘I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.’ I can’t help thinking that Stamens may be one-upping [Timothy] Leary and Castaneda, suggesting that we share consciousness with the very vehicle, mushrooms, (psilocybin, of course), that can liberate us from the ego to merge with the collective awareness of all living things.”
[Editor’s Note: In Pursuit of Wild Edibles: A Forager’s Tour, page 16. Bracketing done by editor to reflect spoken word]
Melanie Almeder:
That’s terrific, thank you.
Jeffrey Greene:
So that actually was in the course of learning about mushrooms and going out with an expert, which is something I advise, and he’d advise it too. And plus, as I said last night that France has, every pharmacy the pharmacist is well trained in identifying the mushrooms so they can check it out.
Melanie Almeder:
And this brings me to another question I had, not only about this book but about your other nonfiction. That is to sort of… I think of it as a kind of generosity, your books are full of the people you meet and their knowledge, their stories, and part of your journey being meeting them and talking to them and I wonder if you could tell us a story or two about some of the people who informed In Pursuit of Wild Edibles.
Jeffrey Greene:
I think what drives fiction and drives poetry and drives nonfiction really is character, often even yourself being- making yourself a character, which is tricky business, ‘cause you- how do you describe yourself, you know, physically, people have a picture of who you are, what your background is, and so people tend to identity with you and see you as you go and meet various other people. I have several gurus, and different types, but one person that’s helped me through several books is a forestry professor in France. And he would set up these meetings for me, when I was writing about wild boars, for example, he would take me to Chambourg and we’d go out with experts and learn about and see the wild boar in the wild and going out at night, and so he's been kind of my tutelary guide, you know, with the last couple of books. Also, just our neighbors. One of our neighbors was a forestry person himself, he grew up in a charcoal maker’s family, and that family was forced out of the woods when he was really young by the Nazis, and they lived and ate in a two-room house right next door to us. And he was an interesting guy because he was kind of the town drunk, well not just kind of [laughter].
Melanie Almeder:
Definitively the town drunk.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, he had that terrible thing that happens to people that smoke and drink where he got mouth cancer, and they took off half of his jaw, and people in the town had a certain amount of disdain for him, and other people loved him, but he was one of the most generous and knowledgeable people I’ve met. And he was the kind of guy that could go out in the woods with that traditional knowledge and tell you a lot of things about, you know, how trees grow in relationship to one another, sometimes shielding one another, sometimes molding themselves around. And he would also bring us gifts all the time, from mushrooms or nuts or pheasants, you know, things that he would get. And so, all these people become part of the book as well, so it's humanized in that way, and it’s not just a guide or a scientific thing, it’s a story.
Melanie Almeder:
And it seems to me that that’s part of this hybrid nature of In Pursuit of Wild Edibles; it’s not only this poetic language, the scientific and interesting information about foraging itself, these wonderful characters, but also this weave that you have of yourself as a character, a memoir.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah. This is a memoir, and all my nature books are what I call “personalized nature books,” not that I’ve heard people talk about it that way, but that’s what they are. They’re memoir, but they’re subject driven, and the whole thing is just that when I start these books, I’m as ignorant as most of the audience, or maybe a lot of them more knowledgeable than I am. But the whole thing is a journey into a subject and the transformation that takes place is the knowledge that’s acquired as you go, and all literature is based on transformation. There has to be a change that takes place, you can’t just go and stay the same from beginning to end so, that’s the journey, and so the reader learns with you, so… that’s what makes it literary. Otherwise, I mean I’m not interested in writing guidebooks, and or…
Melanie Almeder:
Field guides.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, identification things. There are recipes in these books, but in a way, they’re kind of art too, and they like to draw in the senses, the thingy-ness of the ingredients and how they interact with one another, so I find it very hard to stick to that kind of writing too.
Melanie Almeder:
Well that leads me to one of the questions I wanted to ask you: part of the hybridity of this piece is those wonderful recipes that read like found poems. What is the fine art- what is the literary art for writing a recipe?
Jeffrey Greene:
Well partly, having a good editor [laughter]. But the thing is you’ve got to practice it several times to really start getting it down. I mean one of the wonderful things is that you go out in the woods and you find these treasures, and then you think, “Well, what would I like to do with it? What are some of my favorite dishes?” Risotto is a classic dish, and if you go to northern Italy, it’s a great meal when you have wild mushrooms on it. Basically, this is a pescatarian book; it really has no meat in it, but it does have fish and those kinds of things, and vegetarian dishes, and really sort of points in that direction. So, because of that, you have to make a broth to make something like risotto, so you use a vegetable-based broth to sort of keep that focus of pescatarian cuisine. And it was collaborative, both my wife and I love cooking international cuisine, my mother’s highly trained and Mary likes French cooking, long-term cooking projects. And so, we all collaborated and argued and you know, fussed too, about what would go into this, so that was really a fun part of the project. The book contains also photographs, so I had to go out and do a lot of photography, and I don’t know, this is coming up quite a bit if you look at books by Patti Smith, or Sebald, there’re little photographs that sort of add to the quality and the depths of the works. So that was a fun part too, although tricky because my publisher said, “Keep taking photographs, keep taking photographs!” They were never satisfied, “We want more!” And it wasn’t always easy because Wild Edibles is very seasonal, so, you know, if you need to get a picture of a snail in the winter, you have to go find them hibernating and wake them up to get a photograph of them [laughter], annoy them.
Melanie Almeder:
To create your own still-life, right, your own Dutch high art.
Jeffrey Greene:
So I had to wake up the snail that’s actually on the cover of the book [laughter].
Melanie Almeder:
Did you eat the snail afterwards?
Jeffrey Greene:
Not that particular one.
Melanie Almeder:
Not that particular snail.
Jeffrey Greene:
But the others didn’t get off so easily. Except for the ones that escaped.
Melanie Almeder:
Did the photographs, in turn, inspire any poems? I notice your poems are very image-driven, among other drives.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, I think some paintings are influential, some Hokusai prints, things like that or more of the other arts besides- well, photography comes up in this book too, so yeah… I had a teacher named Donald Justice, he said, you know, if you can’t film it or photograph it, people are not going to be able to see what you’re after, image-wise. But that’s also his aesthetic – there are a lot of writers now that make language itself the driving interest, rather than what you’re seeing so much.
Melanie Almeder:
Alright. I wonder if this’d be a good moment to hear a poem or two from Beyond Our Means, which has just come out, congratulations.
Jeffrey Greene:
Oh, thank you. Well I’m going to read a poem that ends up in Appalachia since we’re here, and this is sort of also because I’m traveling now, I’m going on book tours. I’m not one of those people that earn enough money or have the publisher fly me here and there all the time, so I go by car. And this is a poem about racing from the West Coast to the East Coast to catch a plane early, but at the same time I was going, there was a very strong wind that went right across the whole country, and I was struck by this kind of inconsolable feeling of the wind moving across the country. So this is called “Blew”:
A wind blew from Sacramento across Nevada
where small twisters blew with it and uprooted sage
and the sage blew too. It blew over hidden penitentiaries
and a string of box cars on fire in Mill city.
It rose over Utah, into the high desert of the Divide
and through the wind farm where tall white blades
turn on the rim. It blew through rail yards
in Cheyenne and over April snow that lay
in shadows. It didn’t stop all day for days.
It blew along the Platt River lined with trees
all the way from where it leaves and finds Nebraska.
It blew over hills and gulches so that cows gathered
against it under oaks. It reached Des Moines,
motor inns and lots, and it didn’t stop there.
It blew through steel bridges in Illinois and over
the birthplaces of presidents and marinas along the lakes
where it blew inconsolably. It blew through Ohio.
Then Appalachia rose with its ancient solitary springs
and it began to rain. For a while the wind blew the rain,
and you could taste it like someone else’s tears.
[Editor’s Note: Beyond Our Means, page 53]
Melanie Almeder:
Thank you. I also wonder if you would be willing to read the poem “Oyster.” In part because it returns us to our topic today and to the beginning of our discussion. The poem seems to traverse intellectual history, religious history, art history, and the self in a world of oysters.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, I was fascinated by how many still-lives have oysters in them, whether it’s the impressionist painters and particularly the Dutch golden age painters. And they also have a kind of symbolic value, even sexual insinuations in the Dutch paintings going against the Calvinism that’s going on. But it’s also such a challenge to paint an oyster, the liquid, to render it, so it almost sort of shows the masterliness of these painters, so I spent a lot of time looking at paintings of oysters. So this is called “On Oysters”:
Among the lush cornucopia of foods,
some half-eaten, some in gyres
of their own skins, lemons, vanitas,
life unraveling, the tipped-over goblet,
another half-full, sweet wine as in
a tulip, abandoned, the planetary grapes,
red dressed in squares of window light.
Amid this oyster glisten, gray-
green to silver, round on half-shells,
the wild type in the Calvinist mind,
a little naughty sea fruit so real it
anoints the master brushstroke
in the Dutch Golden Age and you
can almost see their rimmed petals
contract to the finger’s touch, then
swell again, tidy flesh, pumps
of tissue, tears in a cup, the broad
Atlantic that passes for lips.
[Editor’s Note: Beyond Our Means, page 51]
Melanie Almeder:
Thank you. It’s been wonderful to have you here at Roanoke College and to speak with you today. I wonder if we could close out with your advice for writers who are just beginning to write across genres, who are engaging writing in multiple forms, or letting the forms influence each other.
Jeffrey Greene:
Yeah, in a way that’s what we teach in our program. Students start out, in a sense, “cross-genre.” They try their hand– they can specialize in a genre, but they have to try at least one other, some exercises in the different genres so they get exposed to it, and they sort of find out what they’re gifted toward or what they’re more passionate about in terms of writing, and they also come up with a lot of surprises. So those early classes, it’s good for them to get that experience of trying the different genres. And then, a lot of these genres speak to one another naturally, so that as they say, there’s going to be the lyrical prose passage that uses metaphoric structures for example, or rhythms of language. Prose has its own kind of rhythms and music, so I think for the young person, it’s great for them to just try all the stuff out. It’s almost like a microcosm of the liberal arts model within creative writing, within the liberal arts of genre in a sense, and that’s the great thing about being a student at a liberal arts school is you get to taste all these different fields and then you start figuring out what’s the thing that fits your life. And I think it’s also a lesson for people who are established writers too, you know, just to practice what you preach [laughter]. You know it’s always sort of annoyed me that people would teach a subject, teach a genre that they haven’t tried themselves at some point or published in, you know, and they might be really great teachers and so on, but there’s something a little different about having experienced it. Also, I think people that are—and this is obviously not a unique idea or original idea—but creative writing is, in my mind, the new wave of teaching literature, and really, it’s teaching literature inside-out. It’s not like applying different theories or, you know let’s see, sort of the economic conditions of the time, how did that affect this piece of writing, or sort of feminist views and you take the thing apart according to those views, taking apart voices, working from the outside, pulling it apart to analyze it. You’re going on the inside and putting it together and you learn what it feels like and what your brain goes through creating literature. And also, you’re looking at models all the time, so I think it’s a valuable thing for students to try, even if they don’t go on to be real writers themselves. It’s strategizing, and all writing is strategizing, so it helps people that would go into PR for example, or just even writing a convincing letter or argument, you know, it’s a kind of training with language. Also, the language itself has its own intelligence that words have different connotations and how they’re used and how they are used in damaging ways, and to be sensitive to that too.
Melanie Almeder:
Absolutely. Well thank you for the good advice, thank you for being here, and we look forward to reading your books in the future.
Jeffrey Greene:
Total pleasure for me, thank you.
