Now You're the Enemy
James Allen Hall

This interview is also available on Foreword Magazine’s website.

Any particular story to tell concerning the writing of Now You're the Enemy?
One story, about the title, seems important to tell.
My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner.
Dustin said to me, "Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you're the enemy." It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I'd been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.
I was deeply concerned about writing about other peoples' histories (their successes, their failures). In Now You're the Enemy, a mother figure takes center stage, and the speaker's fascination and love for her despite/because of her self-destructive tendencies is perhaps the light that shines down from the tech booth. When I realized I was writing a manuscript loosely based on my own mother, I was plagued by the ethics of representing another person: what if I didn't get it right? won't the facts be inherently flawed? I tried my best to exile those questions to keep writing. Writing about her was the one connection I had with my mother at the time.

The exile was not successful. The questions continued to ask themselves. I answered by troubling narration and representation. I wanted to contest the notion of a single story, one person's truth. I wrote a series of poems that drew on visual art and history. "Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas" was the first, soon followed by portraits of my mother as Rosemary Woodhouse (of Rosemary's Baby), the lost queen from King Lear, and a fake entry in an encyclopedia—to name a few. Writing about other women who mask my mother, I was able to uncover really strange parallels between many women's lives and the shaping forces of politics, religion, and art. Ultimately, the poems tell us something beyond my mother's story. Or, to say it another way, they are versions of my mother as intersected and voiced by others throughout history.
I felt relieved after the book found its home; I knew that the book was finished and that I couldn't do anything else for/to it. I lived in the dark rooms of that book for a while, and I'm glad now to have moved out.

How has your mother responded to the book?
I waited until it was at press to tell her; I didn't want to make editorial changes based on her reactions. Because I have friends who write about family members in memoir, I know there is no way to gauge what, exactly, might upset someone. I feel grateful that she loves the book. She has a good sense of humor and self, and she knows that the mother in that book is and is not her. Though, responding to a poem in which a friend calls my mother an incendiary name, my mother said, "Tell Elycia she can kiss my ass." Then we both laughed really hard.

When did you start reading, and what did you like to read?
I cut my teeth on glossy, operatic romance novels which my grandmother used to hawk at her yard-sales. The first time I wrote to an author, I was seven years old, and I'd been moved by a Harlequin title. I no longer remember the author or the book. Only the bodice-ripping remains.
My parents owned a cleaning service, and Wednesday nights my brothers and I would help them scour an already-sterile doctor's office. On breaks—when my mother would smoke—I'd pry any random book from the doctor's shelves and sit myself down on his beautiful leather couch. I was maybe ten, poring over anatomically correct models, reading about sexual malfunction. It thrilled me.
I pilfered my parents' collection too. Two titles loom out from the living room bookshelf of my childhood: Other Healers, Other Cures, a guidebook of alternative medicine, and Psychotic God, a biography of Hitler.
The first large novels I loved were Steven King's. As a boy, I read my father's disappointment when he gave me the Lord of the Rings series—I hated it. Where were the heroines?
In the fourth grade, I devoured every version of every Greek myth I could get my hands on. God, I loved those stories: of jealousy and creation, rape and dismemberment, beauty and violence conflated. I loved comparing versions of the same story, as if one writer knew more about the gods than another. These myths were like gossip columns. I had passing dalliances with Norse and Egyptian mythologies as well.
Somewhere in high school, a Christmas present: Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems. I just about washed my eyes in it.
I read anything when I was a kid, convinced that books could save my life.

How do you write? What's good about it? What do you hate about it?
The first draft for almost every poem of Now You're the Enemy was composed in couplets. I believe that you can spot an out-of-place word, an awkward phrase, a bum image so easily in a couplet. After the initial draft, I subverted the form, working with longer strophes, dropped lines, and stanzaic pattern; that's one way I knew when to say when. The end product was very different for most of the poems in the book.
In general, I unfold from dramatic situation. Who are the characters? Where are they? In my first workshops as an undergraduate, I only added settings in revision. I'd have something I liked, and then I'd realize that there was no world, no context, virtually no position from which this speaker sang. That changed as soon as I became more conscious of it. In revision now, I consciously add sonic texture to the poem. I know poets who start there, but for me that's largely the work of revision: I need to put up the walls first before I start to make the music resonate and echo. That kind of revising allows me another entrance into the poem, to re-envision through sound what and how the poem might mean. I hope my process continues to shift; I suspect that different projects need different things from us.
Writing is the one pure act. I love that, when I write, I'm simultaneously transcending and analyzing myself. No poem exists devoid of some mark of the author's mind. So, all writing bears some relationship to the self. But, then, writing a poem makes me feel selfless. The song blaring on the radio, the telephone, the neighbor's baby—all of it falls away. To be aware of one's senses in altogether senseless way, as pure intellect and emotion. To feel, for once, timeless.

What good advice have you received concerning writing? What's some advice that you could offer young writers?
April Bernard: "You chose to be a writer, to say the difficult thing. Say the difficult thing."
Liam Rector: "Always Be Closing."
Ellen Bryant Voigt: Write more syntactically interesting sentences.
Jorie Graham, quoting Frost?: "No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader."
Find your aesthetic. Then read the opposite, or adjoining, aesthetic. Read prose on poetry by poets. Wallace Stevens' "The Irrational Element in Poetry" changed the way I write. Ditto Louise Glück's Proofs and Theories. I recommend a wonderful anthology called Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade.
If there's an opportunity to show your writing to other writers, take it. Everyone has something to teach you. Your job is to find what that something is, then to separate the useful from the useless (and sometimes detrimental). Seek out smart criticism, the most blunt, most honest that you can find. Pray that your teachers are hard on you, and let their voices into your process. As hard as they are on you, be even harder on yourself. When praise comes along, relish it half as much as critique, but twice as long.
Does this mean I'm not young anymore? Thank god; oh shit.
Courtney Love: "I want to be the girl with the most cake."

How did you find the publisher for this book? What has your experience with the publisher been like?
I've admired poets in the Arkansas series for a while: David Baker, Billy Collins, Michelle Boisseau, to name a few. When the manuscript was finished—very shortly after I finished my degree at Houston—I began researching contests and publishers. I sent to Arkansas in October of 2006; it was taken the following June.
If I may be allowed a slight effusiveness: The University of Arkansas has been everything I could hope for in a publisher. They sought my input for cover art selection and design, they put up with my late-hour edits, they encouraged me, they've kept the process transparent and swift. And they make beautiful books.

What are you working on at the moment?
A memoir, tentatively titled I Liked You Better When I Didn't Know You So Well. Pieces have appeared in literary journals such as Redivider, Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, and others. I'm also building another manuscript of poems concerned with violence, masculinity, sex, and (strangely enough, as if in spite of my irreverent self) spirituality.

What are you reading?
I read poetry and creative nonfiction, mostly, though I love novels and have an especial hunger for the short story form. Michael Dumanis' My Soviet Union, a collection of essays by Thomas Glave called Words to Our Now, Sean Hill's Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, Cate Marvin's Fragment of the Head of a Queen, Miguel Murphy's A Book Called Rats, and Ann Patchett's memoir Truth and Beauty are all keeping me up late. After reading her second and third books, I've finally found my way to Natasha Tretheway's Domestic Work. I could say many things about these books—their linguistic invention and play, the ways each of them revitalize the use of image, the formal acuity of each writer. But I'll shorthand it: go read these books.
I also read current issues of journals: Gulf Coast, jubilat, Ploughshares. Not enough.

What are you watching?
I'll watch anything Bravo shoves out onto its airwaves. Love Project Runway, My Life on the D-List, and Top Chef. I wish I could produce a tv channel that played endless loops of episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Veronica Mars, and My So Called Life. My dream channel would produce new episodes of the short-lived series Wonderfalls and Noah's Arc, a campy but compelling series that follows four gay black men in Los Angeles. Late at night, the channel would switch suddenly writers reading from their works, live from cafés and colleges and streetcorners from around the world. Mixed in—the occasional, sensational Cher video.