by LE Francis & Jay Rafferty
Following the publication of her 8th book, Just to the Right of the Stove (TwistiT Press), poet Elisabeth Horan sat down with our own LE Francis to talk about her latest collection, sources of poetic inspiration, and how she manages to stay brave while sharing her raw and deeply personal work with the world.
LE FRANCIS: How would you describe your writing process? Do you squirrel lines away and build around them or do your poems come to you fully formed?
ELISABETH HORAN: I don’t have a good writing time, I don’t sit down every day and write. A lot of the time I write them on my phone.
You know, I’ve two little kids. I’m always behind and swamped. A lot of my poems, especially in the Plath book, were written when I was so sleep deprived and with two babies — they were born really close together, it felt like having twins sometimes. So, I would write at like five in the morning or I would write when they both fell asleep in my car and a lot of it I would just write about pain in my head at that time.
Maybe there’s a line circulating in my head, like I know one poem of mine’s called ‘Wellbutrin in my Brain.’ They were adjusting my med dose, and I felt awful, I was panicking, and I just kept thinking ‘There’s Wellbutrin in my brain and I wanna get it out.’ You know, when you’re being, like, manic and repeating this cause you’re so tired and crazy. Then I was like ‘Okay here we go, I’m going to put that in the poem.’ and just did that.
Then sometimes, so you may have noticed, I really like to channel other women, my female either literary or artistic heroines, like Plath. So then, when I’m doing that kind of writing I sit down, I read a lot of her, I try to empathize with her, get into where she might have been. I kind of go into somewhat of a trance and those I need to do in the quiet, by myself, just me and my Chromebook going off kind of, just going hard and writing them till they’re done. Those are a different process I would say than ones where I’m just writing from my mind.
LE: You have eight books, how do you put together one of those collections?
ELISABETH: There have been a couple of different things. So, with the Plath one I had probably ten poems that were really about the post-partum depression, the motherhood guilt and the kind of idea of ‘I hate myself for my mistakes as a mom and here I am writing poetry and what am I doing?’ I mean you can probably tell by now I’m pretty, awfully hard on myself.
So, I kinda looked at those, and I was in my MFA at the time and I needed to do a thesis. I basically needed to write a book and I was like ‘You know what? I’ll start with that and I’m gonna add—’ cause I wrote a lot of those while reading a lot of Plath in my MFA, I was like ‘I’m going to add another person to this.’
So, I would say a lot of times books come from maybe five or ten poems that you realize ‘oh, these all string together pretty darn nicely! Can I fill in the blanks around them?’ And then you do that. That can be hard. Getting a full manuscript together is crazy hard I think.
For Alcoholic Betty [Fly on the Wall Press] it was kinda similar. I had a lot of poems about addiction and alcoholism, the guilt and the horror. I said ‘Okay, I’m gonna do a book’ and I filled in the puzzle pieces.
With my Frida one, which is the one called Self-Portrait [Cephalopress], that I decided I was gonna do ekphrastic poetry for Frida and write a book. So that came absolutely from scratch. I’d pick out a painting, paste it into my document. I sat there, channeled it, stared at it, absorbed her, did research on her, read about her, watched her movies, did all this stuff and then just wrote and wrote and wrote for two years. So that one was more like, ‘I’m going to do this project. I’m going to start it now and not stop till I’m finished.’ But there were no poems that were already happening that I decided to work from. So that one came about differently yeah.
It’s putting a lot of pressure on yourself. It’s like, you are going to do this. I would sit and write five poems in a few hours and I would come back to it, then I’d have to take a break for several months because of whatever— health issues or whatever it may be. Then I’d dive back in with another thread of her life and my life and keep going. That’s why it was a really long writing period for that book.
LE: So, how do the themes of this new book, Just to the Right of the Stove, vary from your previous work?
ELISABETH: Honestly so much of my work is based on mental illness, specifically my own and that of women. It’s kinda more of a culmination than a difference.
When I was really ill, suicidal, home alone with babies, trying to mother, write poems and unsure if I would survive, I always said to myself “If I get through this I’m going to write a book to help other women not feel so alone in this moment.” Because if I felt anything it was isolation.
I live in a really little town. I felt really misunderstood, judged and ostracized [by other moms]. I was. Those moms can pretend they didn’t do that, but they did. I made them nervous. When a woman is really sick like that, with little kids, isn’t that the time we hold out our hand and be like ‘I got you, love you, you’ll be ok, I’ll bring you some groceries, whatever?’ It wasn’t like that.
Part of it was my paranoia but part of it was some friends being like ‘I can’t be around you right now, it’s too upsetting.’ You just think well, what the fuck? As if I’m doing this to you?
So, with my poetry, it’s always been my goal to use the shit I have been through to help other people realize they aren’t the only ones. If there’s a woman out there who’s suffering alone, if I can reach her with my poetry book and she goes ‘Okay, I’m not going to kill myself today cause clearly this woman, Elisabeth Horan, was worse off than me and she survived it. I’m gonna fight, I’m gonna keep pushing.’ then I’ve succeeded. That’s how I judge my success in poetry, did it save a life today? Did it reach out and hold someone’s hand who was alone?
I feel with this book I try to reach out and hold Sylvia’s hand. I try to reach out and hold anyone’s hand that is falling off that cliff. I’d say ‘Don’t let go I got you. Don’t jump today. Hang on another day. Tomorrow something might change.’
When you’re that sad it’s hard to see that tomorrow might get better but we still have to hang on somehow. We have to hang on. That’s what I want this book to feel like. Hang on one more day for me.
LE: If you were to identify a piece that was the crux of this collection, the soul of it, or even your favorite, which would it be?
ELISABETH: I’ve always been really proud of the title poem, ‘Just to the Right of the Stove.’ It’s one where you see both of us really clearly in that moment of total chaos. The culmination of her pain and the culmination of me feeling of inept to save her. I really like the intensity of it and seeing her voice next to my voice, or at least how I imagine her voice talking to me. That one, for sure.
There’s always been some that make me hurt badly, one of which is ‘I Hate Elisabeth Horan.’ That one is really painful. ‘I’m no Louise G.’ is very dark and deep to me, same with ‘Wellbutrin in my Brain’ and ‘Basement Mother.’ I would say those are the ones that sit with me, they’re kind of a part of me.
Because, when you’re trying to describe though a poem how bad you feel, it’s easy but it’s hard. It’s easy to just say “I feel so horrible, I want to die..” No one is going to read that poem. So, how do you put it into something that they can see inside your soul, inside your brain and still want to hug you and want to help you fight but also let them see how bad it fucking feels. Those are the ones that I think do that.
LE: Another thing I was particularly taken with when I was reading were the poems that feature the line breaks within the words because, from my vantage as a reader, it was like this sense of intimate chaos. They’re very grave statements and I’m leaning in to read and understand, it brings me so much closer to the line. What inspired you to use that method?
ELISABETH: I’m so happy that you experienced [that]. That is exactly what I could ask, if I could hope, in one of my wildest dreams, that one of my readers could feel that [technique] brought you more intimately in.
I find some readers don’t know what to do with that. Some readers are like ‘Did you just do that for fun?’ It happened organically.
Some of the first poems I happened with, I would be writing and I just want to take an axe to this and chop it up. Like ‘Some Fellas Love,’ I’d hit this boiling point of anger against this man and I wrote ‘Do you think I’m going to murder the kids?’ But that couldn’t just go on in a line. It was like, I’m hacking this thing up at the knees.
And then I liked it more and more. I don’t have a good explanation other than it felt right. It felt right to title this poem ‘Honeymoon’ and ask the reader to follow me down this rabbit hole into insanity I suppose, or where Sylvia was at with Ted in her marriage, in her life, like let’s go down there and we’re going to go the hard way.
LE: A pet question I have with all of my poetry friends is how do you approach line breaks in general? What does the poetic line mean to you?
ELISABETH: It’s such an important thing, isn’t it? I had a review done last week from a younger reviewer. It’s interesting to see somebody who had not read a lot of Plath, or maybe none, come at this [book] and to see how it struck them. She said something like ‘It’s really crazy but good how all the poems have totally different form.’
I really like to challenge myself. I think books where every poem is one page long with similar structure, I find that really dull on the eyes even if the writing is incredibly good. I’m not criticizing it but for me line breaks come where my ear hears them.
In my editing, I work at line-breaks more than anything else. To emphasize the meaning as much as I can through the text and the form.
Especially in this book, where there [are] a lot of conversations. I had to look at that without writing it as conversation you’d see in a novel. They’re pauses in my brain and in the rhythm of the lyric in my head. I guess I just trust my brain to count, like the musical counting I’m doing in my head and how the reader will get the most of the meaning from where I give them that little break.
I want to help my reader follow the rhythm and have the meaning stick in those certain places. That’s what line breaks can do. They’re so powerful.
You could study it your whole life and there would still be more to learn about structure.
LE: Your poetry is really raw and honest, it’s openly addressing the very heavy things you’re living. How do you prepare yourself to share that?
ELISABETH: I will say this to start: it’s not easy. I still have a lot of anxiety about Alcoholic Betty and my book Was it R*pe? being out in the world. I did those things and I was like ‘Fuck. What did I do? What if someone reads this and it comes back to me and they try to hurt me? What if my students read this? What if my children read this someday? What the fuck am I doing?’ There’s a lot of that and it hasn’t gone away. I haven’t gotten used to that.
But I guess, it’s kind of the only way I know how to write. From the beginning when I started writing poetry, 2016. I don’t know how else to write, from my guts, from my soul. Whenever I would write a really difficult poem would be when people would reach out to me the most and be like thank you for writing that. That response, it’s intriguing and it encourages you to push like that.
I’m so flawed, I’m so very flawed. And I guess I’m 45 years old and if I’m not going to talk about it now when am I going to talk about it, you know?
I spent 20 years being quiet about being raped, about addiction, about the divorce of my parents, about hating myself. I didn’t say anything and crushed it down and went to work and choked on my pain and it was like — you know what? What do I have to lose?
If I’m not going to say these truths, then I never will and I won’t help anybody either. I won’t help anyone unless I say how bad it is to be an alcoholic. If I say how bad it is and I show how bad, then maybe someone else can get into rehab because of that, or ask for help.
LE: The next question I have we’ve kind of talked about and that is how has Sylvia Plath’s story inspired and shaped your own but do you have anything else you want to say on that?
ELISABETH: I think it’s important for me to differentiate that I’m not Plath, the genius Plath is, and I don’t understand completely what mental illness she had. I think she was bipolar, I think she had PMDD, and I’ve read that when those two are combined suicide is really common. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m not trying to pretend that she and I had the same thing, just that I understand when the monsters come for you — what do you do? And I feel like that I get.
I don’t judge her for killing herself. And I don’t think people should judge other people for killing themselves because we don’t know what was happening in their heads when they did it. I think that is a really big issue in society — the aftermath of suicide and how brutal it is. And how we say, ‘How could she leave her children?’ Well we don’t know what was in her head.
I think a lot about all of that and say you stay alive for your children. Well, that can be really awfully hard too. I’m just saying we can’t pretend to know what someone else’s agony is. We can empathize and use our own experience for a guideline but we cannot know. So, I guess with Sylvia I was trying to put myself in her shoes, I was trying to get into her head a little bit, but I can’t ever know.
LE: Aside from Plath and Frida [Kahlo] what other artists have inspired or shaped your work?
ELISABETH: I also did a collection about Dickinson [Odd list Odd house Odd me, Twist in Time]. Dickinson is someone I read a lot of and I learned so much from reading her poetry. If I could have one book to continue to study poetry from I would say Dickinson because it’s so tight and so wild all at once. She was insanely good. And again another super isolated woman, alone in her mind in the cold, in New England. That was a very fun book to write I loved it. It’s very lustful and yearning and nature and sex and death and all the fun things she used to love to talk about.
Robert Frost I’ve read a lot of, you know I’m from Vermont and Robert Frost is a hero here for sure. [With] him, [you’re] really looking into that rhythm and kind of learning to think about your lines like a horse trotting or cantering, the hoofbeats, the lyricalness, and the precision with which he wrote was insane. And I’ll never get anywhere near that but it made me aware of all that.
I’ve learned from several [contemporary poets]. I saw Jericho Brown read in Amherst, Mass., it was awhile ago now, he put on this show. It wasn’t a reading, it was a performance and it completely changed the way I felt about reading poetry, about performing poetry. And I was so blown away by him, the content of his poems but then the way he performed them. I’d never seen anything like it.
Kaveh Akbar, he inspired me so much and my Alcoholic Betty book I decided to do after I read Calling a Wolf a Wolf. And I tweeted to him, I was so brave, I said, ‘Read Kaveh’s book it inspired me to write about my own addiction.’ And he actually wrote back and I messaged him and I was like, ‘Can I send you a copy?’ And he was so gracious. I love him because he will speak to the little people and so does Jericho.
And Danez Smith, seeing him read on YouTube, some of his poetry hits me hard. And I have immense respect for him and everything he’s doing. Natalie Diaz is someone I’ve read a lot of. Her poetry just slays me every time. There’s a lot of them.
One of the poems I’ve always loved so much and will always keep in my back pocket is ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden. It taught me about stanzas, when I think about my stanzas I think about his winter rooms and how he constructed them. I don’t think you can write more beautifully than that.
LE: In general, what inspires you to create what you create and what does your creativity mean to you?
ELISABETH: I’m definitely a really creative person, I’m excited by art I’m excited by poetry. I went to college and I got a BA in American Lit and then I didn’t do anything with it because I was in trauma and I was falling into addiction and I had no self love. So at 22 when I could have embraced that and gone somewhere with it, I crashed and I truly feel like I wasted 20 years of my life, I just lost them working shitty jobs for other people — just the grind of mediocrity and suckiness and self-medicating and self-harm and living for what? And I always thought to myself, you’re going to be dead at 40, you’re just on this path.
So having my first kid saved my life and I decided that I would change my life for them to not die and not be someone’s secretary. I wanted my kids to be proud of me. So I did two masters degrees in six years with two little babies and learned how to write poetry and for me it was redemption, it was proving to myself that I don’t completely suck. That I have a lot to tell the world and that I have a lot of pain that I’m tired of carrying on my shoulders alone. And so far anyway, the poetry world has reached back to me and said “We’ll help you carry it” and it’s a huge gift that I don’t take lightly.
It’s been a tough road but here I am still fighting.
Thank you Eli for taking the time to sit down with us! You can find her 8th book, Just to the Right of the Stove, at twistintimemag.com/product/just-to-the-right-of-the-stove-by-elisabeth-horan or links to her other work on her website, ehoranpoet.net.
LE Francis is the fiction editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
Jay Rafferty is the poetry editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
