John Skoyles is the author of eight books of poems and five of prose. All the Question Marks, an autobiographical novel (Unbound Edition Press) was recently published on September 22nd, 2026. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, and many other publications. His awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. Skoyles served as Ploughshares’ Poetry Editor for 18 years, then Interim Editor-in-chief before retiring in 2025. He is Professor Emeritus at Emerson College.
This interview was held over Zoom on July 9, 2026.
Hayley Pisciotti: Your novel is a deeply vulnerable account of your heartbreak and grief that follows the ending of your forty-year marriage, and I’m fascinated by your choice to write in mostly third person, especially knowing that you also wrote a personal essay on the same topic for Ancient Wisdom. I’d love to hear what the third-person perspective and the landscape of the novel gave you room to explore that an essay simply couldn’t hold?
John Skoyles: Since this is an autobiographical novel, I used the third person to create distance from the writer. In this way, I was able to say things that I might have not said if I had used the first person, I voice. Even to myself. And by using my real name, I hoped to foster an intimacy between the narrator and the reader. So that’s how I made the choice. I didn’t do it any other way. As a teacher, I’d often read a student poem written in the first person and ask, “Why don’t you try this in the third person?” I’d suggest a different point of view―for them to realize a new dimension, a way to get a different take on the subject. In the case of this book, third person seemed to fit. I hope it works.
HP: I especially loved the line towards the end that reads, “Inhabiting a character is similar to unearthing a self.” And that does seem to hint at your choice to write the narrative the way you did. How did you decide on that dual narrative of John and “his quashed devil,” and how did it allow you to experiment with interiority?
JS: The funny thing about the “quashed devil” line was that I originally had written an afterward to the book. In the afterward, you’d learn that it was my ex-wife who wrote the book. She was “the quashed devil.” The afterword had her saying, “Now you’ve read my account.” But when I sent the manuscript to Pam Painter, who maybe you know?
HP: Yes, I’m familiar with her work through Ploughshares.
JS: We were longtime colleagues at Emerson. Well, when she read the manuscript, she didn’t read the afterword. That was my fault as I had written End or something like that on the novel’s last page. She rightly had no idea that an afterward was to follow. After she read it, I asked, “Do you think that worked? About the wife writing the book?” She said, “What do you mean?” And I became aware that it was a fake construct. So, I cut the afterword, realizing I’d written the book in a way that was about me through my ex-wife’s eyes, which gave a whole different perspective. I was left with the quashed devil―myself! I was allowed to explore pain and its result in ways that I wouldn’t have done if I had used the first-person singular or even the third person from my point of view.
HP: I also think there’s an awareness of the past and present versions of yourself that appear when you are going through grief—there’s a duality to it. You’re always seeing yourself presently, but you are thinking about yourself in a past tense too.
JS: That’s really true. There’s a book that I learned something from―Dennis McFarland’s The Music Room. The flashbacks to the past are so alive. I got so immersed in the book that I didn’t realize how the narrative worked: the story begins with the narrator going to New York because his brother has died, and that was in past tense! Then it flashes back to their growing up in Virginia. The scenes were so vivid: he put the past in the present tense. I thought, “Boy, this is ingenious.” The past is present, but the present is past. It was really an enlightening switch. Anyway, it was interesting to play around with perspective like that.
HP: There’s also a duality between prose and poetry here [in All the Question Marks], and I was interested to know about your choice to write titled chapters that could be considered micro or flash prose.
JS: I’ve done that before. I did it in Driven, and I like doing it. I admired a novel by Joshua Ferris called Then We Came to the End. Before every chapter, he’s put headings like―I’m making these up―“Meeting Hayley,” “Coffee with Joe,” “Disaster,” so there’s a whole list—maybe about twelve or fifteen of these on a page introducing each chapter. It’s like a roadmap for what’s going to happen, so it entices. Of course, I didn’t do anything like that. Mine are, as you noted, separate titles, but it gave me the idea. And a reader, I hope, takes pleasure in seeing them. Also, it’s a delightful challenge to write titles―they often surprise! As Frost says, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader, no surprises for the writer, no surprises for the reader.”
HP: Having them in eight parts, looking at them on the page, it almost creates its own poem.
JS: Well, it’s an age of short takes as well.
HP: Did the titles come to you after writing the chapters?
JS: Oh yeah, and I would try to name the chapter so it would be inviting. Like all titles―you want to give a hint, but you don’t want to be overly revealing and you don’t want to be obscure either.
HP: Did you always feel like the book was going to take a linear approach?
JS: Yes. I did. I can’t do it any other way, but I admire books that are not linear. I like the Oulipo group. In French it means “workshop of potential literature.” They call themselves rats who build a maze from which they plan to escape. Georges Perec wrote a whole novel without using the letter E. The most well-known may be Raymond Queneau, who wrote Exercises in Style. Among my friends, I’m the odd one out because most prefer a conventional approach, but I get a kick out of the Oulipo’s playfulness. I think it goes somewhere into my brain and infuses me with possibilities. I’m not going to write a book as extreme in strategy as not using the letter E, but these writers make literature lively. So far, I’ve kept to a linear narrative. But you never know…
HP: That allowed you to experiment with other things, possibly? The grief that you write about is balanced with dark humor in this book. Is that something that you can tap into right away when you’re writing or is that realized through revision?
JS: It’s not through revision. It comes to me right away. I think I was born that way, or maybe my parents raised me that way—to laugh at pain. My first response when anything goes wrong is to laugh. So that comes across in the work, I guess, maybe to its detriment too. [Laughs]
HP: Who were the writers that wrote dark comedy and showed you that you could write like that?
JS: One writer I really love is Enrique Vila-Matas. He’s a character in his books. He lived in Marguerite Duras’ apartment when he was a young man in Paris, and he talks about these experiences, and they’re very wry and very funny. I don’t know if they’re particularly dark, but there’s an inspiration to me in reading his semi-autobiographical fiction. In poetry, my great friend Alan Dugan wrote very dark poems that were very funny. One is about his father’s death, and I can recite it to you. [John recites Dugan’s “Elegy”]. I love Auden’s poems for the same reason. The most famous poem by him is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters…” but then he has a line like, “The dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” There’s humor amidst indifference to cruelty. Gogol is someone I love for “The Overcoat.” Oh, Denis Johnson—if we’re going to look at contemporaries—he can really make you laugh and in the most grotesque of moments. I’m thinking of one of his last stories which appeared in The New Yorker after his death, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.” It’s very dark but there’s a lot of levity too. John Cheever often has that same quality, strategy, whatever you want to call it.
HP: I wondered how setting informs your work since Cape Cod and New York play significant roles in this book, and where do you feel most inspired?
JS: I’ve always felt like a New Yorker, even though I left Queens when I was seventeen, and came back here just four years ago. Living in New England for thirty years or more, I oddly never felt at home. I’ve always felt a real kinship with this city’s life in all its shapes, forms, sufficiency and insufficiencies. It’s enriching even as it exposes you. I like the Cape too, but in the winter, it was only the seagulls, the post office, and the dump. Remember, I commuted to Boston for work so I was tired most of the time I lived there [Laughing] except for the summer. And as Alan Dugan told me when I moved there, “Skoyles, if you accept an invitation to every cocktail party at the beginning of the summer, you’ll be dead by Labor Day.” It was feast or famine!
HP: Do you feel like you need to be close to water in any way?
JS: When friends ask what I miss about the Cape, I say fishing. I used to love surf casting. Going down to the beach in the middle of the night with a lantern and coming back wearing sunglasses. When I took my son fishing as a little boy, if he didn’t catch anything in twenty minutes, he’d say, “Can I walk down the beach?” He was bored, but when he passed through adolescence, he understood the pleasure of fishing. It isn’t solely to catch fish. It’s to be alone with the beauty of the landscape, and with your thoughts, looking at the sky and the clouds and the water and you’re hearing things and you’re alert with all your senses. I miss that. I love the water. I buy Mega Millions tickets, and if I hit it, I’ll buy a place on the ocean! No question about it.
HP: I’m right there with you! Along with setting, music is something that ties into your work as well, specifically the song “You’ve Changed.” It’s a song that’s covered often, and in both instances in All the Question Marks and in your poem “Lottery” [from the The Situation] you’re writing about live versions of it being played. What is it about this song, and music in general, that feels influential to your writing?
JS: Many years ago, I was with a woman and her little brother. The kid’s great desire was to go to Studio 54. This was in its heyday and there was no way he was going to get in, but I took him. We stood outside. Limousines arrived and they’d let all the celebrities enter, and this poor kid in his suit was jumping up and down and waving his hand like an honors student hoping to be called upon. On the same street was Jimmy Ryan’s jazz club, where Roy Eldridge played; it seemed like he was there all the time. So, because we couldn’t get into Studio 54, we went to Jimmy Ryan’s. We sat there and when Eldridge took a break this older man started playing the piano. Not many customers were paying attention to him, but I was, because I probably identified with him! When he finished, he said, “This is Frankie Dash at the piano playing ‘You’ve Changed.’” And I loved that. The name Frankie Dash. It wasn’t the song as much as the man playing that song. And his name fits his job. He’s the interlude between sets, a literal dash! It seemed significant to me at that moment because the relationship with the woman wasn’t going very well, and we’d just come from not getting into Studio 54 which I knew was an absurd quest. As you say, that song’s been covered a lot. It’s often on the radio and everyone plays it, but the lyrics don’t touch me as much as Frankie Dash did, playing with his onetime longing to be center stage and now being the intermission pianist. Maybe I was thinking, too, that he had to change. He had to alter his ambition and goals, that’s what struck me.
HP: For All the Question Marks, why did you want to write about it in there?
JS: Because the change of my life was enormous. Not only changing forty years of a relationship, that’s my whole life, but moving from a house with maybe five thousand books to a one-bedroom apartment, where I keep buying these books that I miss. Aside from that, it’s the totems and talismans that are around a house too, which I didn’t think would be so meaningful to me, but they are. There is a nostalgia for things that have to do with your kids and such.
HP: Early in the book, you have a sentence that reads, “John is tracking the past as one retraces the labyrinth of a dream in the morning, surprised by its revelations.” Is there anything that surprised you when you were writing the book?
JS: Yes, as I quoted Frost earlier, “No surprises….” I think a writer surprises himself or herself all the time. If you don’t, your work is preset and preordained, and the reader can predict what’s going to happen. The one thing that surprised me was remembering a phrase my grandmother used to say: “Love your friends with their faults.” If I complained, as a little boy, “Charlie stole my marble,” she’d say that sentence. In this book, when I went back over what I’d done, I thought that is the way I have lived my life [Laughing] and in return, the friends I’ve chosen have certainly forgiven me my faults.
HP: The surprise does work for the readers, and so does the vulnerability. Is there anything besides surprise that you want the readers to reflect on or take with them after reading the book?
JS: I never think too much about what the aftershock of a book is for a reader, but something that I learned from the book that might be helpful—not that the book has to be helpful by any means—is that there is a way to carry your dead with you. I don’t mean only those who are no longer living, I mean those from the past as well. Years ago, I read an interview with Carlos Fuentes, who lost his son when his son was in his twenties, and he was asked how he dealt with that—I haven’t read that interview since then, but I never forgot it—he said, “Well you take him inside you and he lives inside you.” You can keep your ghosts with you. Even though they’re physically absent, they don’t have to depart from your heart or consciousness.
HP: That’s a beautiful sentiment—the reimagining of, maybe, the acceptance stage of grief.
JS: In the book, Driven, I did put my dead parents in a car—that book is about driving from Truro to Boston—and I put an old girlfriend in the car, the one who I took to Roy Eldridge. I guess it’s maybe a mode for me now? I just thought of it at this moment that I’ve done that in at least two books.
HP: And there’s another surprise right there.
JS: Yeah, that’s true!
HP: What are you hoping to explore next in your writing? Any future projects on the horizon?
JS: My closest friend, Michael Burkard, died in December 2024. We were friends for fifty-three years—his last poem appears in the [Ploughshares] Winter 2025-26 issue. Mary Ruefle, his widow, sent it to me when she found it in his papers. We were close friends all those years and his poetry was an inspiration. He had written many poems to me, dedicated a book to me, and vice versa. We were very close. When he couldn’t talk on the phone anymore due to Parkinson’s, I began to write letters to him, one a week, and they were funny. I say this because I intended them to be funny. I wanted to amuse him. I knew my audience and I knew my method, and I knew Mary was going to read them to him. So, I was writing to amuse, and I wrote a lot of these letters, and she sent these all back to me a while ago. And I looked at them and I thought, “My God, these were funny anecdotes, and they were so personal to the two of us. It’s as if he’s in the room with me.” My first response was that I wanted to tell him about it! Look at these letters that Michael wrote to me—hundreds of pages, single spaced over the years.
[John lifts a large stack of opened envelopes and folded, loose-leaf pages from his desk]
Maybe I can bring him back in some way through these letters, and my letters to him. Again, it turns out through this interview, I’m understanding my mode and its possibilities.
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