A Conversation with Joy Sullivan
BY SHAUN ANTHONY MCMICHAEL
Joy Sullivan received an MA in Poetry from Miami University, and her work has been published in Boxcar Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and Bracken Magazine, among many others. Sullivan has served as the poet in residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts and has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University. She is also the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft.
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Portland-based poet Joy Sullivan’s debut collection, Instructions for Traveling West (The Dial Press; Penguin Random House) biographs a woman’s journey of self-discovery through nature, relationships, and language. Penning verses witty, sensual, and accessible, Sullivan serves readers a work of profound wisdom and delight.
Shaun Anthony McMichael: The names of the collection’s subsections derive from lines in your overture, the titular “Instructions for Traveling West.” When in the process did you pen this poem?
Joy Sullivan: I came back to language in a profound way during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. I experienced this rupture while working remotely for a marketing company; I left work and took myself on a six-week sojourn through Arizona, New Mexico, and into Colorado. On the trip, I realized how strong and capable I was. I realized the job I had at the time was not meaningful and purposeful in the way that I wanted. I feel like for many of us during the pandemic, we woke up. The world just split open, reality shifted, and I asked myself, is email marketing campaigns what I want to do? I wrote the poem “Instructions for Traveling West” to keep going. The poem became a roadmap. Within forty days of writing that to myself, I had ended my relationship, sold my house, quit my job, and had driven my Subaru from Ohio to Oregon and started over.
SAM: The collection unfolds like an adventure. The poems flow together, one image blending into the next as you present and then invert themes and tie motifs together. How did you blend these poems together?
JS: The book was originally called New Fruit; I was approaching the collection as a liturgical movement: Eden (the utopia that happens in childhood), Rupture and Fall (the pandemic), then a Departure (my leap into a new life), and then a Return with remaking home. But while I was arranging the book that way, I didn’t feel like I had arrived at this feeling of home. It began to feel false. Every time you take a leap, you don’t neatly return to a sense of stasis. The early draft felt cheap. An editor and friend suggested reframing the collection as Instructions for Traveling West (IFTW), retelling the story as a series of guideposts, the poems as directions forward. I was grateful for how generative that lens was. It took tremendous reframing and reconstruction in the book and in my own mind, contemplating how we make peace after a tremendous rupture in our lives.
SAM: When does poetic inspiration happen for you?
JS: I call them “tiny tenders”—those little moments in the world where you witness something that can’t be rendered in anything but a poem. By putting it in a poem, you make it sacred and immortal. A life is filled with thousands of tiny tenders and if you don’t capture them, you lose them.
For example, when I first moved to Portland, I was so fucking lonely. I didn’t know a soul here. And I had this repair guy out to fix a light and he said “Joy, I’m home” and I had this flood of aliveness which I put in the poem “The Electrician Sings ‘Easy Love’ in the Kitchen While Fixing My Light.”
SAM: Out of the collections’ motifs, the ocean becomes dominant. When did the ocean emerge for you as a metaphoric vehicle?
JS: The question of home is a nebulous one for me and to define it for myself, I have to go back to when my parents were medical missionaries in Haiti. We lived right across from the Atlantic. In the poem “Yearn,” I write about wandering across to the beach where my mother found me playing in the shallows. Even at three, I had this immense longing to be close to the sea. And this theme has replayed itself again and again in my life. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve ended up on the West Coast. Bodies of water have been a stabilizing force, symbolic of home. When I was getting up the courage to leave the life that I had built in Columbus, Ohio, I had a recurring nightmare of drowning then decomposing within a barrel of water, and when I left for Portland, that dream evaporated and never returned. The intellect of the body is asking to be free and to go. The ocean represents freedom and nostalgia—in its current, that idea of the Sacred Feminine and the Sovereignty of Self.
SAM: Part of your poems’ strength is in sticking their landing memorably. Yet this eludes (and torments) many writers. When do you know a poem has ended?
JS: If I’m lucky, in my best poems, I find the ending first. When I find my exit in the woods, all I need to do is walk the path toward the light. Or I take several paths. But I’ve found the break in the trees. Another strategy I love is to sketch out different endings, open a new document, and then chop as many stanzas as possible, and I see how the poem shifts. How much can I take away so that the poem has its sense of integrity, but also hits an edge of surprise. For me, this usually means cutting the last two stanzas where I went on too long. Sometimes I shock myself. I’d think I had one ending then realize it’s a much more interesting poem when I say a lot less.
SAM: Your poems possess such lovely musicality, for example your line, “You don’t know yet that loneliness grows you a heart luminous as a luna moth,” from “Late Bloomer.” How do you ensure the poems have that balanced sound-sense about them?
JS: Write from the belly, not the brain is a maxim of mine. I don’t start with meaning or clarity, but in a creature state of flavor, color, and sound. I experience synesthesia, so I have some blurring and overlapping between senses. The biggest example of this is the color and texture of words. When I’m putting a sentence together, I’m envisioning the look of a line and whether it feels balanced. But it’s also a process like cooking. It’s a taste test.
SAM: Do you find in the drafting process that you have to amplify each piece’s musicality or tone it down?
JS: As I’ve evolved as a writer, I have less tolerance for language that feels manipulative or that is trying too hard to be the hero of its own line. Now I find myself asking, how can I make this less intense? I come back to that balance of the line. When I read things I wrote five years ago, I have to bring down the heat on all of them because they overwhelm. I had a grad professor say I was preening. And I still catch myself preening too much on the page. Look how clever I can be! That’s the exercise it becomes when we preen linguistically. I want the reader to feel the poem in their body with the generosity of their own experience, not read my experiment with how many beautiful words I can fit into a sentence. With each poem, I’m creating a flavor profile. If I use one very evocative word, I only want to use a couple of those. Otherwise, I feel like I’m mucking up the flavor in that original sentence, adding too much cheese to a beautiful seafood paella.
SAM: I admire how present the topic of movement is, even at the grammatical level. You verbify other parts of speech (e.g. in “Cost,” the horses gentle into their stalls; In “Giving Notice,” there’s still time “to creature”; in “Red” you write red is a verb). Yet, the poems maintain their clarity. How do you balance creativity and message?
JS: I’m part poet, but also part copywriter—a job I did for years. I prioritize clarity and accessibility. At the same time, I remember the words of grad school professors reminding me that my job is to take readers along for the sheer adventure of a line. So, I try to find that balance. I’m not an avant-garde poet but an accessible writer. But I am asking, what’s the riskiest place I can take this? If I haven’t scared myself a little bit either in topic, form, or craft, I haven’t pushed the poem far enough. I want to keep raising the stakes.
I’ve built myself a platform on social media. When posting, you get an immediate reward not always indicative of interesting art. I see a lot of writers get bored quickly because they’re writing clear and easy pieces that end up being popular but unfulfilling. When we only view our poems in terms of number of likes, we run the risk of not challenging ourselves to more exciting and interesting work.
SAM: When do you know a piece is a prose poem and when it demands enjambments?
JS: The answer brings us into the discussion of social media’s influence on the artist. As I’ve mentioned, I built my platform on Instagram; it’s how I got my agent and my book deal. And because I used that medium, I was constrained by the form of the square. You can’t enjamb, you can’t have caesuras or couplets. You have this block of text that you share online. It’s why many of my pieces got condensed in ways that I don’t always like, but it’s the way they first existed and so that’s the way they live in the book. Now, I’m more interested in things that overflow. I’m excited to get some relief from squares. But, like any constraint, it was generative. The limits imposed lead to creativity. And it definitely made me a savvier editor.
SAM: With several notable exceptions (e.g. “In the Office” is a 14 line sonnet), the poetry in IFTW takes the form of prose poems and organically formed lyrics. Aside from the Insta-constraints you’ve mentioned, for the book, were you tempted to fit the poems into more classic forms?
JS: I’ve always felt I was a better prose writer than poet. In fact, many of the poems in IFTW, I might argue, aren’t poems at all. Because my Instagram handle is joysullivanpoet, it amazes me what people will call a poem. So, some pieces feel very much like flash nonfiction, lyrical essays, and prose poems, and that’s the territory I inhabit. If we want to call those poems, we can.
As time goes on, I’m less interested in genre, because I feel it limits a lot of writers. I get that if you’re selling books on a shelf, you have to know what genre it is. My book is being called a collection of poems, though I didn’t originally intend for many of the pieces to be read as such.
But back to your question, I’ve never felt like I was great at form. Though sonnets are great because they’re easily recognized, (you have fourteen lines and the volta), in the collection, there are a couple of poems, like “Instinct” and “Eden,” for example, that beg to be in couplets. But in general, I’ve always felt the need for more freedom. Which is why there are poems that are true prose poems—just blocks of text—and others in lyrical form. I do really love a line break. It’s such a generative, muscular technique that excites me when I’m writing.
In “Interlude: A Woman Walks West,” an exploration of the Biblical character Eve, I experiment more with enjambment and stanzas. As that section is subverting Scripture and is a revisionist act, I was interested in what’s between the spaces. This story was given to me, but what was present in the margins? What were the stories not being told? This drove me to employ space more and consider form more here than in other parts of the book.
SAM: Out of all the Biblical figures, when did your focus turn to Eve?
JS: I had a moment in the airport of watching a woman eating a piece of fruit. I had this idea: what if she was Eve? This sowed the seed for this movement in the collection. I think most women receive some kind of messaging surrounding the character of Eve, regardless of their faith tradition. Also, I wanted her to stand in as a metaphor for the societal narratives that we’re told to accept as truth regardless of religious background. How can we take a story that’s been presented as absolute truth and fracture it in a way that gives you a more actual representation of whatever garden (or prison) you’re in. I’ve always been fascinated with her. And felt solidarity with her as the first woman to do something subversive and to get hell for it as the one who fucked up and brought on the downfall of mankind. Is that the price of one’s own freedom? To know that you’d suffer all that and that you’d do it again anyway even if you were going to be punished?
SAM: You write vividly about the connections possible between women. What connections do you hope will grow between women reading this collection?
JS: I advocate for women experiencing freedom and pleasure and the phenomenal things that happen when women decenter men, instead prioritizing their own sense of sovereignty. It’s such a joy when people read my poems or when they get early copies of the book, and they say: this is what I’m flinging myself into. The magic dark. I’m leaving the neighborhood I thought I would grow old in. I’m leaving the marriage that’s been parched for years. I’m quitting the job that hasn’t fed me for years. I’m flinging myself off a precipice. It’s beautiful and terrifying because while on the one hand it feels like I’m encouraging people to do all of these risky things, I can say from my own experience, that this posture of courage has only served me. There is no radiance without a rupture first. A lot of women have rallied around this idea. So, what is the natural rupture we need to go through, like all living things, before we reach our fullest illumination?
SAM: While IFTW is dedicated to those who go, in what way can metaphor and language be a balm to those who can’t or won’t go?
JS: I wrestle with that too. We go. But then, our life sucks in the new place we arrived at. I think there can be a pitfall to reading IFTW as a message that the reader should “just do it” and then they’ll be happy and everything will be perfect. Instead, whatever road you choose, choose it carefully and thoughtfully and don’t waste your time swimming for the ghost-ship that passes you by. I talk about that in one of the final poems, “Culpable” where I’m hiking, and I ask a woman which way to go and she says a line that’s stuck with me: either way, it’s all heaven. Whatever way you go, there will be either excruciating pain or brilliance. It’s about having the ability to choose and then to be fully aware, available, and alive in that choice and the heaven that exists there.
