Interview with Erica Reid

Fielding the Ghosts in Form and Kestrels: Erica Reid on her award-winning debut collection of poetry, Ghost Man On Second.

Erica Reid has recently won The Donald Justice Poetry Prize for her debut collection, Ghost Man On Second (Autumn House Press 2024). Erica received a BA in Creative Writing from Miami University in 2002 and, then, after a long period of working to make a living in the field of art marketing, she went back to school and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Western Colorado University in 2020. Ghost Man On Second was her MFA thesis. She now serves as poetry faculty for Western Colorado University.

KW: Congratulations for winning The Donald Justice Poetry Prize awarded by the West Chester University Poetry Center. This poetry prize is named after the Pulitzer Prize poet Donald Justice, who was widely known for his work with rhyme, meter, and form. His work kept evolving during his career as he moved from traditional poetry to experimentation with the surreal and back to meter and rhyme later in his life. Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry, says of your book, “One feels form’s necessity, the pressure of truth upon it.” Given your reckoning with grief and loss in this book, and the trajectory of hope and hopelessness between mother and daughter in your crown of sonnets, "Emily," how and why does form allow you to explore such tender boundaries and end with what I see as self-reconciliation in the culminating prose poem of your book, “If Ever There Were a Time for a Long Title This Would Be It” : Spread that rib cage wide & let a bird in. What the hell. There was a time when birds could not est inside you, but who can remember that other life?

ER: The best way that I have to explain my relationship to form is this: when I feel ready to approach difficult material, such as my estranged relationship with my mother, it helps me to have limits. The sonnet crown that you mentioned is a great example. How does one write about their lifelong relationship with their mother, a relationship that has been in turn joyous and heartbreaking? For me, the answer was in episodes, and because a sonnet crown calls for 14 (or so) sonnets, I had a place to begin: 14 episodes which may feel unrelated, but the crown could link them together. I could dart around in time and in feeling, but the crown would hold the narrative structure in place.

To some degree, every form can work that way. A crown of sonnets is long and sprawling, but you can take the same approach within a single villanelle, ghazal, etc. You can broach the impossible by leaning on the structure of the form.

KW: Julie Kane, in her glowing tribute to your book, states that it is “rare for a poet’s first book to arrive fully formed and perfectly made.” I have to agree with her. First poetry books, especially, can be a haphazard of poems written across a wide swath of time and experience, a collection of young poet’s “top hits.” I understand that this book comes from your MFA thesis from Western Colorado University’s Low-Residency MFA program. Is that right? MFA programs, especially low-residency MFA programs, seem to have hit their apex these days. So many are shutting down now. I found an interesting discussion on the low residency MFA program back in 2016 at the Brevity Blog between Dinty Moore, Kevin Haworth, and Emily Smith on whether the MFA is an essential “calling card” professionally for the poet trying to publish a collection of work and finding a teaching position at the undergraduate level and above. (You can find links to Moore’s and Haworth’s responses to Smith’s blog at the end of Smith’s blog.) There are those who think that the MFA has lost its terminal degree power in aiding a poet to find a teaching job: some poets with Ph.Ds are struggling to find work beyond the adjunct level and, often, the low-residency MFA is not able to offer its students teaching assistantships that might give them an edge in even finding a composition class to teach. And yet here you graduated with a thesis complete or near enough to garner a prestigious award. Can you talk about your experience in the MFA program? What advice might you give to a poet thinking of applying to a low-residency MFA?

ER: First, for full disclosure, I have also begun teaching at Western, and do some administrative work for them as well. My experience with what we call the GPCW (Graduate Program in Creative Writing) was so strong that I kept looking for ways to continue contributing, and so my relationship did not end when I graduated.

To be completely honest, I’m not the person you want to ask about the overall state of the MFA program as an institution. I didn’t pursue my MFA looking for job prospects — I have worked in arts marketing for over a decade, and in fact worked full-time alongside my MFA studies so as not to disrupt my professional career. The revelation that I enjoyed teaching came much later, and so I’m not the authority on how the MFA degree is or isn’t helping people land jobs.

I came to Western to write my book. I’ll be the first to tell you that writers don’t need a degree to write a book. If you can do it on your own, go for it! But 15 years after my undergrad degree (also in poetry), I had wandered far from my own path as a poet, and was seeking a way back. I wanted rigor, community, knowledgeable faculty, a mentor or two. I needed a path forward and I hadn’t been able to carve it out alone.

As a result, those are the students I hope will apply to Western and other low-residency MFA programs — the ones who want to write, and who wish for a community to support them through it.

KW: Turns out that we are both Ohio girls who transplanted to Colorado. I keep thinking about the importance of place in poetry: how so much that is deep and metaphorical lives in the land that surrounds us, especially in childhood. The poet KC Trommer in an introduction to the poetry of place says that “poems of place contain the psychological and geographic maps we make of the worlds we know, think we know, and those we remember.” The geographic map of childhood is etched within us. What happens when we move to a place so physically different and begin to write our poetry there? I know it took me a long time to feel that psychic connection to the arid wildness of Colorado after living in the soft pond mist of Ohio. Tim Ellison for Ploughshares has a blog on place and quotes William Carlos Williams from his epic poem, Paterson:

Why should I move from this place
where I was born? knowing
how futile would be the search
for you in the multiplicity
of your debacle. The world spreads
for me like a flower opening —

I’m wondering how once you moved here, you discovered and deeply connected in your poetry to the landscape of Colorado. The poems of place in the third section of your book are set in Colorado and there are some beautiful passages:

Someone has fixed bells to the cottonwood trees.
January air moves through them like icy wire.

Someone has laid lanterns along the exposed riverbed,
their light a golden water, a suggestion of fish.

Someone has placed holly berries in each deer track,
a rosary approaching the river, bowing, & looping back.

Someone has recently dusted the kingfisher:
Someone has passed this way before me . . .
(from Preface)

Can you talk a bit about place in your poetry and what it means, as a poet, to “displace” yourself from the familiar?

ER: Often in my bios I’ll write that I am “a Colorado poet with an Ohio heart.” I haven’t found a better way to phrase it. I didn’t feel like an Ohio person until I left, which I think may be the case for many people. And now, seven years into my time in Colorado, I don’t feel like a Colorado person, either — though maybe I would if I left?

I find this all so rich to explore in poetry. I like to make my landscapes clash — Ohio and Colorado, as well as the many places my partner and I travel, tend to mingle together in my work. That way, it becomes my own personal landscape.

I will say that moving to Colorado changed my relationship with land, practically overnight. There’s just so much love and respect for the outdoors here. Dan and I attend casual talks at breweries about maintaining rivers or preventing wildfires. The city, county, and state parks here are varied, cared for, and constantly programmed — we recently attended a free night hike to learn about black footed ferrets, for instance. There are so many stewardship and conservation efforts that actively invite citizens in to learn and understand.

And so what do writers want to do when they’ve learned something new? Write about it! Or at least weave in those textures and details into whatever they’re working on. I have not sought out “place” so much as it has unfurled itself for me here, and I can’t help but write about rabbitbrush and kestrels alongside grief and loneliness.

I’ve also been on a personal quest to recalibrate my own understanding of humans’ relationship with land and wilderness. I’m guilty of believing/feeling that I am separate from the land, and it can take a great deal of energy to unlearn something, or view it differently. I imagine you’ll start to see that relationship change in my writing.

KW: Newly minted MFA, award-winning poetry book, new poetry faculty for your MFA alma mater . . . what’s next in 2025!!

ER: I initially pursued my MFA because poetry had drifted from the center of my life, and I hoped to guide it back. Just a few short years later, I have my degree (and a strong writing community as a result), my debut collection is out in the world, and I am discovering a joy for teaching and particularly for supporting other poets in their own writing journeys.

This is frankly more than I’d ever hoped for, and I’m trying to go with the flow as much as possible in terms of what’s next.

A few concrete wishes: to publish my second full-length collection; to do as much poetry-travel as I can (conferences, readings, etc); to really learn to teach, since I feel a bit late to the realization that I love doing it. I have also been awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the spring, which will be my first-ever residency; I look forward to discovering what that process is like.

Poetry is back in the center of my life, and I intend to keep it there.

KW: I am so happy for you! And congratulations again!