Interview…with poet Dana Wildsmith

Dana Wildsmith has received honors for her poetry across the country. She's served as a writer-in-residence from Alaska to South Carolina, but in the last two years, she estimates she's only written about four poems.

"I published a book called One Good Hand, and in it I write about what it's like to live on a old farm in the midst of all this extreme growth," she explains. Wildsmith lives on her family's 120-year-old farm in Barrow County, GA, which was recently ranked in the top 20 fastest growing counties in the US. This fact doesn't sit well with this environmentalist and nature lover.

"I found the poems didn't say everything I had wanted to say so I decided to write an essay."

One essay turned into two, then more and more until she had enough for a book-length collection. Essay collections don't sell well, and she was advised to write a memoir. The result is Back to Abnormal: Finding Home on an Old Farm in the New South, a memoir of a place, the one place, as a minister's daughter and a Navy wife, she ever lived twice, and where she works to maintain its rural charm while the towns and cities around her sprawl dangerously close.

How hard was it to write nonfiction after so many years of poetry?

"Writing the different essays was easy," she says. "That was fun. I was always amazed at how many pages I could write."


Learning how to tie them together into a book was an experience. She had to learn how to carry her readers along through the chapters, a technique she referred to as "weaving a narrative thread."

"A poet once said that if a poetry collection has 24 poems, the 25th is the collection (itself)," she says, so there is wholeness to a poetry collection, but it is more subtle.

"In a book, like this memoir, you have to have storyline on the page. You have to have that connection from one chapter to another. People don't want to be left at one point at the end of one chapter then find themselves in a totally different place at the start of the next."

The learning curve didn't stop there. Other tasks Wildsmith had to tackle included writing a synopsis, querying publishers and building a marketing platform. "It was all really new to me," she says.

Not that Wildsmith is new to book publishing. She has several books under her belt. One Good Hand was published by Iris Press in 2005. In 1999, Sow Ear Press published Our Bodies Remember, which also published her first collection, Alchemy, in 1995. Alchemy sold out its first printing within months, a surprising feat in poetry publishing.

How will her poetry readers take to her nonfiction?

She believes they will. Fellow Georgian Judson Mitcham is a master poet and has written beautiful and successful novels. So she has that example, and she is encouraged by the few readings she has already done and the feedback she's received. One poet friend really liked the sound of the manuscript, especially when he could hear the poet in it.

Even in her poetry Wildsmith has been a storyteller. Although she writes in different poetic forms, the narrative form is her favorite. Narrative poetry focuses on the story. Ballads and epics are examples. So her command of storytelling served well in her memoir.

Wildsmith with Fred on her family's farm

Does Wildsmith think she'll return to poetry?

Having begun her poetic life as a child ("I know this," she claims, "because Mama kept them all."), it is doubtful that Wildsmith will abandon it now. However, she has considered other prose projects. She is currently reworking some of the essays to print in journals and magazines. She has an essay set to appear in The Sun, a literary magazine in Chapel Hill, NC, this June.

"I was just thinking the other day that there's this type of magazine article that I'd like to try writing," she says. "I may end up writing a novel. I keep finding these wonderful story lines that appeal to me and (keep) wondering where I can go with them."


To learn more about Dana Wildsmith, visit her website.