New Voices: Kristina Marie Darling

Kristina Marie Darling grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where she later attended Washington University for an undergraduate degree in English and graduate work in American Culture Studies. She is the author of several small press collections of poetry and nonfiction, including Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008) http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-kDarling%20REAL.pdf , and, most recently, Strange Gospels (Maverick Duck Press, 2009). In addition to publishing creative work, Kristina is an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary literature, with critical writings appearing in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Prairie Center of the Arts, and the Centrum Foundation.

You are 23 years old and the author of seven small press collections of poetry and nonfiction. Why have you sought to publish so much at such an early age, and do you ever worry about being too prolific? That maybe people won’t be able to follow your career as easily as if you were less productive?

When I started taking workshops as an undergraduate, I was certainly cautioned against being too prolific. But I think that it's also important for emerging writers to build an audience for their work early on. A piece of writing doesn't do anybody any good sitting in a desk drawer. For me, it's all about getting those poems and essays out there and finding readers.

In a particularly honest and funny first sentence, you open your essay “Thomas Pynchon’s Girlfriend” with “Because I’m a college student from the suburbs, I know very few things from experience,” and you follow it up with one that is equally as good: “I’ve never changed a flat tire, built a bonfire, or so much as set foot outside the state of Missouri.” Has any of this changed since you wrote that piece? Has your experience expanded considerably since then, and how do you manage to write such winsome personal essays within such limited confines? Also, do you consider yourself a Missouri writer, or even a Midwestern one?

Since I started graduate school, I've started traveling more in order to present papers at conferences and participate in artist residency programs. While I'm definitely glad to have a broader range of experiences, I've never felt that it's necessary to be well-traveled in order to write. One of my first poetry teachers, Shin Yu Pai, would challenge her students to find what's poetic about the everyday, even with things like work, bad pop music, or a trip to the grocery store. And this approach has really been influential for my poetry and nonfiction. For me, good writing comes from imagination and its ability to transform the mundane into something meaningful, and not so much from having unusual or exotic experiences.

That said, I would definitely consider myself a Missouri writer. There's no better place to appreciate the ordinary.

Why did you decide to publish your small collection of essays, Strange Gospels, a chapbook, really, with Maverick Duck Press? Who are they, and how did you find them, and are you pleased with the job they did with your work?

Maverick Duck Press is a small publisher of poetry edited by Kendall A. Bell. Strange Gospels is actually their first nonfiction title. I found out about the press three years ago when I submitted some poems to Chantarelle's Notebook, which Bell also edits and publishes with his wife Christinia. I decided to query about the possibility publishing Strange Gospels after reading some poems by authors who have chapbooks with Maverick Duck Press and seeing the same kind of humor and cultural commentary that I was striving for in the essays. It definitely seemed like an aesthetic match.

And they did a fabulous job with designing and binding the chapbook. I love the cover that they suggested, which juxtaposes more serious religious imagery with a court jester. It really matches the tone of the writing.

Same question about Dancing Girl Press which published your poetry chapbook The Traffic in Women in 2006?

Dancing Girl Press is a feminist publisher based in Chicago. The editor, Kristy Bowen, must have training in the book arts because does an outstanding job designing chapbooks. But what I like most about the press is that it also offers poetry readings, workshops, an online journal, and other writing-related resources for women who are interested in poetry. I think it's great that Kristy's creating a sense of community for female writers.

On your Goodreads profile, alongside “poetry” and “nonfiction,” you list one of your “genres” as “Women & Gender Studies”—do you consider yourself a feminist writer? If so, what does this mean to you?

I would without a doubt consider myself a feminist writer. But I think that the term is misused and misunderstood by a lot of people, even within the literary community. For me, feminist writing isn't about singling women out as an oppressed class, or devaluing traditional ideas about femininity. What's great about a lot of women's writing being published today--like the poetry from Switchback Books and Birds of Lace Press--is that it looks at the ways gender politics are negotiated in everyday life, which, for me, is a lot more interesting.

In your essay “The Flat Tummy Gospel,” you write about your struggle with being a fat young woman, and in the course of doing so, you mix personal reportage with research and statistics, as well as the poetry of Donna Stonecipher—how do you decide when to incorporate such outside elements and the words of others into your own writing? What kind of balance or blend are you aiming for?

When I incorporate things like statistics, research, and quotes in my essays, I'm usually trying to situate personal experience in a broader context for the reader. As someone who reads all kinds of nonfiction, my favorite authors are usually the ones who write from their own lives, but also use their experiences as a point of entry to larger questions about society, art, or culture. In my own writing, I've found that these types of journalistic strategies are a useful way to develop personal narrative into something a bit more universal.

Your essays can be pretty hilarious—how do you decide when to use humor to help make your points? Is it a conscious decision, or a more organic one, and do you do use the same technique in your poetry and other writing?

I actually have a very hard time writing “serious” nonfiction. I'll start an essay and tell myself I won't use humor at all, but it always creeps back in somehow. And although I don't think that my poems are ever funny, my imagery is usually very odd and quirky. Humor has definitely become part of how I see the world.

In the first essay in the collection, “Employee of the Month,” a kind of hilarious exploration of your disastrous experience working at a Target in Ballwin, Missouri, you describe yourself as a pre-law major—do you still want to be a lawyer, or has that dream been abandoned? If so, what do you want to do now?

When I first started college, I thought that I could be a high powered litigator if I studied hard enough. But during my second semester, a professor pulled me aside and told me that I'm too nice to be a lawyer. Looking back, I think that it was a blessing in disguise. I started majoring in English and really enjoyed it, even though well-meaning relatives still try to tell me there are fewer career prospects. I hope to eventually get a doctorate in English and either teach, work in arts management, or get involved in curriculum development at a college.

What motivated you to work on getting an M.A.? And why work on that as opposed to an M.F.A.?

I strongly considered pursuing an M.F.A., but didn't want to be limited to an artistic career. Even though I love writing, I wanted to have other interests and experiences in my life. And, from a practical standpoint, I thought a lot about how publishing, contests, and the job market are things that aspiring writers have absolutely no control over. I'm a big control freak, so it didn't seem like a good match.

After exploring a lot of options, I chose to work on an M.A. in American Culture Studies because it's an interdisciplinary program, so there are a variety of career paths that graduates can take. It's also great to be able to explore my interest in Modernist writing while taking courses in philosophy and history.

Who are your favorite and most personally influential writers?

The nonfiction I read is mostly humor writing, although there are also some more serious essays mixed in. I loved Poe Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ, which was published last year by Hawthorne Books. Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay and Jenny Boully's The Body are also favorites.

My most personally influential poets are for the most part contemporary ones—like Christian Hawkey, Elizabeth Hughey, Richard Siken, Simone Muench, and Joshua Clover—but I also read a lot of Imagist poetry. I think that it's important to learn from writers like Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and H.D. It's difficult for a writer to know where poetry is going if he or she doesn't know where it's been in the past.