Today, I’m so pleased to present my conversation with my friend, the essayist and poet, Heather Lanier. We first met during graduate school at Ohio State, where she was on the nonfiction track, though also writing some very fine poetry, which would go on to win her one of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series spots with The Story You Tell Yourself. Her newest chapbook, Erasing the Book of Pregnancy, moves skillfully through the story of a pregnancy, using erasure and adaptation of expectant mother texts.
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Heather Lanier is a poet, essayist, teacher, and thrift-store shopper. She is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and along with her award-winning poetry chapbooks, she has published the full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, which was called “a powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion” by Kirkus Reviews.
She is the recipient of a Vermont Creation Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a New Jersey Artist’s Fellowship. Her essays and poems have been published in The Atlantic, TIME, The Sun, Salon, and elsewhere. Her TED talk, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves,” has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages.
You may be able to tell I have a cold or allergies in my intro/outro. It’s pollen season here. The yellow pollen fog is almost upon us.
Pick up a copy of Erasing the Book of Pregnancy here.
Read more about Lanier here.
Some notes:
Check out Heather Lanier’s TED Talk.
While you’re at it, sign up for her Substack newsletter, The Slow Take.
I mentioned Matt Poindexter’s new chapbook, Fatherland, out recently from Unicorn Press. A great book, and a terrific complement to Lanier’s.
Previous guest Philip Metres’ Sand Opera came up.
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Coming Up: A strong slate of episodes in the queue! DM Aderibigbe, Lauren Camp, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Dan Beachy-Quick, and David Baker.
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and he now works as a freelance writer and editor. Additionally, he teaches poetry at the University of North Carolina.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon
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