Interview with Carolyn Williams-Noren and Lee Colin Thomas

My dad’s career was with an oil company in Alaska, and I worked for the company myself one summer. My life today is very different from that—I live in Minneapolis, doing work that feels distant from the project of taking oil out of the ground, if not always its opposite. The poems look back at that time “close” to oil with curiosity. I basically asked myself over and over, “When was I closest to…