All Things Pankish

Extras: A Mini-Interview with Terese Svoboda

Nicelle Davis who reviewed Terese Svoboda’s Weapons Grade and Trailer Girl last week, also had a few questions to supplement Neil de la Flor’s amazing conversation with Terese.

1. I am amazed at how well Weapon Grade is able to communicate the trauma of war even as the language seems to resist narrative. How do you know how far to take your leaps? Is it a conscious artistic move to shift from topic to topic or rather an exploration that relies heavily on intuition?
The leaps always seem logical to me but like any leap, sometimes it lands where you least expect. The shifting of topics is an effort to keep both the idea alive and the language. Intuition helps, but to achieve what I want in a poem, it’s mostly a lot of revision. Sometimes my ear tells me right but I need to find more precision in the language.

2. The setting of Trailer Girl is so incredibly depicted. The desert is always as present in the story as the characters, as though the landscape was just another child receiving and inflicting abuse at the trailer park. How did you find this trailer park? How were you able to create portraits of this place without ever sounding artificial?

Very interesting, your insight about the landscape as child. I don’t think I ever visited the trailer park in the town where I grew up, which is the locale for Trailer Girl so I’m very glad to hear it was believable. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping was an important inspiration. Mostly, a place becomes believable when the characters are complex.

3. Your work has an uncanny ability to communicate with itself. The four sections of Weapon Grade seem to be in a constant dialogue with each other. Lines in Weapon Grade bleed over into the pages of Trailer Girl. Your work communicates as a whole without ever having a sense of redundancy. How do you get your books to talk to each other?

I spent a very long time–at least a year–putting Weapons Grade together and after it was accepted, editor Enid Shomer had plenty of new ideas for which I am very grateful. I’ve never thought about actual conversations between book–that’s way too hard. Must be some unconscious consistency–or at least that’s what I’d like to think.