TtD supplement #142 : seven questions for Aja Couchois Duncan

Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press), Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and won the California Book Award in 2017. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along.

Her poem “Initiate, chapter one from The Intimacy Trials” appears in the twenty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the sequence “Initiate, chapter one from The Intimacy Trials.”

A: The manuscript has evolved a great deal over time. However, the architecture of the work has remained the same. It is based on the structure of an actual trial. So Initiate is really conceived of as the beginning of the trial; in this case a trial about intimacy, both romantic and collective. The use of the world trial here is both literal and figurative. It is often `a trial’ to do the work intra and interpersonally to be intimate. And too the judicial system has been designed and used to control the way people connect with one another, whether conferring the rights of husbands to rape their wives, or preventing women from controlling their reproductive lives, or enabling some groups of people to take everything from other groups of people such that their bodies, lives, cultures are radically interrupted and they and their descendants live in enduring precarity. So the notion of a trial felt deep enough to dive into for the explorations I wanted to do in writing The Intimacy Trials. 

Q: How does this project relate to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: This manuscript is a sequel to another, yet to be published, manuscript Vestigial. Both are exploring intimacy between people and intimacy with Aki, earth, and her inhabitants. I’ve been presencing the earth as a central voice in my work for some time as I hear her talking to me, to us, to all of us.

Q: How did you get to this point in your writing—to be, as you say, “presencing the earth”—and what does that presencing look like? What does that phrase mean to you, and how does it present itself in your writing?

A: That is such an interesting question. I am deeply connected to the earth, I am part of the earth. We all are. But many people are seriously disconnected from their understanding of our collective sentience, the rhythms of  river, rock, sky. The question that troubles me is what will it take for others to restore this connection and how might my writing be part of what brings them back. I don’t write explicitly for this awakening, but I am always writing toward it.

My writing practice has evolved greatly over time, but the “natural world” has always held both subject and object positions so that the particularities of the English language does not define what is living and what is not. There are actually very few inanimate things in this world. And yet this language that we are bridging one another through (English)reinforces a world view that sentience is limited to a very small number of beings on earth.

Q: With a first full-length collection in print, and numerous works of poetry and nonfiction appearing in journals and anthologies, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I am still hungry for the space and time to finish one of the four novels I have started and stopped. Novels are too big to be written in the margins of life and much of my writing practice resides there. I have also begun an interconnected collection of essays about people and place and the effects of climate change on land, culture, the present tense. I hope to do a writing residency next year in order to complete this project. Amidst these longer works, I plan to write flash fictions, or micro stories, which come from beneath the surface and emit a jubilant spray.

Q: How easy or difficult has it been for you to shift from poems to prose? And what do you feel each form allows that might not be possible otherwise? What have these shifts been teaching you?

A: I am not sure I have ever differentiated poetry from prose. I write almost exclusively in prose. I do hold poetry and fiction differently. And fiction and nonfiction. Although the hands that hold them are the same.

There is a precision to poetry and an expansiveness. So my prose is different in a poetic context. In fiction, and even in non fiction, the meaning is more direct, more closely bound. In these contexts, my prose is more explicit.

That said, I have always written toward a nexus of forms, a confluence of waters. It is the wild and deep waters at the junctions of these tributaries that I want to swim in. The words ebb and flow from this place.

Q: There is something of the blending of prose and lyric I’ve quite enjoyed about your work. Do you consider genre to be fluid? Are there differences in the ways in which you might approach a poem over, say, fiction or nonfiction?

A: Prose creates compression and expulsion. The sentences throb with juxtaposition and movement. I am most at home in the terrain of the sentence. I absolutely adore the period. So terminal. So controlled. And then to overrun it with words.

This too is possible in poetic lines that break. I am assuming this is what you mean by lyric. But my ear is clunky and I often mistrust my breaks. Go back and break and unbreak. It begins to feel like a kind of violence. So I gravitate toward prose.

In fiction or not fiction—forms that tend to be more fixed in the way that sentences can seem fixed—I am drawn to the lyric, to ruptures in form. Alexis Pauline Gumbs does this to stunning effect in Spill: scenes of black feminist fugivity.

Q: Finally, who do you read to re-energize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

Ah. So many. Like most writers my home is filled with stacks of books. But one particular stack is my most treasured. Things get added, and sometimes moved. But many have remained in this cherished placed for years. Some of them are Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, Eduardo Galleano’s The Memory of Fire trilogy, John Keene’s Counternatives (a newer edition to the stack), James Balwin’s Evidence of Things Unseen, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Chrysto’s Not Vanishing (this book is out of print, which is tragic). There are others. I am finding myself conscious of doing some kind of curation, which isn’t the point, at least not for me. The point is these books, and others, provide worlds I can return to again and again. Because they convey something deeply important about the world and the way words and their arrangement can help us access this in surprising, heartbreaking and soul affirming ways. They break us open again and again. And, in so doing, offer us deeper access to our collective humanity.