Alison Deming is so prolific and has been writing for so long that it was a bit overwhelming to pack into a 20-minute interview, but we tried our best. Hawthorne is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program in 2015. She has an MFA from Vermont College, a Stegner Fellowship, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and multiple other fellowships, residencies and prizes. Her new book, A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress, was released by Counterpoint Press in August. Honorable mentions: Poet Pattiann Rogers Novelist and short story writer Andrea Barrett Scottish poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie Writer and curator Rebecca Senf Writer Pam Houston Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist activist artists Deming’s daughter, artist Lucinda Bliss

Published Date: February 1, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference and Book fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams,

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers...

Kate Martin Williams:

For writers.

Jessica Cole:

Alison Deming is so prolific and has been writing so long, it's a bit overwhelming to pack into a 20-minute interview, but I'm so grateful to speak to someone I've been hearing about and reading since I was a master's student in creative writing poetry program at UC Davis. I took classes there in the Nature and Culture program, which sounds similar to the field studies and writing program that Alison founded in 2015 at the University of Arizona, where she is currently Regents professor. She has an MFA from Vermont College, Wallace Stegner fellowship from the NEA, just a bunch of residencies and prizes, and I'll try not to fan girl too much. Welcome so much. So happy that you're here.

Alison Deming:

Thank you so much, Jessica.

Jessica Cole:

Your new book, which is coming out in August, is called an amazing title, like all of your books have amazing titles, "A Woven World on Fashion Fisherman and the Sardine Dress." Can you tell us a little bit about it and what we can look forward to and maybe read us a bit?

Alison Deming:

I would be delighted. Thanks so much for having me. So this book came about because I was interested in two things. One, writing about my grandmother and great-grandmother, who my great-grandmother was a dressmaker in Paris for Empress Eugenie in the second empire, and left Paris for reasons we don't know, and came to New York and set up a dressmaking business that she and her daughter ran. So these were artistic women, entrepreneurial women, and there's no record of their lives or the businesses. I wanted to know them as best I could.

At the same time as I was thinking about writing about them, I was thinking about the fishery on the little island where I've gone since I was a child off the coast of Eastern Canada, and these beautiful herring wears that they build to catch fish right off the shoreline and insure fishery.

I started thinking, wow, these are both these beautiful small cultures that are being beaten out of the world by corporate and capitalistic bulldozers, so to speak. I really want to honor them and learn what I can about them. So it's a book about dressmakers and fishermen, and there's a lot of dresses in this book too. It's a braided book. I think it's going to be fun for people to read because it's got a braid. One braid is a Felt family story. One braid is about the fishermen, and the other braid is dresses I had through my childhood and growing up.

Jessica Cole:

That's amazing. I think I've seen some fishing nets that are incredibly ornate and seem like they could be part of a dress or fashion or something. Alexander McLean-

Alison Deming:

Well, there are fishnets of course. There are fishnet stockings, which have been around since ancient Egypt as far as my research tells me, and are still kicking it in the roller derby and in the grunge world. So.

Jessica Cole:

Ancient Egypt. Oh my gosh, perfumery and fishnet stockings. That's incredible. You have been connecting poetry and science for a long time, which is my two favorite things, and especially connected, my favorite thing. I am curious about what sparked that. Also, I would be interested in hearing about the field program that you developed it at U of A.

Alison Deming:

I think the interest in science started my childhood. I'm not trained as a scientist, but I grew up in a New England family where we had lots of books and we also did a lot of work in the yard with gardens and building stonewalls and going up into the woods and transplanting wild plants to plant around the house.

But my books were, of course, children's story books like Stuart Little and Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz. But I also had a lot of little natural history books, like very pocket sized Guides to Trees, Guide to Wild Flowers, and a Children's Encyclopedia of Natural History, which I think I got on a childhood visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York, which blew my mind. Of course, the dinosaur skeletons as every child knows, it's just mind blowing. So I just grew up knowing that books take you out into the larger world, either through stories and literature or through science.

I didn't, as a child, have the division that there's science and there's art. It was one thing, and I somehow managed not to ever let that split go, and it's just stayed with me because science I just find it's such a turn on. I find it so interesting. Scientists look with such precision at the world. It seems a beautiful compliment to art, and at this point, the way science has been denigrated and censored and suppressed, I think art can have science's back as well, and that we can do something to celebrate what science can give us in terms of knowledge and wonder and attention to the world that's being wounded so badly.

Jessica Cole:

Such an amazing thing to say. Yeah, the arts can have the science's back now.

Alison Deming:

You had another question in the middle of that double question now. I don't remember what that-

Jessica Cole:

Oh, sorry. No, just in terms of how you developed the creative writing program.

Alison Deming:

As you know, in creative writing programs, there's never any money for anything as there is in some of the sexier fields. I got appointed out of the blue as an endowed chair, and it was an endowed chair in environment and social justice, and with it came a modest amount of money. I said, "Well, what can I do with it?" They said, "You can do anything you want. You can do a reading series." And I said, yeah, another reading series. Okay. Then I jokingly said, "If I could do anything, I would take graduate students up to this fishing island in Eastern Canada and have them do immersion research and writing about how literature can contribute to understanding climate change and environmental and social justice issues." And I thought they'd just laugh and say, "Are you kidding me?" And they said, "Yeah, do it." So I did it.

Then they liked it so much that they said, "Well, we'd like you to develop another program in the Southwest and we'll give you a little money to do that." So the program up in the Canadian Maritimes is over. We've done it for five years, and now we have one that runs in the board of lands of Arizona. So that those students spent two weeks in immersion doing research and working with some marginalized youth who are doing ecological restoration on the land, and also going to some of the humanitarian organizations that are doing things like putting water stations out for the migrants to help them survive in on their journey. Then they write about their experience of being down there. So we're turning their attention and their skills to being bearers of witness of what's happening on our weaponized order. So it's been a great program. We're always scraping for money to keep it going, but it's been really inspiring and we love it, and I hope other programs will start doing things like this.

Jessica Cole:

That's amazing.

Kate Martin Williams:

Hopefully with the current administration, we'll get some more funding back into our earth programs.

Alison Deming:

Possibly, and education.

Jessica Cole:

And science.

Kate Martin Williams:

And science. I know.

Alison Deming:

Yeah. There's a chance. We're certainly in a much better situation than we were, and also for more humanitarian policies about the border, I'm hoping, pathway to citizenship, et cetera.

Kate Martin Williams:

Absolutely.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah. Your ability early on struck me, and I feel like that you were in a cohort of writers I was reading in the '90s, because that's when I was coming of age and starting my becoming a writer journey in a more academic and formalized way. But for me, it was the women who were doing work of Patty Ann Rogers and Amanda Barrett.

Alison Deming:

Oh, yeah, Barrett.

Jessica Cole:

She's from my hometown, which I brag about.

Alison Deming:

Oh, I loved her so much. Also, I really recommend now Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish writer who's both a poet and a non-fiction writer. She is brilliant. I love her. Kathleen Jamie.

Jessica Cole:

I was going to ask you who else you recommend.

Alison Deming:

And of course, Rebecca [inaudible 00:09:27], who's a little bit more journalistic, but also brilliant.

Jessica Cole:

Amazing.

Alison Deming:

And Pam Houston, who you may have worked with up there.

Jessica Cole:

Oh, I should have mentioned her. Yes. Oh my God. Thrilling. Thrilling. Yes.

Alison Deming:

Gretel Ehrlich, and now we're starting to see some writers of color come into the genre, Lauret Savoy and her wonderful book "Trace," and my former student, Francisco Cantu, who wrote "The Line Becomes a River" about the border.

Jessica Cole:

I know that title.

Alison Deming:

Yeah, it's a great book. It's a great book.

Jessica Cole:

She's a former student? Oh, neat.

Alison Deming:

Yeah. Yeah. So where we're seeing diversification finally coming into the environmental writing. It's just been slower in this genre than in poetry and fiction, but it's happening, I think now. Drew [inaudible 00:10:11]-

Jessica Cole:

I was wondering, because I realize it could be an artificial view of things, because it was just when I was becoming more sentient about everything that I felt like all these writers were available to me. But was there, from what you just said I'm guessing not, but it seemed to me at the time that was the poetry plus science or creative writing plus science, nature/ecology/environmental restoration was a space that women could carve out a place for themselves in the '90s. Is that true?

Alison Deming:

Yeah. I think there were a lot of women because of their particular interests and empathy for the natural world, which is deep and long in time as part of it. I think it was easier opportunity for women than it was for writers of color, because what was considered nature writing wasn't considered issues of environmental justice, issue of who's suffering the most from climate change, disadvantaged communities of color. Hello. So no longer could we separate the issues of conservation and environmental sustainability from environmental justice. So I think rethinking what is nature writing to be more capacious in opening up to these concerns that we feel so keenly now has begun to open it up to writers of color as well. It hasn't opened it, they have helped to redefine what it can be. It's really cool.

Jessica Cole:

Again, I feel like you were one of the ... I mean, again, I could be missing a whole bunch of people. You were one of the early, at least women that I was reading, and I think writers at all who were linking environmental justice and Carolyn Forche linking the political with the personal through the landscape.

Alison Deming:

Now it's kind of ubiquitous, but when I was starting to do this, I had the feeling people were sort of looking like, you know.

Jessica Cole:

I mean, I really want to ask you about that. I mean, your early chat books, "The Girls in the Jungle," What is it? "To Survive in the Arts," which is an amazing title and unfortunately still relevant. And your collaboration with your daughter, aptly named.

Alison Deming:

Yes.

Jessica Cole:

Both the Daughter and the book, which is "Anatomy of Desire, Mother-Daughter Sessions." So with that, was that coming out of trying to carve out that space of specifically writing about place and writing about the environment, or was it simply more broad and about being a woman artist in the world in general?

Alison Deming:

The project with my daughter, you mean?

Jessica Cole:

Yes, and Girls in the Jungle.

Alison Deming:

Well, "Girls in the Jungle," we had an exhibition in Tucson in whatever year that was, 1991, I guess, where it was an exhibition of work by the Gorilla Girls, this subversive group that were trying to hold exhibition and curators accountable for their lack of representation of women. So they came out to do this exhibition, and I was invited to give a little talk. So it was one of those things. I had no time. I was really busy, and I wrote this list. We had a small feminist press, Corey Press, that was just starting up in Tucson, and they were looking for their first project, and they were there and they said, "We want this. We want to publish it." And so that was their first publication. So that was really exciting.

But I certainly had felt it's easy for women to take the dismissals and the ridicule and the harassment, whatever's going to come their way to turn them away from their own ambition. It's easy to be shut down by that. And I wanted to write something that said, "Listen, man, if you want this, here are some tips from me that may help you keep it going. You cannot use that stuff to silence you. You have to use it to energize yourself, in resistance to all the BS that comes your way." And so that's where that one came from.

The one with my daughter, I can't remember how we decided to do it. I think she was in an MFA program. She's a visual artist. She said, "Mom, we should do something about desire." Because as a young woman, I had worked for Planned Parenthood for a decade, and I had done a lot of sex education. So I was not at all squeamish about talking about sexuality with my daughter. I came of age in the '60s, so I also had a fairly freewheeling time, shall we say, in those days, thankfully, pre-aids and everything. It was great.

However, but we talked quite openly about sexuality, and people were always saying, "Well, you and your daughter can talk about this stuff." And I say, "Yeah." "Well, I can't talk to my mother about anything," everyone would say. And so we said, "All right, let's write something in which we push each other to find the edges of our discomfort," because there is the inherent maternal drive to protect your daughter, where you don't want her to make some of the stupid choices that I may have made as a young woman. You don't want her to be victimized. On the other hand, you want her to embrace her sexuality and enjoy it and find pleasure in it, and it's a very hard place to be as a mother. Where do you exert the control without putting her under surveillance or just suppressing her and making her feel policed about her own sexuality. So we wanted to tease out those tensions and limits and push it to places where we were like, "Ooh, I don't want to hear that." That's kind of what we did in that project. It's like-

Jessica Cole:

How brave and cool. I have a son, Kate has a son and two daughters, so I have a different set of challenges.

Alison Deming:

You do. You do.

Jessica Cole:

I do.

Kate Martin Williams:

I don't want to run out of time, so I want to make sure we get to your reading. Can we hear-?

Alison Deming:

Oh, okay.

Jessica Cole:

Yes. Oh my gosh.

Alison Deming:

I can read you a couple of pages from the prologue to "A Woven World." Okay?

Jessica Cole:

Wonderful. Thank you.

Alison Deming:

And this is the galley, but it's a beautiful design. I'm so thrilled with Counterpoint for that.

Jessica Cole:

Who published it?

Alison Deming:

Counterpoint Press.

Jessica Cole:

Counterpoint.

Alison Deming:

Okay, so this is from the prologue, and the prologue is titled "The Unmaking."

"The kitchen wing of our 1864 Castalia cottage had been slumping down into the earth for decades. Sill beams laid on bear soil had crumbled, making the walls sink. The shelves had held our dishes and glassware had tilted wallward. The floor enlisted and rippled like a fun house. A gap had grown between the kitchen wing and the main house, inviting rain, mice and fearsomely, huge black ants to run rampant each in their season. After my parents were gone, stewardship of the summer place became the price I paid for spending a few months each year in the Canadian Maritimes. The house on the other hand, spent the whole year on the stormy seashore of the long bank, battered by wind and rain and snow and ice, saturated with fog and salt air invaded by mold and mildew.

"The roof shingles were busting up from where the old brick chimney soothed creosote into rainwater and snow melt, making gruesome watercolor abstractions on the ceilings. And while the old fieldstone cellar walls held generally upright, one corner had caved to external forces. The house was unmaking itself.

Half of my neighbors told me to finish the job and tear the whole thing down. "150 years is long enough," they said. The other half said, "How could you tear that house down? It's been here 150 years. Who built that house? Anyone?" they asked. Then the stories began. A fisherman grew up here who was lost at sea for a week in his dory, and the crusty quips relegating me to outsider status, though our family had owned the place since 1957. "You're living in my grandfather's house."

The more I learned about the place, the more I imagined the lives that had gone before me and came to feel somehow that I was their keeper. I knew the house would not go down on my watch, at least not the whole of it. Had the kitchen wing torn down and hired Larry Small to reno what remained. New windows and doors, gut out plaster, insulate new pine tongue and groove boards for the walls. No kitchen, no bathroom, a camp sink. It will become an art studio for my daughter who plans to keep our family's story moving forward in this place.

Demolition has its pleasures. In two hours, a backhoe and dump truck can turn a house into a vacant lot. A few bites through the roof, a few scoops of lathe and plaster, smashed windows and linoleum, and the wing was smooth to bear dirt and open space on the land as it had been before the cottage was built. The demolition was catharsis. All those years of dithering about what to do with the ruin. All those years of family argument and avoidance and lack of resources, financial and emotional, gone with the dump truck rumbling down the road. Maybe they were ghosts from the family before us, who felt the relief as well. I don't really believe in ghosts as apparitions of the dead, but our dead do live with us as spectors in the mind. What do they ask of us? It seems at the very least, they ask for stories that will hold them among the living. This is no less true for our ecological losses than for our familial ones."

Jessica Cole:

Oh, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. I'm so excited for it.

Alison Deming:

Oh, I'm so excited that you're excited. I'm really thrilled to have this book come out.

Kate Martin Williams:

What's the pub date?

Alison Deming:

August. It's available for pre-order now at Counterpoint and usual places, but the actual pub date is in August.

Kate Martin Williams:

Well, best of luck with the book and with the new puppy.

Alison Deming:

Yes.

Jessica Cole:

Now I see why you named Coco, Coco.

Alison Deming:

Yes.

Jessica Cole:

To your ancestor.

Alison Deming:

Coco Chanel shows up in the book a couple of times, so that's my puppy.

Jessica Cole:

So great. Thank you so much, Alison. Such a pleasure.

Alison Deming:

Thank you, Jessica. What a pleasure.

Phuc Luu:

Thank you so much.

Alison Deming:

Have fun everybody. Bye.

Kate Martin Williams:

Thanks, you too.

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP conference and bookfair. Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusted and hardworking intern is [inaudible 00:21:39]. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.

Jessica Cole:

Phuc Luu, you sound like a dad.

Kate Martin Williams:

Our producer dad.

Phuc Luu:

All right.

Kate Martin Williams:

Keeping us in line. Yeah. Thank God for Phuc.

Jessica Cole:

We're the puppies in this situation.

Kate Martin Williams:

We're all the pups.

Phuc Luu:

All right. We could start.