The Interconnectivity of Writing: An Interview with Leigh Anne Couch
“I don’t want art that is just trying to get me to see the world exactly how that particular artist sees it. No more narcissism!”
Leigh Anne Couch is a freelance editor of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She is the founder and editor of SWING, a print literary magazine under construction at The Porch, a nonprofit writers’ collective in Nashville. Her books of poetry include Every Lash (University of North Texas Press, 2021), Green and Helpless (Finishing Line Press, 2007), and Houses Fly Away (Zone 3 Press, 2007). She is the winner of the 2020 Vassar Miller Prize. Her poems have been published widely in magazines including PANK, Pleiades, Subtropic, Smartish Pace, Nelle, and Cincinnati Review, with poetry featured in Verse Daily, Dzanc’s Best of the Web, and in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Penguin). She lives in Sewanee, Tennessee with writer Kevin Wilson and their sons, Griff and Patch. She will be the first of three visiting writers at the In Process Spring Fete in April.
The slogan for your magazine SWING is “writing that moves you; regional identity with a national sway.” What makes SWING different from other literary magazines, and what do you look for while reviewing submissions?
We are really looking for writing that is dynamic, energetic, and compressed in a way that makes it feel like it’s trembling. The writer has created something that is living and that will change as soon as it’s read by a new community. The idea of “community” is particularly important to SWING and to The Porch, a literary nonprofit and collective that became really rooted and grounded during the pandemic (and who SWING publishes through). People are longing for connection, and for a literary magazine, especially one in print, to be important and to thrive, you have to build a community around that magazine. If you can build a community though the magazine, then it will be able to survive. When I’m reading, I am looking for microcosms of community building or storytelling that I am invited into as a reader, and then at the end I feel pushed back into a world that I see in a new way because of that story.
In the submission guidelines for SWING, you mention that submissions from marginalized or underrepresented communities are particularly important. Why do you think it is important for creative writing magazines to include authors from different backgrounds, especially in a state such as Tennessee?
I don’t want art that is just trying to get me to see the world exactly how that particular artist sees it. No more narcissism! And it’s a fine line, because I think the most important thing that art can do is create a space for empathy. The difference between narcissism and empathy is that when a piece of art creates empathy in a reader, that reader is changed, and that reader will go out into the world and see it differently. When a piece is only about narcissism, or “navel-gazing,” then all the reader knows about is that one person’s perspective. Especially since the pandemic, people forget how much difference and diversity and beautiful experiences are in the next house, community, neighborhood, or county. Marginalized and underrepresented voices have not been heard on the various levels of the publishing echelon, and it’s really important that at all levels they get entry, because if they don’t get heard in lit mags they might not get heard at all — we are the first step. It’s part of my belief that literary magazines are an important part of the publishing ecosystem. If they don’t get heard here, they aren’t going to ever be heard. It’s just a little bit that we can do, but it should be an important goal for all publishers of literary magazine. For [writers], it’s often their first publication, their first open door.
What is it about being published that makes it such an important step for a writer?
There is always a space for new, good work. For me, when I first sought to publish my work, I had always considered myself a writer, but it was hard to accept that this was my career, my profession until after I was published. There is also a community that comes with being published. Now, although I still write, I am using my creative energy to focus more on editing and publishing others.
Right, you offer editorial services in your own time. What got you into editing?
When I work creatively with my own work, I just sit down and let my mind go for hours at a time. I cover pages and pages. And when I read through those pages, I start to find connections. Through those connections, that’s the way that a poem is built. In magazine work, you find all of these different elements from all of these different communities, people, even genres. And then I start to find these through lines, where these different people are writing about the same concept for some reason. The idea that all of these differences can be woven together in some sort of serendipitous way is really exciting to me. So, in editing, I have always loved looking at someone else’s work and finding things in it that they might not have recognized were there. Most people come to me in my freelance job when they’ve been working on a story for so long, and they know that it’s not working but they can’t figure it out. Or they’re at a stopping point in their novel where they’re like “all of the energy is gone, what’s happening?” and I can be like “well wait, what about this unfinished thing?” or “didn’t you realize that you were really writing about this?”
I find that I can write all day long, but when I try to sit down and fine-tune, it feels like the hardest thing in the world! Why is editing an important part of the writing process, and why should writers not fear the editing process?
I feel like it’s like sculpture. You know the thing is there; you just have to carve away until the form reveals itself. That’s how revision is for me. If somebody comes to me wanting help with revision, then that already shows me that they want their work to do a different thing than just speak to their own experience. They want their work to reach out beyond their own experience and connect with others. The first person you have to connect with is me, your editor, and then I help you reach further. The first step is to ask for help. If it’s something that they can’t put away and they feel like it’s meaningful, and they just don’t think it’s getting anywhere, then I would say that they need to get an editor in some form or another.
Your most recent published work, Every Lash, has a sense of familiarity while also constantly changing perspective and subject matter. You encapsulate the human experience on the page while also feeling like you are speaking directly to the reader. There is humor thrown in, but you are also pretty blunt on a lot of subjects. Tell me how you found this balance.
When I first started writing, I was in college at Sewanee, so all of the poetry I’d read was classical — Keats, Wordsworth, Blake (I really love the Romantic poets) — and I’d read some contemporary poetry, but not a lot, so my diction was pretty elevated. You just run out of energy with that. And I’m not a formalist, so I knew I was going to write free verse, and you can’t apply “thees” and “thous” to free verse easily. I really love language; in this book you’ll find a lot about etymology. The reason why I chose the title Every Lash is because I love double entendre: “Lash” can mean something beautiful and gentle, the lash of a silk robe or an eyelash, but it can also be something violent, like the lash of a whip or a lash that binds.
I also realized that I love to eavesdrop — listening for stories, but also personal diction. Not really the things that were said, but the way that people said them. I think when you start to realize that poetry can be about what’s happening right now — because no matter what we’re all moving to that same end — then you can write and speak plainly and clearly about it.
You aren’t afraid to take up space on the page, or to use a lot of punctuation or capitalization. Do you write all of your poetry like this, or is Every Lash an exception?
My first book Houses Fly Away was published in 2007, and the lines were much shorter. As I was writing the work that would be in Every Lash, I had so much less time. My life was so different. The poems that I wrote in 2007 for my first book where written when I felt like I had all the time in the world. At first, a longer line and a longer poem was often a result of not having enough time to make it more concise. But then it started to become a more natural voice, and I don’t mind a longer poem as long as it is adding something integral to the story, and I hope my poems do that. But it did originally come from not having enough time to cut them down!
What would you say to someone who is afraid to publish their work?
I just want to say, you do not have to publish. It is not a requirement for every piece of art or good piece of writing. And I think it’s important to know that rejection is inevitable. There are so many good voices and good writing around, which doesn’t mean there’s no space for yours, but that it just needs to find its right place. And it’s a lot of work. You have to send it to so many places, and you need to just let rejection fall away and know that you just might not have hit the right person at the right time. Be very organized, and don’t take rejection personally.
Megan Crowe is a senior English major at MTSU with a minor in Political and Social Thought. She loves to analyze the works of different writers throughout all genres and time periods, and she is fascinated by the infinite number of ways that human beings can experience the world around them. Megan’s goal is to teach English at the postsecondary level to inspire the next generation to find the strength and power of their words.
