Learning as a Creative Endeavor: An Interview with Jesse Graves

“If you aren’t risking some sentimentality … you probably aren’t going where the real depth and the real resonance are in the material.”

Jesse Graves grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain (co-authored with William Wright), and Merciful Days, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poems of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English. The 10th Anniversary Edition of his book, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, was recently included in a display at a multi-media exhibition in the Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University. To read more about the exhibition, visit its website.

Do you have a memory of when you first discovered writing as a passion?

Yeah, I have a couple. I was not the most literary kid; I grew up way out in the country, not really in a house full of books, a first-generation college student. My mom loved to read though, so there were always books around and I remember as a kid — my brother and my sister were several years older than me, so it was almost like being an only child. When I was playing in my room or playing in the yard, I was always working on stories to go along with the games. Then I would sometimes write these out in notebooks. As a teenager, and even earlier, I was obsessed with music. I wasn’t actually a very good musician, unfortunately, but writing songs, and the narrative play, narrative games, were very much a part of my imagination. And then my first year of college I had a really good English professor. I was invited to enroll in an honors English class, which was kind of just one of those things that I kind of lucked into through my ACT scores. My professor had us do a personal essay, like a memory-type piece, and I wrote about a Thanksgiving Day football game with my brother, my cousins, and all the kids in the community that were around. It’s still a vivid memory for me — we had this spinning snow, and all the fallen leaves were on the ground. It was just a really meaningful memory for me, playing football in the field with all these kids, some of them a lot older than me. And my professor said, “I wish this were longer; I don’t usually feel that when I’m grading, but I would like to read more of this.” And at that moment, I kind of had this realization that my own life story — my own experiences — could be part of my subject matter. The books I had been interested in were probably more like fantasy, sword and sorcery, they weren’t necessarily realistic personal stories. I discovered that kind of writing around that time, and that maybe I really was drawn to it. That’s a pretty definitive time for me — my first year of college at Lincoln Memorial University before I transferred to UT-Knoxville. I had really great teachers who took an interest in me all through my years in school. I was super fortunate. But that college professor, he was big for me, David Worley, who pointed me in the direction of a lot of books that would become important to me.

That you can have somebody you can look back to as an inspiration like that is really lucky.

It was. And I recognize the good fortune of how many teachers I had who just — not to say they weren’t interested in everyone — but maybe saw a little interest that I had, or a little talent or a flash of ability that I had, that they helped me work with or helped me find.

Would you say you have any specific muses, or inspirations, in your writing?

I think my ancestors and the place where I grew up, which had been in my family for almost 250 years at this point. My first German ancestors settled in my county in East Tennessee way back in the 1770s. There was a whole lot of upheaval around TVA in the 1930s, and my great grandparents got moved off their land. I’ve written about that — really from early days that was part of my subject matter. I think that my best poems are about that family connection to the land, and about my daughter — about being a dad and about having that kind of bond. And the poems that I find most encompassing of my own experience. or my own ability, are the ones in which she is part of that sort of ancestral lineage. The last poem in Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is called “Big Elm Point,” and the scene is by a lake in Sharps Chapel that was flooded by TVA, which of course displaced my family. But I’m with my parents and I’m with my daughter; we’re playing on the lake bank, and fishing and she has some little plastic animals that she’s playing with. That poem is probably my favorite of all my poems because it in some ways encompasses all of my themes. All of the things that are most important to me, are all in that one poem. You can’t get that very often. You don’t want to only write about those things, though, and I’m happy to have poems about New Orleans and I’m happy to have poems about playing basketball and all the other stuff that the poems are about. But the really the main core feelings are in that poem and a few others. But to me, those are the Muses.

That’s great; there’s a lot of depth.

It’s when they come together that it’s magical for me. I love nature poetry and landscape poetry. I’ve spent obviously a lot of time in my writing life trying to get the right descriptions and the most evocative or representative ways to describe the landscape, but it’s when the people in the landscape intersect that I’m most interested, most engaged, at that point.

I think this gets asked often in interviews, but I think it’s interesting: What does your process look like when you approach writing?

I I like that one too, because I think it’s really important for young writers to hear what older writers do — how do you get your work done, how do you get your writing done. Because this is not obvious and it’s actually not that easy to figure out. I’ll just go ahead and tell you that you will try a bunch of different things before you find the best way to get your work done. But my process — I call it a “variable” process. I try not to be the sort of writer who has to have my favorite tea, and my favorite mug, with my favorite candle burning, writing with my fountain pen on special paper, at five in the morning. I don’t want to be that kind of writer who is so bound to ritual, or routine, that I can’t function otherwise, or can’t write otherwise because I mean, I have a job, I live in the real world. I’m not a man of leisure — I work all the time. So, I have to find ways to get the writing done because it’s just a fact that other things, like teaching especially, can feel more pressing. The deadlines are more like: I’ve got class tomorrow, I have to be ready for class tomorrow; I need to write this poem, but it doesn’t necessarily have to get done tomorrow or today, I can push that back a little. And that’s that’s very dangerous for writers because you can’t push your ideas, you can’t push your inspirations, back because they won’t stay — they don’t like to hang around and wait for you. That phrase “flash of inspiration,” I think is pretty accurate, because when you get something you need to be able to write it down. And, of course, it’s handy, but I’ve never become super attached to typing in the notes on my phone. But I’ll tell you what I do have — I have a whole stack here of pocket-sized notebooks. And these notebooks — one or the other of them is with me pretty much all the time. It’s a little chaotic, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend having this many active notebooks, maybe too many, but that’s also only like half the stack here. But I like to have something that I can write with wherever I am, whenever I need to. But back to the process for me, its more like I try to write everything out. You can’t really see behind me, but there’s a typewriter on the desk behind me, and this literally is a fountain pen. I’ve got a couple of these which were gifts from a beloved mentor-poet-friend of mine named Jeff Daniel Marion. I need to mention him because tomorrow is the first anniversary of his passing away last summer, and he’s just such a beloved and important figure to me. I still write with these fountain pens that he gave me. For me, I need a little bit of structure, so this month, July, I have been writing with a small group of friends, there’s only four of us (there’s only ever been four of us). We’ve been doing this for 13 or 14 years now where we pick a month, or two, or three, every year and write a poem a day for that month. Some people do this in April, because it’s national poetry month and there’s a little bit of a sort of group effort going on with that. But April’s not really a good month for me, I’m too busy with school, and so July is a better choice, a little quieter. January, February — these are good months. Sort of in the off-season for teachers. We write a poem a day, every day, for a month. In the early days, we were very strict about this and we had some rules, and one rule was if you didn’t get your poem turned in by midnight you were out of the group for the rest of the month. So, nobody wanted to be the one who got kicked out of the group because it’s a little bit competitive. There was a little bit of sort of pushing each other forward a little during that time. That has helped me so much. And two of these friends live in Washington state — one of them I’ve never met in person. One of them I’ve met in person one time when I did a poetry reading at Eastern Washington University and he drove from Seattle, all the way across the state, to my poetry reading. There’s something about that anonymity, obviously we’re dear friends at this point, but in the beginning, it wasn’t like working with old friends or working with people that I saw every day. There was a little bit of freedom in that, which helped me a lot. Having a group of people to think and create with — it doesn’t have to be as elaborate or specific as ours — and having a little bit of a community that you can work with is so important for writers.

It sounds very motivating; I really like that idea.

I can’t tell you how well it’s worked for me, like most of my books have been written during these marathons. We call them marathons because you really are — by the end of the month, after three or four days, you’ve written everything that you think you’re going to write, and you really just have start paying attention to things. The poem I wrote last night — I’m mostly a night owl by nature. The one I started last night; it was after midnight when I started it, and it was after just going over to hang out with a couple friends after we hadn’t seen each other in a while, we’d been off on various things. So, we just got together at a friend’s house and sat around on the carport and talked. So that was my subject — the stuff we talked about was sort of the subject matter for my poem last night. I don’t know if that will ever be a finished poem, or a published poem, or what will become of it. You can’t worry about that when you’re doing a poem a day every day. You are just trying to get down everything that you can. It’s so important for writers to make a record of their days and their experiences. I think writers maybe don’t write enough usually. You’re waiting for that inspiration, you’re waiting for that feeling of “oh here’s my big idea,” but really you can’t wait for that. I don’t think I heard that quite enough when I was a writing student. I think I got a lot of great instruction about revision and perfecting what you’ve got, but one thing I try to tell my students is just write as much as you can. A lot of it’s not going to be any good, and that’s okay, it’s just practicing like you do with anything else you make an effort to learn how to do.

That’s really good advice; I’m definitely going to use that when working on my thesis.

If all the rest of this sort of floats off into the ether, as you’re doing your thesis try to remember this part. I’m struggling a little bit right now with a project that’s been going on for a long time for me and I can’t quite get over that last little bit to finish it. It’s just a matter of time that I don’t have right now, but it is also like a little bit of a block preventing me from finishing it. And I think when you’re doing something like a thesis, which feels kind of like high pressure, one way to get through that is to just sit down and write something kind of thesis adjacent. Don’t think “I’ve got to write the second chapter of my thesis,” or “I’ve got to write the first paragraph of my thesis.” Sit down and start working on something just in regular sentences, not in paragraph form, just like “what is my main source material all about?” Do a little summary of something like that, and that can help you ease into it with lower stakes writing that’s not going to be published — not going to be in your thesis probably. It can help you organize your ideas, and it can also help you get into the part of the writing that’s going to be what you actually turn in and get evaluated on. Lower stakes and then you can sort of ease into higher stakes.

Your poems in both Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days, I noticed, are so rich in natural imagery. This was one of my favorite aspects; while reading I kept underlining images of nature because they were just so clear and focused, and it seemed that they really grounded the poems. What role has nature played for you in your life as a writer?

I appreciate you noticing that because of all the descriptive qualities in the work and all the imagery in the work — that’s the part that for my subject matter has to be right. It has to be accurate, and not cliché and not sentimental. This is a little bit of a trap for somebody who writes the kind of material that I do — where you’re writing about your family, and your life at home, and your ancestors. It’s pretty easy to get sentimental or just merely nostalgic. So, the imagery helps with that. Part of the idea behind the title, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, is that nature is not just this beautiful, bucolic, relaxing, easy-going kind of place. If you really look at nature, there’s a lot of struggle, there’s a lot of conflict — every piece of ground is contested. I remember in a poem by another of my old mentors, A.R. Ammons, he talks about how on a creek bank every inch of soil is contested by one plant or another, or one beetle or another, or one ant colony or another. He was also a scientist, so he could break it down into these like, seemingly minutiae. But it really did represent to me that nature is nature is a contest at times. I didn’t want to just show the pretty parts and I didn’t just want to focus on on the beautiful parts of it, although to me if I didn’t get the beautiful parts in it, it wouldn’t be accurate either. Some of the poetry that I loved most as an undergrad and grad student was the British Romantic poets, who were enthralled with this idea of the sublime. The idea that what’s beautiful and what’s terrible/terrifying converge in one vista, or one experience, or one scenario. That interested me a lot and it sort of rhymed with my sense of nature — that you look out and the splendor of it is is everywhere, but also the conflict of it is everywhere, too. That’s some of what I’m hoping to capture in my nature imagery. That’s why the blight in the pine was so important to me in that poem. Appalachia, my part of Appalachia, is very poor, very rural, a very hardscrabble place. It’s a place without a lot of outside help, and without a lot of outside interest, honestly. So, to be able to look at both aspects of it — the beautiful and the terrible — I think was important to me.

I found your poems to be just as rich in emotions as nature, especially as the narrator recounts memories and the nostalgia and loss that accompany them. Do you feel that emotion is as guiding of a force in your writing? You mentioned that you kind of walk that line of sentimentality.

I realized the danger of being overly sentimental about my subject matter and I’ve tried to be cautious of it. I’m going to mention another great teacher that I had — we had a visiting writer when I had come back for graduate school at University of Tennessee named Jack Gilbert. Gilbert was 79 years old when he was my teacher. He was there for only one semester and that’s the last class he ever taught. He was already one of my favorite poets, because my professor there, Arthur Smith, had been teaching Jack Gilbert’s work for years in his own classes. It was through Arthur Smith that I met your teacher, Gaylord Brewer, who came to UT and gave a poetry reading when I was a graduate student, and he was friends with my professor, who someone called my poetry guru (which I think was probably true). For me, what makes a poem memorable is the emotion, the feeling. I think the imagery is attracting and it’s a connection point, it gives grounding, like you say, to the feelings. But I tend to remember poems more, think about poems more, and care more about poems that make me feel something. And that’s not to say that thinking and feeling are binaries and poems do one or the other — that’s really not true. But the poems that lean into the feelings most, and that lean into what’s at stake in the poem and what matters in the poem — those are the ones that that are most important to me. Jack Gilbert said something in class, we were talking about one of my poems. We had a workshop discussion, and it was my turn to ask questions about the poem — did I have any questions about what people thought. And my question was: “was the poem too sentimental?” And Gilbert responded first, and he said, “In poetry, sentimentality is the risk most worth taking.” And I filed that away, I made the the note and I filed that away. I think about it pretty often when I’m writing, when I’m revising, especially when I’m revising my own poems and trying to put a manuscript or something together. And he said that’s how you know that you’re close to where the feelings are in the poems. So, it’s a little bit of an oblique answer — it’s the risk most worth taking — but to me I feel pretty clearly that I know what he means. If you aren’t risking some sentimentality, you probably aren’t going where the real feeling is in the poem. You probably aren’t going where the real depth and the real resonance are in in the material.

That’s such a great way to think about it: the risk most worth taking.

That helped me a lot. And it has continued to help me a lot actually.

Has poetry helped you to reconnect with your own past and memories and reconcile those?

Yeah, for sure. This month’s poem-a-day poems — I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad’s brothers, two of whom have already passed on, and those are the ones who’ve been on my mind the most, along with my dad. So, it’s like, three central people for me are already gone from my life. And that’s important work for me to do, that’s important subject matter for me to work on, because my family experiences are fairly typical of rural Appalachia. I mean, there’s a lot of tragedy and my own experience is not so much different. I went off to college, I went off to great universities and got to live a little bit of a different kind of life than my ancestors and my family, and I recognize that. And I feel sometimes a little bit alienated because of it, like I’m one step removed from what’s really important to me. This may not all fit into the context of your question, but to sort of circle back to that — it is a way for me to reconcile some of those feelings and to sort of work my own way through how the choices that I made for my life were so different, based on the opportunities that I had being very different from the people who came before me and my family.

It sounds like it’s almost therapeutic in a sense, to be able to explore everything.

Yeah, I think that’s true. I think if you’re writing about personal subject matter, it has an element of that, you work through some things that you maybe have difficult feelings for, or even ambivalent feelings, or you don’t know how to feel. And one way you sort of can approach that and can think about that is: write about it and see where the images and the poems take you. Or the stories, certainly stories too.

I think that is so important because you’re writing for an audience, but in a way you’re also just writing for yourself.

I try to think about that — it’s easier with poetry because you don’t presume an audience for poetry. You don’t necessarily imagine anybody’s going to read it, but you do kind of have to write it so that it’s important to you. And then after you write it, you start thinking about how an audience will read it, and not just a big, generic audience, but how will somebody interpret it, is there enough here. I tell my students, think of your poem as a public document. You’re sending it out into the world to stand on its own, do you have enough for the reader to understand it? Or relate to it in the way that you hope that they will? So that’s a question for me too. That’s also part of my process — have I equipped this poem with enough to go out and meet a reader without me being there to explain it?

In the introduction to your collection of essays, Said-Songs, what stood out to me was your discussion of the importance of the imagination in writing. I really liked what you had to say about that. Do you look to any other creative endeavors outside of writing to help feed your imagination?

It’s mostly reading. I think of reading as maybe my most creative act. If I’m feeling a little stuck in my own writing, I will try to find something I haven’t read before, maybe even a writer that I haven’t read before. Especially if it’s a poet that comes from a background very different from my own so that I’m going into it without any kind of familiarity. I’ve had this great ongoing reader relationship with Adam Zagajewski, a Polish poet who died just this last year. His work to me — you know he was born in 1945, so a generation older than me, in Poland, right at the end of World War 2, right at the beginning of Communist-era Poland. A place of intense conflict and intense struggle and poverty and oppression. His background, his context, is so different from my own that I learn so much from his poetry. I don’t think he’s a well-known poet necessarily — he’s not an unknown poet — but to me its like reading one of the greats. Like reading John Keats or Emily Dickinson, because its just a whole world encompassed in his work. I try to find work that I’m not already super familiar with. That to me is a very creative process. But you know I’ve always done other things — when I was younger, I played guitar all the time, when I was younger than that I played basketball all the time. When I was younger even than that, I collected baseball cards and comic books. Even at this advanced stage, I’m still trying to learn. I have a friend who’s trying to teach me how to fly fish, which is not as easy as it looks in the movies! So, I try to keep a bunch of things going that I don’t already know how to do. I have an old truck that I try to keep running; that’s maybe the most challenging thing of all. But I’m always trying to find something that I need to learn. I can’t really say that I’m a painter or I’m a serious musician or anything like that, like many writers, but the other creative endeavors that excite me are just things I don’t know how to do yet.

Learning as a creative endeavor — that’s great. I like that you mentioned basketball, too. I think a lot of people forget that sport is so creative in itself.

Oh my gosh, yes. I think I learned a lot about being a writer from being a pretty serious basketball kid. There’s a poem right at the end of Tennessee Landscape, called “Deep Corner,” it’s one of the last two or three poems in the book. And it’s about playing basketball until it got too dark to see. I try to not use too many sports metaphors in teaching, because I know a lot of my poetry students don’t know or care what I’m talking about with it sometimes. But that sense of practice, that sense of discipline, that sense of creativity, where if you’re in a basketball game and you have the ball, and somebody’s guarding you — you’re scanning, you’re looking for the most creative thing to do, the best pass to make, the best move to make to get to the basket, the best shot to take. All of those decisions are really quick. I think writers probably have to move a little more quickly in their thinking than people realize and that people, even beginning writers, give credit for. The poem is a shifting landscape, it’s not like you can stop time while you’re writing. Time is still moving, and your mind is still moving, and your images and your ideas, and all these things that will get away. So, you are kind of quick-thinking when you’re writing..

Do you have a specific milestone in your career that you are the most proud of?

I don’t know, I try not to think about that stuff too much. I mean, publishing my first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape, which just had its 10th anniversary edition — I mean that’s a delightful thing to happen — that the book still had enough life in it to do another edition of it. The publishing of the first book was a big thing for me because you can be a writer for a long time before you move into publishing writing. I waited a little while before I published my first book, I didn’t jump right into it. I let that manuscript evolve over several years before I even tried to publish it. So yeah, the first book is the milestone really. Everything else is just like, you’re happy if you get to do it.

Congratulations on the anniversary. You kind of mentioned this with your writing every day this month, but what are you working on now?

Oh new poems right now. This is a good time to ask me this question right now because I have finished some ongoing projects that were taking a little while, and I feel really good now that they came together. One is a collection of essays on an old professor of mine named Robert Morgan, who is a hugely important mentor and writer to me. And another is an anthology of poetry from the state of Virginia. I have one more big project like that, that I hope to finish in the next few weeks. Maybe before I see you this project will be done. I alluded to this one earlier — that I’m really close but can’t quite get over the hump on one project. I am editing a volume titled The Complete Poems of James Agee, who is a writer from East Tennessee, born in Knoxville, so he’s like a hometown literary hero to me. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Death in the Family, back in the 50s, shortly after he died. He only published one book of poems in his life, but he had all of these unpublished poems and all of these handwritten manuscripts that nobody had ever seen until just the last 10 or 15 years. So, I have been working with one of my old professors, Michael Lofaro, from the University of Tennessee, on editing this volume of his poems. We’ve really been at it for a long time, and we’ve made a lot of progress and we’re getting close to the end of that book. So, I’m working on my own new poems with poem-a-day and a poetry manuscript that I’ve got just an outline in mind for, but I’m also working on this scholarly project too, for which I am writing the critical introduction. It’s really important to me because he was one of the first, probably the first, Knoxville writer I ever read. So those are two things going on right now that I feel both anxious and excited about.

They both sound very exciting, and I’m very excited to read your new works when they do come out.

A lot of the poems are in absolute total first rough draft, I don’t even know if they make sense yet. But it’s been a good month, I’ve felt more connected to writing my own work this month than maybe anytime since before the pandemic. I’ve felt freer, I’ve felt less weighed down by things this month than the last few times we’ve done this. It’s a good feeling.

Micaela Anderson is a senior at MTSU, where she is double majoring in English Literature and French. She was the recipient of MTSU’s Homer Pittard Creative Writing Scholarship for the 2022–23 academic year and is the editor-in-chief of Collage: A Journal of Creative Expression. She is currently working on her creative Honors thesis, “Movement Through a Lyrical Lens: A Collection of Prose, Poems, and Photography.” In her free time, she enjoys running and is in the process of training for her second marathon, the St. Jude Memphis Marathon.