The Transmitter: Allison Boyd Justus Answers the Questions That Matter

Author Allison Boyd Justus talks baby walruses, stargazing with Ray Bradbury, and her new poetry book Solstice to Solstice to Solstice.


Allison Boyd Justus is the author of the poetry collection, . Her poetry has appeared in Penwood Review, Nibble, Eunoia Review, Madcap Review, Quail Bell, Calliope, and Contemporary American Voices. A 2015–16 Middle Tennessee Writing Project Fellow, Allison teaches language arts and serves as the gifted education facilitator for Eagleville School.


ALTERNATING CURRENT: Describe your writing style to someone who’s never read you.

ALLISON BOYD JUSTUS: Quirky, experimental, playful. I’d like to say “dreamy and ethereal” since that’s how much of it FEELS to write, but how much of that comes through on the page, I’m still not sure. Also, I have had several people who do not typically enjoy poetry tell me that they enjoy my writing. I am not exactly sure what that says about my writing style, other than it’s “accessible,” I guess (though when someone recommends a book to me as “accessible” I always feel a tiny bit insulted). In any case, I’m excited that Solstice is finding its way to those and other readers.


How would The New York Times categorize your writing?

Oh, Editor’s Choice, absolutely. No. I have no idea. “Dreamy and ethereal”? Actually, I wonder if they would categorize Solstice to Solstice to Solstice as memoir rather than poetry. The collection fits the genre of a “project memoir,” such as Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project or Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood, though my quest was more like that of Walden or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.


What was the catalyst that made you start writing?

Well, like most writers, I’ve been fascinated by story and language for as long as I can remember. I enjoyed writing in various genres throughout my childhood, but as I took on more rigorous academic work and, on a personal level, became much more aesthetically and philosophically idealistic, my confidence waned. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I realized I needed to write to survive. I was studying theology and biblical languages while recovering from a massive bout of depression brought on by key structural failures in my defiantly dreamy idealism. Fighting for my own sanity and stability, I’d get into these weird states — maybe mania, maybe something else — and just write. That kind of thing happened a few times before I realized I was writing poetry that was quite possibly good or on its way there.


Your favorite —

Whisk(e)y: Oh, gracious. I don’t drink, but in the a.m. hours of the last U.S. presidential election I felt I understood why someone would want to, and for some reason I thought of whiskey specifically.

Wild animal: Not sure, but this summer I got to see a rescued baby walrus at the Alaska Sea Life Center, and it needs to cuddle with someone several times a day. There are people at the Sea Life Center who cuddle this baby walrus as part of their jobs!

Waffle topping: I can never go wrong with a pecan waffle from Waffle House.

Poem: It changes. I read Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” every day for a couple years. These days I find myself returning to William Stafford’s poem “.” The moral urgency of remaining “awake,” the need to know one another and to step and speak in surety and care, the nature of responsibility and interdependence — all stuff I’m grappling with these days as a teacher and a writer.

Scientist or inventor: I love to picture the pioneer geneticist Gregor Mendel studying the pea plant blossoms in the monastery garden, back when the whole science/religion “debate” was a non-issue. I’m also intrigued by the work of Janna Levin, the theoretical cosmologist and writer.

Broadway musical: Les Miserables or maybe Hamilton. I’ve listened to the Hamilton soundtrack plenty, but I need to actually see the show before I can make the call between it and Les Mis.

Badass getaway vehicle: I hope I never need a getaway vehicle, though I did enjoy Baby Driver. My dream vehicles have included a red convertible (Make? Model? Don’t know.) and a blue Volkswagen bus.

Movie to watch alone: Ever After. I can’t help it. I first saw it when I was thirteen, and I watched it so often throughout high school that I could quote the entire script.

Quote: From Psalm 139: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines as the dark, for darkness is as light with You.” A very literal translation of the final phrase, which consists of just two words in the Hebrew, would be something like “as-the-darkness-to-you as-the-light-to-you” — balanced, like an equation. It’s a little disorienting to think of the difference between darkness and light as inconsequential, but as someone who walks through the depths of depression fairly regularly, I find these words life-giving and grounding.


Tell me about your favorite books or authors.

Madeleine L’Engle’s fiction sustained me throughout middle school, all the while gradually challenging me philosophically and spiritually in ways I couldn’t fully grasp on an intellectual level until I began rereading her books as an adult. It was very strange to reread A Wind in the Door during my first year of teaching and find that my life situation aligned me more with Mr. Jenkins, the weak, embittered school principal, than with the teenage protagonist Meg. I was in my twenties at the time, but I suddenly felt so old. But just as Mr. Jenkins had much to learn and even proved essential to the success of the characters’ quest, I found I had as much to gain from A Wind in the Door as I ever had and came to appreciate my own small role in the world as essential — no more “important” than anyone else’s, but essential nonetheless, something not to be scorned or rejected.

Annie Dillard is another favorite. I didn’t discover her until grad school, when a friend gave me a copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I devoured it, and I knew I want to live like this. I’ve since read several of her essay collections and other books. I love her unabashed pursuit of metaphysical truth, her sense of humor in the face of futility, terror, even beauty, and her rootedness in a reality comprised of bare sensory data and bizarre facts.

Since embracing poetry as a writer, I’ve come to appreciate and admire the work of so many poets, several of whom I’m thrilled to know personally. One such poet-friend whose work I’ve found both instructive and thoroughly enjoyable is Kory Wells. Her poetry is celebratory, sensuous, lighthearted, serious — she has such a range. Much of her work explores some of the key tensions of Southern culture: rural vs. urban life, our rapidly vanishing “country” and small-town ways, race and racism, the nearness and impact of history. I highly recommend her book Heaven Was the Moon.


If you could witness or participate in any historical event or time period, what would it be?

I have to imagine this is a scenario like in A Swiftly Tilting Planet (Madeleine L’Engle again!), in which protagonist Charles Wallace temporarily inhabits the lives of a few key ancestors as they navigate difficult and dangerous situations in different historical periods, not fathoming how their individual choices will shape global history. If I could be sent on a mission like Charles Wallace’s, I would hope (and it scares me to say this, only because I do not have complete confidence I’d be up to the task) to enter a period of Southern history more fraught and tumultuous than today — Reconstruction perhaps, or the Civil Rights Era, or any of those “peaceful” periods with so much violence brimming just below the surface — whether the overt violence of vigilantism or the social and spiritual violence of slavery, segregation, bigotry, and oppression.


Which underrepresented cause do you want to bring to our attention?

I work in gifted education, serving those students whose creative and intellectual abilities surpass those of their peers to such a great extent that special education services are necessary to ensure that these gifted students have opportunity to realize their potential. That’s gifted education in a very small nutshell. Within the field, one issue that concerns me is the under-identification of minority students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds as intellectually gifted. Giftedness occurs across all cultures and people groups, so there’s obviously some troublesome bias at work here. For instance, cultural bias in some (not all, and not all to an equally severe extent, I ought to add) IQ tests may prevent highly intelligent children from non-mainstream cultures (e.g. nonwhite, non-English speaking, economically disadvantaged) from qualifying for the services they need. Also, the culturally-rooted values and behaviors of potentially gifted students may not align with ideas of giftedness held by majority-culture teachers, so non-majority-culture students may be overlooked. Similar barriers to identification and service occur with twice-exceptional students — gifted students who experience a co-occurring disability such as autism or ADHD, for instance. Those of us in gifted education, like people in any field, have to work to check and overcome our own biases, help others navigate theirs, and deconstruct systemic barriers to equitable access to meaningful education.


Weapon of choice:

Years ago, I was alone in a house when I heard a sound at the door. It turned out to be a tree branch scraping the exterior wall, but I thought someone was trying to get in. I wanted to go to sleep and ignore it, but then I thought about how stupid it would be if I were attacked in my bed just because I wanted to get to sleep and refused to be vigilant. I grabbed the most weapon-like object in the room, an iron statuette of a flautist. I figured I could ram that flute into someone’s temple if necessary. But I had this awful moment of reckoning before exiting my bedroom: Was I really willing to kill someone? I decided that I needed to preserve my own life and that I was willing to risk killing someone if necessary. I am not advocating this position, just stating the conclusion I reached in that moment.


If you could invent something that is missing from your life, what would it be?

Environmentally-friendly air conditioning.


The perfect soundtrack to your writing:

Joanna Newsome’s The Milk-Eyed Mender and Ys.


Which literary figure, dead or alive, would you want to —

Take tea with: Henry David Thoreau used to have people over for tea in his cabin by the pond. I’d like to do that. Hear him brag about his beans.

Arm wrestle: Emily Dickinson! Wouldn’t that be terrifying?! I am sure she would win! But to be beaten in arm wrestling by Emily Dickinson … !

Ice skate with: Madeleine L’Engle. See, I am pretty terrible at ice-skating — I didn’t learn how until I was twenty-one, and I’ve never been highly athletic or coordinated, so I fall down a lot, and I’ve never successfully accelerated past the speed of a brisk walk. Nevertheless, ice-skating brings me such an intense delight, even joy. I am sure Madeleine L’Engle would understand.

Drink under the table: Er, Dostoyevsky?

Get a blurb from: Maggie Smith! Oh, WAIT. (This is reality? I am still pinching myself.)

Beat in a duel of wits: Thoreau, over tea, of course.

Have on your side in the apocalypse: Quite possibly A. S. King. I read Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future early last fall at the recommendation of a brilliant eighth grader, and by November I felt both unnerved at the serendipitous timing and grimly grateful for the haunting narrative I now had stored up within me.

Write your next book for you: The Holy Spirit? Is that allowed?

Go stargazing with: Ray Bradbury.


The one thing in your writing routine you couldn’t live without:

Coffee! Or tea.


Set the perfect scene for you to write your next masterpiece.

Take me to the Seashell cabin on Seaside Farms just outside Homer, Alaska. Let me stay there a week, a month, a summer — there’s a little writing desk before a row of windows overlooking Kachemak Bay and the mountains beyond, and the air carries the mingled scents of wildflowers.


When writing makes you rich, you will …

Laugh. Pay off someone’s student loans. Buy my own beachside writing cabin.

The Coil

Literature to change your lightbulb.

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Alternating Current Press

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Indie press dedicated to lit that challenges readers & has a sense of self, timelessness, & atmosphere. Publisher of @CoilMag #CoilMag (http://thecoilmag.com)

The Coil

The Coil

Literature to change your lightbulb.

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