Featured Fem | Meg Eden
Interview by Anna-Claire McGrath
Meg Eden is a poet and novelist who teaches at University of Maryland. Her poetry has been featured in Rattle, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore and Gargoyle. She has published four poetry chapbooks and her novel Post-High School Reality Quest is forthcoming from California Coldblood, an imprint of Rare Bird Lit.
In “A Week with Beijing”, you anthropomorphize Bejing, but specifically as a woman. Why make Beijing female? What did that allow you to do?
Meg Eden: This is a great question — and I’m not 100% sure why I made that choice. Being a woman, I think I felt like talking to Beijing as a woman would be a more intimate experience for me. The trip was one where I was interrogating my own female body and coming of age in a way: trying to find big enough pads for my period (all I could find were frickin’ panty liners), and being told in dress shops that everything was “too small”, hence that I was “too big.” With Beijing as a woman, I could interrogate my American female body, and try to understand it in relation to a different culture’s female image and expectations. The image that started it I think was that being in Beijing in 2006, I realized it felt like the city was still “putting on its make-up” for the Olympics. I guess this made me envision Beijing as a woman with her curlers in, and me at the crack of the door while she shooed me away, saying, “Come back for the Olympics. Not now.”
Why did you choose Beijing to focus on? What drew you to the city that made you want to explore it more through poetry?
Meg Eden: My Beijing trip was my first trip where everything wasn’t some perfect tourist utopia. It was raw, and real, and as a white middle school girl of privilege that was a really transformative experience for me. I’d read about lifestyles different than my own, but to see it was very surprising and humbling. I felt there was so much to say — that I saw so much in such a short time about wealth disparity, the female body, the Olympics transforming a city, and the silencing a culture can impose for publicity’s sake. Even now, I continue returning to that experience and am finding new things to say or explore.
Post High School Reality Quest takes the form of a video game, and it’s something I haven’t seen done before which was exciting. Why did you go for that particular format? What did it free you up to do? Did it restrict you in any way?
Meg Eden: It actually started as a joke. My friend said “Hey, you should write a novel in the form of a text-adventure game.” I thought it was kind of a silly idea but I tried it for the heck of it. I found that I was addicted though, and couldn’t stop! I found the form allowed me to create tension right away (and with my background in poetry, plot is my biggest struggle), and to explore Buffy’s unreliable narration — I can have her testimony, but also the (relatively) objective perspective of the text parser. I actually found the second person very freeing — it creates distance from the closeness of “I” but is still more intimate than “she”. It’s the perfect balance, and now I find it hard to go back to first and third person. The fact it was a video game also allowed me to bring in video game tropes and play with and transform them, such as saving. I felt that through “saving” I could play with time, regret, and nostalgic longing to go back in time. That is, these video game tropes could do larger work to embody ideas in the human experience without me necessarily having to explicitly address them.
You offer mentoring services on your website, and I was just wondering if you had any advice that you find yourself giving again and again. What would you say to young writers looking to start their careers?
Meg Eden: I find myself telling poets a lot to reconsider their title (often the title gives info that’s already in the piece, and “gives away the punchline”) and encouraging them to try formal forms that may work with or juxtapose against content. I’ve found that we forget how powerful form can be. Take for instance Rothke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” The common meter, which connotes some sort of innocent nursery rhyme, is juxtaposed with a dark childhood experience. The poem would be so different without the form.
The best advice I can give is to read, write, and submit! I started sending my work out in high school. I have done thousands of submissions to get my relatively few acceptances. Keep reading, keep writing, keep sending, keep editing. Go to local readings and conferences. Learn about literary magazines and presses. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, and don’t be afraid to declare what you have done.
Lastly, I always like to ask people what they’re reading and what writers they’re excited about. Who else do people have to check out? What’s the last great book you read?
Meg Eden: I just ordered “I have to go back to 1994 and kill a girl” by Karyna McGlynn and I’m hooked! I love the immediacy and urgency in the language. I recently finished Death by Video Game: Tales of obsession from the virtual frontline, which was very informative — as a writer, I learn so much from video games and video game writing. Also just finished ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, and am like, why didn’t anyone tell me this book existed earlier? It’s phenomenal. I ate it up in about a week (which for me is very fast).
