Interview with Kathryn Savage

Kathryn Savage is the author of Groundglass: An Essay from Coffee House Press. Groundglass was named a best read of the year by the Sydney Morning Herald, a Yale Review Favorite Cultural Artifact of 2022, and was showcased in Orion Magazine, Lit Hub, and selected by EcoLit Books as a Best Environmental Book of 2022.

Savage is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, and her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Her recent writing appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, Guernica, VQR, World Literature Today, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. She has studied creative writing at The New School, holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Savage is an assistant professor of creative writing at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).

I met with Savage over Zoom in February to discuss Groundglass and her thoughts on eco-writing, attention, and creating work that expands beyond empathetic imagination into a shared conversation.

—Ashlee Laielli, Contributing Editor

Ashlee Laielli: At The Dodge we publish eco-writing, works in translation, and writing about animals. I’d love to begin by asking, what does eco-writing, or eco-literature, mean to you?

Kathryn Savage: When I started writing Groundglass, I knew I was writing about grief, place, ecology, pollution, motherhood, and the more-than-human world—ecopoetics is certainly an accurate description of the work! Early on, I thought mostly about the voice and mood of the prose, so I knew I was writing grief work after my father died, and in the first person, but was not yet interested in defining the writing more broadly. I teach undergraduate writing courses and was recently describing the difference between the pastoral and the georgic in class—both poetics that center the natural world—but the pastoral depicts scenes of ease whereas the georgic is concerned with work and practical matters, like agriculture. In Groundglass, my ecopoetics is, I think, closer to the georgic tradition. It is a book about labor and loss. Yet, unlike the pastoral and the georgic, contemporary ecopoetics does not ask its writer to choose. It allows, I think, for more simultaneity and complexity. So, I can describe a sunset and the violence of extractive industries on the same page and there’s really no contradiction.

AL: I read Groundglass as a book that practices “staying with the trouble,” to use the Donna Haraway term, in that you begin with a point of entry close to your own body and life and pursue its threads of entanglements, connecting seemingly disparate parts into a network of meaning. You engage in research rooted in lived experience, focusing attention to the body, particularly to the body as environment, and to the interdependencies and porous boundaries of environments and bodies. Could you talk a bit about the process of researching and writing for this project? When and how did it find its form?

KS: I appreciate the kind comparison to Donna Haraway, who is certainly influential to my thinking about ecosystems and bodies, and narrative for that matter (“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots…”). I was equally influenced by Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of The Dead, Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism, and Victoria Chang’s Obit. Initially, I started to write poems informed by an immediate, personal crisis—the death of my father—that took the form of tentative collage. Groundglass started out as a lineated docupoetic long poem. I was reading EPA reports, court transcripts, community testimonies, conducting interviews, going to Superfunds—Groundglass moved back and forth between poetry and essay over several drafts and as many years. Part of the connection you generously observe between seemingly disparate parts is, I think, an attempt to retain some of those earlier collage elements. I’m not a skilled visual thinker. Though I love the pairing of essay and imagery, I eventually abandoned pushing the work further in this direction. I deeply admire Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle’s SIR. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, and in SIR, visual imagery powerfully widens the lyric sensibility of the prose. I really wished I could have written a book where the visual imagery widened the prose lyricism, but I could not. Someday, I hope to collaborate on a collage essay project!

AL: How long of a process was this, and how did it end up going from the poem to the form that it’s in now?

KS: The writing process took about five years. The more research I did about Superfunds and brownfields, the less this was an essay exclusively about my own grief. The more it was about the harm of pollution done to other impacted communities too. I knew I did not want to abstract what I was writing about through a poetic lens. The essay is the writing form most closely aligned with truth; I wanted the book to be about the realities. Because I’m not a trained journalist and I’m not an investigative reporter, I also didn’t want to promise readers more than I could deliver as a writer. Ultimately—and this gets back to your earlier question about definitions of the ecopoetic and ecoliterature—I attempted to find a form, in the lyric essay, where both the personal and the reported modes of writing that appear in Groundglass could find a home together.

AL: You write, “My father’s body was on the other side of glass. I felt a responsibility to look. I was his only daughter. Looking can be many things, and one of those is love,” and, “I couldn’t watch his body burn, but I decided I could visit the Superfunds.” I love these passages and how you launch into these ideas this way in this book. These considerations of responsibilities and attention are ever-relevant. We have to make choices about where to direct our gaze and invest our attention. This book puts this into practice beautifully, and I’d love to hear you speak on this subject of attention, how we make these choices, and how you navigate this in your work as a writer.

KS: When I was working on early drafts, I was introduced to Fred Moten’s ideas about how poetry, in particular poetry inspired by music, cannot reproduce what the music is doing but can get close to the music’s secret—I hope I am paraphrasing Moten accurately! This idea of there being something subterranean, capable of moving between works of art through channels of inspiration and close attention, stayed with me. I was writing about Superfunds, places that are often described in cold omniscient language. I was reading a lot of EPA reports and also reading my father’s patient visit summaries. I started to write about Superfunds and hospitals in a poetic language register. I was reading EPA reports, medical forms, and considering Moten’s ideas about the music’s secret interiority. I wanted to write in a way that could invite the reader to see Superfunds and hospital rooms in an idiosyncratic manner, that I hoped, would invite intimacy guided by the speaker’s observations. In terms of voice and narrative point of view, I chose to explore the personal, less than anything that could be conflated with the ‘universal.’

AL: I am very interested in collaboration in writing, in writing as conversation. You began to speak to this already, but I would love to hear more about the choice to include these different voices in this book. Could you share more about that process?

KS: Groundglass centers two classifications for contaminated sites from the EPA, brownfields and Superfunds. At first, I expected the research to be place-based and immersive, but I ended up doing a lot of it from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I share in Groundglass, and have spoken about in prior interviews, while researching I met many people who lived near industry, and we shared stories of health harms likely caused by proximity to pollution. I decided it was vital to the essay to include their views and experiences.

After reading Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions), a work of lyrical reportage about rising sea levels, I was further inspired by Rush’s decision to include testimonies from members of communities impacted directly by rising seas across the United States. Rush’s work opened a window, formally, and I attempted a similar narrative structure of redacted testimony to include more perspectives in Groundglass. I am deeply indebted to Keisha Brown, Rebecca Jim, and Gudrun Lock for sharing their stories alongside mine.

AL: How do you think about the relationship between art and activism? How do you think about writing and changemaking, about the responsibilities of writers, and about the practice or role of “eco-literature”?

KS: I was in Alaska seven years ago and on a hike near Exit Glacier, a valley glacier, I noticed the park’s path signs along the hiking trail had posted dates: 1950, 2010, etc. I realized the dates were marking glacial retreat by year. The signs marked 195 years of accelerating pullback. You could really see the acceleration of glacier retreat made visible through the park signs. I bring this memory up because what was powerful about those signs was, they showed me what had happened and would continue to happen slowly over a long stretch of time very clearly. There’s a similar making-visible that occurs in the space of poetry and lyric essay writing, I think. Attention is paid by the writer and so the reader can slow down, can be with what is happening and being described. The park signs invited me to stop and attend to the grief of what's been lost and what we’re still losing. When I read, I feel invited to pay attention in a way that is rare and important and can be foundational for reckoning and for civic action. Yet, art isn’t the same as activism. Rebecca Jim is founder of LEAD (Local Environmental Action Demanded), an organization whose mission is to achieve environmental justice in northeast Oklahoma. I’m honored she spoke about the work of Local Environmental Action Demanded in Groundglass, but I would never conflate my writing with her very impactful direct action. So, where does art belong alongside activism? I don’t know, but I am interested in connection. Maybe the role of eco-literature, of all art, is to be with.  

AL: I’d love to hear you talk about navigating metaphor between the human body and the environment, those parallels and layers of connections being made, that are more than symbolic.

KS: Our bodies and environments are connected literally—we breathe, drink, eat, touch—but these connections are deeply personal. I love how figurative language can take commonplace images or ideas and offer them up in new and surprising ways. To me, metaphor serves complexity by resisting simplistic descriptions of the world. So much violence operates along lines of reductive thinking and imagining. I admire writers where there's the sublime and profane, desire and devastation, pain and delight being described in their work. In other words, there's a range of thought, emotion, and image and I’m trusted as a reader to consider and care about another’s nuanced mind and heart. This is a very wonderful aspect reading to me, this attention to interiority that I am asked to pay. I think good metaphors serve the specific and particular well. I know I wanted to write an intimate book.

Published April 15 2024