Outsiders Looking In: An Interview with Suzanne Roberts

Suzanne Roberts on Cotopaxi, Ecuador

Name: Suzanne Roberts

Age: 39

Cultural heritage / Ethnicity: British mother/Jewish father

Languages spoken: English, Spanish

Based out of: South Lake Tahoe, California

Education: PhD in Literature and the Environment, MA in Creative Writing, BS in Biology

Current work / projects: I am currently working on a book of travel poems, a hiking memoir, and a book of travel essays. I am also co-editing an anthology of skiing and snowboarding stories.

Books published / forthcoming: Shameless (Wordtech Editions, 2007), Nothing to You (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), and Plotting Temporality (forthcoming from Red Hen Press)

Writers / Journalists whose work inspires you: I am a big reader, so I could name hundreds, but here are some of my favorites: Rainer Maria Rilke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Contemporary writers I especially admire are Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, Louis Glück, and Ann Carson.

Photographers whose work inspires you: Annie Lebovitz, Ansel Adams, and Catherine Roberts Leach (that’s my sister!). I also like Nevada Photographer Peter Goin’s Black Rock desert work and local Tahoe photographer Corey Rich’s work.

Books / magazines / media currently reading: Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, One More Theory about Happiness by Paul Guest, Black Nature, edited by Camille Dungy, Collected Poems by Lynda Hull, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I always have at least five books going at once. I read the New York Times everyday as well.

Last concert attended: Does a Bassnectar rave at Burning Man count?

[DM] Your work seems to fit somewhere at the intersection of poetry and travel writing. Although it seems like there should be a natural overlap (and audience) when you put these two elements together, it seems divided, at least in the publications I’ve found.

Most literary journals seem to publish certain styles of nonfiction (with “travel writing” often seeming a pejorative term), whereas travel magazines publish other styles, much of it very homogeneous (with terms like “literary”or “poetic,” potentially seen as pejorative). Have you found this to be true? And if so, how have you “bridged” it?

[SR] I find everything you have said absolutely true, and to tell you the truth, I was surprised when I found out that travel writing is seen in a pejorative light. I think that’s because of the nuts and bolts nature of the where to stay/what to do/where to eat-type articles, but these serve a very important purpose for their audience.

Poetry is the ideal medium to capture sense of place because of the poem’s imagistic in-the-moment nature, but you are right, the travel journals don’t typically publish poetry. Therefore, I don’t think I have “overcome” or “bridged” the attitudes you suggest.

I have been shopping my hiking memoir around, and one agent told me it would be hard to find a mainstream publisher because I don’t have any real books out—she then said, “You know poetry doesn’t count, right?”

And in the marketplace, poetry doesn’t count unless you are Dante or someone else long dead. We often forget, and I include myself in this, that it is the writing and not the publishing that’s important.

I think most poets finally come to accept this because we have to write the poems while knowing that most likely, they will not find a very large audience. Yet, at the same time, this can be very freeing. In poetry, I often feel like I can write whatever I want, because really, who is going to read it?

In much of the work in your upcoming collection, the narrator is an outside observer to other people’s realities, specifically, poverty in India. The themes deal with distance (the narrator is often looking out on the scene from “the ambassador’s car”) and separation from local people.

As an outside observer to these realities, how do you reconcile creating poetry or art out of them? How do you distinguish what is poetry / art / expression and what is rendering (or even glorifying) guilt or “white man’s burden”?

When I have returned from places, such as India, people have not wanted to look at my photographs; they have said, “Don’t tell me anything sad.” I think by ignoring the sad realities of the word, we make them worse.

Read the full article at MatadorU →

Community Connection

Please visit SuzanneRoberts.org to find more about her work and upcoming projects.