Interview: Whitney Rio-Ross

Whitney Rio-Ross

Whitney and I met at Union University, the small Baptist university where we both got our undergraduate degrees in English. We ran in a lot of the same circles there, and not just with our English classes: we were paired up several years in a row for a mentoring program called Life Groups (hey, as I said, it was a Baptist university), and we both were staff members on The Torch, the school's literary magazine.

But I think anyone who knew both of us back then probably now remembers Whitney much better, and that's not false modesty—as much as this can be true of someone with extremely academic interests in the humanities, Whitney was a star. She went on to become the editor in chief of The Torch and part of the leadership of Life Groups, in addition to completing a whole second major (in philosophy—ya know, easy stuff); when we graduated, she was then accepted to Yale Divinity School, where she got a dual degree in religion and literature. She's now teaching literature at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville. All of this is a long way of saying that Whitney is one of the smartest people I know (in addition to being thoughtful and kind and just an all-around great person).

Somewhere along the line, she also became a great writer, too, which is why I'm interviewing her here. In college, I remember her crafting some sharp pieces of creative nonfiction, and since then, she's really jumped head-first into writing; Whitney's a poet and a darn good one at that. In fact, her first chapbook of poetry, Birthmarks, just came out in the midst of all our COVID-19 pandemonium. At the time I conducted this interview, I hadn't yet read Birthmarks, but I have now—it's good stuff, folks! You can buy it here, if you're interested.

Anyway, you can read the interview below. We talk about teaching, faith, Evangelicalism, poetry in general, and her poetry in particular; as you'd expect, she has smart things to say, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.


Interview

Michael: What’s your history with poetry? I know that you and I in college both got degrees in literature—did it start there?

Whitney: I really started writing poetry mostly after graduate school. In college, I always said I was never going to write poetry because I liked it too much and didn’t want to screw it up. But then I took some prose writing classes in grad school and realized that I was drawn more and more toward writing poetry.

M: Was there any particular reason for your shift?

W: Well, a teacher at Union was teaching an advanced poetry class, and she asked me and a couple others who had graduated a few years before to participate because it was such a small class. And she said, “So you will bring in some poems.” And I thought, “Oh. I don’t have any of those, really.”

M: Is this when you were currently a master’s student?

W: After. I had just written a few poems before that, not anything really serious, so that literally forced me to write poetry.

M: Obviously you had read poetry before for your bachelor’s degree, but was poetry something that you were always drawn to to read? I feel like now poetry isn’t something that people tend to casually get into as much as in centuries gone by.

W: I started reading poetry pretty intensely during my freshman year of college. I got really into contemporary poetry as I learned that there are poets out there who are living who are doing awesome stuff, so I read a lot in college, and that continued through grad school.

M: Let’s pivot to your own poetry. I’ve read several of your poems over the years, and then you sent me six prior to this interview, so those are the ones I’m most familiar with at this point. Probably the most surface-level observation you could make about these poems is that a lot of them are centered around the Christian faith, which makes sense; your degree from Yale was a combined theology and literature degree, right?

W: Yeah, it was a dual degree in religion and literature.

M: Okay, so biographically, it makes sense that you’d write about faith. Can you could explain how you conceive of the relationship between your poetry and your faith?

W: I think anybody’s writing or art is going to reflect the mythology that they have working in their lives. So whatever your faith is (or lack of faith), what your beliefs are—it’s going to show up in anything that you make. And I think we all have beliefs, even if we don’t believe in a god. That’s been such a big part of my life that it’s actually hard to avoid in writing. I’ve tried, and it’s really hard.

M: Specifically, at least in the ones you sent me, you have this presence of biblical matriarchs like Eve and Esther. Is there anything about those figures as opposed to others that you’re drawn to? The Christian mythology is huge, as far as what you can draw on, but at least in the poems you sent me, Eve is mentioned twice, and you’ve got Proverbs 31 and Esther and a few others.

W: Well, my chapbook is all based on biblical matriarchs. I think I was most drawn to that because, especially growing up in the Evangelical South, I heard a lot of terrible takes on women in the Bible and women in theology. As a part of a Christian Studies program at a pretty sexist university, I had to deal with a lot of crap about what females meant in the study of theology and what females in the Bible represented, so I needed to explore those ideas for myself during and after college. I think they show up in my poetry because that’s kind of what I was thinking about for a few years.

M: You mentioned Evangelicalism, which was something I was going to pivot to. You have at least a couple of the poems among the ones I read that deal with Evangelicalism. I’m thinking specifically of “The Seminarian Translates Proverbs 31” and also “Our Mothers Spoke of Apocalypses.” Both of those, to at least some degree, seem to be making a criticism of certain ideologies or habits of Evangelicalism. Do you feel bitter about Evangelicalism? I sometimes find that I get bitter if I write about Evangelicalism. What’s your stance toward that history?

W: I definitely do feel some bitterness. It took a lot of healing to get past some of the damage that a lot of those teachings created for both me and my friends who also came out of very harsh Evangelicalism. I’ve seen that writing about it has actually helped me work through some of that bitterness, so that’s been weirdly therapeutic. I didn’t start writing those poems because of that; it just somehow happened while I was looking at those topics.

M: Would you consider yourself outside of Evangelicalism now?

W: Yeah.

M: Is there anything you’ve held onto from that upbringing? We’ve talked about feeling bitter, but are there any positive things you’ve kept from it?

W: I love that I know so much about the Bible. Even though some of the ways that it was taught and some of the takes people had on it were really bad, it’s really cool to know so much of that story and to engage with so much of it, artistically or not artistically.

M: Is poetry pretty much your main artistic engagement with the Bible?

W: It is. I started out more just writing essays, but I’ve gone more to poetry. I still write some essays, though.

M: Going back to your poems themselves, what can you tell me about that chapbook?

W: It is thematically unified in terms of focusing on female characters who I think get either the worst reputations or the smallest roles in the Bible. They’re all put into contemporary situations in the poems; sometimes those have to do with the biblical narrative, sometimes they don’t—so for example my Esther poem is more about a girl growing up with these strict gender roles rather than the whole biblical story.

M: In a case like that, where it’s not directly connected to the narrative in the Bible, what’s drawing you to Esther?

W: Well, when I was thinking about writing an Esther poem, I was honestly thinking about writing a gay Esther because I was thinking about how awful that whole situation was [for Esther], but also: what if she didn’t want to be with a man, period? What if she was a lesbian or asexual and just would have no interest in men at all? So I was thinking about that and realized that so much of those ideas start happening when we’re kids, especially for girls. You’re told that you’re going to marry your prince one day, and for some girls, that sounds terrible. So that’s what I had in mind when I was just thinking about Esther, and that’s what happened with the poem.

M: I think that if we think about any Evangelical audience, you’ve really given them an invitation to find the exit by saying that Esther could possibly be conceptualized as non-heterosexual [laughs]. I think that’s great. Do you have any Evangelicals reading your poems, and if so, how do they respond?

W: I have a lot of Evangelicals reading my poems. I dedicated the chapbook to my mom, and my mom’s still pretty Evangelical. She says she likes it, though. With poems like the Esther poem, I don’t come out and say, “Hey, by the way, Esther is gay.” It’s interesting because I actually wrote it for a friend of mine who’s gay, and I had her in mind when I was writing it; I was like, “Oh, this sounds like this friend of mine.” But I think that that poem can apply to all kinds of girls. I hated being told that I was going to get married one day when I was younger. I think a lot of these poems might open up possibilities for these women that Evangelicals might read, and they might just not pick up on any of that. People from other perspectives might read them and get a little bit more of the criticism or limited viewpoint of Evangelicalism from them.

M: Do you conceive of your poems as subversive? Or do you just write about people? You mentioned that the Esther one was written with a friend in mind.

W: There’s definitely a subversive element to that set of poems, because I kind of wrote it for myself in college or high school—like, I wish that me in college had some of these different versions of these stories, or different versions of these women. So it’s definitely subversive. I didn’t mean to write it in any kind of “Take that, Evangelicalism!” way, though there’s definitely some of that added to some of the poems, too. But it feels more personal—like, “Take that, person in my Greek class who belittled me.”

M: As someone who knew you during undergrad and heard stories about your frustrations in your classes, I find that delightful. Even though I didn’t know a lot of those people personally, it is nice to imagine that Whitney, eight years later, is now scribbling away poems that will put those people in their place. You probably put them in their place at the time anyway. Anyway, you mentioned the Bible stories that don’t get told, or only get told in a particular way, and I think that both Esther and Eve are interesting examples of that—and also Proverbs 31, which we can get to eventually, too, because it’s one I think is really interesting. But first about Esther. You’re talking about the traditional Evangelical interpretation that you heard, the “you’ll one day meet your prince” story, which is interesting because in a certain way, Esther does conform to the Cinderella-type story—the second half of Cinderella isn’t too different from Esther in the sense that a royal man rides around trying to pick up chicks. But there’s also a lot of the context that I think sometimes people ignore, like the fact that the king… does he execute his first wife at the beginning of the book? Because she won’t perform sexual favors? There’s something really egregiously sexist at the beginning.

W: Yeah, his wife is killed for basically not doing what he tells her to do. Right now, I don’t remember what it was, but it’s super scary. And so to be in the position of “Will you be the next queen?” should be terrifying.

M: Plus the added element of the fact that Esther is Jewish, and the Jewish people are on the verge of being massacred in the book. I think it’s so interesting that, as a dude, I had never heard the story of Esther told as something to aspire to, at least in the matrimonial situation; you might aspire to her faith or her courage, but did people just straight-up tell you that Esther is a great example of a submissive wife, or something like that?

W: The thing that really got me about how people talked about Esther was that there was so much focus on her beauty, which is definitely a factor in the story—she’s chosen because she is so beautiful. But it was talked about in this sense of awe, and that seems really troubling to me. And then when it came to Esther saving her people, that’s awesome, but I usually heard it talked about as just “Wait on the Lord, be faithful, do whatever He tells you to do,” and, while I’m all about following divine guidance, it was often tied up in this idea of “Do what the king wants you to do.” I found that very disturbing.

M: Isn’t Esther famously the only book of the Bible that doesn’t mention God by name?

W: Yes! And I think that’s so cool.

M: And the king himself in that story is super distant and scary. Doesn’t she have to prostrate herself before him three times before he’ll even listen to her request?

W: Yeah, there’s a super scary thing with the way that it’s a risk of her life for her to come before the king without him calling for her, and so she takes this huge risk of dying just to invite him to the dinner where stuff goes down and she saves her people eventually. So that’s a really scary part to me in that story.

M: You talk about parts of stories that are ignored or the ways that the Bible is interpreted in certain limited ways, while really, the Bible and the Christian tradition in general is just so sprawling that I think any person has to necessarily make some sort of editorial decisions when trying to figure out how it’s all going to influence their lives. But it’s fascinating how different ideologies or denominations or what have you choose to make those edits. What you’re telling me about how Evangelicals view Esther is clearly an editorializing of the text. I mean, the Jewish people view it completely different; for them, she’s more of a national hero, right, with the holiday of Purim. Versus the kind of individualistic view of “She’s so hot she saves the country, and she serves God.” So speaking of editing, your poem “The SeminarianTranslates Proverbs 31” is interesting. First of all, translation is a work of editing as well. Those of use who went to Union always knew the different agendas of the different translations. But then your poem basically has the text of Proverbs 31, with words omitted or printed in white so that you can’t see them unless you highlight them. Describe to me what’s behind that poem.

W: One thing I wanted to highlight was what translation is and what it means to read a biblical text. The closest I ever got to losing my faith was in a Greek class when a student answered a question with an interpretation that I thought was totally untrue and I also knew that he didn’t believe in, but it showed me that you can make anything mean what you want it to mean, and especially if you know the original language. That’s just such a power that can be good but is so often used for evil purposes. So when I was writing the Proverbs poem, I was thinking about how I’ve had that passage taught to me before, just all kinds of different things about what I’m supposed to be as a woman, what I’m supposed to be as a good wife. I wanted to show some of the freakiness behind the teachings that we get with Proverbs 31. Erasing those words and having more of a terrifying look at the woman in Proverbs 31—she is terrified—that’s mostly what I was trying to do.

M: It almost works like found poetry. Have you ever done anything like that before?

W: I haven’t done found poetry, but I did two other poems like this in the chapbook, one of the Magnificat and one of Mary Magdalene at the resurrection. So I’ve realized that I like doing it with Bible passages.

M: What is it about Bible passages?

W: I just love thinking about how reading anything, in any language, is an act of interpretation, and the place where I’ve heard that messed up the most is in biblical interpretation. Growing up I often heard, “Just read the text, don’t interpret it,” and that’s ridiculous, because reading is interpretation. So I think I’m especially drawn to the erasure of the biblical passages.

M: Regarding the same poem but in a different gear: I’m reading these poems online, and on the website where I’m reading “The Seminarian Translates Proverbs 31,” there’s an element that feels to me essentially digital, which is what I mentioned earlier where if you click and drag to highlight across the page, you can see the erased text. What does that look like in the chapbook, since obviously you can’t click and drag in a physical book?

W: In the chapbook, on paper, a lot of found or erasure poetry looks confusing or jumbled, and with the Proverbs one, it’s the longest erasure poem in the book, and it looks just like a passage scattered or torn apart, which I think is really cool for what the text is. It kind of looks like a sprinkling of words here and there. The typesetter was awesome, and it ended up looking very readable.

M: Does the reader still have access to the erased words?

W: That’s totally gone. But in the notes section, I do say the exact passage and the translation, so if people want to go read the original, they can.

M: This is on a completely different subject, but in the case of the Proverbs 31 poem, that was done on the internet in a way that makes the technology that renders it on the page essential to how it’s read on the page. I know in fiction, which is what I’m most familiar with, you have with the digital era the rise of digital fiction with hypertext novels and that sort of thing; do you do that much with digital poetry? I don’t even know what poetry does in the realm of the digital world.

W: There is some interesting stuff going on with digital poetry. A lot of it technologically I don’t even know how to do, so I haven’t looked into it much. But also, my eyes can’t read a lot of stuff like that, so I haven’t been drawn to it because it’s difficult for me to see it while I’m typing it.

M: So it’s the screen that makes it hard to read?

W: It’s the screen.

M: Gotcha. Yeah, screens suck.

W: They change everything.

M: I don’t know if you also feel this way, but you can go to Project Gutenberg or something and find the entire text of a novel on a single webpage, and you read the whole thing just by scrolling down the whole time, and I find that to be a completely different reading experience from reading individual pages in a book, in addition to the added difficulty of the screen itself.

W: Honestly, I find stuff like that really nauseating. It feels like so much all at once, like cramming a ton of data into something, like cramming for a test rather than just absorbing the material.

M: Here’s an even broader question: I read a little poetry but not a ton, and definitely not enough to be able to say what the state of poetry is today, but as mostly an outsider looking in, it seems to me that poetry is in an interesting place because even before print media started spiraling, it was becoming increasingly a niche interest, and it seems like that’s been compounded by the way that printed journals and such have retreated into obscurity. How do you feel about poetry as a medium right now?

W: Some people critique poetry as too abstract and too weird. I hear people say that about what they call “modern poetry,” which is hilarious because that’s not really modern poetry—that’s contemporary poetry. I think that the people saying these things probably aren’t that well-read; maybe they’re seeing what seems like the sexy, cool thing online, but there is so much going on with poetry that still feels very normal, like stuff that you might have read in a poetry class. There’s poetry that makes sense. There’s poetry that’s still narrative. And then you’ve also got stuff that’s a little more wild and all over the place. I like both. I do hate it when poetry is trying so hard to be new and sexy that it just ends up being a mess; that’s the kind that annoys me. One thing that’s really awesome is that the poetry community has been widening so much to include not just different races or genders but also people of different socioeconomic classes, and that’s something that’s cool about the internet. People laugh at the idea of Instagram poetry sometimes, but for people who don’t have access to the MFA programs or the connections that can get them published traditionally, I think that’s really cool that they could share their work on something as simple as Instagram. It’s a voice that I think is often left out of the typical big publisher world.

M: As a high school teacher, I can say that my students don’t read a ton generally, and they certainly don’t read a lot of poetry, but the only poetry I’ve actually seen my students read—and this was especially popular a couple years ago—was this collection called Milk and Honey. And I think the author started as an Instagram poet, right?

W: Yeah, it did start as Instagram poetry. I’ll be honest: I don’t like Milk and Honey. But I was thrilled that it got my literature class that semester to actually want to read other poetry. Poetry is so much a matter of taste more than merit, but it was sad that when my students asked, “Oh, do you like this book?” I said, “No.” But then some of them were saying, “So is this not real poetry?” and I had to stop myself and ask myself the question: What is “real” poetry? And I think so much of that is defined by the people that we find in the canon. So I said, “It is poetry. It’s real poetry. I just think that there’s better stuff out there.”

M: A lot of people are resistant to poetry, and you mention the abstraction. But I think in general, even if they don’t consider it abstract, people will say, “Poetry doesn’t click with me” or “I don’t understand poetry.” What would you say to those people? I wouldn’t say most people say that about novels or film or essays. They may say that about some novels or some films, but with poetry, people paint with such a broad brush that they say that they can’t get into any poetry. What would you say to those people?

W: One thing that I say to my students who say stuff like that is, “Yes, exactly. You don’t ‘get’ it. There isn’t a right or wrong interpretation.” Well, there are wrong interpretations. If you read T. S. Eliot and say that it’s about your dog… well, no, it’s not.

M: It was probably about his cat, actually.

W: Exactly [laughs]. But I love it when I can get real fights going in my class about what a poem is doing and finding different ways of looking at it. The students are all very respectful as they do it, but as they’re defending their own reading and arguing about it, they realize that there is so much possibility in the poem. There’s a Billy Collins poem that I start every one of my Intro to Lit classes with, and it’s called, “Introduction to Poetry.” It’s fantastic, because it’s about teaching introductory poetry and the idea of trying to “get” it or understand it. Like you said about people not saying that about novels or short stories or something, I think that a lot of the time there still is that idea of room for interpretation in fiction, but we don’t think of it that way because we walk away thinking, “This is what the story was; this is what the story meant.” We don’t always even think about how there might be debates about what’s going on there.

M: Why do you think people are able to do that with fiction but not with poetry?

W: I think that poetry demands an attention to certain words. It’s usually much shorter, so there’s an attention to words and syntax that people might take for granted in fiction. In poetry, we see that we’re supposed to pay attention to these certain words, and so if we don’t get it automatically, it can be frustrating, whereas in fiction, we read words in a sentence and don’t think about whether or not we get it because we can just move on to the next sentence.

M: Do you think that that aspect of poetry dooms poetry to a certain level of obscurity that other literary forms might not face?

W: It might. I think that some of the issue is that we have kind of marketed fiction as the layman’s literature: anybody can read a novel. They might not want to read Ulysses, but anybody can just read a book by itself. I think that part of the reason for this is that we have moved so much from the oral tradition, where we told long stories like The Aeneid in verse. I think another thing that’s contributed to it is film, because so much of film is just a story from the beginning to the end. I think that’s made people more prone to think that this is how stories work. And then they don’t find that thing in a lot of poetry. There are films that feel more like poetry than fiction to me, and that’s really cool.

M: Do you consider song lyrics poetry?

W: Yeah, I do. In fact—I can’t do this anymore because my students are too young now and haven’t known a world with this—but I used to start my poetry section off by having someone read “No Diggity” out loud. We were talking about if they liked poetry, and a lot of the students would say, “No, I don’t.” And I’d say, “Well, I want someone to read aloud this famous poem, and you all can tell me if you like it or not.” And then like halfway through, they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, it’s that song! I love this song!” It’s a great song, but it’s really funny to see them notice that suddenly: “Wait, this isn’t a poem, it’s a song,” and that’s because it’s both. I really admire good lyricists, because it’s hard enough for me to write a poem; the idea of doing that and having to think more about the music of it sounds unbelievably difficult.

M: One of the things I’ve run into trying to teach not just poetry in the sense of T. S. Eliot or whatever but also in Shakespearean plays, which of course are often written in verse, is the level of abstraction that we’ve given poetry that it might not have had originally. Like, I’m trying to teach about meter and iambic pentameter, and I think for a lot of my students, it’s completely abstract because when we look at the plays, they don’t sound like anything because they’re written on the page—it’s the same thing for a lot of poems, too. There are obviously open mics and things, but if you’re going to try to find poetry, the most immediate way you’ll find it is written down as opposed to recited. Do you think that that’s contributed to some of the distancing from other poetry compared to, let’s say, song lyrics’ poetry?

W: Yeah, I do think that’s contributed to it. I really have to read a poem aloud, for example, when I’ve gotten a new poetry book. It just doesn’t sink in for me until I do that. I don’t really know how people just read poems on a screen or on a page without saying it out loud. But that’s what most people do, and I think that adds to the disconnect between poetry proper and lyrics.

M: It’s kind of a teacher cliché to connect Shakespeare to rappers like Dangerous Minds and all that, but it is instructive at times, because hip-hop is one of the genres that keeps a lot of the poetic traditions alive that are hard for students to understand, like meter. I’ve always found it interesting and frustrating that something like Shakespeare’s work is so abstract for students because it’s so distanced from how it was initially experienced.

W: I have such a hard time teaching sound in my classes, and I think it’s because my students talk so differently—totally different pronunciations, different cadences. We have a ton of exchange students, students of every ethnicity, nationality, area of the country. So when I have a really Deep South student read a poem versus maybe one of my Spanish exchange students, it just sounds so different. And I can’t say, “You’re reading it wrong,” because that’s just not how the words might work for those students. So I find music really is the best way to teach sound.

M: Do you ever read your own poems to your students?

W: No. I don’t [laughs]. They ask me to, and it just feels weird to teach my own poem in any way, including just reading it out loud. My students still probably read them, since they can find them in print, but oh well.

M: Have they ever come back and talked to you about your work if they’ve gone and read it?

W: Yeah, sometimes. I try to hide a lot of my online life from my current students because they can just be really stalkery. But with the book being shipped out right now, it’s out of my hands. Some of my students know about it already. We’ll see if I get in trouble. And I guess we’ll see if they like it or if they never want to take my class again.

You can buy Whitney's chapbook, Birthmarks, here.