AN INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY PEACOCK (interview)..............................................................JULIA MACDONNELL

An Interview with Molly Peacock

Julia MacDonnell

The astonishing literary life of multi-genre writer Molly Peacock proves that creativity can do better than survive the meager soil of its birth: It can go on to flourish, restless and varied, finding and, when necessary, generating its own nourishment, even amid the noise and violence of contemporary life. Peacock’s new poetry collection, The Analyst, her seventh, just published by W.W. Norton, explores her 40-year long relationship with her psychoanalyst, one that began when Peacock, in her early 20s, fearful and floundering, arrived in New York City to begin her career as a writer and teacher. Her analyst’s stroke at 77, and the analyst’s subsequent loss of memory and language, but her pivot toward painting as a means of self-expression, triggered Peacock’s collection. With exquisite lyricism, stunning imagery, and sly wit – the hallmarks of Peacock’s oeuvre – The Analyst offers a luminous meditation on their rare and ever-evolving relationship.

Recently, after a launch for The Analyst at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Peacock, generously agreed to an indepth electronic interview. Here is an excerpt (find the complete interview at www.philadelphiastories.org):

The Analyst seems to me to be a return to your work as a more traditional poet after the successes of Alphabetique and The Paper Garden. How long were you working on it? When did you conceptualize it?

My long-time therapist had a stroke in 2012 and closed her practice. Though I had finished our time of analysis, we had check-in appointments for decades and were very close. When I thought she would die, and that I would never see her again, I was catapulted into a strange grief-with-gratitude state. Poems poured out of me. But she survived! Her memory was blasted, though, and she reached out to a me that had existed years before, in the recesses of her long-term memory. We began a new post-therapy relationship. I then had the privilege of watching the person who helped me claim my life as a writer reclaim her own life—through painting. She cannot read. She had to relearn what a key was, to relearn how to lock a door! But those nodes of growth I was talking about worked for her. Her girlhood talent for painting has rescued her. The minute she got out of the hospital she began to draw. And draw away from her previous life. And draw herself into her coda. I wrote the poems obsessively from 2012 to 2015. And then, as it became clear that I had to return to my life, and that she had made a small, peculiar, but vital life for herself with a lot of professional and family help, I stopped, and realized I had a book.

In general, how does a poem, or any other new work, begin for you? Can you describe, briefly, your writing process?

I am writing all the time, either in my head, or on paper. New ideas burgeon, and they are kind of in the back of my mind. I am relaxed about this. I know new ideas will come. It’s one of the pleasures of a long life of writing.

What success has been most meaningful to you?

My greatest successes are my relationships. I have a remarkable forty-two-year friendship with the poet Phillis Levin (Mr. Memory and Other Poems; May Day). We have seen every poem the other has written over all this time. My relationship with my husband began when we were thirteen years old. We are able to keep great solitudes in our marriage, solitudes that hold our creativity apart, yet hold our personalities together. My relationship with my former analyst began when I was 26 and continues, despite her stroke and move across the country, to this day. I can barely define it, even though I wrote a whole book of poems about it. These relationships feel like art to me. In each one we are, together, writing the book of two strangers becoming more and more familiar. Yes, I am thrilled by each writing success as it happens. And probably the New York Times Book Review of my second book of poetry, Raw Heaven, is the most significant success. That landed me on the map of contemporary American letters, and from then I have had a place. But my ever-changing relationships, with growth rings for their years of development, are like great trees in my life.

Yes, you have the time to write. Yes, you can write with a full time job, sick parents, a puking dog and children with head lice. I dare you to write fourteen lines of poetry or prose in 45 minutes. Just about everyone has 45 minutes in a day: 15 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at lunch. Women! Keep your writing in your purse. Don’t reach for that brochure in your dentist’s office waiting room: read your favorite writer—you. Get out those drafts from your bag and revel in your own ideas. That will get you to the next line, the next sentence.

What can we expect next from Molly Peacock?

I’m working on The Flower Diary, a biography of an amazing floral still life painter, Mary Hiester Reid, born in Reading, PA. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, met and married a Canadian painter, ran away to Europe with him, then returned to his home in Toronto to make a career. A married artist! And binational…. Do I hear an echo?

Julia MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, was published by Picador in 2014 to widespread praise in national media. The paperback and a German-language edition were published in 2015. Her first novel, A Year of Favor, was published by William Morrow & Co. Julia serves on the nonfiction editorial board of Philadelphia Stories.

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Most people won't realize that writing is a craft.

Simplicity “There must be more to life than having everything . ” is the glory I shall try to of expression. tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Suburban Philadelphia

MFA in Creative Writing MA in Publishing Double Degree in Creative Writing and Publishing

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Spring Event Highlights

Philadelphia Stories celebrated the winners of the annual Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry during April’s poetry month at a reception at Rosemont College. This annual national poetry prize features a first place of $1,000 cash award; three runners up received $100 cash awards for individual poems. The winning poems were published in the spring issue. The prize will open again on June 15; see www.philadelphiastories.org/poetry-contest for details.

Carla Spataro addresses a full house at the annual Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry reception at Rosemont College.

Judge Lamot Steptoe introduces winner Nancy Davis.

Left to right: PS Poetry Editor Courtney Bambrick, Winner Nancy Davis, PS Executive Director Christine Weiser, Judge Lamot Steptoe, Editor's Choice Harvey Soss, Runner Up Will Jones, PS Editorial Director Carla Spataro, Editor's Choice Maggie Lily, prize sponsors Joseph and Matthew Sullivan