The Na/GloPoWriMo Interviews with Samar Abdel Jaber and Nicole Callihan
Samar Abdel Jaber and Nicole Callihan are the authors of Translucence, newly out from Indolent Books. Abdel Jaber is the author of Wa fi rewayaten okhra (And There Are Other Accounts; Malameh Publishing House, 2008), Madha law konna ashbahan (What If We Were Ghosts; Dar al-Ahlia Publishing, 2013), winner of the Palestinian Young Writer of the Year Award from the A.M. Qattan Foundation, and Kawkab mansey (The Forgotten Planet; Dar al-Ahlia Publishing, 2016). Callihan is the author of Henry River Mill Village (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), co-authored with Ruby Young Kellar; the poetry collection SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014); and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015), co-authored with Zoë Ryder White and winner of the Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest Award; The Deeply Flawed Human (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016); Downtown (Finishing Line Press 2017); and Aging (Yes, Poetry, 2018).
We start with our interview with Samar Abdel Jaber:
1. Why did you start writing poetry? Why do you still?
My interest in poetry started because my dad used to read me a lot of stories and poems when I was a child, and I believe that is what made me attempt to create poetry at a young age.
I started writing poetry whenever I was sad or anxious. And when I wrote, my sadness and anxiety would turn into feelings of happiness and satisfaction. It would feel as if I threw a burden off my back. The feeling of creating “a combination of words” which have not existed before is the most satisfying feeling ever.
I still write poetry because it’s my way to express my thoughts, feelings and observations. I still write poetry simply because I enjoy doing so!
2. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve gotten? The worst?
Some great advice I got when I was 14 was from my Arabic Literature teacher, Mr. Anwar Al Zein, who was a poet himself, and who had the most important role in my poetry journey. He said: “Rip apart all what you’ve written so far. And start again. Keep doing it over and over. That is how you will grow as a writer”.
I don’t think I have gotten any bad advice, or probably I just ignored it if I did!
3. How did your new book come into being?
I met Nicole Callihan online by coincidence after I translated a poem of hers into Arabic and asked for her approval to publish it in an Arabic cultural website. I asked Nicole to send me more of her poems as I felt her writing style in English is so similar to mine in Arabic, and that is when Nicole suggested that we work on a poetry book together. We would choose pictures and write a poem inspired by each, I in Arabic and Nicole in English. The book took less than two months to be completed, during which we were writing almost daily. The poems covered several subjects mostly inspired by our day to day experiences. As the collaboration went on, our poems started to turn into some sort of “dialogue”. I & Nicole clicked immediately although we live in two different continents with completely different lives. I believe this was the most enjoyable writing experience I ever had!
4. Is there a generative prompt, practice or ritual that you find particularly helpful, or that you would recommend to students, friends, or other poets?
When I was writing the book, I started a practice that was new to me relatively. I made it a habit to dedicate time for writing daily, and that worked perfectly well. Previously I used to wait until a thought is very strong in my head to go write it down. Many times I lost a lot of thoughts because I didn’t write them on the spot. What I learned from Nicole, while writing the book together, is that she deals with her poetry books as projects. Dedicating time for writing is essential to progress. And that is my advice to other writers.
And now, we continue with our interview with Nicole Callihan:
1. Why did you start writing poetry? Why do you still?
I started writing poetry because I was confused. I was fourteen; the Oklahoma sky was swallowing me; my mom had married another man; I vacillated between being born again and wanting to kill myself. With poems, I could name myself and the world around me. I could claim that wild, sometimes rhyming, sometimes ranting, voice in my head. And I still write them because I’m still confused, and also because I feed off of that tuning-fork feel of my heart and brain when I’m really receiving—and trying to translate—the world around me.
2. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve gotten? The worst?
The best writing advice I ever got was from Dana Goia. I was twenty-two, and Iris Dunkle and I had driven across the country after finishing our first year of grad school in NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Somehow, we ended up having lunch with Dana Gioia. He said, “You know who the best poet I knew when I was twenty-two was?” And we were like, “No. Who?! Tell us!” And he said, “Actually, I don’t know either, because that guy quit writing. It doesn’t matter,” he said, “who’s the most talented. It just matters who sticks it out the longest.” Now, twenty-two years later, I’m still fighting the good fight.
The worst was from Marie Howe. I love and respect her, but she said to me, “Poets need to be anointed. Stanley anointed me. Maybe one day, someone will anoint you.” Screw that. I’m a poet because I can anoint myself!
3. How did your new book come into being?
Last summer, I was writing in Prague, and I received a Facebook message from Samar Abdel Jaber. She had been working on translations of poems from English into Arabic and asked if I’d be okay if she published her Arabic translation of one of my poems. We corresponded a bit and decided it would be worthwhile to collaborate. I love writing poems with other people and am fueled by community. We settled on writing poem-pairs off of photographs, each pair “appearing” to be a translation but actually its own thing. I don’t read Arabic, so Samar would send me her “translation” of her own poem after I had completed my poem which she would read after she had written her own. Ultimately, we are reckoning with notions of translatability—each of us translating an image into our own language(s)—and thinking about how, perhaps, nothing is truly translatable, or everything is. One surprise is that as the project progressed, it became more and more like a conversation. We truly became friends, which is interesting because we’ve never met in person or even spoken on the phone. Another surprise is that the first publisher I sent individual poem-pairs too—Indolent Books—asked immediately if they could look at the whole collection and possibly publish it. The turnaround from beginning to write to publication was only seven months which is wildly fast!
4. Is there a generative prompt, practice or ritual that you find particularly helpful, or that you would recommend to students, friends, or other poets?
“Read” a poem in a language you don’t understand; “read” it several times; now, “translate” it into your own language.
