Nine Books About Your Life:

Interview by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In the Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In the second installment, we speak with Sara Wainscott, author of the forthcoming Insecurity System (Persea).

First Book – Books were always around when I was growing up, so I don’t have a memory of a first book. But the first time I remember being completely lost in a book, like timeshiftwormholeblackoutworldmelting reading, I was in first grade and had just started to read chapter books. I was reading a chapter book, and whatever it was, it was awesome. I remember more or less coming back into myself and realizing that everyone else had transitioned from quiet independent reading time to another activity, feeling disoriented by finding myself in school again, feeling mortified that I hadn’t heard the bell ring or the other kids put away their books or the teacher call the class to the carpet, feeling nervous that my spell would land me in trouble.

Most Cherished Book – I have the idea that books belong to everyone collectively—my formative years were anchored by weekly library visits—so I treasure most those books that lived with someone else first. I like to find used books lovingly inscribed to other people, to read a stranger’s marginalia. My dad’s formerly-used and well-worn copy of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck makes me cry to hold it. The corners gone soft and the pages turning brittle-tan. The fading place inside the front cover where he wrote his name in pencil. Reading his awkwardly neat signature really gets me. I’d love to be able to visit my old hometown library, down a set of brown stairs, down a brown hall, through a brown door in the basement of the city hall building where now and then, once I’d begun to venture beyond the children’s shelf, I’d check out a book and find my dad’s name written some years earlier on the card. The way the privacy and intimacy of reading can be a shared experience, that’s what I cherish about books.

Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-0142000687

Most Perplexing Book – Plenty of books I don’t understand, or my understanding of them might be shifting, but to me understanding doesn’t need to be the goal of reading. Currently I’m reading The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso (trans. Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades), and at this point, on page 75 or so of 400-some, I don’t understand this book. Dozens of characters shuffle within the maze of the crumbling monastery/orphanage where the book is set; the narration might be polyvocal or might at times switch to internal monologue; sometimes characters appear with different names; stories unfold within stories, or maybe I mean myths within myths; the world of the book is eerie and lush, familiar but weird. I’m finding that the going is slow, and the going is gorgeous. And sad and horrific and absurdly comic. Writing is the art of raising questions, and I’m generally curious about how books collect and control and dispel and refrain and reframe questions. As I read The Obscene Bird of Night, I’m asking a lot of questions, happily, since wondering is one my favorite methods of reading.

The Obscene Bird Of Night
José Donoso (trans. Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades)
Verba Mundi
ISBN: 978-1567920468

Life-changing Book – In terms of lasting impact, The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White and Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban are my foundational texts, the books always inside my mind’s core, projecting images of cardboard salt shakers, swan boats, jump-ropes, tiny sandwiches, razor blades. Inherent to these books are the notions that language exists as song and song also exists as language, that the quotidian is ritual, that being ridiculous is one way of telling the truth. These ideas appear in my writing, but I think they are more evident in my day-to-day life, to the dismay of my children.

The Trumpet of the Swan
E.B. White
HarperCollins
ISBN: 978-0064410946

Bread and Jam for Frances
Russell Hoban
HarperCollins
ISBN: 978-0060838003

Most Underrated Book – I learned about Lola Ridge over the summer when I found a library copy of Therese Svoboda’s biography of her, Anything That Burns You: Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. Svoboda’s book is meticulous and juicy, and I recommend it in its own right, but it astonishes me that a poet so prolific (and so well-connected) could be essentially erased. Or maybe it shouldn’t astonish me, considering Lola Ridge was a radical, a feminist, an anarchist. I’m obsessed right now with her book Sun-Up And Other Poems, which was published a hundred years ago but remains vital and present. Here’s a bit of it:

Centipedes

have hundreds of feet

because it is so far from hell

to come up for air.

Centipedes

do not hurry.

They are waiting for the last day

when they will creep over the false prophets

who will have their hands tied.

Anything That Burns You: Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet
Therese Svoboda
Schaffner Press
ISBN: 978-1936182961

Sun-Up And Other Poems
Lola Ridge

A Surprising Book – The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a book I should probably adore—it’s fantastical and fractured and interplanetary and metaphoric in its logic—but it’s a book I’ve never been able to love, despite its completely captivating illustrations. When I read it as a kid, I felt held apart by the narration, which addresses children and childhood by expressing suspicion of adults and growing up yet winks to grown-up experience in ways I couldn’t access then, and this seemed duplicitous. It seemed then to me as it seems now, a book for adults posing as a book for children, chasing some too-sweet idea of innocence.

Your Most Recent Book – Insecurity System comes out in April 2020, and it’s a collection of sonnet crowns about worry: the perseverations of anxiety, the effects of capitalism, the structures/strictures of motherhood, the friction between various dimensions/modes of time. As a tangential point of context, these poems were written during the increasingly difficult years of my dad’s Alzheimer’s disease. Bruce Springsteen’s song “Dancing In the Dark” instigated a conversation with myself that turned into this project, though it started as a personal joke that went further that I thought it would.

Insecurity System
Sara Wainscott
Persea
ISBN: 978-0892555048

Your Next Book – I have a completed draft of a book-length poem called The Star Cabins, which I modeled after the language patterns and aphasia of my dad’s dementia and which is about time travel by way of exploring simultaneity of experience, multiplicities of the self, and recursive motions of memory. I have the concept for a sequel to The Star Cabins that engages with holes, negative capability, and irretrievable information, so that’s next. Lately I’ve also been writing these kind of retro-pastoral poems about singularity, among other things. These are the first discrete poems I’ve written in several years, so the experience of writing feels slower and more diffuse. But that’s next too.

Plug an Author – A few years ago Yarrow Woods gave a brilliant reading at Wit Rabbit (the former reading series I hosted with Sarah Meltzer). I’m always excited when I see her new poems out in the world! Her work is lush and radical and funny and daring and gorgeous. I love her sharp attention to the line and to fragments and to space/breath/hollowing.