Photo credit: Aaron Mayes / UNLV Photo Services

Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of a novel, Here Lies, a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is the director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Her latest book, An Arm Fixed to a Wing, is out now on LSU Press. It seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker's present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily.

Several poems explore the theme of motherhood–the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book's center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled "Camera Poems," exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

In “Before” you write, “and if I don’t write this down, it will / all fall away, but even I can’t remember” (4). What do you think makes a memory so important? Is it the experience of an emotion, the events, or something else? Why do you write about memory?

Memory is certainly at the core of this book. I’m also very interested in how we think about memory in relation to the present moment. Perhaps an event is important, and we anticipate that we’ll want to remember it vividly, and then we don’t remember it at all. And we often remember things that we don’t expect! As for me, I tend to remember textured details. Something strange that was said, the long earrings a friend wore. That’s why we talk about the importance of details so much in writing; they’re what we remember, and they’re how we remember. Years ago, I got a phone call that my grandmother had died in Louisiana. I went to a bookstore I’d never been to and bought a book of short stories by Don DeLillo. I was crying. After I paid, the bookseller handed me a tissue. I remember the particular way she handed me the tissue. I remember the onset of grief through that interaction.

Speaking of memory, there are a number of elegies in this book. What appeals to you about elegies, and why do you think there are so many in this book—especially alongside poems about children and motherhood?

That goes back to memory. And memorializing that memory. Again, I like thinking of memorializing the present moment. We know the cliché about having small children is: This will all go by so fast. Many artists already understand that concept, though—that so much is fleeting. Whether children are in the picture or not. One of the best things a poem can do is memorialize a moment. However long that moment is.

Sleep and dreams also appear frequently, especially in the first section of the book. What do you think makes dreams so compelling for so many artists?

When I had my children, especially when they were babies, I wasn’t getting much sleep. It’s no wonder sleep, and the lack of it, shows up in my work. And because I was often getting only two or three hours of sleep, the texture of my dreams changed. They’d become even more visceral, and when I woke up, I’d have to remind myself of where I was, where I lived, who I was. It fascinated me too that my dreams weren’t always caught up with where I was in life. Other times, my dreams would be in the future, with my newborn already walking around and talking to me. Dreams are that imaginative, associative space. If I could, I’d often try to write when I was in a half-sleep, half-dream state. That was freeing.

In the opening poem of the “Camera Poems” section, you write about a director and an actress: “Then he said, ‘Are you—are you really / even aware of the camera?” (15). I was really interested in the idea of the camera as a framing device, especially since the Latin word camera literally means “room” or “chamber,” which has connotations of both personal comfort and confinement. What gave you the idea to write the camera poems?

A couple things. I used to be an actress as a teenager and young adult—on stage and television. My experience on television was a formative time in my life. When I was in college, I read Barbara Guest’s THE CONFETTI TREES, a book of poems that follows a kind of narrative arc of making a film. Guest is also fascinated by performance, directors, cameras lenses. This has all been rotating in my mind for a while. I wrote a story called “The Real Thing” (published in McSweeney’s) about a strange acting school. I’ll keep writing about all of this in various ways, but having the “Camera Poems” as a series really helped me anchor the book. At first, this wasn’t a series, but just a group of poems scattered throughout the collection. I have outside readers to thank for seeing early drafts of the manuscript and showing me that these poems of mine wanted to flock together.

Relatedly, in “The Well”, you wrote, “She’s giving things she doesn’t have” (17). I liked how this poem played into my expectations and against them. It reminded me of the term “gender script,” coined by Ellen van Oost to describe expected actions someone in a certain gender would take in a given situation. How do you think about gender roles or gender scripts and surveillance? How can we both participate in gender and protect ourselves from the effects of surveillance?

It’s notable that the Director in the “Camera Poems” is male. Certainly, I was thinking about the male gaze, male direction, female performance. In my story that I mentioned about the strange acting school, the school director is female, with both male and female students, and I’m playing with expectations of gender roles in that story in a different way. And there’s a difference between the stage and the camera in that story. That is, there’s a difference between acting in class for a small group of people and acting for a camera. In one of the poems in “Camera Poems,” the main character recites a monologue in a dark closet. I like that she feels utterly alone in that poem. And doesn’t this relate to writing? When I’m first writing, I’m alone in the work. Later, I imagine a small audience, and then later, maybe I imagine a slightly bigger audience.

I got away from your question, but I suppose I’m still thinking it through!

I really enjoyed the poems “She Looks Into” and “Her Own,” which felt connected in the way they both take up alternate modes of experiencing identity and perception. How do you think self-perception and identity are connected to creativity and power? How do we reclaim or preserve them?

Perhaps we preserve our creativity by allowing ourselves to reach deeper levels of self-awareness. For me, that happens through reading, writing, time alone, time with others. But I also think it happens through re-invention. I don’t write the way I did when I began writing, and that makes sense. I think allowing for those different selves—as I write about in “She Looks Into”—is essential, especially over the years, if you’re in this for the long run. Your different selves along the way will cohere and unify.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.

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