A Conversation with Brittney Corrigan
Ellen Notbohm talks with Brittney Corrigan about Daughters, Solastalgia and how poetry can reach readers in new ways.
In hindsight, I’m astounded I did it. The set-up was as far out of my comfort zone as Pluto. But I applied for, and won, a writing residency at a cabin in the coastal mountains where the only other person in residence, and for some distance around, would be a complete stranger. But it was fast-friendship-at-first-sight. I had just begun writing my historical novel, The River by Starlight, and Brittney Corrigan was working on what would be her second published poetry collection, 40 Weeks, a progression of short poems using the imagery of the natural world to follow a developing pregnancy. When our week together ended, we continued to meet every other Sunday morning to critique each other’s works-in-progress. At first, I balked at critiquing her work, as I knew nothing about poetry. Her indelible reply was that she didn’t want to only appeal to other poets, she wanted to touch a wide range of readers. That one remark made poetry seem suddenly accessible to me. In the seventeen years since, it’s been a joy to walk beside Brittney through what is now five poetry collections. The last two, Daughters and Solastalgia, are the work of a mature poet who is indeed reaching to deepest corners of contemporary life.
Daughters is a collection of persona poems that reimagine characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters, while Solastalgia faces down the Anthropocene age with shattering yet hopeful perspective on climate change, extinction, survival, and love. — Ellen Notbohm, Guest Interviewer
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EN: Daughters is one of the most widely relatable poetry collections I’ve ever read. Every woman who ever walked this planet is a daughter, right? I watched Daughters evolve from your original idea, writing from the perspective of mythological or fictional characters to including perspectives from startlingly contemporary daughters: an active shooter’s daughter, a storm chaser’s daughter. Many of the poems are unexpectedly jarring commentaries on social issues that have always plagued the human condition: the Pied Piper as a pedophile, Goldilocks as a desperate homeless mother, Dorothy Gale deep in dementia. How did you conceive Daughters? What has been the response to it, and is it what you expected?
BC: I fell into this project by accident. I had been interested in persona poetry in college, and after a couple of decades of writing poems about myself and my family, I was interested in returning to persona poems as a way of trying something different with my work. I wrote “Scarecrow’s Daughter” on a lark and enjoyed it, so I moved on to Bigfoot. But I was struggling with the poem from the perspective of Bigfoot himself, so I decided to switch it up and write in his daughter’s voice, instead. “Bigfoot’s Daughter” just happened to end up with the same number of lines and stanzas as “Scarecrow’s Daughter,” and that gave me the idea creating a larger project. I decided I would write 50 daughters’ poems and began making a list of ideas. I had no idea at the time how much these poems would end up resonating with readers, but I love that the daughters really speak to people, and I’m always interested in hearing from folks about who their favorite daughters are from the book.
EN: Even readers who enjoy a range of prose will tell me they don’t “get” poetry and therefore never read it. What creates this mindset and how can we talk about it in a way that encourages hesitant readers to give poetry a chance?
BC: This is certainly a common response to poetry, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because the only poetry some folks have had contact with was in school, and perhaps they were asked to dissect or explain a poem before they’d had a chance to just read it for pleasure. Or perhaps they’ve only read poetry by dead white men (not to say there isn’t value in those poems, too) and haven’t been exposed to other poetic voices, including ones to whom they can better relate. Contemporary poets are doing exciting work with subject matter, form, and performance. I urge folks to come to poetry with an open mind. If we approach something with a mindset that we can’t understand it, then surely we won’t understand it. But if we approach a poem with willingness to listen as well as curiosity, we’re set up to be pleasantly surprised by what we might find, and then we can enter into a deeper conversation with the work.
EN: About that dead-white-men observation. In She’ll Be the Sky: Poems by Women and Girls, curator Ella Risbridger calls out the fact that only one of twenty-one Poet Laureates in the UK has been female, and in the US, only 14 of 53 Poet Laureate/Consultants in Poetry (title of the position before 1985) have been female. Yet when I think of contemporary poets, the first who come to mind are Amanda Gorman, Maya Angelou, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ada Limón. Why such disparity in the upper levels of the art? Do you see that changing?
BC: I think the disparity is there for the same reason it is in other arenas: a long history of misogyny and sexism. But I absolutely see it changing. There are many strong female (as well as trans and nonbinary) voices in contemporary poetry, and our three most recent U.S. Poets Laureate have been women of color (Ada Limón, Joy Harjo, and Tracy K. Smith). These poets, and so many others, are changing how people—especially those who aren’t immersed in poetry on a daily basis—think about who poets are: what they look like, what they write about, and how they can start conversation or affect change in the world.
EN: The word solastalgia was new to me. It’s a 21st-century combination word that describes our distress about environmental change and a kind of homesickness for the home you’re still in. Tell us why you chose it as the title of this latest collection.
BC: Yes, solastalgia is a neologism coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005, combining the Latin word sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief). The poems in my collection explore topics of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age and how we as humans, and myself specifically, are dealing with these challenges. It seemed the perfect word to describe the complexity of emotions associated with living on a planet that is in peril because of the actions of our species.
EN: Please define “the Anthropocene age” for readers who are unfamiliar with the term. It’s a little discomfiting, isn’t it? Do you find some potential readers have trouble confronting or accepting the concept?
BC: The Anthropocene is our current geological age (folks might be familiar with the Mesozoic, which is the geological age in which the dinosaurs existed). The Anthropocene age began about 2.6 million years ago and is characterized as the period in which human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment. Most of my readers seem well aware of how humans have impacted our planet, though I’m not sure everyone wants to accept how negative that impact has been and continues to be. One of the ideas my poems wrestle with is that the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants may well be better off without us, and that is certainly a concept that makes people uncomfortable, or sad, or some combination of the two.
EN: Some of the poems in Daughters have climate or meteorological perspectives. How did Daughters lead to Solastalgia?
Daughters was definitely a project book, and it took me five years to write, wedged in between work and raising children. As I was coming to the end of that collection, I was feeling like what I wanted to write about next were issues of climate change and extinction. I’ve always had an affinity for the natural world and animals, and the state of our planet was calling me back to those loves in the form of my artistic expression. The very last poem in Daughters is “Yeti’s Daughter,” which is about the human impact on the planet and the beings who live here with us. It was my “gateway poem” into the writing of Solastalgia.
EN: Who are you looking to reach with Solastalgia?
BC: The poems in Solastalgia are not just for other poets or lovers of poetry. I hope that these poems will speak to anyone who is concerned about the state of our planet and the more-than-human beings with whom we share it. I hope readers can see themselves within these poems—be it a wonder for the natural world or a fear of its demise—and are inspired to take action in whatever way they can to help undo as much of the damage we’ve done as we possibly can before it’s too late and to be better stewards of the Earth moving forward.
EN: Which poems in Solastalgia might be good introductions to readers new to poetry? I gotta go with “The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind,” in which we end up oddly rooting for those abandoned storefronts. And “Elegy for One Billion Animals,” a soul-wringing requiem for the unspeakable losses wrought by wildfires. “No telling smoke from ghosts” is a line that will haunt me forever.
BC: The “Anthropocene Blessings” in Solastalgia evoke a variety of endangered species, which may be familiar and of concern to new readers. Folks might also enjoy the poems with a bit of a pop culture feel, such as “The Ghost of Marlin Perkins Visits Me Wearing a Copperhead” or “Tweet.” I also hope readers can identify with poems in which I, the writer, relate my own personal experiences, such as “Fossil Record: Smilodon” or “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit.”
EN: And Daughters?
BC: I invite readers to meet the daughters through the table of contents and sample poems below, and start with those they find most relatable. Many of the Daughters poems are available in literary journals online, as well. To name a few: “Lepidopterist’s Daughter,” “Surrealist’s Daughter,” “Minotaur’s Daughter,” “Active Shooter’s Daughter.”
EN: The poems in both Daughters and Solastalgia range from bleak to hope-filled, a few even defiantly exuberant. Why and how did you craft such a balance? How do you decide the order in which poems appear in a collection?
BC: In putting these poems out into the world, two things were important to me. First, I think we need to sit with the darkness for a while. We need to meditate on the damage we as humans have caused, and we need to take responsibility for that damage. We need to feel sorrow, maybe even a bit of despair. But then we need to do something with those feelings. And so the collection is also threaded with wonder and hope. Because I have to believe that, while we can’t fix everything, we are fully capable of doing something to make things better, or at least not make them worse. The poems are arranged in sections that mirror the spheres of the planet: biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere/cryosphere, and there are several types of poems within each section. The final two poems in the collection are intentionally hopeful. I want folks to come away from Solastalgia feeling, and thinking: What’s next? However small, what am I personally going to do to create change?
EN: What would you like readers to know that I haven’t asked?
BC: Many of the poems in Solastalgia fall into categories. In “world without us” poems like “The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind,” I see images of nature thriving without human influence. In “parallel life” poems such as “Triolet for the Marine Biologist I Didn’t Become,” I explore other possible career paths I might have taken that are rooted in the natural world. I’m especially fond of the “unloved animal” poems, in which I celebrate (and hopefully change readers’ minds about) creatures such as opossums and coyotes, with whom we often share our urban environment. The “Fossil Record” poems examine my own life experiences in the context of the issues I’m writing about. The “Anthropocene Blessings” highlight both the beauty and plight of some of our most threatened species. My goal in creating this variety of poems is that any reader can find themselves in the collection, find something that resonates with them. Something, as my editor Simone Muench at JackLeg Press says, that make readers “…want to be better, do better.”
Brittney Corrigan, Nina Johnson Photography.
The following poems appear courtesy of Brittney Corrigan and are excerpted from Daughters, published by Airlie Press, 2021.
Goldilocks’ Daughter
Trespass: the very word sounds
like the combing of hair. The tines
separating the locks, wrestling each
strand into its own. Curls parting,
disentangling, to let the wooden
fingers drag themselves through.
Consider: that’s not how
we saw it. The cold, it set even
our toes to trembling, knocking
together in their blue chatter
of flesh. Our hands, our ears,
our noses fared no better.
Understand: we did queue up
at the shelter. Mother and I,
our coats held around us
like weary pelts, skins crackling.
There were never any beds
when the dark came stinging.
Notice: the door was open,
the house unattended. Who
leaves three meals a-steam
on the table top? Yes, we tried
on the chairs for size: the novelty
of a custom seat, a bowl just so.
Imagine: the beds! Oh, the beds
were nothing like the ground,
were nothing like a box, or
a doorway, or a troll-worn bridge.
Even the least downy among
them was cause to sing.
Listen: Mother and I, we thought
to stay only long enough to warm.
But oh, how they always find us.
How they always turn us out. How
it goes like this: an open hand,
then the roaring of the bears.
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Siren’s Daughter
Our songs are not for you.
My mother didn’t teach me
to lilt a lyric from my throat,
to crest a note from my
tongue, in order to enthrall
or summon a man.
Such conceit, to think
a goddess would sing
of men’s deeds. We sing
for the same reason cranes sing,
or the deepening whales,
or a whole fierce chorus of wolves.
I wish all of you would bind
your rough and yearning
bodies to the masts
of your figureheaded ships,
sails a-beat in the salty
wind, breaking the waves.
Because truth be told,
I’ve had enough of your
maddening inability
to keep your hearts and hands
to yourselves. Your excuses
puddle ‘round your boots.
But still you come. My mother
says men cannot leave a thing
of beauty to unfurl of its own
accord. You must always lean
in and pluck it, roots and all,
no matter the withering.
So we have to make our homes
among the sharpest rocks.
We have to pick the roughest
whorl of seas. And if we draw
your ships to smithereens, well,
that will not keep us from singing.
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Alien Abductee’s Daughter
My mother isn’t a sci-fi-movie-
1960s-housewife-drying-her-hands-
on-her-apron-as-she-half-sleepwalks-
into-the-yard-where-there-is-a-bright-
beam-waiting-to-levitate-her-through-
the-whipping-wind kind of gal.
She makes grilled cheese sandwiches
sensibly, with butter on both sides,
and pickles, and tomato soup. She
reads novels of literary merit, maybe
a little magical realism thrown in,
but not enough to make her moony.
She believes in ghosts, it’s true, the same
way she believes in mathematics.
The beauty of theories and formulations,
the attempt to enumerate all things:
black holes, gravity, planetary orbits
and tides, weather, dark matter, energy.
What I’m saying is, I believe her.
If she lost time, it likely was because
of the UFO. I mean, she’s not
an invents-bedtime-stories kind of mom.
There’s nothing impossible about it.
It all comes down to simple math.
Listen, my father’s not really my father.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When
he’s gone, we know exactly where
he goes. You can smell it on his clothes,
sour and sloppy. My mother was returned
only slightly disheveled, and carrying me.
See? My skin has a shimmery gray undertone.
Just look at my whopping green eyes. We don’t
need my father anymore. They’re coming back
for us, I can feel it. That’s why my mother stands
in the yard every night, crying, holding my hand.
We’re certain. We know the lights will come.
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Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, Daughters, and Solastalgia. Her poetry has appeared in more than 130 journals and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has served in editorial roles for Airlie Press, Timberline Review, and other publications, and served in administrative and advisory roles with Pacific Northwest writer residency programs. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. Her debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction and is forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing in 2024. https://brittneycorrigan.com
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Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose has most recently appeared in Brevity, Eunoia, Does It Have Pockets, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and several anthologies in the US and abroad. https://ellennotbohm.com
