Dick of the Dead

Rachel Loden

An author’s statement

Eleven Questions in Search of an Author

What do you do when you ought to be doing other things?
When I was supposed to be writing this the other night, I was instead going through the OED and obsessively reading the lists of compound words that begin with “wind” or “moon” (and the quotations in which they’re used). It was absolutely narcotic—hard to stop.


What’s something we might not guess as we read your book?
That I’m the prisoner in the paddy wagon on page 32. Destination: the Tombs, a.k.a. the Manhattan House of Detention. I was seventeen.


Who influences your writing in an unexpected way?
My husband, whose first language isn’t English. His teachers in Helsinki were a bunch of nuns from St. Louis and he came to this country to study mathematics at the age of sixteen. Now you can tell only very rarely—when he pronounces a word or structures a sentence a little differently. I find it defamiliarizes the language for me in a useful and pleasurable way. Plus he’s kept me intellectually nimble, just trying to keep up.


What’s one of the oddest things that ever happened to you?
It had to do with a package in the mailbox. My mother, brother and I were living in a rented apartment in Berkeley and FBI agents (like mailmen) were known to come to the door, inquiring after my mother’s questionable activities in the labor movement and elsewhere.

So it seemed quite peculiar to come home from grade school and open up a package containing The Social Blue Book of Seattle. Even more peculiar, we were listed in it at our actual, semiridiculous address of “2919 -1/2 Deakin Street.” I knew it was my Seattle grandmother’s doing, but what I didn’t learn till much later was that that formidable lady herself had, in early days, reported her daughter to Hoover’s minions.

But I remember thinking how funny and poignant that “1/2” was in the address, given the Blue Book’s pretensions.


Why didn’t you go to school to learn to write?
One explanation is that I didn’t get the chance—at first because my family fell apart and later because I was busy with other things, like childrearing.

But actually teachers were sending me to the library for independent study as early as sixth grade. That was supposed to be an honor and I guess it was, but it was also a trifle lonely.

In the end I came to relish solitude and chose to make the best of it. That was a piece of luck because it opened the door to my vocation. And without any student loans.


Would you recommend that route to others?
Not if you want the more practical sorts of doors held wide for you, which is a natural human longing. Your teachers, your mentors, perhaps even your friends, will be not so much laid away in books (in Dickinson’s phrase) as contained in them. You have to open them yourself. But when you do, of course, what friends—their generosity is astonishing.

So you just go on your nerve, as O’Hara said, even when it seems impossible that nerve alone will cut it.

But my story ought to be reassuring to spinners of poetry conspiracies because, as it turns out, to the people who really count—your peers—all that matters is whether you can write.


How did you learn to write, then?
That’s an ongoing project. But back then (as now) it was only by reading and falling seriously in love with my reading.

Beyond that I invented some fairly loopy training regimens. For example, I bought a stack of black and white composition books and drew a line down the middle of each page. Then I recorded snippets of language—things I heard or odd juxtapositions that popped into my head. Like a magpie, perhaps, stealing shiny bits from which to make my nest.

What do you find amusing?
There was a man on the BBC just now, discussing the economy, and (unless I’m hearing things) his name was Roger Boodle.

If you could change places with someone for a day, whom would you choose?
Chrissie Hynde (of the Pretenders), possibly circa 1980.

What else would you like to do other than write poetry?
Make collages, illuminated books, and interactive hypermedia poems. But Tricky D. would probably try to sneak into them. (Shall I resist that? I don’t know.)

What’s eerie for you about the main drag in the town where you live?
That my young, startlingly handsome uncle, Russell Ulrich, crashed and died there years before I was born. He arrived from Seattle to join the freshman class at Stanford and, in that first year, loaned money to a classmate for an illegal abortion; in return he was given a car. Unfortunately the brakes failed and that was the end of Russell on the royal road, El Camino Real. I don’t know exactly where it happened, which may (or may not) be all to the good.

What I do know is that I likely wouldn’t exist without this set of facts. Another story!