Renee Scavone on food, family, relationships, expression

Many of the metaphors in your chapbook are food-related (as is the cover image), which seamlessly segues into talking about greater themes of family and personal history. Was this a conscious decision from the beginning of your chapbook’s conception, or did food just naturally come up as a unifying theme as you were writing?

Using food as sort of emotional mile markers was a conscious effort for this book, but it arose very naturally, after I realized that I’d written a couple of food poems last year. Cooking is a huge part of my life, and forgoing Hopkins to pursue culinary training is something that I’ve often joked about.

Beyond that, I think meal time has always been of elevated importance to me. My family ate dinner together every night when I was growing up, no matter how late it got; we were sort of infamous for our 10, 10:30 pm dinners on school nights. So I think that from very early on in my life sharing food together both became something that was very key to what it means to be in a family in a good way (as in having a shared routine/tradition with people, knowing that there’d be a moment of togetherness at least once a day) as well as the bad (denial of things you want, not being able to control your own time.)

I noticed there are several sections in your collection, with blank pages separating them. Can you talk about your decision to make the sections distinct? What did you choose to distinguish them by (themes/time period/subject matter)?

Once I had determined the order I wanted, it was more or less intuitive where to put breaks—in the Artist Print that’s where there are inserts from cookbooks. The first sort of section really focuses on family and denial, familial tension. When I talk about denial here I mean of all sorts of things—food, emotional closeness from others, kindness to oneself. There’s also a strong theme of abandonment within this part of the book and, conversely, what we cling to and inherit in absence of what we really/actually want.

The center poems are more about getting away from these familial origins, with acknowledgement that they still affect you. The section is bookended by Over Easy, which focuses on the things we take with us when we leave a place, and Comes From, which hits on that idea of origins in a more rebellious way. In general, I chose to put the three poems with both and “I” and a “you” in the center and cap off with just a “you” poem (1 B, 1 Ba, Move in Ready) because I wanted to highlight the fact that you cannot escape from your past through other people. Therefore when Comes From happens next within the first stanza there is a certain sense of fatedness, of a “this is where you are from, period full stop” but then the second stanza clarifies that as to say, where you come from and where you’ll be found do not have to be the same. s

In the final section I tried to more wholly contrast familial poems with “grown up” or new life poems. So we have the sort of austerity/denial of Soup Poem paired up with the “thrilling” nature of being given what you want without strings in My Treat, and the sort of found family and joy of Tiramisu contrasted with the feeling of trapped in one’s familial situation in What Drove Me Inside. I wanted to end all of these pairs, this section, and the chapbook itself with Chatty because I think it acknowledges the uncorrectable past of the narrator while still saying “I can be by myself and not have to explain myself and that’s ‘a beautiful thing’”. I worried that this final section would be too dark, and I think it’s a very hopeful poem.

I think that’s probably a more in depth answer, but I agonized over this decision so I have an awful lot to say about it!

Your chapbook starts with a poem that ends on the image of a mouth, and the last poem in the collection with “Chatty.” It’s a clever way to bookend your poems, and the final one ends with the narrator being able to “shut the fuck up. / And isn’t that a beautiful thing?” What roles did sound and vocalization play in your writing, particularly as they relate to what is said and what is left unsaid?

Thank you! I felt clever doing it. I think when you compare those two poems in specific, there’s this idea of being told these things, having them passed onto us, and then the decision to keep quiet, to not make big statements about how to live one’s life.

The first two instances of quoted speech are in the imperative—one (“save what you love, let it be the last thing you devour…”) is, as I said, a command of how to live one’s life, whereas the other (“Go to sleep!”) is given as a more protective measure. By the time we get to the third instance of quotations in Kiss the Cook things have softened out considerably: “I missed you”, “I’m sorry”, “I care about you”. With Kiss I think I best distilled what I want to explore about the issue—what can and can’t we bring ourselves to say?

Otherwise, vocalization is expressed in text without direct quotations, the most notable of which is probably the entirety of Please do not question the artist about. I think that this creates a certain amount of detachment from the otherwise real world of the poems. This sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of imperfect memory—we rarely remember exact words, and instead focus on feelings—as well as wanting to know things or express things but not having the perfect words to do so. We don’t hear the fight between the mother and the narrator in Over Easy because there’s a certain level of missed communication there, and it’s not the words themselves that are what sticks out, but the eggs. Similarly in The Pineapple Thief it isn’t what is “haughtily announced” that makes a lasting impression, but the gifts of fruit, the narrator’s beloved’s actions.

And, of course, I’m primarily an aurally focused poet (which is why I sometimes struggle with line breaks!) so sound is a lot of times the first thing I structure on; I have written whole poems around liking the way a certain word or phrase rings out.

All of the poems are written in first-person except for “Dream House, or Lot 23,” “1 B, 1 BA, Move in Ready,” and “Please Do Not Question the Artist About,” which are written in second-person. On the one hand, it creates a kind of dissociation by the distancing of self from the narrator, but on the other hand, the reader is being directly addressed, which makes the relationship between writer and narrator more intimate. What effect were you hoping to achieve with the interspersion of first- and second-person points of view?

Most of my first-person poems that take place outside of the familial setting interact with a you, which I think stems back to the idea of trying to find (or escape from) yourself through other people.

The two that don’t (English Breakfast and Chatty) find the narrator at their most blunt in regards to their own imperfections. Part of my motivation for this was reinforcing the idea that issues that have arisen within oneself, whether triggered by family or otherwise, are wholly something that the self has to live with, regardless of who they surrounded themselves with.

As for Dream House and Move in Ready, I wanted to emphasize the isolation that can be associated with spaces, no matter where. Both of these poems are sort of about feeling trapped in your own skin, about not belonging anywhere, and I felt like taking away the narrator “I” helped with that.

Please do not question the artist about is a little more silly. It’s one of the poems that I am very much “in”, so I didn’t necessarily feel the need to have a “narrator I”. Furthermore, it’s an honest request: I put it after English Breakfast, probably the most opaque poem in the collection, to basically be like “Hey! Don’t expect me to explain this stuff!” In that way, I think that it’s good to compare to Chatty, but it’s a little less delicate, a little more blunt and in your face.

What was your revision process like? I was able to see a lot of them throughout the semester as we were working on the chapbooks, and revising is a fairly holistic process in general—but were there elements you focused on more specifically than others?

I struggle with visual form, like how I want a poem to look on a page, so that was something that I actually spent a fair amount of time on before and after I submitted poems to be looked at in both the classroom setting and in the chapbook itself. This also applies to my actual formal poetry—often times I’ll take it out of form and then put it back in, or vice versa. I think that playing around with that and line length can really force a writer to explore different stresses within a poem, and sometimes that creates really wonderful stuff and emphasis on new things that you wouldn’t have previously considered.

Pure content-wise, it’s always kind of a toss up. I think about the things that the poem can and cannot live without, and then try to trim the fat. Of course, sometimes certain lines or details are sentimental to me, so I’ll work harder to keep them even if they aren’t strictly “necessary”.

For a couple of poems, I changed or softened details simply because I knew that this was going to be a thing that (hopefully!) would be read by more than just my professor and classmates. I think that was a very interesting part of the chapbook experience to me—it’s weird and difficult to decide how vulnerable you want to be in front of an unknown or unexpected audience. Of course, it’s not as though this book will be on the New York Times best seller list tomorrow, but it was certainly a different thing to have to consider.

Renee Scavone’s debut chapbook is Over Easy, created with support of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars program. She received her bachelors degrees in Film & Media Studies and Writing Seminars from Hopkins in 2018. She is from just outside Detroit, Michigan and currently resides on the coast.

Ashley Kim is the author of the chapbook titled Have You Eaten? She received her Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University. She was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area and currently resides in Baltimore. She will pursue her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville.