Locally Speaking: An Interview with Maureen McDole
Interviewer, Jessica Brasseur, a Creative Writing MFA Candidate in the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop
Maureen McDole is a poet and the CEO of Keep St. Pete Lit, a non-profit organization which supports the literary scene of St. Petersburg, Florida, through writing workshops, readings, and other educational literary events. Her poetry can be found in two published editions, Exploring My Options (Summerfolk Press, 2006) and Longing for the Deepend (Summerfolk Press, 2011) and her latest release Feast, which was released in November of this year from St. Petersburg Press. She lives, works, and writes in St. Petersburg, Florida. On Friday, March 19, 2021, McDole sat down with Jessica Brasseur to discuss her forthcoming book, writing process, and how building her non-profit has influenced her work as a poet.
Jessica Brasseur: How has the Covid-19 pandemic impacted your writing?
Maureen McDole: Um, it definitely has helped me slow down. I was feeling really burned out on the public aspect of my job [at Keep St. Pete Lit] and it's been really nice to have a year of real quiet. Because, believe it or not, I am an introvert. It really helped me to look at the big picture of my life and where I've come from, the growth I've gone through and also, the growth of the organization. All that being said, I was able to really focus on getting my book [Feast] finished and editing it and I'm having more time to write in general. This is my third book and the poems all tend to be shorter than my first two books. I realized that a majority of the poems were written while I was starting Keep St. Pete Lit and raising a child by myself. It's been eight years since my marriage ended, but the book really is written over the last 10 years or so. I’ve been able to dive deeper into my writing process and I'm really grateful for that. I'm not used to answering questions about being a poet! I keep trying to tie it back to the organization, so it'll probably happen, a lot. But my whole life is one big thing.
Brasseur: Since Feast was written over the last ten years, has there been an identifiable change to your writing?
McDole: My writing process has since changed, but my poems would come when I wrote in my journal. I would do, from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists’ Way, three pages every day, and poems just came from those pages. So, the majority of the poems in Feast were written in that way or I wrote them specifically for events [with Keep St. Pete Lit]. Then, I spent almost a year kind of pulling them out of the journal, but now I changed that. I live in this building in the Roser Park neighborhood, and there are two other poets in my building and they've really informed my writing process and have kind of amped it up to that. Because they're both so prolific and so focused and that's helped me kind of be like ‘okay I got to get the ball going’. Actually, based on one of these poets, if I write the poem in my journal, I have to put it in the computer right away, so I don't spend another year, like I did this time, pulling them out again. But it took a while to birth this book because not only because I was in the middle of recovering from a very traumatic divorce from someone who had been my life partner since I was 19 years old but also starting an organization that same year. And then also being a single parent and coming from a reality of not having any income to building an organization, to being able to pay myself. I really didn't have the energy to actually edit the full book, because a lot of the book is about the breakdown of my marriage and the recovery of that and just the state of the world, and I just wasn't in a place that I was ready to put out a book. As I think books come when it is their time, again, like the birth. And I really feel now is the time for this book and my daughter did the cover art – the three headed dragon. Even the title poem, Feast of it was written not too long ago, too. It’s all in the timing.
Now, I am actually thinking of themes in that I want to explore, I'm working on a grand poem about being a swimmer. And that's not my traditional way of writing. I usually get a line and I chase the line, but my writing has definitely shifted. But that's all part of the process, you kind of just let it lead you. 10 years between books is too long. I'm working on my fourth book of poetry and I'm also working on a book about my family too and I’m not really sure what it will be yet. I think it will be hybrid poetry and nature writing. I have a title and so we'll see how it transforms.
One of the best compliments I got was from Ray Hinst who owns Haslam’s Book Store in St. Pete. I submitted my books to be sold in the shop and they usually don’t sell self-published stuff, but they took Exploring My Options and Longing for the Deepend right out of the gate. And Ray came up to me once and said, ‘you know I don't like poetry like I really, really don't like poetry, but I'm going to check out her book’ and he goes ‘I loved, loved, loved your poetry!’ So that was a great comment from an 80-year-old white man – maybe not my target audience. A lot of my poems are about the woman's condition being a mother, my child, but human condition and the fact that it's still resonated with him that's kind of what's the goal of my poetry is. It's the universal-I, and I know they say to kind of get away from that, but you know that's also part of doing whatever the fuck I want as a poet— the punk rock poet part of me. I don't need to participate in what I like to call the “poetry industrial complex”.
Brasseur: In a related question, how does technology-- Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or even just having your phone—influence how you work?
McDole: I definitely like to use the Notes app, because sometimes poems come in the middle of the night, so to have my phone near me and just to be able to write stuff down or even, as I said, I'm composing this book on my family, with my family, about my family and I will just try and get glimpses and put things down in my phone, but I also like to have little field notes around in journals and scraps of paper. Now, though, if I start a poem I'm putting it right into my Google Docs App and then I'm going back in and editing the poems on my computer too. Because my book is coming out, I am posting more poetry things on social media, but I'm trying to get away from social media. I'm burned out on the consuming process instead of the creative. We feel that we're being creative by consuming, but we're not actually.
I have my books in local bookstores around St. Pete and they've asked me to bring more books in three times because they keep selling out and that’s great for me. This third book will be published by St. Petersburg Press, so that might get me a bit more reach, so we’ll see.
Brasseur: Your work has been transformed off the page and for film, spoken word, and art installations. What can you tell me about that collaborative process with another artist, and how you make decisions based on these translations?
McDole: I have a visual arts background, so it ties into Keep St. Pete Lit because my intention was to merge the literary, performing, and visual arts scenes in St. Pete. When we started in 2013 the literary arts were really in their own lane and then all the other arts were in their own lanes, and I think we’ve been quite successful in combining them to change the culture locally. We did a community exercise in ekphrastic writing and we just partnered on another project having people write about the murals downtown. It was a natural progression. I've gotten to know the art community here and most of them have become my very best friends. The film and the dance pieces have come from partnering with some really dear friends. We created two dance films by two very different dancers, one is a white woman, trained at Julliard, and has two children and the other dancer is a non-binary, African American sound and noise musician who also has a dance background and they found so many connections between their work and in my writing. I think it was very successful and just fun to make cool shit with my friends.
Brasseur: You mentioned how living in Roser Park has impacted your recent writing, how has place, geographic or otherwise, played into your writing?
McDole: The first book that I wrote, Exploring My Options, was mostly written in Asheville, North Carolina, so there possibly are some poems in there that reflect that but I really always felt connected to water in the ocean and I'm also a swimmer so that makes sense, but for me, Florida is just such a part of my DNA. I come from a family of fishermen and they have a fishing business out at John's Pass. And with that are casualties of Florida. It's anywhere but definitely growing up in a fishermen community, there's a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse in my family. The repercussions of that and experience of overcoming trauma and living through it. I do tend to always kind of find the light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully, through my poetry. Someone once asked me, “what if you didn't do that in the poem? And you just let a poem be a little, you know, a little dark?”
But I look at my poetry as a way to work out a question and feel better.
Maureen McDole is a poet and the CEO of Keep St. Pete Lit, a non-profit organization which supports the literary scene of St. Petersburg, Florida, through writing workshops, readings, and other educational literary events. Her poetry can be found in two published editions, Exploring My Options (Summerfolk Press, 2006) and Longing for the Deepend (Summerfolk Press, 2011) and her latest release Feast, which was released in November of this year from St. Petersburg Press. She lives, works, and writes in St. Petersburg, Florida. On Friday, March 19, 2021, McDole sat down with Jessica Brasseur to discuss her forthcoming book, writing process, and how building her non-profit has influenced her work as a poet.
Jessica Brasseur: How has the Covid-19 pandemic impacted your writing?
Maureen McDole: Um, it definitely has helped me slow down. I was feeling really burned out on the public aspect of my job [at Keep St. Pete Lit] and it's been really nice to have a year of real quiet. Because, believe it or not, I am an introvert. It really helped me to look at the big picture of my life and where I've come from, the growth I've gone through and also, the growth of the organization. All that being said, I was able to really focus on getting my book [Feast] finished and editing it and I'm having more time to write in general. This is my third book and the poems all tend to be shorter than my first two books. I realized that a majority of the poems were written while I was starting Keep St. Pete Lit and raising a child by myself. It's been eight years since my marriage ended, but the book really is written over the last 10 years or so. I’ve been able to dive deeper into my writing process and I'm really grateful for that. I'm not used to answering questions about being a poet! I keep trying to tie it back to the organization, so it'll probably happen, a lot. But my whole life is one big thing.
Brasseur: Since Feast was written over the last ten years, has there been an identifiable change to your writing?
McDole: My writing process has since changed, but my poems would come when I wrote in my journal. I would do, from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists’ Way, three pages every day, and poems just came from those pages. So, the majority of the poems in Feast were written in that way or I wrote them specifically for events [with Keep St. Pete Lit]. Then, I spent almost a year kind of pulling them out of the journal, but now I changed that. I live in this building in the Roser Park neighborhood, and there are two other poets in my building and they've really informed my writing process and have kind of amped it up to that. Because they're both so prolific and so focused and that's helped me kind of be like ‘okay I got to get the ball going’. Actually, based on one of these poets, if I write the poem in my journal, I have to put it in the computer right away, so I don't spend another year, like I did this time, pulling them out again. But it took a while to birth this book because not only because I was in the middle of recovering from a very traumatic divorce from someone who had been my life partner since I was 19 years old but also starting an organization that same year. And then also being a single parent and coming from a reality of not having any income to building an organization, to being able to pay myself. I really didn't have the energy to actually edit the full book, because a lot of the book is about the breakdown of my marriage and the recovery of that and just the state of the world, and I just wasn't in a place that I was ready to put out a book. As I think books come when it is their time, again, like the birth. And I really feel now is the time for this book and my daughter did the cover art – the three headed dragon. Even the title poem, Feast of it was written not too long ago, too. It’s all in the timing.
Now, I am actually thinking of themes in that I want to explore, I'm working on a grand poem about being a swimmer. And that's not my traditional way of writing. I usually get a line and I chase the line, but my writing has definitely shifted. But that's all part of the process, you kind of just let it lead you. 10 years between books is too long. I'm working on my fourth book of poetry and I'm also working on a book about my family too and I’m not really sure what it will be yet. I think it will be hybrid poetry and nature writing. I have a title and so we'll see how it transforms.
One of the best compliments I got was from Ray Hinst who owns Haslam’s Book Store in St. Pete. I submitted my books to be sold in the shop and they usually don’t sell self-published stuff, but they took Exploring My Options and Longing for the Deepend right out of the gate. And Ray came up to me once and said, ‘you know I don't like poetry like I really, really don't like poetry, but I'm going to check out her book’ and he goes ‘I loved, loved, loved your poetry!’ So that was a great comment from an 80-year-old white man – maybe not my target audience. A lot of my poems are about the woman's condition being a mother, my child, but human condition and the fact that it's still resonated with him that's kind of what's the goal of my poetry is. It's the universal-I, and I know they say to kind of get away from that, but you know that's also part of doing whatever the fuck I want as a poet— the punk rock poet part of me. I don't need to participate in what I like to call the “poetry industrial complex”.
Brasseur: In a related question, how does technology-- Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or even just having your phone—influence how you work?
McDole: I definitely like to use the Notes app, because sometimes poems come in the middle of the night, so to have my phone near me and just to be able to write stuff down or even, as I said, I'm composing this book on my family, with my family, about my family and I will just try and get glimpses and put things down in my phone, but I also like to have little field notes around in journals and scraps of paper. Now, though, if I start a poem I'm putting it right into my Google Docs App and then I'm going back in and editing the poems on my computer too. Because my book is coming out, I am posting more poetry things on social media, but I'm trying to get away from social media. I'm burned out on the consuming process instead of the creative. We feel that we're being creative by consuming, but we're not actually.
I have my books in local bookstores around St. Pete and they've asked me to bring more books in three times because they keep selling out and that’s great for me. This third book will be published by St. Petersburg Press, so that might get me a bit more reach, so we’ll see.
Brasseur: Your work has been transformed off the page and for film, spoken word, and art installations. What can you tell me about that collaborative process with another artist, and how you make decisions based on these translations?
McDole: I have a visual arts background, so it ties into Keep St. Pete Lit because my intention was to merge the literary, performing, and visual arts scenes in St. Pete. When we started in 2013 the literary arts were really in their own lane and then all the other arts were in their own lanes, and I think we’ve been quite successful in combining them to change the culture locally. We did a community exercise in ekphrastic writing and we just partnered on another project having people write about the murals downtown. It was a natural progression. I've gotten to know the art community here and most of them have become my very best friends. The film and the dance pieces have come from partnering with some really dear friends. We created two dance films by two very different dancers, one is a white woman, trained at Julliard, and has two children and the other dancer is a non-binary, African American sound and noise musician who also has a dance background and they found so many connections between their work and in my writing. I think it was very successful and just fun to make cool shit with my friends.
Brasseur: You mentioned how living in Roser Park has impacted your recent writing, how has place, geographic or otherwise, played into your writing?
McDole: The first book that I wrote, Exploring My Options, was mostly written in Asheville, North Carolina, so there possibly are some poems in there that reflect that but I really always felt connected to water in the ocean and I'm also a swimmer so that makes sense, but for me, Florida is just such a part of my DNA. I come from a family of fishermen and they have a fishing business out at John's Pass. And with that are casualties of Florida. It's anywhere but definitely growing up in a fishermen community, there's a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse in my family. The repercussions of that and experience of overcoming trauma and living through it. I do tend to always kind of find the light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully, through my poetry. Someone once asked me, “what if you didn't do that in the poem? And you just let a poem be a little, you know, a little dark?”
But I look at my poetry as a way to work out a question and feel better.
