January Feature: Interview with Mia Leonin

We are proud to present Mia Leonin as our Featured Artist of February! Leonin is the author of two poetry collections, Braid and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press), and the memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). A third collection of poetry, Chance Born, will be released by Anhinga Press in April of this year, and in 2017, BkMk Press will publish Fable of the Paddle Sack Child, a book-length poem. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.​

Read below our exclusive interview with Leonin, conducted by our poetry editor, Serafima Fedorova...

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Q: Everyone begins somewhere. Your work focuses on origins, but how did you get started writing?

A: Like many, I have loved reading and writing since I was a child. As an undergraduate, I studied English Literature and French at a Jesuit university in Kansas City, Missouri. I came from a small rural town and up until college, both my public school education and my academic performance had been lackluster. Rockhurst introduced me to an intellectual world completely foreign and mesmerizing. For the first time I felt that my ideas mattered and my questions mattered even more.

In my lit classes, we read Beowulf, Shakespeare, Jean Paul Sartre, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. By senior year, I was studying Whitman and Dickinson, Plath and a little Theodore Roethke. That’s as contemporary as it got. I can honestly say that during my undergrad education, I didn’t read the words of one living writer. The classes were exacting. We engaged in meticulous analysis of meter, rhyme scheme, and form. Then and only then could one begin to speak about meaning.

There were no creative writing workshops at my school and I’d never heard of an MFA. By today’s standards it would be perceived as an education lacking in diversity of every sort, but for me, it was a crucial incubation period. I’m glad I counted out meter and unearthed the assonance and alliteration in Donne’s sonnets. Although I don’t write formal verse, I learned to consider my ear as one of my most valuable writing tools. Also, I was surrounded by professors who were truly passionate about the literature they taught. That is the best gift any teacher can bestow on a student. Rockhurst, then and now, hosts the Midwestern Poetry Series. There, I heard the likes of Philip Levine, Carolyn Forche, and Amy Gerstler read. Also, every year one of my English professors would cram a few of us poetry nerds into his Toyota Celica and transport us across the country line to hear Gwendolyn Brooks read in Johnson County, Kansas. The sonorous timbre of Ms. Brooks’ voice still vibrates throughout my cells to this very day.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my professors modeled for me what is it to have an earnest intellectual life and in doing so, they were communicating to me that I could cultivate my own no matter where I was from or my station in life. For me, it was a lifeline.

A few years after undergrad, I was working for a large corporation, troubleshooting technical problems on a computer helpline and scribbling out poems on my own time. I signed up for a poetry workshop led by Robert Stewart at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. For the first time I was with others who wanted to write poems. I got busy churning out my truly awful and opaque rhymed quatrains (I remember one in particular about an old man in winter hiding his money under his mattress – go figure) when one day Stewart returned our poems with comments. On mine he had scribbled, Stop writing about this winter shit, and write something that matters to you. First, I felt mortally wounded like someone had punched me in the gut. Next, I got pissed. I said to him (in my head), Okay, you sob, you want a piece of me? I wrote in a blind rage and what do you know, something that mattered just sort of fell onto the page. I’d recently met, for the first time, my father, a Cuban exile, who I’d previously known nothing about. I wrote a poem about my first visit to Miami to meet my father. I wrote about walking through downtown Miami with my father and his wife. I don’t remember the poem or any of the images. I’m sure it wasn’t spectacular, but I was writing.

Stewart, who much later became a great friend to me and my work, also introduced the class to contemporary poets. That, of course, was the missing puzzle piece. I knew poetry, but I had no idea what poetry could be. I was starving for contemporary voices, especially those of women. However, one of the first writers to truly make an impact was Arkansas poet, Frank Stanford. His free verse managed to be both plainspoken and pulsating. Sometimes narrative, sometimes surreal, his poems pried open a crack in the door of what could be. I was far from writing a “good” poem, but I was writing, and it mattered, to me anyway. I think that’s the necessary starting place for every poet.

Q: Why do you write in Spanish? Sort of an open ended question on language. Which one do you prefer? How is the writing process similar or different for both tongues? Your work contains untranslated segments and quotes, why do you leave certain things in Spanish and others in English?

A: Most of the poems in Chance Born that incorporate Spanish do so because the poem is interested in the function of language in a polyglot city. Living in Miami for over twenty years has changed the way I think about language. The poem “Linguistic Migrations,” for instance, is about how language changes as it migrates from one place to the next. Some Cubans pronounce the letter “r” with an “l” sound. The linguistic roots of this come from Spaniards who left the Canary Islands over a century ago and landed in Cuba. By the way, this is a poet playing linguist, so don’t check my facts. Anyway, at the end of the poem, the speaker says “mal” instead of “mar,” which reveals the linguistic history of that pronunciation, but also refers to the peril of migration, especially for those who take to the seas on rickety boats and rafts.

My mind and imagination move between Spanish, English, and Spanglish, but the movement is not strictly back and forth as the term “code switching” implies. Of course bilingual people switch from one language to the next, but I think that movement is more symphonic than it is bilateral. In Miami, code switching is more generative and multilayered. This is in part because there are numerous speakers of Spanish from very different countries. Jokes, wisecracks, compliments, insults, and neologisms gather and mingle from many parts of the world. Also, the fact that English has its roots in Latin makes Spanish and English very interesting bedfellows. If you know Spanish, for example, you’ll recognize that there are Cuban, Colombian, and Peruvian phrases in my essay “How to Name a City” which is about an outsider (me) acclimating herself to life in Miami. The essay also makes the case the Miami is not a foreign country as many like to quip. Our uniqueness makes us uniquely part of the United States and the Americas.

One exception to previous examples is the poem “After Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde.” The poem is a collage and in one of the strands I wanted to imagine my conversation with Carmen Herrera (a Cuban-born painter who lives in New York and whose work was not recognized until she was well into her eighties), as it might unfold in real life. In some of the interviews I read on- line, Ms. Herrera spoke with a wry wit that reminded me of my mother and grandmother. I wanted to have complete liberty to play in Spanish and English, without thinking about who may or may not understand.

A brief background just to reveal my perspective on language: I was born in a small town in Missouri to a mother from Louisville, Kentucky. I met my father, a Cuban exile, when I was twenty and eventually moved to Miami where I have lived for over twenty years. My first introduction to Spanish was Cuban Spanish, but I lived in Bogota, Colombia for a year, and I’ve lived with my husband, Carlos Ochoa, who is Peruvian for the last fourteen years. Those are the linguistic threads that make up my English and my Spanish. I would add that despite an English-only childhood, I was always obsessed with language. When I was a child, my mother and I would spend weekends with some close family friends who lived on a large farm. There was a girl just one year younger than me and we grew up together like sisters. I made up many languages to go along with the imaginary worlds we invented as we explored the farm. I can remember us chattering away in these languages (not to mention pure nonsensical jibber jabber) for hours. I wasn’t a linguistic genius or anything – they were relatively simple languages – but from a very early age, the potential for the language I was speaking to sound “other” and have meaning made my heart race. When I was in the 8th grade we drove to Disney and while standing in line for a ride, I remember hearing a real foreign language for the first time. Again, cupid’s arrow struck. I was enthralled. The language was French. I ended up studying it and eventually becoming fairly proficient. That’s all I remember about my first trip to Disney.

Q: Your work in all the previous books I've read is very grounded in your experiences as a Miami local. What would you say is the difficulty in moving your setting to places where you haven't been? What is the danger of adopting a persona for complex narratives and how do you write an experience (the bombings and the war in the east) without sounding removed? Do you ever worry that you may be touching upon a certain grief and violence that you cannot speak about? You've done it so beautifully and a lot of new writers make that mistake.

A: Discovering the poems of Ai was a turning point for me as a young writer. Her use of the persona to open up the worlds of all kinds of people inspired me. Later I would encounter the persona poems of Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, and many others, but for me persona begins with Ai. Gritty, unapologetic, and wide ranging, her persona poems made room for child abusers, women masturbating, historical figures, and more. Nothing was off limits. In my first two books I relied heavily on persona, but when I realized I wanted to write about the war in Iraq, I was stymied. I knew intuitively that the first person wouldn’t work. I did a lot of reading and one book in particular, Beyond the Green Zone by Dahr Jamail, focused on the overwhelming number civilian casualties (namely women and children), which is what I wanted to write about.

The first two poems I wrote were “Like Music” and “Refugee.” “Like Music” is in the second persona and “Refugee” begins in the third person and switches to second. These were intuitive choices, but in retrospect, I see that those points of view place a necessary distance between me and the women and children whose lives are destroyed by the war my country instigated. In other poems such as “Drought” and “A Boy Shoots a Marble in a CNN Transcript,” the autobiographical “I” of me as a mother appears, but it’s not the main focus.

I was pregnant with my daughter when the war began and in fact, I felt her first kick on the first day of the United State’s invasion of Baghdad. The statue of Sadam Hussein was toppled and it appeared that the war would be over by the next news cycle. My daughter is twelve now, and it’s still going on.

Q: What advice do you have for our (predominantly young) readers?

A: I would encourage younger writers to read widely and voraciously -- and to travel as much as possible. I admire that younger writers create their own opportunities to share their work via multidisciplinary projects, collaboration, social media, and more. Keep going! My last piece of advice: if you plan to apply to MFA programs after undergrad, consider taking a few years off to work, travel, volunteer, write on your own, and just live.

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