Kelle Groom on Jumping into the Ocean and Living with Uncertainty
Long walks, ocean leaps, and hearing oneself through layers of protection.
Dear friends,
Today I am delighted to welcome poet and essayist Kelle Groom to Writers at the Well. Kelle's newest book is How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster 2011), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her four poetry collections are Spill, (Anhinga Press), Five Kingdoms (Anhinga), Luckily (Anhinga), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.
A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, Kelle has received numerous honors and awards. Former poetry editor of The Florida Review, and former nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine, Kelle was a long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts where she directed programs at the Fine Arts Work Center. She now lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Kelle hosts a Substack called The Continuous Life.
In this interview Kelle talks about her experience writing across genres—poetry, nonfiction, and fiction—her support of fellow writers through her nonprofit leadership roles, and her practice of beach walking to “set her right.” She shares her desire to “hear” her ancestors, to hear herself, and to explore the question: What is home?
Stay tuned for upcoming interviews with novelist/memoirist Laura Munson, novelist Brooke Lea Foster, author/Buddhist lama Cynthia Jurs, novelist/short story writer Jill McCorkle, author/lucid dreaming teacher Andrew Holecek, and author/human rights advocate Dr. Samra Zafar. Previous posts include written interviews with novelist Douglas Bauer, essayist Sven Birkerts, novelist Karen Dukess, poet/sculptor Don Freas, novelist JoeAnn Hart, a poem by Caprice Garvin, and podcast interviews with screenwriter Alan Watt, novelist Mar’ce Merrell, and thrutopian novelist Manda Scott.
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Yours at the well,
Tess
What was the seed image (visual, auditory, conceptual) that gave rise to your book, How to Live: A Memoir in Essays?
The first essay I wrote toward this book was an essay, “How to Live with Uncertainty.” At the time, Nick Flynn was Guest Editor of Ploughshares, and he asked me to send something. I wrote this essay in sixteen, short, numbered sections, each dealing with uncertainty. Almost all take place in Orlando or New Smyrna Beach, Florida, with one in Washington, D.C. The sections deal with grief, love, fear, recovery, my inability to save anyone, and how to live with that inability.
I’m drawn to how-to essays as a form. When I didn’t know how to write my memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, I wrote the chapter, “How to Make a Shoe,” published in AGNI in 2008. It was my way in. In 2012, writing “How to Live with Uncertainty,” I wanted to further subvert the expectation of instruction/answers and use the how-to form for discovery. (This essay was published in How to Live as “The City Beautiful.”)
How do you access your well? Do you meditate? Walk in nature? Stare out windows?
I’ve felt embarrassed that I have no interest in meditation, sitting still. But then I read about walking meditation and was so relieved, as this is something I do almost every day. On the Cape, in Provincetown, it was easy and readily available – the Cape Cod National Seashore right there. Those walks were the best of my life. Complete solitude from other people, vast beach, dunes, ocean. Whales! As far as writing, the walking sets me right. In the way that jumping in the ocean does. I need daily access to the natural world. I need silence (usually). Though sometimes, a thing just has to be written. I’ve written on file folders in a bank parking lot, on my phone on a DC sidewalk, in a fast-food parking lot, in a beach parking lot. Whenever I’ve had the thought, “Oh, I can write that later,” it’s almost always lost. If I’m still feeling out of touch, I play music which also helps bring me back to myself. Coffee.
What do you make of this quote from the Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas? “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
In revision, one of the things I ask myself: “Is it true?” I mean, is it as close as I can get? Leaning in, trying to hear through all the layers of protection. What is within me is the truth, and if I don’t start with that, if the ground beneath me isn’t the truth on the page, I can’t get anywhere.
What would you like readers to know about your book that might not be obvious from the jacket copy?
How to Live is organized by place, often by house, as I traveled for almost 4 years to places I’d never been before. While the structure of the book is 28 short (mostly) chronological essays, each in a different place, the houses are more than locations. When I began traveling, I started with the question, “What is home?” I hoped that writing the book would help me find out.
What are you currently drawing up from your well? What can readers expect from you next?
I’ve been working on a collection of short stories, The Citronaut. For the most part, the stories take place in Orlando, Florida in the late 1980s/early 1990s and explore the vulnerability of being a young woman in a surreal, precarious, bizarre place and time.
My plan was just to keep writing stories, but I now have twenty-eight. So, I think it’s time take a look at them as a whole. These feel very different from writing poems and essays/memoir. I’m interested in dark humor, satire, and speculative fiction.
I have a fifth manuscript of poems, 44 Anna Kareninas with a deep connection to Provincetown/Cape Cod.
I’m working on a nonfiction manuscript, The Year Without Summer, on the search for Thomas Greenough, my 5th great-grandfather, and last of the South Yarmouth Wampanoags; an essay collection, Tideland, on places where land and water meet; and another essay collection in progress, Postcards of the Night Sky.
You are a celebrated poet and essayist. Do the same underground springs feed both genres? Is your process of hauling water to the surface different for each? Does the writing of each evoke a different state of consciousness?
The writing of poems and essays feels like spiritual practice. I need to come back to center. I want to be able to draw on everything. As far as environment, in general: silence, night, music. I often read poems. I like to have lots of books around – science, history, photographs. Language and images to help me leave the grant writing work I’m immersed in all day.
My process almost always begins on the page with poetry / images. In The Year Without Summer, Thomas Greenough’s life and time is so different from my own (and so vast – 90 years), I’ve had to try to find other ways in. I’ve been drawing the places he lived, his houses, to try to see them. Research plays a big part. For the title essay which appeared in About Place, I began by creating an index of key events during his lifetime, and writing into those. I’m currently focused on two questions: Where was he educated to become a teacher? And as a Christian Indian, how did the Indian Great Awakening affect his/his parents’ lives?
“Each piece I write towards this book feels like the shard of a mirror.”
You are known not only for your writing but for your support and advocacy of fellow writers through your leadership in the nonprofit sector. What drew you to this work and how has it affected your own evolution as a writer and human being?
When I was in graduate school, I was awarded an artist’s residency. I hadn’t applied for it and had no understanding of artists-in-residence programs. But I lived with 30 poets, composers, and visual artists for three weeks in the woods of Florida, and it changed my life.
I’m fascinated by artistic process in all disciplines and the value of mentorship and collaboration. When the residency was over, I couldn’t imagine how to live without that on a daily basis. So I created a literary organization, Liquid Poetry, in Orlando, and hosted 100 events over the next 5 years – readings, workshops, dinners, talks, a video interview series while working full-time jobs teaching and managing a bookstore. It was thrilling.
It led me to nonprofit work, for an opera company, homeless shelter, artists’ residency, and finally for 7 years at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as their director of programs. At FAWC, I was responsible for returning and collaborative residencies, and creating and directing the 11-week Summer Program of workshops in writing and visual arts, as well as 24PearlStreet, the online writing program. It was a synthesis of everything I loved: creating inspiring programming, championing the work of writers and artists, offering mentorship and support at all levels, hosting hundreds of readings and artists talks every summer investigating and celebrating artistic process. The thrill of hearing and seeing new work! Each October brought twenty emerging writers and artists to FAWC for a nine-month residency, and it was a pleasure and privilege to live among them, and to experience their new work.
As someone who shares your love of Cape Cod, I was moved to learn about your ancestor Thomas Greenough, the last surviving Wampanoag in South Yarmouth. Your Irish, Finnish, and Wampanoag forebearers left few traces. What fascinates you about these individuals? With or without accompanying narratives, where do they live in the depths of your psyche? How do they fuel your well?
I’ve been writing about Thomas Greenough since my first book of poems, Underwater City, where he appears in “Two Black Suitcases.” The writing is a way of looking for him. He fought so hard to get his land back and was patronized and memorialized by the town as “the last of his kind.” He became a self-educated lawyer. It mattered to him to be heard. I want to hear him. I want to try to understand what home is when it is the ground beneath your feet, and that is taken away. I want to understand what home is for my Irish and Finnish ancestors who left their countries, homes, families for Massachusetts and never saw them again. What did they hope to find that would stand against those great losses? All of their choices brought me here, are a part of me. I want to find them, and know them as best I can.
Alcoholism caused deep wounds early in your life. I can hardly think of a person whose life has not been touched by addiction—their own or another’s. In your own journey to recovery, is there anything you wish a loved one had said—or not said—that might have made a difference?
No, there isn’t anything I wish a loved one had said – or not said-- that might have made a difference. But my family did help in crucial ways. As an alcoholic, I needed to be in recovery meetings, and the people I needed to hear from were other alcoholics in recovery. I don’t know how I would have stayed alive without them, and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten sober. Before I found meetings, and before I admitted I had a problem with alcohol, my dad introduced me to a young woman he worked with who was in recovery. He began this low-pressure campaign of getting me to go to a meeting with her. Finally, I went to a meeting with his colleague. It seemed everyone was at least 40 years older than me. I didn’t return for some time. But when I was ready, I knew where to go. The second thing is that my family didn’t give up on me. They helped me get into a second treatment center, a halfway house, an apartment. I had to stay alive to get sober, and they helped me to do that.
Has the presidential election result impacted the way you see your future work? Has it sharpened your focus or afforded new urgency?
Since the election result, I feel as if I’ve fallen through the ice. Shocked, stunned. Just trying to get back on a solid surface. But I know that the creative work we all create will be lifesaving.
Whether in Cape Cod or Florida, you have a practice of jumping into the ocean at all times of year. What does this plunge do for you physically, mentally, artistically?
It brings me back to myself. Really, it is like I’ve forgotten who I am. Then I jump in the ocean, and I’m integrated again. It feels as if everything shifts back into place, physically and spiritually.
Follow Kelle on Instagram, FaceBook, and Substack. Find out more about her work at: www.kellegroom.com.