1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing?

I got into writing in college. Prior to that, I was more interested in science, especially astronomy. I was reading Sagan books when I was in elementary school. I had an Astroscan 2001 telescope that was like a big red cannon you held in your lap. The way I wondered about the universe is the same way I now wonder about language.

At around the same time, I became enamored with song lyrics, and then romance. I suppose all of these interests had something to do with mystery and longing, with things just beyond my understanding. All of this came together in high school. It had a planetarium, and I would sit there in the dark and hold hands with Sarah, or Celeste, or Kristen, or the dream of any of them. I bought a motorcycle and rode it to school every day of my senior year. I was more into the romance of writing before I even started writing.

I entered college as a psych major. I took a poetry class. I wrote some short, autobiographical poems that had some good images (something about my childhood friend being a father figure to me, holding me down in the snow, farting on my head, and me respecting that). My professor took notice and recruited me into the English department, and into the world I still inhabit.

2. What inspired you to write your book?

Amasa Speaker Factory has been in the works for nearly 30 years. It was inspired by my chaotic and adventurous childhood. At first, I really couldn’t write about it in prose. Memory doesn’t really move in a straight line, and neither did that childhood. Poetry and abstraction allowed me a more nuanced and ambiguous path of exploration.

At some point, I read William Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson, which incorporated all kinds of texts into a pastiche that was like a love letter to place. The older I get, and the longer I live away from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the closer I feel to it.

I wanted my book to be like that: a structure like a river.

3. What theme or message do you hope readers will take away from your book?

Hmmm. I mean, most of all, I would like readers to be at ease with the unknown and feel some intellectual and creative curiosity. I would like the poems to bring them to spaces they have never inhabited. I suppose I could say something generic like “resilience,” but I don’t really want the poems to deliver a message. I’d rather they leave readers with more questions than answers.

4. What drew you into this particular genre?

If by genre you mean poetry, then it would be poetry’s ability to communicate beyond the conventional limits of language. Poetry utilizes space, sound, abstraction, and the line in ways prose cannot. We are all constrained by grammar and syntax and general expectations of narrative. The lyric poem lets us move beyond.

And when we combine the lyric with more narrative poetry (like what Wordsworth and Coleridge did in Lyrical Ballads), we get a wonderful mix of reality and the magic of the cosmos. I think that’s the space I’m most interested in inhabiting as a writer, somewhere between the recognizable world and all the strange possibilities that exist beyond it.

5. What social media site has been the most helpful in developing your readership?

Probably Facebook, but I would much prefer someone sit with a hard copy in their hands and have to flip pages and get dirty.

6. What advice would you give to aspiring or just starting authors out there?

Be comfortable with the unknown. Be messy. Don’t worry about a finished project. It will present itself to you, although sometimes it might take 30 years. Write whenever you can, whether it’s in a parking lot or at a desk. Always have paper and a pen nearby.

7. What does the future hold in store for you? Any new books/projects on the horizon?

I am working on illustrating a long prose poem, What Kind of Animal Is a Patriot, with Dame Darcy. I am excited about the project and hope this is the beginning of a lot of collaborations. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between language and image, and I love the idea of seeing what happens when another artist enters the world of a poem and brings her own imagination to it.

I am also set to reprint the sweet 16 anniversary edition of my memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind, with Modern History Press, and the follow-up to that, Burning Down the Houses, is in the works.

Beyond that, I’m enjoying my 4-year-old and dragging him into a life of adventure as he becomes capable of more and more. I have some documentary projects I’m interested in as well.

8. Can you go into more depth on the inspiration behind the poem “Alley Cats”?

Well, “Alley Cats” is one of those really old poems (probably 30 years!!) that has been reworked considerably. It definitely grows out of a very specific childhood memory: taking a slide from a playset and stacking it onto a bunch of old tires to make a dangerously high ramp.

In the 70s, I just remember playing very hard, being very independent, and doing things that I would probably never want my son to do. It was ominous and dangerous. Grackles gawked and seethed. But those experiences were formative.

Now, on another level, the poem is lyrical. We were in the “outback,” which was another world. To this day, I love riding my bicycle down alleys because they are the other world we shun. It’s where we keep our trash, where we enter the likely not-so-pretty side of the house, where all the pipes and wires and scraps of unfinished projects are kept. Alleys tell more about who we are than main streets.

Anyways, when the character launches into the air and the back tire falls off, the poem “seeps” into magical realism, which, to me, might as well be that same space between ballad and lyric. The actual danger of the experience gives way to something more mythic. The moon is shining in the daytime. The ominous birds join their wings into a “feather-woven cradle and laid me down in the grass.”

The lines “picked our scabs, stood/ in a circle, put our bloody/ elbows together and we were all/ brothers for a time” are still the same ending from 30 years ago. The poem reflects an innocence and a yearning that I don’t think I see in my poetry as much these days. When I wrote it, I think I was maturing and resisting simultaneously. Now that I have a son, I find myself thinking about those experiences differently. I wouldn’t want him doing half the things we did, but I also wouldn’t want him to miss out on the kind of freedom and wonder that made those experiences so important. I’m not sure how to reconcile that.

9. What makes small towns, especially those in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where much of your poetry is set, unique and interesting compared to other communities?

Well, above I talked about the “outback,” a sort of frontier. Anyone who visits can’t NOT feel that sense of being “out” there, whatever “there” might be. It is hard to articulate, and maybe that’s why it lends itself so well to poetry, at least for me.

The towns still retain a lot of independent businesses and wreckage of the past. There is a sense that nature always wins up there. People are independent and quirky. If they follow trends, they might not do that great of a job at it, and that makes them even more special. People have strong intepersonal relationships built on respect, but also on the simple fact that they need one another.

Now, of course, I am romanticizing all of this. There is also a lot of darkness because of the lack of resources. A lot of addiction, abuse, ignorance, and ideological racism. But this tension is exactly what makes it fertile for understanding the human experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAD FARIES is the author of two poetry collections, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge and the memoir Drive Me Out of My Mind. He divides his time between Iron River, Michigan and Thunderbolt, Georgia.