Five Questions with Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

Moira McAvoy : Your story “Whales in Minnesota” (9.1) draws its tension from both a sense of community–between the speaker and his or her friend, between the speaker and whatever is imagined to lie beneath the ice–and a deeper hint of isolation, such as when the speaker is unable to identify what’s shifting in the lake. Where did your interest in this relationship come from?

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell: What is unknown. What is hidden. What is unspoken and vast and in our minds and impossible to adequately describe. Every so often, shoved between activities of daily living is a brief moment where words are absolutely inadequate to describe feelings. I’m not talking about love here–I’m talking about a sense of wonder, awe, fear, cosmic (un)importance. I guess love too. But a love like a scrape, painful and exposed and so raw you want to cover it up with a Band-aid. If I try to think about really describing this feeling, I consistently imagine something flat, something large, something empty, something alone. Winter, a frozen lake, bare sky above–this setting is meant to convey that vastness. The thought of something directly below you, something out of place but more concrete than the size of a sky, like a whale in a lake, is meant to convey that largeness. And the friend, the friend is meant to convey that alone-ness. Because the worst alone feeling isn’t being by yourself–it’s being with someone else and still feeling an insignificance. I think Minnesota winter-nature in this poem inadvertently makes the speaker think about smallness–in terms of physical characteristics, feeling, a tight relationship where no words means more than talking, the bare fact that people die because of cold and because of sun.

MM: You have a stunning piece up at Small Po[r]tions, “Don’t Look at Me: Mine is a Shy Face: Unhinged and Unshaven,” as well as the poem “when as a grown up, instead of,” in Salamander which both use hyper-realistic descriptions to unsettle more traditional scenes–much like in “Whales.” What draws you to this sort of inversion?

SHM: It’s interesting that you find a similarity between those two poems, one which was the exact account of a dream and the other a much more true to life account. Maybe this is too easy of an answer, but I think the link is again a realization of smallness and an inability to really say what is meant, so instead, I try to recreate what evokes that feeling–in “Mine is a shy face” with the continuous crumbling/kind of unstoppable destruction of the narrator and in “when as a grown-up” with the unstoppable passing of time and childhood and all things safe.

MM: From the prose of “Don’t Look at Me” to the meandering indentations of your poem “Rolling Pin” in Red Paint Hill, your work traverses a variety of forms and genres. Where do form and genre play into your writing process?

SHM: I tend to write in phases when it comes to genre and form. For a long while I was writing what looked like the “traditional poem,” much like the piece in Salamander. More recently, I became addicted to prose simply because it felt like there were no gaps in my thoughts, not gaps that you could see anyway, and that the line break I do so love as a poet needed to be conveyed in the space around the piece rather than between it. A prose poem or flash fiction is crunched by the space around it, and I think the pieces are almost trying to convey a sense of helpless tightness. In something like, “when as a grown-up,” the setting itself took place in a condensed space–a bedroom–so I felt the line breaks added a quietness, a silence, a largeness that words in the poem couldn’t communicate by themselves. While I am definitely influenced by what I am reading, as I think we all are, the genre or form a piece takes often feels intuitive. Like, maybe I initially wrote something with a lot of line breaks, but after reading it through, reading aloud, something just seemed off, something easily corrected by tweaking the form. Especially with “rolling pin”–I tried a lot of forms on the page with that poem because it had originally been written on a rolling pin so that if you spun it in either direction, the poem would simply continue forever. The moving back and forth of the lines was an attempt at rolling, rocking, although, if I’m going to be honest, I’m still not completely convinced that the on-page interpretation is as interesting as the original crude Sharpie on wood version.

MM: In “Whales,” you mention folks getting burned from trying to freeze boiling water in the intense cold. You have lived in Pittsburgh and Minnesota, both of which have harsh winters. What’s the wildest thing you’ve done in the winter?

SHM: I’ve actually never lived in Minnesota! I just find myself going back there–at all times of the year, mostly to visit a very good friend. She and the place itself are good for my soul and my writing.

The wildest thing I’ve done in the winter–I wish I could say I’ve done a lot of really wild things but mostly I stay inside and watch it from a window. However, last winter, riding the bus to work every morning, I ended up outside much more often than I normally would have spent in frigid temperatures. After one particular snow/freezing rain/snow/freezing rain/snow storm in 2014, everything was a sheet of ice (as usual). And Pittsburgh is a very hilly city. So the city steps were slick, the roads were nothing but black ice and in some cases ice-ice. Accidents were happening everywhere. But I had a dentist appointment at 7am and I was determined to get there. No one had called me to cancel the appointment and it’s not as if the city were completely dead–people were still commuting to work, slowly but determinedly. So, I made my way up a very steep set of city steps near my house and waited for the bus for about 10 minutes and correctly decided that it simply wasn’t coming. I had just gotten these brand new life-saving super bad-ass winter boots and therefore decided to walk to the dentist’s office. It was only a 1.5 mile walk, but it took me roughly about an hour with the hilly route, the ice, the cold, the snow, the sliding-on-ice vehicles. I made it though, and then, no one was at the office. They had closed because of the weather and “couldn’t find my phone number” to let me know about the cancellation. My socks were not as amazing as my boots and I had painful blisters on my ankles for most of the rest of the winter.

MM: What can we expect from you in the future? What are you working on now?

SHM: At the moment, my writing has been on a slight hiatus because of various life concerns. Excuses, excuses. I’m not sure what to expect of myself really. I have several pieces of flash that I would like to send out but in terms of new work, unknown.