Abbie Kiefer’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Arts & Letters, The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a reader for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.

Abbie’s poem “When My Mom Has Been Dead Eight Months, They Tear Down Lucky Lanes” appears in the Summer 2020 issue and is available to order in print and digital.

Who would you say the intended audience for this piece was, and what did you hope we took away from the piece after reading?

I almost never write with an audience in mind. Silencing my own judgement is difficult enough, so I try not to invite in theoretical readers and all their potential opinions. That’s not to say I don’t want to make poems that people can connect with — and now that this particular piece is finished, I’m able to consider how people might see it. I hope readers enjoy the sound of the language, that maybe they say the words out loud. I hope they read it as a tiny story. I hope they feel a little surprised. This is a poem about a few things, but mostly about grief, so I hope readers with their own grief will find humanity and kinship in it.

The poem zeros in on the complexity of loss in several forms, was this your intention from the start or did you arrive at those conclusions after the poem was written? 

This piece started as an assignment I gave myself. I’m working on a project that examines two different losses — the death of my mom and the economic struggles of the area I grew up in — and I wanted to make a poem about how these losses overlap and connect. Something that would set up the reader for the rest of the collection. So I had that goal in mind and I also had the idea for the title. I went searching for the rest from there.

Your poem deals with grief using a snapshot of a childhood memory, why did you choose this memory out of all of them? 

This is (I hope) an emotionally true poem that contains few actual facts. My first draft was about the roller rink I went to as a kid, which is now an all-you-can-eat restaurant. But I found I didn’t have that much to say about skating or buffets, so I started thinking about other places kids hang out away from adults — places where they might start to enjoy that first bit of independence. Unlike the speaker, I didn’t do much bowling as a kid, but I liked the way the alley functioned in the poem. And since I wanted this piece to feel grounded in a place, I made the alley candlepin — a style of bowling specific to New England. It’s not a detail that’s critical to the meaning but it felt right to tuck it into one of the lines.

Your style lends itself to the prose form, as you are a great storyteller and able to capture a scene in very few lines. Tell us more about your exploration with storytelling and/or was this your first exploration? 

That’s kind. Thanks. One of my first jobs was writing for a newspaper, which taught me the value of a tight story — figure out what’s compelling, get to it quickly. I left the paper years ago, but my first instinct when writing is still concision. That’s not always the right choice, but often it works.

Sometimes I think of my poems as microfiction. I like the way narrative poetry can cross genres like that.

Poems often start out as long form and move to shorter concise pieces, I would love to know how many revisions you went through and how/why did you settle of a short quick memory? 

I knew I wanted the poem’s brevity and straightforwardness to scrape up against the complexity of grief, so I kept it pretty short in every version I did.

And there were a lot of versions. I found 15 separate files on my computer — and I usually don’t type a draft until I’ve done a bunch of work on paper, too. So maybe 30 total? Including a handful after I submitted the poem to Carve. The version you’re reading might be number 26. I’m a relentless rewriter, which I think is pretty common. I’ve learned — well, mostly learned — not to fear the lousy draft. 

Who are some of your favorite writers and who do you most look up to?

So, I have my favorites I’ve loved for a long time: Naomi Shihab Nye, Linda Pastan, Seamus Heaney. And I have favorites I’ve come to love more recently. I just finished Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and his essay collection, The Book of Delights, and they just overflow with beauty and wit. (I especially recommend the audio version of the essays. Gay is a fantastic reader.) Earlier this year, I discovered Leesa Cross-Smith, whose story collection is packed with flash-length pieces. She does so much in such little space. (She’s also a past Carve award winner.) I’ve been rereading When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen and I appreciate its emotional gravity and also the way Chen uses humor. I snort-laughed through a reading of his once, which I hope wasn’t too distracting. (But I’m a snort-laugher. So maybe.) Oh, and picture books. I have young kids so I read piles of picture books, many of which I love, and I’ve even found some written by poets. I highly recommend A Different Pond by Bao Phi and illustrated by Thi Bui and Real Cowboys by Kate Hoefler and illustrated by Jonathan Bean. 

If you could give any advice to other up and coming writers, what would it be?  

First, I’ll say what everyone always says, which is to read widely. And everyone says this because it is excellent advice. 

Second, find writer friends and help each other grow in your craft. I connected with another poet through a poetry program we both participated in and we’ve been exchanging work for about a year. It’s been encouraging and challenging and I’m grateful. Writing can be lonely — writer friends make it less so.

Last, get involved with a lit mag. I recently started reading poetry submissions for a journal and it has been fascinating and often inspiring to see what writers are sending out. It’s also given me a new perspective on the submission process. I see how much very, very good work we have to turn down — so when I get my own rejection notes, I find I’m taking them less personally. 

Share what you’re currently working on. Works in progress?

Off and on, I’ve been working on poems about television shows. I’ve done Grey’s Anatomy, The Joy of Painting, and a few others. I think Cheers might be next. I watched the pilot recently and noticed Diane reading Yeats while sipping champagne at the bar. That feels like solid source material.