I’m excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I’ve paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts. Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.
Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press.
Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.
For example, when I had travel plans to somewhere like Cambodia or Cuba or Kenya, people would often say to me, “be safe,” with the assumption that those places are less safe than America. In many ways, America is more dangerous, but the mentality that the rest of the world is “scary” is something I wanted to push against. It’s only scary because we don’t know it, and this book of poems is my attempt to make it a bit more known, and to turn that judgmental eye back on myself as a representative of America.
I’m drawn in your work to the discussion of conveying hard truths to others. For example, in your marvelous poem “Instructions on Washing and Drying,” you can’t get your mother’s appliances to work while she’s dying of cancer, and you can’t tell your children the truth about their grandmother’s diagnosis. How do you contend with the challenge of confession in poetry, when confession in real life can be so unsettling?
CG: You’re right. Confession is unsettling and for this reason it seems to me that we, at least in American culture, hold so much back. We show our perfect lives on social media. We deflect from the most burning and human issues by thinking and talking about pretty much anything else. Sometimes we’re so disconnected from these life and death situations that we may not know how to feel about it, let alone talk or write about it.
For me the danger of this has been disconnection with the truth, and the alienation that comes with secrecy and isolation. When you lose a parent for instance it can seem like you’re the only one this is happening to; the only who experiences pain and grief in this way. To counter this, I challenge myself to write without censoring, to get to the core of what’s going on even if it’s avoidance, and to write about it as honestly as I can.
I’m curious about the title of your book The Forgotten World, and how you decided on the title and decided to weave the theme “Forgotten” throughout, breaking the book up into three sections with the word “Forgotten” so it becomes an anaphora or mantra. And in your final poem “To Keep Us Warm” you say, “The forgotten world / is not coming back …”
NC: I think there’s a documentarian impulse to most poetry, a desire to capture events so they can be fixed in amber for future study. The events don’t have to be the outside world, either—they can just be the events of a mind at a certain point in time. And the way we look at that amber document can, and likely will, change with the passage of minutes, days, years. That I think embraces the poetic drive towards “confession” or “truth,” as a poem is a medium for memorializing in all its forms.
And because of that, I think there are a couple key aspects at work with the title “The Forgotten World”. One is that every poem is a document of a forgotten world, the world discussed in the poem, this fleeting thing that happened externally and/or internally and is gone and won’t come back, and the poem itself is a window into what’s occurred. But that’s a bit esoteric, and the more on-the-nose interpretation is that, quite literally, during the height of the pandemic, the larger world beyond our homes was largely forgotten as we retreated inwards out of safety, fear, or obligation. So, rather directly, the forgotten world is the rest of the planet, that place beyond us that’s easy to disregard it’s not being presented to you. The book The Forgotten World is an attempt to present it to you, to help us remember.
And since we’re on the topic of titles, I really love the physicality of the title What We Do with Our Hands. It gives an earthy grounding to a collection that ranges across topics, and I think it’s alluring in that it implies a question: like, “what do we do with our hands?” I love a title that gestures at the reader’s need to answer! It’s welcoming, bringing them actively into the interpretive process. Of all the title possibilities your book presents, how did you land on this one?
CG: I agree, it’s an interesting question, “what do we do with our hands,” as the answer says so much about our lives and where we are at any given time and what is important. This theme seemed to keep emerging in so many of the anchor poems in the collection when I looked back at them; whether referring to a hand in marriage, using our hands as we raise children or nurture a garden, as we discard relics of our past or cover our heads to protect ourselves from things falling from the sky, and even violence inflicted by someone’s hands.
It seems to me there is much metaphorical significance, the physical work we do with our hands, cleaning a barn, burying a loved one, extending a hand to someone we care about. We have a hand in everything that happens to us and all those we touch. It also correlates with the black-and-white photograph on the cover of the book; a woman crouched beneath a mountain of boulders, attempting to protect her body with her hands. These are the rocks on Pedregal Beach where I live in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Hunting for Wild Mushrooms” that illustrates how the concept crops up throughout the book:
But we gathered rocks // dressed up in frog colored moss, / handfuls of pinecones / the size of silver nickels… Dirt beneath / my nails, I cupped the fragile // fungi like a newborn bird, / color of a faded daffodil, / smelling of truffle and swamp.
Nick, this makes me wonder about the themes that emerge in your work. You’ve written and published three books now, yes? What themes emerge for you? What drives your writing process? When do you write? What compels you to write?
NC: Yes, The Forgotten World is my third, after Punchline and Let There Be Light. It’s been nearly eight years since the second of those was published, though, so I feel like this book is the beginning of a new era. For my first two books I was pretty “cosmic,” asking big questions about existence and the universe, creation and physics and religion, but for this book I really tried to turn towards more “worldly” matters, like the human experience and the plight of being alive on this planet. I feel a bit more grounded now, and I think that my work is a bit more “practical” now. Maybe that’s because my style has matured…or maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten old and my high-mindedness has been washed away by mortgage payments, haha. Either is possible!
As for when I write, I used to have a really rugged daily process in which I’d try to write all the time, but now I just do it when I’m reading something great. I pretty much only write when I’m reading poetry that inspires, so whenever I’m not writing, I know it’s because I’m not reading. One always leads to the other. So I’m often on the search for the next great book of poems to push me to create. I never quite know what book will do it, but when I find one I truly treasure it.
What about you? Is there a certain concoction of events or circumstances that gets your writerly juices flowing? I know you also live part-time in Mexico, so does being abroad wake up something different for you? How has international living impacted your writing, and really, your world in general?
CG: For me too, being abroad inspires me to write, mostly because I’m really paying attention when I’m in a new place due to plain curiosity and probably as a survival instinct. I just returned from Europe yesterday; there for my son’s graduation. He and I stayed in Shoreditch in East London by the train tracks, all covered with graffiti. This got me thinking about feeling safe and where we feel safe, and the discovery that this can be counter intuitive, that sometimes where you think would be the safest place, i.e. in your own home, can feel the most dangerous, and someplace edgy and raw like Shoreditch you can feel completely safe and at home. Later, when we visited the wine country as my son’s graduation gift, I was blown away by so many amazing metaphors. I think my favorite was the angels’ share, the 1% of wine or whiskey that evaporates each year from oak barrels kept in the cellar. So, these things blow my mind and beg to be written about. In Mexico where I usually live, I find myself constantly moved to write because the culture is so different from America, the values are different, the focus on family and enjoying the sky and sea and tacos and other things that are relatively inexpensive and delicious.
And like you, I’m always inspired by reading something good. If I get stuck in my own writing process, my go to is to open any page from Adrienne Rich’s collected works and I’m fired up! I just read Amor Towles Rules of Civility, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. She was one of my teachers in my MFA program at NYU, and I find her writing compelling and super tightly edited. In terms of poetry, I just stocked up while in the US and now have a new stack of new poetry books including Ada Limón’s new collection, The Hurting Kind. I also picked up some books that Ocean Vuong, a poet I love, has been reading, including The Performance of Becoming Human and The Melancholia of Class. This for me raises the touchy subject about writing about privilege and how to do that appropriately, as we have the amazing ability to travel the world. I try to be aware of my good fortune when I write. One of my recently published poems is called, “I Never Worried About the Police Killing My Son.”
I’d love to know how you handle that in your writing too Nick. Also, you talked about being inspired to write by reading as well. I’d love to know what you are reading now that you find most inspirational, and why and who are your favorite poets?
NC: Ah, I really love what you have to say here about being safe in unexpected places! I’m also taken aback by how I can feel safe in someplace like Cuba or Peru, and far less safe in a place like a grocery store in the United States. Of course, there’s one obvious reason why this is: guns. I write about this specifically in my poem “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” in that I could watch military exercises in Cusco, but never felt threatened, where in the U.S. seeing a white man with an eagle on his shirt can seem dangerous. Growing up saying the pledge every day and celebrating July 4th, I never thought that would happen, but here we are.
And that’s one reason I now live part-time in Costa Rica, just because it feels calmer there. I might have to pay an “idiot American” tax when there, but I’m not worrying about getting shot by a stranger who watched the wrong YouTube videos. It’s a huge privilege to be able to live somewhere else, and I’m well aware of that—it’s definitely a sticky subject in poetry, trying to be gracious when gifted. I think the best thing is to just call it out, and to try to be ethical in one’s own living on earth.
As for what I’m reading, my most recent favorites have been Central Air by George Bilgere and Embouchure by Emilia Phillips. Awesome stuff, both, so vivid and crisp and human. Both of these books have inspired me tremendously. Besides that, I’m reading simply-written things in Spanish, like sports news and Wikipedia articles, because I can’t speak Spanish well and I need to get better at that. So if you see someone super-slowly reading an article about beisbol in Español, looking up half the words, it might be me.
So, to ask my last question of you, I have to know about Little PINK Book! Tell me about this awesome venture, and what exactly you do with it?
CG: PINK is an 18 year old company initially launched as a women’s business magazine; one of the only such publications at the time. We continue to feature America’s most powerful women leaders via LittlePinkBook.com and during our live events every spring and fall. It gives us a chance to reach an unlimited number of ambitious women globally, at the venue and via livestream, who want to know how women like UPS CEO Carol Tomé or Aflac President Teresa White and many others reached their goals. I think this ties back to poetry which gives us a chance to ask other questions and look at what we struggle with at a deeper level and what inspires us as women.
And you? Tell us about Atmosphere Press.
NC: That’s wonderful! A super cool initiative, and it’s always inspiring to hear about companies that transform over time, and are now old enough to vote! Atmosphere isn’t quite there yet, as I founded it in 2015 and really took off with it in 2018. We help authors publish their books with a professional team, and we have an awesome group of folks who help with everything from editorial to interior design to making excellent covers and giving authors wide distribution and a publicity footprint. It’s a super-satisfying job, and one I never could have imagined having when I was in the adjunct salt mine grading freshman comp papers. And we keep putting out better and better books, too, and giving a platform to diverse voices. It’s a lucky place to be!
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Author: Kristina Marie Darling
