Author Q&A with Jamie L. Smith

Jamie L. Smith is the author of “The Flightless Years,” forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (November 2024). Her chapbook “Mythology Lessons” was winner of Tusculum Review’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, and anthologies by Indi(e) Blue, Allegory Ridge, and Beyond Queer Words. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com for more information.

Tell us about yourself.

Let’s see, I’m a former therapist, (re)turned poet/writer, currently living in Salt Lake when I’m not in New York City. I’m very grateful to The Good Life Review for having me and having my work!

Beacons speaks to me as a poem that reflects on how a lifetime is too short to explore all the mysteries or appreciate all the small things our world has to offer. How did your father’s reflections make you think about what you wanted to do with your time on earth? 

My dad was someone who often came across as quiet, but he was fascinated by everything. The end of his life was very difficult. Because of the pain he was in, his world got progressively smaller as his mobility and the space he could physically orbit shrank. One of the beautiful things about his way of being in the world though, was that he really was someone for whom “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—” He was always thinking and noticing. He could be amused or engaged within himself sitting in an empty room. 

One of my dad’s catchphrases was, “Life is short, death is long.” Beacons came largely out of a conversation he and I had a couple of years before he died, well before the moment in the nursing home near the end that the poem describes. He was kind of trying to prepare me for the fact that his time was limited, and, resistant, I said, “Maybe you’ll outlive me,” and he said, “That would be the worst thing.” When he was gone, part of the grieving process was grappling with what I want my life to look like and questioning why I’m here, and it turns out the things that keep me here, the things I look forward to and enjoy most are, fortunately, very small. 

I have goals and aspirations and all that, but most of what matters to me is small moments I want to share with the people I love. Writing gives me a way of sharing those moments that often occur internally or when I’m by myself. I have so many friends living inside of Beacons, and as much as that poem is an elegy for my father, it’s also a thank you to them for lighting my way through a long darkness. 

In your poem, Beacons, I love the line, “Curiosity–that’s what keeps me here, he said.” How do you satisfy your curiosity through writing?

I think writing is a way of paying attention for me. Sometimes it’s a puzzling together of different elements that feel related on a level I haven’t quite been able to articulate for myself. Sometimes it’s a way of honoring what’s already just there in the world in a new way. Sometimes I get these floating lines that surface in my mind, and I just want to spend time with them and see how they resonate with other people.  

My dad was a very curious man, in many ways. I’m a bit like him in that sometimes some very small thing will strike me in a way that just halts everything unexpectedly—the way a reflection surfaces in my windshield, the silica that shimmers in certain sections of sidewalk at night—and I love those moments. Often, I’ll see something and have an urge to touch it, and I think poetry in particular is a way of trying to recreate, remediate, and translate that desire to connect with a moment or memory. 

What do you hope your readers take away from Beacons?

A couple of years ago I read Ocean Vuong’s Reasons for Staying at a time when I needed reasons to stay. Everybody has their own beacons, the things that draw us towards home or help us evade wreckage, and my hope for the poem was that it would signal both of those truths and help call the readers’ own beacons up for them. 

At its core, it’s a poem against suicide, or against the undertow most of us experience at some point in our lives, whether it’s in a period of grief or a pocket of grappling to find meaning.

Tell us about your book, The Flightless Years.

I’ve started thinking of The Flightless Years as a book for anybody who’s loved someone who’s behaved very badly or been loved through their own bad behavior. It weaves myth with memory, and it questions how well we can really know somebody, including ourselves, as we continue to morph and change and build meaning. 

It’s a hybrid: a poetry collection with a CNF lyric essay that’s broken apart and studded across the sections of the book. The essay is centered on my relationship with a dear friend who committed a violent crime while he was intoxicated and ended up taking his own life. He was this full-spirited, generous, beautiful person, and I struggled for a long time to reconcile who he was to me with where his addiction eventually led him. 

The poems and essay both move from the speaker’s childhood and her experience navigating her mother’s mental illness into the speaker’s own addiction history and early recovery. It’s heavy, but it’s also a book with a good deal of literal and figurative light running through it. 

It’s a project that I love a lot, and that I’ve had a lot of help with over the years. I’m so grateful Finishing Line wanted to publish it, partly because I think I could keep spending time with it and changing it forever, but it deserves to have its life apart from me now and vice versa. 

It’s coming out on November 29^th, and you can preorder it here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-flightless-years-by-jamie-l-smith/

How have obtaining your MFA and pursuing your PhD benefitted your writing?

Both experiences have helped teach me to better love what I love. In both programs, the best thing has been the people I’ve gotten to work with and learn from. 

My MFA at CUNY Hunter was easily one of the best times in my life. I’d studied creative writing and psychology in undergrad, but went on to a career as a therapist, so the MFA was a hard reset for me. I needed to rebuild community, I needed good mentors, I wanted to feel compelled to write again, and Hunter gave me all of that and more. That program taught me to read deeply and write with greater openness. 

Doing my PhD at the University of Utah has given me the chance to read, write, and learn more than I ever imagined I would. One of the best parts has been being able to explore other genres and branch out in more unexpected and experimental directions. At the end of my first year, my chair suggested I take a Book Arts class and I fell in love with that practice. I’m defending in nonfiction even though I came in as (and still am) a poet. I’ve just gotten to do things I never expected I would attempt.

I wouldn’t trade either experience, but I don’t think you need a PhD or even an MFA to become a good writer or to build a writing community. I didn’t have the focus or self-discipline it would’ve taken to go it alone and rebuild when I began this process, but I know plenty of autodidacts whose work is absolutely exquisite. 

Your bio speaks of your poems, nonfiction and hybrid work. How has combining poetry and nonfiction deepened your artform? 

You know, I think about this a lot and the answer varies. Most of my poems are true or at least hold some kind of truth, but poems aren’t beholden to facts, and if fiction in its original form means to sculpt or to shape, then I tend to consider poems as fictions or something like true-fictions, if that makes sense. 

I came to nonfiction through poetry. My professor, Catherine Barnett, asked us to write a lyric essay about a book or work of art that we had a relationship with and that turned into the spine of The Flightless Years. Writing prose after years of practicing poetry was kind of like releasing the plunger on a pinball machine—chaotic at first but also a form of release that I gradually learned to rein in through revision. 

I usually have poems on a subject before I can form the prose. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem, I realize I’m leaving out things for sake of form or containment that I can’t shake, and that’s how the nonfiction projects begin—they’re a kind of spilling over. 

The lines between genres are permeable and that delta where they all get mixed together and recomposed fascinates me. My PhD wheelhouse topic is lyric hybridity and I’m kind of obsessed with things like multimodality and remediation. That combination of elements feels closer to the way thought operates in a certain way, and it also just allows extra room for chance and discovery in a new composition. 

What advice do you have for writers eager to have their work published?

Don’t be thwarted by rejection. If you love the work you’ve made and you want it to be shared, keep trying. Sometimes I pull up my Submittable page when my students get discouraged just so they can see how vastly the rejections outnumber the acceptances. 

It also helps to know that the words and form can change while the piece itself still holds the same truth—so be open to revision. The best thing is to keep reading and to have trusted readers or your own to share your work with, and to at least experiment with the feedback they offer.  

How has photography allowed you to see the world through a different lens?

I’m restless by nature. I feel better in motion than I do when I’m still, and photography is like a moving meditation for me. It helps me capture instances I wanted to attend to but knew I was already moving past. It’s a form of attention and time travel or a means of revisiting. 

The capturing of the image feeds that curiosity we were talking about earlier. I love remediating the images afterwards, sometimes long afterwards, using effects to bring something out of them that still honors the moment but also transmits something of what I found within that encounter that made me want to stop. 

What do you think of when you hear, “The Good Life?”

It’s funny, the first image that comes to mind is somebody lounging on the deck of a boat with a glass of prosecco, even though I can’t swim, and I don’t drink, so that can’t possibly be my good life. 

Part of me thinks of ease, and a desire I have for contentment and reprieve. The other part of me doesn’t think the good and the easy are bonded to each other. I have a good life. There are people, places, and things I love deeply and that love me back. There’s a lot I care about and am moved by that I get to invest myself in. There’s plenty I wouldn’t mind having for myself and for the world, but I also know I have enough and more and I’m grateful for that. 

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Jamie’s poem “Beacons” appears in our summer 2024 issue and her poem “What I’ve Tried to Ignore” was featured on our Buzz Blog for Micro Monday on August 19, 2024.

Thank you, Jamie, for allowing us to share your poems with our readers and for taking extra time on this Q&A with us! We’re glad we were able to connect and wish you the best with your upcoming book, future writing, and all of your endeavors.