Interview with Carolyn Williams-Noren and Lee Colin Thomas

Carolyn Williams-Noren is a poet, essayist, and maker of comics. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and have earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, a Best American Essays notables mention, and the support of the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, and Writing x Writers. Carolyn lives in Minneapolis, where she freelances as a copy editor and writer. Besides writing poems and essays, she connects with readers everywhere via the emailed recipe comic “This is good.”

Carolyn was recently interviewed by Lee Colin Thomas, author of Honey in the Dark.

Lee: Tell us about Oil Courses. What is it “about” for you as a poet? What will readers find in the book’s pages?

Carolyn: My dad’s career was with an oil company in Alaska, and I worked for the company myself one summer. My life today is very different from that—I live in Minneapolis, doing work that feels distant from the project of taking oil out of the ground, if not always its opposite. The poems look back at that time “close” to oil with curiosity. I basically asked myself over and over, “When was I closest to oil? What did that do to me? What did I learn?” and wrote the answers. 

Lee: How and when did this project start for you? 

Carolyn: For a long time, I’d set aside this part of my history. I was ashamed of it. And it was easy not to talk about it. But a few things made me want to reconnect with those memories. 

Throughout the 2010s, in conversations about racism, I took in the idea that when we’re not proud of our past, individually or collectively, we cannot make it disappear by declaring ourselves separate from it. We have to look at how injustice has shaped us. I thought a lot about the role of shame for white people in conversations about racism—how shame blocks learning and transformation.

I also had a key conversation with a friend who’s a leader in the climate movement. I mentioned to her that I have a hard time in rooms where the vibe is simply “Oil is evil.” I always feel aware of how much our lives depend on it. 

Her answer, which I didn’t expect, was “You are describing the work that every single one of us needs to do right now.” Meaning to recognize how reliant we are on this form of energy, to acknowledge what we’ve done and are doing. And to choose something different anyway. Even while we’re still made of it, still powered by it. It feels impossible, and yet it’s what’s needed if we’re going to make any kind of livable future. I started to see that my story could have some relevance beyond my own internal mess.

Lee: The table of contents in Oil Courses is very interesting. You’ve titled each poem after an academic subject paired with a number and a date. How did you arrive at this schema? 

Carolyn: For a long time, I kept the poems untitled, or I used first lines or dates as titles. You know this, Lee, because you were one of the patient early readers who would look at a poem, give me encouraging and constructive feedback, and then say “It needs a title!” … and listen patiently while I resisted. 

I felt that adding individual titles too soon would keep me from seeing what else the collection could hold. I didn’t want to close off the possibilities too early.  

The idea of a course catalog, the idea of poems titled with the names of classes—those came after the writing and revision and reordering, and after many months of doing nothing, just waiting for the idea that would hold all these together as a book. And then, after that idea came, it felt important to keep the dates; I want readers to have a sense of when and where they’re landing as they enter each poem. 

Lee: What went into your decision to forego chronological order when assembling the manuscript?

Carolyn: Some of it had to do with inviting readers in. Some information needs to come early so the later poems make sense. 

You’d think a chronological telling would be friendlier, but the book isn’t just about what happened over some years in the late 1900s—it’s about standing here and looking back at that time (re-entering some of those memories for the first time in many years), and what happens when we bring those events into now. I chose the order pretty intuitively. Maybe that’s just another way of saying I can’t explain all my reasons! In some ways, the order mirrors the process of remembering.

Lee: What do you understand differently now compared to before you wrote the book?

Carolyn: The biggest new understanding came from a conversation I had with a high school classmate. I hadn’t talked with this person for many years, and I (creepily?) found him online and arranged a phone call because I wanted to compare notes on some memories, and also to hear his reflections generally. His dad worked for the same company my dad did, and like mine, his family was only in Anchorage because of that job. 

In the course of this conversation, he said in the most light, easy way, “I definitely feel a deep sense of hypocrisy every day of my life.” 

And hearing that, I say in the poem, “I feel closer to home than I’ve been in a long time.” That posture—hypocrisy, embraced without anguish—was a real gift of my childhood. 

In moving away from oil, hypocrisy is inevitable. If we’re paying attention, we’ll be suffused, constantly, with knowledge of our complicity, and we can’t let that stop us from pushing for change. To paraphrase another passage from the book, “rely” and “fight” do live in the same house—they must. We have to be ok with that discomfort if we’re going to get this world onto a different path.

Lee: The setting for much of Oil Courses is Alaska, a place often described as a wilderness or, as you put it in the book, for its vastness. How does that place of ice and snow, moose and bear, influence the individual poems and the book overall?

Carolyn: One thing is that wherever you live—especially as a child, but really always—is going to feel ordinary, possibly boring. 

I worked retail jobs some summers, serving tourists who were walking around having moment-by-moment spiritual experiences: The mountains! The view of the inlet! They’d glow at me and ask, “What must it be like to live here?!” And I’d be like, “Lady, I’m just making the popcorn.” Or whatever. 

And now I’m an outsider. These are my memories—of the moose encounter, of what I knew about bears, what I knew about the mud flats, what happened in our high school parking lot, and so on. When I lived them, they were ordinary (a word I maybe overuse in the book). But I’m using those stories now as an outsider. I haven’t set foot in Alaska since 2004! 

So Alaska is a character in the book, or several. “Wild” and “far” are sort of the default metaphors for Alaska, aren’t they? I hope I’m also working against those a little bit.

Lee: What is the role of guilt in this work?

Carolyn: I read somewhere—I wish I could remember where—that we are too often taught that we’re both innocent and powerless, and that to repair what’s wrong we need to change both of those things. To see our complicity and our power.

In conversations about climate change, there can be a sense that we’re all simply victims of giant and evil companies that work in their own interests and not ours. There’s truth to that, but also we’re never as far from oil as we think we are. 

I want to show that to be guilty, to be complicit, doesn’t look like you’d think it would. Chances are it looks like what you’re doing right now—whatever you’re doing. I think a lot about these lines from “Essay [1983–Now],” the longest poem in the book:

Your coffee cup in the morning: I’m telling you that’s
exactly how it feels to be complicit, to benefit. I lay
on the floor figuring out my math homework, I’m saying.

I’m saying I watched Three’s Company after school.

I want to be careful not to take that all the way to nihilism. “We’re all guilty no matter what, so why try to change things?” That can’t be it. We need that other part, too—to notice our power and use it. 

Lee: Tell us about the cover art. What’s the story behind it?

Carolyn: I’ve loved Molly Megan Keenan’s collages for a long time, and I’m so grateful she said yes to creating this piece for the cover. She read the poems, we talked, and she did her thing. I couldn’t have predicted what she came up with, and yet it’s very true to the book—perfect. 

One little treat: The oil derrick on the back cover is cut from the Isaac Asimov book How Did We Find Out About Oil?, which appears in a couple of the poems.

More About the interviewer:

Lee Colin Thomas is a poet, communications consultant, and university instructor. He is the author of Honey in the Dark, which won the 2020 Brighthorse Prize for poetry and was published in Fall 2021. Lee’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Water~Stone Review, Narrative Magazine, and various other journals. He lives in Minneapolis.

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Thank you, Lee and Carolyn, for working with us on this interview. We appreciate you being part of our growing community, and we wish you both the best in your current and future writing endeavors.