Interview with Author and Poet Lori Brack

BY JOHN CARTER JR

Recently I had the opportunity to interview the the creative and intelligent mind behind the relaxing Museum Made Of Breath, Lori Brack. Her book of poems is an example of exquisite writing talent. The book has an air of wisdom while still maintaining a youthful energy about it and while some of these poems could be read with a nostalgic lens for some, others will be able to relate to the words to their current life. Reading it is genuinely refreshing especially while drinking your favorite beverage (cocoa or a smoothie for me). The poems presented convey a range of emotions, experiences, and perspectives that are specifically made possible through this writer. Here is what we discussed.  

John Carter Jr (TMN Writer)- When did your career as a writer start and who were your inspirations?

Lori Brack (Poet/Author)- When I was 6 and learning to read, I discovered I wanted to make pictures in people’s heads using only these funny black squiggles that we somehow decode and understand. Written language is still a mystery and a wonder! I was inspired as a child by the public library and the 10-book checkout limit. 

As a career, I wrote and edited for newspapers after college, and started taking my own writing seriously around that time. My first national publication – a short story called “Book One: The Bride” – appeared in Rosebud in 2002 and I’ve published many poems and several essays in national journals since that time, along with the book of poems published last year.

JCJ- Why did you name your book Museum Made Of Breath and what was its inspiration?

LB- Museums are in my blood. When I was young, our parents took us to most of the historical museums in Kansas over many weekends in the car. I worked for about 20 years for the Salina Art Center and my interest in museums became a profession at that time. So, museums are a natural subject. The book has 12 museum poems in it, and I started thinking of all the poems in the book as a collection of objects much like a museum might be a collection of tools or toys or TVs. Poet Harley Elliott read the manuscript before it had a title and said, “I think maybe there’s something about breath in there.” The light bulb went on – language is made of breath! These poems also are full of memory, nature, artists, and fantasy, so it’s a diverse museum.

JCJ- What do you do to focus on creating new pieces, how do you get in the headspace to write? 

LB- Reading! My writing comes from being engaged with the words, lines, sentences, and paragraphs of other writers. Something about encountering thought and sound together – the ways language can mimic the world – makes me want to pick up the pen and talk back. So, of course, I read a lot. As a practice, I try to spend at least an hour doing serious reading each morning. My books are marked up with pencil and have sticky notes bursting from the edges. If I’m reading a library book, I copy the sentences or paragraphs into a notebook so I won’t lose track. 

And silence and solitude! My work also comes from staring out the window at the sky, at trees, watching birds and wind and shadows. 

JCJ- How did the poem “as confirmation – echo -” come together?

LB- So interesting you ask about this one, John, because it’s different from the rest of the book. It came not from reading or staring out the window, but from an ongoing conversation I was having with a friend about faith and religion and God and all that. The poem is my response as someone who left religion long ago, as someone who keeps trying to work out the big questions without dogma, and as someone who is trying to be brave in a place and time (Kansas in the Trump era) that uses religion to justify a lot of cruel behavior like LGBTQ discrimination and caging human beings. That poem is an attempt at a moderately persuasive speech suggesting that time and living honestly might lead a person to her own safety and her own devices.

JCJ- Does your writing take any inspiration from any literature, if so what?

LB- Oh, hell yes! As I said earlier, reading is so important to me. Here are the writers I’ve encountered so far whose work I cannot live without: Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. LeGuin, Angela Carter, Lorine Niedecker, Charlotte Bronte, Harryette Mullen, Adrienne Rich, Anne Carson, Tony Hoagland, Jim Harrison, Gaston Bachelard, James Baldwin, George Saunders, and all the fairy tales from the dark European forests of the Middle Ages. I know I’m forgetting lots of people whose work I adore.

In drafts, many of my poems and essays begin with an epigraph from a writer – a sentence or two that inspires me or that I want to think through in the piece I’m working on. Then, most often, I take the epigraph off because the poem or essay went in some other direction.

JCJ- How much emotional investment goes into your work as a writer and what is the payoff?

LB- Not sure I have much to say about this. I try not to invest in titles and roles. Writing is simply how I failingly attempt to make sense of this journey through time and the world.

JCJ- How has your work affected your life, in particular, your book? 

LB- It’s great to have a book in the world, and many thanks to Spartan Press for inviting me to put together a collection, parts of which have been rolling around for many years. I’ve met wonderful humans who come to readings, lovely people who also publish with Spartan, and I’ve had new opportunities to talk with people about my writing. 

JCJ- Are there any projects you are currently working on that you are excited about?

LB- Thanks for asking! I have two finished book manuscripts and I’m working on a third. I’d love to publish a chapbook of poems called A Case for the Dead Letter Detective that contains 25 poems tracing the life and work of a character I invented from combining my archetypal animus with my father. Nine of these poems have been published in Mid-American Review, Packingtown Review, and Superstition Review.

In an unpublished book of essays called Accidents of Salvation, I’m seeking to answer questions about how a self is constructed from geography, culture, and nature, so I’m looking at animals and landscape, gender, sex, memory, labor, family, and religion in 22 essays written over about four years. Six of these are already in the world, most recently “A Wing in Me” at entropymag.org. Another essay, “Touching the Buffalo,” will be out in South Dakota Review this year.

Currently, I’m in the midst of a project without a title that consists of two kinds of writing. There are several essays that work with the metaphors and meanings of fairy tales – not the usual children’s versions, but the lesser-known and more psychologically honest tales. And there are three fictional tales set in a sort of timeless contemporary America that are my attempt at rethinking the old child-wife-crone roles for women. One of those tales, “A Birdsong Romance,” just came out this August online in briars lit.

It was truly a great opportunity to speak with Lori Brack again and a great thanks to her as well. I have been enjoying my copy of Museum Made Of Breath and you can as it is available for purchase on Amazon. There are many talented writers but this perspective is truly one to invest time in hearing. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some smoothies to sip and poems to read. 

Be sure to check out our other interviews with other creators across the country and stay tuned for more.