"Other people’s input can be scary, but it was a gift." Interview with Isabel Duarte-Gray
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- May 22
- 9 min read
Before talking with Isabel Duarte-Gray about her revision process, she sent me the following collection of notes toward and commentary about her debut collection, Even Shorn, winner of the 2019 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. After Dr. Duarte-Gray received some early editorial guidance from poet Jorie Graham, the book was published by Sarabande Books and edited by Sarabande editor-in-chief Sarah Gorham. As you'll see in the PDF below, both Jorie and Sarah are mentioned in the author's commentary on her drafts. We met on Zoom to talk about “The Shrew Ash.”
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): It was so cool to see your handwriting on the page. The way your lists were arranged made me wonder, do you always keep lists like that? Was there like a specific reason you were documenting Kentucky this way?
Isabel Duarte-Gray (IDR): I always do keep lists. But I think in that particular case, I started writing the book when my little brother was applying to a scholarship and I was very stressed out about it because I had noticed that all the men in my family died in these horrible ways. And I was trying to put my finger on why the White southern side of my family is like this. Why is hopelessness so entrenched? I was scared that my little brother wouldn’t go to college or that something bad would happen to him. We’d had a suicide at twenty-two. One of my other cousins fell off a balcony and died. We had so many things like that. So it started as an elegy cycle for all these men. The book was written not really for him, but with the crisis of his future in mind, and so I was trying to get a sense of the history that led us to get there.
I was in Cambridge and Cambridge and Amherst when I was writing that book, and so writing lists was also helping me get a grasp on the materiality of the space. Half the book was research and half the book was me calling my mom and contending with her enormous archive of weird stories that I just wanted to catch. Also, I do have obsessive compulsive disorder. I go into dives, deep, deep research dives, and that’s where most of my scholarly work comes from. That was probably also part of this enormous output that happened very rapidly. And then I had to stop and make sense of it.
BTR: Yeah, I noticed that there was so much in your notes and also in your first drafts that reveal a lot of family history that didn’t make it into the final poem. Do you have a philosophy around how removed a poem needs to be from personal narrative?
IDG: I don’t know that I have a philosophy about that. There was definitely an ethics to who I was writing about. If I were writing about only myself, I wouldn’t have a problem editing it down or removing stuff. But I was writing about people who died before the book was written, and some of the stories were quite personal. So part of the formal poetics of the book are about trying to find a way to say it without being appropriative. Like my cousin Tony fell off that balcony and part of me genuinely thinks it’s because he became an alcoholic because he was queer and he was in the closet and not in the closet at the same time and my family really didn’t tolerate him being gay. And I didn’t think it would be appropriate to say “I think this is because of homophobia,” but that was what it was coming from. I think the poetics and the obsessive detail of location and language and narrative and going back into deeper and deeper history is partly about trying to compensate for the fact that I don’t know what I can say. I don’t want to call it poetic tact, but maybe an ethics of poetic license. Maybe that’s a form of negative capability.
BTR: In “The Shrew Ash,” the last line of the first stanza in your first draft—which becomes the last line of the whole poem—takes on a much more distinctive voice. How important was it to you to capture the Kentucky dialect? Was that a goal of your revision?
IDG: Yes, definitely. I listened to a lot of oral histories and what I noticed was the accent. It was real specific. And at the time, I didn’t have access to the sound of that accent, because the one from two generations ago was really different from the one that you’d hear in my mom’s mouth. So I don’t have the native accent in the same way, but I did grow up hearing it. I always feel really weird about that when I perform them, because I think some locals are like, “You don’t sound exactly right. Why do you get to claim this?” And it’s like, I grew up here. I’m biracial and complicated and shaped by many different regions. And so when I read in person, I often will listen to those recordings before I read to try and see if I can get it right. I was reading Faulkner a lot of the time that I was writing this. I was looking at the way he writes Darl and Dewey Dell, where there is room for poetry within an attempt to capture a particularity of place. And so, I think there is poetic license within what the accent sounds like. I was looking for this kind of rhythm and poetry of a place and how the fatalism of some of these people is reflected in even the syntax, in the, the mode of expression.
BTR: When I was comparing your drafts, I was impressed with how close the first stanza is to the final version. Do you edit as you draft, or do you write the poem in your head before you write it down?
IDG: No, I don’t edit a lot when I draft. There are some poems that are heavily edited, but a lot of them just came out like that. I do this excessive, excessive, excessive research, and then I front load my short-term memory and then wait until I’m sleepy. A lot of my drafting happens either in a caffeine rush or at two o’clock in the morning. It’s when my subconscious can produce things. So it often just comes out like that and then I’ll piece it together or only take the parts that I like. The edit on “The Shrew Ash” was a kind of compromise between what’s comprehensible to me and what’s comprehensible to everyone else.
BTR: That makes me think about how much trust you put in Sarah Gorham as your editor. Her suggestions essentially become the revisions, at least in the poems you showed me. Has working on this book with Sarah changed your relationship to being edited or sharing your work with fellow poets?
IDG: Yes. I started writing the book in November of 2017 and it got picked up in August of 2019. So I hadn’t written poetry in eight years before I did that, and I really hadn’t written much poetry at all. I don’t have an MFA, so I’d never been edited before. And so I was not prepared, didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up calling Jorie [Graham] and being like, “how many of these edits do I have to take?” And Jorie looked at all the edits and was like, “these are great.” So part of it was getting mediation from someone more experienced, whom I deeply trust. Did I cry? Absolutely. Do I think the edits were right? Yeah. Some of them I disagreed with a little bit, I fought about a couple of them, but “The Shrew Ash” wasn’t one of them. I think Sarah was right with that edit. And it did make me realize the power of reducing something.
Part of it taught me humility. I just didn’t have enough experience of either rejection or praise. I just was like, “This is my intent. This is what I’m trying to do. And the vision is full and complete.” And so I had to make space for [Sarah’s] vision within my vision, which was right. In retrospect, I found out that’s unusual. Some of my friends who had books coming out around the same time didn’t get edits at all. So part of what it was I didn’t realize the degree of generosity I was receiving. Other people’s input can be scary, but it was a gift.
BTR: How did Jorie become involved with your process?
IDG: I was at Harvard at the time. Jorie took me into her workshop in spring of 2019. And She’s incredibly generous. She’ll say to everyone in her workshop, “Send me your manuscript.” Did I have a manuscript at the time? No. But she said send me the manuscript, and so I did. And she put every single poem in order. She chose a title and she would write on each page where she thought I should submit the poems. That is a crazy amount, given who she is and how much demand there is for her time. You come in with no book and you leave with a book.
BTR: So Jorie was kind of your editor before you had an editor.
IDG: It’s true. I mean, she put the book in order. I hadn’t really anticipated submitting it that year or at all. And she gave me the confidence that it was a manuscript. And she also helped me understand how you find an internal narrative within a larger sequence.
BTR: I’ve worked and talked with many poets who, though they may have several books out, have not had that type of editorial relationship.
IDG: Once the poem’s out, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. People will make all the meaning they want out of it. They’ll like the poem that you like the least. You can get really wrapped up in your own intentions, and having another person mediate is totally valuable. If you have too much vision and too much license, you become too self-indulgent, too much, not enough editing. Editing is a gift. I hope when I am finally ready with this new book that it will be a more normal process and I will be more confident about what’s in it and how it’s framed. But what I lacked in confidence and know-how was compensated for by having the confidence and know-how of truly gifted writers who wanted my voice in the world.
BTR: Was there anything else that we didn’t get a chance to talk to that you feel would be important to include?
IDG: I thought you might want to know about the relationship between the book’s lack of external Latinidad and the fact that I’m a Latina writer.
BTR: It didn’t strike me as that strange. Maybe there is a sense that Latinos have to sound a certain way on the page or have to write about certain topics. But as a Latina writer, I would hate to be perpetuating any kind of stereotype by only writing about a few things.
IDG: That’s what my dissertation is actually about. Latinos should be free to write about whatever, but in many ways the market’s particular idea of what being Latino, it does feel kind of split. There’s a fissure between my academic work, which is entirely Latinx, or it was at the time. I have a certain imposter syndrome about my own Latina-ness, and it doesn’t come from not thinking I’m Latina, but I’m only kind of bilingual. And my father is a Chicano playwright. I grew up with this particular idea of Chicano-ness, with this really particular idea of like Luis Valdez inspired bilingual poetry. But I didn’t get raised bilingual, I was raised with my mom in this little trailer in the middle of nowhere. And so, people often don’t register me as being as Latina as I personally feel.
I’m always worried because I did such a Southern book that it seems like I was trying to move away from my Latina identity. And the press was very serious about making it clear that I was Latina, which I really did appreciate, but it also made me feel like an imposter. It always will. I often feel so alienated when I try to sit down and write about my Latino-ness. Like, I have a section in my drafts that’s just “attempted Latino poems,” and I write where it feels fake for me to be doing that. Someday, I think I will find the correct voice to write about it.
Isabel Duarte-Gray is the author of Even Shorn (Sarabande 2021). She was born in Oakland, California and raised in a trailer in western Kentucky. She earned her PhD in American literature at Harvard University and teaches literature and creative writing at Loyola University New Orleans.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.
