The Questions We Are Living: A Conversation with Megan Merchant

Hortensia, in winter

by Megan Merchant

New American Press, 2024; 72 pp; $18.00

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Megan Merchant is a visual artist and the author of six full-length poetry collections, four chapbooks, and a children’s book. She holds an MFA degree from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is the winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize, the 2017 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the 2016–2017 COG Literary Award, the Las Vegas Poets Prize, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize, and the inaugural Michelle Boisseau Prize. Her most recent book, Hortensia, in winter (New American Press 2024), was the winner of the New American Book Prize. Megan Merchant is the owner of the editing, manuscript consultation, and mentoring business Shiversong. 

Hortensia, in winter opens with two brief historical accounts, giving us glimpses of Hortensia, Merchant’s “grandfather’s great-grandmother.” In tightly packed lyrical poems, Merchant deepens and explores Hortensia’s world and her own—finding a connection across time and through history. “Maybe,” Merchant writes in the opening poem, “the only thing that matters is what comes after the last word,” and then she proceeds to prove that in a gorgeous tapestry of awareness and connection.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity. 

Rebecca Brock: When or how did you know Hortensia would be her own entire project? What led you to her? Or did Hortensia, as you write in one of the poems, find you?

Megan Merchant: My father and I spent four years transcribing my grandfather’s numerous letters home from World War II. They were haphazardly bunched, written in pencil on wax paper, with faded cursive and redacted cutouts. I found, in that disarray, one letter that didn’t quite fit—it was more aged, had a more elegant slant to the writing, and was darkly beautiful. I immediately needed to know who had written it and how we were connected. Thankfully, with the help of family members and archives, I found Hortensia’s voice and story, preserved in history. It’s remarkable to have even some record of a female voice living at that time. So, I would say that she found me initially, and then I began the search to find out everything that I could about her.

RB: I love that you found her letter in the midst of that disarray. And I was particularly moved by the questions asked in these poems, perhaps because, of course, there is no way for Hortensia to answer. “Do the dead have any say? Was there a splinter of want that flurried your sleep?” Is this the work of poetry? To ask these questions without answers?

MM: I believe that poetry is one of the best containers for the questions we are living. So much of understanding who we are and why we are that way comes from a deep inquisition. When I was writing, I definitely had Rilke’s advice in mind—“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” I have found that questions in poems also open space for the reader to move from the role of witness to participant. When that happens, it allows for empathy to take root.

RB:  Yes, this resonates deeply. You also open the collection with an epigraph by Rilke: “My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.” What a beautiful place to begin: in longing. In the poem “Helpmeet” you ask, “Hortensia, were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life?” I was riveted by that question, the way it reaches through time to so many of us even now. I know I have often given myself that “smallest room.” Is this something you struggle with as a writer, artist, or mother?

MM: Most certainly. I have come to realize how much I have been conditioned—by society, family, religion, media—into believing that I am deserving of the smallest room, and in some ways, even to seek it out so as not to upset the “balance.” This is especially true when it comes to motherhood and caretaking. It’s so easy to slip away, to give up parts of yourself and deprioritize your own needs. It’s taken a lot of work for me to be able to see how I have allowed that to happen in my own life and why. One of the reasons why I was so taken with Hortensia was because she had the courage to speak up against polygamy. When Joseph Smith was murdered and Brigham Young came into power, instituting polygamy, Hortensia left Nauvoo (a town that she had helped to settle) and set off in the middle of winter to Magnolia, Iowa, with only a handful of other families. She had the courage to reach out into the dark unknown to honor and live her beliefs, risking her safety and security. She dared to assert agency in her marriage, faith, and life.

RB: There is a sense throughout this book of wintering, of solitude outlined in the dark, a rendering of one reaching that felt universal. When you began writing to Hortensia, did you know you were writing from such a place? Was it a sort of winter for you, real or imagined, when you reached out to Hortensia?

MM: It was both a literal and figurative wintering. I grew bold enough to disrupt the balance of family life, earning potential, household to-dos, etc., and devoted an entire month to communing with Hortensia. Every day, I set aside two hours and sat at my desk, next to the space heater, looking out a single window, at a bleak winter landscape, reaching out to a ghost. In truth, I was really looking and reaching inward.

RB: That idea of needing to grow bold feels familiar, that need to disrupt the balance in order to create. As a mother and a writer, I struggle with this. How do you hold the room for art in your life? In the same vein, was there ever a time of silence for you as far as writing goes? A time when you weren’t creating? If so, what brought you back to it?

MM: Over time, I have learned to be more patient with the poems and in honoring their arrival. I don’t write every day, or at least I don’t add words to a blank page every day. I’m not into applying that kind of pressure, shame, or guilt to the process. But I guess that I’m always writing, in a way, in my head, pulling images and sounds from the world. When we entered quarantine and there wasn’t anything to pull from, the poems became inaccessible. In their place, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time in my adult life and taught myself how to paint. I needed to hold onto some kind of relationship with image, some semblance of voice. I did this while sitting at the table with my children, in first and sixth grade at the time, while they took online classes and worked. When everything shut down and I became my children’s entire world, I knew that I needed a way to engage in a creative practice, to produce something from my interiority, or I, too, would disappear. In turn, I created space for the poems, and when the world opened itself up again with all of its noise and beauty, they returned.

RB: Do you have a set process or routine for creating? Or do you find yourself fitting things in where you can?

MM: I am currently working with a dozen writers through mentorships, editing, trying to promote my work, teaching workshops, and raising two children, so a lot of the time that I want for creating has to be intentionally carved out. I’m getting better at not feeling guilty for taking up space in my own life, which helps, but it can still be a struggle. I will write when and where I can, because it’s important. I text myself lines and images frequently, use the Notes app on my phone while in the pickup line at school or while sitting next to my children as they do homework. I’ve always believed that poetry is not separate from life and, for me, neither is the creation of it.

RB:  So many women have had to learn to do this—write at the kitchen table, [during] between times, [and] be intentional about time. Your poetry has such a strong, distinct voice. What poets do you find yourself returning to? What books live on your nightstand or your desk at the moment?

MM:  My favorites include Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2011) and Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires (Knopf 1986). I could go on and on. Recently, I took a month off from mentoring and editing to promote my book. I launched into enjoying fiction and took on several books at a time, including Miranda July’s All Fours (Canongate Books 2024) and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (Vintage 2022), wandering between them. Their voices knitted a map of the female experience, one I really wanted to commune with. 

RB: Has being a mother shaped your writing? I love the poem “Have You Branded an Animal That You Did Not Know to Be Your Own?” and in particular the moment where you see your son’s light “blaring through dark hours” and ask, “Why do we grow up thinking that light will save us?”

MM: My children have taught me how to see the world in a way that I don’t think I ever would have arrived at otherwise. My oldest son, a cellist, has shown me how to listen to the music even during the darkest and ugliest times. My youngest son, who has special needs and a lot of sensory struggles, is a master at associative veering and filtering out the clutter. My writing is filled with things that we talk about, preoccupations we share—they can find themselves at every turn in my work. I hope that, someday, when they are old enough, they will be able to find me there as well.