The Many Meanings of Home with Lorna Wood
Interview by Gabriela V. Everett & Ines Le Cannellier
Today we sat down with the prolific writer and musician, Lorna Wood, to discuss her poem “Mercy”, why she became a writer, and the meaning of ‘home’ within her work.
What made you want to become a writer? Although you also write a variety of prose, what draws you to poetry in particular?
I grew up in an intensely verbal home. We had no TV (this was the ‘70s), and my parents read The New Yorker aloud to each other daily. My mother also read aloud to me often and taught me to read. We lived in a college town, and my parents’ friends were informed and articulate, so I was often present at adult, intellectual conversations. The idea of creating things as a way of making a living was always present, since Dad was a composer and Mom was an art historian. I think I write because I love reading and learning things. I feel writing is a way to share that.
I write poetry because I get ideas for things that have to be poems. These are usually insights about relationships. My poems tend to begin in one place and trace the process by which I or my persona or a principal character arrives at a different place, a different understanding. You can see this in “Mercy.” It owes a lot to Romantic lyrics. This intense exploration of individual insights needs imaginative language to help the reader “see” with the poet, and it will get lost in a lot of distracting elements like plot or characterization.
Your poetry has such a mystic lyricism to it. Do you think your time as a violinist has informed your writing?
Thank you. I think being a musician makes me write more musically. I’m always aware of the way the sounds of a poem fit together, which is an element of lyricism. Being a violinist also forces the brain to activate a lot of different areas at once. Maybe practicing that skill helps me make connections that are surprising and beautiful when I am composing a poem. Possibly the entrainment involved in following musical passages lends itself not only to the rhythms of poetry, but also to the journeying in my poems.
I absolutely love the way you use the idea of home in “Mercy” in different ways and connect to this idea of wearing something, as if “home” itself was more than just a physical object, but rather something you can carry with you. How do you think the idea of “home” has impacted your writing and your life?
I suppose most people think of a home as an extension of the people who live there. This is especially true of me because I am an introvert and like spending a lot of time at home. During my childhood, although I was incredibly privileged in terms of my education and had two loving parents, home was a fraught environment because my mother was mentally ill and had frightening, violent rages that sometimes escalated into physical fights with my father.
I believe the combination of long hours spent reading and playing peacefully, on the one hand, with flare-ups of trauma and instability, on the other, led me to idealize and seek to recreate the positive aspects of home. My first story, dictated to my nursery school teacher, was about a rabbit making a home, and home is certainly a theme and a source of material in much of my work. While I do feel I have been able to create a home that incorporates the positive aspects of home from my childhood and not too many unhealthy aspects, I sometimes feel this is my own private world that is threatened and insecure. In fact, I am just now realizing how much of my work is about threats to home as I am writing this.
In your final two stanzas, you write, “Maybe mercy is a home that fits me / with room to spare even for destroyers of dwellings.” Do you think mercy and forgiveness inherently intersect? What inspired you to write on this subject?
The prompt for this poem was a Unitarian Universalist service where we were asked to write about mercy. I have some of my mother’s rage inside (mostly), and when I feel I or someone I love has been treated unfairly, I can stay angry for long periods of time. I don’t believe this is necessarily inappropriate. I am only in favor of forgiveness if the offender has acknowledged the wrong and apologized. Otherwise, in my experience, one is just enabling abuse.
The trouble is, anger puts one constantly on the defensive. It consumes time and energy, so in some ways, it is just letting the perpetrator’s harm fester. In “Mercy,” I compare going through life with defensive anger to the scuttling of a crab. Mercy maintains a clear-eyed understanding of the harm someone has done—without that, there would be no need to be merciful to them—but also a view of unjust acts as part of a larger picture of another human’s flawed journey through life, a journey no one else can fully know. This is empowering because it does not require any action other than choosing to adopt this view. You don’t have to extend the erasing hand of forgiveness, only to have it bitten again. You just clearly acknowledge the truth of the situation, both what you can understand and what you can’t, and agree to respect the humanity of whoever harmed you.
There are other kinds of mercy, but for me those are a no-brainer. Of course we should show mercy to beings who are weaker. But even this is easier when we’re not eaten up with anger.
Are you working on anything exciting that you would like to share? Where can our readers find more of your work?
I am working on a three-part science fiction novel about quantum physics, consciousness, and the future (about 150 years out). I’ve brought all my usual themes—home, family, social justice, religion—to bear on my imagined future world.
To see all the books I have written or am featured in, you can go to my Amazon author page. To find work in journals, you can consult my bio there or on the About page of my blog, Word Music, and then look the journals listed in the bio up in the blog’s search box. There will be links in the posts. Here are three poems I am especially proud of: “Poll Watching: Alabama, 2020”; “Dreaming to Updated Mountain Songs”; and “Lion’s Tooth.” And here is a link to “The Big Dream,” where I put all my talents to work in a gender-reversed homage to Raymond Chandler.
Lorna Wood is a violinist and writer in Auburn, Alabama, with a Ph.D. in English from Yale. Her literary prose includes a novel and a novella on Kindle and stories on Litro [USA] Lab Podcast and in What We Talk About When We Talk About It (Darkhouse Books) and Courtship of Winds. Her horror fiction has appeared on The NoSleep Podcast and in A Monster Told Me Bedtime Stories (Soteira Press), Doubleback Review (Pushcart nominee), and 34 Orchard, among others; and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in WhimsicalPoet, Mulberry Literary, Angel Rust (Best of the Net nominee), and Poetry South (Pushcart nominee), among others. She has also published scholarly essays on Lolita, children’s literature, and the American Renaissance.