Author name: Barely South Review

A fellow poet Charles Rhodes told me to ask you about your Greek lemon soup poem, called ‘Avgolemeno’. It opens the book ‘In the Meat Years’, which you mention in another interview as your most personal collection. I really enjoyed how tender and intimate this poem was, and how the careful stirring of broth into the egg mimicked the stirring of memory and nostalgia. Could you tell me a little bit about how you came up with this poem?

Interview Conducted by Megan A. Pastore Ariana Benson’s debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize Award. A

I definitely can see an argument for trying to stay free of those influences, but that’s not the way I do it. I like to read anything I can get my hands on and have time for that’s related to the topic. There’s a great book, Heart and Blood, by Richard Nelson [also about deer]. It was published at least 20 years prior to my book, and I read that early on when I was kind of considering the idea.

In 2019, I was offered what I thought was my big break: a position at the Tampa Bay Times, Florida’s largest daily newspaper. After fourteen years in journalism, it felt like the moment I’d been working toward. But when the offer came through, the salary was barely higher than what I was already making. I realized I couldn’t justify uprooting my family for what was essentially the same paycheck.

I started writing for the internet in college—my college newspaper, but also websites that don’t really exist anymore. Then I started writing top 10 lists. It was just a different time in media. I used the word “listicle” the other day talking to a student, and he didn’t know what that was. He’s 23.

My process tends to start with an idea that I think is viable. I think ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a serial daydreamer, and so there are always ideas. Even walking here, I was like, “oh, what if a dragon came flying through? How would it figure out the buildings?

After EB White delivered an academic conference paper on Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, an American history professor from the University of Florida approached her with a carbon copy of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlber’s unpublished memoir.

The inspiration for each story in That Very Place is different because the stories were written over the course of three or four years, starting in about 2019. Two of the stories are even older than that. The idea for the collection as a whole came when I saw that so many of my stories had unusual settings, places where the events described just shouldn’t be happening, or where the events themselves were difficult to explain.