Toby Goostree is the author of the new poetry collection But There's So Much DIY in IVF That We Can't Be Sure. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Cincinnati Review. The owner of a financial planning practice, he lives in Kansas City.
Q: Over how long a time did you write the poems in your new collection, and why did you decide to focus on IVF?
A: I wrote the book over seven years, a transitional period in my life. My MFA was far enough in the rearview mirror to have forgotten, and I’d started up writing again, probably with more confidence because of it.
Then something happened to us—something so common, I now realize—we started trying to have a child and it was hard. I was drawn into the world of IVF in my real life, which led me in that direction in my poems. I couldn’t not write about it; it was on my mind all the time.
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The book actually had a different working title, one I liked, also drawn from the book, but which wouldn’t have so clearly identified what the book was about.
Rereading so many drafts, the title, a line from my poem “Follistem Pen” really stuck out. I remember where I was in my front yard, walking to get the mail, when I decided on it. It just clicked and I felt that the play of acronyms was memorable and, also, that it introduced the idea of uncertainty, the central theme of the book.
Q: The poet Valerie Martínez said of the collection, “Goostree’s poems are a beautiful and deep dive into the nature of agency and powerlessness--the essential question of our epoch and that of every epoch before us.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love Valerie’s poems and her description of the book is perfect. It speaks to why I juxtaposed our IVF journey with stories from the book of Genesis, allowing me to consider how far back this challenge really goes.
For some reason, I’ve always wanted my poems to be populated with people and things that those who’ve passed could identify with. It makes no sense to think this way—they won’t be reading the book—and I’ve moved on, at least on the “things” front, including fairly fresh technology in the book, but I think Valerie comment speaks to part of my interest in infertility—this is a longstanding problem, maybe the longstanding problem—feeling powerless in the face of what you want.
Q: Especially given the current political debate around IVF, what do you hope readers take away from your poems?
A: The current political debate succeeds the book so, from that standpoint, it wasn’t on my mind as I wrote it.
The debate inside me was over the idea of unused embryos. Is it alright to leave some behind? I considered this in the poem “Dr. Marsh Says” in the book though, as the reader will quickly gather, we had the opposite problem: too few embryos.
But that doesn’t address the question: is it alright to leave some behind? As a Christian, I came to this believing that it would be wrong to do so though, admittedly, I quickly learned just how outside of our control creating embryos really is.
I spoke to a pastor about it who told me something to the effect of aim for five, you don’t want to end up with a whole baseball team! But, of course, wanting a child, a baseball team of embryos sounded pretty good when we were trying. As with so many difficult questions, I dodged a moral bullet by not having to ultimately choose, by using what we had.
But, again, that doesn’t address the question I asked above. What I would want the reader to take away from the poems is that, when reproduction is slowed down, when it doesn’t arise out of sex, it gets so much more complicated and it’s mostly bound up in your mind and not in your body. I do believe IVF offers a way to be fruitful and multiply and I’m glad we did it, but I understand why people have concerns.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I always hoped to be one of those people who was deep into another book by the time their last one came out. Even now, that idea feels like getting ahead, finding a new job long before your severance runs out.
But it wasn’t like that for me. I could say that working through the publication details kept me looking back, but the truth is that I was still so mixed up in the material and, at some point, I think I just admitted to myself that I couldn’t move forward until the book was out.
Shortly afterwards, though, I began working on new poems. I take notes on my iPhone all the time—images, lines, feelings—and I leave them there for a long time, acclimatizing before I start the journey up the mountain again. But I’ve done that, started up, and I have a few poems to show for it.
There are two phases to writing a book of poems: writing the poems and then writing the book. Having spent the past two years writing the book as it were, I’m just glad to be writing poems again, not worrying about whether they have any connection to one another, whether they’ll be friends.
So that’s where I’m at now. Because the last book was bound up in my life and what was happening in it, I couldn’t rush it. I’m hoping I’ll be able to write my next book faster. I will! At least that’s what I tell myself.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This is a banality but I don’t think we can overstate how important timing is. I’ve known a number of writers who, like me, left their MFA program unprepared for how quiet things would be after. You send to journals that are out of reach and you get discouraged, wondering what to do.
For me, I had to forget my MFA to benefit from it. I’m glad for those years at The University of Arizona and I think I internalized a lot of good things during that time, but I needed them to be in the background to see the reason I began writing in the first place. Then something happened in my life and writing was so important again.
I know friends who have some variation of this story. I don’t know what to do about it—after all, I’m arguing you can’t force things, but it’s encouraging to think that just because you’re stuck doesn’t mean you always will be.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment