world, but I didn't know how to articulate that. I loved to write, so I went to grad school and just kept writing and playing. I was pretty defeated when I left St. Mary's. I had poems and I had some very small publications, but I didn't feel like I had left with a manuscript that was good, and I didn't feel like I left with a foot in the door. I had thought I was gonna get my PhD. I was so tired, I didn't. Then I started teaching, which was a different kind of tired, but I never stopped writing.

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14H: How do those two things come together: teaching and writing? How do they feed into each other? 

 

LLP: There's a poet I worked with at St. Mary's when I was editing the literary mag there and she was like: “Don't become a teacher,” because she had been a teacher for 30 years. She's like: “You won't have time to write. You'll be sucked into the system.” I heard that and she wasn't 

wrong, but I think there's a really big caveat there. When you have to teach something, you have to embody it. I am a good writing instructor and I teach students who are needing a template and I teach the topic sentence over and over again, then I also teach AP students. So much of what I got out of being a close reader– and that came from poetic studies– has translated into my ability to teach. I learn all the time because I practice reading and I practice giving feedback and anything that I ask my students to read, I have annotated and spent time with. If I had a different job, I think I would lose that muscle memory. Teaching is tough. It doesn't give you enough time to write. You have to actively seek that out. I don't know what else I would do, and I don't mean that in a, “woe is me” despairing way. I get a lot out of teaching as much as I hope my students get out of me supporting them. 

 

14H: How do you make the time to write and what does that writing process look like? 

 

LLP: For a poet, and that's how I began, I was okay with the haphazard, whenever I have a chance, wherever I have a chance. That's harder, I have found, with prose. I'm taking longer and rewriting more things because I'm not following a good linear trajectory sometimes. That said, my project, it's braided, it's circular, it's “I want you to read something here and see how it works later on.” That's an aesthetic that I've held onto as a poet, when I understood that my poems really do speak to each other– that they are in conversation with each other. I hope they can be read independently, but there's more to be had when they're read together. That was something I was really excited about with the Fourteen Hills issue was that it was a longer excerpt and I do think they were talking to each other. You have to make the time and you have to be disciplined and it's really hard and kids make it harder. I have a lovely family and they understand that writing is important to me, but they also need a lot. I am of a generation, my husband's of a generation where we– no blame– have fallen into stereotypical gendered roles, so I hold a lot of  the parenting responsibilities and that can interfere, but I don't stop. If I have found that I'm not writing for a while, I actually get really grumpy. Sometimes I write at 5:30 in the morning and other times, I work late a couple days a week and some of it is working on an essay. Sometimes I get to write on Sunday mornings, which feels very Wallace Stevens-y, with my coffee and my oranges. Being in a draft is a great place to be because you're wrestling with something. I'm sad sometimes when the drafting is over. 

 

14H: Shifting over to In the Body it Nests– from the start, the title really struck me in how powerful it is. How did you come up with that, or come to that? 

 

LLP: It comes from one of the poems. It’s there to protect the heart. Not that I don't take liberties with fact, but my nana, who I love dearly, died of Alzheimer's and it was just horrible. She loved to read; loved to talk. She could actually do the New York Times crossword puzzle, like faithfully. Losing her ability to think was just so cruel. Her body lasted much longer than her mind did. While that was happening, I was pregnant and it was a long process towards that. I mean, my children were in the NICU and it was scary. I had already had so many problems and challenges and I was lucky to be pregnant. I knew it wasn't gonna be this standard birth narrative. I didn't even realize how much I felt like I needed to have that to participate as a mother. A lot of my writing is unpacking that, but it came out in the poems first. In the few years after she passed away, and my children were in their early years, I just wrote them– then as a collection that I really would like someday to be out there in the world. What's funny though is that almost every poem has found a home– I've been able to publish them independently. The collection, I kind of shelved for a while. I haven't sent it out. Actually, the Fourteen Hills one, I dug it out for that, was a beautiful thing. I'm hopeful that it could find a home. I didn't know a lot about the brain or understanding how Alzheimer's worked, and I wanted to understand the technical parts of it and the language– and maybe this is what stuck out to me with Milton too– the language of the brain is beautiful. I knew the word synapse and that's a beautiful, fun word to say. Neuron forest and ghost tangles, and these strange concepts that I was learning about in terms of the way that our memories move and the way that our synapses build and the way that our brains die. I got lucky on that end– discovering that language. I think it was a way for me to mourn. Grieving her loss while trying to raise children– that intersection was something that I couldn't talk about and I didn't have anybody to talk about it with. The poems let me have that conversation. 

 

14H: Because these poems are so personal, how do you traverse that line between fact and fiction especially with something published like this? 

 

LLP: It's sort of like a woman walking a familiar path and then being locked out of her home and not remembering how to use a door. Essentially, those things happened to my nana and I pieced them together in a narrative. What I was trying to do was heighten the confusion and the familiarity and how quickly – with someone with Alzheimer's– that can come and go. In a lot of the poems, I was trying to be in her voice or her space. There's another one where I tried to heighten the paranoia. It was more about the accuracy of feeling than it was about being truthful to the moment. In a poem like NICU, my daughter was far less encumbered and everyone wanted to hold her and my son was far more restricted and I held him the most. It seemed like his story needed more space on the page, and hers– there was a lot ringing in the absence. It was an absence that was full of not-NICU. She was there for less time than he was. I almost wonder if NICU's not the right title for that because it seems to have more to do with how others were responding. For example, I'm teaching the Life of Pi right now by Yann Martel. Pi is stranded in the lifeboat with this Bengal tiger. The Bengal tiger is a disassociated part of himself. To teach that book, I have to pretend. I make the kids really think it's a Bengal tiger until we reveal it. Thinking about Pi, telling this whole invented narrative was far more true for him than was this factual reality of in-your-face death and violence. For me, memory was so much impression. I'm trying to write about it now and I don't fully remember their birth or even what those weeks in the NICU were like. It's impressions I have that change every time I access them, the way memories do. In constructing that narrative, I was trying to create a birth story. I was trying to create a death story. They were not separate from each other. It felt like it really should be a chatbook. It's a slimmer, smaller conversation with each other, but it had to be its own narrative. It took me a long time to come back around to all of that. My kids are nine. 

 

14H: What do you draw inspiration from? Even now? 

 

LLP: Other poets for sure. When I get surprised by something new that I read. Leila Chatty lately– I can't get enough of their work. Then, Desert Island: CD Wright forever and ever. I got to study with Brenda Hillman and I hold that pretty dear to my heart. Or there's this AP prompt– I teach the Lang. and Composition class– Barbara Ehrenreich wrote this book, Nickel and Dimed, and her prompt is scolding Americans for watching TV instead of living life. I've been thinking I very much want to write an essay about that because I have noticed that I will dive into a television show, usually one that isn't connected to anything that I am thinking or wanting, when I am drained of the ability to do anything. I was thinking about the relationship between our binging a television series and how we've created that escapism and I was like, man, she's right. I want to write about that, which is totally different from anything else I've really been doing. I've been gnawing on this idea for a year, but if it sticks around that long, then I'm probably gonna do something with it. It reminds me of something I read about Louise Glück– who is also a Desert Island poet and I would advocate for Faithful and Virtuous Night, one of her later collections. She talks about how she'll just not write for a year or two, when she needs to recharge. I was thinking about how sometimes we consume good art, bad art, however you wanna label those things– but we don't even know that maybe we need that recharge. Living as best as we can in relationship to people is very inspiring. I get to hang out with goofy, lovely, sometimes albeit, crazy teenagers. They're pretty funny and so smart, if you're paying attention.