interview by Ken L. Walker
Generally, what is your full bio… as in, where you’re from, where you’re at…
Well, let’s see. My father was in the Air Force, so my family moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Then we moved to Air Force bases in Nebraska, Belgium, Sicily, and Louisiana. I started my undergrad in Arkansas and finished in Colorado before moving to New York. I’ve lived in NYC for almost nine years and that’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere! My father’s people are southern, mainly from Mississippi and the lower Tennessee valley area. We moved to Louisiana from Sicily when I was in seventh grade and my dad retired there. I remember not having any friends at all until I perfected my “y’all”. So, I’m southern in an untypical way; my family refers to me as “The Yankee” and they think it’s funny that I wear a scarf.
I am from the south, Kentucky (mostly), lived in Louisiana for awhile… I am in Brooklyn for an MFA in Poetry, to escape the south as well… What brought you to Brooklyn?
I moved to NY for my MFA. After Columbia, I taught in really terrible public schools through the NYC Teaching Fellows program. I’ve since quit and am currently working on a novel. I really love Brooklyn; I think it’s the first place I can call home, after spending a lifetime moving around.
What is your top five (music) favorite-band/artist list?
Emmylou Harris… Fleet Foxes… Beirut… Kathryn Williams… Johnny Flynn… Trampled by Turtles… Dolly Parton… you said five, right?
Do you feel like after losing your sister in a horrid way you were carried to a new place where poetry meant something fresh or did her murder stop your writing for a time? Basically, a lot of my close family relatives (grandparents, cousins, uncles, two close friends) have died since 2004; but, a sister is completely different…
My sister died when I was in college, during the beginning stages when I was trying to write. I certainly didn’t stop writing, but for many years I didn’t write about her. I guess I was still processing her death, my grief, the shock at the event itself. It wasn’t until I was pursuing my MFA at Columbia that I had the techniques to approach this kind of subject matter. It was sort of a discovery for me because I wasn’t intending to write about it–obviously it’s really fuckin’ depressin’. But things I wanted to do with words–disjointed storytelling in a defiant, raw, and raunchy voice while not being exactly narrative, while being languagey and lyrical–gravitated toward the awfulness of my sister’s murder. Like Anna Akhmatova, I thought I was one kind of poet, but realized I was another. Two things were at stake for me–writing about Heather and making my poems do something they hadn’t yet done. Grief is simply not one thing, but is affected by my parents who received most of my attentions because they lost a child and the relationship that ended with the man I was with when she died. So, my writing was going to a new place and picked up all this stuff along the way. Luckily, I have a pretty sick sense of humor to boot.
Farrah Field is the author of Rising. Read Ken’s review here.
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