In Conversation with Author Alina Ștefănescu
Kudos to Twitter for opening the world to me during the pandemic, and in particular, that little corner of the Twitterverse that is inhabited by writers and artists. It was so refreshing to see how generous and supportive the community is ~ publication days are celebrated, there’s a swell of enthusiasm for each poem that finds a home and virtual hugs all around for awards won. It has been so inspiring to discover creatives across the globe continuing to put words on paper during this very singular year.
I happened upon Alina’s Tweets and was so impressed by the breadth of her reading, her astute commentary, and the fact that she was reading deeply and writing gorgeously during the pandemic, a time when many writers bemoaned their inability to get anything done at all.
Her exquisite poem “Awl” was published by World Literature earlier this year, and once I’d read it, I knew I wanted to interview her. In it, she writes about language, how one acquires words in a strange land, syllable by syllable. In the opening section of “Awl”, she writes: I go by the sound, what it asks of the mouth when one holds it…The vowels attach to objects, and every time those vowels come together, the object appears.
I was intrigued by her experience of existing between two countries. I wanted to know more about the piecemeal way in which we surrender ourselves to a new culture, something I had experience during the years I lived in Paris. I’m interested in the way we hover between two worlds, braiding the language we know with the language we want, and how the places we leave never quite leave us.
At the moment, Alina Ștefănescu lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and children, but one might also imagine her alight over the Romanian fields of her childhood (perhaps flying as in a Chagall painting) where she was raised by her grandmother, and eventually sent to America to join her parents who had emigrated to escape an oppressive regime.
“I am fascinated by the distance between a blessing and a curse on broken flesh. I am twenty-five and pregnant, unmarried, incubating the first bastard in my family tree. I am here for my grandmother’s funeral; to pay my respects to the woman who cared for me when my parents fled to the United States. It is a relief to be surrounded by Romanian vowels, their warm intonation, their curses and threats. I am trying to remember the girl I wanted to be.” ~ from “Awl”
Our conversation took place between April and June, via messages on Twitter, email envoys, and a video call where she read from one of her current projects ~ a memoir intercut with scenes from the life of the Romanian poet Paul Celan. On the call, Alina was animated, articulate and always thoughtful, pausing to put the right words in the right order for each reply. When I ask how she manages to get so much writing done while in the throes of domesticity, she laughs and tells me she covets scraps of time ~ a few moments in the car or before a doctor’s appointment, and in the spacious silence that falls over her house once everyone else is asleep.
ML: How long does it take you to write a poem? Can you describe your process…how many iterations are there before it feels finished?
AS: It depends on the poem — some are first-draft, and they emerge very sure of what they want to do and how to do it (like “Maggie, We Keep Driving,” which literally grew from a tweet) while others sit around for a long time and ask questions (like “Facts About Stalin’s Daughter” which pretended it wanted to be an essay before deciding erasure was part of the portrait). Often it’s the indolent, lolling poems which turn out to be my favorites precisely because I’ve been forced to engage them with a sort of fury that verges on frustration, and there is something they want that won’t go away. I admire their persistence.
ML: What time of day/year do you write best? What circumstances are most ideal? Do you have a routine?
AS: In my dreams, I have a routine — but that’s not how life plays out. Sometimes I have time to write and all I want to do is read. Other times I want desperately to write, the words are foaming in my head like a shitty milkshake, and there is no way to carve that time into the needs of family. I write best when I’m frothy, and when I’m not frothy, I take notes.
ML: If you could only write in one genre, which would you choose & why?
AS: I’d write in whatever genre Anne Carson, Eliot Weinberger, Marguerite Duras, and Benjamin Fondane use. I would write in that one.
ML: How does speaking another language affect your work as a writer?
AS: In American , my primary, everyday language, something stays missing — there is a perpetual desperation to be placed, whereas, speaking Romanian, hearing Romanian (my first language, or the language that birthed and raised me) feels complete. It’s mysteries and worries are mine, or they resonate without annotation. So Romanian is a context, while American is constantly seeking its context, or creating it, tying little boot-straps to language, inventing families and community from corporate discourse, trying to make itself complete.
Despite the loneliness, other languages give me options, alternatives, realities about the US which aren’t accessible from inside this culture with countless commercialized words to designate “fun.” Olga (perhaps flying as in a Chagall painting) explains this best in her novel Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft), in a section titled “The Tongue Is the Strongest Muscle,” where the narrator marvels over monolingual mammals:
“It’s hard to imagine but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or turn to in moments of doubt.
How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, All the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the buttons in the elevators! — are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths….. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them. They are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.”
The irony here, of course, is that English has conquered everything — and yet its speakers have nothing for themselves. I love this description of psychological colonialism. The lonely predation of the powerful.
ML: Who has had the most profound influence on your thought life and your writing?
AS: A question I love but can only answer for the instant, Michelle: I get fascinated by a thinker and devour all their work and then wrestle alone with it, often returning later, but always moving on, accruing new tin-cans to attach to the loud vehicle of this brain.
ML: Were you raised in a home that could be considered religious? (The reason for this question relates to Celan as I have noticed that writers raised with some kind of formal religion seem to carry a melodious, incantory sensibility into their work, however they define their spiritual lives in adulthood.)
AS: Yes and no. Culturally Orthodox rituals were important to my parents, so we did all the feasts (and my parents fasted) and monks came to live in our basement. The Romanian Republic of Alabama was more mystic than politically religious, and my mom particularly loved reading the diaries of holy fools and saints, that was a sort of constant emotional and aesthetic currency in our home. The living room walls were covered in icons and paintings of nude women laying on chairs: there was no tension or conflict, there was no Puritanism. In that sense, religion didn’t tie up with ideology, and both my parents believed strongly that church and state were terrible in bed together, a perversion of both.
ML: What sparks your creative pieces?
AS: Reading. Reading and notebooking. The more I do either, the more I tend to write. But art and music also spark things. The recent tempo-marking sonnets developed from a sudden interest in why composers used tempo-markings in musical scores, and how markings narrowed or expanded the space of performance in the way a line break or an italic or a low-syllable line count changes how a poem is read aloud. The audible is alterable by subtle shifts in signification.
Take Erik Satie’s Vexations, for example, a one-page composition which doesn’t specify an instrument, and offers a short bass theme with four presentations. The notation is enharmonic, and Satie doesn’t offer any time signatures (which creates a very broad interpretive work for the performer). Satie inscribed the following on it: In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities. Jon Cage interpreted this to mean this page of music should be played 840 times in succession for one performance, which amounted to 18 hours of playing. So we have what Satie wrote — the score, the poem, the text — and we have what others made of it, or how that form took shape in readers and performers. This is the rabbit-hole I nestled inside when writing those sonnets, a few of which were recently published in Sublunary Review.
ML: Do you show your work to others before it’s done?
AS: In the past, my husband was my only first reader, but this year I’ve been lucky to discover a writing group that is precious and dear to me and I’m not sure how I would have navigated pandemic without them.
ML: Who do you read for pleasure? Favorite films, music, art?
Everything. All of it. Insatiably, unrepentantly, voraciously. Everything I can find, the weirder, the better. A few recent fascinations: Cedar Sigo’s poetics, Mark Fisher’s lectures on capitalist realism, Jason McCall’s poetry, Giuseppe Morselli’s fiction alongside Henri Lefebrve’s Marxist sociologies, revolutionist Vera Figner, Marianne Hirsch’s writings on postmemory, Kaja Silverman, Mahmoud Darwish, Mihai Sebastian, Dinu Lipatti, libation vessels, mysterious parcels over time, odes to snug boots, Machado de Assis’ hippo, Celan (and all the intersections with Waldrop, Bachmann, etc), Caroline Ebeid’s exploration of MRIs, things large and small in Romanian, including textiles, photos, ghosts of the homeland in my head.
ML: This feels like the perfect place to conclude~ with your evocative phrase “ghosts of the homeland in my head”.
Alina Ștefănescu’s poetry collection, dor, won the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize, and is forthcoming in 2021. Her writing can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, World Literature Today, Kenyon Review, and others. You can find her here: https://www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
