“After the illness” and “Someday we will talk about other things” by Shea Tuttle appeared in Issue 43 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this pair of poems.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people who could stay home were mainly just staying home, I spent a lot of nights lying awake imagining everyone I loved on a ventilator. During the days, underslept, scrambled by worry, and overstimulated from the competing sounds of everyone’s virtual school, I couldn’t dream of writing anything with a rigorous throughline. I found myself returning to writing poetry, both because fragmentation and tangential thoughts were welcome, and because I needed a way to log some of the strangeness of those days. These poems came out of that exploration, though one of them was written almost two years after COVID-19 arrived on the scene.
What was the most difficult part of these particular pieces?
Both of these poems were written in very difficult seasons for me, and both required the work of imagining beyond my current reality.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Can I recommend two? Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us, by Rachel Aviv, and Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Curtis Sittenfeld has been my writer crush for years. I’d love to meet her for anxious midwestern lady decaf coffee or tea.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a novel about an anxious midwestern lady who is undone by the Access Hollywood tape.
Our thanks to Shea for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “After the illness” and “Someday we will talk about other things” here.
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