GH O TI

f i sh

Issue No. 1

Satisfied with Havoc

Often referred to as the poet laureate of the Arkansas Delta, Jo McDougall has consistently raised the bar for southern writers with stunning collections of visually mesmerizing, and yet subtle portraits of struggle in her collections From Darkening Porches, Towns Facing Railroads, The Woman in the Next Booth, Dirt, and her latest, Satisfied With Havoc. I first encountered her writing in the film, Emerson County Shaping Dream, a collection of vignettes inspired by her poems. Her poetry is at once sparse and richly textured, and it stays with you. It invokes the bleak landscape of the Arkansas delta, the lives of rural families tied to the land who dream of escape. She was gracious enough to talk with us over the phone about her life and her work.

G: As far as I understand it, you lived on a rice farm in Dewitt, Arkansas, until you were forty? And then went back to school to get your MFA.

JM: I grew up on a rice farm near DeWitt, Arkansas, married a rice farmer and lived on a farm near Stuttgart, Arkansas, and then went back to school to get my MFA degree when I was in my forties.   

G: What led you to leave Stuttgart?

JM: We left to pursue careers other than farming--I to attend graduate school at the U. of Ark. and my husband to try his hand at various pursuits which led to the position he's in now as a commercial real estate appraiser.  Eventually we lost our farm in the 80's.  There's an ironic story here--our son, who was raised on the farm, is now renting the land he once grew up on because when the bank foreclosed and the farm was auctioned at the courthouse steps, well, a man said he wanted it but on one condition, he said, "That McDougall boy stays on."

G: Your son still farms on the same land?

JM: He rents it but he still gets to work it, and he added some other acreage.

G: Was it the loss of the farm that led you to go back to school?

JM: No, I had already gotten my MFA.  The loss led me to consider teaching as a full-time pursuit.  I was teaching in Louisiana at what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe.  I stayed there a year; then I went to Pittsburg State University.

G: So what led you to go back to school to study writing?

JM: I had always written poetry, but I had not had training. Then, in the late 70's I heard Miller Williams and Jim Whitehead read in Little Rock and I thought; I want to study with these men.

G: And you had published work already, right?

JM: Yes I had, quite a bit. I had published my first book when I was 27 or 28. A chapbook long out of print. But I didn't have much direction. I was living in Stuttgart, a small town in Arkansas with a population of something like 10,000 or 11,000. I had no one to be a mentor. I read all the anthologies I could and immersed myself in poetry, but I knew I needed direction.

G: So it seems like you had probably developed your own voice pretty well at that point, more or less?

JM: I had developed to a point. I had always had a strong love of imagery but I tended to ramble. Studying with the writers at the University of Arkansas, I learned to cut the fat out of my work. Going for the MFA was the right thing for me to do at that time in my writing life. It was the best thing I ever did, especially the reading--a degree at the University of Arkansas is a sixty hour program – much of which is reading in the tradition. That's what enables you to teach - it gives you the reading background every writer needs. It was the best thing I ever did, especially the reading--a degree at the University of Arkansas.

G: You were co-director of the creative writing program at Pittsburg state University in Pittsburg, Kansas?

JM: Yes, and I loved my time there.  At PSU I think I really developed as a teacher. I was there eleven years, taking an emergency leave of absence in '96. I left to come back to Arkansas to be near my children. My 35 year old son had had a stroke in '96 and my daughter was very ill with cancer. Then I took an early retirement in 1998. We stayed in Arkansas for seven years. Then my husband got a job in Kansas City so we moved back to Kansas and I am now devoting myself to full time writing.

G: Now, in moving from AR to Kansas, did you find that it changed your style? It's quite a different landscape.

JM: I think it changed my style for the better. I started paying more attention to the landscape. I very much admired the people of Kansas. They are a very self sufficient people. Southerners are more talkative and dramatic and tend to celebrate the strange. I like the strange but I'm also attracted to the stoicism of Midwestern attitudes. I became more grounded in the landscape. I think living in the Midwest has influenced me to write tighter poems.

G: As a teacher, I imagine, you try to expose your students to writing that will affect them and inspire them. What have you read that changed the way you wrote?

JM: In my early grad school days, Miller Williams introduced me to a Chilean poet named Nicanor Parra. Miller translated a book of his called Poems and Antipoems. It was very sparse, very un-poetic. Of course, it was poetic in the imagery and pacing, but it was not trying to be poetry. Very clean, spare and very ironic. Parra was a large influence. Emily Dickinson's use of slant rhymes influenced me. I use slant rhyme a lot. Jim Whitehead with his perfect modern sonnets and his dedication to craft. James Dickey, especially the tone and subject matter. I can't pretend to write like Dickey; it's not my style, but when he talks about boys he knew in high school and his youth, I really understand it. I subscribe to more literary journals than I can afford. I want to know what's going on around me.

I forgot to mention Flannery O'Connor as an influence. I love short stories. I've written many, not published any. When I'm in a poetry slump I read O'Connor. I'm a great admirer of her. She speaks to my southern roots.

G: I know you've done the film, Emerson County Shaping Dream; are you branching out from poetry into other genres?

JM: I'm working on a memoir about growing up on a rice farm in Southern Arkansas during and after WWII. The title is Daddy's Money. It deals with my paternal grandparents entering this country from Belgium and becoming rice farmers. The memoir ends with the bitter, acrimonious settling of my father's estate (it took six years), the bonds formed between me and my children and grandchildren during that time, and the death of my daughter at age 42.  It comes full circle in that my daughter wears, in her casket, some of my mother's jewelry that I had fought with my sister to obtain.  I've done several, several drafts. I've probably got two or three more drafts to do. But I finally got the courage to send out chapters to magazines. I'm ready for the feedback. I've spent the major part of two fellowships at the McDowell Colony on it. About four to six years on it.

The film (Emerson County Shaping Dream) came about because a student of mine saw the potential in my work for the stage, as dramatic monologues and scenes and what have you. So he and I approached the drama director at Pittsburg and put it together. Towns Facing Railroads was multi-media, consisting of poetry, art, dancing and acting. After that performance at Pittsburg State University, Maxwell became interested using my poetry in a film.

So I never intended to do a film, but I was very happy with it. One attraction of course is that you reach more people. It's short, 15 minutes long. Poetry students could use it in a class environment. My main motivation was to reach a wider audience.

G: Have you tried to publish short stories?

JM: I haven't pursued it. I've been so caught up in poetry. I've been to the McDowell Colony four times and each time I take my fiction manuscripts along with all the other work. But poetry commands almost all my time. I revise and revise and revise. It takes me at least four years to get a book of poetry together. Every writer works at his or her own pace, and I'm very seldom pleased with my work.

G: We're really blown away by your work. I hate to stroke your ego...

JM: Go ahead.

G: But with your poems, there's heart there, there's something behind them. You can tell that someone is in control. That they're going somewhere.

JM: Well, thank you.  I think the writers at the University of Arkansas helped me learn that control, and I've been working on it ever since.  I suppose many writers survive without a mentor, but I found one at the exact time I needed one.  Of course, I'm not always in control--you don't see what goes in the wastebasket. 

 The writers at Arkansas also helped me find my voice. But as it should be with education, my study there was just the beginning.  I find that now I'm very much concerned with scenes and monologues, how they shape the poem's story.  In telling the story, I think it's important to remember the dramatic situation--who, where, when, etc.  And, for me, the "where," the sense of place, is vital. 

I want a poem that tells me some kind of human story I can take home in the palm of my hand.  But we have to remember that poetry is made up of many mansions, many schools of thought.   Poetry is like religion; everyone's striving for the same thing, to understand the mystery.  All striving for the same thing.

**END**

- CL Bledsoe

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