Various Paradigms

Various Paradigms is a column by Ann DeWitt about words, art, film, politics and poetics. The title is a tribute to conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s typographic texts.  Weiner once wrote, “Bits and Pieces Put Together To Present A Semblance of A Whole.”  This column hopes to follow in that tradition of engagement, intimacy and experiment.

Douglas A. Martin in Conversation with Darcey Steinke

“She was my teacher,” I say happily of Darcey Steinke.  That was 1999, and she had published three novels (Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, and Jesus Saves). In the time since then and that we have been a part of each other’s lives, she has produced three more books (Milk, the memoir Easter Everywhere, the forthcoming Sister Golden Hair).

Our first night of class, she said simply, clear-eyed, how you never knew what work of yours was going to take off. Later in the semester, just as frankly to someone’s objection to a story on grounds of “too sad,” she countered how if you couldn’t come to terms with the fact that life sometimes is, you might as well just pack it in. I remember, too, a fortuitous encounter with her in Chelsea, her daughter still in a stroller, and helping Darcey carry her up the steps of an art gallery. This year that same daughter starts Bard College.

Darcey has been connected in some way to almost everything good in my life.  She has blurbed me three times, and when asked if I would interview her on the occasion of her new novel out this October from Tin House Books, I rose to the occasion. Sister Golden Hair is her masterpiece.

In the spirit of Various Paradigms, what follows are “bits and pieces put together to create the semblance of a whole.” The topics following were suggested through both an excising and selecting of a many hours conversation (four? plus a stretch of a half-hour or so of recording discussing her desk’s origin, spirituality, and ritual in writing and the raising of a child, ex’s, etc., lost due to my fingers hitting the wrong button a martini or so in) and digressions on the back porch of Matthew’s on Main, Sullivan County, NY.

Thanks to Ann DeWitt for hosting this exchange.

—Douglas A. Martin

I.  THE FEMALE NUMINOUS

DOUGLAS MARTIN: Say it again?

DARCEY STEINKE: In a perfect world, it would be incorporated with religion more. The sort of moment filled with grace.

DM: A moment of coming into your power as a woman?

DS: It’s not a full gorgeous feeling but these little tiny feelings. You have to track them down.  That would be what my...