The Humble & the Glorious: A Conversation with Iridescent Pigeons author Candace Walsh
something flying fast
iridescent pigeons
cloudy future flocks
a peacock butterfly
from “Wild and Frail and Beautiful”
One of the magical elements of literature is its transformative power. Good storytelling, whether through prose or poetry, can change us, and this is the mission of writers like Candace Walsh. Candace’s poetry pushes back against the power structures of capitalist society and celebrates the beauty of the discounted and dismissed. She is a multigenre writer who just completed her doctorate in creative writing at Ohio University whose work speaks to the myriad incarnations of women and the people and worlds we love.
Candace Walsh’s debut poetry chapbook, Iridescent Pigeons, will be published by Yellow Arrow Publishing in July 2024. Today, we are excited to introduce Candace along with the exquisite cover of Iridescent Pigeons. Reserve your copy at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/iridescent-pigeons-paperback and make sure to leave some love for Candace here or on social media. This collection reflects on the many facets of love and highlights the elements that are often overlooked and mischaracterized. It serves as a restoration project by articulating the everyday unsaid of love, not just in romantic contexts, but as a friend, sister, daughter, dog parent, wildflower admirer, and mother. Iridescent Pigeons is rich with layers of theme and language that call for Candace’s words to be read again and again.
Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, recently engaged in a conversation with Candace, in which they bonded over a love of languages and the natural world. They discussed the impact of powerful emotions, life experiences, and perspectives on writing.
Who are some female-identified writers that have inspired you and your poetry?
Ada Limón is right at the top of my list. Whenever I want to write a poem, I read one of her poems, and it puts my brain in the creative groove. I love the complexity underneath the conversational tone of her pieces. There is so much working under the surface that is transformative. Every time I read her poetry something shifts inside of me. I also really admire how spare her lines are as I am more on the wordy side as a writer.
I also think about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West as lovers and contemporaries—and about how poetic their letters to each other were. One of the poems in the chapbook was inspired by a line in one of the letters Virginia wrote to Vita in October 1927: “I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds.” I used it as a title. It felt like a portal into a poem about longing.
I love the lines you pulled from Virginia Woolf’s writing. I enjoyed reading your cento “Wild and Frail and Beautiful” and that phrase “iridescent pigeons,” the name of this collection. It is such an intriguing title.
I’m glad you think so. The title Iridescent Pigeons, a phrase from Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, is important because I want my poems to speak to the overlooked beauty in the world. A pigeon is considered, in places like New York City, a ‘rat with wings.’ They are seen as humble birds, but if you look at them outside of dominant perceptions, you will see so much beauty. I think most good poetry will encourage us or lead us toward seeing things in a new light. It can be wonderful to see things previously dismissed—in terms of the ways that dominant cultural beliefs shape the way we feel about ourselves and power structures having to do with race, gender, and sexuality—in their glory and their beauty. For me, that is what this title represents, and I am so glad it came out of this cento from Virginia Woolf’s novel.
What prompted you to experiment with the different forms in this chapbook?
The first form I started experimenting with is the Sapphic stanza. As someone with Greek heritage and someone who is queer, I got on a Sappho kick a couple of years ago. We see her poems mainly in fragments because of what has been lost, which is so poignant. It also encourages us to fill in the blanks, and it reminds me that whenever we are reading anything we fill in the blanks with our own subject position, point of view, and experience—what resonates. This speaks to the pluriversality of what we share as humans, which is so often obscured by so many cultural beliefs that separate and divide us. I took on the form as a challenge. It is an Aeolic verse, of only four lines; three lines of 11 syllables each, and a fourth line with five syllables. Its meter comprises trochees and dactyls, and I liked the idea of stringing words together in a way that mimics this ancient pattern and rhythm of stresses. When you are listening to a different language you notice the stresses land differently than you might expect. Maybe questions don’t have the same lilt. As someone who has learned a small to intermediate amount of a lot of languages just because I love languages, when I started to learn Greek, it felt very primordial to me. I’ve loved listening to Greek; it is so different and yet also there’s the familiarities of the cognates. Writing Sapphic stanzas put me in a relationship with a queer female lineage of desire-led writing. And it also put me in touch with my heritage. To be able to create a Sapphic stanza that was not made up of fragments was healing and restorative.
How did becoming a parent affect your relationship with your own parents and family? Do you feel this is reflected in your writing?
I think a lot of parents get freshly angered or disappointed by how easy it is to give certain things to their kids that they didn’t get. In many cases what you didn’t get, especially if we have developed awareness, can seem so simple. You want to ask, “Why couldn’t you do it for me?” Before I had children I told myself to get over it. But when you have your own child in your arms and the love is so huge, it just becomes so easy to sacrifice and not put yourself first. It feels so natural to be present. That’s when that wave of what needs to be healed anew hits, even if you’ve done therapy. That was the case for me.
On the other hand, I would also catch myself doing or saying things, usually when I was feeling a lot of emotion, that were exactly like what I didn’t want to say or do. You realize how much programming happens through being parented. When you have unresolved trauma from verbal and physical abuse, again, even though I did a great deal of therapy I had to learn the importance of noticing anger building and make choices while still feeling grounded. I think intergenerational abuse occurs because people don’t necessarily receive the skills in our culture or remediation around those experiences. For parents, specifically, I think that needs to have more emphasis.
I feel this impacts writing in two ways. One, metacognition around emotional experiences is a positive thing for writers because we’re observing, and we can have a clearer position in terms of capturing those things. It gives us a tiny bit of distance. Secondly, these relationships involve such profound emotional connections. I began writing love poems, mostly atrocious ones, as a teenager. Strong feelings and powerful emotional experiences have always been catalysts for me to start writing a poem. It just followed naturally that I would write about the experiences of parenthood. However, I didn’t write a lot of poetry about parenthood because I felt slightly shamed by the ways that parenthood was discounted. Motherhood, especially, was not seen as worthy of writing poetry about and I didn’t want to be overly sentimental. I have maybe six or so poems about being a mother and the experience of having children. I’m sure that I could go back and write more now with distance, but I wish I had written more back then. I wish I hadn’t been so affected by external attitudes around parenthood and whether it was a worthy topic for poetry.
I wrote poetry very enthusiastically and passionately from junior high through college. I was ambitious about my poems, but they generally were love poems or frustrated love poems or heartbreak poems. I dated this guy in my early 20s who was also into poetry. I was 21 and he was about 27 or 28, and I looked up to him. At one point he wanted to read my poetry, and I pulled out my folder of poems and he said, “You know, this is just about guys that you were with.” He just got jealous and petty and, honestly, pathetic. But I felt shamed by that, and it shut me down. It took me a long time to reclaim my voice. When I was going through my divorce from my first marriage, I began writing poems again because that was a breakthrough emotional moment. There was so much to process.
In grad school at Ohio University, I took a poetry class as part of the curriculum with the poet J. Allyn Rosser who wrote one of the chapbook’s endorsements. In that class, the floodgates opened, and I began writing poetry about all sorts of things. Most of the poems in this chapbook come from that class and from my subsequent reengagement with poetry. It felt like coming home again. I got my degree in fiction, but it was wonderful to sustain and nurture my poetry alongside the study of fiction. I feel like they’re very complimentary because of poetry’s attention to the sentence or the line.
I really like how, now, there is a lot more of that conversation around parenting and intergenerational trauma.
Melissa: It leads to people doing the work, learning, and growing, and making necessary changes in the family dynamic and society. The conversation about motherhood and how valid or important it is, is very poignant. I homeschool my kids and right now that’s basically my job. I am a writer but, as for many, it is not necessarily a paying job. It has been difficult to frequently encounter the question, “But what do you do?” There has been progress toward seeing stay-at-home moms or parents as productive members of society, but it can be hard to line that up in my mind with being a feminist and the judgment I can receive from others. There are so many hard things about all the aspects of motherhood however you do it, and I very much connect to it as a theme in creative writing. I’m glad that you are feeling a push to write more about this important experience. There are so many women and mothers who need and want to hear these stories about parenting, especially in connection to issues with our own parents and childhoods and trying to do better now. It is a very important topic for writing, whether prose or poetry, and it aligns very well with the mission of a press like Yellow Arrow.
Candace: Feminism very much involves doing what you want and what you choose to do with your life. That’s a feminist choice because it’s the one that you’re making and invested in. It is unfortunate that working in the home and raising children is not valued or recognized for what it is, and I think it has to do with patriarchy and shame. What has helped me is to see how other countries, in Europe, for instance, do recognize childbearing and rearing. Their benefits extend to paying parents to stay home, giving them generous leave. At least we can be validated by what’s happening someplace else. At least we know it’s possible. It’s not just theoretical. They’re living the theory, and we can be inspired and heartened by that.
Melissa: Yes, that is amazing, and I hope that in the future we might take some steps toward that in our country.
I love her: curved, swelled, stacked, arched, sloping;
Her satiation-slackened, hunger-unencumbered lips
Allude to pleasures undeferred. I fall,
And soft she takes me in. Sly lusts so unaligned with life-denying:
Praise them.
from “Bowed Beauty”
You include many intriguing and beautiful phrases throughout this collection. Is there anything specific that impacts your word choice in poetry?
I am a shameless thesaurus user. I recently read an article in The New York Times by Susan Dominus about how women have been deprived of menopause treatments based on one faulty study. It can be a miserable experience. She quotes a writer friend who said that with menopause, she consistently couldn’t think of the right word, so she stopped writing. And I’m like, thesaurus, hello, you know? You don’t get any points for not using a thesaurus. It’s a great place to find the word that’s on the tip of your tongue.
I’m also attentive to rhythm. A key thing for me is sound. I love individual words and will even personify them a bit. I connect to them in the same way I love different paint colors or song lyrics or flavors. I choose words based on precision and the charge or novelty they bring. I want to get underutilized words back out there in my writing; maybe they’ll gain a little more significance. We have a rich language with a lot of words in English. I was speaking with somebody who teaches in Denmark, and she said a lot of creative writers who are Danish want to learn how to write creatively in English because there are just so many more words to use than in the Danish language. I thought that was interesting. We have this wealth of words; it leads me to be choosy about them. It has to hit right. In a way it’s kind of like picking out which gems to set in a tiara, on display; we are curating something magnificent. I’m not somebody who is spare like Hemingway. I am about the exhibition of words and how they look next to each other and work together.
Your collection is full of love in many forms and timelines. Can you speak about how you feel love responds or transforms to changes in our lives and relationships? Why do you feel this is important to write about?
You can’t change anyone, and we shouldn’t try, but love is a very transformative power in terms of organically eliciting the desire to change. When that happens with somebody who is a positive influence, it’s a really good improvement to one’s life. When you’re around people who are negatively influencing each other, you can feel that, too, and oftentimes families will have a mix of positive and negative influence. I think that everyone, every human, is spiritual and feels a gravitational pull toward changing or growing because of love. It’s not that people aren’t good enough the way they are, but love is like the sun, and we are like plants that turn toward the sun over the course of a day. Heliotropism! One of my favorite fancy words. Love is like that, but it can also be heartbreaking. What are we left with at the end of an unsatisfying relationship, or when we give up on people changing to treat us better? There are gifts in that reckoning, healing, and grieving that my poems hint at.
I started out writing about people I had crushes on when I was 13 and 14, but the love I write about has moved from being simply romantic to being about parenthood, life experience, friendships, and nature. There’s a diversity of kinds of love that our culture does not recognize or support. I feel my poetry in the last five years has been a journey toward recognizing and amplifying those kinds of loves. It takes away the over-reliance on romantic love. Friendship is not given the attention it deserves. We know how to deal with a romantic breakup, but our culture lacks wisdom about friendship breakups. A lot of times, friendship breakups happen because people don’t know how to navigate conflict or end a friendship gracefully. That was something that came up in my poems as well as the poems on love of nature.
I wasn’t into nature growing up, but in the last 10 years or so, I have found that nature in southeast Ohio has inspired me. I never expected that, so it’s wonderful to notice a new area of growth. I think about Robin Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, in which she mentions “species loneliness,” which has to do with not knowing the names of plants or animals. It’s like being at a party where you don’t know anyone’s name. I have an app that tells me the names of plants if I take a picture, and that’s been a wonderful ongoing journey for me. One of the things I love about summer in southeast Ohio is that when I go for a walk, it seems like I see a new flower every day. Because I’ve been taking this walk for five years, I’ll recognize that it’s red clover time, and then that bumps up against daisy time, which leads to other flowers having their moment. That’s very much in the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Romantic Friend in the 21st Century,” with the surprise lilies. I still see them come up, and I’m still wondering why there’s that one particular rectangle and who planted them. I have a relationship to that road and the plants that grow along it. I can see that this year there’s a whole bunch more red clover than in previous years and I wonder why that is. Different plants flourish or not depending on factors that a scientist would know, but I love the mystery and surprise of it.
And then even romantic love has under-examined phases. We all love a good romcom, and descriptions of romantic love are often connected to dreamy, imaginative, archetypal, escapist levels of consciousness. But new relationship energy lessens, as do our projections on people we’re infatuated with. When those projections eventually fall, we have to decide if we are still committed to the relationship and still love that person. As we grow, we move away from the Hallmark version of love to the nuances, commitment, and decision of love as a verb, not something that descends on us like being bewitched. Acknowledging and honoring mature, settled love opens us up to other kinds of love that are not as intoxicating and transformative, but gentle, subtle, steady, and interesting if you pay attention.
Again, we were one, paired by the sight
like mushrooms springing from the same mycelial net;
glinting within the beats
of distant forests’ hearts.
And so the redeeming lesson longing wrought:
To hell with the illusion of apart.
To hell with the myth of distance begetting endings.
from “I Wandered Lonely as a Romantic Friend in the 21st Century”
Do you have any rituals or schedules you follow when it comes to reading and writing?
I like to walk beforehand; that really helps me. I’ve found journaling important to clear clutter from my mind, helping me focus on writing. I’m not too precious about when I write. I’ve written on the couch while my wife watches football on mute. I can write in the car as a passenger. I love writing on airplanes; being above everything feels freeing. I don’t have a strict schedule, but I write most days. I have regular Zoom appointments to write with my friend Anna Chotlos (who created the pigeon cover art for the book). The body doubling adds accountability and inspiration to keep going. I was working full time when I did my low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and I didn’t socialize very much for two years; weekends were for writing, sometimes nights. I’d randomly wake up at 2 a.m. and write if I couldn’t sleep.
I think it’s a good practice to be able to just write as opportunity strikes. There will be times when you don’t feel like writing, but you sit down and just write, and you realize you can create something great. The myth of needing to feel a flash of inspiration is related to the concept of a genius writer, typically a white guy, effortlessly creating masterpieces. This is an oppressive story writers have received and carry around until we put it down. Ultimately, it’s wonderful to feel that flash of inspiration, but waiting for it to descend is comparable to only writing when it’s raining—silly. We need to reclaim creativity from this romanticized notion, much as we need to with love.
Can you describe the process of creating the cover to represent your chapbook and what led to the final design?
When my book was accepted for publication, which was the most beautiful email to receive, I was on Zoom with Anna. Years before she had given me a drawing of a house finch that I framed and put on my wall. She is a wonderful artist. I love the vibe of that house finch drawing, and so I asked her to draw pigeons for the cover and she agreed and she spent months sketching pigeons, noticing how hard it was to draw them. I wanted a pigeon with the right attitude, which she captured beautifully. The cover pigeon does not have low self-esteem. It is rocking its iridescent neck feathers and looking out at the world with intention. I love it and I love the journey it took us on together.
My wife, Laura André, is a gifted graphic designer, and Yellow Arrow was very generous and open to having Laura design the cover. We decided on one strong pigeon with a watercolor background, fitting the pigeon’s watercolor palette. The colors reminded me of the sublime in art and the northern lights. The collaboration with Laura and Anna, thanks to Kapua Iao’s (Yellow Arrow’s editor-in-chief) and Alexa Laharty’s (Yellow Arrow’s creative director) generosity, made it so special.
What drew you to submit your collection to Yellow Arrow?
I put together a chapbook manuscript last summer while procrastinating writing my dissertation, after realizing I’d accumulated enough poetry for a chapbook. I looked for calls for submissions on the CLMP and Poets & Writers lists. I resonated with Yellow Arrow’s focus on women’s and women-identified people’s experiences, as my work wouldn’t be coming up against the barriers of mainstream or male-dominated presses’ devaluing of my experience as a woman, mother, wife, and daughter. Yellow Arrow Publishing offered an efflorescent sense of welcome.
As a multigenre writer, putting together this collection honored my poet self. The beautiful thing about claiming a multigenre writer identity is that poetry feeds into fiction, fiction feeds into nonfiction, and every other permutation. We are better writers when we write in as many genres as we’re inspired to write in.
Do you have any advice for women writers on creating and submitting work?
Submitting work is a numbers game. It’s crucial to have a regular practice of sending out work. One of the things that made me feel really inspired to put together this chapbook collection was that many of my poems were previously published in journals I admire. With my fiction and creative nonfiction, I tend to go toward more of a mid- or top-tier publication, but I was less choosy with poetry submissions. Sometimes it would be in a journal where it is very competitive and has a hipster vibe, like HAD. Other times it would be a brand-new journal, like the Australian Lovers Literary Journal, where I placed a Sapphic stanza. I led with my heart and saw submitting my poems as my fun play area. New writers often feel discouraged by rejections, but most successful writers face many rejections. You might even question what you are doing, why you are doing it: “Am I not good enough?” As somebody who has been a literary journal editor now for three years, there are so many factors that go into whether your pieces are accepted or not. It could be the mood the person is in, that the journal already just accepted something very similar, or that two editors are having a power struggle and are shooting down each other’s favorite stuff. Don’t give up!
One thing I find really helpful is tracking submissions in an Excel spreadsheet, which is funny because we don’t usually associate creative work with spreadsheets, but it helps me stay organized and motivated. When I get an encouraging decline, I highlight it, and I can visually see which places want to see more of my work. Most successful, published writers have gotten dozens of rejections for every acceptance. It is really helpful to try to collect rejections because if you collect a hundred rejections, you have a higher chance of your work getting accepted. And it’s important to continue to revise as you’re submitting. My short story “Trimester” was accepted by The Greensboro Review after over a year of sending it out. I think it collected 39 rejections, but I love that story and I was not going to give up on it. But I also workshopped and revised it multiple times.
Time can be a beautiful revision partner. As we change and mature, we are also changing our position to a piece, and we can bring that back to a revision. The 39 rejections of “Trimester” coexisted with me, making it better and better, stronger and stronger. After it was published, a prominent agent reached out after reading it. And so now when my novel is finished, I’m going to send it to them. If I hadn’t persevered, that couldn’t have happened. The best-case scenario of getting your work published is when it opens doors like that. Persistence, Excel spreadsheets, volume, and reframing rejections as just a part of success. It’s still hard not to take it personally, and sometimes I’ll still get a wave of discomfort or pain, but I just breathe through it, and I think about my spreadsheet.
Do you have any future projects you would like to share with our readers?
I’m finishing up my novel, which is called Everything We Know About Love is Wrong. It’s about two women who find out that they were switched at birth in the hospital. One ended up in a wealthy family and one ended up in a working-class family. It follows how they respond to this earth-shaking news. I’ve done a lot of research on real-life people who have gone through this phenomenon, and it’s been fascinating. It has a lot to do, for me, with privilege, ethnicity, chance, familial bonds, the culture of a family, and other ways that the circumstances under which we are raised affect us as human beings. What you can change and what you can’t, what can be altered and what is innate. I have also been writing craft essays for years about the intersection of the writer’s craft and social justice. I’m pulling those essays together into a book called Craft Re: Form. Craft can be experienced as something elitist or part of gatekeeping in the writing community, but I’m all about democratizing lessons of craft because they really do teach you to be a better writer, in areas like characterization, treatment of time, sensory description, a structure. These are all things that anyone can learn about, and it just so happens that writers who don’t go through MFA programs may not have a consciousness of the craft. The more conscious you are of it, the more your writing can improve. My published craft essays, along with other published work, can be found at candacewalsh.com. I’ve also been writing creative nonfiction essays along the way and would like to publish an essay collection in a couple of years.
Finally, what is one unexpected or overlooked thing about you, you’d like us to know?
I was hit by a car when I was 12. I was very lucky to survive with only a bump on my left outer thigh that most people don’t notice. I allude to it in the poem “Things I Broke,” which was written during a Roi Fainéant Press poetry-writing Zoom party. That journal published my chapbook poem “Inside the Lip.” The phrase “Things I Broke” was one of their prompts.
You can find out more about Candace and follow her publication news on her website candacewalsh.com and Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @candacewalsh. You can reserve your copy of Iridescent Pigeons today from Yellow Arrow Publishing at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/iridescent-pigeons-paperback. The collection will be released in July 2024.
Thank you, Melissa and Candace, for taking the time to create and share your beautiful exchange. Edits and additions were made to this interview after the initial conversation.
Melissa Nunez makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of south Texas, where she enjoys exploring and photographing the local wild with her homeschooling family. She writes an anime column at The Daily Drunk Mag and is a prose reader for Moss Puppy Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and an interviewer for Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her work on her website melissaknunez.com and follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
Candace Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing from Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include, for poetry, California Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD; for fiction, The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review; and for creative nonfiction, March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages. Her craft essays and book reviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review.
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