Camille Dungy: I completely love that after all these years of talking, our books are coming out in the same month. And the last word in both titles is love.

Sean Hill: It’s pretty awesome.

CD: This is your third book? So you do a book a decade, basically?

SH: Basically. When The Negroes Send Their Love was in production, I was moved to reflect on the fact that Blood Ties & Brown Liquor was the book of my twenties; Dangerous Goods was the book of my thirties. This current book is the book of my forties. I would like to work a little faster to see what I write in this decade of my life. I’m feeling a sense of urgency now.

CD:America, A Love Story is my first book of poetry in nine years. There’s something about taking that kind of time. Right? To live. To watch, to see, to let the poems grow. But also, circling back, taking the time to live! To do all the things that we do that aren’t being writers. For both of us, these books hold a lot of lived experience. They explore what it means to have a kind of daily approximation of survival in this country.

SH: Yes, trying to live and do a bit better than survive. This book tracks my moving from Minnesota to Alaska and becoming a father and moving from Alaska to Georgia and from there to Montana in the span of six or seven years. There’s also living during two Obama administrations, and then Trump’s, then Biden’s, and now this current Trump administration. That’s a lot of life happening, some of which I wrote about.

Years before that, in 2007, I was visiting my family in Milledgeville, Georgia for Christmas, and I took a tour of the Old Governor’s Mansion there which piqued my interest. That led to more tours and archival research and eventually the poems in the Mansion Suite section of the book. But I didn’t write the first poem in that series until 2015. I ruminated for a while.

CD: Were you born and raised in Georgia? Was this place already in your imagination?

SH: Yeah, I first went to the mansion on an elementary school field trip. I remember the guide saying that slaves made the bricks the mansion is built from, and then it was all about the great statesmen who lived there. In 2007, there was different information presented. Matt Davis, the assistant curator of education, and his team were working on a tour that focused on the lives of the enslaved African Americans who worked and lived on the estate. It was a different tour than the one that I had in the mid-80s.

After I finished Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, it felt like there was still more about this place I wanted to explore. I was already researching the African Americans who left Milledgeville in the 1870s and immigrated to Liberia—they would eventually appear in Dangerous Goods—but I didn’t have enough material yet. So I went to the American Antiquarian Society, which is where you went, when you were researching for Suck on the Marrow.

I was trying to understand the now, which is informed by the past, so I could imagine a future.

CD: That place is amazing. All those primary documents that breathe life into the American story. It’s a splendid place to be. An enormous building that holds these memories.

I want to keep thinking about this idea of an imperative to revisit memories from our own childhoods, and how both books are so centered on the idea of love that the word shows up in their titles. In the opening poem in America, A Love Story I go back to childhood, remembering my grandmother. I remember an experience riding in the car with my parents when I’m a small child, maybe seven years old. That memory becomes fundamental to exploring my relationship with the people I love and the place where I live. Throughout the book, I go back to my childhood, and I wonder how much of taking the time to write this book, not feeling rushed, meant I could live in these memories. How much I needed these memories in order to write about my now. The collection feels like a book about this present moment, but there’s no way of understanding this moment without thinking about the past.

SH: In your opening poem “This’ll Hurt Me More,” there’s a return to language that hooked me immediately. Like when you write switch. Right? Switch! Don’t make me send you outside to get a switch . . . . My son doesn’t know it the same way, but I grew up with this practice, I know this word. That kind of return to language and place and people, those loved ones, I found very appealing. And yes, you and I think about the now through the lens of our past.

CD: Right! That’s how we process what now means to us. But I don’t think I always did that. In my first book, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, I have a couple poems that talk about my childhood. At the time I did not want to include those poems. I was never comfortable with them. I wasn’t in a place in my own life development that I could honestly and comfortably inspect my own past. I could inspect the pasts of others, but I couldn’t honestly and comfortably do that with myself. I think America, A Love Story has something to do with where I am in my season of life, something that allows me to look back at my childhood and interrogate it with candor and critique and be comfortable with that. You know, hold that child with a kind of grace that I don’t think I could have done in my late twenties or early thirties.

SH: Mhmm. Mhmm.

CD: So let’s keep thinking about time. Your book really plays with time. You go into some future speculation. In my book, I move through the past and into a kind of very near present. Why do you think the linear chronology is insufficient for these projects?

SH: For me, going to the past gives me context to imagine the future. We’re talking about place, we’re also talking about time. Going back to our childhoods’ place and time. And again, this idea of returning to a shared language, like how that “switch” works in so many ways. This was the project of my previous books, trying to get a sense of what happened before me and how it informs where I am now. And I thought I’d be looking back again with this new project. But then I took that second tour of the governor’s mansion, and then we’re in the first Obama term, and heading toward the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and the quadricentennial of 1619 was coming up. And in 2013 I was like, well, let me think about how this nation has changed since 1619, in these 394 years. And where are we going to be in 394 years—in 2407? That’s how the future speculation started. I was living in Fairbanks, feeling far away from my loved ones, almost like I was living on a space station. I thought, what would life be like in 2407? Would Negroes be living in space? What would their lives be?

I was just trying to understand the now, which is informed by the past, so I could imagine a future. This research and thinking helped build the context for the explorations of the book. And of course some of the things I learned never made it onto the page, but they’re still part of the context. For instance, I came across a letter from 1858 in which Governor Joseph E. Brown was replying to a rabbi who had written because Brown didn’t include rabbis on his list of clergy who would get a half price railway discount. The rabbi pointed out that that kind of exclusion wasn’t constitutional. And Brown was like, oh, that was just an oversight; it wasn’t by design. That exchange resonates with me 170 years later. It doesn’t show up in the book, but that context, that energy is there. And there are cases of unarmed Black men killed by police that don’t show up in the book. I was living in Athens, Georgia in 1995 when Edward Wright, a twenty-year-old Black man who seemed to be having some sort of episode, was walking around his neighborhood naked, so his mother called the police to help with him. Two police officers confronted him, and that confrontation resulted in his death. He was not only unarmed, he was naked. In 2017, Eurie Lee Martin, another unarmed Black man, was killed by the police on Deepstep Road as he was walking from Milledegeville to Sandersville. It was a hot day; he stopped at a house and asked for water. Those people called the police who confronted him, and that confrontation with three officers resulted in his death. I started writing something about these tragedies, but I couldn’t get to anything that worked. And that’s okay. These killings inform the book and inform my thinking about the future. They are there with starting a family, with having a little boy.

So I’m thinking about your poems, about having your daughter Callie, being a mother. I’m thinking about the second poem in America, A Love Story; it has a long title, “The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life; or, what that first year taught me about America.” The poem is seven hundred characters long, and you have several of these poems in the collection. I’m trying to figure out how to ask this question. . . . When I write a villanelle or sestina or something, it’s like, well, that form got me to the poem. Because those forms have a long history, I don’t feel like I need to say what it is or point to it so much. That your seven hundred characters come from seven hundred hours seems very important. But I’m wondering, how do you think about that formally? Is it just, that was an interesting way to create a constraint to make these poems?

CD: No, it wasn’t just that. If it’s just an exterior restraint then you just have a bunch of workshop poems from an undergrad workshop class. You’d tell yourself that this is the form and then just plug any old thing into it. The form alone can’t be sufficient for me to make a poem. There are just so many really traumatizing, scary background events happening that I am aware of. I call them ambient terrors. Having a child makes you hypervigilant, and yet you can’t pay attention to every single thing or you won’t last. I couldn’t. I can’t. I can’t function. And so, how do I balance that hypervigilance with the need to keep moving forward?

I found this statistic that the average mother loses seven hundred hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life, and that was deeply alarming. That’s the equivalent of losing February in a leap year, or not sleeping for twenty-nine days. That’s a lot of hours! And so I thought, what if I write about some of these things that are keeping me awake? I wrote poems that let me investigate, articulate, visualize some of the many persistent issues of ambient terror, frustration, and confusion. I created this invisible but quite restrictive form that meant I had all kinds of decisions about language, about word choice. As it turns out, putting an apostrophe in a word does not save that many characters. You’d think you could write “haven’t” instead of “have not,” but that does not save you any characters. So it made me pay attention to language differently. It had my frontal cortex troubling over this persnickety character situation as opposed to those big ambient troubles. It became meditative, and it became a project that I could keep doing.

I wrote twenty-nine of them. One for each of the days of February in a leap year. The ones that show up in the book are some of the best models of this project.

SH: Thank you. That’s the answer I was hoping for.

CD: Yeah, they get kind of rangy. They cover a lot of different topics. Speaking of rangy, here’s another thing that I feel like we both do. We’re both bird people. The cover photo of my third book of poems, Smith Blue, was taken by this incredible photographer named Dudley Edmondson. But Sean, you were with me and Dudley Edmondson when the photograph was taken! And not many people know this, but you took the photograph that became the cover of Trophic Cascade, my fourth book of poetry. So you’re embedded in the imagery that exists in so many of my books. We share a kinship of the kinds of things we pay attention to. The Trophic Cascade book cover is a tree stump. We both write a lot about trees. The Smith Blue book cover shows this beautiful rough-legged hawk.

SH: Yes! The rough-legged hawk.

CD: Both trees and birds become tellers of terrain and space. In the poem “Where I live (Redux),” you talk about how you have “expanded [your] range map, as some birds might.” And in the long-titled poem that I have about a flock of swallows landing on a ship “One night in 1888…,” I think about “the animals in us who need to migrate as much as we need to settle.” We’re both directly comparing ourselves to birds that are needing to expand their range, birds that need to move around this North American continent with liberty. We’re also writing out of an awareness of the dangers visited upon those birds. You write about the Berkeley Pit in Montana, where migrating birds just sort of dissolved into mine trailings. I talk about the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where birds get to thrive.

Why do you find birds to be compelling? Is it a metaphor? Is it a symbol? Is it just a connection?

SH: It’s a connection. In part. You said this thing once…

CD: I said a thing? (Laughs.)

SH: Once, you said this thing. You made a compelling statement comparing the east and the west in terms of access. On the panel at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference.

CD: I remember that! It was our “Black Poets of the American West” panel. I was thinking about how one of the things that I experience very differently when I’m in the American West is space and access. In much of the American West you just have to walk to the top of a nearby hill and you have these views of expanses of incredibly sublime landscapes that you only get in much of  America if you’re on the 30th floor of a high rise. There’s this way, that living in the American West, we live on the ecotone between man-made environments and wild nature. As a person who was born and raised in the American West and who has chosen this as my adult home, I don’t entirely understand the division that so many of my East Coast peers seem to have between man and nature. It’s all nature where I live.

SH: Growing up in Georgia, and moving around as an adult, birds have always been there wherever I am. They’re always accessible. That’s one of the reasons birds appear in my poems. Growing up in a small town in Georgia in the Piedmont, the greater-than-human world was all around me. My family didn’t go camping. But the Piedmont is verdant, and just being in our backyard I came into contact with so many beings—toads, frogs, lizards, turtles, the occasional snake—so many bugs. Birds visited and mammals like the odd mole or opossum. We saw bats in the evening. Occasionally I would help to catch birds and bats that flew inside the house through an open door. This gave me the sense that the natural world was always with us and us with it. That the walls and doors and windows were these barriers erected to try to keep it at bay, but it was just outside the walls and sometimes in the room with us.

There was also the lawn at the county jail. I was talking to my son about that. He’s like, you did what?You played at the county jail? In those hot summers we’d play in their pop-up sprinklers, and there was runoff that flowed into the ditch cut into the red clay that ran along the road. So there were tadpoles and frogs. That’s where I played. It was across the road that ran behind our house. Sometimes we’d go inside the jail’s lobby, and I remember the feel of the cold vinyl tiles on my bare feet. They kept it well air conditioned, and they had a water fountain and a drink machine.

Occasionally I would help to catch birds and bats that flew inside the house through an open door. This gave me the sense that the natural world was always with us and us with it. That the walls and doors and windows were these barriers erected to try to keep it at bay, but it was just outside the walls and sometimes in the room with us.

CD: So your memory of the lawn where you would play is linked with your memory of the interior of the jail? I mean, I know this because I know your poem, but, like, I just want to talk this through.

SH: Yeah, the shock of my bare feet on the cold tile floor made for a vivid memory. Growing up, I took my shoes off whenever I could. I still don’t like wearing shoes, though I do love them, probably have too many.

CD: Yeah. If we’re gonna have to wear them, then they should be very nice.

SH: And, of course I have this memory because the county jail was mysterious until I followed some kid into the lobby. Even then it was still mysterious because I only saw the least bit of its interior. And they didn’t seem to be too concerned about us coming into the lobby. It was a good place to cool down if you got too hot, get some water, and then back outside to play. Once or twice an older cousin from the neighborhood would call my name from the fenced yard just to say hey. I remember catching those tadpoles and putting them in jars and watching them lose their tails and grow legs and metamorphose into frogs. As an adult who’s traveled a bit and seen how other folks grew up, it’s shocking to think about the fact that I have fond memories of playing on the lawn at the county jail.

CD: I’m thinking about how you bleed between memories of built spaces and natural landscapes, like in “The Cicada’s Drone ~ Draws Me When I’m Away,” where you write about the jolly conversation you have with a guy wearing a Confederate Battle Flag. That’s a really specific human experience, and then overlaid on it is a very specific experience of the greater than human world—the cicada song. I was thinking that things are somewhat reversed for me. But then there’s my poem, “Let Me,” where I’m very specifically talking about a moment of potential domestic violence and I’m also talking about the time that a bear wandered through our cul de sac during a wildfire. Those are placed right next to each other, with one very emotionally charged thing that happened to me, a human being, alongside a very emotionally charged observation of the greater than human world. That’s just what we have to do. Right? That’s how we have to end up making sense of things.

SH: I’m glad you brought up “Let Me” because I love that poem. I have bears in my poem “Imagine We’re Ancestors Dreaming,” and I like the bears in our poems because I think they offer moments of grounding in the greater-than-human world. In your poem there was smoke, the mountain was burning, and those things drove the bear closer. In my poem an early spring and a late frost killed the flowers, so there was no fruit, and hungry bears came looking for food in a trash can. These are very specific things that we’re trying to figure out, as we make sense of what’s happening around us. It’s not like there was just a bear nearby, and we put it in a poem. There’s a reason the bears showed up.

CD: And that reason becomes both fact and metaphor. That’s one of the things that becomes so important to me when I’m writing about the living world. I’m not just using the living world for its metaphorical applications. It’s not just an analogy. It’s side by side. These living beings are alive, living, and needing in their own way. And I am alive and living and needing in my own way. I place those two realities next to each other, and readers can form the comparison.

SH: It’s recognition. Yes? There are several poems in The Negroes Send Their Love in which there is a species, another being that I’m looking at and talking about. And I’m talking about it very specifically, but at base I’m talking about its need to live and our need to live. And that life is this force of us wanting to carry on. And I just want to recognize and honor that. So the bear is trying to live. It’s coming to find food the best way it can. The bear is trying to escape the fire as anyone would. The white headed woodpecker and those miners, Black and white, are basically doing the same thing. The American pica is dealing with the rising heat and so are the people. So I think you’re right.

CD: There’s just so many moments where the things in the world that I love have things in common with people in the world that I love. I have two moments in this book where I compare people I love to the California hillsides. My husband’s soft brown shoulders, my grandmother’s skin. They share physical traits, they are similar colors. When I see either, I see both. And the process of seeing, really deeply recognizing, as you say, reinforces my love, my adoration, my connection with all these living entities.

SH: How do you feel about what you’re doing in this new book?

CD: All of my books have been survival narratives. They question: How do I keep going day by day in a place, in a country, that seems to have a general preference for my not existing. That “me” becomes both uniquely Camille, but also more broadly Camile, Black woman in America. All of my books have this question of how do we/I keep going. They are deeply invested in questions of how my community survives. And my community, from my very first book, has included the greater-than-human world. How can I be part of sustaining the parts of the world that sustain me and those I love? Those are core questions I have in every book. I might move through times and places in history. I might move through varying levels of autobiographical confession. But that’s the fundamental concern of all my work. The thing that I care most about is that those whom I care about most can live their best lives. In order to do that, we’ve got to look at what’s making that more difficult. Where are the historical markers of survival and what are the difficulties, the trauma. The personal history, collective history, communal history, American history, all of those things.

You and I have known each other through this whole journey. We’ve known each other from before our first books. We’ve watched each other develop and grow. We share poems as we’re drafting them. Someone might think that we would actually write more similarly to each other, given that level of poetic intimacy. Topically we have similarities, but aesthetically and stylistically we’re very much our own voices. These books are different in that one of the things I wanted to do was have a really slim and trim, lyrical-leaning book. I wanted it to be under a hundred pages. Your book is a different kind of project. It’s like an epic. At nearly two-hundred pages, it’s got heft. I’m interested in hearing why you went in that direction. You wrote The Big Book of American Negroes, while I decided on the Pocket-Size Collection of Black People in America.

How do I keep going day by day in a place, in a country, that seems to have a general preference for my not existing. How can I be part of sustaining the parts of the world that sustain me and those I love?

SH: The Big Book of American Negroes. I like that. As I said, in 2020 I felt I was supposed to have a book. And I wasn’t ready. I had some poems and these other things—nonfiction and fiction pieces—and an idea.

And part of this came out of conversing with you about writing essays. I’m in your essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, which I love. And I was like, I need to write my own essays.

CD: You’re in Soil, too.

SH: You recommended I keep track of my life on a daily basis, so I did that. And my friend the poet Elizabeth Bradfield suggested a five-year daybook, so I started a five year daybook on January 1st 2017. And that helped me keep track of the moves and changes in my life and enabled me to wade into some essay writing.

I was invited to contribute some poems to Terrain.org‘s Dear America project in November 2016, but I didn’t really have anything until a year later after driving from Fairbanks to Tacoma with my dad as part of my family’s move from Alaska to Statesboro. And it was an essay. Similar to how you talk about your seven-hundred character poems engaging different parts of your brain, I found myself engaged with figuring out how to tell the story of that trip—build scenes, manage dialogue—and shift to the story of our country. The essay allowed me to tell that story differently than if I tried to render it in poems. And it was probably around that time I thought about embracing a multi-genre project.

CD: I suppose I did that with Soil. I have the prose, I have the photograms, as the artist Dionne Lee calls them, I have the poems, and the maps. That kind of multi-genre experience is part of my answer to this question: If I’m going to write a book about expanding ideas of beauty and ideas of what we see as important to pay attention to in the living world, why shouldn’t the art itself be equally expansive and reflective of many ways of presenting?

SH: That was part of the idea, to make a hybrid book that troubles boundaries and borders, a book about race and the greater-than-human world and the past and future and the now. And that’s how one gets to The Big Book of American Negroes.

Bring home copies of America, A Love Story and The Negroes Send Their Love  today and keep this conversation going on your bookshelf!

CD: Somebody asked me how I feel about religion. I said, I’m a preacher’s granddaughter. I spent my childhood summers in the Black Baptist church. The litany and the intonations and these kinds of things are part of the rhythms in my brain and the language that I draw on. But you’re the son of a preacherman, which kind of dunks on my Baptist summers. This is your Baptist book. It’s a long day of lots and lots of ways of worshiping and attending and paying attention to and caring for a collective Black soul. My book is my Presbyterian childhood, how I was churched the rest of the year. We’re in and out in under an hour. Brief, yes, but it still runs deep. You and I are worshiping the same God, but in different ways in these two books.

SH: Yes, we are. Thank you for putting it that way, Camille.

You often write about your motherhood, but I’m interested in how you write about your husband, about fatherhood. I love Ray and how you write about Ray. In Soil, you write about that time when someone said “It’s earthquake weather,”  and you asked Ray what are we going to do if an earthquake comes? I love the things he said. I was like, that’s so Ray, because. . . .

CD: He was interested in me getting to my people, getting to my godparents, because I had people who worried about me. I needed to get to them and he would find me there. It was a tactically smart place he chose, but it was really about me being safe with the people I loved.

SH: The first time I talked to Ray was over the phone in the middle of the night. You and I were out on the town with some friends, and Ray called to say like, make sure my girl has fun. And I was like, who is this guy? This is a cool dude. I like this man.

CD: Unbothered by jealousy. Being trusted is a nice thing.

I think that feels fundamental to America, A Love Story. At the same time that I’m talking about being a Black woman in America, or a Black mother in America, this fraught relationship, I know what a good relationship is. The relationship I have with my parents, that I write into this book, the relationship that I have with my husband, and the one that I’m trying to cultivate with my daughter, these are positive relationships. I can talk about difficult circumstances because I also have a lens for the opposite of difficult. That feels like a safe space from which to interrogate unsafe spaces. I’m asking for this because I know what it is to be loved. Not everybody does.

There’s so much in The Negroes Send Their Love that’s moving through time and thinking from different vantage points in history and different locations in America about what it might mean, can mean, and in some cases has meant, to be free. To be able to trust our own instincts and imaginative liberties. This is part of the reason for all of this expansiveness we’ve been talking about through this conversation. The fractalization allows for crystallization. Allows for a sturdier structure. The seemingly singular view, because of that expansion, becomes even more itself.

SH: Yes, I love the way you put it. That’s it!

I want to ask you a question about Black Nature and how that fits with all the other work you’re doing. You did this other thing that made a crater in the field of nature poetry and made space and expanded things for not only African American poets but also everyone in a beautiful way.

CD: The legacy of that anthology is never far from my life or my imagination. Partially because I edited it and so am sometimes pigeonholed as an “environmental writer.” I could not have been pigeonholed as an environmental writer before Black Nature. I’m the one who was like, “Hey, world, Black people are doing this too!” Before that, Black writers may have been doing that work, but somewhat invisibly. So it’s a funny position that I’ve gotten myself into where sometimes I’m like, “I write about the environment, but I also write about other things.” Right?

I remember we had a conversation when I was collecting those poems. You were like, “I don’t think I’m an environmental poet.” And I’m like, “you have a poem about being a shepherd that I want in the anthology. What do you mean you’re not an environmental poet?”

SH:  I remember. And I tell everybody, every time someone’s like, “Can you talk about Black Nature or talk about this nature thing you do?” I’m like, let me tell you how this started.

I really, really enjoyed being the poetry editor of Orion. We have an incredible readership. They are people who care about this planet and care about making our connections with each other as strong and healthy and supportive as possible.

CD: I have decided that, okay, I’m an environmental writer. And I write love poems. In this moment, to be somebody who writes love poems who doesn’t care about the living world . . . you probably aren’t really writing love poems.

SH: The follow up question of that question was, we’ll soon be calling you the former poetry editor for Orion. Can you talk about your work in that position and how it relates to all of this?

CD: I really, really enjoyed being the poetry editor of Orion. Partially because I like the role of being an editor, which is essentially being a fairy godmother. I get to find poets and help dress them up in fancy outfits and take their poems out into the world for them to find their readers. I really like the opportunity as an editor to share poets’ work with wider and wider audiences. The Orion readership is an incredible readership. They are people who care about this planet and care about making our connections with each other as strong and healthy and supportive as possible. And bringing killer poems, oh, let me not use that word, bringing blossoming poems, wonderful, heart-opening poems, to a readership like that has been really delightful.

I’m stepping down because I need to focus on some of my other projects. I’m really excited about the person who’s stepping into the role. I think he’s going to bring new perspectives. I also feel like it’s important for a magazine like Orion to have turnover sometimes. New voices and new editorial eyes. I am okay helping to make that turnover happen. But I’ve enjoyed being able to share so many other folks’ poems, including yours, during my tenure as editor.

SH: Thank you, Camille. Thank you.