Dustin Pearson is the author of three poetry books; A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millenial Roost, and A Family is a House. His writings have been featured in numerous literary journals and have won multiple awards including ones from the Katherine C. Turner and John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards and the Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo. Pearson will be coming to BGSU’s campus to read his work. I have asked Pearson questions about his writing to allow those interested to learn about his writing journey before he arrives on campus.
Q: When did you start writing?
A: I think I gave fiction writing an earnest effort via a class called Structure of Fiction at Clemson University. That was the second semester of my freshman year of undergrad, so I must’ve been 18. I didn’t start writing poetry until I was 20. It took some convincing. Now I think my relationship to writing poetry is a little too natural.
Q: What made you fall in love with poetry?
A: Discovering poems that made me think: What would it take for this disclosure to happen in a public setting? What intimate setting in my life would I have this conversation? I think I realized poems were the only space I would disclose so intimately or even have those conversations. I loved that poetry and poems were unique in this way, that they had infinite potential for me to have conversations I’d typically deny having with myself and externalize them. Taking that constantly deeper dive over the course of a life makes it magical when you resonate with other poets doing the same thing, whether they’re having the same conversations you are, inspiring you to have a conversation you never imagined, or simply allow you to witness something that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I love that poetry can recover and manifest so much.
Q: What is your favorite part about writing?
A: Having no idea what’s going to happen and, at a certain distance from what did happen, having no idea how it happened or how to replicate it, which makes you appreciate having written in the first place because even though you’re no longer someone who can yield that writing, the writing is such a unique record of the person who did.
Q: Have there been difficult moments in your writing journey? If so, what?
A: Definitely. I think at times the writing itself has been dangerous, but the journey from deciding to write to publishing has thrown me surprises that make wonder if I’d pursue writing if I knew about them in advance. It’s great that I didn’t know, though. I don’t regret writing. The industry and community of writing world can be dangerous too. I think a lot of writers come to find this out. I try to have gentle conversations with my students about this kind of thing, but I’m not sure how much of it sticks, and in a lot of ways, you can only have this conversation with students as much as they’ll allow you to or let you know they’re ready to. I know this is all abstract. Luckily, some of the difficulties of my writing journey are sprinkled on the internet. Here’s one such productive sprinkling: https://www.vidaweb.org/report-from-the-field-seeing-is-changing/
I’d give more specifics, but I’ve been teasing the idea of writing essays about the difficult moments to do them justice, so I’ll stop at that.
Q: What is your greatest source of inspiration? Why?
A: The unrest I feel with the status quo, which some people might simply describe as hope. If I resigned myself to the status quo, so much of what I’ve created wouldn’t exist, if any, so any potential I had to throw to or aspire toward something better or ideal also wouldn’t exist.
Q: What are some common topics and themes that can be found in your poetry?
A: I used to try to break myself to give worthwhile answers to this kind of question, but I find my friends and people who love my writing are much better at identifying such things. I’ve been telling everyone who asks me that I’m writing about friendship now, but one of my grad school friends, Jeannine, graciously let me know a couple to a few years ago that I’ve been writing about friendship since my first book.
Q: How do you overcome obstacles like writer’s block when writing poetry? What about with fiction?
A: I think I’m lucky when it comes to poetry. I write out of emotion, so when I remember that and recognize that I’m having emotions, it’s easy for me to take on the challenge to concretize those emotions in the creation of new writing. The major obstacle I have when writing poetry is thinking too much about how what I haven’t yet written can or should compare to what I have written. That mode of thought is its own writer’s block. I also get stuck writing serially or poems about something specific. I get frustrated when material that could be a poem presents itself but doesn’t fit that serial thread I’ve been compiling, so I fight the impulse to ignore that material, which becomes writer’s block when the impulse wins.
I think I’m more practical with fiction. I take inspiration from other media I like to consume. I like people watching. If I spot someone interesting somewhere and then I leave or they leave, it’s a fun exercise to write fiction about the rest of their day. In some of my favorite works, it’s fun to write a minor or no-notice character as a main character in something new. I’ve been talking a lot to my students about how their characters walk into coffee shops, order something, and then have their order handed to them by a barista who disappears after that superficial moment. It’s fun to write the barista outside of the context of handing someone an order. Doing research on something random is also a great tactic. You can get lost researching the history of closed captioning or whatever else. Before long, you’ve amassed knowledge that feels like it can write itself into something.
Q: Who are some of your favorite poets? Why?
A: My friends are my favorite poets. They all have hurts and dreams they imbue into their writing, and as I advance in my life and career, they become an even bigger reason why I continue to participate in the public-facing aspects of writing.
Q: What is your favorite poem you’ve written? Why?
A: I think it might be a poem called “Sexuality” from my first book. There are four poems in my first book with that title, but I’m thinking of the one that starts “When the world runs off with itself.” There’s something about how that poem subverts expectations from its title to what unfolds after it. It’s such a hard-earned lyric poem from the speaker near the end of an exhausting collection and so different from everything else. It might be impossible to understand. I remember showing the poem to one of my mentors during my MFA at Arizona State University. She drew a huge line down the side of the entire poem and just wrote a question mark, but she didn’t tell me to cut the poem like she had suggested I do with other poems in the manuscript and didn’t provide any other commentary as far as I can remember, so I can imagine she either felt the poem was important or enjoyed reading the poem regardless, and perhaps that at the very moment she did having read all the other poems before and after it. It’s such a powerful and confident speculative commentary and epiphany, and what imagery there is to find relates a place in ruin alongside lyrics that characterize the inevitable relationship between the speaker and everyone else in his life as a result of his experiences and the arc of rumination over those experiences throughout the collection. If the poem is impossible to understand, there’s something I find so admirable about how it still communicates its importance to people who encounter it. I don’t know what to call that kind of thing, but I love that poem for how it brings everything together and reminds me of the magic of poetry framed through experience rather than legibility or comprehension.
If you would like to hear him read his work or learn more about his writing, Pearson will be visiting BGSU’s campus on Thursday, February 23 at 7:30 at Prout Chapel. To learn more about Pearson, you can visit his website, dustinkpearson.com.
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