We Call Upon the Author to Explain–Hattie Hayes

In this newest installment of “We Call Upon the Author,” Hattie Jean Hayes, a writer and comedian, discusses her debut chapbook, Poems [for, about, because] My Friends. Her cheeky, witty answers expose friendship as craft, lineage, heartbreak, growth, and ultimately, an immense gift. Any writer who wants to learn how to cultivate an intimate relationship with readers should spend time with Hayes’ stunning words.

Marah Hoffman: Poetry has a long and culturally rich history as a vessel for meditations on friendship. Yet, you achieve ingenuity. Poems are displayed horizontally. Stanzas sit side by side, coalescing into a whole, rather than fracturing into parts. Why did you choose poems as gifts for your friends? What is it about the form (or more specifically your unique understanding of the form) that lends itself to intimacy?

Hattie Hayes: First, thanks for this generous and perceptive view of the formal choices in the book. Preserving the structures of the poems was vital, and I’m glad you appreciated my intentional decisions! These poems are gifts, and, like any good gift, they’re all unique to the friends they’re for, about, because. I tried to make sure the form of the poems contributed, which is why you get a squarish block of text like that on a postcard in “The Lady’s Improving,” or the dual dueling stanzas in “little twin stars,” or brief diary-style entries divorced from chronology in “The Year in Pictures.”

I’m a journalist by trade, poet by habit. I’ve written a lot of fiction. I’ve written lots and lots and lots of first-person nonfiction. Poetry allows me to write with a potency I find difficult to access elsewhere. My feelings, especially about friends and friendship, are so intense. The formal constraints of a poem allow me to explore the width and depth of a particular feeling without diluting it, or stepping on myself with justifications and explanations.

MH: What inspired you to include the squares of text dispersed throughout your collection? They contain sweet images that imbue the book with a scrapbook element and, in my view, elevate your writing to a realm outside of poetry.

HH: I’m happy you asked about these “prose interludes.” Years before I started assembling this manuscript, I wrote an eighteen-page essay with the working title “An Oral History of All My Friends.” Eventually I wrote myself into a corner, and I put the essay aside. I remembered it as I was working on this collection, and decided to salvage the parts that might illuminate the poems.

The poems capture feelings. The prose interludes capture moments. In the prose parts of this book, I wanted to trace the lineage of the emotions which drive the book as a whole.

I want to give enormous credit, and much gratitude, to Veronica Bennett at Bullshit Lit, who designed the cover. That definitely contributes to the “scrapbook” feel of this collection. When I sent her my inspiration photos, they included vintage photo albums and cookbooks. Veronica also had the idea to block off the prose into squares, which I really liked. I think it helps the prose stand apart and gives it a “confessional” quality that suits the mood of the collection.

MH: The inclusion of loved ones’ names and identifying details is of frequent debate in the literary world. What is your take?

HH: I am a poet of eager embarrassment. I love writing someone a poem and saying “Hi, I wrote you a poem,” and watching their face while they read it. I love perceiving and being perceived. I love using microscopic images as a vehicle for extrasensory perception, a sort of “Oh my God I was JUST thinking about that the other day, I can’t believe you remember it too.” I love writing something, and crying, and thinking, “I hope other people also cry when they read this,” and then feeling validated if they do. I love when someone sees me too clearly for comfort. I love when I get to remove all doubt that a poem is, in fact, a gift crafted for a specific celebration.

I also love being misunderstood. I love when my closest friends read a poem I’ve written and get it dead wrong. I love sprinkling in a little mystery, and privately rejoicing when people try too hard to understand a line that’s just a movie reference. I love to write down my side of the heartbreak, my angry and vindictive narrative, and leave the other party anonymous, giving myself both the catharsis and the control.

In some cases, to be enigmatic is to invite attention. Not throwaway attention – actual attention. A close reading. However, often, people will read your work and mistake the lack of a specified subject for ambiguity. In other cases, you can invite the same sort of attentive, meaningful reading by saying exactly who the poem is about. Darren Demaree’s “Emily poems” are a great example: there is one “main character,” one subject; she has a robust mythology.

All of this is to say: in my mind, every writer should approach every project differently. There are poems in this book that don’t have names for the protection of me, or others. And then the “name” poems are an explicit gesture of appreciation and recognition, because the people I name in my poems are all people who have loved me into a better poet.

MH: Friendships can, of course, be accompanied by heartbreak. Your tender collection does not ignore rupture. Did you think about the coexistence of hope and despair while organizing your poems? If so, how did this affect structure?

HH: When thinking about heartbreak, I have primarily considered it through the lens of friendship. No one has broken my heart like my friends have. By writing about these friendships, I understand their impact on me.

There are two modalities of organization at play in this book, and together, they create a sort of arc. There are the “character chapters,” which are small groups of poems about specific people. My friend Molly is the most obvious of these; the “Molly poems” conclude the book. There’s a section which centers on Dottie, my cat, and those poems make use of her perspective to some degree. And in the front of the book, there is a sequence of poems that use my most established friendship, with my high school best friend Cassie, as the focal point. I see these as three “cores” of my understanding of friendship. They all represent this unconditional friendship that you can come back to, life after life.

And then there are more thematic chapters. Everything from “The Year in Pictures” to “You Will Find Your People” encompasses the excitement of new friendship and freedom of familiar ones. Then, exactly halfway through the book, things shift. You’ll see that “tktktk” through “A Poem That Takes Place on September 26th” delve more into heartache, in many different shapes.

MH: Poems, For, About, Because My Friends contains a lifetime of relationships. I am curious, how long did it take you to write?

HH: The oldest poems in this collection were written in late 2015, early 2016. They didn’t have a “life” in the outside world. They weren’t published. Some lived in emails to my friend Molly Bilker, who sees most, if not all, of my poems. And other poems in this collection from that time period, I shared with the people they were about. “Marriages So Far,” the first poem in this collection, is about four different people; I think all four of them read their “section.” So that was eight years before the book came out.

The first draft of the manuscript came together during the summer of 2022. I had taken a social media hiatus for six months. The day after my social media break ended, I logged on to Twitter and saw Bullshit Lit was holding a 24-hour contest for chapbook submissions. Fortuitous! I assembled a manuscript, which included my poems and the prose interludes, and that was ultimately accepted for publication in 2023.

In the weeks before the book came out, I worked to finalize the manuscript. I rearranged the poems to fit this “arc” I had in my mind, and I added in some more. “You Will Find Your People,” “Civil Engineering” and “For a Decade” were written in early 2023. I composed those poems with the manuscript in mind. In the time since the first draft came together, I’ve been aligning my writing more intentionally with the themes of friends and friendships.

MH: Do you imagine your readers as friends?

HH: I imagine my friends as readers! I know, in theory, strangers and acquaintances are reading my poetry. But when I think about someone sitting down with my book, I always imagine the face of someone I love. My friends have been such vocal champions of my work that it is a challenge to think of anyone else reading my book. But as I say in the first prose interlude in the book, I have a very willing attachment style. Many of my friendships have grown out of quiet, mutual appreciation for each other’s writing or creative projects. And I think now, having a book out, I’m going to experience a heightened version of that phenomenon. If you’re interested in reading all my thoughts on friendship, you’re likely a qualified candidate for a position as my friend.

Poems [For, About, Because] My Friends is available through Bullshit Lit

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Hattie Jean Hayes is a writer and comedian, originally from a small town in Missouri, who now lives in New York. Her work has appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Hell Is Real, Janus Literary, HAD, and others. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her first book of poems is Poems [for, about, because] My Friends, published by Bullshit Lit. Hattie completed a SAFTA residency in September 2022 and is working on her first novel. You can find her poetry, fiction, newsletter, and other writings at hattiehayes.com.

Marah Hoffman is a poetry and creative nonfiction writer from Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an MFA candidate, graduate teaching assistant, and Ecotone reader at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In the fall of 2022, she was the long-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). Hoffman continues to support SAFTA as Creative Director.