NEW LAURELS:

Stephanie Horvath

The New Laurels interview series dives into the poetic minds of our recent Open Competition winners. From thoughts on their writerly influences and habits to the intimate, often complicated process of writing their manuscripts, New Laurels invites readers to get to know the hearts and minds of these poets with an inside look at their upcoming publications.

 

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How did you first get involved in poetry? Was this your first writing genre or something you came to over time? 

I don’t have a strong allegiance to any one genre. At a certain point, I realized that much of what I was writing in my notebooks on a regular basis could reasonably be called poetry. But I also write fiction and nonfiction, and I am often working on projects that I can’t confidently classify as any of the three.

What are some of your writerly habits (e.g., a daily practice, a preferred beverage at your side, music, writing analog)? 

Most of my writing starts in a physical notebook—dreams, impressions, and strange phrases that arrive almost as auditory hallucinations. Then I use the notebook as raw material for shaping poems and other projects. In the initial drafting phase, I try to learn from the unconscious associative work without imposing too heavily any structure or narrative. I like when something illuminating or precise happens almost by accident. Or when my terrible handwriting suggests a word I hadn’t intended, which opens a new door inside the poem. I know my raw impressions want to be something more than raw impressions when I find compelling repetitions in a notebook from one entry to the next. In tracing and inventing the structure posthoc, I learn a lot. I also get a lot of energy from the sunshine; sometimes I feel like a plant. When it’s dark and wintry out, I don’t write as much.

Manuscripts often come together slowly, but sometimes all at once. How did this collection begin for you? Did it take you in unexpected directions? Can you describe how you ordered the poems?

The collection had a much different arrangement under its former title. I think it had eventually stiffened into something dead. After a few years of distance, it felt good to take the manuscript apart, experiment with the order, and cut with total abandon into poems that had basically been mummified. I’ve grown to like a lot of the older poems because I would never write them today. I’ve learned to feel tender even toward the embarrassing ones. I kept some really old poems in the manuscript and added in a good number of super new ones. To me, they feel like they were written by different people, because they were. But then, I also find a deep continuity in the voice and am reassured by that.

What sort of craft elements and themes can readers expect from your work? Why do you find yourself drawn to these things? 

I write a lot about time, illusion, dreams, and nature.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection? Why is it your favorite? 

I like the rare poems that write themselves with very little intervention or revision. The first poem in the book, “The Rescue,” is one of those. It’s a dream written word for word. Same with “Driveway.” I love when poems just happen like this, through an experience that feels almost like possession. I don’t have to spend as much time getting intimate—and frustrated—with them. I can temper the habitual shame and self-loathing that I tend to experience when making anything because I feel like these trance poems barely even belong to me. But, then, I do also love the obsessive and deranged process of working on a single poem for weeks or months, trying to get it right. There are some poems in the manuscript I appreciate just for the amount of work that went into them. I guess I feel like they earned their place in the book, or something, even if they’re not particularly good—they are like commemorations of process and time. But I do think I’ve spent a little too much time with those ones, and I need a very long break from looking at them—maybe forever.

Was there a particular poem that you struggled with in these pages? What was complicated about it, and what did working through the challenge look like for you? 

I have often struggled with the expectation that poetry should account for actual events and objective truth. For a long time, I worried about misrepresenting autobiographical facts. But I think I eventually became loyal to a different kind of truth, an emotional truth that requires misremembering and collaging experiences from different phases of my life and imagination. I have sometimes taken events that happened to me in one location and transposed them somewhere on the other side of the country, many years later. This feels truer to me than the chronological procession of how the events actually took shape in external reality. I like blending memories from different states—geographical and emotional, awake and asleep. I know I’m not alone in thinking that a poem should adhere to logic and time only as much as a dream does. I also like to leave space for poems that are not autobiographical or necessarily self-referential at all.

Looking to your future writing, are there forms, subjects, or themes you want to engage in that you haven’t yet? 

I want to keep trying to find something alive in language that we don’t get to access in most of our everyday conversations and exchanges.

Who were the poets, artists, or other individuals who most influenced you? Do you find yourself most influenced by a particular form of art? 

When you aren’t writing, how do you fill your days? 

Right now I’m doing a Stegner Fellowship, which has afforded me a nice break from clerical and service jobs, and has also made writing seem like something I’m contractually supposed to be doing, even if everything else in the world feels a million times more urgent than writing a poem. So that’s helpful for the actual execution of it. If I’m not writing, I’m cooking, cleaning, or, usually, walking around with my son collecting rocks and sticks. I love to read and garden and go for runs and take long walks, but now that I’m a parent, I’m mostly doing parenting. And I also love that.

What advice do you have for aspiring poets just starting out? What were you told, or wish you were told, in those early stages? 

I don’t feel particularly well positioned to give advice, but I think it’s probably beneficial for most people to resist spending too much time on the internet. And for aspiring poets specifically, I would say don’t worry if your work is not for everyone—I think more often than not that can be taken as a good sign.

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Stephanie Horvath’s poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She lives in Northern California and is currently a 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.