Hello and
Good Morning, Everyone!
I recently
had the absolute pleasure of reading Deborah L. Davitt's collection, The
Gates of Never, and once I finished it, I knew I had to chat with her some
more about the book. For those of you who might be unfamiliar it, The
Gates of Never is a speculative collection that fuses history,
mythology, and magic with futurism, science, and science fiction. Personally, I
felt like I learned so much about mythology as I was reading these poems, and
even with the stories that I was already familiar with, seeing how Davitt
interpreted these myths or these creatures was really fun and it kept me
turning the page fairly quickly as I anticipated what was next.
But don't just take my word for it! Here's what others
are saying about it:
“With The
Gates of Never Deborah
Davitt offers us a sumptuous exploration of the
cosmic and the mythic, the historic and the familiar. Her lines hum with memory
and imagination, forging a distinctive landscape of voice and omen, whether
it’s taking on sea wolves or ancient empires, the mysteries of the human heart
or a single leaf. This is a finely-tuned collection for those who dare to dream
deeply in a vast cosmos.”–Bryan Thao Worra, NEA Fellow in
Literature.
Rich in
humanity and mythology, Deborah
Davitt‘s stunning poetry collection THE
GATES OF NEVER overflows with eloquence and dark beauty.–Christina
Sng, Bram Stoker
Award-winning author of A COLLECTION OF NIGHTMARES
In The Gates of Never, Deborah L. Davitt plumbs the
everyday and the eldritch, ancient past and technological future, the dance of
bone and skin, of seed and flower, of eros and thanatos: bodies cleaving —
flesh joining and also splitting, stone and metal changing and reshaping — to
form old and new lives and entities, based in magic and myth as well as rocket
fuel and neon, a startlingly familiar amalgam of the sacred and the profane.
Davitt’s exquisite poems will set your imagination on emerald fire.–Vince
Gotera, Editor, Star*Line and the North
American Review
So now that we've certainly got your attention, take my hand and follow
me through the gate as we learn more about this fabulous collection and the
brilliant author behind it.
With iron spikes and mermaid tears,
Stephanie M. Wytovich
SMW: Tell us about your collection. What
gave you the idea to create in this fantastical, speculative world, and in your
opinion, what does it represent at its most literal and figurative heights?
DLD: Hi, Stephanie! Thanks for giving me the chance to talk
about my collection! The Gates of Never is a collection of my poems that
were published or written in the first two years of my poetry-writing adventure,
so they span from about 2015-2017 in my poetical output. (Words that just five
years ago, I would never have dreamed that I would write.)
I wanted to put them together in some form more
substantive than being scattered between some twenty different venues, online
and off, and so I started looking at how to shape them into a collection.
Having read a few modern poetry collections, I think
that where most of them fall apart for me in in two places—either having only
one note or tone, where I believe in variation and contrast as important
artistic devices—or having jarring shifts that don’t contribute to an overall
sense of narrative or direction. So it was important to me that the collection
as a whole have subsections—each “gate” represents a thematic grouping. And
that the collection should feel dynamic—that it should move. And since I write
in different eras and on topics from history to fairy tales to science fiction,
that sense of dynamism comes from moving from the past into the future.
SMW: What was your favorite part of the
collection to create and explore, and then to play devil’s advocate, what was
the hardest for you?
DLD: Since I wrote the poems all at different points in
time, and only brought them together as a whole later, hmm. I enjoyed creating each
of the poems individually. Form or free verse doesn’t matter—form for me is a
copilot, and while I might not wind up where I thought I would, with form
holding part of the wheel with me, I sometimes wind up someplace more
interesting than my original goal. Free verse lets me hold absolute control of
meaning, and I play freely in both.
But since these poems weren’t directly intended to be
read side by side in their original conception, the hardest part was the ‘scrapbooking’
process—finding which could sit beside each other. Could comment on each other.
Could echo or deny each other. Could create a sense of narrative whole with
each other. That was harder, but in its own way, I found it very rewarding. It
makes you take several steps back to really judge your own work and go, “Hmm.
Is that one as strong as I thought it was? Does that work beside that one?”
SMW: What drew you to the historical and
mythological references in the book and do you have a favorite? And to
piggyback on that, how did you go about researching for it when you were first
getting started?
DLD: I adore mythology. Sometimes I wrote about things I
already knew quite a bit about—the Russalka, the banshee, or some of the Greek
myths that I directly compare/contrast to the moons of the solar system (Ganymede
in “A Mask of Ice” is a captive of an abusive gas giant, both the boy stolen by
Zeus and the moon covered in ice; Enceladus in the eponymous “Enceladus,” is a
captive of Saturn, but she’s about to birth dragons. . . or become just another
shattered, ephemeral ring.)
But other poems came about when I was reading about
other cultures. I was reading about Maori facial tattoos and what they’d originally
meant in their culture, and the real and very respectful traditions of
preserving heads, which reminded me of things I’d read about teraphim in very
early Israelite traditions.
Now, in most of the places you’ll see them referred to
as household gods, little idols, but I’d also read Tim Powers’ Three Days to
Never which posits them as the preserved heads of dead sons. You can wiki
the origins of the concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraphim
which might be specious scholarship, but who knows.) The two concepts latched
together in my head as respectful ways of treating the dead out of two
disparate traditions isolated from each other by time and geography, and that
landed for me, in how we treat our own dead, and how we cling to them and their
memory.
SMW: Gates are a staple in your collection.
What do they represent to you?
DLD:Gates are places of passage, places of transition. You
can pass through a gate in either direction, but once you’re through, you’re in
another place, another time. And yet, for me, time is all of one piece, and the
past is always with us. Even as we stand in the future, the ghosts of every
generation before us dance in our DNA. We deny it at our own peril.
SMW: Something that I see a lot as an
editor is either a heavy reliance on free verse, or a strict adherence to
technical form. As someone who writes in both, what do you think the advantages
are to challenging oneself to try out different type of poetry?
DLD: Well, as I said earlier, free verse allows me direct
control over my meaning. So when I start writing a free-verse poem, I have a
set goal for this poem, and I know more or less what I want to say, but
sometimes, as I’m writing, it’ll change under my fingers anyway. I’ll find a
repetition, a phrase, an image that I want to use to create structure, and poof,
there’s a poem.
Form is, as I also said earlier, frequently my
copilot. Sometimes the demands of say, a sestina, with those immovable words in
their rigid order at the end of each line, forces the story I’m telling in
those lines to go a little different than I expected, and that’s fine, because
. . . as Pratchett told us, the fifth element is Surprise, and I would be a
worse writer if I didn’t sometimes surprise myself. Surprise is delight.
Surprise is letting your hind brain and the form do some of the work, and
either being pleased with the shape of what you’ve wrought by the end or
feeling the need to do a little gentle tinkering.
Now, I’ve worked with a fair number of people in a
little poetry workshop/contest thing I’ve run for the past three years to know
that this doesn’t work for everyone. I think it’s the difference between “pantsers”
and plotters in prose. Some people have to do a rough draft of what they want
the poem to say and then nail it down in every particular, or they don’t feel
like they’ve done it right. And if that’s their process, more power to them!
But it’s not my process at all! Sometimes, by letting
go and not overcontrolling the process, I find I get some of my best results.
And sometimes, I’ll write a poem in form, frown, and
then rewrite it in free verse, stare at both versions for a day or so, and then
kick one screaming out into an editorial slushheap. I can’t tell you which one
is “better.” I can only tell you which one I like more. It’s up to an editor to
tell me if they like that one or not. Hah!
SMW: Something that I’m always drawn to as
a reader is the hybridity of poetry, especially in regard to genre. This book
weaves between history and fantasy and science fiction, so I was wondering what
advice you had for writers who are looking to dabble in hybrid poetry, whether
in relation to genre or form?
DLD: Erg. The hard part isn’t writing it. It’s selling it.
I have had relatively little luck with literary journals but . . . heck, most literary
journals don’t pay. Most genre magazines do. The trick is becoming
self-aware enough of what genetics each of your poems has, so that you can
fling them at the markets more likely to enjoy them.
And some of that comes from getting to know the
markets. Trying the editors out with . . . two, three, five, seventeen batches
of poems (most poetry markets accept submission packets of 3-5 poems each time,
so don’t just send one, unless that’s what the guidelines say. Always send
poems in packs.
They’re social animals. They get lonely in their cage in
the queue. And even if an editor doesn’t like poems 1-4, poem #5 might catch
their eye. So why not send them all together, instead of waiting 90 days
between submissions of one. . . poem. . .at. . . a. . . time?
Once you’ve gotten a couple of personals, you’ll start
to get a feel for what a given editor likes or dislikes. And then you can
tailor your submission packets a little more towards that perception of their
tastes. Though they’ll perennially surprise you. I’ve sold poems that I thought
were the weakest in their packet, while the editor never even mentioned the one
I thought was the best.
We are our own worst judges.
Then you grab the four that came back as rejected, slap
another friend in with them, and submit them elsewhere. Ideally, the same day,
hah.
So the advice for hybrid poetry is . . . really the
same advice for writing or submitting anything else. Write what you know, in
your own voice. Submit, submit, submit, evaluate where you’re at, where a
market’s head is at, polish, write more, submit, submit, submit.
SMW: What speculative poetry books have
you read lately and/or are on your TBR list? Anything specific that you’re
particularly looking forward to?
DLD: I am a huge fan of John W. Sexton’s Inverted Night.
Each poem feels, mentally, like bubblewrap under the fingers. There’s a near-tensile
strength to the diction, the inversions, in every poem, that makes me
want to pop them and let the meaning ooze out over my fingers. I’m a
fan.
T.D. Walker’s “Small Waiting Objects” is also
excellent; I find reading her poems is a tonic for the stressful times we live
in.
Both poets reveal something about me, lol. I was a
technical writer for twenty years. One of my paramount obsessions in writing
and language is clarity. Even when Sexton’s inverting things and
challenging the reader’s preconceptions, there’s a precision and clarity to his
language that I really enjoy.
SMW: What is next in store for your
readers?
DLD: I have another collection, this one all written as one
contiguous narrative flow of poems, out making the publishing rounds. If I don’t
get traction on this one in the next year, I might lean towards self-publishing
it. I love it, and really want to get it in people’s hands.
I also have literally dozens of short stories out
there, either published or waiting to be published, and several novels that,
should the world ever let me sit down and write for more than a half hour at a
time again, I need to get back to. You can find all of my many things at www.edda-earth.com/bibliography.
BIO:
Deborah L. Davitt graduated first in her class from the
University of Nevada, Reno in 1997, and took her BA in English Literature with
a strong focus on medieval and Renaissance literature. In 1999, she received an
MA in English from Penn State.
Since then, she has taught composition, rhetoric, and technical writing, and
created technical documentation on topics ranging from nuclear submarines to
NASA’s return to flight to computer hardware and software.
Her poetry has garnered her Pushcart, Dwarf Star, and Rhysling
nominations and has appeared in over fifty journals; her short fiction has appeared
in Compelling Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, and Flame Tree
anthologies.
In 2019, her first full-length poetry collection, The Gates
of Never, was published by Finishing Line Press.
She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son.
When
a mysterious enemy attacks his adopted nation of Korva, Earthman Carson Napier
discovers his own arrival on Venus years ago may have unknowingly triggered the
strike. The invaders’ trail of death and destruction leads Carson and his
beloved princess Duare headlong into battle against a seemingly invincible,
primordial race. But that is not Carson’s only challenge, for an uncanny
phenomenon has entangled him with two strange individuals from beyond
spacetime. Will Carson be able to solve the mysteries of his past and the
enigmatic visitors before the entire planet descends into chaos?
Fingers
bleeding, I clutched the sharp edges in order to keep myself from following the
broken section down. The sounds of combat around me fell away until I heard
nothing but my own breathing, ragged and desperate, fearing the slightest
breeze would cause my fragile handhold to break free. 
