#6: An Interview with Todd Dillard
"A lot of what I think a good mentor is comes from [Tom Lux]: it's not just the ways they push you, it's the ways they show you how you belong, how necessary you are wherever you are."
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Today's interview is with poet, academic writer and Poetry Twitter behemoth, Todd Dillard. A stalwart of the poetry community, he is talented, vulnerable and humorous. His lack of ego is refreshing in a world where it's easy to lose sight of what's important amid the din of literary competition. He sees the world through a lens that is both dreamlike and deeply rooted in universal emotions like grief and joy.
Todd is the author of Ways We Vanish, published by Okay Donkey Press, which navigates the loss of a parent, while becoming one, and the chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance, which celebrates the father-daughter relationship with poems that demonstrate how "parenting can feel like a full symphony without the sheet music".
Todd has always been gracious and generous with his time. I have reached out a few times over the years: the first time after my dog had died and I was looking for elegies for pets; another time, for a poetry resource; and now he is agreed to participate in my fledging newsletter. Let's get to it!
Who are you and how do you express your creativity or describe your art?
I'm a father, a husband, a poet, an ex-Texan and ex-New Yorker now living outside Philadelphia, and a professional academic writer working in a complex university medical system. My poetry consists of "soft surrealism" narratives — I'm borrowing this term from my friend Alina Pleskova, who is a brilliant poet — and primarily focuses on braiding elements of interiority with the narrator's physical reality. In this way, remembering what a loved one who has passed on said turns into the dead speaking in my poems, for example.
But I'm not interested in horror narratives--these "ghosts" are just as likely to eat the leftovers you were saving as they are to wake you up in the middle of the night and demand to dance. I think by doing this, the focus of these elements of interiority — grief, despair, joy, desire, etc. — shifts to the everyday-ness of these feelings.
By making the impossible possible, I want to show how the impossible thing we do is live.
What keeps you coming back to creative work? Why is it worth doing?
I think habit is very powerful. I think religion is built upon habit — that people who see in life mysterious ways everywhere, can pull grace from anything, are doing so because they've made a habit out of a particular kind of seeing that's different than the common/agnostic/pedestrian ways of looking at the world. And I think, growing up going to a Baptist private school but with no interest in God, growing up with parents who encouraged me to love art and made sure I listened to lots of music and ate all kinds of food, I sort of replaced this way of looking with an artist's way of looking, and this habit of looking at the world remains in me to this day.
So I can't say I "keep coming back to creative work" because the work is, for me, a way of living. I think, added to that, is that I've always had to work, so I have always had to become a thief of my own time throughout the day in order to have time to write.
So I have been in the habit of writing down poem ideas and notes during morning commutes, lunch breaks, pauses between meetings, in a burst of inspiration at work, after the kids go to bed, in the middle of the night, etc. for years now. It's something I have to actively resist, and doing so is as odd to me as someone choosing to put their own foot to sleep. Why?
In terms of "worth doing", this isn't something I think about. "Worth" for me isn't something I bring to the work. It curbs strangeness, and curiosity, to look at a poem first with — -to use corpo speak — its value-add properties. Poetry is "worth writing" because I want to write it. Ideally, I want others to write it so I can read it too, but I would be embarrassed if they thought about how I'd value it while they were writing it. "I hope someone likes this" isn't something I ever think about when I write. "I hope this gets published" etc. is never my concern.
What legacy do you hope to leave with your art?
You know, I think if you would've asked me this ten years ago I would've said something about wanting to be read after I died, to be in a textbook, to have future readers know my name. But now that I have kids, a job where my writing helps many people, a platform on social media that has inadvertently reached many writers..
I think I would challenge the old me's definition of "legacy." To me back then, [it] was an antonym to my fear that what I write doesn't matter. But now that my life is more peopled with those I love, I don't feel that fear anymore, or need an antidote to it. Now I hope the legacy I leave behind is just one where more people are encouraged to write those weird little poems I love. I hope my kids and my wife see how much I love them in my poems. I hope maybe someone learns something from my poems and writes their own poem."
You know, this question is sort of like the "what's the last meal you'd want to eat" question people sometimes ask--I think there's a book focused on chef's answering this. For me, I think I'd want some good bread, good butter, good cheese. Good wine. I try to live fully by wanting simply.
What are your biggest challenges when it comes to maintaining a steady creative practice, and how have you overcome them?
I think having two kids, a full-time job, and limited access to an in-person writing community present lots of challenges. Kids, obviously, require a lot of the energy and thought I would otherwise apply to writing — which isn't a complaint: I draw so much inspiration from my children and from being a father and a husband that I am not sure I'd have much to write about without them. And having a full-time job, too, means my time to write is pretty limited.
It makes it hard to work on larger projects: My poems are fragmented, cohere more so via the period of time they're written than a broader scope/project, and the essays and stories I want to write have been shelved until such time my kids need me less. (Does that happen? I am assuming so?)
All of this applies to the limited writing community too: my time is just so pinched, it's hard for me to bop into the city for a reading, join a workshop, consider going to a fellowship. I just do the best I can with the time I have, which often means writing quick drafts that I then spend weeks or months or years tapping away at until they're done. (I have a poem forthcoming in Threepenny Review that took two years to finish, and another in Southern Review that I think I first drafted in my MFA days in 2008.)
What advice do you have for someone who wants to start or maintain their creative practice in a new way?
I think you have to give yourself permission to write badly. I love writing badly. Blow something up! Get weird! You never know what will rise from the ashes until you burn something down. I think if you find join in tinkering, hammering, chainsawing, guessing, distorting, mutating, kicking up dust, etc. in your writing, you're going to always be growing as a writer.
You're going to be more confident in the ways you write because you're going to see the potential for newness, the places where leaps and risks need to be made to push the writing to a place where you previously didn't know it needed to go. The poem knows best, but often the way it tells you this is through a patois of the mistakes you made. Lean into that, and you'll hear new ways your poems speak to you.
In terms of time: set aside 15 minutes a day to write and at least that much, if not more, to read. It doesn't have to be all at once. I piecemeal my writing time throughout the day, and it's worked for me this way for years now.
Why does mentorship/ community support matter?
I think mentorship is unique because it's commonly thought of as a relationship, but it's almost like a place too. It's where you can go to become the self you haven't arrived at yet, and your mentor — a good mentor — will help you "get" there. Not a physical place, but an area of possibility localized to your interiority. Inviting someone into that space to help you explore it is a beautiful, and vulnerable thing. A good mentor/mentee relationship is something to hold onto fiercely.
Community support can function similarly. It's wonderful to be seen, to have people say they love your work, you're there favorite poet, etc.
When people I don't know share my poems, when I see them out in the wild, because others want to share them--it makes me feel connected to Art in a way that tapping words on my little keyboard in the corner of my den simply can't do. I don't write to be seen, but to be seen because I write? It's a miracle.
I will warn writers against placing too much hope into community. It is important, but it's not the only thing. Too often I see people focus on a lack of recognition, opportunity, and readership. While I think this is important when critiquing gatekeeping and such, ultimately your focus should be the art, not the accolades. I'll add that I laugh when these concerns come from people I never see lift up their fellow writers. Community means getting in there yourself and participating too!
Do you have a mentor?
I don't. I have been lucky to have several excellent writers who briefly took me under their wings. At University of Houston, Jericho Brown was extremely kind and brilliant, and went out of his way to introduce me to new work and talk poems with me, and this is something I still hold dear. Claudia Rankine was my thesis advisor there, and she was also just wonderful and brilliant.
At Sarah Lawrence, I ended up hanging out with Tom Lux and he not only snuck me into some writing events I wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford, he booked me for my first officially paid reading and published my first chapbook. I lost contact with him during a tumultuous time after my MFA, and he passed away not long after. I never got to tell him how much I loved him. I think he knew, but I'll never forgive myself for the time I took for granted. A bit of a tangent on my part, apologies!
Are there other support structures or community that have helped you? How did you find your community?
I have a wonderful community of writers with whom I exchange work. There's probably been over a dozen in the past 10 years. Some I email every week (and, when I am being really prolific, multiple times a day). Some we email when we have books finished and want someone's POV, or a tricky poem and we want some honest input. All but one of them I met through Twitter, which I think is an excellent place to meet writers, as long as you don't take discourse too seriously. I've also connected with writers via working on literary journals; two of my readers I met when I did a stint at Barren as a reader a few years ago.
Joining a literary magazine staff is probably the easiest way to connect with writers and to improve your writing too. It's really sobering plowing through a thousand submissions and seeing the common moves people use or themes they explore. I think it's an incentive to explore elsewhere--folks are already covering that territory, after all.
How has your mentor (or support structure/community) impacted you?
Certainly having people email me and say "Todd, this is quite bad" has been a necessary part of my craft. (OK, my readers are nicer than that.) Sometimes I'll over edit a poem and they'll tell me to go back. Sometimes they'll suggest an edit and I will have this visceral reaction, this loud NO that goes off like a gong in my chest. It's important to weigh the feedback you receive, to treat it with respect of course, but to also know when it nudges your work in a direction it doesn't want to go. My readers have also recommended places I should submit, which has been a great motivator for me and resulted in my placing work in journals I mistakenly assumed wouldn't have accepted my work.
Who is your dream mentor, living or dead, and why?
Let me tell you a story: the first summer after my MFA I was too poor to fly back home, so I spent most of it alone in my apartment in Yonkers reading poems, going to Sarah Lawrence to work in the bursar's office filing freshman applicants' essays, and emptying humidifiers in the audio/visual equipment library. (These odd jobs across campus were how I could afford to live in New York; I often worked 60 hour weeks even during the semesters.)
Tom Lux plucked me out of this boring, lonely routine and slipped me into a writing conference on campus, and then later cajoled me to joining his team at the writing retreat's annual softball game. Our team was terrible. I love poets, but not many of them that day could hit a softball past home plate. Worse, these Raymond Carver wannabe ass fiction writers had filled up the other team, and were just knocking ball after ball out of the field, forcing our team to go fetch, while they hooted on their victory lap.
Eventually, I found a softball that was so busted up on the inside that when it was hit it would putty into a little floppy disc and wobble to the ground. Me and Tom got a rhythm going where I'd pitch the ball, the fictioneer would try to wallop the stitching off it, it would flop to the ground, the fiction bro would get all flustered, and Tom would hustle out of the catcher's spot and toss it back to me ASAP. I'd remold it into something orb-shaped in my glove, and then it was batter up again. We still lost by double digits, but just getting away with our little hustle was so much fun. We did it the next year too (same fun, same result).
Tom was really good like that — he'd put you in places where you felt like you didn't belong, and then he'd make you feel like you were an insider. You'd find yourself losing, and he'd still show you what winning was like. He could peel back the most pedestrian poem and show you the magical gears whirling inside. I'd love to have him back. I'd love for him to meet my family. A lot of the goodness I aspire to comes from him.
A lot of what I think a good mentor is comes from this: it's not just the ways they push you, it's the ways they show you how you belong, how necessary you are wherever you are.
(Interview conducted via Twitter Direct Messaging and email September 29-October 2, 2024.)