Virginia Konchan on The Social Distance Reading Series

How do you begin a new piece of writing? What conditions help your writing process?

New poems, for me, usually come from a saturation in other texts or forms of language (found poetry, overheard conversations). Thus, often, I’ll begin a new poem with the “scaffolding” of another piece of writing, be it a line or image, and while that scaffolding usually gets erased or otherwise absorbed into my poem, I find it really useful and fun to play with these forms of intertextuality, this complex web of meaning-making that underlies all creation, humming in conversation together. I’m lucky in that I can write pretty much anywhere (in bed, on my phone; on the bus; in waiting rooms), but my preferred conditions for writing are sitting at my home desk with my cat Gigi beside me, an ever-renewing cup of coffee in my hand. I can’t listen to music when I write, but I do enjoy hearing the birds.

What was an early experience that taught you language has power?

I think my earliest recognition that language has power was when my mom or dad would make a promise to me, and then uphold that promise; that taught me that language acts have meaning, and that when language “do’ers” or agents state a will or intention, then follow through with it, they are enacting those powers. That taught me to mean what I said, and when using future tenses or making promises, to fulfill them to the best of my ability as a way to honor language and speech acts. Also, my younger sister Anne, when a child, used to say that the sun and clouds looked like “a pad of butter in a sea of mashed potatoes,” and I remember delighting in that simile and mixed metaphor of clouds/sea/potatoes; in 8th grade I started to use figurative language myself in my student writing, and was told by my teacher I could really “turn a phrase,” which gave me confidence and set me on the path of writing.

What poets or writers do you continually go back to?

Poets: Sappho, George Herbert, John Keats, William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Rilke, Hafiz, Rumi, Wang Wei, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, Robert Hass, Anne Carson, Robert Creeley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Forché, Sarah Vap, Danielle Pafunda, and Ariana Reines.

Writers: Kafka, Dostoevsky, Thomas Bernhard, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Clarice Lispector, Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Kate Zambreno, Amina Cain, Ann Patchett, Jean Rhys, JD Salinger, Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, Patti Smith, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Dante, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Roland Barthes, Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Simone de Beauvoir.

What is your favorite childhood or adolescent book?

Tie between Roald Dahl’s Matilda and E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

A baseline introvert (with extroverted tendencies), I personally have been ok, and am grateful for the opportunity to catch up on writing, reading, and letter-writing to friends and family. I also have a loving partner and cat, and recognize how lucky I am not to be in total solitude. But I know so many are struggling (my friends in the performing arts, my elderly relatives and neighbors, parents now responsible for home-schooling their children, among them). This pandemic is terrifying and tragic for so many, in terms of lives threatened and lives lost (to say nothing of the upending of our global economy and all those whose livelihoods are imperiled, including my partner who owns a restaurant in Halifax), and I am grieving those losses and that uncertainty. However, the outpouring of support and love for those alone, endangered, or living in fear, the increased sensitivity we are all feeling in quarantine, and the heroic sacrifices our frontline and essential workers are making every day during this crisis encourage me to try to find hope in this situation, and in a collective future that could possibly become, when we emerge, more community-based, locally-sourced, and humane: what Carol Gillian called a “new ethics of care.”

Where can you find me?

My website is: www.virginiakonchan.com. My email is konchan.virginia@gmail.com. And my social media handles are virginia.konchan (FB) and vkonchan (Instagram).