| The opening poem from Site of Disappearance, Erin Malone’s second full collection of poetry, deftly deposits the reader into the past, the way a mouse might transport her young by the scruff. Separated by virgules rather than line breaks, the compact womb of “Biography” conjures Malone’s younger brother, Michael, into existence. He is, “born blue / not unlike the sky… blueberry mouth blue eyes his heart / tied in a bow.” This gateway serves as both cypher and code, setting the tone for Malone’s intricate, tender detailing of her brother whose congenital heart disease led to his death at eleven. Her meticulous sculpting of words on the page—only the essence remains—demonstrates what’s possible in the hands of a skilled craftsperson. Forty years ago this September, Michael died after undergoing open-heart surgery; that same morning, the body of a missing boy was found in a field in their small Nebraska town. Another would follow. These three deaths and the hunt for the serial killer silently haunted Malone for decades; when her own son approached the same age as the lost boys, suppressed memories and grief rose to the surface for reckoning. Boys, bodies, bears, the color blue, and birds are but some of the symbols that interweave this nest of poems, past to present. Malone grapples with the loss of her brother and the murdered boys alongside her boundless love for her son who she yearns to safeguard in a world where children hide from armed predators beneath their desks. Malone’s formally inventive work, particularly in longer poems like “Archive,” “Frieze,” and “Overlay,” contribute to an overarching sense of the uncanny. Coffee cups chime, wind rattles, restless objects tick and ring—time gets stuck and suspended—yet, the shifting quality of light is a reassuring guide. We begin naked and exposed in thin, pale sunlight; at the end, we emerge transformed near the warmth of a fire. This transcript has been edited for clarity and flow. You’ve been writing about your brother’s death for some time. Where did the tendrils of this book begin, and how did they come together? Erin Malone: Well, I was glad to be done with my first book, Hover. That was a huge subject. It was about my long-suppressed grief for my brother, which came to light when I had my baby, who was also a boy who was born in September, which is when my brother’s birthday is—and his death day. It sort of collided at his birth. I hadn’t expected it. Hover is about coming to terms with that. Around the time Peter, my son, was nine or ten years old, I started having these memories. Not just of my brother, but of something really bad that had happened. I talked to my parents about it, especially my mother, at first. I remember staying up late with her one night on a visit and piecing together a timeline. Then I decided I wanted to write a poem—I needed to write a poem—about this. I feel like it was in 2015. I was part of the Jack Straw Writers Program, and Kevin Craft was the curator. I think my project description was that I was going to write a long poem, and when I started getting into it, I realized that it wasn’t just one poem, it was many. That’s where it took off. Was “Archive” where you started? Or “Overlay”? EM: That’s a really good question. I think “Childhood” was a very early poem. I wrote that during Jack Straw. I think I first wrote “Overlay” in paragraph form. It was going to go in the beginning of the book. I had an idea—and there was no way for a publisher to do this, it would be crazy—but I had this idea that I was going to have several paragraphs explaining [the poems], and then over the top of that would be a piece of vellum with holes in it, so you would just see certain words standing out, then you would turn the page and you would have the fact sheet. Basically, the explanation of the story. When I realized no publisher was going to be able to do that or willing to do that—I mean, the amount of production, it was just kind of crazy… I didn’t want a straight prologue, so I started crafting “Overlay” into something digestible, a form that kind of matches the other poems. Let’s dig into that word, digestible. It speaks to your careful work with space on the page, and how space functions for the reader. For example, the diction and physical spacing in “On This Day in History” where time widens to a dial tone. That assonance—time, widens, dial—is a delicious sound that slows down the reading. I felt like I ingested it, word by word. EM: Sound is really where I start, whether it’s a sound image, or sometimes a line will arrive in my head, and I work off of that. Like the sound the bird is making on the page, but also sonically with rhyme. It’s like putting down musical notes, and noting the breath between the notes. I have no musical skills whatsoever, but I do feel like I can do this on the page with words. Sound is extremely important to me. I would be nowhere without that attention to breath and accents and internal rhyme—you know, all the tricks of the trade. Indeed. So, these poems were coming together in 2015…when did you feel that you had a collection? EM: I kept thinking two or three years in, Okay, now this is done. I remember telling this to someone who laughed. She was like, “Yeah, we always think we’re done, and then we’re not really done.” The last poem actually just went in! [Laughs] I added “Ghost” in April. I started sending the book around in maybe 2018, which was too early. I did have people who were kind about it, but I stopped. I gave it to Ornithopter Press in November 2022, and in February 2023 they took it. I couldn’t believe how fast it went, productionwise; the editor is really great. He’s a one-man band. He does the design, the editing, all of it. The fact that he put it together so fast is amazing. Along the way, I had a lot of really good news. I think it was a finalist for contests like ten or so times, and for some big contests, too, which made me feel like not giving up. At the same time, I remember telling Shawn, my husband, “If it doesn’t hit this year, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” I had sent it out to a new batch of contests in January. Like, I’ll just put it in a drawer, you know? Shawn said, “No, you can’t do that.” But, at the time, I felt like, I don’t know where else there is to go—I’ve done it all. It’s always interesting, how a book comes together, particularly when you work on it long enough to see gaps, which you keep working at. At some point, you do have to stop, though. EM: With this book, I was seeing those holes as I was going along. When I was assembling it, I realized it was very unclear who these other boys were, so I would add a poem, and try to build some narrative. One of the poems that came in later was about my mother on the stairs. She has to turn around to tell me the news, but it’s that moment, right before she does. It’s such a heartbreaking image, and I’ve carried it with me forever. I had tried to write that poem for probably twenty years, twenty-five years. Finally, I had some distance and I was able to write it. I could look at the book and say, “What else do we need to see?” I felt that was an important moment. The structure of the book kept changing until maybe a year before it was taken. I kept experimenting with how to put it together. At first, it was just one long book. I didn’t have any divisions because I wanted that blurring of my brother and the boy and my son. Then I realized along the way that it was too confusing for the reader to go back and forth. I had really good readers who helped me—friends who are not only fantastic poets but keen editors. Really, really sharp. They helped me a lot. Is ordering poems a physical experience for you? Do you print them out and get down on the floor and move them around? Do you read the whole reordered collection aloud each time? EM: Yeah, I’m down there on the floor, and I’m moving things around. You know, one thing I will say, and this is about my last book: when I was done with Hover, Megan Snyder-Camp, a poet and friend of mine, was in my living room, and she read the book to me, start to finish, after we had moved all the poems around. That was such a gift. I did not do that this time around. I sort of did it internally. I took it in bites. At the end, I remember talking with Megan about how to order this book. She’s also working on a book-length project, so it’s nice to have that companionship when you’re both going through the same thing. One method that finally worked was a sort of accordion method. You look at the first poem in the section and the last poem in the section, then you see how they fold inward and how they move out. Then you’re looking at the first poem in the collection, and you’re looking at the last poem in the collection. Everything you’re doing, it’s bit by bit and seeing how all of the structure works. Jane Alison wrote a book called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative that’s very insightful and helpful. I feel like I’ve learned more from poets about how to be a better writer. I think it’s the work poets do on the level of the sentence, the line, the word, the syllable—and the level of sound. EM: A lot of times, you can pick up a book of essays or a novel and tell if that person has roots in poetry. Given their care with language, I feel like we’d be fortunate if more poets were essayists. EM: I would love to be able to write long form. I wanted to write an essay explaining this book. I started and I just can’t do it—or it would take me forever, I don’t know. I’m fascinated by braided forms. You’re already doing it! Let’s talk about poems like “Archive” or “Frieze.” What you’re doing with collage and braiding in these pieces—it’s just more compact than an essay. There’s such judiciousness. How many words did you have to scrape away for these poems to emerge? EM: That’s a great question, how much did I have to scrape away. Poetry makes me think of sculpture in that way. Some sculptors say that the form is inside; you just need to clear away material to uncover it. EM: I remember having this conversation, maybe as an undergrad. My teacher said that, with poets or sculptors, you’re either someone who’s adding, or you’re taking away. I’m the one who’s always taking away, always scraping away. The narrative poets are building and building; I’m the opposite. I whittle. You know those miniature paintings of scenes inside those mini glass bottles? When I see that, I recognize the painstaking intensity of that art. Your work contains such careful detailing, and there’s a recurrence of particular details—chimes and ringing, the color blue, birds, boys—how does that patterning happen? Did you intentionally weave these through the poems, or did they emerge organically? EM: I wrote this book poem by poem. When those started coming in, well, one reason you notice birds all the time is that I am terrible at identification. So if it’s in the air, and it flies, I’m like, Hey, a bird! [Laughs] I keep wanting to be better at that. I have a field guide to western birds. I tried to educate myself a little bit, but classification is not natural to me. I did some of that in “Archive,” though. I had a residency in Minnesota at the Anderson Center, and they have this incredible art collection. They were cereal barons; the founder invented puffed wheat. Anyway, there’s a private art collection in the basement, and I walked into the office one day and asked to see it. The guy took me down there and said, “Well, I need to get back to work, so I’ll leave you down here. When you’re finished, lock the door behind you.” I’m in this art collection. There’s no one with me. I’m in there with Picassos… There was an etching by Chagall, and the movement in it made me think of feathers. I think I say this in a poem [“Training Exercise”]: In Chagall’s Psalm / a person etched in a tree / a person / in / the sky / a child’s version of a sun / Against fear / the sky / its feathers its heralds… So that is my description of a piece of art that found its way into the poem. Do you start out writing in more traditional forms like couplets, then evolve poems like “Archive” or “Overlay” into something more experimental or hybrid? Or, do you start out that way with certain poems? What tells you a poem needs a different form? EM: Sometimes I know the form of a poem pretty quickly, but “Archive” started just as notes. I was driving myself to a residency in Nebraska, where I grew up. I was returning to the scene where all this happened. Some of the first lines are, “A train and I / kept time” and “rain connected / the side of one state / to / another.” I wrote those in my notebook, and then during that residency I kept at it. I reviewed it as I was getting ready to talk to you today; apparently, I was calling it “The Wreck” for a long time because the poem wasn’t really a poem, it was just lines and it was a terrible muddle. What do I do with this? It was a lot of shaping to get it there. I was very particular about form and repetition, especially in lines like, “In the sparrow’s white eye-ring / An eye-ring / Of frost/ In the frost- / Starred brush, / The bruise—” And you didn’t say bird, you said sparrow! EM: I looked them up to make sure that, yes, sparrows are there in the fall! I love the way that boy and body fade into each other in sequential moves. How did that happen? EM: I don’t remember where it came from exactly, just that I was looking at these two words, boy and body, which were repeated through all of the poems. Putting those together and seeing what connection was there, and then removing one letter, and just doing that back and forth... I was gradually shading out the letter “d,” and a friend suggested playing with that, so the shading is reversed in the second column. I love the subtlety in that idea, the movement up and down. This move falls in with the larger alchemy of the book, which contains a poem called “Spell.” I don’t know if we want to call it magic, but by the last poem, “In the Stories We Are All Transformed,” the spell comes apart. EM: That’s from a fairy tale. I don’t know if you know the fairy tale of Snow White and Rose Red? Maybe the Disney version of Snow White, but not Rose Red. EM: It’s a great fairy tale. When I was little, I just loved it. This poem originally had two sisters and a mother in it, then I decided to change it because just the two women are important in my story. In the fairy tale, the bear is actually a prince in front of the fire, and he takes off his suit—he steps out of it. That poem was truly the ending of the collection for me. It was so surprising for me when I wrote that poem; it was an early one. I mean, not that I’m ever planning the poems, but I can sometimes just sort of see how it’s coming. That last line—“I pick it up. I put it on.”—came out of nowhere. It was quite a moment, a sort of transformation and taking on who you’re becoming within the story. The next world begins in another world’s end. Rather than look back at grief and loss, the speaker takes action. She has pulled on this suit, and she’s going somewhere. EM: Right. Another symbolic animal to add to birds and bears is the mouse. One poem notes that your nickname was Mouse and, maybe it’s related, there are collections of pocketed items that function like rats’ nests of delightful things—nests, of course, also belonging to the avian world. It’s all connected. EM: Thank you for noticing that. I did have that nickname in junior high and maybe in high school, too. But when I’m writing, I’m not thinking like that. This reading is such a gift because you’re identifying levels that, for me, are subconscious. You seeing it and giving that back to me is really incredible. As a reader, it’s exciting to discover the patterns and connections you’ve left for us. It’s embedded like a code, the story under the story. The payoff is, when you go looking for threads between these poems, you absolutely find them. Let’s talk about that on the language level. There are ringing phones and dial tones; a spectral call is sounding. There are chiming coffee cups, ticking clocks, the sound of a hill accumulating, all of which lend a sense of the uncanny. How do you work with the language of sound? EM: I don’t know where those come from. [Laughs] I mean, I do know that in one poem, the coffee cups chiming, I was at another residency and there was an artist who was making all of these patterns. They appeared on the walls painted in black ink. At the same time, I found something on YouTube and was fascinated by it. This man invented a turntable that would play the rings on a tree. You can listen to this on the web, and it’s really amazing to hear. So I played it, and I had that soundtrack going in. I heard the plink, plink and the chiming in that particular poem—that’s where those sounds come from. It’s just my observing by ear what he has done. Another surprising sound is that of a heart turned into a horse. It’s in “Suite Ending with the Middle School Symphony Orchestra.” The heart in its stall / stammers / stamping the edges… EM: I really like horses. They appear in my poems a lot, for whatever reason. This one I was playing with the mare, like the sea. I was thinking la mer, the French word for sea, so it’s “the mare / of me”—the sea of me—“rocking, rocking.” This poem started with text messages that my then-thirteen-year-old son was sending me. He had just gotten his phone. One of them said something like, I need you here. Not right now; I just need you to hold my coat. I thought that was funny. He was doing this orchestra thing, and I kept trying to put those texts into a poem. One of my smart editor friends said, “You gotta take those out. The poem doesn’t need it.” That was exactly right. In the end [my son’s] coat is folded on my lap. Small intuitive moves make the difference. Going back to color, I was thinking that, if this book were a painting, it might be a Rothko. The poems move the reader through this world in gradients. They take us to powerful places via soft transitions. EM: I love that. The tonality of the colors, as well as quality of light, becomes lighter and warmer by the end. EM: When you say that it gets lighter at the end, I’m really thrilled. I mean, I know that it does because I’m working towards some sort of lightening, but I really had to order the poems in the right way for that to come through. When I was in graduate school working on my first manuscript about my brother, which eventually got put in the drawer, my teacher was Linda Bierds. I remember her gently saying to me that the reader needs to be able to take a rest. The work is so concentrated and so intense, and if it’s just intense, intense, intense, intense, the reader is like, I can’t take this. She said it in a very gentle way. Since then, I’ve always thought about that. Like, we’re going to build this, but then we’re going to back away a little bit, and then we’re going to build it up again. I mean, there’s not a lot of light moments in there. But there are times, I think, that space on the page gives you a little bit of breathing room, and that’s important. That was a lesson that I learned early—I graduated in ’96, almost thirty years ago—and I’m not always able to do it, but I’m trying. The tenderness helps. Never at any point did I feel beleaguered or weighed down as a reader. There’s grief, but there’s deep sweetness between you and your son, and that modulates the tone. A book of only grief would be too much. EM: Right? Right. Can we talk about titles? I’m a person for whom titling work is the bane of her existence. EM: Me, too. I’m terrible at titles. I use so many one-word titles because longer ones are hard! Making fantastic titles is a talent. When I wrote “Site of Disappearance,” I just knew that would be the title poem. That poem was written pretty early on. I was in Oysterville doing a little self-residency during the fall or winter, and we have those big storms that come through. Our cottage, it’s such a lovely cottage, but there are cracks and the wind gets in. I was thinking quite a bit about that. And then I have a note—I must have been reading Gertrude Stein because there’s a note in my book that says, What is the wind, what is it? I think that’s the quote—it came out of that. I’m drawn to the way, to borrow that concept of accordion, that you have sites of disappearance, and you bring them together as one manifold site, making the plural singular and the singular plural. EM: Right? Because it’s also the loss of memory. Not only is it the physical loss of these different boys, but it’s the loss of my memory and the loss of myself. There was so much that was pushed and packed down that I didn’t have it to come back to, but it followed me, like in “Overlay.” In your note you asked whether I was done with the subject, and I really do feel like I am. I’ve written so much about my brother, and I feel like I found a place to set it down. It feels good and very freeing, finally. I do want to say something about the timeline that I did not realize. Things come together in weird ways. A friend sent me an article from the Bellevue Leader, which is the local paper from Bellevue, Nebraska, where these events took place. This past spring, some people in town made a memorial for the boys who were the murder victims. September 21, 2023, is the fortieth anniversary of these events, and my book is coming out on October 1. I didn’t schedule it, but… Chills. EM: Yeah. I reached out to a couple of journalists because they just unveiled this beautiful memorial. I have the story, and I have this book, and I would love to share it, but nobody got back to me. Journalists have other things to do. That’s a shame. This is another side to the story they’re covering. These are fertile spaces. The boys’ bodies found are also the boys’ bodies lost; how do we reconcile that? On page 53, there are impressions of space—erasures, redactions—that are part of that boy/body alchemy. A boy has a body and a body can be a boy, and the body exists on a continuum, which goes from unborn to alive to not. There are exchanges. These spaces aren’t only about what’s missing, but where something can be held. EM: I wanted to leave that in the mind of the reader. In order to rest, something must first be examined. Which brings me to the cover art. It feels so right. Were you able to select it? EM: Yes. It’s oil and graphite on panel, and it’s by Ryan Molenkamp. You may have seen his work around Seattle. He painted a volcano series. When I was co-editor of Poetry Northwest, one of the real pleasures was getting to choose the art for the covers. We—Aaron Barrell, my co-editor, and I—were looking for art by local or regional artists to feature, and we loved Ryan’s volcanoes, so we had one of those on our cover. But I also was hooked by other work he’d done. Later he told me he’d abandoned this particular project of dark houses and structures that looked abandoned; this one had the parent/child figures and the bear. After I saw it, I thought, If my poems become a book, I hope that I can use that image. That was, say, six years ago. When I asked Ryan this winter and he said yes, I was so thrilled. I think I would have been a little bit heartbroken, if we had had to go another route. I just can’t imagine something more perfect. Can you talk a little about structure, too? What drives the five parts of the book? EM: Well, again, it came after much struggling. Lisa Ampleman, an editor from Acre Books, a press I really admire, gave some really helpful thoughts about the book. She said, “We’re not going to publish this right now, but it was in our top ten.” She gave me some comments that led me to completely revise it with this new structure in mind. It had to do with where “Archive” ended up, I think. I sent it back to her the next year, and she was like, “No, we’re not going to publish it,” but I did meet her at AWP and thanked her because of what she did. You know how it is, as an editor, when you give your time to make helpful notes on someone’s manuscript and they take them. Like, they don’t just push away the rejection, but they take them. I always felt like, if something I say to you helps you, that’s fantastic. I’ve done my job. And she did this for me. Anyway, I realized how the first section needed to work. I was still doing a lot of back-and-forth between son and brother. In this last revision of the first section, I knew I needed to introduce my childhood, and introduce that fear, but my son also needed to be there. My brother and my son needed to be in that section before introducing the rest. The second section is my brother’s death…and the murders. The third section is really a deep dive into memories. That’s how I was thinking about it. Then, the fourth with “Archive,” it’s how I began to remember that whole process. The fourth section is really important because it’s also an acknowledgement, I think, of the pain that the other people in these stories face. I do use the word bystander in that one poem, “Grief Sequence.” Bystander: that’s really what I am to the story. This is not my story. It is on just one tiny level, right? That’s the coincidence of it. This violence touched me, and I’ve been carrying it for so long, somewhere in me all of this time. But I needed to acknowledge that there was this pain these other people were feeling, these other—I say mothers, but I mean other parents and siblings—and so, hopefully, that comes through. I’ve struggled a lot with that. I don’t want to be sensational about it. I read a couple of books written around this case and they felt invasive. I can see how they could. Although, when you’re a kid, and something like that happens in your community, it gets into your bones, and you don’t forget it. EM: That is one thing I wanted to talk about with this book, too. It’s not just my story, and it’s not just their story, it’s what’s happening even now, the way children are treated in our society and the way violence is affecting them. One of the poems we didn’t talk about is “Frieze.” I talk about hiding in this corner, and it’s partially true. The fact is, the murderer of these boys was finally arrested because he was outside of a preschool, which is where my youngest brother actually went. It was before school started, but the teacher was there getting ready for her class. So, you know, there’s that oh my god [feeling]. My mother and father had that horrible realization: like, if it had happened during school hours, if my little brother had been there on that day—I’m not talking about my brother who died, but my youngest brother—anyway… I was working on this book at the time of Sandy Hook. I remember being in the classroom; I was teaching. It might have been either my fourth or fifth graders, and I remember we were doing broadsides. It was, like, the end of the term and we were doing celebrations. They were making these beautiful broadsides of their poems, and the classroom teacher called me over while they were busy working and told me what had happened. Horrible chills traveled down me. The idea that this violence just goes outward, and touches all of us… Like the shooting at Uvalde. How far away is that? I’ve never been there. And, yet, a good friend of mine is related by marriage to a little girl who died there. I know that friend, and I know that story, and so we all carry it. It ripples out. We are the bystanders watching this happen. EM: We’re not doing anything. Anything. I was thinking about that teacher and thinking about how we do these lockdown drills. My son is turning twenty-one this month. I remember my relief when he was out of the classroom. I would get texts from him saying, We’re on lockdown. There’s an active shooter in the area. And there I am in traffic or at home, not knowing how to deal with that. So many parents are dealing with that on a daily basis. With this subject put to rest, at least for now, where are you going next with your work? EM: I am really hoping to be done with the past—for a while, anyway. It’s a relief to be moving forward after working on this book for so long. I’m actually collaborating with a visual artist friend who lives in San Francisco. She’s an abstract artist, so she’s doing some drawings, and I’m writing in response to her work, and we’ll see where it goes. I’m really happy we’re making something together. A lot of my poems in Site of Disappearance and Hover start with a visual. Visual art really moves me and inspires me. My concerns now are shifting. I’m thinking about aging and long marriage. You never stop being a parent, obviously, but now I’ve got someone who’s fully adult in the world, and on his way, so that is a different kind of release. I haven’t seen him enough this summer. I feel like I need to put my arms around him, but he’s been off at camp. He’s a camp counselor, a really good caretaker. I love that about him. |
| Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, and educator. Her writing, interviews, and visual art have appeared in BOMB Magazine, True Story, Orion, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Pity She Didn't Stay 'Til the End (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and the forthcoming fiction collection, How to Not Become the Breaking (Gateway Literary Press, 2025). She serves as managing editor and creative nonfiction editor for Crab Creek Review. Erin Malone’s new book, Site of Disappearance, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is out now from Ornithopter Press. She’s also the author of Hover (Tebot Bach Press, 2015), and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (Concrete Wolf, 2008). Her other recent honors include the Coniston Prize from Radar Poetry and the Robert Creeley Memorial Prize from Marsh Hawk Press. Erin has received grants and fellowships from Washington State Artist Trust, 4Culture, Jack Straw, and the Colorado Council of the Arts; and residency support from Kimmel-Harding Nelson, The Anderson Center, Ucross, and Jentel Foundations. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Cimarron, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A former editor of Poetry Northwest, Erin lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and works as a bookseller. |