Issue 4: Ceridwen Hall
"Because the eye assumes it knows everything, learn to walk / like your body double, whose coat and hat you can borrow."
~ “How to disappear in plain sight” by Ceridwen Hall
Your piece “How to disappear in plain sight,” playfully explores the shadowy and parallel habits of writers and spies. Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind this piece?
For the past few years, I've had a lot of questions – as a human and as a writer – about authenticity, privacy, and integrity. These are big and perilously abstract ideas to explore in writing, so I've turned to one of my favorite strategies for generating new poems, which is to research an adjacent historical topic (in this case, Cold War espionage) until I can start to see parallels arising. These parallels often become metaphors – vehicles for travelling between different spheres of knowledge, or between intellectual and emotional responses. "How to disappear in plain sight" came together when I challenged myself to treat the Moscow Rules (spy tactics developed by American spies in Moscow during the 1970's) as writing advice and realised that both writers and spies follow routines, craft personas and hone their crafts in order to reveal (or conceal) particular truths.
Your work is keenly perceptive, understated and quietly humorous. How do you go about cultivating your narrative voice?
When I'm drafting a poem, I like to let sounds and images lead the way. I write around particular words or anecdotes/images that have caught my attention to get a sense of the poem's rhythm or pulse and the terrain the poem wants to cover. Then I check in with the dramatic situation of the poem and play around with syntax and style until I've got a voice that fits both the dramatic situation and my sense of how and where the poem moves.
You are deeply involved in the literary world in the US, as a book coach and editorial consultant. How has this work influenced your own writing practice?
It's such a privilege and a delight to witness and guide other writers' processes. My work keeps me reading and thinking through a wide range of genres and styles of writing. Coaching also pushes me to identify and articulate how particular creative strategies work (or where they fall short) – so it often sparks writing about the strange/joyful/lonely act of writing.
Which books are sitting at the top of your ‘to be read’ pile at the moment?
Joy Harjo's "Poet Warrior" and M.R. O'Connor's "Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World".
Ceridwen Hall is a poet, essayist, and book coach from Ohio. She holds a PhD from the University of Utah and is the author of three chapbooks: Automotive (Finishing Line Press), Excursions (Train Wreck Press), and fields drawn from subtle arrows (forthcoming from GreenTower Press). Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals. You can find her at ceridwenhall.com.