I gave myself a constraint where each entry must take place on a single neighborhood street. Many of the poems are inside the main characters’ home, but often they are outside in the front lawn, or back yard, or just down the street visiting a neighbor. While most of the pieces weren’t written with this concept in mind, once I found my through-line, I was able to collage and re-work them into some type of (hopefully visible) narrative, all the while writing pieces to connect the dots and fill in some necessary world-building details.

It’s hard to nail down what it’s like working with Leigh Chadwick, as you can imagine, being Leigh Chadwick, and based on all that other stuff I just said. Things just sort of…happen. I began writing in ways I’d never written before, and sometimes we’d even write at the same time, working on lines simultaneously, forming something real and depressing and beautiful out of nothing. Simply put, working with Leigh Chadwick is transformational. 

The last few paragraphs of this interview notwithstanding, I think I am ready to do a more serious interview about art. Art. (Felt the need to start a new sentence so I could make sure “art” was capitalized.) In the past, my interviews have been called “jokey” and “some of the best interviews ever conducted in the history of interviews” and “thank you for existing, we need this in our lives,” but I think it is time for me to dive deeper. 

I was on Goodreads and saw that you had like 12 ratings/reviews for this book of yours, Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. (It was on Goodreads where I also discovered that you had more than one book--unless there is another poet named Amorak Huey--which I found surprising because I had never heard of these books before…). Anyway. I figured maybe some other people read it, or tried to, and just forgot to rate or review it.

The editors of Olney asked me to write an introduction for this interview, which is the first entry in my new column, “Mediocre Conversations.” Why the editors of Olney were dumb enough to give me a column, I will never know. It is something I am sure they will—if they don’t already—regret.