For this next installment in a long-running series of interviews with contemporary poets, Peter Mishler corresponded with Sasha Debevec-McKenney. Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of the poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She received her MFA from New York University, was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in places like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and Granta. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Peter Mishler: Where do you write? What do you write with or on? What does your space look like? Could you share a ritual related to your writing process?
Sasha Debevec-McKenney: I’m not precious about it. I write wherever I’ve recently been productive. I rarely sit at my desk. There is no particularly beautiful spot that inspires me, and I don’t work well in silence. The less light the better. Lately, I’ve been productive at the Toco Hills Library in Decatur, Georgia, which is both beautiful and well-lit, so I wear sunglasses inside. Sometimes I write on my phone, in the Notes app, while stopped at a red light. Or while walking around. If I didn’t walk, I would write way less. I’m able to separate myself from my body when I go on long walks, which makes it easier to think. If I follow a thread long enough in my notes app, I’ll eventually paste it into Word and then work on it until I feel like it’s a real first draft.
When I’m ready to write a real second draft, I copy and paste it into Google Docs so I can have access to it on my phone wherever I go. I keep copy and pasting the poem into new pages in the same document, so I’ll often end up with one document that’s like six versions of the same poem—I love killing my darlings but I don’t want to lose them forever. When I’m happy with it, but I know it’s still not good enough I’ll print it out and then take it on a walk with me. I’m aware of some of my weaknesses so I always check for those: I overuse “just,” “thing” and “beautiful,” I use five words when I could use two, I rely too much on anaphora. And then I post it on my personal Instagram account. And then I just keep working on it until I’m bored with it. Bored writer, bored reader.
PM: What is something you’re looking for in a draft that keeps a poem moving to the next draft?
SDM: Ooh, basically if I can’t stop thinking about a poem I keep working on it. If it feels like a puzzle I need to know the answer to, I keep working on it. If there are lines that sound wrong, I keep working on it until they sound right. I basically just keep working on it as long as it’s fun. I love writing poems, and if I’m not loving writing the poem I know I should give it space.
PM: Do you have any artistic “procedures” that serve as an indirect way to find your way into a poem, like collage?
SDM: I have lots of little scraps of language and miscellaneous images in my Notes app in my phone. When I haven’t written in a while, I’ll search through my Notes app to find maybe a first line or abandoned draft to get me going. I do use collage a lot to make poems, but usually that’s with found lines from a book I loved or from my old tweets or lines from a beloved subreddit. I’ll print lines out and play with the lines on the floor. Found work should have a significant emotional connection to the source material. I feel like my poems are very focused—maybe that’s crazy to say, because a lot of them are so long—but collaging together lines from all these different places doesn’t interest me as much as collaging together lines that all come from a similar place.
PM: How often is it that a poem doesn’t go through several drafts? I only wonder because there is a sense of immediacy in your poems.
SDM: Almost all my poems go through like 10 plus drafts within their first week of life—I’m just constantly changing the line breaks, cutting lines out, messing around with the order, placing commas then taking them out again, adding concrete imagery, trying weird stuff. I would say it’s rare that a poem of mine doesn’t reach a draft that’s close to the final draft within 72 hours of it first being written. There are definitely a few shorter poems I’ve written that come out and never change, but that’s very rare. And even then, I feel like those poems just go through a drafting process in my head before I write them down.
PM: In what way do you surprise yourself as a poet?
SDM: Oh! I really surprise myself when I write short poems. But I guess every poem is supposed to surprise you, really, right? (And surprise the reader!) Nothing can ever be mapped out. Sometimes I feel real clever because I think I know how I want a poem to end, but then I can’t figure out how to get there. Or the poem goes in a different direction when I want it to. The poem is always in charge and you have to respect that. It’s shocking how much my voice has changed since I started writing poems and also shocking how much it hasn’t.
PM: What about your collection are you finding out, after having written it?
SDM: Well, I’m realizing people are actually going to read it. Somehow that never really occurred to me.
PM: I loved reading the Debts, Sources, and Notes section at the end of Joy Is My Middle Name. What role does this section play for you?
SDM: Like in Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series, I use the “Debts” section of my book as a place to put all the extra information that didn’t fit in the poem. I love those books and I love how they’re so long and the Notes section feels like all the stuff they told him to cut out and he was like sure I’ll cut it out…and put it in the back of the book. I also like that I can clarify some stuff—like I think it’s funny to say in the notes section that there’s a poem in the book I don’t really like (“Sestina Where Every End Word is Lyndon Johnson”). And I think it’s funny to put a secret extra poem in there. And I always consider myself a wannabe historian, so of course there are some real sources in there too.
Poetry should feel like freedom, but when you consider your audience too much (which I feel I am guilty of sometimes—too much anticipation), it loses some of that freedom.
I also liked using it as a place to let people know how much I actually lie in my poems. I will always choose sound, alliteration, emotional truth, the joke, etc. over the real truth. None of the information is really technically necessary, but it was fun for me. And I am a maximalist. I love excess. I love too much. The “Debts” section is one of the few parts of the book that was originally in my actual MFA thesis—which means I first drafted it during deep Covid, probably April 2020. I was kind of spiraling, so it has a spiraling sort of “I refuse to shut up” energy that feels true to who I am. I sort of expected my editor to cut it out and she didn’t so I just kept riding with it.
PM: You mention in your notes that stand-up comedians have played a role in your development as an artist. What’s the correlation for you?
SDM: I love stand-up. It’s all about surprising your audience. Holding their attention then messing with it. Pausing in the right places. Turning! Connecting a bunch of seemingly odd threads! The thing about poetry is that for some reason I feel like it’s not generally encouraged to consider your audience. A lot of people think that’s, like, sacrilegious. (I don’t.) A lot of people write poems for themselves only, or in their journals, or they think the MFA is evil and will change you and ruin your voice, or that the poem is only a place for them to show off, to brag about how well they can use language.
And the real message, the real feeling, gets lost. I’ve been to sooooo many poetry readings where it’s obvious no one is listening, the poet is just droning on and on about something super depressing and the reading is happening like, in a dark bar. Some poets don’t know how to read the room. But also, to be fair, I think if you are given a microphone and fifteen minutes, you should take that time to talk about whatever you want. Poetry is inherently selfish, in a good way—I love talking about myself and what I saw and how I feel. Poetry should feel like freedom, but when you consider your audience too much (which I feel I am guilty of sometimes—too much anticipation), it loses some of that freedom.
So, what I am saying I think is… it depends. Poets and stand ups both draft obsessively, but stand ups do it in front of an audience and poets often do it alone or with one or two readers. If a joke fails, a stand up can’t be like, oh I wanted that to not make people laugh, actually. Whereas I’ve been in workshops where people are like, oh I wanted that to be confusing, actually. I was talking to a poet once who said they love poems that are riddles and I really don’t. I want my reader with me the whole time. Considering them and anticipating their reactions gives me a better chance to control how I make them feel. Perhaps. Hopefully.
PM: Is there a moment from your childhood/youth that you look at now and think that it in some way “predicts” that you would be invested in poems as an adult?
SDM: I don’t know if there’s a moment in particular, but I do think growing up in a town that was literally founded in 1633 has had a huge impact on how I use American history in my writing. I grew up in a place where everything was named after someone who signed the Declaration of Independence. George Washington slept here, Thomas Jefferson pissed on this tree, Oliver Ellsworth walked down this street, etc. History never felt far away to me. It was part of everyday life. The lines blurred. These “great men” were not untouchable. Also, I went to Arts high school, so I started taking poetry very seriously as a possible career when I was 14.
PM: Do you think there is something “Northeast” about your poems or something that you think remains from your time there?
SDM: I’m from Windsor, Connecticut—the normal part of Connecticut, not the rich part. I consider myself a Midwesterner now, because I lived in Wisconsin on and off for ten years. If you get any sort of bratty meanness in the poems that’s my brash, New England self, but it’s not like I feel myself working in the shadow of Wallace Stevens or anything.
PM: Haha. Gotcha. For all the past interviews I’ve done with poets in this series, I’ve asked the question, “What’s the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?” Many of the responses have been about the mystery of poetry, so I was wondering if you could give us a counterpoint to talking about the mystery of poetry. Why do you suppose that response is so common?
SDM: I’m not sure…obviously poetry is mysterious, you’re listening to a part of yourself that isn’t really part of yourself when you write it. But I’m not scared of her, she’s me. She knows the way. I think sometimes, when I read interviews with poets, they like to make it seem like they’re doing something difficult and brave and for me I’m just…writing a poem because it’s fun and I like it.
PM: Why aren’t you scared of her-you?
SDM: I’m not scared of the place my poems come from. It’s mysterious, but not in a way that’s ominous or dark. I just mean to say that when people talk about writing poems like it’s this mystical labor, I don’t get that because I just think of it as a fact of life, a necessary part of myself.
Anyone can read my poems, I hope, but everything I’m revealing about myself in my poems, all the embarrassing stories I’m telling, all the bad stuff I’ve done, I know other girls have felt the same way.
PM: I wonder if you could pick a specific audience that you’ve written for and why you wanted to address them, potentially from a poem from this book.
SDM: In my mind, when I write, the people I want to impress the most are the fifty-or-so friends who follow my personal Instagram account. I write poems that I hope they will like, laugh at, relate to. I post my drafts to that account because when I imagine other people reading my poems I can immediately see more imperfections. But they’re a group of people I feel safe showing those imperfections to. Sometimes I write a poem to impress a crush. And I normally want to write poems my parents can understand—they both read a lot of fiction and nonfiction. If you are interested at all in American history, you might enjoy my poems. But most of all my audience is girls. Especially crazy, chaotic girls like me. Girls meaning all women of every age. I like when girls like my poems best.
PM: Would you say more about this?
SDM: Anyone can read my poems, I hope, but everything I’m revealing about myself in my poems, all the embarrassing stories I’m telling, all the bad stuff I’ve done, I know other girls have felt the same way. I’ve been desperate for love and affection. I’ve hated my body. I’ve experienced profound female friendship. I’ve thrown myself at people who don’t want me. I’m happy to admit it all if other girls can relate.
PM: Which poem from Joy is the most recent and when looking at it in the context of older poems in the collection, what do you see?
SDM: There are some poems in the manuscript that were written in 2017, before I got my MFA, before I understood what a line break was (and I still have a lot to learn), when I was coming off my long-term antidepressant, was still drinking regularly at levels I rarely touch now, when I was in my late 20s. The newest poem in the collection is “Elegy,” which is a poem about First Lady Rosalyn Carter’s funeral procession and feeling lonely in Atlanta. I moved to Atlanta in 2023 to start a fellowship at Emory University, plus I was going through my first-ever real breakup which I thought would be easier because we ended on good terms but in actuality was a living nightmare.
Part of the reason I wanted the fellowship so badly is because I’m on this lifelong journey to see every president’s grave, and I thought Jimmy Carter might die during my residency. Rosalyn died first, and they had the funeral on campus. Jimmy was there. I felt lucky to be witnessing this piece of presidential history so up close, but I didn’t have anyone to share it with. Nobody nearby understood what it meant to me. I wrote the “Elegy” when I was 33, better equipped to handle my feelings, much less hectic, much more stable. Not stable compared to other people, of course, but compared to me when I was 27. I see a more refined, contained poem, but…at what cost?
PM: Could you say more about the “cost?” Are you concerned with preserving a kind of authenticity?
SDM: Oh, I meant the cost of loneliness! Academia is so lonely—you go wherever will have you, no matter what. You leave people behind. I took the fellowship at Emory because it was prestigious and I wanted to live in the South for the first time and visit Civil Rights and Civil War sites, but I never really considered the fact that I would be so far from basically everyone I knew. Writing a good poem about something painful can make the pain feel worth it—if you’re a sicko like me, at least. But as far as authenticity—I think it’s quite nice that my voice has changed because it means I have changed. You couldn’t pay me to relive my twenties or to be that person again.
PM: Can you say more about your interest in U.S. presidents?
SDM: I have been obsessed with the presidents since I was a little girl! I don’t always know how to explain why they fascinate me so much, they just do…they’re my special interest. (Though I don’t think any president has ever been “good.” It’s impossible to be “good” when you’re a figurehead for a world power.) I like to use them as metaphors and images; it feels natural to me. I’m about to move to Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of Gerald Ford, and I’m looking forward to living in a town where a president is buried. I’m so inspired by American history because it makes me angry.
PM: What power do you think maximalism, as you describe, it has?
SDM: My friend Chessy Normile, who is brilliant and also a maximalist influence of mine, shared this Mary Ruefle essay with me where she writes about how to be heard in a poem you need to speak either above or below the din. I’m not hating on anyone or any way of writing poems, but sometimes it feels like the poetry world values poetry that’s “below the din” more: small, lyric poems, a page with ten words spread across it, riddles.
Literally an editor who passed on my book said I valued laugh lines over beauty, which really pissed me off. When I read loud, funny, absurd, repetitive, clear, wild, angry, ugly, long, overtly political poems they feel more human to me. I feel excited and inspired. I think it’s brave to say clearly and loudly how you feel. Poems are supposed to connect us to other people, to give us a peek into other lives, and those kinds of poems empower readers to talk about their own feelings more openly. I know I’m oversimplifying all of this, and it’s not a black and white situation at all. Probably the best poems speak both ways. It’s just a matter of preference. I think all poetry is powerful in its own way! And all poets!
My number one maximalist influence is probably Rachel Zucker, who was my first professor for my first class ever in my MFA at NYU and made us write a 30-page poem. Her book SoundMachine in particular is full of these essayesque poems I love. They just keep going and going but you’re never bored. You trust her. I love Hera Lindsay Bird, Kate Durbin, and of course Frank O’Hara, who taught me to put it all in the poem —that the poem should be big and alive and noisy. When I think maximalism in poems, I’m imagining people who speak above the din. I’m incapable of being quiet in my day-to-day life, so of course I feel closer to loud poems.
