Interview with Writer Holly Pelesky
This interview was conducted on February 21, 2020 by EIC Sarah O’Brien for Boston Accent Lit. This is the fourth in a 2020 Boston Accent interview series with writers.
Holly Pelesky holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She teaches poetry workshops through the Nebraska Writers Collective. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in Roanoke Review, The Nasiona, and Jellyfish Review among other places. She recently released her first collection of poems, Quiver: A Sexploration. Learn more on her website.
Boston Accent Lit: Why did you become a writer? Have you always been a writer?
Holly Pelesky: I was one of those kids, you know. The kind who read a lot of books and found solace in worlds that weren’t my own. I started writing my own stories on church bulletins, then on my mother’s typewriter. The process of writing made me vibrate with creation. Story gave room for my imagination. I remember once my dad ruffled my hair after reading one and said, “That’s my little writer!” and I had never been prouder.
Boston Accent: Your book of poetry, Quiver: A Sexploration was published by Picture Show Press in 2019. What I love about this collection is its simultaneous sass and tenderness that is achieved largely due to the poetry’s honesty. In “Shapes We Make,” you write, “When I fucked a woman / no shaft thrust inside / me spilling my blood / on the sheets, no empty eyes / looking up at me from the dark.” How have you grown to understand your sexuality, and how does this identity play into your writing?
Pelesky: I grew up in a sheltering household. We did not have a television. We could not listen to secular music. I attended a Fundamentalist Baptist church and was homeschooled until tenth grade. My view of the world was not an accurate depiction of this broad world I know now. I knew of a world where women marry men and bear their children. I got married my first year out of college to a man and later bore his children.
My adulthood has been a lot of unlearning. A lot of opening up what I was afraid of, peering inside, writing and speaking about what I had once believed was taboo. I have been attracted to both men and women all my life but only a few years ago began to let it live out here in the air as a part of me. By embracing my identities rather than hiding them, I discovered my most honest and vulnerable self. Those happen to be the two traits I’m most proud of in my writing.
Boston Accent: You recently finished writing your creative nonfiction manuscript. Can you describe this work and your writing process?
Pelesky: My manuscript is a collection of letters to my daughter I placed up for adoption in 2005. It has been my unzipping. It is me burrowing past my exterior and finding my viscera. It has been so hard to write. My desk, many nights, was littered with Kleenex and empty cups once filled with vodka. But I also think it is my most important project to date. It is all I didn’t know I wanted and needed to say.
Boston Accent: You’re originally from Seattle, WA, but you live and work in Omaha, NE. Do you consider yourself primarily a Nebraska writer? What does “home” mean to you?
Pelesky: I am nearing the halfway split: I have almost spent as many years in the Midwest now as I did in the Pacific Northwest. But I still don’t know that either is home. They are places I’ve lived. “Home” is a word I’ve never fully grasped because I’m not sure that I’ve ever known it completely. I believe it to be somewhere you can stand tall inside of and also sink deep into. But if that’s what a home is, my home is in the people who matter to me and in the words I am able to string together because of them.
“The process of writing made me vibrate with creation. Story gave room for my imagination.”
Boston Accent: You are a slam poetry coach to teams of high school students, and you recently began to perform in slam tournaments yourself. Does participating in this form of poetry shift the way you view your role as a poet?
Pelesky: Absolutely. It has forced me away from my desk and out into the literary community for one thing. It has also reinforced, again and again, the force our words can have. To see a poet step onstage and move an entire audience in three minutes reminds me again and again of the power words have and the power they give us, as wielders of them.
Boston Accent: You have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from the University of Nebraska, where you focused mostly on the craft of fiction. You write and publish work in all genres, however. How do you choose which genre is most appropriate for a particular story? Do you usually know before starting to write, or do you ever find the genre switching midway through?
Pelesky: When I sit down to write a story, I know it’s a story. I have a character, a place and time, and a situation I want to explore. But poems sometimes turn into essays or stories and essays sometimes distill down to poems. Little scrawlings on receipts can become anything. I let the words naturally find their shape as I write deeper into them.
Boston Accent: In an alternate universe in which you are not a writer, teacher, or slam poetry coach what are you doing? (No choosing waitress or barista either, since you’ve lived those lives…)
Pelesky: Running a little establishment like a coffee shop or deli where everyone knows your name. A place you could come to every day if you wanted that becomes a community. I spent some years as a barista and I loved getting to know people in daily parcels. I would love to create a home for people who don’t feel they have one.
Boston Accent: What is your favorite current writing project?
Pelesky: I’m working on a collection of linked short stories about a character I wrote into one story and then decided I want to get to know more fully. It might have come about when someone in my writing group said, “What’s Janice’s deal? I want to know more about that,” and I agreed.
Boston Accent: You have a writing group that meets regularly to workshop pieces and inspire new ideas. Can you talk about how building relationships with writers has affected your writing life?
Pelesky: I don’t want to discount the value of “writing group” by talking about them like they’re just a handful of people who come together once a month to talk about writing. Because they are so much more than that to me. These people and I email edit suggestions to each other and encourage each other to submit and pass books around. But also, Jen makes us chili and sometimes forces me to take medicine. They all let me cry when I need to and we even travel together on writing excursions. My writing group is my Midwest family. They have reminded me over and over of what is important, to get back to writing. They have kept my writing life from tanking underneath the demands of daily life. Being mixed up with the people who are pursuing their writing keeps me pursuing it too.
Boston Accent: Where do you derive energy and inspiration to write?
Pelesky: Honestly, inspiration could be anything. The curve of an unusual door handle, the melody of a stranger’s laugh at Qdoba, the structure of a sentence I read in a book, a phrase from a song. I am constantly paying attention to details in the world that make me want to create and jotting them down in my ever-present notebook.
The energy is a bit harder. I have two boys who are always needing to be fed or read to or bussed around or quizzed on how to spell “weather.” By the time I get them to sleep each night, I make myself a pot of tea and think I’m going to sit down and write but many nights I fall asleep instead. My best writing time comes in the day, when they’re at school. Sometimes I’ll meet with a friend and write so I’m not in my apartment because I have a tendency to prioritize cleaning over writing. I’m not sure if it’s energy I’m seeking or discipline, but I’m constantly struggling to find both.
Boston Accent: You have an extensive personal library and you say that you like to “interact” with your books, marking them up and making comments in the margins. How does this help you to develop and refine your voice as a writer? Do you hope that people will interact with your books in this way?
Pelesky: I love to mark up my books. I underline particularly impactful sentences or details, circle surprising word choices, write, “lol” when something makes me laugh. Reading is both an enjoyable pastime to me and the study of writing. I would love for people to interact with my books in the same way. It is a hopeful sign that we’ll return to it sometime and see what was inspiring before.
Boston Accent: What are you reading right now?
Pelesky: I tend to read multiple books simultaneously. Right now I’m reading A Boy’s Book of Nervous Breakdowns by Tom Paine, Post Office by Charles Bukowski and The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch.
Writer and Editor Holly Pelesky has mastered every genre and will likely create some of her own.