Raven Interviews Michelle Matthees, author of Complicated Warding

Michelle Matthees

Raven Chronicles: First a bit of history to introduce MICHELLE MATTHEES. Michelle could you tell us a bit about your background? Education? As a writer/artist?

Michelle Matthees: I’m from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I was always reading as a kid, but I had no dreams of being a writer or an artist. Growing up, college was always talked about as something you did to get a job that paid well, never as a pathway to the arts. I took my first writing and studio arts classes at the University of Minnesota, and that was that. I never looked back. I eventually earned a BA in English and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota. After graduating I took to the road, living in Poland and Russia for a year, then spent some time in North Dakota, then back in Russia, all the while applying for grants and working assorted jobs to give me that prized time to write. I’ve published three art chapbooks: Served, a book of prose poems about pizza delivery constructed from pizza boxes, waxed paper, and paper bags; Outside, a handsewn collection of poems about living in a cabin without running water and electricity; and Junket, anaccordion-bound, slick little booklet of city poems. I published my first full-length collection of poetry, Flucht, with New Rivers Press before self-publishing Complicated Warding. Currently I live and write in Duluth, Minnesota.

Raven: You say the book “is an historic look at institutionalization, is meant to be read as a patient/inmate case file filled with original poems, historical documents….” What inspired you to write this book, these particular poems? How did you create the book in the format you did? And what research did you do to find the patient/inmate case files—how did you get permission to do that research?

Michelle: When I look at the projects I’ve completed, I can always see the seeds of the next work contained within them. In my previous book, Flucht, there is a poem about my great-grandfather and the county poor farm, so on some level I was thinking about this project back then. The main impetus for the book came with the sudden death of my father in 2012. As a boy he had lived on the grounds of the Minnesota State School, an orphanage, and I began this project as an attempt to understand him better. Once I began reading the state school files, I started thinking about institutionalization in general, and the project expanded from there. Additionally, my partner and I have an adopted daughter who was living in an orphanage in Russia when we met her. The simple answer to your question is that I have a lot of family connections to institutions. I published this book because I wanted to give these people a home. I wanted them to be treated with respect.

Most of the research for the book was done at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. I would drive down every few months and spend days engrossed in the files. I was allowed access only to files that were at least 75 years old, and I had to submit a written request explaining my project to gain access. I also visited state hospital and poor farm sites in an attempt to understand what life was like there and what the intentions were of the people who created these places.

The completion of Complicated Warding took ten years. Once the poems were written, I taught myself InDesign, and I began to lay out the book. I had done most of the original artwork for the book early in the process, so it was just a matter of deciding which artworks went next to which poems. For the first section about the Fergus Falls State Hospital, I knew that the intake pictures of people would need to be included. I decided to print those images on a semi-transparent vellum because many of the photographs in the case files were on glass negatives, and I wanted to keep their translucency and allow the text of the poems to be visible through the images. The second section, which is primarily about the St. Cloud Reformatory for Men, contains pieces constructed almost entirely from found text and echoes the avalanche of forms, documentation, and punishment that made up the reformatory system. The third section, “Occupation: Poor Farm,” contains images, poems, and erasures about county poor farm residents. It was very hard to discover personal information about most of these residents, and this section became, in part, about those gaps. The final section, “Homemade,” contains two personal poems that function as a coda.

Raven: Why did you decide to self-publish? Because the format, paper, and design of this book is so unique, I assume it would be too expensive for an independent publisher to publish?

Michelle: Exactly. Most small presses would not have been able and/or willing to invest in the different types of paper, the color images, the font idiosyncrasies. For me, the tactile and visual elements of the book were essential. Self-publishing seemed ideal. Because I had released a book with a small press previously, I had an idea of what I was signing up for, including the marketing piece. Fortunately, I live in a state that offers great arts funding. I received a grant from The Minnesota State Arts Board that covered Complicated Warding’s printing costs and my time spent deciphering InDesign.

Raven: How did you arrive at the title, Complicated Warding?

Michelle: Complicated warding is a type of lock, one with several moving internal pieces. When I first read those words, I suspected that it would be the title of the collection. I wanted the book to ask certain questions. How do we take care of the most vulnerable among us? What are the things we have tried, and how have they worked? How do we hurt those we are trying to help? What else can we try? People’s intentions may be good, but the warding, the power contained in that process is incredibly complicated. Additionally, warding has multiple meanings. Its definitions include keeping watch over something and turning something away. There are inherent tensions contained in that word.

Raven: Your original artwork is amazing and innovative. Tell us about your process in creating it.

Michelle: Thank you. As an undergraduate I had a studio art minor, and I had kept up with drawing and painting over the years. For a while, I had even considered applying to a studio arts MFA program rather than one in creative writing. Complicated Warding was the fortunate result of blending the two approaches. I’ve always been taken with the work of Henry Darger (who lived in an orphanage as a young man), and I began drawing and painting on printed out Oxford English Dictionary definitions as an homage to him. The words that I chose were all connected to institutionalization in some way. I felt that the artworks were communications from non-verbal people who found themselves in institutions.

Raven: What is your writing process? (Where, when, and how often do you write?)

Michelle: I am an erratic writer. I write best when I travel, so I spend as much time as I can traveling, staying in cheap hotels, drinking instant coffee in my room under a lamp, and eating food from grocery stores. When I travel and write, I develop a rhythm of creating new work in the mornings and revising older work in the afternoons. Evenings, I wander. I am not someone who views writing as daily work; I am not at my desk every morning. I binge write, and then I go for stretches without writing. Additionally, I spend a lot of time reading, observing, and preparing to write. I pick up the pen when I am fully charged. I would say that I do not revise endlessly. Usually, but not always, the energy in my work comes from the earliest drafts.

Raven: Who are some of your favorite poets, or prose writers, ones you go to again and again?

Michelle: I read a lot of work in translation, and my largest influences come from Eastern Europe and Russia. For poets I’d list Charles Simic, Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, Osip Mandelstam, and Sylvia Plath. For prose I’d list Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, and most recently Olga Tokarczuk. I also am very taken with the non-fiction works of Svetlana Boym.

Raven: What are you reading right now?

Michelle: I am working on a collection of prose poems, so I have been reading Charles Baudelaire and from the anthology Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem, edited by Stuart Friebert. I just finished two fabulous fiction books, The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck. I’m also slowly working my way through Palomar by Italo Calvino, savoring each piece like a slice of perfect dessert.

Raven: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

Michelle: When I was an undergraduate, I remember hearing that quote about how sometimes “you have to murder your darlings.” In other words, you may really be taken with something you wrote, a turn of phrase, a detail, but if it doesn’t serve the whole, it’s got to go.

Raven: If you have any advice for beginning poets/writers, what is it?

Michelle: When you feel the most stymied and frustrated, when you feel like giving up, take a few deep breaths and know that you are on the cusp of something important. That, and find someone gentle and honest to give you feedback on your work.

N.B.: Take a look at the travel photos on Michelle’s blog: http://www.michellematthees.com/blog. Fabulous photos of sites in Canada, Poland, Ukraine, and other Eastern Europe countries.

Complicated Warding
by Michelle Matthees

ISBN 978-0-9832332-3-7

http://www.michellematthees.com/shop/complicated-warding

2023, paperback/artbook, 98 pages, $20.00

Cassandra
—Michelle Matthees

Don’t look for a unifying face.
Rather, be the air

that holds the bird, the dark
at the perfected edge of lamplight,

an expanding room of locks
where disarray prepares itself.

At my wedding I wore white,
flat as I could be. This, so that 

later, a defector to the background,
I could fool the pince-nez viewer 

trying to guess at my happiness.
I swirled in the olive groves 

now crammed into a can of white
walls. What once was out is in. 

You taught me about
containment, and now 

nothing will keep my image
from sailing off the edge of the map.

“Cassandra”: The poem was originally
published under a different title,
"St. Angustius at The Fergus Falls St. Hospital,"
in The Midway Review, Vol 11, Issue 3, 2017, Web.