An Interview with Ava Nethaniel Winter
By: Yehudis Burton
Ava Nethaniel Winter is a poet, professor, and a queer, Jewish trans woman. She
received her MFA from Ohio State University. She received a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, where she now also teaches in the English and Gender Studies departments. Her upcoming poetry collection, Transgenesis, was chosen by Milkweed Editions as a winner in the 2023 National Poetry Series. It will be published this fall.
I had the privilege of interviewing Ava [over Zoom] in April 2024. Below, I’ve transcribed what I think are the main points of our wonderful conversation.
Yehudis Burton: I guess I’ll just start with the obvious question- Why are you utilizing all of this Nazi imagery? I don’t mean this in an antagonizing way [both laugh], but I’m also Jewish, so this is interesting to me. What’s with all the Nazi imagery?
Ava Winter: Most of that imagery came from a period when I lived in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Half a mile from my house, there was an antique store half a mile from my house. And this store had lots of Nazi artifacts. I became interested in it- and concerned about it, to some extent, because it was clear that people were interested in it and people were buying it.
I moved there when Trump was elected, I left around around the time of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. So there was a large resurgence of Nazi rhetoric being explicitly part of the public conversation. There was also a significant amount of militant Neo-Nazi activity in the region I was living in. Neo-Nazi groups were running military training operations, a group was arrested for planning a suicide bombing. So it was a very real and present part of the world that I was living in. So I wanted to understand what people see in these objects, what is the value that they find in them? I’m not saying that everyone who bought and sold these objects is a Neo-Nazi, but it was clear to me that the market for these objects was far from innocent.
YB: Speaking of Nazi imagery- you have this really long poem, titled Rollermills Antique Mall. It has images of Poland, of people experiencing Poland contemporarily, and of course your experiences. There’s all this, which then leads into the antique shop located in the mall. That’s where you have that list of Nazi artifacts from the store, which become the titles of subsequent poems. So I was going to ask about writing longer forms, which I struggle with. You have this whole long poem, made up of different pieces. Which then leads into the question of writing a poetry collection- you have all these poems, which need to work together. So I guess, just thoughts on that? [both laugh]
AW: For that particular poem, the Rollermills antique poem, part of how it came about was that I drafted a bunch of poems about the objects that were for sale in this antique store. The poems were pretty disparate, and it felt like there needed to be some kind of container for them, some kind of way for the reader to understand what’s going on with them.
So I tried to write a poem about the mall itself, but I found that, as a poet, my brain was just going in all of these different directions. It felt like the way that I wanted to situate these antique poems was not just inside of a physical structure, but I wanted to come back to the question of markets and memories. I wanted to think about the fact that historically in the 19th century, this place was a flour mill. I was interested in who was making that flour and who was consuming it. I was interested in how the buying and selling of these items has to do with how people remember historical events- or want to remember them. And I can’t really think about these things and NOT think about the history of my own family. My grandparents on my father’s side were Jewish immigrant from Poland and Hungary, between the wars. A great many of the members of their families stayed behind, and did not survive. So, in thinking about these items, I also found myself thinking about my own family.
For better and worse, the way poets tend to approach things is not always straight-on and not always straightforward. So I felt that the only way I could make sense of these objects was to weave together these disparate threads. So, initially, I tried to write in this more simple way, in that there’s a long, long poem about this store, and inside of the long poem about the store there are these individual items, and there are poems responding to them. I think that where I ended up is more complicated than that, but I hope that readers are still able to find their way through it and make some kind of meaning out of it.
YB: So there’s a lot of family history here, there’s a lot of all sorts of things here. How did you approach the creation of a unified collection? Going back to the Rollermills poem- that took shape the way it took shape where you sort of had this thing you were musing on, you were meditating on, this thing that you were really obsessed with. And then you were like, oh well there’s a history, there’s my family, there’s this, there’s Nazis, there’s historical Nazis, there’s neo-Nazis, there’s antisemitism, there’s anti-black racism. There’s all these things. And then it sort of takes shape the way it takes shape, you know. And so it feels like half of this collection almost comes organically from this musing. And the rest of it isn’t directly connected but is still connected. So I guess, yeah, how do you approach creating a unified collection?
AW: It’s a good question, it’s a tricky question. And I wouldn’t say the way I did it is necessarily a great model. This took shape over many years and took many revisions of manuscripts. It started in 2014, the earlier versions that were finished- it was an entirely different book. I was openly queer at that point, I was bisexual. I mean, I am bisexual, but I was not thinking of myself as trans, and those parts of things came together later. There was one poem about being at the Auschwitz museum in Poland and seeing a suitcase with my family’s name on it. Which is a thing that did happen!
YB: That’s where the poem- what the suitcase, what it might have contained [referring to “WHAT THE SUITCASE BEARING MY FAMILY NAME MIGHT HAVE CONTAINED WHEN IT ARRIVED AT AUSCHWITZ]- you wrote that poem at the time?
AW: I actually wrote a completely different version of the poem. It was inspired by the same event, but the form was entirely different. It was a more straightforward narrative of what that experience was like. Which I re-wrote like 20 or 30 times and ended up throwing the whole thing out and just writing this list of objects that might be in a suitcase.
So, it went through many radical transformations, both in terms of the individual poems and in terms of the collection as a whole. And I mean, my life has been through significant transformations during this period, as well. So I started sending out the book in 2015. Then I moved to Lewisburg. I was doing research, I started baking bread, I started thinking more about gender- about my own feelings about gender. I also did a PhD in creative writing after that.
So like, the easy answer to your question of “How do you write a unified collection” is: You write a bunch of poems, you see which ones talk to each other, and then you start sticking them together in a document and seeing what you can make of them. I very much approached it as writing one poem at a time, and taking the best poems and trying to see if I can make them work together to create something larger.
Yehudis Burton graduated in the class of 2024, and studied math. For work, she teaches. For fun, however, she writes poems and climbs rocks.