An Interview with Lauren Russell
By: Olivia McArtney and Abby Walton
A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close by Lauren Russell, ISBN: 9781571315670
About the Poet:
Lauren Russell is a poet and an educator. Her new book, A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close, will be published in August of this year. Other notable works of hers
include Decsent, which won the Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2021, and What’s Hanging on the Hush. She has won a plethora of awards including a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and VIDA/The Home School. A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close showcases Russell’s intimate relationship with language and captured her experiences of love, loneliness and survival.
Q: Why did you feel it was essential to include the visual media with your poetry?
A: I do not think the collages are actually essential to the book, but I do think they add another dimension to the text.
Q: Can you describe the process of creating the art pieces, and if it was before or after you wrote the poem?
A: As I mention in the Acknowledgments, in the fall of 2019 I took a Book Collages class with Ryan McCormick at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Students were encouraged to bring our own collage materials to class, and when Ryan saw my Pride and Prejudice paper dolls and Dover book of old-fashioned cat illustrations, he suggested that I put two and two together. Ultimately, Dover Publications granted me permission to reprint costumes from Brenda Sneathen Mattox’s Pride and Prejudice Paper Dolls, which the cats are “wearing.” Their heads are from Dover’s Ready-to-Use Old-Fashioned Cat Illustrations, which are copyright free. In that collage class at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Ryan mapped out the background for the first of the two-point perspective collages, the one with the sun in the background, which wound up on the cover. Though I started that collage in Ryan’s class, I actually had not completed it by the time of the COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020. In the early weeks of the pandemic, I would work on the collages on Saturdays. Though I was alone with my cats in my apartment indefinitely, collaging was something I could look forward to at the end of the week. In the early months of the pandemic, I completed the first two collages—the one with the sun in the background and the one with the houses in the background—and I think I also started a third one but put it aside, as that summer I relocated for a new job and became increasingly overwhelmed.
I was still effectively in lockdown (though in a different state) by New Year’s of 2021, when the visual artist Shawn Yu and I decided to celebrate the holiday with a long-distance New Year’s Eve collage session (he in Virginia, I in Michigan). We worked on collages at the same time and chatted over Facebook Messenger, sometimes taking pictures of the collages-in-progress to show each other. On New Year’s Eve, I worked on the third collage (the one with the text leaves on the trees), and posted the triptych to Instagram on New Year’s Day. The collage with cat pointing an accusatory figure at another cat in judge’s robes came later, in the summer of 2022 when I was doing a residency at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency. (This was right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, an event that certainly influenced the composition.) I was primarily reading and writing at Ox-Bow but would collage in my studio when I needed to switch gears. After my three-week residency ended, I stayed at Ox-Bow for another week to co-facilitate a four-day Art on the Meadow workshop with the art historian Tessa Paneth-Pollak. The workshop was called “Cutting, Collage, Cut-outs, and Cut-ups,” and I was facilitating the writing portion. I taught the class how to use collage-like practices as composition strategies in poetry and how to create poetry from source materials through textual interventions, including juxtaposition, as well as erasure and substitution). From Tessa’s portion of the workshop, which focused on visual arts collage practices, I learned about approaches I hadn’t been introduced to in the one collage workshop I had taken at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2019. I started the final collage (the only one where none of the cats are wearing paper doll attire) later in 2022 and finished it, as I recall, in early 2023.
Q: Do you prefer writing long-form or short-form poetry? What are the benefits and difficulties for each form when it comes to sharing a narrative?
A: I tend to enjoy working in longer forms and sequences, both because they allow me to be more ambitious in my work and because I’m not constantly having to restart. I wrote much of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close at writing residencies, where I had expansive time to write, and I enjoyed being able to come to the page each day and continue a work I had already begun. When writing time comes in spurts, as it does for many people—perhaps on the subway or in a laundromat or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office or during a lunch break, or for me, working on in-class exercises alongside my students—shorter forms may be more adaptable, allowing you to complete a first draft on one page of your notebook in limited time. When I have more time to spread out, I enjoy letting the longer pieces unfurl over weeks and months.
My second book, Descent, was a “project book,” and though I worked on the poems and essays within it individually, none of them have individual titles or operate as discrete pieces, so the entire book is presented as one thing, not as a collection of things. A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close operates differently. Structurally, it’s almost like a cross between Descent and my first book, What’s Hanging on the Hush, which is a collection of poems, many of them in innovative forms. A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close takes hybridity even further, including interactive three-dimensional poems, visual art, and hybrid essays that contain poetry in verse.
Since you mentioned narrative, I’ll add that A Window that Can Neither Open nor Close is interested in interrogating narrative, the construction of narrative, and I think a lot of that interrogation occurs through the interaction of the various long and short forms, the disparate genres and modes and mediums that find their way into the book.
Olivia McArtney graduated from Rutgers University in May 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and media studies, and a minor in creative writing. Her hometown is Long Valley, New Jersey. She is passionate about animals, and nature, and uses creative mediums to capture their stories.
Abby Walton recently graduated from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree in communication and a minor in creative writing. She is from Haddon Township, New Jersey, and is an avid fan of poetry, songwriting and all types of storytelling.