Chet’la Sebree is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University and the author of Mistress, winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Her poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
Chet’la will be in conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz, discussing her new book Field Study (published by FSG) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 5th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
From my birth month of May.
From the left side of a rented duplex in central PA.
From the third floor in a patterned, blue-velvet armchair across from my teal-painted desk.
And, because I didn’t finish this all at once, from the first floor enjoying the afternoon sun.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I want to be the kind of person who says exercise. I certainly spent some time on my mat and pounding the pavement, but it has really been food, wine, and fellowship that have held me together. These have always been the things that kept me sane. In grad school, I loved having people over for potluck dinners. But this sort of fellowship surrounding food took on new meaning in the pandemic. It wasn’t just that I learned how to make gluten-free pasta from scratch or placed orders for specialty wine shipments, but it was the sturdy calendar of happy hours and dinner dates kept me going. I did everything from virtual wine tastings to learning how to make injera with poet Diana Khoi Nguyen with home-ground teff to have boozy brunches and movie nights with friends from high school and college.
Right before the pandemic, I transitioned into a new job as a tenure-track professor and director of a university literary arts center and was traveling for my first book, Mistress, which meant sometimes I was in two different cities in one week, while also teaching classes and hosting events. This meant that I spent little time with my friends. Moving around less meant that I could not only reconnect but deepen relationships. Nearly every week since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been meeting with prose writers Dantiel W. Moniz and María Isabel Álvarez—both of whom I’d met at a writing residency in 2017. Our first Zoom was an attempt to heal the wound of not seeing each other at a March 2020 conference. What started as a conversation, led to salons, led to work sessions, led to us planning for our own future residencies. We’ve cried; we’ve rooted each other on; we’ve held each other accountable. They kept me going through the last rounds of writing and editing Field Study, and I can’t wait to talk to Dantiel about it on June 5th!
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now, I’m primarily reading emails and my students’ final portfolios, but I’m so excited for the pleasure reading this summer will bring. When I can sneak a moment, though, I am toggling between three books: Felicia Zamora’s newest collection I Always Carry My Bones; Nana Nkweti’s brand neew Walking on Cowrie Shells; and Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. That last one is a reread; I first read the His Dark Materials series in high school. I often return to books I read in those pre-college years—fantasy and sci-fi novels like Ender’s Game but also Toni Morison’s The Bluest Eye, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I like thinking about who I’ve become since first reading them.
The book I would say I return to the most, however, is probably Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, or maybe even just specific essays in it: “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I’m such a sponge, which is part of what made writing Field Study so fun. The patchwork style of quotes interwoven with my own language gave me a space to name names of those that influenced me. It gave me the chance to be in conversation with literary legends and thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Maya Angelou, while also calling on my brother, best friend, and cousin for insight.
I’m inspired by visual artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Nekisha Durrett, Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Stephanie J. Williams, and Deborah Willis, but I’m also inspired by theatre, films, dance, television. Who knows what Field Study would be if it weren’t for the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People that came out in April 2020. I am an early-to-bed person, but I finished watching the series at around 11:45pm, got out of bed, and worked on Field Study until 7am. Then, I slept for four hours, got up, and worked for the rest of the day. In watching that well-orchestrated chaos and intimacy, I was taken back to my early twenties, on which Field Study is loosely based. That’s how I work—something gets me in my guts, as poet E.G. Asher would say, and I find my way into the work. It could be a good show, Max Richter’s recomposed Vivaldi, or a nice food and wine paring that gets me going.
I also wrote to an erratic playlist that’s also representative of the diversity of conversations in Field Study. The music included everything from Foo Fighters and Paramore to Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill to Henryk Górecki and Sol Rising.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
My bookstore, URGE, would double as an integrative wellness center with a mind / body / spirit focus. We’re talking incenses and essential oils along with your book of the month picks. There’d be two locations: one on Whidbey Island, where I finished my first book Mistress, and laid the groundwork for Field Study; and the other in DC, which still calls to me even though I moved from the city seven years ago.
My bestsellers would be a tie between anything Audre Lorde (probably not surprising) and anything Bob’s Burgers-related, since my inner circle would know I got the name of the bookstore from the show’s Season 11’s Valentine’s episode: “Romancing the Beef.”
