Jill Mceldowney is the author of Otherlight (YesYes Books, 2023) and the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She is an editor and founder of Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Muzzle, Vinyl, and other notable publications. Otherlight looks at the Dantean depths of grief through the cold, scientific language of “Psychotherapy” and “Psychophramacology” that contrasts sharply with the hurt and empathy of a speaker who listens for the “voice in the water” of the lost beloved.
Tiffany Troy: How does your first poem, “The Lake Will Wait” set up the rest of the collection that follows in Otherlight?
Jill Mceldowney: “The Lake Will Wait” is actually one of my favorite poems in the book. The overall tone of “The Lake Will Wait” is really important in setting up expectations for the reader. The structure of it also trains the reader; it accomplishes what a first poem is supposed to do and serves as a roadmap for what the reader. It helps them know what to expect, or what they should expect to encounter, in the rest of the book both in form and tone. The way that poem is set up–poetically, structurally–is echoed across the rest of the book.
TT: Can you speak of the process of writing the poems in this collection, putting the collection together?
JM: Otherlight actually started as my MFA thesis. But what it was is a shadow of what it is now; it’s changed very much. I went to law school after doing my MFA so I revised the manuscript during my first year of law school. The angst, anxiety, and overall emotion of year one of law school is definitely evident in Otherlight. There’s a difference, I think, in writing about something and writing from something, or writing from that place. Otherlight would be a different book if I wasn’t going through what I was going through when I revised it.
Order is super important to this particular collection, just because it does work in an almost narrative form, or there is a narrative throughline. That was definitely important in putting this collection together. The order is as close to perfect as I can get it. Even looking at it now—I just got the author copies a week ago—there is very little that I would shift or change. The fact that it’s a book largely about unresolved grief does make that job just a bit easier just because we’re never going to arrive at the destination of “This is resolved, and we’re done and everything can get better from here.”
I don’t think the last poem in Otherlight sets the reader up for any kind of sense of completion, or that we’ve completed the cycles of grief or anything like that. That rings very true for what grief is actually like, what you actually experience when you are going through grief in real life.
TT: I really love how you arrive, approach, or point toward an emotional truth through the juxtaposition of the almost scientific and cold questioning of the psychotherapists and the answers which are poems within a poem. I agree that the structure feels almost as perfect as you can get it, because the repetition of different types of poems built momentum in a way that felt very intentional to me.
How do form—its repetition and variation—inform your collection?
JM: I worked with Carmen Giménez Smith in grad school, and one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard a poet say is, “Form informs content and content informs form.” I love that, and it’s always going to be something that I really strive for in my work.
The “Psychotherapy” poems and “Psychopharmacology” poems in this particular collection are really focused on that. These poems are set up as a back-and-forth conversation between a patient and a psychotherarpist. The questions are all pulled directly from the intake forms you fill out when you go to see a therapist.
One of the things that I was attempting to do in writing that particular form is to question healing and what healing means, as far as moving through the process of grief, or even wanting to heal. In some of those poems, you sense the speaker’s hesitation toward healing: I don’t necessarily want to be here. I don’t want to talk about this. I’m talking at circles around this.
TT: What does the word “otherlight” mean to you? There are several “Otherlight” poems in the eponymous collection. What do you want readers to get out of reading those poems?
JM: First of all, Otherlight was not the original title of the book. I changed it based on advice from my editor, which I’m glad I did. Otherlight suits the book really well, and serves the book better than the original title.
The “Otherlight” poems are not supposed to be section breaks–I actually don’t really like sectioning in books–but more as guideposts for the reader. They are there to give direction on the overall tone and form of the book. Every time you encounter one, they are intentionally placed as the tone shifts or as we go deeper into this grief or into this world. That was the intention of them, to be an almost Dantean guides through grief.
TT: That reminds me of how Richard Greenfield describes your poetry as “ascend[ing] from actual Dantean depths in a voice its own Virgil,” and how the poems are this heroic look into the idea of grief, balanced with self-reflection. I thought that was just so well done. For poets or writers approaching grief, do you have any advice, using your collection as a model?
JM: Yes. I love how he described that and I’m really thankful for the blurb he wrote for the book. I’m fascinated by grief. I think it’s such a complex and interesting human emotion because it doesn’t look the same for anyone. As humans, we have to try and explain everything so we invent names for unnameable things and call them “cycles of grief.” Or we go to therapy and talk to a therapist to help us work through what it is. Those things help, for sure, but there is no “right way.” Loss and grieving are so different for everyone, I don’t know that there is an actual formula to working through it completely. Grief changes you. There is really is no going back.
Learning to be really vulnerable was very important for this collection. I forced myself to do that through the use of questions. The questions that are supposed to both be rhetorical and true questions for the self and true questions for the speaker. I would write the question and force myself to answer it. In my older work, that’s not really something that I would go for or really do. But for this particular collection, it was necessary. Use of questioning and just kind of remaining true to what your grief process looks like. And or even just being able to commit to the idea that grief doesn’t resolve itself, or if it does, it takes a long time. That is definitely one of the things that I wanted Otherlight to leave the reader with, the idea of unresolved grief, just because I feel like that’s so much more accurate and real after the death of someone significant to you.
TT: I admire how the questioning and probing explores the expansiveness of grief in the sense that it implicates the self through the guilt of having survived notwithstanding grief. The speaker’s soliloquies also imagine other people asking her questions, and those modes serve the collection well.
Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?
JM: The last poem of the book, “Treetops,” is one of the most important poems of the book. It is one of the last poems I actually wrote for the book so it serves as a capstone, almost. I feel like I get to the end of so many poetry books about grief and they ache to leave the reader on a good note. and leave the reader with this hope of “Oh, the speaker is okay, we can move on now.” But “Treetops” leaves the reader with this question of: does the speaker actually move on from here?
Even though it is a poem that pushes on that unresolved grief. It is hopeful in that we can hope for the speaker, that they will find their way through the grief that they’re experiencing. It’s okay to not be fully over something terrible but it’s also okay to hope that one day you will be.
Tiffany Troy is a critic, translator, and poet.
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