As Lovers Always Do
As Lovers Always Do
Marne Wilson
Etchings Press, UIndy
ISBN 978-0-9988976-6-0
46 pages
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Marne Wilson writes a collection of poems about the life of a woman going through a loveless marriage and divorce. Wilson’s writings continue to describe her character’s life after the divorce, and her collection of every man she loved correlates beautifully into a hard-to-put-down easy-read.
Reviews
“Marne Wilson writes with the subtlety, openness, and honesty which are hallmarks of the best poems. As Lovers Always Do is a masterful collection of narratives focusing on themes of relationships, loss, nostalgia, and hope. These pieces burn with heartbreak so the reader suffers with their narrators, but they also adeptly depict the daily realities of domestic life, and in that sense, we as readers feel comforted. Wilson casts a spell in her writing, and we can’t help but fall under it. This book is full of that powerful kind of magic.”
—Ace Boggess, author of The Prisoners and I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So
“As an editing team we unanimously decided to publish this work. Our team couldn’t stop reading, and we loved every second of working with this story.”
—Etchings Press Student Team for As Lovers Always Do
Interview with the Author
Marne Wilson: My first attempt at organizing the chapbook was with a chronological pattern of organization. This made sense to me, but since these poems are about isolated moments scattered throughout a long life, there wasn’t enough connective tissue for the reader to make meaning out of them. After reading a lot of other chapbooks, I had a breakthrough. I realized that the reader needs a collection of poems to tell a story, but since poetry is not memoir, it doesn’t have to be a true story. I rearranged the poems into an order that approximates the arc of a coming-of-age novel. The speaker starts out at a turning point in her life and goes through several cycles of exploring new romantic situations before finally ending up in a place of greater wisdom. The narrative arc doesn’t parallel my personal life story as much as it once did, but I think it has a greater impact on the reader.
EP: Who or what inspires or motivates you to write?
MW: When I find myself lacking motivation to write, it’s usually because there’s something specific I’m afraid of writing about. Sometimes a poem that’s starting to grow inside of me seems too close to the bone, and I fear it will expose too much of me to the world. While it’s true that these very personal poems do inspire the most comments from readers, they almost always tell me about their own lives instead of asking me about mine. I’ve heard it said that poetry is a way of talking about truths that can’t otherwise be spoken. I think that feeling of helping people to examine their own lives in a different way is a large part of what keeps me writing.
EP: What made you decide to submit As Lovers Always Do to the Etchings Press contest?
MW: Since I grew up in North Dakota, worked in several Midwestern states, and now live in West Virginia, I have a hard time deciding how to define myself regionally. Am I a northern writer? A southern writer? A midwestern writer? I was impressed that Etchings Press has a definite regional focus (a 370-mile radius around Indianapolis) that manages to encompass every place I’ve lived in my adult life. That seemed like a good sign to me.