In the Herald of the Improbable Misfortunes

An enchanting poetry collection about dreams, dreamers, and otherworldly happenings, In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes will captivate you through ornate imagery. Campbell brings animals and inanimate objects to life in this enchanting read.

Reviews

“In this book, ‘Dreams are not merely our pretty/theater of elsewhere—there’s/a wildness unsanctioned.’ Robert Campbell, dear reader, is here to lead you through that wilderness, where everything—the deer, the grass, and even the factory—is dreaming. With a sharp wit and a sly irreverence, these are poems that reach through the dream, toward an uncertain awakening.”

Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines

“In the title poem of Robert Campbell’s fine chapbook, the speaker announces: ‘This/is our duty, to inform you of developments/and departures, of every last unhappening.’ Throughout In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes, mystery—conundrum, enigma, dreamlike revelation—is given a voice and a vision through extraordinary messengers such as deer, opossums, angels with their ‘barbed artilleries of red.’ Each image, line, and stanza combine to create secular testaments, both Old and New in their revelations. These poems herald the worldview and the arrival of a very fine poet.”

Pamela Johnson Parker, author of Cleave

“In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes is intimate and strange, cutting and tender. When I read Robert Campbell’s collection, I want to share the lines with everyone in earshot. These poems, ‘animal’ and ‘true’, they ‘trouble’, they ‘heartache’, they make you want to ‘fall upon the rocks and sing’.”

Blas Falconer, author of The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light

Interview with the Author

Rochelle Bauer: How long have you been writing?

Robert Campbell: I remember writing poems in third grade. No joke. But honestly, I’ve been writing in what you would call a “serious” way since the tail end of my college years. Writing with the intention of having an actual reader, I mean, and not just for cathartic or educational reasons.

RB: What inspires you the most?

RC: That’s a hard question. I try not to rely on inspiration, of course, since writers have to write regardless of whether we feel “inspired” or not. That said, I keep going back to the absurd or the fantastical. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s because, for all our commonalities, we all experience the world in totally unique ways through the lens of our own little dreams. I think there’s something really beautiful and sad about that.

RB: I know it’s hard to pick a favorite from your own poems (from the book), but do you have a particular one you’re proud of? Why?

RC: Writing “Dream in Which My Body Is a Knife” was an interesting process. The early draft was a kind of prose poem, but I’m just very fond of the pacing and breathing space that comes with lineated poems, and the density of prose poems kind of terrifies me for some reason. Then it became a very long-lined poem, completely end-stopped. I actually still like that version, but it reads with this odd severity that is almost too dramatic. Also, at one point, it was much, much longer, and much more referential toward Emily Dickinson’s “My Life Had Stood—a Loaded Gun,” which is one of my favorite poems, much better than any poem I’ve ever written for sure. I think I revised that poem pretty regularly for over a year before I was actually happy with it. I remember a Word document with five or six different versions at one point.

RB: Do you have any advice for younger writers?

RC: I feel like anything I would tell a younger writer in terms of traditional advice would be based on the kind of writer I wanted to be when I was younger, but those things can and should change. Instead, maybe just decide what kind of writer you want to be and identify the wise voices that speak to you and can guide you properly, then follow them. It’s inevitable that you have to read and write a whole hell of a lot to figure that out, but everyone knows that. Hell, I still have so much to learn.

Also, don’t get too hung up on the idea of “being a writer.” The idea of “the writer” as a singular, monolithic identity gets needlessly complicated and is a really strange paradigm to unpack. Just be the kind of writer you need to be. That’s enough.

RB: What does being published by our Etchings Press class mean to you?

RC: It’s wonderful. I mean that not only as a writer being able to share a collection of poems with the world, but in the sense that this press is a learning opportunity for students as well.

How amazing is it that students gain experience in the process of running a small literary press? I’m thrilled to be a part of the Etchings Press legacy. It’s just a very cool thing in every way.

“‘It’s not because I love you,’ I say to the empty room, practicing. ‘It’s just that winter is long and you tell a good story.’”

from #lovesong, p. 16

Interview with the Author

Etchings Press: Why birds? We’ve repeatedly seen connections between love and birds in literature, but you focused on dead birds. Why?

Chelsea Biondolillo: Birds fascinate me, and I write about them often. I’ve looked for them in the wild and in zoos and all over the world. I’ve held a live hummingbird, a dying vulture, and a terrified chicken (by the leg), and in grad school, I had an opportunity to skin song birds for the vertebrate collection at the university. It was a fascinating process and because I take pictures of everything, I took pictures in the lab.

In the environment, birds are rarely still. They are hard to catch in binoculars, hard to photograph, hard to shoot, if shooting them is your thing. Catching that chicken by the leg was hard as hell. We consider, in fact, how much more a bird in the hand is worth, than possible birds, because getting a bird into your hand is tough. So these motionless birds on the table or in the palm of my hand became very interesting as subjects. Once I’d started taking pictures of dead birds in the lab, I began to photograph them out in the world when I came upon them.

Why do I correlate them to all my ex-boyfriends? It started over a conversation that I was having on social media with a poet-editor friend. She was in the process of soliciting work from me and as we spoke, I brainstormed ways to combine an assortment of disparate elements that I’d been playing with for some time.

EP: The pictures are incredibly specific, and they all seem like they were taken on serendipitous occasions. How did this all come together?

CB: I have a degree in photography, and I take pictures nearly every day. The lab pictures, of in-process or prepared skins, all came about while I volunteered at the vertebrate collection for the University of Wyoming. The other photographs are from walks. I walk everywhere I can, and the more you walk around, the more bird death you’ll see. I try to get pictures of as many of them as I can. After awhile, it occurred to me that I probably had a lot of dead bird pictures and I started mulling over what I could do with them.

I have other “collections” of images (street signs, images of my feet walking, black & white still lifes, bowls of soup, horizons), and other collections of texts (flash essays about dead animals, notes on my phone, a variety of lists and series of lists), and I am often mulling one or more of these collections over trying to envision the series as an object of some kind.

When I hit upon pairing what was initially just the bird photos with found texts, I was excited and my writer friend was excited, and I was buoyed by it. This is why I value my writer friends and heroes. I am supported, inspired, and pushed by my virtual writing community.

EP: Some of the found texts name you specifically. What’s the backstory there? Like the ones from 1986, did you save those for years?

CB: All of the found texts are from notes, letters, postcards, emails, and chat transcripts that yes, I have kept all these years. (Except that one from 1986, I threw that particular note away when I got married. “P” was my first real boyfriend, and it bothered my ex-husband that I still had a note from the eighth grade where someone had confessed his love to me.)

The only backstory is that I keep damn near everything because you never know when it might be needed again.

EP: How does your writing and your history in environmental studies come together? Though this collection is a clear example, how does it influence your inspiration?

CB: I position myself as a body in the natural world in nearly every piece of writing I complete. Sometimes I write directly about the natural world and have researched a variety of ecological stories, but even my experimental writing circles around the ways in which the outside surrounds us, both literally and figuratively. We are shaped by natural forces and live among natural systems. My environmental studies have given me rich resources in the way of lenses, texts, imagery, and discovery to apply to my observations and experiences.

EP: You classified your writing in this collection as “microprose.” Why make that specification? What difference does it make in the collection?

CB: Much of the text in this collection that I wrote (as opposed to photographed or curated) was originally written on and for Twitter. The pieces were inspired by Creative Nonfiction magazine’s rolling #cnftweet contest, and several have been published by the magazine as part of their “Tiny Truths” feature. The first time I appeared in the magazine, I wondered what to call a tweet-as-essay. Flash essays can be 1200 words long, so that didn’t seem to suffice. After some crowd-sourcing, the term “microprose” seemed the most apt.

In 2013, I participated in a round table discussion on tweet-length essays for Creative Nonfiction (a portion of which is online here), and during that conversation, I mentioned that I found 130 characters ideal for break up stories “that would become too maudlin with excessive words,” because “no one wants to read 3000 words on most people’s breakups. But to crystallize in 130 characters the moment when you knew you weren’t in love, and why, requires that most of the petty specificities be stripped.” A few of the pieces in #lovesong were just a bit too long for Twitter, so I’d tucked them away like so many old love notes and waited.

EP: Do you have a favorite of the found texts you included?

CB: Each one was my favorite, at one time. That’s how love works.