Scott Ferry On Books And Writing
I recently got in touch with Scott Ferry. “Fill Me With Birds,” his latest book, was published in January. He resides in Seattle.
This interview has been edited lightly.
Would you tell me a little bit about your new book?
Daniel McGinn and I met in the Southern California poetry scene back in the 1990s. When I moved to Seattle in 1998 we lost contact until Facebook reconnected us in 2015 or so. When I was going through a tough time in my writing looking for my voice, I read his book “The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog,” it literally saved me.
His voice was so authentic and honest and humble it just knocked me over. He made my own real words acceptable to myself and this made all the difference.
When we approached the idea of a collaboration we just started shooting poems to each other and responding to them pretty quickly. The book took form as we cut and rearranged. The poems are about death and God, about aging parents and delirium, about overcoming addiction and depression of many kinds, about teaching children about danger and laughter, about mirrors and open skies and wings, and about hope after all. We are both really proud of the dialogue and synergy we have created here.
What was it like to collaborate with Daniel McGinn?
He is a humble and brilliant guy so in a word: easy. He is very giving as an artist and willing to engage the reader intimately in his poems. The poetry itself was not that challenging, as we lit a fire and it kept burning for the most part. We had very few if any disagreements about the content. His lovely daughter read over the manuscript and gave us input which was valuable. As Daniel said she is good at pointing out the awkward parts which may not be immediately apparent and be left in if not identified.
I don’t really edit as much as I should, and Daniel would say that he could just keep editing forever so we helped each other balance in this way. We had a recent reading in Tujunga hosted by Alice Pero where we met in person to read and it was pretty great, even Beth Marquez from the So Cal days came. Unfortunately, Daniel had to drive me to LAX afterwards which, if you have ever lived in the area, you know is bonkers.
How long did it take to write? Do you have a writing routine?
Like I said, we just kept firing poems back and forth on email and then responding to them. Sometimes we wrote once a day, sometimes once every three or four days depending on our life’s dramas.
We didn’t overthink it and I believe that is why it worked better, had a more organic feel. After we had about 80 pages we started to cut things and edit and rearrange. Some of the poems that didn’t fit the feel of the book ended up in “Each Imaginary Arrow,” some ended up in the trash bin.
How did you go about getting the book published?
Well I had done a fabulous collaboration with two of my absolute favorite humans Lillian Necakov and Lauren Scharhag called “Midnight Glossolalia” and we had Elizabeth MacDuffie from Meat For Tea Press publish it!
She really rocks, running this magazine and press with her husband Mark Alan Miller. I don’t know how they do it. So we had been friends for years and had a wonderful experience with “Glossolalia,” so when Daniel and I approached her with this project she was all in.
On your website, you mention that you “began writing poetry in high school to mostly try to communicate a lack of meaning and a yearning for depth.” What’s kept you writing all these years?
I always loathed small talk and the petty BS of daily conversation and I feel I have made it a point to retain my childlike wonder and awe of the world throughout my life.
My observations and epiphanies about life don’t really lend themselves to being spoken and I don’t want to lose them so into poems they go. I have a natural tendency to make strange, illogical connections between rain and aortic valves and Mid-Atlantic Ocean vent worms and Fibonacci sequences and ennui. I find it invigorating to connect all of the stuff and non-stuff into new creatures. It seems like what I should be doing.
Does your work as a nurse have any impact on your poetry?
Not really. I mean I have a nurturing nature and the nursing helps me help others, but I don’t really get a satisfaction as in a life-sustaining charge from nursing. Writing does that for me, and my fantastic wife and kids!
Any new projects in the works?
I have two collaborations going on right now, one are ekphrastic poems based on paintings and the other is more like a loose dialogue. Both the poets are very good technically and they are pushing me to be better, and to harmonize with completely different voices while retaining my own voice. Really fun stuff! I also have two manuscripts basically ready to go: “500 hidden teeth,” which is 500 sentence poems and “the blue milk of april,” which is a full-length written in 2023 and 2024.
