 DAYNA PATTERSON is a writer, photographer, and textile artist living in the Pacific Northwest. She’s the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (2020). She co-edited Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. She founded Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that explores the intersections between belief and doubt, sacred and profane. In her spare time, she curates Poetry + Fungus. |
Book Title, Press, Year of Publication:
If Mother Braids a Waterfall, Signature Books, 2020
Synopsis: If Mother Braids a Waterfall is an intergenerational journey into and out of a conservative religion.
What do you think makes your book (or any book) a “project book”?
A project book, to my mind, has a central obsession. It’s a macro lens that blows up what it holds in its frame. If Mother Braids a Waterfall looks closely at faith conversion and deconversion. What causes a person to convert to a religion? What leads another person to leave it, or parts of it, behind? Specifically, in this book, I’m focused on the Mormon faith tradition, more specifically the eight generations of history, faith, and culture I was steeped in from birth, the weight of that legacy. It’s an artistic exploration of my ancestors’ journey into Mormondom in 1852, as well as the reasons why, after my mother’s coming out, I felt compelled to leave orthodoxy behind.
Why this subject (or constraint)?
I’ve heard Mormonism described as a “high demand” faith—it requires a lot of its members: time, money, physical labor, etc. In places like Utah, where I was raised and where Mormonism is fairly ubiquitous, it has also become a culture with its own rules, institutions, clothing conventions, jewelry, movies, music, recipes, routines, holidays—you name it. People who are extracting themselves from such a high-demand faith face a lot of obstacles. In other words, I had a lot to think over, and I do my best thinking through writing.
During my five-year process of extraction—measured from the day my mother came out to the last day I attended church service—I consumed, voraciously, the faith crisis narratives of others who’d experienced something similar. It was immensely cathartic to hear, over and over, that I wasn’t alone, that thousands (millions?) had reached similar states of cognitive dissonance in a variety of conservative religions. I felt the courage, the bravery, the generosity of these people sharing their narratives; I wanted to add my story to theirs.
Are you comfortable with the term “project book”?
The first time I heard the term, it was used in a vaguely pejorative sense. A poet I admire enormously was giving a reading and mentioned that she could “never write a project book.” I’ve come to terms with the fact that that is just how my brain works—I like digging deeply into specific subjects, writing through what I discover. I’m a poet of deep-seated obsessions, and I’m leaning into it.
Was your project defined before you started writing? To what degree did it develop organically as you added poems?
Actually, I was working on a different book (another project book!) that is very similar to If Mother Braids a Waterfall, except that I was drawing heavily on persona as a kind of protective layer between myself and the hot potato material I was writing about. The poems and lyric essays in If Mother kept coming, though, cropping up between persona poems, wriggling out of the costumes I kept trying to lace them up into.
Did you allow yourself to break your own rules?
If Mother Braids a Waterfall is a whole book of broken rules—as I mentioned, I was trying to write something else entirely. I felt much safer writing, and especially publishing, persona poems. About a month before If Mother was slated for publication, I had a near panic attack about how the book would be received, especially by certain family members, former mission companions, and friends. I tried not to wonder if I would be excommunicated. I’m relieved to say that, a year later, so far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and kind.
Have you abandoned other project attempts? How did you know it was time to let go? What happens to project poems that never amass a full-length book?
Short answer: Yes, I’ve abandoned projects that’ve lost their glimmer, for whatever reason.
Long answer: “Abandoned” is a terrible word, isn’t it? Is a project every really abandoned if there’s a possibility you might come back to it, years, even decades, later?
After completing a project, how did you transition into writing something new? What are you working on now? Another project?
So far, my projects have evolved organically into new projects. There were questions I wasn’t done with, or new questions that rode in on the tails of the old. As I was wrapping up If Mother Braids a Waterfall, I began thinking about new inroads to spirituality, particularly the Feminine Divine. The manuscript I’m currently tinkering with explores, subverts, questions, presses up against, supplicates, worships, rails against, and reimagines the Sacred Feminine.
What advice can you offer other writers, particularly emerging writers or poetry students who may be using the project book as a guiding principle for their own work?
Poems that don’t “fit” will arrive when you’re trying to focus on your project. Let them come. You may find that you end up with another chapbook or book besides the one you thought you were working on. Also, your brain will need rest. It can be enormously helpful to have something else to turn to when you grow tired of your main project. Allow yourself some flexibility and grace.
