by Rebecca Doverspike

MFA Alumna Danielle Ryle and her cat

Ashley Danielle Ryle received her MFA in poetry from West Virginia University in 2011. She currently teaches composition at Somerset Community College in her home state of Kentucky. Her chapbook, Fetching my Sister is due out in September from Dancing Girl Press.

I recently had the opportunity to email Danielle some questions.

How did the poems for your chapbook, Fetching my Sister, come about? Anything you’d like readers to know regarding this collection?

Wow, that’s a big one. Fetching represents a breakthrough moment for me, but also a style that, in many ways, I claimed and then abandoned. It’s a highly structured poem in sections and parts, and while I really like it and I think it does what I wanted it to do, I can’t imagine going back to that level of (visible) structure.

It came about because it needed to, because I needed to claim my own stories. Up to this point (I wrote Fetching in my second year of the program) I was relying on persona poems as the way to get my world on the page without ever having to admit it was my world. Not that everything in Fetching is true. Like any good ghost story, imagine ‘based on a true story’ floating across the bottom of the title screen/page, but of course the true story is just urban legend that’s been passed on and on. That’s a scary place to be though, to say, yes, everyone, these poems are about me. And I couldn’t have done it on my own. Mary Ann told me to stop writing the persona poems, just to not do it anymore. That was terrifying, but the best advice I got in my first year.

I also have a lot to owe Plath here. I resisted her work for a long time. It almost seems shameful to admit that I didn’t read a word of her until I was twenty-two, and even then I wasn’t at her ‘threshold,’ as my mentors have so aptly referred to it. (I love that image: me standing at the open door to the poet’s house but unable to cross it, waiting for an invitation, like a vampire.) I came back to Plath in 2010, and it was her rhythm and sound that really struck me. That’s what I pocketed for my own.

What influences your writing? (In the poems you sent me, I see: body, the sea, animals, transfiguration, myth, dancing…)

All of that, yes. Classical myth has been my biggest code-breaker, I guess. I just put together a full manuscript that is ‘the Greek book.’ I worked those myths until they were part of my own personal history. Even though I wrote most all of the new manuscript in about sixteen months (from about December 2011 to March 2013). I have to be honest and say it’s the work of the last six years, the outcome.

What’s your writing process like?

I still write everything by hand first, which allows for an immediate revision when I type them sometime in the next week or so. I write a lot. I’m at the desk most mornings, and I refuse to let anything be precious. There is probably another third of Fetching abandoned on my computer, and when I wrote the new manuscript I didn’t stop until I had 100 new poems so that I could chuck half of them without having to blink. And I don’t mean I’m ditching bad poems. The bad poems, or non-poems, don’t make it out of the notebook. I’m not the kind of poet who revises and revises and revises. I know on the reread of the typed copy whether it’s a keeper or not. Then it’s over.

What was your favorite part about the MFA program at WVU?

The time with other writers, my peers and my mentors. There’s nothing like showing up for work every day and having everyone think, oh, there goes one of the poets. That’s irreplaceable.

Who do you like to read?

I ‘discovered’ Baudelaire this summer, which has been really important, and I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Shakespeare. As for living poets, I got Louise Gluck’s collected poems this year and read the whole thing pretty quickly. I go to Gluck for myth, to Baudelaire for gritty romance, and Shakespeare for compression. But my favorite reading is usually with prose. I get more, I guess, ‘inspiration’ from prose. I don’t know how I’d live without having known Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust or without my almost yearly re-reading of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

How does teaching affect your writing?

For the last two years and in the upcoming year I’ve been trying to balance five sections of comp each semester with doing my own work. It sounds impossible. I remember one of the past graduates saying he taught that many classes and just sitting there in terror like you’re probably doing now. And it is terrifying, but if anything my production has increased since I finished the program. It’s not as easy and it’s not as fun, but sometimes the time constraint makes me get to the work when maybe I otherwise wouldn’t. I spent a few days with another poet from my year, Charity Gingerich, this summer at the Sister of Loretto Motherhouse, or actually at the retreat cabins at the back of the property. I spent my time there thinking a lot about the foundation of those Sisters. They are dedicated in part to the suffering of Mary and are themselves teachers. I don’t like this idea that you have to go through suffering to get to something better. I think it’s a dangerous belief. But I also think it’s true. When I’m dissatisfied or tired, I have more to say, I NEED the language more. So, I have to say I have the tribulation of such a heavy class load to perhaps thank for the work I’ve done. And I don’t think distress leads to poems about distress. Being distressed can actually lead you to value and be more present in the good moments.

What has post-MFA life been like? Any advice?

I think I may have addressed a lot of this in the last question. Advice: Just keep writing. You’re going to find out when you leave whether this writing thing was just a hobby or whether it’s life-or-death. I spent some time the first year out thinking that the MFA had been some cruel joke. How could I have believed I lived in a world where poetry matters? Then you have to come to terms with the real world. And then you just keep writing anyway. My three years in the world where poetry mattered was what gave me the strength to keep it up in my outside life. As Berryman puts it in one of the “Dreamsongs,” those “inner resources,” but since he’s really talking about when you don’t feel like you have those, be prepared for those moments when you’re “heavy bored” too.

How does landscape influence your work?

I don’t know what I’d do without a window. I’ve always had my desk near a window. In WV, it looked out on the cascade of run-down rooftops leading to Decker’s Creek, and now in KY, it’s a bank of trees leading down to Pittman Creek, which is really a river. Right now I’m looking out at a nuthatch on my porch rail posturing to scare off a cardinal chick. (If you don’t get to see birds posture, Google it.) I’ve been drawn to the outdoors since I was a child, though I am not in the least ‘outdoorsy.’ Landscape is just integral.

Do you write more during particular seasons or times of year?

I used to think I was an autumnal composer, but I think this actually has to do with the combination of a summer where I did all my living and the frustration of a new school year where I only have so much time to get the writing in. I have a lot of material and not a lot of time. Wordsworth says emotion recollected in tranquility, which is sort of what I mean. And Proust, his whole thesis is that only memory matters. Living doesn’t matter; living is just what it takes to turn out memories. And the ultimate proof of your existence is to turn those memories into art. But if you go around thinking about that, you’ll end up writing bad poems. It just happens that way. It’s an after-the-fact sort of thing.

Danielle’s work has most recently appeared in Denver Quarterly, Iron Horse, and MidAmerican Review, and her chapbook, Fetching my Sister, is forthcoming this fall from Dancing Girl Press.