Interview: In Shoshanna Wingate’s Secret Garden by Barbara Carter

I guess sometimes I have to learn how to get out of my own way so that the poem can have a life of its own. For example, in “Chapel Hill,” I wanted to write about my old home. I only lived there for a short time, but it retained a strong influence on me into adulthood. We lived out in the woods, at the end of a dirt road, in a predominantly black area. I was the only white kid on the school bus. Our neighbours lived in a log cabin with a dirt floor and no electricity. The father had inherited this log cabin from his father, who had been a sharecropper. We didn’t have electricity either and kept our food in a cooler in the creek, tied closed with a rope to keep animals out and prevent it from floating away. Many of our meals were communal, cooked over an open fire outside. My father’s friend lived in ouryard, in a bookmobile, and drove a Cushman, an old postman’s truck. On Saturday mornings, the little girl next door and I would pick wildflowers and load them into buckets in the back of the Cushman. The adults would all sit in Denny’s and have coffee while we kids sold flowers on the side of the road. When we’d made enough money to pay for breakfast, we’d shut down and join our parents inside.

Now when I tell friends this story, their eyes bug out and they say things like, “you were that poor?” Yeah, we were that poor. But that is not an unhappy memory for me. There were unhappy memories from that time and place, for sure, but I loved the outdoors, our wildflower field, the creek.

When I sat down to write “Chapel Hill,” I wanted to tell the story of my neighbours in the log cabin,
whom I also loved. We had our own world back there in those woods. We didn’t have a TV. I don’t remember listening to the radio. I had a few pet turtles. But those woods were our playground. Every little girl loves to throw a tea party, so we held ours on tree stumps. I wanted to capture the wildness of childhood, how imagination functions, how kids find what they need and want, without the judgments of adulthood.

In order to tell this particular story, I had to pare it down. I couldn’t throw in the bookmobile, selling wildflowers by the side of the road, the communal dinners outside. I wanted simplicity so that I could play around more with language, like “joust with drooping cattail reeds” or “wrap the willows around our necks like scarves.” I wanted to conjure the magic those woods held for me and in order to do that muc of the background story had to go. But in cutting all the other details, I was able to highlight the ones that could really speak to the time and place in the poem. This poem needed a certain weight and speed to mimic childhood and I had to find just the right language in order to do that.