Creating a Happy Home: An Interview with Maggie Rue Hess

Interview conducted by Amber Walters-Molina

Maggie Rue Hess is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has either been writing, reading, or studying poetry for well over a decade. In her spare time, Maggie enjoys making baked goods and serves as a poetry reader and Managing Editor for Online Content for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts.  Maggie’s writing can be found in Red Branch Review, Rattle, and Connecticut River Review. Maggie’s debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published in February 2024 by Belle Point Press.

The Bones That Map Us is a collection eight years in the making that establishes themes such as love and loss by mapping the emotional and physical moves across Hess’s life. As the chapbook’s back cover blurb describes, “The Bones That Map Us embodies an intimate yet understated world of grief. Confronted with the erasure of family history, the speaker gradually fills in the cracks with her own love story.” In the chapbook, Hess explores how the trauma from our past can be mended and forgiven.

Amber Walters-Molina: Hi Maggie! It’s so nice to see you again! Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! Since we have known each other for a few years, I might know the answer to some of these questions, but for the sake of our readers, let’s dig into your background and writing practices that contributed to The Bones That Map Us. So, what are you studying currently?

Maggie Rue Hess: I am a contemporary Americanist, and I intend to study and write about contemporary American poetry. My interest is really in exploring feminist poetics, and I think that I’ll be dedicating a lot of time to experimental female writers. But I am also intrigued by how that appears in form and topic areas that range from family, mothering, love, queerness, grief, etc.

 AWM: When did you start writing poetry?

MRH: I have always been a kid who loved reading and writing. My family will say once I learned to read, and even before I learned to read, I was always trying to scribble things out. I was drawn toward illustrating and writing stories. But poetry came around middle school. I don’t know exactly what caused the shift, but when I got into middle school, I was like, “Oh! I can make poems, and they can be like stories, or they can be much more condensed.” So yeah, probably since I was an awkward 11 or 12-year-old, I’ve been writing poetry.

AWM: How do you incorporate daily or regular writing practice into your schedule?

MRH: I don’t. I have—the very stereotypical—notes app filled with ideas of poems, and like half poems. So when it comes to anything like a ‘regular practice,’ that’s about as close as I get. I think I could do much better to be disciplined with my writing.

Also, I do some of my most exciting writing when I’m supposed to be working on something else. I’m very good at not working on what I’m supposed to and then being like, “Oh, let me write this poem,” or, “Draft out this idea for a paper.”

But something I’m trying this year is to write on paper more. A lot of my poems started in notebooks before they went into a Word document. And I think there’s something about the physical writing experience that can be a little more freeing since it’s multi-sensory.  So that’s something I’m trying to be better about this year. Also, I always carry a notebook around. I always have paper around me. It’s just a matter of opening the page and jotting down whatever is going on.

AWM: What book(s) are you reading right now?

MRH: For class, I am reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W Chesnutt. But then, for fun, I’m in a book club—which is crazy as an English Ph.D.—so I’m reading The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which I’ve just started, but it’s really entertaining so far.

AWM: Do you have a particular style or genre you are drawn to?

MRH: Yeah! Poetry is always going to be in there, and I think poetry provides a nice sort of pacing break from other longer forms and genres. But aside from that, I’m really drawn to memoirs. I love life writing. I love biographies, auto bios, and memoirs. I am a huge fiction person, and within fiction, there is an inner child in me who loves a good mystery. I grew up on Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie. I am also trying to get more into horror writing because I’ve found that I really enjoy it.

AWM: Speaking of your reading habits and things you are drawn to, The Bones That Map Us begins with a quote from Howard Moss: “my wound has been my healing, / And I am made more beautiful by losses.” Could you tell us how this quote resonated with your work?

MRH: The quote comes from Howard Moss’s poem called “The Pruned Tree,” which is a poem from an anthology that I read when I was in high school. I knew I loved poetry and wanted to read it, but I needed to find more contemporary writers. And, I found this collection called The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart. So, of course, I was a moody teenager who was like, “Yeah! I wanna read this angsty love poetry anthology!” It follows the cycles of grief and relationships in the collection: falling in love, breaking up, false hope, and acceptance.

I’ve tried to find this anthology again recently because I lent it to someone and lost it forever. And so, I really want a copy again because so many of the poems in there were formative of how I understand contemporary poetry.

“The Pruned Tree,” in particular, was about how you lose things, and that makes you better. And that’s a way to think about one of the themes of my chapbook. When you experience a loss, the first instinct is to hurt, but you can grow from that hurt, and that loss is formative in how you love people.

AWM: On the Belle Point Press website, you have created a playlist that accompanies The Bones That Map Us  which includes songs like “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, “Sedated” by Hozier, and “In My Life” by the Beatles; What was the logic in crafting the order of the playlist?

MRH: I wanted to track the emotional journey of the chapbook with music. That’s how I operate. I love making playlists. It’s a love language for me. So, it just made sense to do it along with the chapbook. Also, some people find poetry unapproachable, but music very approachable. I was hoping there could be a little bit of the drawing in with the playlist. And so, to that end, every track matches a song, either in title, mood or lyrics, and that was fun and kind of hard. There are some songs that could actually go with multiple different poems, but ultimately, I had to settle and say, “No, you’re for this one.” I was in between three different Hosier songs, all from his debut album. I love him as an artist, and he has some of the best lyrics in the game for his genre. There were some things that were interchangeable with the poem that I ended up linking to his song.

There was a song that I really considered putting on the playlist. It’s one that my sister sent to me once—Vance Joy’s “Snaggletooth.” My bio on the chapbook will tell you I have crooked front teeth and my mom had crooked front teeth. It’s just this sort of thing she passed down to me—that has joined us. My whole life, my front teeth have been a family inside comment that’s not hurtful, it’s just like how it is. And so my sister sent that song as a way of saying, here’s a loving way to notice this thing about you. And because the chapbook focuses on my connection to my mom and to my family, that song would have been perfect thematically, but there is no poem that goes with it in exactly the way I want. So, it didn’t make it on the list this time.

AWM: How did you settle on the title of The Bones That Map Us?

MRH: Yeah, I did the classic move of pulling a line from a poem, and not even just a line, but one of the poems’ titles. But that was not the original title. I don’t even know how many different variations of the title I’ve gone through. I had The Bones That Map Us for a while, but there is another poem from the collection that has the phrase “Hers was the body,” and that was the collection’s title for a while. They both do something really important, which is noticing the body as part of the title, and I thought that was really important to what a lot of the poems do.

So, in going between the two options, I ended up picking The Bones That Map Us, in part because of who is involved in the poem and who is involved in the big idea of the chapbook. Then, also it takes a line that is a question in the poem and turns it into a statement for the title. I really liked to be able to do that. I think about bones as something that serves as our physical connection to our family and history, but it also just kind of sounds goth to say “Bones Map Us,” and I think that is right for the chapbook.

AWM: The Bones That Map Us utilizes multiple different forms across the 25 poems; for example, “Funny Like That” works in erasures. Is there any form you are most interested in using in your writing?

MRH: I love that you asked about “Funny Like That” because the erasure form is one I come back to over and over again. It’s used twice in the chapbook. The series of “We know the ending but not the beginning” poems are also erasures. Done in a different way from “Funny Like That,” which is kind of why I like the form because it can be adapted. It can be the same form, but it shows up in different ways. So, I’m trying to find all those different ways and what topic matters fit that form.

There are other traditional forms that I feel lucky when I can write into them. There’s a ghazal form in “Ghazal for a Pulse.” That’s a beautiful traditional Middle Eastern form that is a poem of loss. I wanted to write one for a while and didn’t know what would be right to use that form for, and I had had this draft of a poem that I’d been struggling and struggling and struggling to get right. And then I was like, “Well, what if I put this into ghazal form?” And then it really worked.

AWM: “Summer Ages” is the ultimate poem of the collection and is the sole poem with a dedication in the chapbook—and my favorite. I know it is for someone else, but it so spoke to me and my relationship with my husband. Could you speak to who Austin is and how your relationship has “filled in the cracks” in your life and, by extension, your writing for the Chapbook?

MRH: Yeah! The project of my life, from childhood, has been to think about, how can I have a happy home? In many ways, I grew up in a happy home filled with people who loved me. And in many ways, I grew up in a house filled with sadness stemming from things like divorce and illness. Anybody can say that, right, but for me, as a kid, I wanted to very intentionally take what I learned from the home that I grew up in to make sure that adult me has the happiest home possible, based on any lessons that I learned. I think that watching my mom love people and be unlucky in love was really formative for me. In learning to love beyond my siblings, my parents, and my grandparents and be a really good partner with Austin—my husband—I was early on cognizant of the fact that I could make a happy home with this guy. And that was incredibly eye-opening and self-transformative.

Love has a transformative power. It asks you to be active in that transformation because somebody else can’t just change you. You have to want to change yourself in any way that is important. That’s what I wanted the poem to speak to because then you can create endurance out of that love. You can make ages and ages of this relationship. I think my life project of creating a happy home and learning from my past also feeds my poetry. Because thinking about home dynamics is something that I will be curious about and poking into with my writing. I definitely wanted to end on that note of, like, Here is something that I can sort of proudly say, and the fact that it could touch other people is always what I want a poem to do. It’s obviously written out of my experience. But it’s like, “Does anybody else out there understand this feeling?” That is what each poem in the chapbook asks.

Amber Walters-Molina is a PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the University of North Texas English department. Her studies focus on nineteenth-century British literature and digital humanities. Her research interests investigate issues of gender, socioeconomic disparity, and monstrosity in work by authors like Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot. She recently served as a co-editor, alongside Nancy Henry and Eliza Alexander Wilcox, for a special issue of Nineteenth Century Contexts– “Nineteenth Century Movement(s).” She is the fiction editor for American Literary Review.