speaker-0: Hey everyone, it's Jeff. Before we get started, a brief programming note. Writing Forward is going on summer vacation. We're taking a couple of months to recharge and plan season two, but we'll be back this fall with a whole new slate of conversations. If you've enjoyed this season, I think you're really gonna love what we have planned next. So that's it. Until then, I hope everyone stays cool. And let's get into the season one finale of Writing Forward. Hello and welcome to Writing Forward, a conversation show featuring some of the best and brightest voices from across Wisconsin. I'm Jeff Aloisia, I'm a former editor at the New York Times, a Milwaukee suburbs native, and now I'm a freelance writer based in Madison. Each week I sit down with writers from and connected to my home state for candid, sometimes messy conversations about craft, identity, and what it means to build a writing life at home and away from the traditional centers of the literary world. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry to journalism, we dig into what keeps Wisconsin writers moving forward, one word at a time. My guest today is Nicholas Gullig. Nick is a poet, educator, and former Wisconsin poet laureate, whose work has long explored questions of place, belonging, history, and identity. A native of Eau Claire and the author of four poetry collections, including his most recent, The Other Altar, he spent much of his career examining what it means to write from and remain connected to. The places that shape us. He most recently wrote and produced Welcome Poets, a PBS Wisconsin documentary about the life and work of the Wisconsin poetry icon Lorreen Nedeker. I wanted to have Nick on because he's, like many of our guests, one of those rare writers who is as thoughtful in conversation as he is on the page. As our poet laureate, he spent years traveling the state and thinking deeply about Wisconsin's literary culture. And his work continually returns to the questions that are at the heart of this podcast. How does place shape a writer? What does it mean to make art outside the industry's traditional centers of power? And what can we discover by paying closer attention to where we are? Nick Guolig, welcome to Writing Forward. If you can just go ahead and answer all those questions I raised in the intro. I have a lot to ask you, but first we begin each episode of the show by asking our guests to share a brief passage from someone else's writing, be it a novel, poem, essay, or article, that for them evokes Wisconsin in some memorable way. What did you choose? And can you read it for us, please?

speaker-1: Thanks for having me, Jeff. wait. Yeah, I'm really excited to share this essay called Stump by Steven Espada Dawson, who's the poet from here in Madison. I believe he's still Madison's poet laureate, if my memory serves me incorrectly. Yeah. It takes place in Denver, so I don't know if I'm breaking the rules here a little bit, but to my mind and in my heart, this is an essay that places me back in Wisconsin. So I'm just gonna read the beginning and I'm gonna read the end of it if if that's all right. I wasn't looking for poetry when I posted the advertisement. I was looking for something to do with my body. I was young and unwell in a way for which I didn't have language. I was restless, lonely, and agitated by my own unspent energy. I wanted to feel hurt so I wouldn't hurt myself. I put an ad on Craigslist offering to chop wood piles for free. The only people who responded were older women with wood burning stoves. Almost all of them told me quickly and without ceremony that their husbands had died. I did not ask follow up questions and wrote down their addresses. I was providing a service to my community. It took a long time to understand that this was already a form of writing, not the chopping but the pattern, the repetition, the careful movement through other people's spaces without entering them exactly. The way I substituted action for confession, the way I built a practice small and sturdy enough to hold what I couldn't yet articulate. This is how poetry came into my life, not as an expression but as a behavior. I did not write because I had something to say. I wrote because I needed something to do that could keep me from unraveling, something small enough to fit within a day, portable enough to carry through it. Precise enough to have a shape, a thing with edges. For whatever reason, chopping wood for strangers taught me this before poetry did. Usefulness can be a form of self-dignity. Repetition can be a declaration of staying when nothing else says stay. Sometimes attention is the only kind of care you have available. I learned you don't need to understand what you're feeling to build something that can hold it. I still think about those women whose names I don't remember or maybe never knew. I think back about those windows. I think about that stump, how easily I said yes, how quickly I believed ambition was the same thing as capacity, how I swung at what was visible and pretended not to notice how far down the roots had stretched. I'm better now, more attentive to depth, more honest about what I can touch. I'm not trying to explain myself. I'm trying to make something I can return to when I don't yet know what I'm becoming. I no longer want to remove what is buried. I want poems that show me where the burying began. Not an incredible essay. That is like a whole bunch in the middle too that's just as good, man.

speaker-0: That's amazing. It I it feels like such a good jumping off point for this conversation. I know that you said that you know it takes place in Denver, but it brought to mind Wisconsin and home for you.

speaker-1: Yeah. Can you tell us why? Yeah, I've been thinking about that 'cause you asked me for something to read and this is the first thing that came to mind and I was like, Well shit, that that takes place in Denver, that's off the table. And I kept reaching for other things, but I kept reaching past them and coming back to this essay. I think there's a couple reasons. One material, I think maybe one immaterial. I think the material reason is the kind of most surface reason which is I I'm less interested in and it's just the fact that it's an essay about chopping wood, which feels like a kind of quintessential Midwestern masculine action, you know, or something along those lines. You know, and I have a wood stove, you know, I chop wood all s all winter. You know, I grew up in hunting cabins where we were, you know, we were always putting wood in a fire. so it feels like Wisconsin in that way, but I think there's a more interesting way in in which the essay reminds me of and makes me feel like I'm at home in Wisconsin. And that has something to do, I think, with the the way By which I came to this essay, which is to suggest that language is not only the world that it points to, but also the world from which it emerges. And what I mean by that is really nothing more complicated than like thinking about the rhetorical situation, right? Like the a piece of language is also the context in which the audience encounters it. And I encountered this essay in January. of this year, right after Rene Good was killed in Minneapolis, which is a which I grew up right outside of in Eau Claire. It's a city that largely defines my teenage years. I think I spend every weekend in Minneapolis at punk shows as a teenager. You know, ICE was in the middle of its kind of brutal occupation of Minneapolis at the beginning of the year. And I think like a lot of immigrant families My family and I were essentially sheltering in place at that time. my eldest daughter still doesn't have her full doesn't fully have her documents yet. So we were like a lot of folks in the Midwest, we were incredibly on edge and incredibly kind of you know, essentially like locked ourselves locked ourselves in our houses and had cut off most ties to the outside world and My eldest daughter is fourteen, so she's old enough to to see and think and worry about the world that's happening around her, and I think especially as an immigrant. She had a lot of questions about what was happening and a lot of concerns about what it meant to live in a country where the government is going after people like you, where the government is killing writers in the streets. And I didn't know exactly what to tell her, you know, but I'm her dad. dad, so I have to tell her something. Like I'm no longer I don't no longer have the luxury of just like not saying things. Yeah. You know, in those kinds of situations. And I didn't know what to say. And so like I often do when I don't know what to say, I sat down and I wrote her letter. And as I was writing that letter, I found that the letter was as much as if if not more so about poetry and in language itself than it was about the occupation in in in Minneapolis. I wrote that letter and it was published by Lithub, but I had to publish it anonymously, to kind of keep my daughter's name off of the radar or or whatever. And so I wasn't able to post like, hey, I published this thing, you know, I published this thing in Lit Hub on my socials or or whatever. But there were people that I wanted to read it, and those people were other writers in my community. There were certain friends that I went to school with, teachers that I had when I was in school and and people here in my community in Wisconsin that I really wanted to show that letter to in large part because I think like whatever wisdom I had to offer my daughter in that situation was wisdom that I inherited by virtue of my relationships with teachers, friends and other writers here in the state. And so really I came to see that letter is my friends and teachers and fellow writers kind of speaking through me, helping me talk to my kid at a time and place in which I didn't know what to say to my kid. And so I passed that letter on to friends. My friend Sidia sent me an email back. And in that email, she's like, Hey, thanks for this letter. I've been leaning on this essay by my friend Stephen during this time. You know, Sidia also, you know, is an immigrant, has immigrant. family in Minneapolis. she's like, hey, this this essay by my friend Steven has been really helpful these last few weeks. so I wanted to pass it on to you. And then I read it and I've kept on reading it. I passed this essay on to almost everyone I've met, everyone who I think would would need it. And when I say that this essay makes me feel like I'm at home in Wisconsin, what I mean by that is that it reminds me that I live in a place Where someone's language, in this case, Stevens, could take care of another person, in this case, Sadia, right? And then through her could come to me and take care of me. And then through me, help me take care of the people that I need to take care of. I think when I was younger, I didn't see Wisconsin or experience Wisconsin as a place like that. Yeah. I could have been wrong about that. I don't know. Maybe I was just like young and you know, oblivious. That's very possible. But now as someone who's in the middle of his life, Wisconsin feels like a place like that to me. And it's a feeling I never imagined when I was a young writer. But now, as a much older writer, it feels like it's everywhere. And this essay just like is evidence of that. So I'm super grateful for Steven for writing it. I'm super grateful for Cidia for passing it on. And I'm excited to be able to pass it on to who's ever listening to this.

speaker-0: It's a beautiful story in that it speaks to how language is alive. Yeah. You know, you mentioned growing up in Eau Claire and going to punk shows. I wanna sort of start there. Sure. You grew up in Eau Claire as part of that city's underground punk scene. I understand you were you know, you were going to Minneapolis for hardcore shows and punk shows. Yeah. What was it about those communities that drew you in and what did you get from them?

speaker-1: So Minneapolis in the nineties was as far as like my punk rock my cognizance of like punk rock history is accurate, there was a magazine in run out of Minneapolis called Profane Existence, which was also like a distributor of underground DIY punk records primarily at the time. And so this scene kind of grew up around that essentially zine. Right, this piece of literature in in some ways. We were in Eaure at the time, and Eau Claire in the nineties was very different than it is now. Yeah. You know, like I was coming of age and coming into selfhood, you know, at the end of history, Fukyama is the end of history. Capitalism had with the fall of the Soviet Union, with the fall of the wall, with everything like capitalism had One, it no longer had any kind of pressures acting against it. And that was the world that I inherited. And that was the world that I grew up in. There's a couple of ways that I feel like that the end of history manifested itself in Eau Claire. One was with the closing of the Uniroyal Tire Factory, which was the, I think like the third largest tire factory in the United States. It was easily the city's biggest employer easily the city's biggest like union labor opportunity for people in Eau Claire and that shut down in the early nineties and with it came like the what happens to every city where when the major employment facility closes. And the same time that that was happening, it was like the height of mall culture. Like we got Oakwood Mall, which was our big super mall where every brand on the planet had had a store and and with that came like the collapse of like the city's downtown. Yeah. So I grew up in Eau Claire where the downtown was dead. it was just abandoned storefronts. The mall was where people went for fun. The mall was where people turned to understand themselves in the way that like consumerism o offers a kind of Hollow empty selfhood that you can step into if you can afford one brand and step into a different self if you can afford a different brand. And it was also the height of MTV, which I loved at the time, but which I've kind of since come to see as essentially doing the same thing that malls were doing, which was offering us costumes and identities to to put on and At some point, I think because we were so close to the antithesis of that in Minneapolis, I had access to an alternative. I had access to something that was trying as best it could for better and for worse to exist outside of and in tension with what was on offer everywhere else. It was homegrown, it was grass roots, it was done with like the blood, sweat and tears and efforts of people who had very, very little, but who managed through sheer passion and effort to construct something, you know, it's temporary, it's no longer really there. But they made a culture for themselves and it wasn't mediated in the way that the culture of the mall was was so incredibly mediated. And I needed that as a teenager and there was.

speaker-0: don't want to talk too about Fort Atkinson because I want people to go and watch the PBS series. Yeah, me too. But I want to ask you about the the sort of moment you drove past this sign in Fort Atkinson. What year was it that you moved to sixteen. Okay, sixteen, yeah. And I know in talking to you that like the world, let alone small town Wisconsin, did not feel like the friendliest place at that time. Yeah.

speaker-1: It was a mess back then. I mean it still is in a lot of ways, but you know, I hadn't been back I mean I'd been back to visit my parents, but I hadn't li been to Wisconsin to to live in Wisconsin since I was I left when I was eighteen, nineteen. And then I was just like chasing poetry for, you know, turns out a long really long time and then my dad passed away in two thousand and fifteen and I was living in Thailand at the time and I at the time I thought that I would just live there. You know, my wife was there, our our first daughter was there. I had a good life there. You know, with advanced degree from the United States, it's pretty easy to get a job at a university in Thailand and I was just working at a university that didn't really ask much of me. Most of the time I just like write and sometimes teach classes, sometimes not. But then my dad passed away and pretty suddenly and it was pretty clear I needed least in my heart, like I needed to come home. I was worried about my mom being alone. I felt guilty for spending so much of my life so far away from from everything. And I made my way back the job offer at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater and my uncle lived in Fort Atkinson, which is just ten minutes from Whitewater, so I decided to to live in Fort Atkinson and like that summer moving into Fort for the first time, driving through rural Wisconsin during the lead up to the 2016 elections. Wisconsin did not look the way that I remembered it. I never imagined Wisconsin taking on the energy that it took on leading up to the first Trump presidency. And I think I was you know, especially tuned to it or prone to experiencing it because of my family and because I was immigrating. Two brown people during a moment when like that was the worst thing to be in the United States in 2016. And I was asking them to adopt this home that very clearly and very openly and very brashly, everywhere you looked, was saying, like, you're not welcome here, you're not welcome here, like you specifically are not welcome here. And and I was feeling like a bad husband, I was feeling like bad dad. I was just like, what the fuck am like why am I bringing these two women here at to this place at this time? I was feeling really selfish, you know, like if I was a good husband and if and I was a good dad, like I wouldn't be asking my wife and daughter to move to Donald Trump's America. But here I was and that's exactly what I was doing. And Fort Atkinson is a small town and the the outskirts of that town was mega flags Bumper stickers, yard signs, everything. And I regretted coming home, in large part because I was like, this doesn't feel like home. But we're driving past we turn off the Highway Twelve and turn on the Main Street there, and we're driving past a diner, and the diner had a little marquee above the door and it's in Welcome Poets. At that place in point in time I Think I needed those two words more than I needed almost almost anything on the planet. It just felt like a huge sense of relief. Like those two words kind of existed as a counterforce to every Trump flag in the state. It felt to me. Like here was rhetoric that was welcoming me, welcoming my family. That sign was there because earlier that summer there had been a Lori Nidaker poetry festival, and the owner of the diner just hadn't gotten around to changing the marquee.

speaker-0: That there's that connection between you and Edeker. I want to ask you about the experience of being poet laureate, which I imagine was like another step in sort of reintegrating and feeling a little more at home in Wisconsin and and probably a little bit surreal. You know, you spent a lot of time now thinking about poetry beyond the university. You had to travel for that position. Yep. What did those experiences teach you about who poetry is for? You know, what surprised you most when you started bringing poetry into libraries and schools and community centers? Yeah.

speaker-1: those two years that I was Poet Laureate the state, I saw more of Wisconsin in those two years than I had seen in the f I forget how old I was at the time, forty some years prior. And it's not like I was a homebody, you know, like I I got around, I you know, I traveled, I did things. but I saw every corner of Wisconsin in those two years and It was such a stark contrast to the Wisconsin that I imagined I was living in when I was a up and coming poet at the age of, you know, thirteen. When I was thirteen, I think like a lot of people from Wisconsin, if they have like artistic proclivities, you feel like you gotta get out of here because everyone you read is not from here. All the bands that you listen to are not from here. I think to a a young Boy, there was a sense where nothing of cultural sustenance was available to you in Wisconsin, and so you had to leave, and so I did leave. And then when I came back, you know, within a few years I was the poet laureate of the state that I had had left and returned to, and I was found myself traveling the state, and the thing that I was looking for. The whole time that I was away was everywhere around me. It was in small groups of people meeting monthly in bookstores and coffee shops and in parks in towns I'd never heard of. You know, towns that were smaller than Fort Atkinson would have groups of people getting together, writing poems, sharing poems, reading poems together, like this whole ecosystem of poets like was just there and like every day I'd open up my email and there'd be someone from some town I'd never heard of being like, hey, any chance you're gonna be here, you know, or could be here? Like and then there I'd be like sitting in a living room or sitting, you know, in some library or at a bookstore or wherever, talking with group of strangers about poetry. And I was just like, man, where was this? When I was young I was so mistaken. Like Wisconsin is so much more fertile than I ever imagined it was, and I credit my tenure as poet laureate as this experience that gave my state back to me.

speaker-0: One thing I love about your work is I think you have this tendency to sort of like divininize the everyday and the ordinary and sort of make the ordinary feel almost sacramental. I love the way you talk about your daughters and your wife. I'm curious what draws your attention in the first place. Like wh why the the moments that you're writing about in your books? Yeah. Why those moments?

speaker-1: I don't know if this is a gonna answer your question. but I often tell my students nothing that they wanna write about is new. I mean that sounds incredibly pessimistic. But what I mean by that is like I don't know, I I'm exaggerating to make the point here, but I feel like you could count with two hands the amount of subjects that poems are about. When you when you're writing poems, the thing that you're reaching for is not a new subject. necessarily but a new relationship to a very, very old subject, and that if the poem is successful it's going to renovate and r resurrect that subject. I think a poem is successful when it through some configuration of language it takes what is familiar and and turns it into magic, as so as though you're experiencing it for the first time, like Stephen's essay makes chopping wood feel new to me. I had never seen that action that way before, and now it's more than what it was before I read that essay. And it's what I want poems to do. It's the reason that I turned poems is because they bring the dead world back, you know. I think I write about the things that I write about because I'm aware that if I can get the poem to work, It's going to save something that I need to be saved. Yeah.

speaker-0: Can talk about altars a little bit? Orient is sort of full of altars. Your most recent collection is The Other Altar. Candidly, you know, the first time I met you was at the Washington Island Literary Festival and I heard you speak about altars. It was, I think, the fall of 2024. And I was back in Wisconsin. My dad was pretty like clearly dying from Alzheimer's and and related things. And

speaker-1: For sure. Yeah.

speaker-0: You know, just hearing you talk about how you thought about altars was like really deeply moving to me. And so Well, you know, I I went back and revisited some interviews with you. You describe an altar as trying to accomplish the impossible task of helping us hold on and let go at the same time. And and I never heard grief described that way before. How did you come to realize that poems might be trying to do something similar or the same thing?

speaker-1: What I said. Yeah. one of my favorite classes to teach is this class on the aesthetics of grief. I'm teaching it this fall, so I need to actually get off my ass and put a new version of that class together. In that class, we build altars. One of my assignments just to have students go out and build an altar for someone who's gone. And we spend a lot of time in that class thinking about the r rituals that surround All the funeral rituals that we do. And one of the things that we quickly quickly realize is that at the at moments of profound loss, we turn to art, we decorate death. You know, I wasn't there when your dad died, or I in the aftermath of your dad dying, but in the aftermath of my dad dying, when all the people who cared about him got together in my parents' backyard, what did we do? We sat around and we told stories. Right. Storytelling is a form of decorating death. We say prayers, right? When our like one of the few times I like sincerely prayed was when my dad was dying. You know, I'm not a religious person. I don't I don't believe in God necessarily. But I was there in that hospital, like praying my ass off and praying is poetry. Death is this thing that we can't make sense of and when we encounter something that we can't make sense of, we turn to art and we tell stories and we recite poetry, we sing songs, we build altars. And I think one of the things that became clear to me as I was talking with my students about their experience building altars is that we do it on the one hand, we do it To keep the dead there in the room with us. Right. My dad died in 2015. It's been eleven years now, over a decade. It's one of the first thing I see when I walk in my my parents' back door. is an altar that my mom has kept for eleven years. My dad's ashes are there. Photographs of him all the way from when he was a infant to when he was a teenager to when he was like a young man to when he was an old man are there. Ephemera kind of representing the different things that he cared about throughout his life are there on the table. And my mom has organized these objects in a particular way, and you know, every so often she reorganizes it, adds things, takes things away, and she's just decorating this space and it's a way of like keeping my dad there in the room with us there in the house. So it's a way of holding on, right? The irony is Is that it helps us move on. It helps us kind of step foot forward into the world where they aren't there. It's also this thing that we do to let the person go. And so it it occupies this space of contradiction. And at least according to Keats, it's the space out of which art emerges, right? And like he says, you have to be able to exist in that. space of mystery, uncertainty and doubt. If you want to be a poet, if you want to be an artist. And I believe him. Another way to think about it is in terms of inheritance and influence. Like that the film Welcome Poets, I think at the end of the day, even though like what happens in that documentary is the telling of Lori Niedaker's life. I think what the film's about is inheritance and influence. And it's an attempt to kind of celebrate the extent to which we are in indebted to the writers who came before us. And that indebtedness places a real responsibility and gives meaning to our attempts to kind of write on in their aftermath. So everything that I'm able to put down into a poem or into a book is there by virtue of The writers whose work has mattered and made sense to me. And yet at the same time, I can't be a clone of those people. And so you're as a writer, you're in this position where you have to kind of hold on to and acknowledge and pay tribute to the people to whom you are indebted. But at the same time, you have to be able to let them go and walk away and like make your own name for yourself as a writer. I remember one of one of the best. pieces of advice, even though I didn't like it at the time, was from a teacher named Karen Volkman at the University of Montana. And at that time I was heavily under the influence of a poet from Montana named Richard Hugo. I couldn't read another poet other than Hugo. Like no other poems worked for me. And everything I was writing was just like me trying to write like Richard Hugo. And I remember bringing a group of poems to Karen and asking her, like, I was like, hey, I think I'm ready to start publishing. You know, I'm like a college kid. And she's like, well, I don't know that that's the case. And now so I was upset with her. And she gave me this piece of advice. She said, like, Nick, unless you stop reading Richard Hugo, you're never gonna be a better poet. And I was furious. because I just I was young and I hadn't been humbled yet. I thought I knew everything. I was very wrong. I was very wrong about that. but she d had enough respect for me and believed in me enough to be honest with me and her honesty, like her advice was like, Look, you gotta let him go so you can find something that's more than that. I think that's what we're trying to do as as writers. We have to acknowledge our debts. We have to s celebrate our inheritance and our influences, while at the same time moving on. walking into the world where they're not there and I think altar become a way of making that clearer for me.

speaker-0: That's beautiful. We'll lighten things up and do it a speed round in just a minute. But I just want to think about I wanna try to zoom out just a little bit. You know, you write quite a bit in your books about personal grief, but you're also writing explicitly sometimes about global conflict and and larger issues. You know, we've spent the last several years living through extraordinary public grief. Yeah. Pandemic, war, political violence. Climate disasters, you name it. And yet we seem to have very few sort of shared rituals for mourning anymore. I thought about this a lot in the wake of the pandemic, that we never had any kind of public reckoning or even a memorial. I don't know exactly what the question is, but as artists, like how can we make the personal feel universal? Or I guess a another way of putting this is just like what can Poetry or art do that facts alone can.

speaker-1: When my dad died, the world changed and I changed with it. When my dad died is especially like that last week, which was the most amount of pain that emotional pain that I've ever I've ever been in, watching him die and knowing that there was nothing that there was nothing that was gonna change that. it became very, very clear to me very, very quickly, how much of my self existed. Because of him. It became so like death is so grief is so clarifying. All of the illusions of a life that I had carved for myself through my own individual efforts, like those illusions just fell away when I was watching my dad die. It was no longer I was no longer able to kind of see myself as an isolated individual because it's just so clear to me how all of these decisions that he made, all of these sacrifices that he made created the context out of which the illusion of my individuality had a had emerged. And so it kinda like a way of saying that more succinctly is to say that like my sense of self just kind of dissolved when my dad died. And I say that that was his last gift to me. and what I mean by that, I think, is that I wear that illusion less so now than I did before. And when the borders of the self are porous, when the thing dividing you From other people, when the the self and the experiences that divide your place in the world from other places in the world, when those borders become permeable, as they did in the aftermath of my dad's passing, it becomes so much easier to experience what other people are experiencing. The book Orient. Is a book about the civil war in Syria, place I've never been, involving people I've never and most likely will never meet, people who would, whose lives and experiences and struggles and sorrows and joys would otherwise be completely abstract and far away. Through the kind of investigation of my own grief losing my dad, which is like part of what happens in that book, other people's grief became real because I was less I was less. Right? Keats says the poet has no self. I didn't know what that was until my dad died. And so Through the selflessness that my father gave me as a kind of final gift, that book Orient became possible. It's one of the proudest, at least as far as art goes, it's one of the things I'm most proud of is that book, the publication of which changed my life and made it possible for me to to be here. Like my life as a poet didn't really kind of find firm ground. Until after my dad died. It's one of the things that I'm also saddest about is that he didn't get to live long enough to like see me succeed to the degree that I that I have. but it was his passing, at least in my mind, that made all that possible. Yeah.

speaker-0: Wanna do a quick speed round? Sure. What is a jazz album that you think everybody should listen to?

speaker-1: I'm gonna say Love Supreme by John Coltrane because he talks about writing a song in much the same way that we've been talking about writing a poem. He says like when I'm trying to write a song, I'm trying to start in the middle of the sentence and move in both directions. So it's again it kinda like rhymes with bits and pieces of our previous conversation. So I'll say a love supreme.

speaker-0: All right. Do you have a favorite Wisconsin bookstore?

speaker-1: Yeah, Woodland Pattern, easy. Yeah. It's one it's the best bookstore in the country. Yeah.

speaker-0: Who is a poet you think everyone should be reading?

speaker-1: Sadiya Hassan of Easy.

speaker-0: What would someone find in your notebook besides poems?

speaker-1: Rest peace, probably. Or like reminders, man, like my memory is shot. Like it's just shot. So reminders. This is what I have to do today.

speaker-0: Last one. You sit down at the bar at the Great Eaure bar at the joint. Mm-hmm. What are you ordering?

speaker-1: A pint of lining coughl's which is not a beer I necessarily love. The joint i does not have good beer. Right. But it has so much else.

speaker-0: Okay, I said lastly, but there's one more thing I wanna do. We started the season with a poem. Yeah. So I'm hoping we can end with one too. Would you be willing to read us one of your poems?

speaker-1: Of course. They're kinda like two poems from this last book, The Other Altered, that I like to close with. One of them's a poem about my wife, the other one's a poem about my kids. Let's read the one about my wife. It's called Border Work. Border work. Our being here together is the night struck violet plucked from an edge blue curve of air. The light does not absolve us. Because we named our children in the margins of a garden's darkness, the white rose listens. I love the thousand shades of you. Every morning our daughters sleep beyond themselves in day glow. The house grows quiet in their wake. To the place where you should be, I lash the ache of every brightness I've disfigured, the years that we have left. Bury with me the bottom half of fence posts in the yard, pack the loose dirt harder. These days I'm beginning to believe that I belong here. Because we chose to raise our children in the center of an empire, the low grass glistens in the west wind. At night the sky edge finds us staring at our hands. It is easy to forget we left a world for this one. Thank you.

speaker-0: Nick, before we even recorded an episode of this podcast, I knew that we wanted to have you as our season one finale. And so I I know that you said you may not believe in God, but thank you for taking us to Poetry Church today. I I really appreciate you doing this.

speaker-1: Thanks for having me.

speaker-0: That wraps things up. Another big thanks to my guest, Nick Gulig, and thank you for tuning in. We'll put links to Nick's books and to welcome poets in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, or any of our episodes, please leave a rating or share with a friend. It really helps. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes when we return this fall. You can reach me anytime at jeffaloisia.com/slash writing forward. That's J-E-F-F-O-L-O-I-Z-I-A.com slash writing forward. I'd love to hear from you. This episode of Writing Forward was recorded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Helen C. White Library with support from Dane Arts. It's produced, edited, and mixed by the incomparable Anya Van Wagten Dog. The theme music is by the Lolo Ombre. Logos and episode art are by Tim Burton. Thanks again for listening. Until next season, in the words of Quick Trip employees everywhere, we'll see you next time.