Nin Andrews discusses her Memoir, Son of a Bird with Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Sally:
I absolutely adored your prose poem memoir, Son of a Bird, Nin. Thank you for taking the time to discuss it with me!
Before we delve into SOAB, I think our readers would be interested in learning
a bit about the history of your relationship with poetry.
Was there a first poem you read that evoked a longing to become a poet?
Nin:
Most of the poems in my book, The Last Orgasm, were written in honor of other poets, poets who have been major influences in my life. So many poems evoke that sense of longing!
The first poem I fell in love with was a Yannis Ritsos poem called “The Third One.” I was in 9th grade, working at The New Dominion, a bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia, and there was a Yannis Ritsos collection, Gestures, on the sale table. When I picked it up, the owner of the shop said I could have it, adding that poetry doesn’t sell, especially poetry in translation. I took it home and was so entranced with the book, I read several poems aloud to my parents. “Stop!” my mother said. “We don’t know what he’s talking about.” “It sounds like nonsense,” my father added. I was thrilled. I felt as if I had found a secret space my parents couldn’t enter.
For many years, I thought only I knew Yannis Ritsos, that he was an unknown poet, sort of like a castoff like a Salvation Army dress that no one wanted.
The Third One
The three of them sat before the window looking at the sea.
One talked about the sea. The second listened. The third
neither spoke nor listened; he was deep in the sea; he floated.
Behind the windowpanes, his movements were slow, clear
in the thin pale blue. He was exploring a sunken ship.
He rang the dead bell for the watch; fine bubbles
rose bursting with a soft sound – suddenly,
“Did he drown?” asked one; the other said: “He drowned.” The third one
looked at them helpless from the bottom of the sea, the way one looks
at drowned people.
Sally:
If you had to name a few poets who were formative influences, who might they be?
Nin:
I’ve had a lot of influences, but my first were Yannis Ritsos, Henri Michaux, David Lehman, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Gabriel García Márquez and Haruki Murakami. I know Welty, Márquez, and Murakami are not poets, but they were among my early gods.
Sally:
Can you say what it is about Marquez and Murakami in terms of their writerly craft that makes them poets for you?
Nin:
I love how, in Marquez’s and Murakami’s work, the dream world merges with reality, as it does in my experience.
Sally:
Which poets are you reading these days?
Nin:
I read all over the map because I’m always looking for someone to take me out of my humdrum mind. My latest love is Ocean Vuong. He enters the soul of our culture and shines a light in spaces no one else goes. He is at once tender, humorous, and painfully beautiful.
Sally:
What about the title Son of a Bird? I am gathering that it has to do with Mary, the nanny who cared for you until she died when you were five. “She called you Little Pea when you behaved, Son of a Bird, when you were naughty.” She seemed to celebrate the mischievous side of you and offer an oasis of stability and love.
Nin:
Mary swore a lot, and she always made up nicknames for people. Son of a Bird was a combination of a swearword and a term of endearment, and it fit me well. I was both scrappy and dreamy, my feet in the sawdust, my days spent in the grit and dirt of farm life, and my head in the clouds. Mary both loved me and saw me, all the way to my bones.
I will add that I think any name Mary called me I’d have loved because of how she said it, her voice, liquid magic, her words, when she spoke to me, warm and glowy, like melted butter. I could rest inside her words.
Sally:
And is there more behind the title? I think you told me once that you see us all as fallen birds, so the title fits in this way as well?
Nin:
Yes, I think we are all fallen in some sense, but I don’t think most people think about that as much as I do. Rather, I’m pretty sure most don’t think like that at all. I think the name fits me, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all name.
Sally:
I was struck by the how the image of the bird travels throughout your memoir. At least twenty iterations of various avians. Can you say something about this, Nin?
Nin:
I love Gabriel García Márquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” in which a fallen angel is kept in a coop and looks like an aging chicken. I think people are like that, they are fallen angels in coops who remember having wings and are always trying to fly back to wherever they came from. Some do this by art or dance or poetry. Others by athletic achievements. Others by faith. Others by drugs. Others by blind ambition. Always the goal is to become that winged creature they once were.
Different kinds of birds remind me of different kinds of people. There are the predator birds, the songbirds, the death birds, the caged birds, the domestic birds. Like angels, like poetry and imagination, birds fly in the space between heaven and earth, dream and reality, now and then. In different faiths and mythologies, birds function as messengers or as important symbols of life or death. It’s no surprise then that birds frequently appear in literature.
Also, as a girl, I raised many birds including chickens, starlings, seagulls, parakeets, and one English sparrow—until the Rottweiler ate it.
Also, I suffered from frequent nightmares or visions of one particular bird that was bigger than life, that haunted me for most of my childhood, that I associated with death.
Sally:
Yes, the bird of death. Maybe we can land on that later for a bit.
One more question about the title though; is there something in it as well about being free from gender with “son”?
Nin:
Yes. I was supposed to be a boy. My name was George before I was born. Even the doctors were sure I was going to be a boy because of the way my mother carried me, because she was extra-large, maybe because my parents wanted another boy so badly. What a disappointment I was!
As a child, I tried to be a boy. My father used to say that if I kissed my elbow, I would turn into a boy. I’d bend my arm as far as I could. I could almost kiss my elbow. I could almost act like their second son. The more boyish I became, the more my parents approved of me. But I always felt as if I were son of a bird, not of them. That I didn’t belong. I came from some other family or world, not this one where I landed. I wanted to go back home.
But I will add, I liked being a girl, even if I hid that fact from my parents.
Sally:
That is so interesting, Nin, your spin on your genealogical origins and how they are held by the title as well.
I am curious about the epigraph by Albert Camus:
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me,
An invincible summer.”
Nin:
The invincible summer in the midst of winter—I found it in the midst of a profound depression, and it was an inexplicable gift.
Or rather, I try to describe it in the final chapter of the book. How, one morning, I was suddenly filled with happiness. What happened? you might ask. I don’t know. I remembering lying back on my back, looking up at the sky and thinking, How could I be so lucky?
Sally:
As a reader, I did not know that the epigraph pertained to that lifting of your depression on that morning at your sister Sal’s. I thought it was a more general statement about your invincible spirit. Thanks for clarifying, Nin.
I do remember that morning that you mention. On that same day you received a letter from a high school boyfriend who describes you as being like the St. Francis Satyr butterfly who, he says, is a survivor, like you, come back from near extinction. You said that you kept a photograph of that butterfly in one of your books for years.
Section two of SOAB is “The Book in my Chest.” This book is an internal book that you envision as holding your entire life. You say, “If I go back too far, the pages disintegrate. Or turn into winged insects— termites, bees, moths. What is the price of letting them disappear?” Does the disappearance of memories or pages call to your near disappearance into depression at the end of the book that is symbolized by the St. Francis Satyr?
Nin:
When I came out of that intense time of depression, I saw the summer everywhere: in the past, the present, the future. I saw that it was there in my spirit as a child. I had just lost sight of it. Your reading was not wrong. It was just more explicitly referred to on page 130.
I do think everyone has a book in their chest, a collection of stories about their life. The pages disappear for different reasons including depression. But it’s hard to decipher many of the pages, even if one does not suffer from a nervous breakdown. The pages you can’t quite see often hide secrets. What happens if you let those secrets go? I’m not sure, but I think you lose a part of yourself.
So yes, I was referring to depression but not only depression. There are other ways, other reasons we lose aspects of ourselves or chapters of our lives. There are, I suspect, memories/stories/reflections we delete in order to stay alive.
Your question is right on target. My memory of that time is very damaged. But like the butterfly, it survived. As did I.
Sally:
I was struck by the power of humor in Son of a Bird. In an earlier interview you said. “There’s so much versatility in the prose poem format. And great opportunities for humor.”
How do you see the prose poem as offering greater openings for humor than other poetic forms?
Nin:
I don’t know if the prose poem has to be funny, as Edson suggested. Or that it’s funnier than verse poetry. There are plenty of witty verse poets, of course. But to me, there is something inherently fun and funny about the prose poem’s boxy form. It appears as the plain Jane at the poetry party but often surprises the reader with its unexpected charms. Humor is just one of its possible charms.
In my opinion, the prose poem has to work a little harder than the verse poem to prove its worth.
In other words, when I look at verse poems, I see a ballet happening on the page. When I see a prose poem, I ask myself, how is this box going to dance? The very question makes me laugh. I hope that makes sense.
But I do think poetry reaches for an epiphany of one kind or another, and humor is one way of achieving an epiphany. It’s one way to transcend, even if it’s just a little blip of transcendence. Sort of like the drop shot in tennis.
Many of the funny poems in Son of a Bird are about my mother. My mother didn’t realize how funny she was. She was on the spectrum, which, in her case, meant she was simply logical. I learned from her that social norms are not logical. Here is one such poem:
I was in sixth grade when I curled Stephanie Comb’s hair around my colored pencils in English class. My teacher, Mrs. Ward, tapped me on the shoulder with her orange fingernails. “Come with me,” she hissed and pulled me into the hallway. “You have to stop touching that girl’s hair. I’m beginning to worry you’re a lesbian.” She sent a note home that day— carefully tucked in an envelope with the inscription: A private matter for Mrs. (not Mr.) Heyward to discuss with Nin.
“Heavens,” my mother said. “All little girls are lesbians.” She tossed the note in the garbage. “Were you a lesbian?” I asked. “I was—a little lesbian,” she said. “I had crushes on girls. But I wasn’t really lesbian.” “How do you know?” I asked. She shrugged, “It’s just like the heifers. They start humping each other in the springtime.”
“Cows are lesbians?” I asked. “It’s genetic,” she shrugged. “Some of us get more of the lesbian, and some, less. Time will tell how much of the lesbian you possess.” “How will it tell?”
My mother sighed, her silver-blue glasses sliding down her nose. “If you are in your twenties and you still want to play with Stephanie’s hair . . . Well, then, you’re a lesbian.”
“Not a hairdresser?”
My mother stared at me blankly. “I do hope you’re not a hairdresser.”
Sally:
Yes, this poem is laugh-out-loud funny and I would like us to return to it a bit later when we discuss your mom and her view of animals and children.
Let’s move on to another poem. Could you read the one that begins, “Stuck in the early pages…”?
Nin:
Stuck in the early pages of the book is an old photograph.
The farm where I grew up is in the background, my bald
father with browline glasses and a tweed trilby hat and my
mother with her hair permed tight as a poodle’s are in the middle
ground. In the foreground are my four sisters and Miss Mary, the
nanny. Miss Mary is holding me, a screaming, cross-eyed towheaded
baby, in her large black arms. If you look closely, you can see a halo
above her head. Or is it just a fingerprint from all the times I touched
her face? My brother is absent. I no longer know him. He took
himself out of the picture long ago. “Why?” you might ask. I don’t
have to tell you.
Sally:
I love this poem and wanted you to read it for a few reasons. First, I love the metaphoric and literal truth of the “halo.” Mary is good and deserving of a halo whether it come from the repetitive touch of a child’s finger on a photo or from a more spiritual elsewhere.
I also wanted to draw attention to the poem’s exquisite sounds, especially around the description of the father.
I was wondering why you end the poem as you do, saying to the reader
about the brother, “I don’t have to tell you”? Why the withholding and why address the reader, the “you”?
Nin:
I wanted to point out early in the book that I would not be telling the reader everything. Even if I wanted to do so, I couldn’t. I had to choose what to tell, what not to tell. In some ways, as an author, you are forced to play God. And like God, you don’t have to explain yourself.
Sally:
Do the concepts of withholding and of addressing the reader directly factor in as craft elements for you in general, not just in this specific case?
Nin:
I don’t usually like to address the reader, and I only did it in this case because my brother is estranged from the family. It’s not a story I wanted to write. But absence is a statement, and absence creates a kind of tension. The fact that he would want to erase himself is important. I, too, wanted to erase myself.
Sally:
The brother comes back near the end of the book, after the speaker’s breakdown. She smokes his dope. Is this important to the narrative structure in some way?
Nin:
I don’t think you can ever disappear from the past, no matter how hard you try. I felt as if my brother needed to make a cameo, to offer a hint of why he might have removed himself from the story.
Sally:
Was there something that spurred you to write a memoir at this particular point in your life?
Nin:
As I wrote in the beginning of the book, I’ve had this book in my chest for years and years. I have been writing little pieces of memoir from time to time, but it was so hard to see it, to shape it. In part because there are too many stories. In part because my father didn’t want me to write about the past, and his ghost kept preventing me from writing it. In part because much of my childhood borders on the surreal. But then, in 2020, my son became ill, and he almost died a few times. I spent so much time in hospitals with him, I began to relive my childhood medical experiences. I could feel the specter of death hovering in the room. I sensed the bird again. Sitting by his bed, I wrote the early chapters of the book.
Sally:
Oh yes, the bird of death you saw as a child. On that note, could you read the poem that begins, “I flip back..”
Nin:
I flip back to the earliest pages I can read and find my mother in a
twilight sleep, a doctor stationed between her legs. It’s the day her
last daughter is born, the umbilical cord wrapped so tightly around
her infant’s neck, the skin turns blue, then purple, then the color
of dusk. Blood leaks into the baby’s eyes as life slips from her every
pore and rises as mist. I am going home, her soul thinks as it detaches
from the flesh and looks back (this is why, in myths and dreams, one
should never look back) just as the doctor tugs the child free from
the womb with metal tongs. He holds her upside down and whacks
her, once, twice, three times before she screams as air tears into her
lungs. A nurse swaddles her in a pink blanket and places her n a
bassinet. “Pink again?” my mother says when she opens her eyes.
Then she closes them again. That’s when Death stops in, looks down
at me from above. You? He asks, cocking his head. Here?
Sally:
I wanted to include this poem for a number of reasons. First as another illustration of the gift you have of bringing together the literal and metaphoric truth as you did in the family photo poem with the halo.
The baby presumably turns pink when the doctor slaps her. She had been near death’s door. And then the conflation of the pink blanket of the unwanted girl with the reader’s knowledge of the near death combusts into darkest humor when the mother says, “Pink Again”?
In the above poem, you imagine both being present at your own birth and that Death is speaking to you. I don’t know how you make it work so effectively for the reader, Nin, but I was wondering if you think it has anything to do with you having had true visions of Death as a giant black bird as a child? That Death as an entity has been organic to your emotional landscape.
Nin:
Thank you so much for your kind words! I don’t know why things work or don’t work in my poems. Writing is always a wrestling match. I feel like Jacob—I have to fight with the angel every single day that I write, and I never win. I feel physically exhausted and beat up afterwards. Writing is more tiring than running or swimming or any other athletic endeavor. But, on a good day, I get a few decent lines written.
As to that poem, I am simply telling how I saw it, even if could not have seen it. I was told many times about my difficult birth, blamed for being so huge and female. The fact that I was a big and a girl was like the punchline in a joke my parents told. “And after all that drama, a giantess emerged from Jane!” my father joked when told of my birth. As a child, I was terrified of growing up and turning into an immense lady. Being large and female was not an option in our family.
I also thought some mistake had been made. Death, who attended my birth, knew that, too.
Sally:
Hence, your idea that you could be the offspring of a bird?
Nin:
Yes, the bird was like a father. He spent a lot more time with me than my parents did.
Sally:
SOAB is divided into seven sections like the seven days of creation. I am guessing that was coincidental and not purposeful?
Nin:
I studied religion and philosophy in college, and when I was writing this book, I took an online class with Jessica Jacobs. What a generous teacher and person! And what a poet! She was so thoughtful about every aspect of constructing her beautiful book, Unalone. Thanks to her influence, I thought of creating a book in seven parts like the seven days. It was a passing thought. After all, I am no Jessica Jacobs. I soon forgot about that idea. I can’t believe you pointed it out. What a sharp reader you are!
Sally:
Thanks so much! When I really admire a work, I try to read it as closely as I can, Nin.
Back to Miss Mary. I know you mention her as being very connected to you in all ways and with your writing practice.: “Even now, when I sit down to write in the morning, I ask Miss Mary how she is. Miss Mary says what she always said, ‘I’m blessed, Child. I bless you too.’ It’s a little ritual we do.”
Do you have an imagined reader and if so, can you describe that person?
Nin:.
I like to think I am writing to a dear friend, someone who listens closely to each and every word and thought, holding them up to the light.
Sally:
I would like to return to your mother and her relationship with animals. You said that your mother “bragged that we were farm children, raised by animals, the wind, the stars, the rain.” It seems to me as a reader that though she was not a mother who could hug and comfort you, she sometimes had a way of normalizing your behavior and feelings by talking about the similarities between your behavior and a particular animal’s behavior as she did in the poem you read earlier in this interview in which she discussed the whole nascent lesbian/ heifer thing. Was this some source of comfort to you, Nin? It was hard to tell as a reader.
Nin:
The words, comforting and my mother are antonyms. My mother was cerebral, hyperactive, and cold. A classics scholar, a naturalist, a dairy farmer, an activist, a gardener, and an avid hiker, she was a fountain of information. Whether she was identifying bird calls or species of pine trees or rock formations, whether she was talking about the heifers or Greek mythology or the literary canon, she offered rare insights into the world. And she had a beautiful, New England voice—she sounded like Katherine Hepburn. I loved listening to her talk or read aloud.
But she was emotionally disconnected from people. And she could not tolerate weakness. “Stop crying or I will leave the room!” she would say if any of her children were crying.
Sally:
I see, Nin. Maybe a bit of an overly optimistic reading on my part. I see the emotionally nurturing side was completely absent. How sad.
The loving listening to the sound of her voice, the sonics of her voice. Do you think this has anything to do with your love of poetry, which is so much about sound, or is that way off on my part?
Nin:
I don’t think of it as any sadder than having a mother with a missing limb. But it took me a while to understand her limitations were not a choice. And it took her a long time to understand that I was never going to be a classics scholar or dairy farmer or a naturalist like her.
And yes, she fed my love of poetry. Absolutely. And partly by her voice alone. And also, by forcing me to think about the sounds of words. She took elocution lessons in college, and she was forever correcting my Southern accent. “You’re murdering words!” she would tell me. “Open your mouth wide! Say ahhh, not ay. Hair does not rhyme with Bayer.” Thanks to her, I listen closely to how people shape words with their mouths, and how, just by a change in tempo or an added lilt or drawl, they can alter their meaning and impact.
Sally:
And the gull she taught to fledge using pretty brutal means, Hard as it must have been to witness, she showed you a kind of survival truth that exists in the natural world. Was this useful to you in some way?
Nin:
I don’t know. Animals are cruel at times, just like people. But it’s always upsetting to witness.
I do think farm children become inured to the violence that is part of life. They get a clear picture of our animal nature. They know they aren’t growing up in a Disney movie.
Sally:
What did your relationship with animals give you as a child? Are animals still important in your life?
Nin:
The animals were my therapy. They kept me grounded, whether it was the calves who galloped along the fence and bucked and mooed when they saw me walking down the dirt road. Or the barn cats that curled up in my arms when I sat in the grass. Or the dogs who slept beneath my bed—their devotion, unquestioning and ever-present.
When I went back to college after my suicidal episode at Bryn Mawr, I rode horses several days a week at a stable not far from campus in order to remain centered. I spent hours, walking, trotting, cantering, jumping—hours thinking of nothing. Just trying to synchronize with the horse.
Sally:
The story of Melvin was particularly moving. I was amazed reading how you would come home from school and play toreador with him. You were nine or so when your beloved bull Melvin was butchered. Your father said he was sent to another farm where there were other bulls for him to play with. The butchering was hidden from you as you ate his steak nightly for dinner. You sensed the truth and stated with dark humor while “kissing your steak”, addressing the dead Melvin, “Don’t you look lovely tonight?”
I guess I am just wowed by how you navigated this particular deep love and loss
and how you think you developed the wise dark humor which is pretty unusual for a child so young? Were you aware of its developing? Did you consciously cultivate it?
On that note, would you read your wonderful poem about Melvin?
I came home from a school camping trip, and Melvin was gone.
My father said Melvin had been sent to another farm where there
were other bulls and cows his own size for him to play with.
My mother said, “Your father tells lies.”
We ate steak night after night. My mother chewed happily, wiping
the grease on her napkin. “They say that love makes the meat rich
and sweet,” she said. “It’s true! Isn’t that so?”
“Hello, Melvin,” I whispered before kissing my steak. My father
pushed his plate away and turned white. “Don’t talk to your food!”
he shouted. I stabbed another forkful of pink meat, held it up to
the light. “Don’t you look lovely tonight?” I asked. Then I took
another bite.
Nin:
A therapist told me once that youngest children are the clowns of the family. I doubt that is always the case, but it was true for me. I was forever in trouble for making wise cracks, drawing cartoons, bending the rules in school and at home.
As to the Melvin story, I talked to and kissed my steak as a way of taking revenge on my father. And it made my siblings and mother laugh. My father couldn’t eat his dinner when he saw that it was Melvin on his plate. But it was my father who had decided to slaughter Melvin, my father who insisted we get over any inhibitions about eating our livestock.
Sally:
Fascinating backstory. So the humor does seem like a kind of power.
Nin:
Black humor is part of my family legacy.
Sally:
One last question. Your father was an architect. I would like to ask about your father’s design of the house, which is open and allows for all to view each other. This seems an interesting contrast to your father’s rather secretive nature. Your thoughts on this, Nin?
Nin:
The design of the house was not exactly open, certainly not by today’s architectural standards. Our windows were directly across from each other, but there was some distance between them. Below the windows was a courtyard where my parents entertained on summer nights.
In other words, we could not see each other that clearly, but we loved spying on each other, yelling from our windows into the night.
Thanks to my father, the house did have all kinds of secret passageways and closets inside of closets inside of closets. If you played Hide and Seek, you risked never being found. I was pretty sure there was a Narnia in it somewhere.
Maybe because there were so many hiding places, I spent hours and hours snooping, trying to find where Santa hid his stash. I never did find Santa’s sack. But I did find my mother’s wedding dress, half-eaten by moths, pieces of it fluttering around me when I lifted it in the air. And I found my father’s secret love letters.
Our house began as a stone square. My father, an architect, added two wings onto it to accommodate the ever-expanding family. By the time I, the last child of six, arrived, it was shaped like a U. Children’s bedrooms were on two sides of the U so we could look out our windows and see each other getting dressed. “I see you naked,” one sister would call out through an open window. Another yelled back, “I see you in your polka-dotted underpants!” From 7:00 to 8:50, I watched my sisters doing their homework, framed in the yellow light. At 9:00 sharp, the house went dark, the day ending with a flick of the switch—like a movie without credits. I lay back in bed and listened as the night sounds began: horses kicked their stall doors; tree frogs clung to the window screens and sang to one another; owls screeched and swooped over the fields, and the rooster crowed and crowed—my father always said that was because he was an Andalusian rooster and came from the wrong time zone.
Sally:
There was so much secrecy in your house of origin, so much that went unsaid. Do you think this had anything to do with your desire to write poetry, to say the unsayable, to delve into what is particularly difficult to articulate?
Nin:
That’s an interesting question. I’ve always been driven to say what has been left unsaid. To discover what is hidden. To address what is not understood or allowed in our houses or minds. Poetry lends itself to that task.
And for many years, I’ve tried to solve certain personal questions or mysteries such as why, as a child, I was haunted by recurring visions or fever dreams or . . . I’m still not sure what they were. My mother always insisted I not talk about them. That they weren’t real. But it made me wonder, why not? And why, then, was I experiencing them? Where is the line between reality and unreality? And who draws it? How do we decide what’s real?
Poetry can linger in the spaces that are just out of reach of words.
Nin Andrews’ poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry. The author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, she has won two Ohio individual artist grants, the Pearl Chapbook Contest, the Kent State University chapbook contest, the Gerald Cable Poetry Award, and the Ohioana 2016 Award for poetry. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian poet, Henri Michaux, called Someone Wants to Steal My Name. Her book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020. Her memoir, Son of a Bird, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in 2025.
