An Interview with Barbara Henning
In this ongoing blog series, we interview members of the Belladonna* Collaborative, delving into their ongoing practices as writers and artists. We hope to illuminate some of the contexts and affiliations that support a writer's work.
Poet and Belladonna* author Barbara Henning in her workspace
Zoe Tuck (for Belladonna*): I'm starting with Belladonna* stuff: what was the process of writing Looking Up Harryette Mullen like?
Barbara Henning: That project started because I was teaching Harryette’s book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, for an MFA LIU class, “Traditions and Lineages.” Harryette and I were friends and I thought the students would find it interesting if I were to ask her questions about how she wrote the poems. We did not intend on publishing anything. I was taping our conversations so I could type them up for the students, and without planning, it evolved into a wonderful dialogue between the two of us, several sections of it later published in magazines and zines. And then I thought this could be an interesting book, so I wrote Rachel about the idea.
I remember meeting Rachel at 1st Ave and 1st Street outside a café. She had come on her bike from Brooklyn and at that time, I was living in the East Village. Rachel was excited about the idea and suggested that we include photos and other supplementary material. After that, I flew to Los Angeles to take photographs of Harryette and various locations that were connected to her poems. Martine Bellen was on the Belladonna Board and she volunteered to edit the book. It was an inspiring experience working with Martine, Harryette, and Rachel.
After Looking Up was published, I joined the board of Belladonna and I have very fond memories of all the readings, meetings, and retreats. After we finished Harryette’s book, I became involved with Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Belladonna re-published one of her early poetry books (Fifteen Poems) with an interview by me. Belladonna also helped me get Bobbie’s Selected Prose (BlazeVox) into the world by ordering copies and sending them out to reviewers.
ZT: What are you working on now?
BH: Right now, I’m working on getting my last book, Ferne: a Detroit Story, into bookstores and libraries. I’ve had several readings from the book and I’m heading to Detroit for a few readings in the beginning of October. Ferne is a hybrid biography of my mother’s life, as well as a story of the history of Detroit. The public and the private are woven together. A collage of a story, history, clippings, and photos. Ferne died when I was eleven; therefore, a lot of the narrative is imagined.
I’m also working with Maureen Owen, editing the blog from our poetry road trip in 2019. David Wilk is publishing it on City Point Press.
Currently, I’m writing short portraits of my girlfriends, starting in childhood. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about my male partners in life when in fact, the women in my life have been the most important. This is a project I started long ago and I decided recently to go back to it.
ZT: What non-literary activities feed back into your writing?
BH: What I read, what I watch, what I live, what I imagine, the political, the private, and in between—all part of my writing. I raised two children, put myself through school, worked in many different jobs besides teaching. I have been a yoga practitioner for years; after my first two visits to India, I wrote a novel, You, Me and the Insects. Yoga theory and practice is a central part of my life and so it shows up in my writing. I remember when I first started practicing yoga and reading theory, I realized that yoga was a way to live the post-modern theories I had been reading. If we lose everything, if everything can be deconstructed, if language has a slippery connection to material existence, if we are perhaps only language, the question is how to live without too much suffering. I found practicing yoga to be extremely helpful and of course, I write about this.
ZT: What's your relationship to the word feminist? The word experimental?
BH: My relationship with feminism started when I was an undergraduate in college (early 1970s), taking literature and Women’s Studies classes at Wayne State University. I remember reading early studies about how gender identity was not absolute. Androgyny was something I aspired to. While we were not as vocally active about gay rights then as we are now, this was an important step. We wanted equal rights and freedom. I remember marching in anti-rape Take Back the Night marches and men were spitting at us as we marched. It was shocking but the solidarity was important. For several years, until I moved to NYC in 1984, I lived in the Cass Corridor in Detroit with a community of artists, writers, and political activists. Feminism was one of the core ideas. Also, Detroit was a factory town. The men and women in this community were probably mostly from the working class, but we were also artists, and most of us sensitive to women’s rights and advocating for communalism versus capitalism.
Later we/I started thinking more particularly about language and how the way we use language in our poems reflects our ethics, our politics. At one point, I became very interested in French feminism. Part of my interest in experimentation came from a desire to unravel the fabric, rip it open and examine what I was saying, and then to see and say the world differently.
ZT: How do your writing and your teaching influence each other
I’ve taught for 42 years. At Long Island University, I was very lucky to be able to follow my own inquiry and then to design literature and writing classes, graduate and undergraduate. How lucky I was to spend so many years reading deeply and studying writing by poets and fiction writers, from the Americas and worldwide. And then to present my learning and questions to students so they could add their thinking to the dialogue. Dialogue is central to my ideas about language, writing and teaching.
ZT: What books / writers are you most excited about right now?
BH: Right now, I’m 73 years old and cooling down. My eyes don’t let me read as much. Nonetheless, recently I decided to reread Moby Dick. Every night, I read a few chapters. Before that I read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. On the top of a stack by my bedside where intermittently I dip in: Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser and Cole Swenson’s And And And.
ZT: What's your relationship to life writing? (I'm thinking of projects like Make Your Mama Proud, but also My Autobiography.)
BH: I think of everything I write as autobiography. Sometimes it is extremely experimental (when I’m in my experimental mind, i.e. My Autobiography or “The Dinner”). In My Autobiography I dipped into my books and pulled out phrases using a specific method; I then wrote 72 sonnets. I called it My Autobiography because it is in a way a story of my relationship to my books or at least a record of the time I spent pulling the phrases out of the books; in that way it is also a narrative. In the story “The Dinner”, I used the phrases to invent a short novella.
Other times I retell/reinvent my life story, (i.e. Make Your Mama Proud). Every thought, every action, every observation, every emotion (etc): all available for writing, all part of my autobiography. It is possible that all this writing has been an effort to hold on to what has already been lost or maybe I gain some understanding or perhaps I’m just imagining.
I remember at one point thinking I had to conform to some ideas about writing that some of my peers had: anti-narrative, anti-lyrical. But what I discovered is I like narrative, I like lyricism and I also like to experiment. Hurray, we have to go where our mind/imagination/spirit pulls us. That’s the advice I have for young writers.
ZT: What books / writers are you perennially interested in?
BH: I recently made a list of some of the women writers who had been important to me during my life, perhaps thinking about the characters and or authors as girlfriends. Perhaps I will write portraits of them for the project I’m working on: from books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Anne Frank, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Diana diPrima, Marguerite Duras, Simon de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys, Grace Paley, Elena Ferrante, etc.
ZT: Tell me about your relationship to place.
BH: I think we are never alone. We are part of the environment that we inhabit, part of the others who inhabit it with us. The big old oak tree outside my window does yoga with me in the morning. I am affected by my environment, close and far, so with everything I write, I try to be conscious of what surrounds me and the others I am writing about or around. With my recent book about my mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, I could only imagine her story if I also considered the environment around her; that was the city of Detroit 1920-1960, as well the country and the world. World War II in Detroit. An automobile factory town becomes a producer of military machinery. People started pouring into the city for work. And Ferne was alive in that moment. We know very well now that what we do affects others far away and what they do affects us. Place is very important in my writing. Detroit, Michigan, Brooklyn, the East Village, Tucson, New Mexico, India—I’ve lived in these places. Many of my poems I’ve intentionally brought into a local story, something at the same time in another place, but also in our minds, in the news, for example, the Iraq war, Trump’s evil actions, etc. See my last two poetry books: A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015) and Digigram (United Artists Books 2020).
Barbara Henning is the author of five novels, seven collections of poetry, four chapbooks and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Lewis Warsh published her first book of poems with United Artists, Smoking in the Twilight Bar (1988). Subsequent poetry collections include: Digigram (United Artists Books, 2020), A Day Like Today (Negative Capability 2015), A Swift Passage (Quale Press), Cities and Memory (Chax Press), My Autobiography (United Artists), Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil), Love Makes Thinking Dark (United Artists). She is also the author of five novels, most recently, a novelized biography of Ferne Hostetter (Barbara’s mother), Ferne, A Detroit Story (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Thirty Miles to Rosebud, You Me and the Insects, and Black Lace. Between 2003 and 2014, she published limited editions of a series of artist pamphlets (16), combining photography and poetry. Henning is the editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna, 2011), and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (Blazevox, 2012). She was also a board member for Belladonna Series (2012-2016), and the editor of the poetry/art journal, Long News: In the Short Century (1990-1995). As a long-time yoga practitioner, having lived and studied in Mysore, India with Shankaranarayana Jois, she brings this knowledge and discipline to her writing and her teaching at Naropa University (2006-14), University of Arizona (2006-2009), writers.com and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emeritus.
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light) and the chapbooks "Vape Cloud of Unknowing" (Belladonna*) and the "The Book of Bella" (DoubleCross Press), the latter of which is bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel's "Peach Woman". In addition to teaching creative writing and literature classes, Zoe is the co-host of The But Also reading series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn and the co-editor of Hot Pink Magazine with Emily Brown. Since 2019, she has been a proud member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, where she has hosted readings, publicized books, and composed the newsletter.
