Poet, essay­ist, and nov­el­ist Sydney Lea has penned more than twenty books in his storied career.  Though he was accord­ed the honor of Vermont poet lau­re­ate (2011–2015), a rich Maine her­itage has always informed Lea’s work. Recent­ly, he con­nect­ed with Stonecoast faculty member Susan Conley, who studied poetry with Lea at Mid­dle­bury College and wrote her first book, a col­lec­tion of poems, under his men­tor­ship, to discuss those lit­er­ary influ­ences, his views on craft, and what makes for great sto­ry­telling. Conley is the author of five books includ­ing the novels Land­slide and Elsey Come Home and the memoir The Fore­most Good Fortune. 

A col­lec­tion of Lea’s essays, Such Dancing As I Can, was released by The Humble Essay­ist Press  last fall. His latest novel Now Look, was released in May by Down East Books.

Susan: It’s been so good to connect thirty-four years after we last talked poetry at Mid­dle­bury College, in the small rooms of that little clap­board cape that housed the New England Review. It’s left me feeling dizzy about how the time has passed. I knew that I had gotten older, but I didn’t realize I had frozen you in time! 

It’s thrilling to remem­ber how our shared passion for the Maine woods and its land and its people overlap. Since I’ve known you, I’ve thought of the Ver­mon­ter in you. I have that in me too—my Mom’s people were from Vermont. But you are also of Maine. Can we talk about those orig­i­nal folks in Maine who taught you “con­ver­sa­tion,” up in Wash­ing­ton County and who mes­mer­ized you as a kid? 

Sydney: Well, if they were alive today, none would be younger than 120. They lived in the tiny village of Grand Lake Stream, which is well known as a fly angler’s Mecca, and at one point was home to the world’s largest tannery. But once syn­thet­ics replaced the local hem­locks’ abun­dant supply of tannic acid, the indus­try dried up, and the men there con­tin­ued to work in the wood-product indus­try. The women split wood, tended to the pigs, cows, and chick­ens (and the men), corned venison, raised huge gardens, and canned their produce for winter. 

One of my favorite char­ac­ters was one George MacArthur, a former tie maker. When he felled the cedar trees, he had to limb each and peel off the bark. After cutting the limbs into four-foot lengths, he stood on top of each log and hewed two faces on it with a big tool called a sleeper axe. (Sleeper was a synonym for tie.) George was, by all accounts, the best tie maker in the area. He gave me his axe to remem­ber him by. But then, incred­i­bly, someone broke into our camp and stole one thing: George’s axe. Broke my heart.

Full of 60s’ rad­i­cal­ism, I once asked George, then in his late sev­en­ties, if it didn’t enrage him that the big bosses were making all sorts of money off sweat like his while he was being paid such a pit­tance. He sur­prised me: “Those were the best days of my life,” he claimed. “I took pride in how good I was at what I did. That’s when I made up all them poems and stories too.”

Susan: Anyone else come to mind? 

Sydney: Yes, Earl Bonness, who’s on the cover of my new novel, Now Look. A river driver, he was one of the brave crew who iced-out and moved mil­lions of board feet of timber down the Machias River to be picked up by schooners on the coast at Whit­neyville. It was a 39-day trip over cold water full of rapids. The trip was unspeak­ably dan­ger­ous; drivers reg­u­lar­ly drowned on it. But Earl craved it. 

Susan: What specif­i­cal­ly did their oral culture of sto­ry­telling imprint upon you as a writer of stories? 

Sydney: I started to write, largely, I’d say, by way of expo­sure to these old-timers. I am influ­enced by a diverse cast of lit­er­ary char­ac­ters from Emily Dick­in­son to Richard Hugo, but not so much as by these sto­ry­tellers. I knew I couldn’t use their dialect—I didn’t have the talent of a Willa Cather or Mark Twain—without sound­ing con­de­scend­ing, and that was a long way from how I felt. I imag­ined that if I told stories like theirs, ones I’d invent­ed, in poems, I might capture some of the cadences of their speech without having to imitate it. Whether I was proved right or wrong is not for me to judge. 

Thanks to these elders, I truly believe, even in poetry I con­tin­ued to feel an alle­giance to story. So my earlier work in that genre tended to be more per­sis­tent­ly and specif­i­cal­ly nar­ra­tive than it would become. Even now, though, I feel some alle­giance to con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive values: char­ac­ter, setting, dia­logue, even (implied) plot. 

Susan: And what, if any­thing, did these mentors teach you about cadence and deliv­ery. About not ruining a punch line and main­tain­ing patience, tension, and humor?

Sydney: Oh yes, patience. The great archi­tect Louis Kahn once said that to produce a good build­ing design, you need to find out what the build­ing “wants to be.” I think the same applies to writing. If you have a gen­er­a­tive “idea” for a poem, a story, a per­son­al essay, a novel, don’t just go charg­ing off to deliver it. If you do, you are not dra­ma­tiz­ing the unfold­ing of a process; you’re in a hurry to send some message whose meaning you already know. So there will be no dis­cov­ery on your part, no “Aha! So that was what was on my mind! I didn’t know it.” Your char­ac­ters will be stick figures, walking toward a fore­gone conclusion.

The old tale-tellers knew how to … well, the cliché “spin a yarn.” You have to let your story unravel at its own pace. It takes time for you to grasp what that pace is and what your own emo­tion­al or psy­cho­log­i­cal invest­ment in the nar­ra­tive may be. 

In both my novels, the out­sider char­ac­ter (my sur­ro­gate) feels a ret­ro­spec­tive love for the old timers and laments that they are gone forever. The first novel was set in the years of Vietnam,  a type of cul­tur­al and folk­loric con­ser­va­tor­ship, maybe.

Susan: You’ve been known to tell young poets and writers to “do some­thing else besides writing and do it with a passion.” Why is that?

Sydney: We live in an age of Creep­ing MFAism. Mind you, I’m a believ­er in the MFA. I taught in good faith at the low-res­i­den­cy one at Vermont College for just under fifteen years. I coached cre­ative writing courses else­where for more than forty. But if you have ever attend­ed an AWP con­ven­tion, say, you may, like me, be put off by how much talk you hear about “the pro­fes­sion,” how little about art. Kind of a guild men­tal­i­ty, I’m afraid.

Susan: What have you seen happen on the page when someone follows your advice?

Sydney: Having other pas­sions besides your writing is a safe­guard against hyper-pro­fes­sion­al­ism. If your only con­ver­sa­tions, social events, and work are limited to writing and other writers, you may end up assum­ing that you share con­cerns with a wider swath of others than actu­al­ly exists. Or perhaps inel­e­gant­ly said, preach­ing to the choir is not apt to broaden your perspectives.

If I look at my favorite prose writers, Alice Munro, say, or Claire Keegan or Peter Matthiessen or (for all his occa­sion­al misog­y­ny) Larry Brown, it’s crystal clear that they’ve been to places many don’t know about. That’s a good thing.

Susan: What does it mean to take some­thing like a deep passion for the out­doors and distill it on the page? How does that trans­late? Is it all about speci­fici­ty then? Lyricism?

Sydney: Oh, speci­fici­ty is crucial. Your own Land­slide, for example, is chock-full of par­tic­u­lars. To me, the world you devel­oped was entire­ly iden­ti­fi­able after a handful of pages, even though in most respects that world is quite dif­fer­ent from the one of my own experience. 

            As for “lyri­cism,” I can’t opine on that beyond saying that if you love lan­guage, and you’d better, you must abandon your­self to your mate­r­i­al, your words. If you are careful with your words and if you love them, they will lead you in a good direc­tion, lyrical or not.

Susan: When you start in on an essay or a poem, what calls you first to the page? Image? Voice? Place? Emo­tion­al curiosity? 

Sydney: What calls me? The desire to write. It’s just what I do. In fact, as a retiree with kids well grown and gone, the impulse is stronger than ever. Often, I start writing about some frag­ment of con­ver­sa­tion I’ve heard, recent­ly or as far back as child­hood, and I see where that takes me. For what­ev­er reason, I have a very acute memory for what I hear, far sharper than for what I’ve seen or read. 

Writing allows me to make con­nec­tions among things that wouldn’t at first blush appear con­nect­ed. I have learned to have faith that what­ev­er I may be writing about this image, char­ac­ter, expe­ri­ence, setting, will bear a rela­tion to that other one merely because I’m the one whose atten­tion was arrest­ed by each. Self-aban­don­ment to lan­guage will uncover these connections.

Susan: Here in your eighth (!!!) decade (how that hap­pened is some­thing I am really explor­ing now), I have amnesia about a lot of college, but I remem­ber the work­shop you taught in the little New England Review house. We sat in a circle. It was at night, as I recall. “Have subject matter!” seemed to be your imper­a­tive. Could you talk about how you choose from the mate­r­i­al now? Does the buffet open at a certain time of day and you go looking at all the dishes?

Sydney: I do remem­ber those work­shops very fondly. It seems that format or genre choose me, not the other way around. My first novel, for instance, began as what I thought would be a brief non­fic­tion recall of George MacArthur. Then the lan­guage just took off on me! What­ev­er was lurking in my sub­con­scious wanted to be a novel, if I might use that Kahn dictum again.

Sim­i­lar­ly, my latest col­lec­tion of essays began, like most of the pre­ced­ing six, when I “trans­lat­ed” a few unsuc­cess­ful poems. I thought that maybe the sup­ple­ness of prose would help the utter­ance, yes, to become what it wanted to be. And the rather free-asso­cia­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties of those essays, some no more than two pages long, just seduced me into writing nothing but essays for quite a spell until I had a book. My writing routine is about the same as it was when you and I saw each other reg­u­lar­ly. After I’ve rambled an hour or so in the woods or, in warm weather, paddled the same length of time, I devote as much of the morning as I can to being “cre­ative.” I have about four hours of writing in me at a stretch, after which I begin to spin my wheels. If I have free after­noons, I can and do revise, but I do not create.

Susan: Does it feel any dif­fer­ent now—how you approach that buffet table and what you most want to say?

Sydney: Well, the instinct now to look back and con­sid­er the highs and lows of what has become a long life is irre­sistible. The ever-quick­en­ing passage of time and its threat to the fragile cen­tral­i­ty of love, espe­cial­ly for my wife and five chil­dren and seven—about to be eight— grand­chil­dren. All of that pre­oc­cu­pies me more now. It also hammers home the fact that each remain­ing day is pre­cious. As a friend of mine once put it: “Live every day as if it’s your last… because someday you’ll be right.”

Susan: It was so good to connect. What amazing work you have done.

Sydney: It was down­right tonic to speak with you.

This tele­phone and email con­ver­sa­tion has been edited for publication.