This interview was conducted by Ellen Scherer and has been edited for clarity.
Who is Leslie Cairns?
I’m really into arts, writing, English, reading, and things like that, [but] I’m an English person at heart. I have a Master’s in English and moved to Denver over 5 years ago. I currently teach at Denver Public Schools.
Let’s talk about your chapbook, “The Lights Go Down on Amber Way.” How did you get started on that? What’s writing a chapbook like?
This is a slightly weird situation but I wrote a poem in a teacher’s class that I published on social media and a lot of people in my personal life thought it was terrible [in that] it really offended them… My personal life kind of blew up and it was hard. But I felt vulnerable enough to post it online over the holidays. I think that poem stuck out in [my teacher’s] mind for a poetry fellowship at Denver Lighthouse where they pay for you to work on a chapbook all year long. I’ve been working on about 60 pages of short prose and poems.
What’s the theme?
The theme is what it means to be a daughter [and] all the different places I lived in my 20s. [I researched] in the early stages [of writing] and I forgot that daughter in chemistry is a breakdown of a chemical—a “daughter chemical.” I thought the meaning of “daughter” was really cool; “something considered daughter” is one of the definitions and “the breakdown of a decay” is another and I [thought] those definitions fit my experience pretty well. I had five different mother figures [in addition to] my own mother.
You’re really good at titling your pieces.
I feel that I’m really neurotic with titles. I get a lot of ideas when I’m moving, like when I’m on a walk, which one of my favorite authors always said that works for her. So I think that’s my thing. Amber Way is where I lived, also where a lot of abuse happened. So it feels kind of cool to have the title be a place [that] wasn’t great and then put it into poetry and make it a cool place again. The Trees Have Scars Too, I know I wanted it to have trees and the rings that they have, but I say 10 different versions in my head and pick the one that sounds better. Sometimes I’d send [a play] to Green Buffalo Productions and they’d [give] alternate titles.
What would you say to somebody who wants to write about abuse or pain? How do you write about those topics without making your piece the saddest thing in the world?
I pick really good moments or really painful ones, and sometimes put them in the same poem. That’s where some of the beautiful parts come in, since you see the person you cared about, the way they weren't good for you, or the situation that was really bad, but also that something good was happening.
I’m remembering a video you posted on Facebook discussing how to write responsibly about mental illness and it was really powerful.
When we’re talking about mental health, we’re still only talking in this certain category or topics. And the really hard and painful “crisis stuff”—I haven’t seen [that] in literature [or] film much, because it's the “weird” stuff. It’s the personal stuff that’s not getting better. When I finally did a “picking1” poem… I still don’t think I can “get” to it. But when I write about it, I’m being really specific about what happens when I have a panic attack instead of [writing] about the idea of a panic attack. Last night, there was a poem that came into my head and I realized I was picking my skin to resist writing it, and then finally, I had to say “you can’t write it tonight, it’s just not going to happen.” So I would say that people should definitely protect themselves. I wrote the main idea down in case I want to do it later. That sounds kind of silly but I think with poetry you hear maybe a line or two in your head and you say “I’m not gonna remember this tomorrow or it’s not going to be good tomorrow because I’ll wake up not feeling in that mood and stuff, so last night I had to be like “I’m not [writing].”
It’s an effective way of tackling trauma because that’s how memory works. Pieces of good and pieces of awful at the same time. That’s why you’re trapped in it.
I think that what I learned in the workshops I’ve been taking is that a chapbook has an arc to it. I do have some pieces in the beginning that I think are slightly sad. I wouldn’t say it transforms into an optimistic ending; I think it just complicates the beginning so that by the end the readers think “wow this person had a ton of different experiences all at the same time.” So [for example] if you have a collection of three poems and one is about assault and the [other] two are your identity beyond that, if you could be creative in that way, that would help. I also think about being creative in making an old story new. Find a new theme or a new image that hasn’t really been connected to assault before. In one of the poems that I was just workshopping over the weekend, I have an image of a three-legged cat kneading her legs on the bed. I liken that to how I still want family and love even though it was broken first. I haven’t read any other poems about three-legged cats before with trauma, so I think making interesting images that the reader connects with helps. In another, I talk about trauma to be like bent moth wings. The more you go into a specific image, the better you’ll get the reader rather than saying the word “trauma” over and over again.
If I were to write a specific trauma that I don’t personally experience, disordered eating, for example. I have an inkling of what that would be but I would have to do research. What do you think about writing outside your own experiences?
I would agree that you really have to research it. YA author Laurie Halse Anderson did Wintergirls pretty well considering it wasn’t her experience. But I would say stick to your actual experience when you can; that helps a lot more. [Another writer’s] manuscript was about suicide that runs in her family. It was not as direct as my experience, but it was just as real. She, for the most part, talked about the real ramifications in her life and some people might [think], “well the more interesting story is the direct suicide that gets in their heads,” but I think if she would have done that, it wouldn’t have been as touching. Her poems were about watching her mom, [ dealing with] her own depression, and worrying about her grandfather. Those poems were a lot more “real” because they're her own experiences.
Then you get the different stages of the “event” too. When the “event” happens and the aftermath and the lasting effects.
Yeah, because on the surface, mine is “direct” trauma whereas hers is really indirect. But if she had tried to [be direct], I think I would have enjoyed it less. [What she did] was still moving because it was her reality. She has a poem about painting a photo of Bob Ross after he died. And her mom kept replaying the tape. I’ll remember that poem forever even though it’s not “super intense.”
In the chapbook, I focus on all the mothers’ habits. Sometimes, I convey the actual details in a line or two, but I also take that same experience and focus on other details like the siblings that I lived with or the part-time jobs I had during that time.
I took a trauma writing workshop with Cinelle Barnes, author of Monsoon Mansion. The book itself was really heavy and so she used the mansion as a metaphor. The trauma was done to the house instead of her. She said she did that more to protect herself [than anything else] because she couldn’t talk about the actual event in a ton of detail and that she could “put more heart into the house.” I’d never thought about trauma as a worn-down mansion. Who would enter the house unprovoked? Who wouldn’t take care of it? The stories that are about her life are “non-trauma” stories, although she still hints at the trauma. But the focus is her life outside of trauma. I think that makes it a much better story.
You’re writing a lot now, obviously. Were you writing creatively when you were in undergraduate or graduate school?
I didn’t really write in college but there’s a caveat—I went on medical leave. That’s when I didn’t have a place to live, and I wrote out my experiences in prose as they were happening because it felt cathartic. There was so much grief going on at that time, but It helped to write it down. So I guess I did write. It was around 100 pages but it was more of actual events rather than fiction. I’ve always written poems when I’m having a really bad picking day instead of verbalizing it. But I would say Denver Lighthouse and Green Buffalo have made me write a lot more. I also happened to meet someone who works as an editor and I’ve gained a lot of insight from her.
You’ve submitted a lot of plays for GBP’s Quarantine Quarters within two hours of being given the writing prompts. How do you write so fast?
I am a fast typer! The poetry manuscript over the weekend was interesting because [I] read another person’s manuscript from someone who agonizes over every poem for hours. I like editing because I’m not great at it, but when it comes to the actual poem, I already have an idea in my head or I won’t write in the first place. I spend 15 to 20 minutes to complete a poem and then edit it. Like “this” and “that” will happen, and how to get from “this” to “that.”
I think because you’re so cerebral all the time, you’ve always got something cooking, whether you know it or not.
You have to push through the desire to stop—that’s the thing I learned. You will never be in the perfect mindset to write the most beautiful poem ever. You have this beautiful idea, it comes out perfectly, and then you’re done—which is just not true. Now I tell myself, “okay you could actually have like a good poem today and you don’t know it.” So that kind of makes me less anxious to start writing, which is a clear benefit.
Sometimes, I simmer on an idea for two weeks. Maybe I want to write a short story about a particular subject, like how I wanted to write a micro-fiction piece about Pluto. It’s not been published yet, but I had to think about where I wanted to go with this piece for a week or two. It helps to let an idea in your brain simmer for a little bit. I ended up focusing on nostalgia in the Pluto piece, which was something I didn’t have in mind from the beginning.
I’m from Colorado, so I will continually say that the Denver Lighthouse Workshop is the best. They had this event (before COVID) where you would go to their beautiful building, and they’d have snacks, coffee, wine and beer, which I thought was really funny. You could just sit down somewhere in the building for up to three hours and they gave you a packet of places to submit which was sorted by genre. You could submit to places with other people around you; it definitely took the pressure off, like ripping off a band-aid. So now even at home, I’ll mass-submit to several magazines once a month, then prepare myself for rejections. For one of my last poems that got accepted, I remember opening it and [feeling] genuine surprise that it didn’t have the rejection headline. Having that awareness that it’s going to be rejected more times than not helps too. Once you brand yourself or write more, people will love your work.
One thing you could do is submit to Too Well Away because there are no rejection letters. That’s the editor’s guiding principle.
That’s actually so cool. I would say my micro-fiction piece I got published two years ago was kind of a “lower stakes” submission but I submitted it to some other [places]. I would encourage people who are new to do that because really, who cares if it’s a small microfiction magazine? It still meant that someone liked my work. Just don’t submit to the New Yorker.
Ellen Scherer is a writer, director, and co-founder of Green Buffalo Productions, based in Buffalo, NY. Her short play, Well and on My Own will premiere this Spring with Equity Library Theatre. Other writing credits include 2020 Was My Year (A Moment of Your Time), When the Party’s Over (Cone Man Running), I Was Here (Equity Library Theatre, Open Space Arts, Inclusive Theatre of WNY), I’ve Got Your Back (GBP), Scary Monsters (GBP, Inclusive Theatre of WNY), I’ll Drink to That (Inclusive Theatre of WNY, The Literatus), Rooftop Healing (GBP), and Rosen Verified Current Issues: Gun Violence (Rosen Publishing). Ellen has directed and produced several pieces for GBP over the past 3 years and has recently added to her bag of tricks by becoming an editor for the company’s Spooky Film Festival.
Interviewed by Ellen Scherer.