A Conversation with Nicole Callihan
Nicole Callihan’s most recent book, This Strange Garment, navigates her 2020 breast cancer diagnosis and the resulting treatments, and was published by Terrapin Books in March 2023. The winner of an Alma Award, her book, SLIP, will be published by Saturnalia in spring 2025. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
By Zoe Elisabeth
I recently had the privilege of interviewing Nicole Callihan about her new poetry collection, This Strange Garment. We discussed illness and treatment, the ephemeral nature of the self, and the way Nicole’s experiences shape her writing process. You can find Nicole online at nicolecallihan.com.
Zoe Elisabeth: Your recent poetry collection, This Strange Garment, is an intimate depiction of breast cancer and treatment. How did you decide to center this collection around these experiences, and what was your motivation when you began writing it?
Nicole Callihan: Since I began writing poems—at age fourteen and then more seriously in my twenties—poetry has served as my way to mark existence. I know I was very much alive on January 27, 1988, or October 4, 1995, or February 19, 2017, because I have the journal scrawl (or Google doc!) to accompany it. When I received my breast cancer diagnosis on September 29, 2020, I moved forward with this practice. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see how I took the news. I didn’t even write the word “cancer” until a week later when I attempted an unsuccessful abecedarian!
The poems, though, were first just those almost daily poems written in the eighteen months after my diagnosis. I felt quite changed by the diagnosis, the twenty-eight rounds of radiation, the five surgeries, the daily pills, and I wanted to gather those poems together to honor that experience.
ZE: How do you feel your experience with illness influenced the choices your made in your writing?
NC: One poem in the book, the longest, “The Paper Anniversary,” which I wrote around the one year anniversary of my diagnosis, leans very heavily into sound. It is less documentary—i.e., “here I am in the MRI machine;” “here, I am getting my blood drawn—” and more internal, both rhythmically and, I suppose, physically. I think my experience with acute illness returned me to the more primal aspects of poetry. Once I got out the nitty gritty details, I sought solace in something that feels more akin to song. I embrace straight rhyme a bit more; I tend to let the thing be just as it is without coming to it with ideas about capital-P poetry.
I think the writing—and returning to the writing—also helped me keep perspective about the illness. It was bad, yes, but it was just a part of the fabric of being alive.
ZE: Similarly, how did language and writing inform your experience with treatment?
NC: Since my diagnosis was very early pre-vaccine pandemic, I wasn’t allowed to have anyone accompany me to appointments or most surgeries. In that way, writing—mostly notes in my phone—felt like my companion.
I think the writing—and returning to the writing—also helped me keep perspective about the illness. It was bad, yes, but it was just a part of the fabric of being alive. It was something I was experiencing, but it wasn’t the only thing I was experiencing at the time. There was lice, and periods, and jokes, empty mailboxes, a dog that needed walking, a room that needed dusting…
ZE: One thing I find especially compelling about this collection is how your writing displays a deep reverence for life without ever feeling trite or glossing over the uglier experiences associated with illness and treatment. How did you approach the balance between these extremes in writing this collection?
NC: I’m very much a throw-the-spaghetti-on-the-wall kind of poet. So much gets put down on the page, but most poems wander lonely in my cloud or are shared with only my closest readers. In that sense, it’s less about balance while writing and more about choosing what to include. My revision process rarely involves individual poems. I know almost immediately if it works or doesn’t work. The ones that don’t work—yesterday about lying under a tree, for example!—can still serve me as a human interested in the fact that I’ve been alive, but they don’t serve the balance of a manuscript.
But I also believe I’m both a little less precious and a little more reverent when I think of the body. As a collaboration with Poetry Well, I’ve just finished a workshop series and am in the midst of editing an anthology (to be published by Terrapin in early 2024) called Braving the Body, so perhaps more than anything I feel, both in language and in thought, that I’ve grown braver about the experience of being in a body.
But I also believe I’m both a little less precious and a little more reverent when I think of the body … so perhaps more than anything I feel, both in language and in thought, that I’ve grown braver about the experience of being in a body.
ZE: Your writing often explores the relationship between the body and the self. How did your experience with illness influence the way you think about the body and the language you use to write about it?
NC: My body was quite changed with my illness. I have a footlong scar across my abdomen. My breasts, also significantly scarred, are much smaller. I have two tiny blue star tattoos to “cover up,” or perhaps highlight, my radiation tattoos. My areolae are tattooed. I was put into a sudden medical menopause as part of my treatment, and so my joints ache, and I’ve had to reapproach notions of desire. I think my poem “The Alternative” in the collection captures many of the feelings I have towards my changed body and its relationship to my selfhood. But I also believe I’m both a little less precious and a little more reverent when I think of the body. As a collaboration with Poetry Well, I’ve just finished a workshop series and am in the midst of editing an anthology (to be published by Terrapin in early 2024) called Braving the Body, so perhaps more than anything I feel, both in language and in thought, that I’ve grown braver about the experience of being in a body.
ZE: Many of your poems note an awareness of constant change and no longer being the person you were before. For example, in “There Is No Happiness,” you describe the aftermath of a toothache as containing “nothing but the absence of what defined you.” How does this sense of ephemerality inform the way you write about, or define, yourself in poetry?
NC: Time, she is a tricky little clown! I’m quite interested in thinking about how linear time is a construct. I suppose for me the idea of “no longer being the person I was before” makes me even deeper the person I am now, the person I’ve always been. More fractal than ephemera; more quantum than classical.
ZE: In “Desquamation,” you say, “In 2011, the same year I lost one pregnancy and found my last, Charles Weschler and his colleagues explained that humans shed their entire outer layer of skin every 2-4 weeks.” What inspires you to incorporate facts and statistics reflective of your personal experiences into your poetry?
NC: I taught Expository Writing at New York University for twenty years. There, in a pedagogy designed in large part by Pat C. Hoy, we encouraged students to use various types of “evidence” to get to their “idea.” The logic, in part, was that to access and utilize as many parts of the writer’s brain (or heart—dare I say soul?) was to speak to the reader more truly and organically. For me, math and science—my mother and brother are both scientists—are as alive and engaging as music and poetry (my father is a bit of a renowned ukulele player!). So that holistic approach coupled with my great esteem for Wikipedia often results in poems that include a bit of everything.
ZE: Many pieces in This Strange Garment use a prose-like form with no enjambment, like “Everything Is Temporary,” while others have a more traditional poetic form. How do you decide what kind of form best fits a poem?
NC: Poems, for me, “arrive” in whatever form they ultimately take. I don’t “make line breaks” and very rarely do I toy with stanzas. The breath or segment of thought informs the poem as it takes shape. The prose-like form that lacks enjambment is not a form I usually write in, but most of the poems I wrote immediately after my diagnosis use this form. I think I was grasping at all my straws, perhaps even reaching towards essay as many of those poems might be called lyric essays, in an attempt to understand my experience. Once I settled into the reality of the experience, I was able to play more; it became less of a prose-like reckoning and more of a poetic experiencing.
Zoe Elisabeth is a poet from Washington, DC and a student at Sarah Lawrence College. She has previously been published in literary journals such as Kissing Dynamite, Caesura, and Rust + Moth under the name Zoe Cunniffe, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. She is also the Senior Editor of Thrush Poetry Journal. Zoe can be found on Instagram at @makeshiftparadises.