In the first of a (hopefully) semi-regular series of interviews with and between uHlanga poets, Milk Fever author Megan Ross chats with Helen Moffett about her award-winning 2016 release Prunings, as well as all of the other important things she tends to in her literary career.
Photo by Martine Bisagne
MR: Dr Moffett, you're a literary maven with wide, outstretched arms, enveloping every artist in your care with support and expert encouragement. How do you balance your editing work with your poetry work, or do you feel the two sort of overlap in some way?
HM: Thank you. Those are very kind words. I do what I do as a form of mothering/nurturing, and it meets a very deep need in me. There’s no overlap other than the kind of ongoing sparking that creates poems from everyday events and ideas – a lovely aspect of editing is that it involves constantly learning new things, and that feeds the poems – or at least, feeds the borehole from whence poetry comes.
As for balance, I’m both bad and good at this: bad because I am always sacrificing myself as a writer for my editing, because I get so passionately involved with whatever and whoever I’m working on as an editor. But good in that writing poetry is often something I HAVE to do, a compulsion, and it drives the other stuff out, even if only for half an hour now and again.
MR: As a many-times published author, but as ‘our’ author in the case of Prunings, what drew you to publishing with uHlanga, and do you feel a kind of, if any, kinship with other poets who we have published?
HM: The answer is simple: I trusted Nick. The story of how uHlanga came to publish Prunings is a delightful one, and a sequence of events that could probably only happen in South Africa. I’d invited some of my indie publishing friends to lunch on my patio, and the small group included Nick (I was editing his short stories at the time) and Colleen Higgs of Modjaji, who’d published Strange Fruit. We were all discussing what I should do with the poems that didn’t make it into Strange Fruit because they didn’t fit the loose narrative (it’s largely about my infertility), and we came up with the idea of Prunings. I thought it would only make up a chapbook, and Colleen didn’t do chapbooks, but Nick did. He offered to publish on the spot, I walked into the house to find an unfinished painting by the late Ellaphie Ward (she was my botanist dad’s illustrator), and suggested we use it as a cover – and that was that. Colleen, Nick and publishing genius Arthur Attwell (of Electric Book Works) were sharing a ride home, and when they were in the car, Arthur said “You’re going to publish Helen’s collection without even seeing it first?” Nick, all the gods bless him, said “It’s a no-brainer.” It did help that Strange Fruit was by local poetry standards a bestseller (it’s gone into eight print runs, even if only about a hundred each time). He sent a cover design three hours later, and that’s the one we used; and there was enough material that it did make up a collection, not a chapbook.
The informality of our arrangement meant that Nick chose the poems from the scatterings I dumped in his lap, sometimes taking only fragments, and in one case, just one line. When we got to editing, I would sometimes strike out lines because I was unsure of them, and he left those lines in, but with the strike-outs visible. This got a lot of favourable comment. I said one line in a poem was sentimental, so Nick rewrote it, and is credited with it in the collection. So he had a free hand and intervened to the point of collaboration, which would not have worked with Strange Fruit, which was heart’s blood stuff.
Kinship with other uHlanga poets: I think a sense of awe would be more fitting. I am very proud to be published alongside such exceptionally creative and slant (in the Emily Dickinson sense) poets.
MR: In a similar vein, what ‘draws’ one, or in this case, yourself, to a particular publisher?
HM: I write across multiple genres, so I’m very practical. Bookstorm works well for my non-fiction trade titles, academic presses publish my research writings, a British commercial publisher did our erotica, and so on. I don’t know that I could have done Strange Fruit with anyone else other than Modjaji (even though UCT Press accepted it first): I needed a feminist and someone I trusted, a friend, as a publisher. Colleen guided me, then Rustum Kozain (once again, a close and trusted friend) did the line edit, and the whole thing was emotionally exposing in a way that much of my writing isn’t. So I look at the fit.
When it comes to poetry, it has to be someone I care about and trust. So that’s Nick, Colleen and Karina (of Karavan Press, who will possibly publish my next collection/s). There are other excellent poetry publishers in SA (brave and foolhardy souls) – thinking of Dryad Press, Deep South, Botsoso and others – but I need someone at the helm I feel personally close to.
MR: It's been 16 years (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT) since Modjaji Books published Strange Fruit. We know that books can take one on certain journeys, sometimes to the heart of painful things, and in a more outward way, to events, to new people, to new spaces... Where did Strange Fruit take you, and, on that note, did Prunings take you anywhere that Strange Fruit didn't?
HM: Oh my hat, how long have you got? Let’s start with Prunings, which won the SALA for poetry in its year, and meant I could describe myself as an “award-winning poet”. It got more critical recognition and attention than Strange Fruit, but I felt it showcased my craft (even though I still think “WHAT craft?”) rather than my guts and marrow. I do love it, though.
For years after we published Strange Fruit, I got messages and emails (and that was in the early days of social media, so it was much harder for people to track me down) from women (and one man) telling me how they felt seen, understood, that their battles with infertility, miscarriages, menopause, and the whole panoply of Wimmin’s Stuff that is veiled in most (all) societies, were acknowledged, given expression. I was constantly moved by the private notes of pain, the personal messages telling me my poems had comforted them. I STILL get these, 16 years later!
Just one of those emails from a stranger thanking me for voicing their experience would have been reward enough. But there’s more. A former South African, Peter Midgley, then at the University of Alberta Press, came across Strange Fruit, and gave it to one of his closest friends, the respected Canadian poet, Kimmy Beach. She had also battled with infertility. So this intense friendship sprang up between us, complete strangers. And that in turn led to a cascade of events in which I got invited to Western Canada on a poetry tour (yes, The Canadian government actually sponsors such things!) I went road-tripping with Peter, his lovely spice Julie, and Kimmy, crossing the Rockies for three mind-blowing days, visiting the dinosaur badlands of Drumheller, reading my poems in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton, teaching at a creative non-fiction workshop in Victoria, more road-tripping to Tofino on the western edge of Vancouver island (the only place in the world more beautiful than the Cape). I still pinch myself to think: poetry took me there. (TBH, it was Peter, Kimmy and Canadian author Myrl Coulter, whose memoir I had just edited, who made it happen.)
I’m not done yet! Last year I went on a residential fellowship with 20 other brilliant academics from around the world, and after one memorable evening of wine and song around the communal fireplace, I fetched two copies of Strange Fruit from my office and gave them almost at random to two of my new Fellows (we were only weeks into the semester). One – a tax law expert! – turned out to be a poet who’d published a brilliant and agonising collection about the experience of loving his profoundly autistic son. He subsequently became one of my best friends. A few days later, the other, an internationally honoured theoretical physicist, said he’d read the collection, and could I guess which his favourite poem was? I was cynical: it was sure to be one of the funny dirty ones, probably about penises. Nope. It was “Always”, a love poem. With a pure sincerity only possible for those for whom English is not a mother tongue, he told me that reading it, he realised he and I shared identical views on love. And at regular intervals that semester, he would ask me to read the poem to him. I’d been resolutely and contentedly single for over ten years (four and a half of those with Long Covid), we were both fiercely committed to our work and residency projects (and the other Fellows); I doubt I will ever get over the shock of finding myself plunging into a relationship with someone so much my opposite, we were effectively from different planets. I still wake up in the mornings going WTAF. And yet, as of today, we are still a going concern in spite of not having been in the same time zone once in the last five months. (He also got me into wild swimming, and that has changed my life and health beyond recognition, a gift that can’t be taken away.)
So, to put it mildly, Strange Fruit changed my life. And this is why we should write poetry, why we must keep publishing it. I have a poem in progress about how years, decades after writing a poem, it can still bring someone to your door, following the silk rope of your words. Write that poem.
MR: And lastly, are you working on anything new (that you could potentially tell us about)?
HM: I have three collections bubbling away. One was mostly written over ten years ago, but a lot of that impetus went into my novel Charlotte, so that clutch of poems is still in a drawer. Then in 2020/21, our family went through the agony of my sister being in Covid ICU for SIXTY. FIVE. DAYS. I wrote poems during that utter hell (what else could I do?), and have a slim collection provisionally titled “We Must Caution You”, a phrase her doctors used when warning us not to expect her recovery. (She lived: a bona fide miracle.) And I’m now writing lots and lots of (bad) poems about the regeneration and transformation of the last ten months of my life, provisionally called “Spell”. Karina and I are talking about how we could possibly combine these unpublished collections, but it’s all up in the air, and the current poems need to be corralled into a drawer for composting.
Thank you for asking these questions. Answering them has given me joy.
