Haunted By Gravity:
An Interview with Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum by Luke Johnson

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s second book of poetry, Visiting Hours (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020) is a beautiful collection that reads like a lost love letter to one of the poet’s best friends growing up, Mary Interlandi, who took her own life in their hometown of Nashville, Tennessee in 2003. It’s a wonderfully diverse book--aesthetically, formally, the ways in which it explores love and loss and grief. 

In his review of Visiting Hours, Frank Piano says “I never believed in ghosts, but after reading Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s newest offering...I’ve changed my mind… [Visiting Hours is] a sustained elegy, a pitch-perfect wail...haunted not so much by the shade of Mary as it is by Mcfadyen-Ketchum’s grief as he wrestles with the angels of ‘What If’ and ‘If Only.’” 

Tell us about the writing of this book, Andrew.

Thank you for these kind words, and thank you for asking me about Visiting Hours. Mary’s books took a decade to write, and all I wrote about that entire ten years was Mary and her death. I wanted to invest everything I had as a poet into Mary and her book (I call it Mary’s book), and I lived a lot of life between starting it in grad school, graduating from grad school, publishing my first book, Ghost Gear, and making a living as a writer, so it took a good while just to write a first draft. 

After about a decade, I finally had a draft and started submitting it to publication prizes. Immediately, Visiting Hours was a finalist for a number of exciting prizes, but it didn’t win, and the trail went sort of cold for a while. This was a strange experience compared to Ghost Gear, which was rejected outright for five years; then, out of nowhere, was a finalist for a few prizes and got picked up by the University of Arkansas Press. To have a second book that hit right off the bat then goes quiet…To feel so much excitement and possibility only to see it turn to disappointment… That was a bit of a rollercoaster. But I kept at it as all writers must do, and it found a wonderful home at Stephen F. Austin University Press after about three years of searching--which is nothing compared to the experiences of all sorts of poets and their books.

In Ghost Gear, you, among other things, tell the story of your upbringing in Nashville. Ghost Gear reveals how you got to this point in your life, and we know what happened to Mary, but she’s not a focal point. Then, bang, here’s this second book entirely about this tragic loss of life and friendship. It’s like an earthquake—a devastating event in your life that fractures the foundation set in your first book. You were truly changed by Mary’s death, weren’t you?

I was. It’s hard to talk about. That’s why I wrote the book. I had to get it out. The terrible guilt. That feeling that I should have been able to save her. Why didn’t I reach out and catch her before she fell? Because she didn’t fall. She jumped. She made a choice to leave this world, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Not a thing. It took me years to come to this understanding. Writing this book was an acknowledgement of my need to heal and the need to spend a little more time with her before I really let her go. There are 24 poems in the book for each hour of the day. Every time I look at the book, I have a chance to visit with her a bit. And others can visit with her too.

It’s a beautiful book inside and out. The image of the full moon on the cover is one of your photographs, isn’t it?

Thank you for noticing! I got a little obsessed with moon photography a few years back when I was traveling across the country living in a tent. When you live in a tent, you see the moon a lot, and I always think of Mary and other friends who have passed away when I look at the moon. So I started photographing it and, after quite a bit of trial and error, got some decent shots. When Stephen F Austin picked up the book, they said I could have as much or as little control over the cover as I wished. I wanted the cover to be arresting and to somehow express what the book was about…but I wanted it to be simple. At some point, it occurred to me that a black cover with a full moon and nothing else was the way to go. The fact that we were able to use one of my photographs for the cover (and three others for each section page inside the book) was a total surprise.

Darkness appears in Visiting Hours quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit more about your obsession with the moon and darkness in general?

The moon--in theory at least--is a part of the earth that broke off, somehow, millenia ago and then became trapped in earth’s orbit, turning into its only satellite. Without it, there would likely be no life at all on earth, so, until it attempted to break free of the earth, no life could exist. No surprise the moon has been seen by humans as a mother figure in our myths and religions. When Mary leapt off that building, she too was attempting to leave the earth, but got caught in its orbit--tho, this time, the orbit of those she left behind, in our memories, in our dreams. When you commit suicide, you don't leave. You try to leave but, ultimately, get captured by the gravity of those you attempted to leave behind.

It took me a decade to come to this understanding with myself and the book and Mary. In writing these poems, this odd conflict emerged between me and Mary but also between me and myself: Here’s this woman who committed suicide, who made it clear she no longer wanted to live...and here’s this poet refusing to let her go… I often wondered as I wrote it if it was the right thing to do. I still wonder about that. Maybe the best thing to do was to let her rest, to leave her be, yet, everytime I looked up at the night sky, there she was in the moon. How could I possibly ignore her?

In essence, Visiting Hours, is about a haunting--by both the living and the dead. The moon represents that haunting perfectly. I knew her from the day she was born. We were basically brother and sister. I went to high school three blocks from the sidewalk she died on. I currently live less than a mile from the building she jumped from. Any time I get on the interstate, there’s that building on the horizon, reminding me of the dear friend who took her life.

Talk to us a bit about writing this book. What was your process?

Organic. I inhabited the world of this book. From 2007 to 2017, Mary was the only thing I wrote about--not something I would recommend! I was still editing Ghost Gear at the beginning of that process, but if I was writing a new poem, I was writing a poem about Mary. If a poem arose in my consciousness about anything else, I rejected it.

As for the book I envisioned, I had no plan. I wrote Ghost Gear fairly intentionally. Once I had the idea, I found a structure and made it work; with Visiting Hours I wanted the book to come to me more like poems did. I didn’t want to build the book; I wanted it to build itself--which meant I had to be incredibly patient. 

Over the ten year period of writing Visiting Hours, I finished my MFA, pursued a number of different careers, published Ghost Gear, got divorced after a decade of marriage, lived in nearly ten states… In short, I lived a LOT of life as the book was being written. It was always on my mind and heart, but I was also pretty overwhelmed with making ends meet and keeping myself alive, to be honest, so I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote (always about Mary) and probably ditched 90% of the poems that came out of that and kept the other 10% that, for whatever reason, seemed like they belonged and literally just kept them in a single word doc and moved them around and broke them apart and reorganized them over and over and over until, in 2017, I had what declared itself a book. 

How did you know when Visiting Hours was ready for readers? Most poets don’t spend anywhere near that amount of time on a single manuscript. You must have been obsessed.

Maybe this will sound strange, but Mary told me it was ready. I don’t know how she told me, but...when you spend that much time with someone in your imagination, you start to feel like you’re really talking to them. And maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe it was all in my head, but, one day, I was working on the book and I simply knew it was ready. Yes, it changed a bit from that moment to publication, but not much.

In the final couplet of the final poem of the first section, “On the 1st Anniversary of Mary’s Death,” Mary says, “Listen… / Say it. After me: “There was nothing I could do.”” That last line says it all, doesn’t it?

It does. That guilt I felt mixed with that knowledge that no matter what I had done, Mary would have done what she was going to do...that was the central conflict in the book because, well, it was the central conflict of my life for so long: I should have done more, yet there wasn’t a damn thing I could have done…

I think some people understand wanting to take your life and some people don't. A few months before Mary killed herself, we spoke on the phone and I was really shaken. I knew she was going to kill herself. But I was a college kid, and though I expressed my worries to my parents and her parents, there was no way to know.

Still, for many years, I felt like I should have pressed harder. I should have grabbed her parents by the shoulders and shook them until they finally agreed to take more drastic actions with her mental health. I should have told my father he would be to blame if she died, which of course is not true. I should have taken her on a camping trip that would somehow convince her to stay alive. Something.

But how unusual is it for an 18 year old to say, “I'm going to kill myself”? This is not that unusual. People say things like this to express how they feel, not necessarily to express what they are actually planning on doing. Yet, sometimes, they actually do it, and you’re left with nothing. 

Lots of people commit suicide. We just don’t hear much about it for some reason. I suppose this is part of what Visiting Hours is attempting to do: To show people how real all of this is, to teach people to take their ailing friends and family seriously. 

All that said, killing herself was Mary’s decision. At some point in the process of writing the book, I started to respect that decision more and more, which is a really weird thing to understand. A lot of people will not understand that when someone takes their own life, all the negative things people say about those who commit suicide are simply wrong. I think it's important to say those things and to express those things (they’re selfish; they’re crazy), but none of us understand what's going on with someone who actually goes that far. Even though I could empathize with her, I could never truly understand why she jumped off a building--accepting that action as a choice, a decision she actively made helped me heal. I don’t think she made the right decision; I don’t think it was a decision well made, but suicide is everyone’s choice, and Mary made that choice, and I was left to live with it.

When she says, “Listen… / Say it. After me: “”There was nothing I could do.”” Mary is saying there was nothing you, Andrew, could do, but she’s also saying there was nothing she, Mary, could do. Life had gotten away from her; she felt it was time for her to go. And I had to learn to accept that. I think we all have to accept the choices those around us make, even if it leads to their deaths. Otherwise, we can’t move on. And we have to. We have life to attend to. 

How have Mary’s parents reacted to Visiting Hours?

I think they’re really happy with it. They’ve known about the book for some time. Early in the process, I sat down with them at their kitchen table and told them I’d been writing about Mary and felt the need to write a book about her. They gave me their blessing. This was probably in 2008. Then, throughout the years, I shared poems with them that I published and, when I had a draft of the book, I sent that to them as well. 

This was terrifying. I was deeply worried an image would hurt their feelings or a line would make them angry or would be too personal or...who knows? But they never expressed any unhappiness with me at all about it. In fact, quite the opposite. “There are many ripples to Mary’s death,” her mother once said to me. “Your poems are one of those ripples.”

I’m not sure this is the right word, but was writing this book an act of exorcism? It feels that way at times…

I’d say release. I had romantic feelings for Mary, but our families were so close, I never felt like I could follow through on any of those feelings. I’m fairly certain she felt the same way, so we actively chose to be dear friends rather than lovers. That haunted me more than anything else. What if we had had a relationship? Could that have saved her life? Maybe that’s a silly notion, but much of the writing of the book was to release those doubts, worries, fears...and the guilt (false though it was) that came from those feelings. 

I was releasing myself as well. I was certainly haunted by Mary, but I also haunted her in writing this book. I haunted her, we, everyone who knew her and talked about her for so many years after her death, haunted her. The book allowed me to release the guilt of not doing more to save her while, at the same time, it gave her a way to release me. This is all imaginary of course, but, Lord, it feels real. It’s all so very personal. I sometimes feel badly for inserting her into this imagined narrative about her, but when she killed herself, all any of us were left with was our imagination. Visiting Hours is as much about the imagination as it is anything else.

This book is composed of quite a few long poems. The title poem is composed of eight single-page sections. “Marysarias,” one of the first surreal poems, is ten pages. The penultimate poem is also ten pages, and there are more long poems between them. 

Long poems are hard for so many reasons. One of their primary difficulties is momentum. A short poem can maintain its momentum fairly easily, but a long poem has to work a lot harder to keep the reader, well, reading, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. The trick is to change gears. If you're driving along at 55 miles per hour on the interstate, observing the speed limit, making sure you're using the best gas efficiency in your car for six hours, you're going to be bored. So what do you do? You downshift from fifth to fourth and have some fun. The same goes for a long poem. If you look at “Marysarias,” each section break represents a shift, typically from lyric to narrative, or the shift might be more tonal. 

The first section is mostly lyrical. Then the second section takes a step back and introduces some characters and setting, which is more narrative. The tone the poem opens with is quite dark. Then it takes a breath and opens up a bit. Then it drops back down as the poem moves back into lyric and so on and so forth.

I learned this approach from Jon Tribble and Jake Adam York, both of whom are no longer with us. Jon was one of my mentors at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Jake was one of the press’s authors. He visited Carbondale to give a reading. One afternoon, we were all at a restaurant having lunch, and Jake and Jon were talking about long poems when Jon turned to me and said, “Andrew, listen: If you're gonna write a long poem, you better reward the reader, every three lines.” Jake laughed, but it was in delight, and that stuck with me: Reward the reader for reading every three lines. So every three lines in a long poem (and, honestly a short one too), I try to make sure the reader feels it was worth it with, say, a beautiful image or a surprising metaphor or a symphonic moment. 

Also in a long poem, you pretty much have to know where you are and who is talking. This might be true in any poem, but it’s particularly true in a longer one. It’s just like a novel or short story. You can be way off the rails with language and lyric in any written form so long as you have a solid setting and solid characters. 

I learned this from Judy Jordan at SIUC. She taught an essay by Greg Orr called “The Four Temperaments of Poetry.” Every poem, Orr argues, works either toward narrative or lyric; Judy, however, believed that poems ought to combine these temperaments in what she called lyric-narrative poems--verse that is simultaneously lyrical and narrative, not one or the other. I don’t think this has to always be the case, but in long poems, if you’re being purely narrative or purely lyric, I don’t think you’re going to be as successful as you’d like. 

It’s worth noting that “Marysarias” was the first poem I wrote for Visiting Hours. I wrote it in the winter of 2007 while in graduate school. At that point I had a draft of Ghost Gear, I needed to step away from it before diving back in and getting it ready for my thesis, and I knew I wanted to write a book about Mary. I also knew that once I dove back into Ghost Gear, that book was going to take all of my focus and then, after that, I’d graduate and be back in the non-graduate school world and would struggle to have space for Mary’s book. So it was important to write the primary poem of her book that winter; “Marysarias” was the result. For many years, it was the title poem. Even though I eventually titled the book Visiting Hours (which I think is a better title for all sorts of reasons), “Marysarias” is still the poem around which the collection orbits for me.

So much of this book (and Ghost Gear) revolves around the natural world. “Like the Dead” is one of my favorites. 

Like the Dead

To the geese our world must be burning:
Razed, set fire to, and igneous—the earth
Below their pneumatic wings nothing more
Than a smooth sheet of ash smoothed
Across an altar. No matter how low they fly,
It’s nowhere near enough, February so thick
With overcast it’s as if the world were breaking
Apart and all its matter shelved in this near
Orbit of dust. Never having mapped
The moon or stars, the geese fly lost, wailing
These avatars wedged into the slug-light
Of the nightclouds, the wind and its elements
Lumed by Draco signature snaking beyond
Reach. They call out, ghosts these geese
We can and cannot see, their cobalt-colored eyes
Scanning the drifts, wings fanning the flames
They believe flare up below. Like fish
The color of water. Like the dead. Like me.

How has the natural world shaped your work? How does nature help you heal?

I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a city, sure, but it’s very easy to get out in nature. Drive twenty minutes in any direction from the house I grew up in, and you’re in the country. Me and my dad and Mary and her father got out a lot when she and I were kids. We went fishing, hiking, caving, camping, bird watching...if it was something we could do outside, we did it. I do most of my work outside. Me and my family spent the entire covid summer going to waterfalls. I love to go on long walks. I love that so many restaurants now have outside seating in the winter due to the pandemic. If I can be outside, that’s where you’ll find me. That’s just who I am. It should be no surprise that so many of my poems take place outside, particularly if I am suffering in some way. 

After my divorce several years ago, I lived in a tent for about two years, and in my search for solace after Mary’s death, I spend as much time as possible with nature. Nature has helped me and my family grow stronger despite this horrible disease. If I'm not outside every day, I'm in trouble. I’m fairly certain this is part of the trouble with our nation and its people. So many of us stay inside all day long. If we all got out more, I truly believe the world would be a better place. We’re only so many generations removed from, for all intents and purposes, living and working outside. Spending so much time inside isn’t good for any of us, I don’t think. That’s probably the other reason nature appears in my poetry so much: If I can bring it to people, perhaps I can help soothe their worries, relax their fears. When you're out in the natural world, it’s a lot easier to live in the now. The now is all we really have, so that’s where I try to live. For those who can’t live in the now, maybe they can find it in a poem.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing my third manuscript of poems, Fight or Flight, which is about trauma--and healing from trauma--and I’m learning to write happy poems, which isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. Visiting Hours, obviously, is about anything but happiness, and Ghost Gear is joyful, but I wouldn’t say many of the poems are about happiness or come from a place of happiness. A little over two years ago, I became a stepfather and finally healed from the trauma of my childhood and the divorce, which I feared meant I would never have children. Fight or Flight shares my experience with all of that and the happiness I have, thank God, finally come to with Karen, Siliuna, Otis, and Eli. They are the loves of my life, and I’m enjoying learning to write about them and the life we are building together.

It’s oddly difficult to write about being happy. I’m not sure why but poetry (and writing in general) isn’t what we often turn to when we are happy. Quite the opposite. There are certainly some happy poems and poets out there (Ross Gay immediately comes to mind), but, generally speaking, there isn’t much of a history of the happy poem--so there aren’t a lot of models out there to work from. 

I am also challenging myself in this book to write as economically as possible, so most of the book is composed of short poems, which isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse either. And I’m doing everything I can to avoid structuring this manuscript according to narrative. There is a story being told, but I really want Fight or Flight to operate more lyrically than narratively, so I’m sort of reinventing the wheel in this book, at least personally speaking, and I am quite pleased with the results.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an author, freelance editor, & ghostwriter. He is author of Visiting Hours and Ghost Gear; Acquisitions Editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books; and Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.com, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days. Learn more at AndrewMK.com.

Luke Johnson is an award nominated poet and content creator who lives on the California coast with his wife and three kids. His poems can be found or forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, The Florida Review, Nimrod, Tinderbox, Thrush, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, The Cortland Review and Connotation Press among others. He is the co-founder of Fansmanship.com and additional sports content has been featured on Bleacher Report, The Sportster and Campus Sports. He received his MFA in Poetry from Sierra Nevada College.