Ghostly Collaborations:
An Interview with Flower Conroy and Donna Spruijt-Metz about writing together and with Emily Dickinson by Nan Cohen

Flower Conroy, of Key West, Florida, and Donna Spruijt-Metz, of Los Angeles, California, met in 2013 at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. In 2019, Spruijt-Metz joined Conroy in The Grind Daily Writing Series, an online community in which, a month at a time, groups of participants commit to writing a poem every day. Their exchange of work led the two to begin writing poems collaboratively, including a series of poems with titles taken from last lines of Emily Dickinson poems (e.g., “And Leave the Soul Alone,” “My Wilderness Was Made”). Sixteen of these Dickinson poems appear in a collaborative chapbook from Ghost City Press, And Haunt the World, available as a free download.

This interview was conducted first as a set of questions and answers over email, then in a three-way conversation over Zoom, in July 2021. 

When you look back at how And Haunt the World began, can you say not only how it started, but what were the conditions—practical, imaginative, or other—that made it possible for you to embark on and complete this project together?

Flower Conroy: Being dear-hearts is crucial; having respect for each other’s previous work as well as the joined work; striking the anvil of those moments of clear commonality and melding with clear unlikelihoods while not exactly knowing what we are doing, how we are doing it or to what purpose I think is a bit of this work’s lifeblood—that we have ideas of what we want to do and how but that the poems are molten, shapeable, re-shapeable.

Donna Spruijt-Metz: We were almost always in the same group in The Grind; we tracked one another’s poetry and lives. We would comment on each other’s poetry backchannel. Comments became suggestions, became meddling, became “mind if I rewrite this a little?”

We were so enthusiastic about what the other did with the work. Flower is one of the best—no, she is THE best reader for a manuscript. She just wants to make you a better you. 

And then when you had gotten to the stage of meddling with one another's work, Flower, you came up with the idea of using last lines from Dickinson poems.

FC: Yes. I had been reading two editions of her books because one was in one room, one was in the other, and I had read one of the poems and the next night had the other book and read it: the same poem, but a different last line. I know it's because of the different editions, but I was struck by the difference. All her endings feel like beginnings anyway, so I [thought], “Well, what happens if you take that and just see where that leads?” 

It was just collecting a little bit of dust when Donna said we should work together, [and I said] maybe we should work together on that.

Can you go back in time to before you did this work together and remember what you might have thought of doing collaborative work before then? Donna, you’re a scientist—

DSM: Yes, I’m an interdisciplinary scientist, so there’s no such thing as “my work” without collaboration. But it never occurred to me to do it in poetry. And yet we were already kind of doing it; we would “cheat” and comment on one another's poems in the Grind. And it was also a way to follow one another's lives since our lives always get braided in. Already, Flower, sometimes you would say “I love this poem; I would change that line.”

FC: Right. And you would do it to me too, you know—read each other's work and have little suggestions. And then it just got a little messy: Now I'm in your poem and I'm rearranging your stanzas. It was already a collaborative process—

DSM: Yeah, already kind of organic. By the time she sent me this list of last lines, I think we were already on the same page, so to speak.

FC: Definitely, definitely—”on the same page.”

Separately, you both described this project to me as “freeing” and “taking you out of yourself” as writers. I imagine that poets who haven't collaborated might think that working with somebody else might cause them to become more entrenched in their own style. Would you have expected this collaboration to be freeing, taking you out of yourselves?

FC: I don't know that I expected it to be as free as it is. I think it just kind of happened pleasantly. I don't feel like I was worried about what Donna would say, because if one of us feels strongly about something, then that's that. We don't just willy-nilly it, either. We’re like, I feel strongly about this because this speaks back to that; it syntactically makes sense here, it carries this emotional weight, so it's not just “I like that word.” 

In one of the last poems we revised together, collaborating gave Donna a real voice in the poem— the poem was mostly “mine” and then I said, “Donna, revise this word,” and that made a huge impact on the poem. It's one little word, but that's what poetry is: it’s the accumulation of one word at a time. 

DSM:  I opened up And Haunt the World just before we started this interview, and looking at the list of poems, I thought, “I have no idea who started which poem.” Except the first one [“Break, Agonized and Clear”] was Flower. And the last one [“And Left It in the Sky”], me. 

Could you describe your process in composing the poems and assembling the manuscript?

FC: For me, the first step is to either pick an ED last line or let it pick me.  From there, either I’ll write a line or two for Donna to respond to, then respond to her response, and her response’s response, like a Slinky—cattywonkus and determined—down the metaphoric staircase of lines until we arrive at a poetic landing; or I’ll rework old material that I couldn’t before get to lift off the page. 

I’ve been finding these “failed” poems discover their new breath through Dickinson.  They begin to slough the dead cells, sprout new feathers and horns, lose an eye, gain a head, morphing and transfiguring. 

Once the poem’s heart quickens, I pass this piece to Donna, who then in turn listens beneath the surface and off the page, dismantling and rebuilding; oiling, hammering, torquing; recasting—whatever moves her—until she returns the poem to me.  We’ll continue making offerings to each other until we both seem satisfied that the poem is accomplishing what the poem wants to accomplish. 

DSM: We made a shared Dropbox folder, but we are both too chaotic to use it properly. We just kept messing with the poems—and then when this chapbook idea emerged, we thought we would put together the ones we liked best. 

We started by saying “Five from me and five from you,” but when we went through the poems, with only a few exceptions, we had no idea whose was whose anymore, so [it was]:“Which poems do we like, which follow nicely one to the next—how’s the transition from last line to next poem?”—Flower is genius at that—and then, there it was!

Knowing your work, I think I hear your individual voices in many of the poems, and also places where they seem to join to create a third voice—"Circumference Between" is one example. And, of course, the titles of the poems introduce Dickinson's voice and rhythm into the book as well. Do you think of this book as having one, two, three, four or more voices in it?

DSM: Oh, four voices for sure—mostly FlowerDonna, sometimes Flower, sometimes Donna, and then there is indeed Emily—her stamp. Sometimes we’d take the last line and the poem would flow through that, or sometimes one of us would have a fragment or a poem without a title and a ED last line would present itself as the proper title and that would completely drive the revision of the poem. So yes, four.

FC: Yes—I hear a braided voice in this manuscript.  There is of course Dickinson’s voice and divining rod presence; there is Donna’s voice, and there is my voice, and our voices meddled and muddled together; there is the reader’s voice that joins the chorus; there is the voice of the YOU...

Did you each have a strong relationship with Dickinson before you started this project? And how has it changed?

FC: For me, it's changed over the years, because when you're younger, you just struggle. They’re so dense you can't get in them—and then, over the years, I stopped caring about that, you know, like, I don't have to get in; I can look at it, I can feel it, I can just—you know, I don't have to enter wholly. And I think that allowed more of her work to open up over time. The complexity of each little piece in itself was attractive to me.

DSM: This is kind of weird. I didn't have much of a relationship with Emily Dickinson at all. But one of the first books of poetry that I ever had was an old book of Dickinson I think that my mother gave me. Right before Flower made the suggestion—I really love beautiful things, and I found this facsimile edition [Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, edited by Cristanne Miller].  I had just spent a small fortune on these two books, and then Flower suggested this.  

Shall we look at a poem together? Are there any poems that you would consider sharing between two voices, or are you thinking that either one of you could equally read any of the poems aloud?

FC: I'm sure there are some poems that are a little more suited for one of us. But I would happily have a stack and blindly pick out of it and whatever we are reading, I think that would be equally appropriate. It is a shared voice—the whole collection was born out of this collaboration.

Well, then, let's take “An Overcoat of Clay” and have each of you read it separately and each of you gets to listen to it.

DSM: Oh, we do this all the time.

An Overcoat of Clay

What does memory want?
All this squander. My attention—narrow

at the throat.

I’ve been busy with God
lately, the first creative act

one of concealment—how we both

hid our faces. I feel the loss
coming for me—

and even now, in the midst
of dismantling

I should modify that noun
because that’s where my mind goes—

the modifier. We are forever
modified.

I don’t mean this kindly.

Anything seem different there than you expected it to be? Anything you noticed about one another's readings?

FC: I think Donna's was more hopeful-sounding and mine was a little more—I smite you.

When you wrote it, did you have the poem that the line comes from in mind, or do you just take the line and go with it?

DSM: One [way it happens] is, I'm looking at these lines, oh gosh this is a cool one, let's see what comes out of it. Another is, I have a bunch of stuff, or even Flower has some stuff, and I open this book and I look at last lines and I think “This is where this stuff is going.”

FC:  I'm kind of the same. I think one of the most surprising things I've discovered about using her last lines is that it gives me a structure for taking failed material, and I mean like lots of failed material, and being able to pull it apart and cull together something out of it. I don't want to say salvage them, but breathe new life into them, you know—

DSM: Resurrect.

FC: Yeah, definitely.

In the line, I should modify that noun—what's the noun? It seems like we have a few candidates. Are you both thinking of the same noun?

DSM: Act. The first creative act.

FC: Ahh. I went to dismantling.

And I went to loss.

FC: That's good. I’m going to change my answer to loss.

I think part of the point is “even now in the midst of dismantling”—you know, the poem is dismantling, and we have a choice of nouns. We are forever / modified. And that last line—I don’t mean this kindly. Who did that come from, do you remember? Flower, you’re pointing at Donna?

FC: Yeah, I'm pretty sure Donna wrote it, but I think it was somewhere else in the poem. 

DSM: Yes, that’s right. You know how this ended? This originally ended with I feel the loss coming for me. And then Flower made it all work, and added. Subtracted and added. There's a lot of math going on.

What are your hopes for this chapbook, and for this project as it continues?

FC: I just hope people get as lost in them as Donna and I did. As we're working and we're going through the poem, our two energies are going in different directions, and we're making them go in one direction. You're going to be getting pulled around a little bit, and I want the reader to enjoy getting lost.

DSM: There's this vortex of energy that pulls me in to the work that we do together. That is freeing. It's amazing to me. I hope that it pulls other people in in the same way—that you can lose your, your “you”-ness, just let it be for a bit and fall through—

FC: Be haunted.

DSM: Be haunted. Yes. Let your world be haunted. 

FC: Let it be so.

LGBTQ+ writer and former Key West Poet Laureate Flower Conroy is the author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, chosen by Chen Chen as the winner of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ Stevens Manuscript Competition.

Donna Spruijt-Metz is the author of the chapbook Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and a professor of psychology and medicine at the University of Southern California. Her first full-length collection, General Release from the Beginning of the World, will be published in 2022 by Free Verse Editions.

Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems and a forthcoming chapbook, Thousand Year-Old Words, from Glass Lyre Press.