all our multiplicities

An Interview with Heidi Seaborn

Many of us go for a few weeks, months, even years without writing poetry. But Heidi Seaborn’s hiatus lasted for forty years until in 2016, she returned to the practice—and from there it was a whirlwind. In this interview, Heidi tells us about the shift from her successful business career as a communications executive to becoming an award-winning poet and Editor in Chief of The Adroit Journal. We also learn more about her writing practice: how has she remained so prolific? What was her process in developing her collections? Citing her teacher David Wagoner, Seaborn discusses the three phases of the writer: the mad writer, the craftsman, and the critic. By allowing ourselves to be “lazy” with our writing, she explains how we might let the madder, most inspired writer out onto the page. Ultimately, no matter which “self” we inhabit from poet to executive, what’s crucial to any career is to “keep our minds and our eyes open and pull from whatever we see.”

In your Financial Times essay “From Business to Poetry—A Road Less Travelled,” you write, “I wonder whether my previous self—the executive—is just a facet of the overall self, that has always included the poetic?” How do you feel that this “poetic” self affected your business career and vice versa?

I like to think of ourselves as a multitude of beings—which we are, in many ways. Not only am I someone who's had a couple distinct careers, I’ve just written a collection that touches on performance culture, how we're all performing a version of ourselves. So I’ve spent time thinking about the selves we inhabit and project. But for me, the one constant is to have a curious mind. You must be inquisitive. When I look at how I approach the world, I tend to come at it with questions and intention. The through line in my life has been attentiveness and intuition which I’ve brought to every endeavor whether it's business or whether it's art.

Having just returned to poetry in 2016, your fast rise in the literary community has been exciting—publishing three chapbooks and two full-length collections, many of which garnered prizes, and serving as the Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal among other achievements. But we also keep thinking back to when you first decided to pursue writing once again. What was your approach to re-find your poetic voice?

There's a long answer to how we find our creative voice. In my case, there was a 40-year gap during which I just didn't make time for poetry. Achieving that reconnection meant making time. I just read a book of essays by Kim Addonizio where she talks about making time for writing. For my business career, I made time. I had time for my children. But I didn't make time for poetry in my life. When I finally made time, I wasn’t sure if there was any poetic voice left inside me. But fortunately, it was all there waiting to be tapped.

The one thing I would say is just write. Spend ten minutes, spend an hour, take a class, do whatever you need to do to get at it. When you hit those lows, the answer is not to beat yourself up about it but rather to write and see what happens. If nothing happens, forgive yourself and come back to it again. I'm in that time right now after a period of productivity where I have a lot of threads but nothing's really jelling. I can't see the next book in front of me. So, this summer, I plan to carve out some time to be lazy about it, to not feel the stress. I know there's some things that help—to read helps. Free writing can be helpful. I went back to read my free writing from the very beginning of the pandemic and found some good stuff. I know a lot of people use prompts, but for me it's most important to read and write and give yourself permission to be lazy about it. The biggest thing is to let your mind open.

When I first came back to writing, I had a workshop with David Wagoner. There, he would talk about the three phases of the writer: the mad writer, where you just are throwing anything down on the page, the craftsman, and finally the critic. Often what happens is our critic comes in right at the beginning and shuts us down. So, trying to hold back that critic by allowing yourself to be sort of lazy, to write whatever, allows that madder writer person to come out on page.

Your two full-length collections—An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021) and Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} (2019)—feature textured poems that center around set themes yet speak to all corners of human experience, especially that of women. Can you tell us more about your inspiration for these works and your process to develop them?

I think of my writing as being somewhat interrelated to my life experiences. While the new book An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe was informed by extensive research of Marilyn Monroe, it's a book of poems with Marilyn in dialogue with the speaker, which is some form of the poet, which is some form of me­­. I'm embodied as a woman with a lifetime of experiences that inform all my work. I also live in a cottage that is located between the forest and the sea, so my imagery pulls from the natural world around me.

Additionally, I've been a feminist all my life, so I think there's a feminist undertone to what I write. I hope people get that sense of things from my books. Certainly in the Marilyn Monroe collection there is a feminist story that comes through as the speaker and Marilyn wrestle with their life experiences through the trope of a middle of the night conversation between two insomniacs.

You asked how I put the collections together. For me, starting in 2016 I just wrote and by the end of 2017, I realized I had enough for a collection. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe was my thesis for my MFA so followed a set two-year plan.

How does your new work relate to earlier pieces from high school and college? Have you ever incorporated past writing into your current oeuvre? 

When I started writing in 2016, I had an old manila folder that had my old poems in it, typewritten or torn out of magazines they’d been published in. Reading them again, I cringed as most of it read very assertive, young, emotive.

But there was one poem that was still interesting. I had written it right before going off to university and it was about our family going on a hike, then lunching in the sun on a driftwood beach. Reading it now as a mother of kids who have gone off, I saw that poem differently. I edited it very slightly to reflect my second layer of emotion then submitted it to an anthology that the poet laureate for Washington State created for Washington State poets. The poem was accepted and I was invited to give readings, probably a dozen, all over the state. It served as the connective tissue between my young poet self and now.

As a general writing practice, I try to constantly stay fresh. I had this conversation recently with another poet about how a lot of the older male poets she had grown up with just rehashed their work over and over again. Over the course of her 50 years, she felt the need to constantly stay fresh. Instead of writing through emotions which I did in my youth, I'm writing from experiences then hopefully creating an emotional connection for the reader. I've had an amazing life of experiences to draw on to then share through poems with readers. 

Though there’s pressure today for people to choose a discipline and stick with it, you’ve referred to yourself as a chameleon. This description resonates with our mission to help promote polymathy, and we’d love to learn more about your experience engaging in both business and arts.

I don't feel like my work in business has necessarily impacted my writing—and if it had, that would probably not be a good thing! But I worked in technology beginning when I was in my twenties in Silicon Valley, so I've now written a few poems, weird ones, that pull from my technology knowledge. And I’ve started to write a memoir that's about that early time when Silicon Valley was just beginning. It’s called Upstart. Those projects reflect a bit of an integration of my business life into my poetic life but more as the storyline rather than a writing influence.

As for the other way around, I had poetic training when I was young, and I think I brought that into my working life. Not in obvious ways, but I feel that because of poetry I can see things conceptually so I could very easily figure out how a company or product should be positioned. I could parse through the noise to find the right strategy—clarify things using the poet's mind of finding the right language to tell the story. That element is part of how I see the world, and I think I brought that into my business career.

While your formal hiatus from poetry lasted decades, most writers (ourselves included!) can relate to the feeling after an extended break whether circumstantial or chosen. What advice would you have for people who want to sit back down and write but don’t know where to start?

It goes back to my previous comments about having a curious mind, an open mind, of being a kid that colors outside the lines—to not have guardrails in our thinking. That's the important thing: keep our minds and our eyes open and pull from whatever we see. It's a level of attentiveness to nuance and to the world around us—extracting whatever we can then bringing it into our work.