“One of the things I’ve learned from all this is that there’s very little under our control as humans. We must work with each other and with the earth in harmonious, healing, and honestly, hard ways if we are to survive.”
—Cassie Premo Steele
Cassie Premo Steele - all photos courtesy of the artist
During these Corona Times the Jasper Project strives to continue to support and promote communication among artists and arts lovers. In this interview, Columbia-based poet Cassie Premo Steele shares what both her personal and professional life have been like since the onset of quarantine and we come to realize that there is little separating the personal from the professional these days, and what a gift that might actually be.
Here’s Cassie.
Thanks for sharing with us, Cassie. Let’s start with some basic info for the few people who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet.
JASPER: Tell us about your background, please – where did you grow up, go to school, and how did you come to live in the SC Midlands today? You live in Forest Acres, right?
STEELE: Thanks so much for inviting me. I was born in Detroit, where my grandfather, an immigrant from Czechoslavakia, was Henry Ford’s secretary, and my grandmother, the oldest daughter of Irish immigrants, helped take care of me while my mom was in college when I was a baby. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Winona, Minnesota, before moving to Reston, Virginia, a progressive, planned community outside Washington, D.C., when I was 12. I went to high school at Immaculata on Tenley Circle, which was an all-female Catholic school run by the Sisters of Providence, an experience that is still very important to me today. I settled in Columbia after finishing my Ph.D. at Emory in 1996. I was married to a professor at USC and we raised two girls together, and I have lived with my wife in Forest Acres for six years now.
JASPER: How long were you in academics and what made you leave the academy to write full time?
STEELE: I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels from 1991 until 2008 – in English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs at several institutions. I love teaching and I still teach but in a different capacity now, working with women academics and educators from around the world through my coaching business.
As an adjunct for that many years, I had an insider’s view to the inequalities of power and the ways academe reinforces those, especially for women and people of color. I use this to help women academics navigate those treacherous waters and still do the writing and teaching that they care about.
JASPER: You have published quite a few books – can you tell us about them – a chronological listing of your publications would be fabulous.
STEELE: The ReSisters. A #1 bestselling LGBT YA novel about an indigenous teen who decides to try to kill the president after her mother is taken to a detention center, with art by Amy Alley. All Things That Matter Press, 2018.
Tongues in Trees: Poetry 1994-2017. Collected poems published since 1994, plus new poems with #resist and #metoo themes. Unbound Content, 2017.
Beautiful Waters. Poetry about lesbianism, love, and marriage. Finishing Line Press, 2017.
Earth Joy Writing: Finding Balance through Journaling and Nature. Experiential practices, ecofeminist reflections, and writing prompts. Ashland Creek Publishing, 2015.
Wednesday. Poems co-created on Facebook each Wednesday since 2010 with over 300 Facebook friends from around the world. Unbound Content, 2013.
The Pomegranate Papers. Twenty years of poetry about marriage, mothering, and creativity. Unbound Content, 2012.
This is how honey runs. Poetry based on work with clients using writing as a way of healing, finding balance, and empowering oneself creatively. Unbound Content, 2010.
Shamrock and Lotus. Novel set in Ireland, India, and the United States, about the way mothers and daughters can heal from histories of colonization and globalization through renewed connections to each other and the land. All Things That Matter Press, 2010.
Easyhard: Reflections on the Practice of Creativity. Thirteen lessons on overcoming doubt and fear and living a creative life. WordClay, 2009.
My Peace: A Year of Yoga at Amsa Studios. Lyrical essays on the connections between yoga practice and achieving healing and peace in life. WordClay, 2008.
Ruin. Poems about loss and recovery based on work using writing as a way of healing, which Marjory Wentworth, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, called “A beautiful book: courageous, spiritual, and timeless.” New Women’s Voices Series by Finishing Line Press, 2004.
We Heal From Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa and the Poetry of Witness. A scholarly study of how the writing of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa bears witness to and provides visions of healing from multicultural American traumatic histories, both individual and collective. Palgrave, 2000.
Moon Days: Creative Writings about Menstruation. An edited collection of creative writings and art about menstruation. Personal narratives, short stories, and poetry selections that move from reflections on first experiences to visions of spiritual celebration and reclamation. Summerhouse Press, 1999. Distributed by Ash Tree Publishing.
JASPER: This is the place where we make you crazy by asking you to name your top one or two favorites of your books and tell us why you are most proud of them.
STEELE: It would perhaps surprise you to know that I think We Heal from Memory is my most important book. I trace the legacies of our national collective traumas in that book – colonization, slavery, and sexual violence against women and girls – and walk readers through how poetry can be a way of witnessing to and healing from these legacies. I think, even though it was published 20 years ago, that many people are just now able to begin hearing what that book had to say.
JASPER: From social media it looks like you and your wife, Susanne Kappler, have really gone back to the land. Did this start before COVID-19 or as a reaction to the pandemic? Can you tell us about your little Eden and how you’ve spent your non-writing time since March?
STEELE: Oh, my goodness, this is one of the things that brings me the most joy in life! We had chickens and a garden before the pandemic but we’ve basically doubled down on providing for ourselves since March. We don’t have a lot of land and we live in a very modest neighborhood, but we make the most of what we have with a vegetable garden in the front yard (our long-term vision is that we can grow enough that this can be a place where neighbors can harvest what they need), and three chickens in the back yard who give us fresh eggs, and the cutest dog in the world who sleeps next to me while I meditate and write and work every day.
I won’t say that being in quarantine has been easy, but it has been filled with joy knowing that we are cooking food from scratch and brewing beer using ingredients we harvested in our own yard and being grateful for what is here, right now, because we are alive and working -- and working in a way that upholds our vision of sustainability and gratitude for the abundance of the earth.
JASPER: What have you missed about the World Out There during our sheltering-in period?
STEELE: I used to love to go out to dinner! It was my go-to treat when I’d had a hard day or something was stressful or I just needed a date night with my wife. You know what? I didn’t really need it after all. We have found that when we’re both working from home and I can spend time cooking in the morning and she can brew on the weekends, then our dinners on the back porch are as fun as anything served to us somewhere else.
JASPER: Is there anything you have come to love tremendously during this time?
STEELE: I have come to love South Carolina in a new way. Every Friday morning, I take a drive with my dog to a state park or heritage preserve and we walk, mostly without seeing any other humans, up and down hills and next to rivers and through swamps and over creeks and sometimes off trail. The land here remembers so much. It’s beautiful. It has stories to tell.
Premo Steele with wife Suzanne Kappler
JASPER: Now, professionally, can you talk about how the pandemic has affected your work life? Have you been more or less productive? Are there any new projects you can tell us about?
STEELE: Well, honestly, I don’t like the word productive. We are not products. Art is not a product. I would say my writing methods are the same, but the intensity and depth of them is deeper.
I know I just said, “the depth is deeper,” and that bothered me, so I looked up alternate words for “deeper” and found these: bottomless, unfathomable, mysterious, serious, pressing, graver. I think that about sums up the multifarious ways this pandemic has affected my writing—and I’ve been writing both poetry and memoir this year.
And of course, I keep a journal and write by hand every day. I was recently looking through one of my journals from a couple months ago and I found an entry where I was heartbroken that the US had suffered 7000 deaths from Covid.
“Three times as many as 9/11!” I wrote. “And it’s as if no one cares or can really deal with it.”
Now we’ve passed 160,000 deaths. That’s what I mean by graver.
JASPER: What’s next for you as an author?
STEELE: Who knows, you know? One of the things I’ve learned from all this is that there’s very little under our control as humans. We must work with each other and with the earth in harmonious, healing, and honestly, hard ways if we are to survive.
I don’t just mean survive Covid. I mean life on earth, life in this nation, especially for people who are not white, Cis, hetero, males, is very, very hard, and we must be strong enough to find new ways to survive together or not at all.
I hope my writing helps people do that in some small way.
JASPER: Where can our readers find more of your work and where can they purchase copies of your books?
STEELE: All of my books are available online, and people can visit www.cassiepremosteele.com if they want to read excerpts. I also have a series of audio coaching lessons called Joywork that I made available for free on Insight Timer when the pandemic started. [The link for that is http://insig.ht/cassiepremosteele ]
JASPER: Is there anything we didn’t ask you that you’d like to share with our readers? Any advice or wisdom to pass along?
STEELE: Life is very beautiful, and very, very short. Who do you want to love? How to you want to live? What work do you want to do? What legacy do you want to leave? What brings you joy? Go do it. Now.
JASPER: Could we possibly prevail upon you to share a piece or two of your recent work with us?
STEELE: Sure! Here are two recent poems.
Butterflies on the Floor
I saw butterflies once on the floor,
swampy Sunday morning forest, startled
them as they were eating down below
and something dead was sweet
to them, they piled on the wet
carcass like children playing
with a cadaver as children
do when they are starved for
life and their hunger goes deeper
than the body into a kind of
morbidity and pornography
and I felt ashamed for even
seeing this as if it were my
guilt I carried inside me most
moments that had spilled
outside me and I wanted to turn
away or even pretend I had
not seen it but I couldn’t because
the woman I love was with me and
I heard her gasp, “How beautiful.”
What I Love About Lesbian
is the island of love in it, the Sappho and
fragments on papyrus, the skin of words
and the she. Moonlight, goddesses, spring
flowers, women’s bodies. The be in the middle
syllable. I will be. You will be. She will be.
They will be. Morphing and transforming
like menses and moon cycles and tides into
I be, you be, she be, they be, we be.
The we of it. The smallness that can only
be seen when you get skin to skin, eyelashes
fluttering, and you notice her lips get bigger
and darker as you come in for a kiss. The les
of the we. The let’s. The less patriarchy, less
male gaze, less misogyny, less gynophobia,
less frat boy drunken haze. The lez, and les,
with a French pronunciation, les girls,
les femmes, les sorcières, les poètes
les philosophes, les mères, les soeurs.
The lay of it, like eggs, like rugs, like soft
round things that lay themselves down
close to the ground, like thighs. Hers
and mine. And the final syllable, an—
as in an opening, an affection, an emotion,
an ideal, an uncovering. The word âne
in French also means donkey, as in ass,
as in what we show to those who disrespect
us as we walk away, and what we watch as
she sidles up to the bar or home base or the
podium or the microphone or the courtroom
or the boardroom or the surgery floor,
taking charge, giving orders calling shots,
making plans, changing laws, changing
lives, saving bodies and so much more.
Lesbian is woman and full and curve and
wave and the too muchness of moon
and earth and ocean pulling on each other
with love and gravity, and no wonder
it came from an island because we are
indeed separate and green and lush and
fertile with our sweet scent of possibility.