Q&A with Mary Fontana

After reading Mary Fontana's poems "Astronaut" and "Gharial", as well as learning about her fascinating background in Immunology, we simply had to learn more about her writing process. Julian Kanagy, our hard-working Editor-in-Chief and poetry fanatic, learns more about the origins of her poetry, as well as the life that inspires it.

I loved the imagery throughout "Astronaut," and found myself endlessly entertained by the image of a voyaging baby floating in the vacuum of space, as well as by your image of the baby as a tumbling stone in a current, weightless and naive to the fact that it is being carried by its mother, "even as she fashioned the stone and the river." Did these images come to you over the course of years, as the narrative implies, or did you conjure them from reflecting on memory?

This poem took shape over five or six years, and many drafts. It took so long that it’s a little hard to piece together now, but I think the different elements came to me at different times. While I was pregnant with my first-born child (almost twelve years ago now) he felt very distant and mysterious and solitary to me—so physically close, floating beneath my rib cage, yet hidden from sight and touch. I think the idea of the astronaut came out of that feeling of distance and mystery. After he was born, he did love, to an almost absurd degree, to suck on his parents’ fingers, which gave me the poem’s starting point.

I didn’t begin to actually write the piece until my son was several years old. I think I needed a certain distance from the experience of early motherhood to be able to write something about it that was crafted and not just a diary of raw emotion. The image of the stone in the river came in that later more reflective period, when I was thinking about different places to take the poem and different ways to describe the mother-child relationship.

Could you tell us and our readers a bit more about the inspiration for "Gharial?"

During my graduate studies in infectious disease, I spent three months working in a research lab in Delhi, India. Visiting the Delhi zoo, I was taken by the gharials, crocodile-like creatures that live in the rivers of north-eastern India and Bangladesh. When they opened their jaws, the pure shining white of the insides of their mouths floored me. It was such a striking visual. I left the zoo thinking about how those shining white jaws would be the last thing some fish would ever see. Considered aesthetically, it’s a rather beautiful ending, but that’s presumably little comfort to the doomed fish.

Also in India I visited many solemn, lovely temples and places of worship—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh. And I travelled to the city of Varanasi and saw the burning ghats on the Ganges River where some faithful Hindus are cremated after death. The poem grew out of two images that became linked in my mind—the gharial’s jaws and those cremation fires on the banks of the Ganges. I wanted to explore connections between death and beauty, and how both of those intersect with rituals and sites of worship.

Do you find that your research background influences and informs your poetry?

Yes, absolutely. I see a lot of similarities between the scientific process and the generation of a poem. In both cases, I often start by observing something closely and trying to describe it. Then I step back and try to find a pattern, a bigger picture that reveals something true about life and its workings. Both parts are essential—the detailed description and the more removed analysis—in order to achieve a discovery, or perhaps an epiphany, that feels both universal and substantiated.

My scientific training shapes my writing in other ways, too. I don’t write many poems that reflect the laboratory—which is where I’ve spent most of my scientific career—but I do often write about the natural world, and I like to incorporate natural history to bring out the “character” of trees, rivers, birds and the like. For example, certain mangroves (trees which grow in brackish water along coastlines) get rid of excess salt by secreting drops of saltwater onto their leaves. I find that so evocative—trees that cry. Sometimes scientific knowledge about an organism can make it seem more human, more like us; sometimes it makes them seem utterly alien or fantastical. Either way, it makes our world a bigger, closer, wilder, more fascinating place.

Are "Astronaut" and "Gharial" parts of a larger body of work, or do they stand alone?

I hope they stand alone! They’re not explicitly parts of any series. But I have written a loose constellation of poems about motherhood, including “Astronaut,” and another constellation about death and dying, where I think “Gharial” fits. I’m currently arranging a full-length collection, and it’s been interesting to put poems like these two in conversation with each other and see what emerges—all the links between birth and death, and the tenderness with which we human beings can experience both.

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Mary Fontana

Mary Fontana grew up in central Washington state and trained as a malaria immunologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Rust + Moth, Kestrel, SWWIM Everyday, Moss, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

Julian Kanagy

Julian Kanagy is a poet and editor whose work sets out to explore questions he can't find other means of asking. He reads, writes, and lives alongside his kitten, Pippi, in Chicago. Both as an editor and in writing his own poetry, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and structural variety. Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.