Reader Meet Author: Kristina Marie Darling

Man vs. Woman, I imagine it could all boil down to genetics, but I like to think it is more profound than that. No matter how long you have known each other there is always a lack of communication between men and women. More than communication it is a lack of understanding that manages to find its way into the middle of relationships. Until I started reading the work of St. Louis' Kristina Marie Darling I felt that men didn't understand because they didn't take the time, but now I see it a little differently.

Kristina's work tends to focus on the internal struggle of the female. She uses the day to day details of life and love to explore the nuances of the female mind. She covers romance, fear, respect, as she allows her characters to grow and experience. It's rather remarkable to capture so much in the confines of a poem.

Recently, Kristina was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

Orange Alert (OA): Your writing seems to address an interesting conflict that as a male I can't fully or accurately comprehend. It is the struggle between romance and power or perhaps respect. Is that an accurate statement? There is level of romance and wistfulness, but with an undercurrent of rippling demands that sooner or later surface.
Kristina Marie Darling (KMD): That's a very accurate statement, especially when thinking about my recent chapbooks of prose poems from BlazeVox Books and Gold Wake Press. Since I first started writing poetry, I've been fascinated by contemporary, often untraditional variations on the love lyric, and the ways that old forms and narratives can be experimented with. While I'd have to agree that this tension between romance and respect is more germane to the female experience, I like to think that revising long-standing literary conventions to reflect modern life is a much more universal concern, something almost anyone can relate to.

OA: Do you feel the suburban Midwestern experience can be just as noteworthy as the Brooklyn or Hollywood experience?
KMD: I've always thought of Brooklyn and Hollywood as places where extraordinary experiences--such as great theatre or warm weather in October--become everyday ones. The Midwest, though, is all about learning to appreciate the ordinary, and trying to make something remarkable out of strip malls or neighborhood barbeques. In this sense, places like Missouri and Nebraska challenge the imagination, and that's what's great about them. One's time there can be whatever one chooses to make of it.

OA: What role does your background play in your fiction and poetry?
KMD: Although I identify as a liberal, a feminist, and a number of other things, I think that my suburban Midwestern background has been a formative influence on my writing. In my prose especially, I gravitate toward mundane experiences, such as working a part-time job at Target, yo-yo dieting, and dating self-styled tortured artists. This fascination with the everyday, and, more importantly, the way it becomes suddenly strange when viewed from the right angle, is definitely something that's informed by growing up in the suburbs of Missouri. I remember discovering as a young person that however normal someone or something seems, almost everything has its quirks. And as a writer, I've found that these oddities are some of the most fun things to imagine and convey to readers.

OA: You seem to have a healthy respect for the chapbook, but I feel all too often poets tend to take the chap for granite. How do you feel the chapbook is viewed currently?
KMD: I feel that the great majority of poets view the chapbook as a means to an end, merely a stepping stone to a full-length collection. But it's so disappointing to open a volume of poems and find work that's mostly been recycled from a shorter book. Contemporary writers definitely need to appreciate chapbooks as an art form in themselves, one that allows for great flexibility and experimentation.

As someone who works primarily with these types of smaller projects, they've allowed me to constantly reinvent my genre, style, and subject matter, something that's not usually possible when one reasons in terms of full-length books. I like to think of the chapbook as a space in which writers can try on different voices and literary forms, but not necessarily commit to them for the duration of a longer project. And it's this ephemeral quality that makes them so appealing, for me at least.

OA: You also write reviews. Do you ever visualize yourself reading the review as you write or is there a certain disconnect that needs to take place?
KMD: When writing any kind of literary criticism, I find it's very important to think about how the piece would sound to possible readers as one constructs it. Although one's interpretation of the text matters, a critic's job is also to convey this point of view to an audience in a memorable way. I've always thought a review or literary essay should be just as engaging as a well-written story or poem, and in order to achieve this, it's definitely useful to consider how one's sentences, tone, and diction will be perceived by a potential reader as one writes.

With that in mind, I'd have to say I think of literary criticism as being a lot like other types of nonfiction, rather than a purely academic endeavor. This kind of perspective allows for attention to craft as well as experimentation and some creativity, all of which are components of a good review or literary essay.

OA: What's next for Kristina Marie Darling?
KMD: I'm getting ready to start a master's degree in continental philosophy this fall, and am also hoping to put together a full-length collection of prose poems. This summer, I'm heading to Salem Art Works in upstate New York and the Prairie Center for the Arts in Peoria, Illinois to work on the book, which is very exciting. Given my background in writing chapbooks, though, I'm hoping not to end up with three or four smaller projects instead of what I originally set out to do. I guess only time will tell.

Bonus Questions:
OA: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would it be?
KMD: As someone who's volunteered for a lot of small press publications, such as The Cordite Review, Stirring, and the storySouth Million Writers Award, I'm very interested to talk with other poets who do editorial work, especially about how their role in publishing informs their writing. With that in mind, I'd have to say Gina Abelkop. In addition to working on her own poetry, she edits Birds of Lace Press, which publishes beautifully crafted editions of books by women, as well as a feminist magazine called Finery. It would be great to discuss how one's own aesthetic informs the choices one makes as an editor, but also how these decisions tend to diverge in fascinating ways from one's own writing.

OA: What type of music do you enjoy and who are a few of your favorites?
KMD: Although I've been repeatedly told that I have bad taste in music, I'm still a huge fan of the Silversun Pickups, Strata, Interpol, and A.F.I. The majority of what I listen to would probably be considered indie rock, but I definitely take pride in being open-minded. I'm probably the only twenty-four year old who's seen Elton John in concert.

For more information on Kristina Marie Darling please visit her website.