THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2019 // 5
in the fishing industry your whole life.
What does this life mean to you and
how does it inspire your work?
SG: My dad is a commercial fisher-
man, and so I did grow up around fishing.
When I was in college, I started work-
ing summers on my dad’s boat as a deck-
hand. I worked my way through college
and grad school and then a little longer,
eight summers in total. When I was a kid,
I liked fishing, but I didn’t realize it was
special. When I did it in college, I think
I sort of fell in love with it. It felt like
the most real thing I could do. I liked the
physical sensations of fishing: the exhaus-
tion, waking up to sunlight streaming onto
my bunk, the heat of the diesel stove on a
cold day, savoring a bad meal that tastes
good because you’re so hungry, the way
jellies jiggle in your hand … and I liked
the sense of contentment I felt living sim-
ply on a boat.
Fishing gave me a lens through which
to see the world, and it felt a little dif-
ferent than what most people see, so I
guess it inspired me to try to share a sliver
of what I experienced with other peo-
ple, though it wasn’t so conscious as that.
Mostly, I enjoyed writing and what I
seemed to write about was fishing.
If I was, at one point, in love with fish-
ing, we’ve since gone through a diffi-
cult breakup. I quit working on the boat in
2013 and was, at first, pretty pleased to be
taking a break. Now I miss it in my bones.
I’m not yet sure if I’ll fish again or not,
but either way fishing was and always will
be a profoundly formative part of my life.
CW: Many of your poems, like “Gra-
cias,” seem to follow the path from the
external — physical labor, the elements,
especially the mercurial nature of the
sea — to the internal, a personal reve-
lation, like the last lines from that same
poem:
I wish on milky scales stuck like stars
to their neoprene green pants
that I never have to leave here, never
have to weave a home in some far-
flung place,
dreaming my family together while
I work a job no one wants.
How does the physical toll of the
fishing industry lead you to
introspection?
SG: The thing people often say is that
physical work gives you a lot of time to
think, which is true to an extent, but I
wasn’t usually thinking of poems while
I worked. I think more so what led me
to introspection was feeling completely
absorbed in a way of working and living
that I loved. Loving something made me
want to ask how and why and look at it
from different angles and challenge it and
test it to make sure it was true.
Tyler Jones
In Southeast Alaska, Sierra Golden holds a king salmon on her father’s boat, the F/V Challenger, a commercial salmon seiner. Golden spent
eight summers working on the boat as a deckhand and many more weeks “vacationing” as a kid and as a adult (which pretty much means she
worked, she said).
CW: Where do you do most of your
writing? On land or on sea?
SG: Writing is a long process, so it’s
hard to say exactly where I do my writing,
but the simplified answer is that for this
book, I collected my images and stories
on water and I did the pen-to-paper writ-
ing on land.
CW: How are the poems arranged
in the book? Linearly? Thematically?
What would you say is the organiza-
tional principle of dividing the book
into three parts?
SG: I think I rearranged this book at
least 50 times! There’s no intentional
chronology or plot to the poems, as I
wrote most of them as discreet entities
with lots of different voices and char-
acters. Yet, as I arranged them, I also
wanted them to somehow grow or build
on each other thematically. I spent a few
years arranging poems around the wrong
theme — then I realized what the book
was actually about. Sometimes, I would
get the first half of the book right. Always,
though, the second half would just fall
apart. When I arrived to the book as it
is now, I was relieved to find that it has
some kind of ending, and I just went with
it.
The way I was thinking about it while
arranging poems, the first section intro-
duces the reader to the themes of the book
and then troubles those themes, raising
questions. The second section then picks
up on that troubling. It’s the darkest sec-
tion, and the poems deal with hard issues.
The third section is a relief from that —
and also shows, hopefully, some growth
or change in the way the speakers talk
about love.
CW: Having participated in the
FisherPoets Gathering before, what is
your favorite thing about it?
SG: My favorite thing about the Fish-
erPoets Gathering is the clear sense I get
that poetry matters. It’s a fun weekend —
full of friends and food and beer — but
the thing that keeps me coming back is the
little web of magic we spin each February.
It’s a way to create meaning out of our
lives, celebrate the good parts and chal-
lenge the rough parts.
Golden will be reading her work at the
Liberty Theatre at 9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 22,
and at the Voodoo Room at 9 p.m. Satur-
day, Feb. 23, where she will be the emcee
all evening. “The Slow Art” will be for
sale at the FisherPoets’ Gearshack at
1312 Commercial St. and is also available
for purchase online at bearstarpress.com
and Amazon. CW
Sierra Golden
The cover of Sierra Golden’s ‘The Slow Art’
features a photo of trawl nets in Western
Alaska taken by Corey Arnold and titled
‘Entrapment.’