AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Remember Every Ginseng Seed

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Remember Every Ginseng Seed.

There was this one time when I was on a walk with a friend, and I told him I was just so homesick. I’d been in the US for two years at that point, but it still felt like it was a visit that had gone on too long, and I wanted to go home and sleep in my own bed. And my friend said something I’ve been thinking about ever since. He said, “Everyone in America is homesick.” He may have been overstating it just a little bit, but I’ve come to understand what he means. Where I’m from, Belgium, you pretty much stay where you’re born. Here, you move. For college, for jobs, for love. Maybe everyone is homesick.

One poet who always feels the pull of home is Chelsea Harlan. She grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in an old chestnut log cabin deep in the forest, with a mom who knows every creek and tree stump and bird around her, and can tell you the backstory for each of her neighbors’ horses. And when you read the poems in Chelsea Harlan’s debut collection, Bright Shade, you’re right there with her, on that scraggly mountain side, picking wild chamomile, and you see how dear it all is to her, how infused with golden light. And yet, she too moved away. First to Charlottesville, then Brooklyn, California, and, about a year ago, New York State. That’s where she was when I sat down to talk to her. She was working at a very dreamy-looking tiny public library in the Catskills.

Helena de Groot: which sounds like a too-good-to-be true kind of writer’s life. Can you tell me what it’s like and if it is really so dreamy as I imagine it to be? Like, what are your days like? How did you get there?

Chelsea Harlan: Sure. Yeah. I would say it is too good to be true. My husband and I, we’ve kind of been bopping around here and there and everywhere for the last two years. We were out in California for a time on a few different farms. I spent some time down at my mom’s in Virginia, where I was living in a shed last spring and sort of throwing myself into a different kind of romance with writing. And we found ourselves back up this way last summer, originally for a cousin’s wedding, but we kind of just stuck around. And yeah, I don’t think either of us really expected to be here for as long as we have, which is really just a year and some change. And I was looking for part time jobs last fall, and have always thought it sounded like fun to work in a library. And I’d always loved the idea of like Philip Larkin was a librarian and happened to write many of his poems working behind the circulation desk. And yeah, it’s a long story, but we had a pretty terrible director, and in the last six months or so, there was a library revolution. We succeeded in overthrowing this person. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Chelsea Harlan: Which sounds really bad. And I guess I just never expected that, you know, within the world of a little library that there could be this kind of drama.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chelsea Harlan: But then I’m realizing, like, maybe that’s why I joined in the first place is the intrigue,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Chelsea Harlan: you know, the sort of, yeah, the dust on the spines of all these books. And it has been really lovely. And so I have found myself in the position of interim director, and

Helena de Groot: Oh! I was just going to ask, so who is the director now? It’s you! (LAUGHS)

Chelsea Harlan: (LAUGHS) Right, it’s me. Which is particularly sort of Shakespearean, or I’m now sort of faced with the high stakes of, you know, what, what happens if I’m the—

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chelsea Harlan: What happens, you know, now that I have this power. And will it

Helena de Groot: Will it corrupt you?

Chelsea Harlan: Will it corrupt me? Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chelsea Harlan: Time will tell.

Helena de Groot: What do you think? So far?