C. B. McClintock

Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?

C. B. McClintock: The sequence of poems I am working on now—one of which is included in this issue—reacts and responds to ongoing social issues. In these poems, I attempt to examine the connection between naming and voice for women in general and married women in particular. The social convention of referring to women by their husbands’ surnames represents, in many ways, a legacy of erasure and silencing, so in my poems I imagined women speaking out from underneath these names to reflect on themes of identity, self, and creation. Certainly, the idea of a woman finding her individual voice is very relevant in the year we are celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage, when women refused to accept the idea that they were “covered” by their husbands’ votes.

ORP: If you could add a prelude, an epilogue, or an addendum to your piece, what would it say?

CBM: I recently rediscovered a Virginia Woolf quote (from her novel The Waves) that I initially came across while writing my dissertation: "How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there.” This seems to be a time where many of us are wondering how light can return to the world; the idea of being temporarily eclipsed by something is certainly part of what I am trying to get at it. So yes, I think I’d use this.

ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?

CBM: A sense of empathy and the possibility of empowerment.

ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?

CBM: I think the pandemic has really helped me appreciate the generosity of art—both in those who create it and those who work hard to distribute and amplify it. It seemed to me that artists began to make their work—and themselves—available to people during the pandemic both as an act of generosity and because they implicitly understood that art has the power to soothe, console, to make plain the enduring ideals that connect us. And that art represents a movement toward beauty, which is what a hurting world needs.

ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?

CBM: An impossible question, of course, and one whose answer would change depending on the day I answered it. But here goes. I’ll choose among the living: I’d love to be friends with/mentored by Madeline Miller, Jenny Offill, and Bernardine Evaristo. The Song of Achilles is one of my all-time favorite novels and just devastated me with its beauty and narrative power. Evaristo makes writing novels that are simultaneously a joy to read but also brilliantly layered and deftly structured look easy. And Jenny Offill can’t write novels fast enough for me. I’ve never related to narrators more fully than I have hers. These three contemporary writers make me feel excited for the future of the novel, and who wouldn’t want friends like that?

ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?

CBM: I like Colum McCann’s idea of writing toward what you don’t know, in that I think a sense of humility and hungry curiosity are some of the best qualities a writer can have. I also find the idea of the habit of art a helpful one; it takes the pressure of being perpetually divinely inspired off of the writer and instead acts as a reminder that cultivating the habit of writing, while much humbler, is just as important as, if not more important than, a brilliant idea.

By day, C. B. McClintock is a professor of literature and women's studies and has been for fifteen years; by night she is a writer working in various genres. Most of her publications up until now have been academic in nature, though she has had several monologues published by Heinemann and performed internationally. Her academic work in literature and women's studies strongly influences the poem published in this issue, which identifies the woman only by her husband's name but give her a private voice from underneath this name. She is grateful for the opportunity to share it here. McClintock can be found on instagram @c.b.mcclintock. Listen to her read her poetry here.