In the mid-November 2020, I had the pleasure of sharing an email thread with Christopher X. Shade—a teacher, poet, and author. His most recent publication, Shield the Joyous is a book of poetry centered around deep grief, love, and the space in between the two. Christopher teaches at The Writers Studio and co-founded the literary journal Cagibi. His involvement in the mid 2000’s resurrection of 12th Street is amazing, and a lot of the work he did on our journal has helped to set the current precedent which we publish by.
12th STREET: In terms of grief and dealing with grief, what is your understanding of belonging, humor, isolation, and the part they play in the process of healing?
SHADE: I love this question. I see something of poetry in the structure of the question. The juxtaposition of belonging, humor, and isolation—the togetherness of these three—resonates with me as a moving way of lifting ideas right up off the page about what makes us tick. Because for each of us there is belonging alongside isolation, and humor has a special bond between them. Humor can carry us from dark isolation to joyful belonging. Belonging is of joy, and isolation the opposite—isolation is manifest peril, very much so for those who suffer addiction. I grew up in small-town Alabama. We were a mom and four kids whose early years were interrupted by the deep trauma of loss—my dad was killed when I was two. To this day in my family, we hold each other close with the deepset fear that we might lose another of us. All of my childhood, I was laughing and entertaining the others. I longed to make them feel joy. At a very early age, instinctively I recognized that humor distanced the pain. On Christmas in 2017, the loss of my baby brother Matthew, a half brother many years younger, was a loss that unknown to me at the time gathered in its arms all the other losses I’ve experienced and the fear and dread of more. I made expressions of that deepfelt loss and pain in poetry, on monastic retreats, all of which came together in this book Shield the Joyous. And many times I reached for humor in the poems. I would like to say that this process has been one of healing, but I feel so far from healed that I wonder if healing is even possible. Sometimes I think healing is simply to have hope that it is possible to feel less pain, so that I may cope enough to do more work out in the world.
STREET: What sorts of books line the shelves of a Catholic monastery? Are there any surprises?
SHADE: At the monastery they have a library, in the enclosure, of over twenty thousand books. Incredible! So many books! Though when I say it’s in the enclosure, I mean that it’s off limits. When I stay at the guest house, anything within the enclosure is off limits. So I have only ever heard about the library. I mailed them both of my books, and they are glad to have them on their shelves. I wonder who I have the privilege of standing next to—maybe call numbers with the letter S, and I stand next to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
STREET: How the monastic tradition of prayer/meditation stayed with you?
SHADE: One day I was with a dear friend of mine who is yoga teacher, author, editor, East Villager, and she pointed to a young man who I think was serving tables, and she said, “He meditates.” And it seemed clear to me, too, that he meditates, and his inner work had stayed with him. He seemed steady, even-keeled. If only I could approach my own daily life this way—if only I could approach my writing this way, as ever steady and even-keeled, carrying the monastic meditative experience with me. But it’s more the case that I feel the opposite, my mind tossing on the ocean. I do meditate every morning. I’ve been doing this for years now, and lately I post on social media a focus of “today’s meditation” with the hope that it may inspire others to do this difficult work of sitting. It’s the most difficult work I’ve ever done. I’ve spent most of my life missing the point, feeling that inner work was simply not the best use of my time, that working outward was all that was important.
STREET: What is today’s meditation?
SHADE: My latest “today’s meditation” is, “Being with friends is a medicine on the spirit, giving us a perspective on ourselves and our burdens.” Simple words to reflect on and carry with you today. This one rings true in this holiday season, given how challenging it is during this pandemic time to be with friends—while actually not with them. I was also thinking about books here—books as friends, books as a medicine on the spirit in this way. Reading often leads me to a Today’s Meditation—books like David Whyte’s Pilgrim, John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara, Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude, Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, and really any reading.
My latest “today’s meditation” is, “Being with friends is a medicine on the spirit, giving us a perspective on ourselves and our burdens.”
STREET: Of all the places you’ve lived- where do you consider home? How important is location to your idea of home?
SHADE: I guess because I have lived in so many places—from small-town Alabama to Colorado to New York City, and now during these tragic pandemic times away from NYC, taking refuge in rural Vermont and New Hampshire—I’ve come to think of home as a shapeshifter in my embrace. Just when I think I have my arms around her, nothing is as it was. Impossible! So what does it take to belong? As I write new poems—a working title of Vermont Diaries for a next book of poems—as I write these, I’m “at sea”. . . with not even the sea here to offer the soulful solace that it does at its shores. Maybe I should be seaside instead of here, where I am writing you from, which is on a rural Vermont road where each day a white-bearded man wearing camo drives his ATV into the woods at the end of the road with a rifle on his lap. Do I belong here? What would it take to belong here? My novel The Good Mother of Marseille follows a woman named Noémie who longs for a sense of belonging in that tumultuous and often violent French port. That story ends on a hopeful note.
STREET: While working on 12th Street, was there a published piece or a bit of procedure that stayed with you?
SHADE: What a time that was! I am honored to have had my work appear in that first issue of 12th Street, in that year of 2008—so long ago! Working as a reader in those early 12th Street years. . . I remember the paper—so much paper—all the printed poetry and prose, and the personalities, the people and potentialities, the chemistry of editors in any moment, right or wrong, with the alluring ever present question of What does it take? and the fights, the makeups, the crushes, and the spunk and punk rock perspiration that made trailblazing possible. I remember the urgency—more than important, this was essential—we felt such pressure to do it right! Resurrecting a journal gone since the forties, passing through intersections that so many esteemed New School writers and thinkers had passed. Was such a dream even possible? We all learned that it was.
STREET: In your writing process, what determines if a work should be told in the form of fiction or poetry? Does expectation play into this?
SHADE: There is, certainly, a leap of faith that the reader will be engaged. I teach my students to reach for their own unique voice and style based on the literary canon — in other words, look closely at the most important and influential works of prose and poetry. The poems in Shield the Joyous are styled after the emotional fragility of James Wright, the clarity and groundedness of Levine, the fearlessness and depth of Auden, Larkin, Clifton, and so many others, the perseverance of Elliot, the devotion to material and tones of Anne Sexton. All to say, an aim of mine is to have many distinct influences on my work, so that I can do something as inspired as pull together a book, organize it, and underpin it with a resonant depth of meaning for both myself and the world of readers. Many teachers earlier in my life, whose teachings remain with me, stirred me to approach writing this way, with emotional vulnerability, intellectual rigor, and self-discipline—among them, notably Joseph Salvatore and Luis Jaramillo during my studies at The New School, and later Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio where I now teach. All to say, for me the form emerges. I no longer begin at form, though for most of my life I did. Now in fiction, I don’t know whether a story I begin will be a short story or a novel, or whether I will discover that it needs to be distilled down to a poem.
STREET: What are your favorite literary / poetic tools?
SHADE: Two of my favorite tools, broadly speaking, are reinvention and distancing—really, any distancing technique. I’ve become very interested in ways to help writers get out of their own way, as I’ve had to. I have found that sometimes I do lack a technical skill without realizing that I do, while more often I think it may be a technical skill that I lack, when it’s instead how I’m approaching the material. With my novel The Good Mother of Marseille, I reinvented its structure several times before I realized the frame, or narrative stance, of a compassionate, knowing, and shapeshifting narrator, across all the book’s chapters, who has the capacity to feel hope and love for the world despite the brutality we are capable of levying on ourselves. The most difficult part of writing, for me, is reinventing what I have done, to let go of what I believe it should be. And this is a reinvention of myself as an author, every time.
STREET: What draws you to a piece from the perspective of an editor?
SHADE: For one, stories that I feel have been authentically told. I find that in my own work it’s a mistake to aim for a feeling of authenticity in a story, because it almost always leads to writing from the neck up—too much thinking. . . and, not enough courage. Writers become very confident about their ability to “technique” their way to authenticity. But what truly does it require? There’s some mystery to this that is beyond us. Writing from the neck up is dispassionate, to the reader, or another way of saying it is that it is reaching to be empathic. As an editor this is usually quite evident, and very common. This is not to suggest that technique is less important. Everything is important. Everything has to come together and earn its own life and lift itself up from the page for us to behold in wonder.