Chelsea B. DesAutels

Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books, Oct. 2021). Her work appears in the Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A Tin House Scholar and winner of the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review, Chelsea earned her MFA from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. Chelsea lives with her family in Minneapolis.

What brought you to writing in the first place?

Language itself brought me to writing. I remember being young—first grade, I think—and so pleased with the sound of a poem I’d written with rhyme and alliteration (though I wouldn’t have known the terminology). I wrote in college but didn’t return to writing seriously until, in the middle of another career and the first months of motherhood, I faced a significant health scare. At that point, writing my story was the only way I could wrap my arms around all that was happening. I was trying to face this tremendous upheaval, full of dread and gratitude, head on. I didn’t know how else to do that except poetry.

What is your writing life like? Do you write everyday or whenever inspiration strikes?

I write in spurts. There are months when writing just isn’t feasible. Then it becomes feasible again and I’ll try to write or revise a poem each day. This schedule works for me. It takes the pressure off the times I’m not writing.

Please share with me a poem you wish you had written. What in particular do you admire about it?

There are hundreds of poems I wish I’d written! This morning—one of the first cool, damp mornings of almost fall—I wish I’d written Sharon Olds’s “Station,” from her first book, Satan Says:

Coming in off the dock after writing,

I approached the house,

and saw your long grandee face

in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade

the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered

eyes found me on the lawn. You looked

as the lord looks down from a narrow window

and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no

hint of shyness you examined me,

the wife who runs out on the dock to write

as soon as one child is in bed,

leaving the other to you.

Your long

mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,

did not curve. We spent a long moment

in the truth of our situation, the poems

heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

I love how the poem exists in a single, quiet moment and simultaneously manages such emotional complexity. I study this poem to learn about image, expanding time, music, and syntax that holds small surprises.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Pema Chödrön and Simone Weil (both books by Weil and a book called Tough Enough by Deborah Nelson about Weil and other women writers and artists). As for poetry, I recently reread John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry and Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, and I’ve been reading a few poems from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton most days this summer.