An interview with Mary Ruefle

Conducted via typewriter and the postal service

Hey y’all,

Mary Ruefle is one of my very favorite writers. I first came to her through her “erasures” in A Little White Shadow, a 2006 book of poetry made by painting Wite-Out over most of the text in an old nineteenth-century book. I fell in love with her work when I read her collected lectures in 2012’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. Since then, I’ve read every book of hers I could get my hands on. Her latest is The Book, a prose followup to her poetry collection, Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. You can read a nice selection of her poems over at the Poetry Foundation website.

Ruefle doesn’t do Zoom interviews or use a computer, so we conducted this interview via our typewriters. I typed a bunch of questions on individual pieces of yellow paper and mailed them to her home in Bennington, Vermont. She typed her answers underneath and mailed them back to me:

See the family tree that Tom Phillips sent me.

Read more about Ruefle’s “Random Acts of Poetry” as Poet Laureate of Vermont.

What I didn’t mention is that my blog post about Ruefle’s On Imagination is actually what led Meghan to discover she had aphantasia!

The Caspar David Friedrich show is coming to The Met next year.

If you thought it was only for synonyms, too, I wrote a whole letter last year about Roget’s Thesaurus. (As to why she still reads her old Encyclopedia Britannica, Ruefle has said, “I would rather wonder than know.”)

When people ask Ruefle why she wastes time with the erasures, she has one of the greatest responses I’ve ever heard: “Because it’s fun and I love it. That’s why.”

A huge thank you to Mary Ruefle and to Catherine Bresner at Wave Books for making this happen!