TITLE: INTERVIEW : JUDY HUDDLESTON
AUTHOR: THE COLLAGIST
PUBLISHED: 10 DECEMBER 2009
AVAILABLE: The Collagist
Judy Huddleston's poem "Cold Motel Room" appears in the November 2009 issue of The Collagist. She received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts and her MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her memoir This is the End was published in 1991. She has recently completed her second memoir and first collection of poetry. She currently teaches Literature, Writing, Film and the Novel at Globe University in the Twin Cities.
The Collagist: Can you talk about the inspiration for "Cold Motel Room"? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?
Judy Huddleston: I’d focused on that feeling between lovers when a situation should be romantic, but isn’t, so it disappoints even more. Everything seems cold and small and wrong. At the time, it seems the definitive moment of truth. However, it’s often how memory filters the experience that we remember it. In this case, his dog might have been between us, but I suspect not.
The Collagist: "Cold Motel Room" at first struck me as a confessional poem, but I always worry about jumping to that conclusion, partly because, as a fiction writer, I'm acutely aware of the dangers of having every realistic story written in the first person assumed to be drawn from my own life. Is this a concern in your poetry, if your poems aren't pulled from personal experience? If this poem is, then perhaps a different question: How do you balance the artistic needs of the poem with any responsibility to the accuracy of your experience? Is there such a responsibility?
Judy Huddleston: Most of the prose poems in this collection, Isis Leaves Idaho, are confessional, which I find somewhat embarrassing but can’t much control. Because I’ve been involved with narrative nonfiction, I do believe there is a responsibility for accuracy. I tend toward it a less so in poetry, which by its nature exaggerates emotional states.
The Collagist: Like "Cold Motel Room," the other poems of yours I've seen have also been prose poems, a strain of poetry we at The Collagist seem to be publishing a lot of. What makes the prose poem the right form for you? What advantages does it have that other types don't?
Judy Huddleston: I veered toward prose poetry partly as a solution to the problem of artistic needs you just mentioned. I wanted the freedom to meld fiction with nonfiction in a short imagistic form that holds both sides. It’s a different flow not being so concerned with literal truth as in memoir or line form as in poetry. You can take stories into poems and poems into stories.
The Collagist: Your memoir This Is the End… My Only Friend, about your relationship with Jim Morrison, was published in 1991. You've just recently completed a second memoir, almost two decades later. Especially in non-fiction and memoir, I that a writer's perceptions of her own life—and what in it is most important to get onto the page—might change dramatically over time. How was writing the second memoir different than the first?
Judy Huddleston: Some things remain the same, though I’m decades older than the girl who wrote the first book, I’m most interested in portraying the psycho-sexual dynamics of female experience. My memory still snags on personal details, but I’m more concerned with cultural context. In White Lipstick I wrote back in past tense to the tomboy at twelve to understand how she became the seventeen-year-old narrating the first memoir. We have deep bodily memories that are extremely accurate; following them can lead to a kind of unvarnished truth.
The Collagist: What other writing projects are you currently working on?
Judy Huddleston: Aside from sending out White Lipstick and Isis leaves Idaho, I just rewrote an ekphrastic collection of poems called Bitter Sea, based on the narrative frescoes of Giotto in the Arena Chapel and Chapel of Mary Magdalene. I recently began a series of connected shorts about a fatal love triangle in the 1880’s. (Thankfully none of these are memoir.)
The Collagist: What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
Judy Huddleston: I’ve been teaching the Novel this quarter, a course focused on work from the 19th century. The one we’re reading now is Sea Wolf. I’m impressed by Jack London’s character Wolf; he’s complex, layered and paradoxical–the kind of compelling, cruel and brilliant sociopath we love to hate. Right now, I’m looking forward to reading Mary Karr’s and Louise Glück’s newest books.
