Over the course of our Spring 2026 semester, our undergraduate interns had the opportunity to contribute to The Iowa Review‘s online publication, Switchgrass. Here, current University of Iowa student Ilianu Banu interviews previous contributor Maxine Scates (51/1, Spring 2021).
Iliana Banu/The Iowa Review: I’d like to start by discussing your poem “Animal,” which was published in issue 51/1 of TIR. Where did this piece begin? Is there a particular image or line that feels central for you?
Maxine Scates: When I look back at my first draft of “Animal,” I’m not surprised to find that it began with the owls and the bobcat kit and the woman, Annette Lorraine Montero, who had died so horribly. The latter two events had happened in the town where I live, Eugene, Oregon, and the newspaper article was about what was taking place in the Northwest. (The killing of Barred Owls remains controversial—but according to the Eugene Register Guard “more than 2,400 barred owls (were) killed so far in a controversial experiment” which preceded the program still being proposed.) I remember all of these events as happening almost simultaneously. The lines I think of as being central for me come toward the end of the poem regarding children: “the most human of human beings,/ or maybe it all depends on what we mean/ by human, and maybe children are not human yet” which I hope convey the sense that learning to be “human“ involves what we choose to know and how it excludes what we would rather not know. I think this is what I didn’t know when I began to write the poem, and what the poem taught me.
TIR: “Animal” was published around the same time as your most recent collection of poetry, My Wilderness. Both works feel grounded in the natural world and human relationships, often with an awareness of their transience. Was “Animal” written as you were developing My Wilderness? How do you see “Animal” fitting into your larger body of work?
MS: No, “Animal” was not written while I was finishing My Wilderness, but it was written later the same year, 2019, and looking back I find that of the poems I was writing post My Wilderness it is the only one that survives in my current manuscript, “To You.” Moreover, it was originally called “Animal” so, as your question suggests, it was an important poem for me, one of those watershed poems that gathers and predicts what might come next, and is, as a matter of fact, the central poem in the section of “To You” which explores cruelty and what it says about a culture that both perpetrates and ignores that cruelty to children and animals and those living on the margins.
TIR: My Wilderness opens with a quote from Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Wheel is in the Dark.” I’d love to know more about why you chose this quote in particular—what drew you to this poem as an epigraph? Are there any other writers or works that informed this collection?
MS: Well, I thought about using all of the first stanza, but I thought that one line with its exclamation point had everything to say about how My Wilderness came to be. Unlike my previous books, it was a collection that came together rather quickly, and the last half of it was written out of the immediate grief I felt in losing my dearest friend, Brigit Pegeen Kelly in 2016 and my mother, Lucy Scates, in 2018. My mother was 100 but that made it no easier to let her go after sixty-eight years, and witnessing her last months and days was what I needed and was compelled to do. As for an influence, I had spent most of my writing life sharing my work with Brigit. And because we had always shared our work and since a number of poems are addressed or refer to her, Brigit’s presence in the poems and my consciousness was something I often felt while trying to speak to her loss—even as it was a way to continue to talk to her after she had gone. My wheel was in the dark and writing those poems led me out.
TIR: My Wilderness explores both natural landscapes and human-centered interactions with memory, grief, and violence. I’m curious about how you see “wilderness” functioning in this context—is it both internal and external, physical and emotional? How do you navigate the connection between these two realms?
MS: The title poem, “My Wilderness” was written in 2014, an attempt to embody the wilderness of my own making where my partner and I have been privileged to live for the last fifty years in our home among firs and maples and dwindling oaks, and the rhododendrons and shade roses which sprawl everywhere. On spring days like this one, I look out the window and cannot see the sky, the space around our house a welter of blooming I cannot contain—nor would I wish to. That said, it may help to know that I grew up in a GI Loan housing tract a mile from LAX where as long as my father lived with us the violence within my own household was frequent and morality or purpose was muddled. Metaphorically, my wilderness has over the years closed around me as a sanctuary and let me live a peaceful life—which has allowed me to negotiate both past and present. In its use as title of my book, I was writing out of a depth of grief I had not experienced before, an emotional landscape that was both unfamiliar and one I had to enter. Used in this way, I’d like to think my use of wilderness affirms possibility and renewal rather than the familiar, colonial usage of wilderness in American history—which insists on conquering what it does not know whether it be the land itself or the Indigenous Peoples whose land this was.
TIR: Your work often engages with memory and reflection. What advice would you give to emerging writers working within this landscape?
MS: I guess what I would say is that it’s always much better to listen to your subjects rather than insist what your subjects might be. By which I mean, it’s not that I have found my subjects over the years, but that they have found me. If anything, what I have learned is to listen for who or what wants to be said. My family, the way we lived, has always haunted me, not only by who they were, but how I left them. I don’t always return to them willingly, but I have learned to recognize that I need to when memory insists. That consideration is not simply personal but has allowed me a greater breadth that reaches beyond my immediate experience. To listen to what wants to be said. Easy enough for me to say, but it took a long time to learn that because there are so many other voices in our heads telling us what we ought to be writing about or how we ought to be writing it. Now, more than ever, your voices, who and what speaks to and through you matters.
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Maxine Scates is the author of My Wilderness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021); Undone (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011); Black Loam (WordTech Communications, 2005); and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). Scates is the recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, the Lyre Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and from Literary Arts. A former poetry editor of Northwest Review, Scates taught poetry at Lane Community College, Lewis and Clark College, and Reed College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, on Kalapuya land.
Iliana Banu is an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa majoring in English on the Publishing Track.
