Intervening Absence

Carrie Olivia Adams

An extended bio from the author

 

 

I was born the only child of a fireman and a school teacher in Staten Island, New York in 1979. Having no other siblings and being very much shy of the world beyond my driveway, I began to cultivate the habits that sustain me today—spying out windows, chatting to myself aloud, and imagining myself interacting with the characters in books I read—not becoming them, but writing myself into the story. It was a very social world of one.

At the age of eleven, I was packed into a car and moved across the Appalachian Mountains and below the Mason-Dixon Line to a 60-acre farm in Kentucky, where I lived through high school. My driveway alone was now longer than two city blocks. I tried very hard. I wore cowboy boots. I learned to ride horses. One summer, my mother and I bottle-fed Holstein calves and sold them in the fall at the stockyard. But meanwhile, in the seventh grade, I memorized Whitman, Poe, whatever I uncovered in old teaching books of my mother’s. But thinking that they were indicative of how poetry should be and knowing the cadence of my own thoughts, I decided at first that I could not write poems, so I simply read and recited in great quantity. Later, I devoured Hemingway and began to wonder how one makes a life as a writer. He was a journalist, I read; so I was editor of the high school newspaper and a columnist for the city paper. And in that earnest teenage way, the summer I was 16 I declared I was going to be a poet. I must have been aware of how foolish that sounded, for I wrote a chapbook that summer entitled “Starry-Eyed Girl.”

Nonetheless, I entered college determined to find a way to support myself as poet, even though for several years I wrote very few poems and focused on literary scholarship rather than writing. I earned a degree in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. While living on my own in my proud studio with only one window and having to support myself through college, practicalities led me to my vocation in publishing—I began as an intern at The Georgia Review and then worked for the University of Georgia Press. Today, I work for the University of Chicago Press and serve as Poetry Editor for the independent literary press Black Ocean. Along the way, I earned an MFA from Vermont College, and it was during my time as a student in that program that the majority of the poems in Intervening Absence were conceived.

As a result, there is not a day that is not bound up in books somehow, though this only child still finds herself spying out plenty of windows—office windows, train windows, bus windows. When I am not playing voyeur, I might be cooking, watching baseball (thanks to many fond memories taking batting practice with my Dad in the backyard), sipping a well-made Manhattan, or watching a film I wish I had made.