Erin Block speaks the language of Colorado. From fly fishing and fly tying to hunting deer for food, her writing centers the reader on traditional practices in natural environments. Her debut poetry collection, How You Walk Alone in the Dark, won the 2024 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Litreactor’s Stephanie Bonjack sat down with Block to discuss mountain living, writing on the edge of modernity, and animal familiars.
SB: Thank you for coming down the mountain for this interview! Could we begin with you describing the environment in which you live and write?
EB: Sure! The environment in which I live and write is very rural. It’s in the mountains, and my little house is at the bottom of a canyon area. I have a lot of wildlife coming through that I see every day. I also have neighbors. Everyone has couple-acre plots of land, and it’s a nice mix. I’m not completely out in the boonies but I’m in the mountains. I don’t have a designated writing area. I have a desk, but I don’t often use it. I’m at the kitchen table a lot or I’ll use my phone when I’m outside. I’m not organized, like I don’t schedule time to write.
SB: You’re not Virginia Woolf?
EB: I’m not Virginia Woolf!
SB: One thing I find very striking about our moment in time is competing realities. You simultaneously are alone in the mountains living a life not too different from what you would have lived 100 years ago, but you could also be on your couch binge watching “The Real Housewives.” How do you keep yourself in that rather timeless place when the modern, distracted world is right at your fingertips?
EB: I do have a husband, so I don’t live totally alone. And yet, I do a lot of things alone, so I think that’s where that vibe comes through. I think about competing realities a lot. I have fiber-optic internet and do Zoom meetings and watch Netflix in the evening, and yet I spend a lot of my time off doing old-school things. This next weekend, I’m staggering my days and planning to tan a deer hide my husband shot with a bow last year. It’s something that’s interesting to me, a duty that I do, and very old-school — not many modern people know how to tan hides!
It is a weird place to exist. I think it’s good training to be able to hold conflicting versions of yourself at the same time. Sometimes it’s not a comfortable thing, but it’s a place in which you get used to being. I did grow up on a farm in a rural area. Instead of driving cars, my sister and I were riding horses into town! My grandma and my mom were both bread makers, so I always have sourdough starter, and these things just feel normal.
SB: You’ve published two non-fiction works and this is your first book of poetry. What led you to pursue poetry this time?
EB: It wasn’t a super conscious choice. I started reading a lot of short stories, and I was mystified by how much of a punch you get with a short story versus a novel. I fell in love with that, with how you could do everything in a shorter amount of time. It almost has a greater emotional storytelling impact, and I just became obsessed with that for a while.
I started thinking about how that relates to essays, which is what I was writing at the time, and I started reading a lot of poetry. Short story to novel is like poetry to essay — you can distill this big thing into this smaller chunk of meaning, which I fell in love with! And then I started writing poems. This was in 2019, and after a number of years, I had a collection.
SB: Can you talk about your creative process, and was it very different for each one of your books or does it follow a pattern?
EB: It was very different for each of the books. The first one was short essays, but they’re all connected because it was me learning how to make bamboo fly rods. It was very linear; I wrote it as I was going through the process. The second one was more of a historical view of women and their role in fly tying, and it was an idea suggested to me by my publisher. It was really interesting! That one was also chronological.
The poetry book was different. I don’t like saying anything’s inspired [by one particular thing], but I would take a line and jot it down and come back to it and flesh it out. I don’t sit down and write a poem from start to finish. I feel like my writing is like a loom and I’m weaving.
SB: Is your process between your mind and the paper? There’s no other mechanism that you’re processing through? I think of Andrea Gibson, Colorado’s Poet Laureate; she processes through the voice.
EB: No. After I’ve written something, even essays, I’ll read them out loud. When you read something aloud, some things just sound weird or off, and need an additional syllable here or there. But it is part of editing after the writing has happened.
SB: Do you see your work as belonging to a larger creative group? For example, some moments in your poetry reminded me of Sylvia Plath and I was reminded of Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, in which she encourages the reader to find themselves by literally or metaphorically going alone into the wilderness. Which creators do you connect yourself to?
EB: Mary Oliver, Jim Harrison, Todd Davis and Noah Davis have all influenced me. I’m drawn to poets who write about nature. Another is Ted Kooser, who is originally from Nebraska and writes about that area. I’ve always admired his work because it’s very rural. You get the nature element and the people element, and I think that’s what I’ve always really liked in reading – when you have that combined.
SB: Hunting is a recurring theme in this collection. Can you talk about what is important for you to communicate about hunting? What do you want the non-hunters to understand about it?
EB: I started hunting because I was at a point where I was either going to become a vegetarian or try to start hunting. I was an adult in my late 20s or early 30s. I grew up on a farm and we had 4H steers and goats and chickens that we butchered. So that whole process of eating things that you’re familiar with, or that you personally had a hand in killing, was not foreign to me. But it was something I helped with as a kid; it wasn’t my decision to do.
As an adult, I started hunting because I wanted to be more involved with my food. A lot of people hunt for trophies, which I consider to be the wrong reason to hunt. I wanted to show that a lot of hunters have a tough time with it, and it’s not a decision that we make lightly. We really try to make death as quick as possible. There’s this notion of the hunter figure who’s a bro dude who likes killing things, and I wanted to show the other side of that, the part that’s not fun. There is an interesting side too — to hunt, you have to understand animals on a totally different level. You become a predator, hunting deer like mountain lions hunt deer. You have to turn into an animal yourself, to think like them.
There was this great tradition in literature, with Jim Harrison or Tom McGuane, of hunting and fishing being part of storytelling. But they’re old skills that not a lot of people do anymore, and they fell out of literature and became sport. But hunting has all the themes that make great literature and great poetry: life, death, high stakes. This is the foundation of great stories! I think it can be written as literature, not just sporting essays.
SB: And how often do we see women writing about hunting, or even depicted as hunters? We see girls as hunters or trappers in post-apocalyptic stories, like in Station Eleven, but when do we see grown women hunting?
EB: That’s very true!
SB: This book is very much about alone-ness, as we see in the title. But I would also argue that it’s about loneliness. Do you think the two are intrinsically linked?
EB: I think a lot of times they are, but you can definitely be one and not the other. I spend a lot of time alone and I enjoy doing things alone, especially hunting or foraging in the woods. When I’m alone, I’m not usually lonely. I think loneliness is something that can happen independently. And you can be lonely and not alone. You pegged it — the book is very much about being alone and loneliness too!
A lot of the poems have this element of my dog growing older and dying. He was very much my partner in all things. When I bought my house, I adopted him shortly after and it was just me and him for a couple years before I met my husband.
SB: On the topic of your dog, he features prominently in many of these poems. And we are having a political moment about single women with cats. Can you speak to the value of an animal companion as a creative person?
EB: Yes. They’re almost like a muse. Banjo was very important. He was like a partner; he was always there. If I was writing or working or doing anything, he’d be lying there. He went on all my foraging hikes and adventures and fishing trips.
And I do have three cats, so I’m a cat lady too! They aren’t critical. So much of a creative life is criticism – I’m critical of my own work and the work I read, even if it’s positive or just analytical. And you get so many rejections or critical edits, so it’s nice to have this supportive creature who thinks you’re awesome! It’s an emotionally important part of my life.
We have two orange cats, they’re brother and sister, and during the pandemic this stray tabby showed up. Her name is Jo and she’s kind of become my animal. I’m her person. I’m not sure why it’s important for me to have an animal who identifies me as their person. Maybe it’s a confidence or stability thing, and it probably goes back to childhood too. I grew up on a farm and I have a younger sister, but we weren’t around a lot of kids. All our animals became our friends.
SB: Do you think poetry has a unique role or function in today's world? If so, how do you see your own poetry contributing to that role?
EB: I think it does because everyone’s attention is so fragmented. It’s hard to finish a novel or really invest yourself in a book series. Short stories and poems that don’t have to be read front-to-back; they allow you to dip in and dip out, [which is great for] modern life. Also, there are not a lot of women who write about hunting, so my work is unique and fills a niche.
SB: And finally, what’s next for you and what are you working on?
EB: I don’t have an organized project! I work organically. Right now, I’m trying to keep writing, one poem and then another. That’s my plan.
How You Walk Alone in the Dark is available through Middle Creek press.
About the author
Stephanie Bonjack is an academic librarian and musician who lives and works on the Colorado Front Range. She teaches the relentless pursuit of information, and illuminates the path to discovery. She has presented at national and international library conferences, and is especially interested in how libraries evolve to serve the needs of 21st century patrons.
