SmArts

August 29 - September 4, 2016

Profile in Brief: Bryce Emley

By Molly Rector

It is eight thirty in the morning and the sun hasn’t quite made its way around the barn to the lime green picnic table where the fellows (our group at least) share most of our meals. This morning, that includes breakfast, over which I interview poet Bryce Emley about his work and his writing practices.

Emley, who serves as poetry editor for Raleigh Review, recently graduated with his MFA from North Carolina State University. Soon after his graduation, he moved to Memphis, TN, where he lives in a retro-fitted camper with his fiancée – a traveling nurse.

The camper has come up frequently in our group’s easy fun-poking, but it comes up in my interview with Emley as a reflection of his approach to work. He tells me that one of the reasons he is drawn to the work of writing – work that, by its nature, is constant, not limited to a particular place or time – is that he enjoys things that take a lot of maintenance. “I like having to constantly struggle with things,” he tells me, and when I ask “like what?” he replies, suppressing a smile, “I like living in places where I have to fix stuff all the time…”

Joking aside, he tells me that he has always been very goal-oriented – that on a given day he tends to set more goals than he can actually achieve. He feels the pressure that creates helps him be productive. He likes, for example, to write poems outside of his normal scope to suit the aesthetics of certain magazines. I suggest that perhaps this has something to do with his upbringing: his father had a debilitating stroke when he was four years old and his mother was thrust into the position of permanent caretaker, relying heavily on the strength of her Christian faith to handle the daily tasks of her life with grace. “Maybe,” he answers, “or maybe I just liked the structure of things.”

Structure is an important part of a writing day for Emley. It begins with a lot of reading – in addition to reading for the Raleigh Review each morning, he reads a set number of pages of non-fiction on themes relevant to his work. Right now, that includes slim lyrical works like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Limber by Angela Pelster. Since grief is a theme in his work, he also reads from Kevin Young’s anthology The Art of Losing before he begins writing.

Another theme in his work is water. Although he is from Florida, he says he has only written about Florida in a single line in one poem. His fixation on water stems more from the way it has impacted his family: his father’s stroke he describes as a “flooding in his head,” saying that the way his father talks, too, it sounds like his mouth is full of water. He also describes his mother’s death from pneumonia (a complication of chemotherapy) as “another flooding in the body that caused something bad to happen.” He says, his sense of humor appearing even in this heavy conversation, that the ideas he was writing about became “obvious vessels, no pun intended” for the theme of water.

To read Emley’s work, you can visit his website at www.bryceemley.com

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.