Donna Vorreyer (00:00)
What are you running from? A friend asks. Death, I answer.

And once again, I have failed to articulate my desire to cherish everything.

David (00:11)
Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections and seven chapbooks. And in this episode of In Three Poems, she and I are reading two poems from her latest collection, Unrivered, that was published by Sundress Publications in 2025. Her recent work has appeared in Plowshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals.

She's the co-founder and co-editor of Asterales, a journal of arts and letters, and she hosts an online poetry reading interview series, 100 Pictures of Honey, which maintains a YouTube archive. I'm David J. Bauman, and as busy as she is, Donna Voyer is joining us from her home in Chicago.

David (00:55)
Now, Donna, I love this book. have to confess to you and I don't try to just say things to really butter people up in every podcast, but neither do I like to do a podcast about poems that I don't really love. But every time I tried to make notes for our talk,

Donna Vorreyer (01:05)
It's okay, I'll take it.

David (01:14)
I fell in love with another one of these poems. This is the book that we're talking about. is called Unrivered. And for those that are on YouTube, you might be able to see me as I bump my mic and try to hold it up. This artwork was done by you, right? Yeah. Could you, do you want to tell us about that?

Donna Vorreyer (01:27)
It was. Yeah.

Sure.

I, when I was a teenager, used to love to make art and then stopped for years. And during lockdown, during COVID, I had a, I had a difficult time reading, which is like my go-to pastime. And I was kind of going crazy. Like I need to do something with myself other than like try and write, which was awful difficult. And I started, I just picked up whatever stuff I had in the house, know, pencils and you know,

David (01:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Me too.

Donna Vorreyer (02:00)
and scissors and I just started, you know, making things. And then I got kind of really interested in it, I've taken a couple classes. And the funny thing about this one is I actually made the collage before the book was picked up. Like I had this, the vision in my head of this figure.

David (02:16)
⁓ okay.

Donna Vorreyer (02:20)
that represented to me what the book was trying to say. And I was taking a class at the time and we were learning about this technique of reverse collage where you take a photograph and then you use the papers or the other things to kind of go over it and make things.

David (02:24)
Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (02:37)
So had made all the papers and I was like, I finally found the picture I wanted to use. The statue is actually a photo I took of a statue in Recife Cemetery in Buenos Aires. ⁓ So it has this kind of Madonna feel in a way, but the things that are coming from her hands are, she's both being drained and they look a little bit powerful.

David (02:47)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Donna Vorreyer (03:00)
So there things puddling at her feet,

but then there's also kind of the things going together. And the book really is about...

you know, a lot of parts of your identity as you get older and go through different kinds of losses of connection, of the job that you've always had. I lost my parents right before the lockdown period. and at first I thought about the word unmoored and I'm like, no, no, it's because I'm not drifting.

David (03:12)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (03:27)
Like, I feel like things have been taken away from me. And so I wanted to try and make that as a collage, and I was really happy with how the collage turned out. And then when the book got picked up and they were like, well, what do think about cover art? And I said, well, I have this thing, and if it works, great, but if it won't work, let me know. And I sent it and they were like, no, no, this is it. This is going to be it. So it was very exciting. Yeah.

David (03:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, was a fantastic choice. Yeah,

there's there's the religious mythology, maybe a little bit of witchery in there. And yeah, both of the sense of power and loss, I think, get caught in it beautifully.

This structure was just so exciting when I realized, ⁓ okay, so that's a sonnet, that's a sonnet. At first, when I saw the Roman numerals in the table of contents, I usually check out table of contents first because I'm a library nerd and a librarian by trade. then as I looked at it, I'm like, wait, the Roman numerals are each sonnets. And I thought, okay, but then in between there are other poems and

Donna Vorreyer (04:16)
Okay.

David (04:28)
Some of them are sonnets, but some of are not. Some of are prose. And I thought, well, this is really delightful and fascinating. And then it hit me, my god, it's 15. It's a crown of sonnets.

Talk to me about what got you interested in doing a crown of sonnets. Because first of all, I'm jealous. I haven't done one.

Donna Vorreyer (04:44)
Well, I'm kind of a sonnet stan. Like, ⁓ many of my drafts, without trying to, often end up somewhere between 12 and 16 lines. ⁓ It's just kind of a natural space for me, as I write more short poems than probably any other poems.

David (04:47)
Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (05:02)
So I've done a lot of, written a lot of sonnets over the years and I think when I wrote the first one in that series, I kind of had the feeling like, okay, like it's pretty, it's nature, but it didn't really go anywhere. And so it kind of sat for a long time. And then as I was writing more poems, different poems and starting to see the same themes emerge,

I started to say, well, what would happen if I tried to extend this? Right? And so I kind of, piece by piece, I kept building and then I was like, all right, well, let's get really crazy and make it a heroic crown so that it's got all, so that means that all of the first lines all have to work as a sonnet at the end of the group. ⁓

David (05:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, like the first line,

I guess, if you haven't seen this, the first line of each sonnet is the last line of the previous, right? And then it's all got to go together and make sense as a sonnet at the end. Wow.

Donna Vorreyer (05:51)
.

the previous. So that's a crown.

Right. And

what I really found freeing about it, first of all, I am not the first person to have done this in even the last few years. ⁓ It's, although it's not heroic, Taylor Bias's book, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, ⁓ is anchored by a brilliant sonnet crown where each one of them is called South Side. And so, you know, I love her work and I had read that book and I'm sure it was in my head when I thought, well, maybe this is something I could do.

David (06:14)
Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (06:29)
⁓ But what I wanted to do is I didn't want to make it, I wanted this, the crown to kind of go everywhere that the other poems were going to go.

David (06:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (06:40)
Um, not just physically in the landscape. we're, you know, we're in the woods, we're at the sea, we're a childhood home, we're, know, on Instagram, we're, you know, running away from the crowd with Frankenstein. You know, we're, everywhere in this crown. And, um, it kind of took it on as a challenge. And then when I decided to put it in the collection, I said, I don't want it in one big chunk. Right. So what I started to do was group poems, like,

okay, well, there's a cardinal in this part of this sonnet. I knew I had at least one other poem that had a cardinal in it, right? And I started kind of trying to piece together ⁓ poems of similar theme or that had similar imagery, but still kind of create an arc from this kind of loss and grief to more acceptance at the end of the book. And... ⁓

I think what really cemented it for me, someone was asking me about this a while ago and I said, you know, and I really tried to kind of find the right language to pin it down, that a crown of sonnets is exactly what happens in your life, right? It's propulsive, but it's also recursive, right? It moves forward, but it's always going back. And I think that's kind of how we work.

David (07:56)
Hmm.

Okay, yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (08:05)
in our lives. We were constantly moving forward, but we're always reaching back to memory, ⁓ to who we used to be, to things that are gone. And so I think the form was kind of echoing the content or the emotion of the book. And that was when the book started to kind of click together for me.

David (08:20)
Beautiful, yeah.

makes total

sense that you're still that same person that you were even though you're not that same person and your mother is still here with you even though she's not here with you. that's that's a great way of saying it and as you were saying this it had me thinking ⁓ Jehanne Dubrow recently

Donna Vorreyer (08:31)
Right.

David (08:43)
was a guest and in her craft book about writing trauma poems. It was called The Wounded Line. she mentioned in that interview that for her, using form was a way to sort of trick herself into thinking, I have some control over what I've been through, some of this trauma, as I try to address it and face it. I'm still gonna discover stuff as I read it, or as I write it, but it gives you the illusion of control.

Donna Vorreyer (09:00)
Thank

David (09:09)
Is that sort of does that resonate with you that definition? Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (09:11)
Yeah, it gives you a container to

put in a you know, my third book, which is was really an elegy. Book of Elegy for my parents contains some centos, which were really the only way I could start talking about it was with other people's language, which when you take lines from other poets, yeah, to everything there is. ⁓ And that that was the only way I could begin to approach it. ⁓

David (09:26)
And that's to everything there is. Yes. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (09:38)
and was really super helpful for me to kind of be able to, know, because writing is the way I've always worked things out, but I was, stymied by that, you know, I mean, I'm still writing about it and it was, you know, seven years, seven years ago. Wow. Eight years ago almost now that I lost both of them. Yeah.

David (09:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well,

Donna Vorreyer (09:56)
Yeah, having the container for any emotion, whether that's a wound or joy or any topic, having a container to pour it into is always a way to begin. It's not the way they always end up, but it's always a great way to begin.

David (10:12)
And that fits with what I was actually gonna ask you next is how do you feel like this collection fits in with some of your previous ones? And you ⁓ mentioned to everything there is before that every love story is an apocalypse story. And what was the first one? ⁓ House of Many Windows. Yeah, and so how do you see a progression in what you did in those books to where you are, what you did in this one?

Donna Vorreyer (10:27)
first one was a house of many windows. Yeah.

I can say, I mean, I think House and To Everything There Is and this book are kind of in a way like a more autobiographical kind of trilogy, right? Because my first book was kind of about the infertility and inability to conceive a child and then adopt adoption. ⁓ And of course, you know, as publishing goes, you know,

The book came out when my son was like 18. know, so, you know, long past time all this stuff was happening. But, so that was kind of my, you know, and I think the first book is usually pretty autobiographical. And then I felt really strongly that I didn't want my second book to be that. And so Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story was a project book that actually started with.

David (11:02)
Yes.

Donna Vorreyer (11:27)
language from the journals of Lewis and Clark. That's not where it ended up, but that's where it started. But I found myself telling this story with that language about like a betrayal, like a relationship falling apart. And it was really fun to write those poems because I have been with my husband since I was 19. ⁓ So it is not an experience that I have had, although I've watched a lot of friends go through it. So that was a really fun book to write.

David (11:31)
I love it.

Donna Vorreyer (11:55)
because I could kind of take on a different life in that book. And then the third book is, like I said, it's an elegy, really. And then this book is kind of like the aftermath of that. ⁓ You know, how you go on, how you keep going.

David (12:06)
Gotcha.

Well, I made you talk so much about the book right off the bat. How about, can I read something from it? It was really hard to choose because there were so many

Donna Vorreyer (12:14)
Absolutely, I would love to hear you do that.

David (12:20)
But this is from page 47 and weirdly enough, not a sonnet. So you're going to have to get the book and we'll tell you how to get the book. I'll put it in the show notes and everything to read the sonnets, but I'm going to read this one too. It's called If You Go Into The Woods Today.

The forest preserve rumbles with the deep-throated song of frogs, holed up in fallen trees, or testing the frigid indigo of the lake. The gully is a bowl of fog, the water unmoving, no tides to bring forth its secrets. Algae drapes the surface, obscuring what lies beneath. Fish, certainly. A dead tree, maybe. Perhaps even a body.

Last fall, a missing man, car abandoned nearby, was found dead in these woods. There were no details provided in the press, but time and weather are not kind to flesh. And animals will do what animals will do. In this maze of trees and unmarked trails, deer and coyote disappear like magician's tricks when startled from the path. Like the man's body.

undiscovered for weeks. How many times I must have walked right past it, unaware of him just beyond the tree line. There, but not there. How many days no one knew I was there, too.

Donna Vorreyer (13:55)
That's beautiful, thank you.

David (13:55)
What a sobering ending. ⁓

thanks for letting me read it. Fell in love with that one instantly, along with many others. And there's, even though it's a prose poem, there's a certain music to it that I just adore. Things between the frog and the fog. There's just so many places. This, I take it, feels like ⁓ a poem sprung forth from...

actual real life, your daily walks, unless you're speaking from somebody else's voice, but it sounds like something, a place that you've actually been to many times.

Donna Vorreyer (14:23)
Yeah.

Yes, actually in the book, ⁓ Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, which is a large forest preserve about a mile from our home, gets a thank you, gets a shout out, ⁓ because it was the only place during lockdown that you could go, right? You could go out to the forest for walks. ⁓ So this, you know, a lot of this book really, there's a lot of walking in this book and that's because of when it was written. ⁓

David (14:34)
Mm.

Yes.

was

doing that too during the lockdowns,

Donna Vorreyer (14:55)
But I think

this one was, there was a news story that my husband walks there almost daily as well. And we were both like just stunned, right? I mean, we're there every day, right? And yet there was this thing that had happened unbeknownst to the people walking the trail. thinking about mortality, right? Well, how many days am I there, right? By myself, right?

David (15:17)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (15:17)
where no one really knows. I mean, my husband knows I'm out walking and where I probably am, but you know, not exactly where I am. And kind of this, that feeling of...

Nobody knowing really what's going to happen or where it's going to happen or where you are. And in this place that is just so full of life and so peaceful, that it's not something I normally associate with that place. So it was something that stuck in my memory.

David (15:30)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (15:46)
and I think during that lockdown time, particularly because there was kind of this nowhere else to go feeling that also had me thinking about intrusion, that, you know, yes, people use the forest preserve, but the level of use increased so much, right? It was like an intrusion on the animals that live there. We have loads of deer and coyotes, ⁓ lots of hawks.

David (15:57)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (16:13)
and snakes ⁓ in that preserve. so that whole idea of kind of being the thing that doesn't belong there, I think also resonated with me a little bit. And if you go into the woods today is from that creepy children song, ⁓ the teddy bear's picnic, right? Which I always found like weirdly menacing in some way, I don't know why. And so I thought I could work in many different ways.

David (16:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, if you go into the woods today.

Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (16:40)
You know, think about what happens, what the then would be. ⁓ Could be many things after that, if so.

David (16:43)
Yeah, it does work on

multiple levels, absolutely. Now you chose a ⁓ But do you wanna tell us anything about this poem or do you wanna just jump right in and read it?

Donna Vorreyer (16:56)
Well, I think,

like I said earlier, think, you know, when you're writing about change and loss, like things can get really dreary. ⁓ But the book isn't dreary, I don't think, as a book. ⁓ Because they're, you know, I always find that it's just as important, or even more important for me to write about.

David (17:08)
No.

Donna Vorreyer (17:16)
hope and joy, even if it starts somewhere that's not there, but to get there in some way. And I think this poem is one of those poems that maybe does that. And so that's why I chose this one. This is, fail in many tenses. I make a list of failures. It trails unwieldy, a weighty Jacob Marley's chain. I fail daily to rejoice.

At the breath in my lungs, at this long and irksome job of living, at each bowl of hot soup with crackers, at each pile of unraked leaves, at each simple act of being. I walk every day. I run. But still I fail at getting faster, getting smaller. What are you running from? A friend asks. Death, I answer.

And once again, I have failed to articulate my desire to cherish everything. From the dragonfly on my shoulder to the hair my husband leaves in the sink after he shaves. He shaves, he's alive. Failed to kneel at the temple of birches and oaks in the forest preserve at the towering skyline of the loop in the distance at the brine of an olive.

David (18:32)
you

Donna Vorreyer (18:42)
at the ache in my back, burning yet alive, and I am still failing to explain. But God, give me more chances to be bad at joy, and one of them will stick. I swear.

David (18:58)
I love that. Give me more chances to be bad at joy, It's funny, we both pick poems ultimately that end up in the woods at some point. And that's part of that thing being with you even when you're not. We're obviously not in the woods.

Donna Vorreyer (19:08)
Yes.

David (19:16)
bedroom or living room, studios are not there.

Donna Vorreyer (19:16)
Yeah, and I, well, you know, and then,

you know, obviously there's deaths in both poems. In this one, in more of a joking way than the other one, you know, kind of a realistic, practical way. But it is a shadow. Yeah.

David (19:21)
Yeah.

And when I read this, yeah, when

I read this, I was thinking of that meme where you have the woman, supposedly shouting to a jogger running by her house, well, she's got a wine glass or maybe coffee, depending on who's doing the video. And she says, what are you running from? Is somebody chasing you? And so that went through my mind as well. And I love the answer, death, And yet you immediately say, once again, I failed too.

to say it, I failed to articulate what I mean. And I love that this starts with a list of things. I think a lot of my poems start with lists as well, and I'm not sure what I'm going to be writing about, but I have these things on my mind, so I just start writing and see, you know, how does this fall together? How did this poem come to be, do you think? How do you think it came to be on the page, if you can remember?

Donna Vorreyer (20:18)
Well, I know

where it started, actually, because it started in a workshop that I took with Joan Kwan-Glass. ⁓ And I don't know if it was a, I think it was a prompt, something about failure. And ⁓ I kind of, think in my head I was like, geez, where do I begin? You know, like, you know, all of us fail at something every day, you know, whether it's just like,

David (20:24)
OK.

Hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (20:45)
forget to close the cabinet or, you know, ⁓ forget to tell the person you love that you love them or, you know, whatever it is. Like there's so many small failures ⁓ in every day and in every life that I thought, well, what if I kind of took a bunch of those, but then tried to flip it on its head? Like, what are those little things that...

I should be more cognizant of or should be more joyful about, even if they're irritating or even if they're not things you normally would welcome, know, like nobody wants their back to hurt, right? Nobody wants to clean up air out of the sink, right? But those things also mean you're alive, right? That this is another day.

David (21:22)
Hahaha

better to have a sore back than to not exist and

have no back.

Donna Vorreyer (21:31)
This is another day

and that there can be those little joys in everything if we look for them. It's the looking that we often fail at. We often fail to look.

David (21:39)
And you also.

But you have me thinking too about things that I have failed at in ways that these domestic situations with the hair in the sink and whatnot, you said about closing a cupboard. I don't know how often

But I will complain if I'm getting coffee, if I'm up before my husband Brian is, is, and I'm like, who left this cupboard open? And why is this out? Why didn't we fill up the pitcher? And I realize later,

yeah, that was me. I failed to do that. And I said, I've even said to him, I apologize. And he looks at me like, for what? Because we weren't even arguing. said, for all the things that I've secretly grumbled at you about when you couldn't even hear me, that were actually things I did. I think there's something about the two line stanzas. ⁓ they expand as it goes.

which kind of gives it that feeling of having, know, starting somewhere small and ending up somewhere where there's some broader roots. I feel like the whole reason I want to do this sort of podcast and talk to people is because I think poems are made to be heard out loud, but there's also that visual element that I like to talk about. It's a whole mix. ⁓

Donna Vorreyer (22:52)
Right. Yeah, and this one

is, I wanted it to be longer on the page to be like that chain ⁓ that's mentioned in the first line. ⁓ I am just like, yeah, and I love that image from Dickens, Christmas Carol is like.

David (23:05)
And it helps slow you down so it's not too comedic.

Donna Vorreyer (23:13)
a big part of my life. Like my dad used to read it to me when we were kids and like it's my first like Christmas thing I do every year is listen to Patrick Stewart perform it. And so that idea of the fact that you carry something with you that is like proof of your failure, your wrongdoing. Like I have always found that to be just such a striking idea. And so I was like, I knew I wanted to use that at the beginning.

David (23:22)
Yes.

Donna Vorreyer (23:40)
and I know my editor at Sundress wanted to ⁓ what did she want to flip? She wanted to flip around the adjective. She wanted to

she wanted it to say Jacob Marley's weighty chain. And I was like, nope, nope. The way it sounds is important to me. And it's weighty, it's gotta be weighty Jacob. Marley's gotta have this, that's sorry, that's not changing that. She was like, okay. But yeah, and then kind of wanted the poem to kind of follow.

David (23:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (24:10)
a chain of thought as well, but to not just stick on one thing, but to kind of keep building this chain ⁓ of different images.

David (24:11)
Right. Yeah.

And the music of

unwieldy to weighty in the next line, unwieldy, weighty, and the eight inch, the weight and the chain. There's just a lot of ways that you use music between the lines that is so subtle that I think you might not even notice it's there until second or third reading. I love that.

Anything else you want to tell us about the book before we read another poem by somebody else?

Donna Vorreyer (24:42)
I don't think so. mean, I've just been really, really pleased with the way it's resonating with people. And I think that I thought it would be mostly people, you know, our age that would, you know, appreciate it the most. But I've done some in-person readings and it's been really lovely to have like college students and people in their 20s like, oh my gosh, I want to get this book. And so, I I can, I like view that as a success.

David (25:01)
Hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (25:09)
It's not too limited of a thing. It's something for everybody. And I very specifically asked women of kind of four different decades to do the blurbs for that reason, because I wanted to see what each of them was going to kind of find in it. And it was a really lovely surprise what they did.

David (25:17)
Yeah. that's great.

And you chose ⁓ a poem by a favorite poet of mine to read by Jack Gilbert.

Donna Vorreyer (25:33)
when I first started to kind of, I don't know what you say, like take poems seriously, like want to be better at writing poems. One of my mentors, Diana Goetsch said, you have to read. You have to read everything.

David (25:38)
You

Mm. Okay.

Donna Vorreyer (25:49)
like just read like crazy. And Gilbert was one of the first poets I found that just kind of took the top of my head off as the Dickinson quote goes. ⁓ And I think he's still a he's one of the only people I like to read that can get away with.

a lot of abstraction in a poem because the images that he chooses are so well anchored that then the abstractions are earned. ⁓ And my first introduction to him was The Great Fires. And then I started going back and finding lots of other of his work to read. And the one I'm going to read today actually was published in Poetry in 1965. So I was three years old when it was published. But I think I chose it because I think

David (26:31)
Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (26:34)
I it deals with some of those same themes being able to see what's beautiful and what's joyful in your day to day. this is What Is There to Say by Jack Gilbert. What do they say each new morning in heaven?

David (26:43)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (26:52)
They would weary of one always singing how green the green trees are in paradise. Surely it would seem convention and affectation to rejoice every time Helen went by, since she would have gone daily by. What can I say then, if each time your whiteness glimmers and fashions in that dark?

if each time your voice opens so near in that dark new. What can I say each morning after that that you will believe? But there is this stubborn provincial singing in me. ⁓ each time.

David (27:31)
Hmm.

And what a delightfully ironic way to start a poem with a title like, well, what is there to say? then we find out as you go.

Donna Vorreyer (27:47)
I just love

the way he lands this poem ⁓ to go from the lover's voice in the dark to what can I say, right, to... And then having stubborn and provincial followed by the ecstatic O, which is the exact opposite. I mean, I think this is just such a lovely...

David (27:51)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (28:11)
It's a lovely love poem. Like, I love love poems. I don't think people write them enough. And I think this one just really gets me because it's true. it's the, what you see in the one you love is not even necessarily something they would see, but how important it is to you.

David (28:15)
Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (28:29)
Right? That it's, it's better than what they would say in heaven. Right? And that's kind of, you know, what I carry from it. it's like in heaven, everything's great and they get bored. But, you every a magic. Yeah.

David (28:41)
and I never bore you. And

even though he's saying what is there to say, it's you can't, I just can't help but say it. It's just welling up inside of me, I have to. And in that way, it's a love poem, but also like a love poem to writing poems, you know,

Donna Vorreyer (28:57)
Yes, yes, absolutely.

David (28:59)
And so that feeling of what is there to say and have I already written this poem? But I've done that one trick pony thing where I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. But but then when you spring in, it springs you on to something else.

Donna Vorreyer (29:06)
I've written a lot of the same poem over and over again. I get that feeling. Yeah, absolutely.

David (29:19)
Brian has this thing, he's teasing me all the time. He is younger than I am But...

Donna Vorreyer (29:20)
Absolutely.

David (29:26)
I, as I've gotten gray hair, he like looks the same as when we first started dating 16 years ago. And he'll joke about like he has a turkey neck or something like that. And that's our joke going. And I was thinking about that whenever Helen goes by. And I always try to find something to compliment that isn't what he's worried For multiple reasons, partly because like you said, he doesn't see himself the way I see him. And he says that about me all the time because I worry, oh, I'm getting a.

Donna Vorreyer (29:51)
Right.

David (29:56)
heavy, have a sore knee and it's hard to not have a sore knee because I'm heavy and then you feel like in the doldrums of that circle. And then the stuff he tells me, you know that he's witnesses or he thinks about me are just very different.

Donna Vorreyer (30:07)
Yeah, we all

need that kind of affirmation, but then we also need to learn to be kinder to ourselves. And so, you know, this idea of becoming a new self as you age, part of that is just accepting who you are now. That doesn't mean that you, you know, it's...

David (30:17)
Absolutely.

Donna Vorreyer (30:33)
give up, But, you know, I'm not gonna be 26 again. I'm not gonna run marathons anymore. Like, that's just not happening at this age. But there are lots of other lovely things that I have now that I didn't have then. And, you know, I do miss my... I was a redhead before I went gray. I do miss my red hair, but not enough to try and match it with a dye. ⁓

David (30:37)
Right.

And, right.

⁓ okay.

I had some

platinum blonde days back in the day, back in my mullet days of the eighties. a good friend of mine, Keith, has told me before too, and I've moaned about the fact when my kids are, now that they're all...

Donna Vorreyer (31:01)
You

David (31:12)
older and on their own. It's a little different. I've kind of dealt with it. when it first start happening, you're thinking, ⁓ I miss, ⁓ I miss when they were little and they're never going to be small again. And Keith just looking at me deadpan going, this is what's supposed to happen. You did your job. Yeah. And so I tell myself, yeah, that's true. And I when I do tell my try to

Donna Vorreyer (31:29)
Yep. That's what you work for. It doesn't make it any easier.

David (31:38)
in being kinder to myself say, hey, well, this is what you're aiming. It's this or the abyss. So what's it going to be? well, Donna, tell me what else are you doing? What's coming up next? Have you got a break in mind or are you already working on another project?

Donna Vorreyer (31:54)
⁓ well, in terms of like new, new writing, I, I kind of like the period where I'm promoting a book because I don't put any pressure on myself. and I just write what comes and I've been pretty pleased with some of the stuff that that's been coming out, but there's no, like, I don't really ever work in project mode. Like I'm going to write a book about X. it's more like.

David (32:06)
Great.

Mm-hmm.

Donna Vorreyer (32:18)
bunch of poems start happening and then we see if they can play nice. ⁓ But I do have another manuscript which is completely different than anything I've ever written that was a project book that is kind of making the rounds and looking for a home.

David (32:22)
And then we see how they work together.

Donna Vorreyer (32:34)
gotten some nice comments, but hasn't quite found it, found its right ⁓ place yet. And I'm trying to think of like the one sentence description that somebody asked me for, that I posted on BlueSky. Okay, so it is a weird book of prose poems, erasures, blackouts, and dream analysis about

David (32:54)
wow.

Donna Vorreyer (32:56)
modern problems, for women, misogyny, and it's all based on language from Billy Budd.

David (33:02)
Wow. That's something to look forward to. That is why that's it sounds it.

Donna Vorreyer (33:05)
It's wild. It's completely different than anything I've ever done.

And ⁓ I really like it. And like I've had some like beta readers and who, who got what I was trying to do, which that was my fear. Like I was like so honed in when I was working on this, like, yeah, and then I'm to do this and it's going to be this and people are going to, and then like when I finished it, I was like, nobody's going to get this. I'm just a weirdo.

David (33:31)
You

Donna Vorreyer (33:32)
You know, ⁓ but the couple of people that have read it for me, I'm like, no, no, no, I get what you're doing. I get it. so that, so that's out there, but I'm not like in any rush with that. I'm just like, I'll send it somewhere and wait and see if it, if it catches and if it doesn't, like where this one, was like heavily, I wanted to do try the, you know, the prize circuit. Cause I had never done that. And,

I kept getting like finalist, finalist, finalist, finalist, which is nice, but it doesn't get the book published. And, you know, had a conversation with someone finally that was like, well, why do you want to win a contest? Like, do you need that validation or do you need the money? And I'm like, no, and no, I don't need the money, but maybe like, maybe the validation, you know? And then I was like, well, that's dumb. And they were like, well, do you want validation or do you want the book published?

David (34:02)
Right.

Mm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

There you go.

Donna Vorreyer (34:24)
And

I'm like, okay, good question. ⁓ and so that's when I kind of reached back to sundress and they were like, we'll always look at what you have, but you know, I had to go through their process. Like their board had to read it and, and say yes. You know, it wasn't like a gimme. ⁓ and so I felt really good about, cause their board is, is quite young. of them. And so I felt really good when, when they came back with the yes. And they've been a lovely, a lovely home for me.

David (34:28)
And Sundress, yeah.

Right. They're a great place to publish with.

Wonderful.

Donna Vorreyer (34:53)
You know, you wouldn't have any books if it wasn't for them. So shout out to Sundress.

David (34:56)
So pick up a copy of, yeah, pick up a copy of

Unrivered from them. And I guess we could keep talking and reading poems like this because this has just been a delight. Thank you for, it's great to finally converse with you face to face, if not in person. From what, Chicago to Pennsylvania? Is that what this one is? Yeah.

Donna Vorreyer (35:10)
Yes, it is. Thank you for having me. Correct.

David (35:16)
Thank you for being here and thank you for reading with me and for letting me read your work. And I hope we get to talk again really soon.

Donna Vorreyer (35:24)
Me too. Thank you.

David J Bauman (35:27)
Once again, our guest today has been Donna Voyer. What is There to Say was published in The Great Fires in 1994 by Knopf and Random House, of course written by Jack Gilbert. was later in his collected poems in 2012 and it was originally published in Poetry Magazine in January of 1965. It was used here on the podcast with the kind permission of Knopf, Double Day Rites. For the latest about upcoming episodes, you can follow us on Instagram.

at In Three Poems, same place on Facebook or BlueSky. And if you like what you hear, please share it. You there might be a friend of yours on the way to or from AWP as you're hearing this, and maybe they could use some good poems for the trip. Tell them they can tune in on their favorite podcast app or at inthreepoems.com. In Three Poems also has a channel on YouTube where you can catch the latest episodes. I'm David J. Bauman, and this has been a conversation in three poems.