Bottom Feeders release party | Friday, June 26, 6:30 p.m. | Letters Bookshop, Durham
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing about Florida,” said Arielle Hebert, author of new poetry collection Bottom Feeders, speaking from a Durham office crowded with lush-looking monsteras.
The Florida Hebert evokes in Bottom Feeders, out this month from Black Lawrence Press, is a place of vivid contrasts—waterfront mansions and invasive snakes; parking lot loosies and cheap beer; and storms that blow in suddenly, the air buzzing “with live heat and salt.”
There’s a certain come-and-go baked into the Sarasota landscape, with its snowbirds and circus vanishing acts. As sea levels rise, erosion slowly gnaws at shorelines. OxyContin is a specter. As Hebert writes: “Between 1999 and 2013, prescriptions of opioids increased by 400%. … Police said getting an opioid prescription was as easy as buying a cheeseburger at McDonald’s.”
Woven throughout these atmospheric poems is a fierce love between two teenage girls, as addiction hooks its teeth into one, while the other tries to help, to ride out the storm, before resigning to getting out while she still can. Then comes North Carolina, with its seasonality and “acorns so fat they pop like glass bottles” under tires. Visits back to Florida, Hebert writes in “The Dead Layer,” are a “training exercise in breathing underwater / and I was never the strongest swimmer.”
Hebert is a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and the director of operations and marketing at Blair, a nonprofit publishing press based in Durham. Ahead of the book’s release and several local readings, the INDY spoke with Hebert about creating a poetry coven and navigating writing about addiction, place, and grief.
INDY: This is such a cohesive collection—what was the writing process like? Was there a moment when you knew there was going to be this shape to it?
ARIELLE HEBERT: I started writing Florida poems, I guess we can call them, in grad school. That was a little over 10 years ago—so the first seeds were sown quite a while back. One of the early poems that felt like “OK, maybe this is going to turn into something” was the title poem, “Bottom Feeders.” Ada Limón chose it as the winner of the North Carolina State Poetry Contest [in 2019].
After that poem got recognized by Ada, it made me think about the collection in a different light. I didn’t realize, at first, that it would focus on this relationship between the speaker and her girlfriend, her friend. I did want to write about the opioid epidemic in Florida, and realized after writing “Bottom Feeders,” and it winning that contest, that it felt like the root of something and that the relationship was a big part of that poem. It lays the groundwork for a lot of scene-building taking place in Sarasota and felt like the heart of the collection.
The opioid epidemic is a big through line. What considerations played into that?
While I was there, I knew things—they were calling it an epidemic on the news and in the newspapers already, and it did feel like pills were everywhere. I was in high school and a young adult by this point, and so they were at parties, at my job, you know? It just was part of teenage life, and I assumed it was like that everywhere.
I know communities elsewhere have suffered through the epidemic, but it took leaving Florida and researching all of the news—hindsight helps a lot, too. There was a lot more coverage about Florida being so lax with laws and pill and pain clinics. What I felt living in Florida was confirmed after I left.
I learned a lot via research afterward, looking at news clippings and reading about when Purdue Pharma got taken to court. There were these misconceptions about it being less addictive than morphine, and there was so much money involved in tourism and the selling of pills in Florida. I didn’t know a lot of that before I started writing these poems.
There seems to be a balancing act in loving a place that maybe doesn’t love you back all the time.
[Leaving] felt like a bad breakup, or burying a friend. I lived there for 13 years, from elementary school through college through undergrad. I’ve been in North Carolina for 13 years now, so I’m at this weird equinox period. It is very poetic to have the collection coming out during this split in my home feelings.
Sometimes it feels like I ran away, and other times it feels like I escaped. I think both of those feelings are still true. I dealt with a lot of guilt after leaving, wondering if I had made the right choice, if I could have done more for my friends who were going through addiction or recovery, whether I could have done more for my community at large.
Sometimes it feels like I ran away, and other times it feels like I escaped. I think both of those feelings are still true.”
I grew up 15 minutes away from the beach; one of my first jobs was at the beach. We were always there. I miss the water, the coast. Besides the natural landscape, I love the people I left behind, too. The focus of the book is about a relationship, and I still miss that person, and I [also] miss who I was when I was there.
That was part of the grieving—leaving behind a part of myself and having to start over somewhere new. I didn’t know anybody here, and starting from scratch was daunting, but I’ve also made a new home here and feel like I’ve found my people.
Florida feels like it has a distinct voice and perspective, with the writing that comes out of it—Harry Crews, Zora Neale Hurston, Lauren Groff. What do you think it is about Florida?
Florida is so mystical and magical; it feels otherworldly. In part, it’s because it’s a vacation destination—whether you’re going for the coasts or for the theme parks, there is this kind of suspension of reality where, if you’re not a local, you’re there to have a good time and experience some magic.
I love Lauren Groff’s work. I feel like she and Kristen Arnett are both writing books that honor and capture Florida in all of its weird, wild, wonderful, strange nature, and in some ways I feel like I’m following in their footsteps. There are certainly different Floridas that can be experienced, whether you’re on the coast or in the rural parts or outside of Orlando, where the parks are, and then there’s Miami. Florida is not a monolith, as no place is.
I wanted to ask about Sarasota’s history as a circus town. Was that something you planned to weave in from the outset?
I didn’t know it was going to be such a large part of the background of the book. The first poem I wrote that included the circus was “Circus Town,” and it started as a way to flesh out Florida. The sense of place is so strong for me, and I related to it as if it was a character or a person I knew and loved.
It was a puzzle piece that made a lot of other things make sense and click. … There’s so much history that comes from the circus that paved the way for industries and tourism to happen, and the lifers I’ve mentioned—everyone being unabashedly themselves.
You could be wild and weird and unique, and be accepted and celebrated for that, despite the lack of acceptance in other ways in Florida, whether for queer people or immigrants. There’s a political resistance to accepting people for who they are, but there is also this contrast. You can go to school to be a princess, or go to clown school, or learn how to walk the high wire or the trapeze.
You went to N.C. State’s creative writing MFA program—what was that like?
I had applied to some other programs and was waitlisted at N.C. State. I deferred at other places to study with Dorianne Laux. About a week goes by, and I get a call from Dorianne, and she says someone else dropped out and there’s a spot for you now. I feel like it was kismet.
I really found my literary family there. I’m still best friends with some of the women I met in that program. They’re my poetry coven, and I still write with Dorianne Laux and her husband Joseph Millar—once a week on Zoom, we still share poems and books. It formulated me as a poet. I knew poetry was important in my life, but N.C. State and the family there showed me what it was to be a poet in community—how to form that family and keep it.
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