Dennis James Sweeney’s, You’re the Woods Too, explores our more-than-human encounters with moss, masculinities, and a natural world full of theatrical dramas. Sweeney highlights not only the porosity of gender but also the malleability of our conflicts between the wilderness and the social expectations that we impose upon its changing contours. In a sense, it is a book that reflects my own concerns with the thickets of the microscopic scale.

Orchid Tierney: Let’s first address the insistence on the word “green” in, You’re the Woods Too, which has the interesting effect of collapsing human and natural world into a wild theater. How do you understand your book’s characters in relation to this collection’s green mise-en-scene?

Dennis James Sweeney: There’s this beautiful story Prudence Gibson tells in a chapter on the philosophy of green in “Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World.” When Gibson was little, she writes, her favorite colored pencil was this particular dark green that she used for everything: trees, grass, flowers, but also things like cars and signposts. She liked it so much, “It soon became a stub among its tin of giants, too small to grip, left as a reminder of the full colour wheel.” Using the green, in other words, ultimately wore it down. The pencil literally disappeared—though it disappeared to somewhere, which was onto the page. I think that’s what my green is here. It’s in all-caps, GREEN, like the other characters in the play. But it’s a totality—the fact that every single space in the theater is described as green—almost renders it invisible. In that way, that first page is a microcosm of the book. The characters of the book press themselves so hard against “nature,” against the revelation that’s supposed to be found there, that it disappears (onto the pages of my book, I guess), and they find themselves pushing their bodies out into an open space. Later, the LONG LINE OF MEN keep finding themselves at cliffs, or inside whales, or floating up into the sky tied to balloons. In these moments, nature is no longer “nature.” It becomes so everything that the men, to their fright, can no longer differentiate themselves from it.

OT: You also problematize nature by staging it in the context of modern individuality. Lines like “When the sun graces us with empty eyes” “I am spores” and “Even the weather is indefinite and bored” frustrate the I/it, us/them, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman binaries. In this instance, nature is conceived as a modern inattentive individual forced into bearing a humanized ecopoetics. If we go to the woods to “find ourselves,” do we expect the natural world to arrive at solutions for very human problems?

DJS: You’re so right about this tension: the idealization of the natural world, and human aspirations to “be more like it,” are really a fundamentally human problem, except to the extent that those human problems ultimately cause real-world environment destruction. That’s why, for me, the book is always arriving at nature as a reflection rather than a solution, a place that helps us be what we need to be but which we can’t really say anything about or for. This is why all the talk about interweaving and ecosystems is really coming from a deep, personal desire, which is to be content with the exact amount of space I take up in the world.

Moss always seemed to have that kind of quality to me, something I’ve often called smallness but could also be defined as a non-extension of itself outside of its own modest boundaries. Moss feels so firm in its softness. It neither shrinks nor overflows. Moss doesn’t think about its own smallness, but I do, and it helps me a lot. I really want to ask you about smallness too! It’s right there in the title of your book: looking at the Tiny. Along with that smallness—in the subtitle, Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading—is lichen’s resistance to depth-based ways of reading. Its smallness is also a lack of “depth,” a surface quality, a place to exist that doesn’t need to be deep.

I wondered how you pursued this smallness, honored it, and at the same time were really looking at the lichen: “I truly wanted to see them,” you write. How did you balance the tension between lichen’s smallness and your devoted attention when you were imagining and creating this book?

OT: Lichens invite our participation in scalar modes of observation and spreadability, to zoom into molecular dramas that unfold in imperceptible spaces. To this end, looking at the Tiny deploys repetition and fragmentation to avoid lingering on a particular object, although a cluster of ideas congregate around Beat poet Lew Welch, who serves as a guide within the chapbook. It felt important to settle my attention on him if only because he refused to linger. His own erasure from Beat history, coupled with his final act of annihilation compelled me to place Welch on the horizon of my lichen readings.

Welch often sought refuge in nature as if these places could offer salvation from his own burdens. But I wonder how much of his desire for refuge was a manifestation of the social expectations placed upon men at the time. What would his life be like if he was able to get help for his depression and addiction? Welch offers an interesting connection to You’re the Woods Too, which likewise engages with masculinity and this idea of the “refuge” as if nature can summon new masculine configurations.

Can you say more about this theme in the book? You write: “who tells the stories?” It’s a LONG LINE OF MEN,” a line that invokes the complex lineage of socially gendered restrictions.

DJS: Yes, it’s almost as if Welch (and “men” in general) can’t find their way out of a restrictive gender paradigm, and so their recourse is to leave and try to find what they need somewhere else. But this just cements their impenetrability, exotifying unfamiliar cultures and othering the natural world. In my book they become, like you said, a LONG LINE OF MEN: these men have this distressing linearity to them, their stories so worn into grooves.

That’s why the stories that feature them keep straying. Like me, they start with masculinity, linearity, some kind of expectation that puts them in power but also prevents them from realizing themselves. I realize now (I didn’t when I wrote them) that the stories want so badly to stray. They are always arriving at some cliff, some sky, some fire, a “blank pasture of skin.” If I’m honest, I wasn’t summoning new masculine configurations. I was exorcising it. I was popping out of the groove and trying to find something else.

OT: Can we talk more about the “line” in You’re the Woods Too? You include pages of flash fiction, which feel reasonably contained, but the collection also contains poems where the line crumbles into tiny units of thought. The poem “Eurhynchium oreganum” is a wonderful example:
These are the feathers
Do not elect
Sun sun sun sun
The delicate madly
Recommend nothing
Green on a background of green

At first blush, this poem exemplifies the “mossyness” of your language. The writing is humid, small, wet. To what extent is writing plantlike or akin to what Michael Marder calls a modulation: that is, a plant’s active attentive response to environmental stimuli?

DJS: I love that! It gets at something we were talking about in our earlier conversation, how, in the moss poems in this book, the moss lives between the lines. The juxtapositions and breaths that the lines leave—the gaps in logic and image between them—do the thing that I feel I need, as a person who’s deeply stuck in many of these ruts.

That includes the colonial/pioneer heritage that informs my past relationships to nature, and is still influencing my language, the English language in general, all the time. The moss poems were ways of taking those lines, those grooves, those harmful continuances, and placing them next to each other in such a way that a more beautiful and livable motion was evoked.

OT: Wow! It’s curious how these ideological expressions inform the way we speak of nature. The metaphor “lichen colonies,” is one example as if lichens are participating in systemic dispossession of native vegetal inhabitants. Do lichens engage in the violence of spreading? Relatedly, You’re the Woods Too gestures to Linnaeus’ taxonomic organization of nature through the use of scientific conventions, but the book’s movement towards relationality seems to subvert a colonial heritage that has relied upon hierarchies and dispossession. It’s a strategy that creates a livable motion as you so brilliantly call it.

DJS: I would be very gratified to be part of that important shift! It’s something I was curious about in your work too. Your writing feels related to the intensity of academic discourse, its certitude, its sometimes-linearity, but also constructing ways out of these sometimes harmful patterns into a different type of knowing. In looking at the Tiny, I felt like the “wow” particularly opened up those gaps for me. “wow” becomes this refreshing refrain, a place where interpretive discourse—looking at, needing to see deeply and maybe even through—comes to a halt, and instead emerges as this out-loud expression of wonder and presence.

One of those “wows” is preceded by this comment on Lew Welch’s work: “he might as well have asked: what do they mean? what is their purpose? but such questions would inevitably lead him into the trap of reducing their significance to a poetic punchline. rather, he leaves us, the reader, with the lichens’ cosmic speculations, the questions that cannot be answered because doing so would collapse the pleasure of their presence.” It feels like “wow” is the embodied, vocalized version of that point. But it’s also more: a whole page even, toward the end of the book.

What space does that “wow” hold for you? Where does it travel when face to face with the lichen, with Lew Welch’s poem, with tininess?

OT: In many respects the “wow” is a precursor to the astonishment I imagine Welch utters, when he finally exclaims “This lichen!” at the end of his poem, “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen.” Welch’s utterance is an embodiment of authentic delight, an emotional realization of the cosmic connection between himself and the spreadability of life. For Welch, lichens are the manifestation of his maxim: “observe, connect, do,” which he expresses in the poem “Philosophy.” But his wow! is also my wow! It’s a subliminal articulation of my smallness staged alongside the enormity of these meticulous beings. I am a “nothing” beside the empyrean breadth of lichens. To bear witness to my own smallness is an act of humility. To be a nothing beside them is a liberatory moment, where I am released from the expectations of human exceptionality. Wow!

DJS: That’s exactly how I felt reading those moments. You’re reading and something suddenly happened, but it’s not there on the page. It’s experiential, which is possible because you left enough space around the language that something outside of the language could happen—in this case the “wow” being given a whole, other-wise blank page.

OT: Right. What are we outside of our frames of space-time references? I’m intrigued by the arrangements of boxes and the white page in You’re the Woods Too. Your work embraces enclosures while leaving open the possibilities for new arrivals.

DJS: Because it’s the frame that makes the opening possible, right? You can’t open if you haven’t once been closed. That’s the story of my life, a little—or at least a story of it. I’m always bouncing between wanting to pin things down and using that ultimately failed attempt to do a much less grounded thing, which is I really want to do. The moss poems have these scientific names, but it just highlights how “identifying” them is impossible. Only then (at least for me) can we really look at the thing and feel the magnetism of something that doesn’t claim to be other than what it is.

OT: Failure is a word that has cropped a couple of times in our conversations outside of this interview, and it seems to be an essential component of both our enterprises. But I wonder whether we can read this failure differently. That is, we are not failing to curate information, data, and knowledge, which calls us to organize the messiness of life. Rather, we are in movement to place ourselves in relation to the moss, the mountains, wilderness, or the nature reserve while acknowledging that these relationships are also constructed by human discursive systems.

DJS: That’s such a generous way of looking at it! Instead of static interpretation or representation, the motion of interacting and relating becomes the definition of “success.” Messy, fuzzy, and feathery, the feeling of that interaction is the “outcome.” We moved through/with and are still moving through and with.

What about failure in looking at the Tiny? Could you talk about inhabiting imperfection? When we talked about this in an earlier conversation, I was so impressed by your willingness to make a home with the book’s imperfections. It brought to mind Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, where Clare contends with the desire to cure disability in favor of bodily “perfection.” How can you make a book a home for the imperfect, especially this form that is theoretically so bounded, limited, and set down in type? How does looking at the Tiny transcend this?

OT: Eli Clare’s Brilliant Perfection has certainly helped me to conceptualize my own vexed relationships with the body mind as a person who is Mad with a complicated history of psychiatric institutionalization. In many respects, looking at the Tiny refuses a closure much in the same way as Welch’s life has no conclusion--for all we know, he might still be out there in the wilderness.

All this is to say, the project is still evolving, because I simply cannot let Welch go. And since I can’t let Welch go, I can’t let the chapbook settle as a perfectly bounded book. It has to enlarge itself, to take up the space that Welch cannot take up for himself. Wow!

DJS: I second your wow! That was a part I loved so much about your book, this idea of Madness as an act of reading and creating laterally, of opening toward breadth. As you write, “I am inclined to read this configuration of Madness—with a capital M—as a form of counter-creative knowledge production, where knowledge is outside of institutional mechanisms of fostering interpretation.” And later, “to be Mad is to live with situated and radical co-production.”

Without conflating Madness and disability in general, it makes me think of disability’s quiet hovering at the edges of You’re the Woods Too. A lot of the backpacking and running I describe in the book was a challenge to me not just because of the physical feat it was supposed to involve; also because my body couldn’t do what my non-disabled friends could do. I hadn’t yet understood myself as disabled, and so I was living this strange space where my body’s knowledge and my brain’s knowledge were at odds. You’re contingent! my body kept telling me. Your body is as textured as the nature you’re seeking! But I didn’t listen, at least not for a long time. I think moss became a way of being obliquely gentle with myself, at a time when I didn’t know how to be gentle otherwise.

OT: There’s something to be said about eco-cripping the natural world. So much of nature is so profoundly inaccessible, and yet we might question what does accessibility look like in spaces that run counter to the possible mobilities of human bodies and desires?

DJS: Eco-cripping the natural world is exactly what I needed and still need. Along with your book, Gut Botany, by Petra Kuppers, really opened up for me an embodied, disabled perspective on interacting with the natural world. The beautiful thing about it for me is that the relationship with nature then becomes so much less linear, so much more creative, so alive to the actual connection between the self and everything outside the self. It reminds me I’m here too, changing and always changed. At one point you write, “we ambulated down a path without any sense of definition.” I want to move like that. We’re still telling this story, and its surface goes on for a long way.

OT: Absolutely! How might we move moss like, lichen like, on a scale that exceeds our human comprehension of vegetal velocity? Wat kind of world could we co-create with other lifeforms if we could drift, blow, shift, stay, crawl, like in the Tiny? What wows might we then perceive?