Alexandra Naughton Interviews Amy Berkowitz at Vol.1 Brooklyn

To celebrate the rebirth of Amy Berkowitz's Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015; Nightboat Books, 2019), Alexandra Naughton and Berkowitz sat down at a cafe in San Francisco earlier this year to discuss true crime, the initial reception of Tender Points, genre, process, and more. (There are also a few cameos by nearby birds and pigeons.) "I did feel compelled," Berkowitz explains in response to Naughton's question, "What was your process like?" Picking up from there:

The connection between my chronic pain and the trauma I experienced as a child is something that I’ve been trying to understand ever since I woke up with chronic pain the morning after I recovered that memory, and Tender Points was an investigation of that. I was in a really unsupportive graduate program that sort of apologized for and did nothing about this abusive professor, so that was not a place where I felt comfortable talking about or writing about these experiences. I didn’t feel like my experiences as a survivor would be believed or honored there, so it took me some time. I was writing a lot of poetry in grad school and after grad school. Occasionally I would write a poem that I liked, but none of it felt very urgent to me. It wasn’t like flowing out of me. 

What was it about?

It was like Frank O’Hara: I do this, I do that poems. Friendship. Dating. Just my daily life as a young woman. I’m writing a long poem right now called “Gravitas” about how much I hated grad school. One reason I hated grad school is that no one would ever do anything about this serial predator professor, and the other reason is that the only feedback I ever got on my poems was “umm, your poems lack gravitas.”

(laughs)

You know, and I was just trying to write my truth as a young woman. And it was pretty sexist, as a friend would later point out, because there were young men in my classes writing poems about eating hamburgers on Amtrak and they weren’t getting that feedback. I think I internalized that criticism and thought my poems lacked gravitas and were frivolous and it wasn’t until I felt ready to start writing Tender Points and start this project that I did feel this urgency, like oh I have to unravel this mystery. Like obviously, sexual trauma, chronic pain, disbelief of women’s pain, patriarchy, these are all very weighty topics, they certainly have gravitas. That was exciting for me, not because I wanted to please these professors but now I felt motivated, because I felt alone but I knew I wasn’t alone, this topic just wasn’t being written about enough yet. 

Continue reading at Vol.1 Brooklyn.