Lauren Russell's Descent Riffs on Audre Lorde's 'Biomythography'

Poet Lauren Russell, author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), is asked the infamous Poets & Writers Ten Questions this week. Descent, Russell's second book, is based on the diary of her great-great-grandfather Robert Wallace Hubert. "Researching a book like this forced me to connect with people in ways that didn’t always come naturally," says Russell about her process. More from her interview:

…I had to make phone calls, I had to ask questions of strangers, and eventually I traveled to East Texas and, with my parents, met relatives I didn’t previously know I had, as well as local history experts. Actually it was on that trip that I began to practice making eye contact—now I’ve been doing it for five years, so it doesn’t require as much effort, though I still get the sense that by neurotypical standards my eye contact is a little bit off. All said, while my shyness is a challenge, it is also a gift because what’s most fundamental is being able to listen. 

My second major challenge as a researcher is that I don’t know how to drive. I certainly would not have been able to get around East Texas if my parents had not cheerfully accepted my research trip as a family vacation and met me in Houston with a rental car. Also, the internet has made it possible to do a lot of research remotely, and I often worked with digital archives or had archivists scan or mail copies of documents because I simply couldn’t get to them—but I wonder what unknown mysteries I might have uncovered if I had done more of the archival research in person. In the notes section of Descent, I emphasize that I am a poet and not a historian. There are several layers to that statement, but one is that my limitations as a researcher have created openings for imaginative work. Hence I call Descent a work of biomythology, a riff on, or expansion of, Audre Lorde’s “biomythography.”

Lorde talked about her concept of biomythography—elaborated on in her 1982 book, Zami—in Conversations With Audre Lorde. Read the rest of Russell's interview at P&W.