I was raised in a strict fundamentalist household, and I always say that gives you a muscle of belief. I want to believe in something, but I don't believe in what my parents believed in. Poetry has taken the place, or I think the arts have taken the place, of religion in my life. I wanted to see how that was working out through the poems.
Barbara HambyYou want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.
Barbara HambyOne of things I write about a lot is the role of women. An older friend of mine said that she feels like there's always a tension between wanting to be free and wanting to be cherished. I think that's one of the things that my whole book speaks to, wanting to break out of the confines of the roles that are prescribed for women and yet at the same time, not wanting to be totally free. You want to have intimate relationships. It's that bursting out of confinement.
Barbara HambyCynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heartโs territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinsonโsharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of loveโthe broken fragments, the fallen leavesโand puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch outโsheโs driving down your street.
Barbara HambyOne of my problems with religion is that it's limiting in so many ways. I remember the first time I took a humanities class, I thought, I can't believe this. This is fantastic. This is what I want my life to be. When I was a young person, I did a lot of dabbling in Eastern religions, and it was very satisfying in some ways, but there's that limitation always, which I find myself bridling against.
Barbara HambyWhen I was a young woman, I had this friend who was really beautiful, and she would talk about how she was losing her looks, that she wasn't as pretty as she once was. She was gorgeous, and I thought, I'm going to stop this bad habit of self-criticism that I think a lot of women get into. You make a choice to be different.
Barbara Hamby