A Conversation with Tania Runyan

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 13

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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Don’t you know how small
this life is? Even the stars

are just the sweat Christ shakes
from his brow. When you make crooked

the path to eternity, you send your brother
to oblivion, to the buried speck

in the midnight desert stone. This time,
no magic will save you. You

will have to find your life in the dark.
Today you will have to be led by the hand.

— "Paul's Blinding of Elymus" by Tania Runyan

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by Ben Palpant

Tania Runyan is one of those rare gems whose laughter and energy are contagious. Her prolific pen and thousand activities are due as much to her dogged determinism as to her many loves. Of course, a family will keep one busy, too. That's why I decided to rope them into my opening foray of questions.

"How would your kids and husband describe Tania Runyan?"

"I'm so glad you sent your question beforehand so I could ask my family. Otherwise, I would have no idea. Is that cheating?"

"Yes." I laugh. "What did they say?"

"They were very sweet about it. Here's their list. They said I was loving, generous, wise, fun, caring, determined, hardworking, comforting, funny, courageous, and patient."

"Sheesh! Pretty much the perfect human being. You should give them a raise in their allowance."

"I should."

"Did they elaborate on their answers?"

"No, of course not."

"You have said that you're an introvert with people skills. That you love people, but that you need to reboot in solitude."

"Yes, I guess I’m fairly decent at starting conversations, building community in a classroom, drawing out the best in people, and making people feel loved. But I know that I am an introvert because all of that 'peopling' comes at a cost. If I don’t provide myself with large swaths of solitary time to balance out interactions, I become drained and even a bit depressed. This is why I have never been able to sustain teaching for very long. I adore students and make good connections with them, but my energy cannot keep up with my heart. I am at my best when I work and write alone, interspersed with opportunities to speak, teach, and connect before burrowing back into my cave under my pile of dogs."

"I'm glad to spend some time with a fellow introvert and dog lover,” I say. “This might be an overgeneralization, but it seems to me that many poets are introverts. What makes introverts uniquely equipped to write poetry?"

"It's the solitude, really. I don’t think it’s about being shy or more thoughtful or anything like that. Because we love solitude and need solitude, we have the opportunity to write. It's hard to write when there are a lot of people around. It's not even about the quiet so much as the opportunity to be alone. I can't get enough solitude; I need it a lot, but I also love people a lot, so it's tough. I'm torn."

"I wonder if solitude predisposes the heart to reflection in a way that crowds simply cannot."

"I don't know. I can be in the presence of people and still reflect and think about things. A huge factor is whether I'm stressed by the company and whether I'm responsible for them or not. That puts a strain on me."

"Have you been this way since you were a kid?"

"Yes, actually. I was a latchkey kid. My older sister is fourteen years older than me; I was raised like an only child. I had so much time to myself that I had to find ways to entertain myself. One of those ways was reading. Believe it or not, I loved reading encyclopedias, atlases, Peanuts cartoons, and comic books. I read novels, too, but that wasn't my main diet back then. I became very comfortable with solitude but it was still a language-rich childhood.

"I think it was James Baldwin who said that solitude is the home of the strong and silence is their prayer. Do you resonate with that?"

"I would have to think about it. I suppose, to some degree, it does. But I'm not a very quiet person. For instance, I'm always listening to music. You know, some people hear the word 'solitude' and they, I don't know..."

"They imagine a monastic life?"

"Yes, and that's nothing like the life I live. I just like being alone."

"You can pick your own music, for goodness sake!"

We laugh. "Yes, exactly," she says.

"There are some poets I read whose poetry feels like it was born out of silence. Other poets don't give me that sense. I don't know how to explain it."

"Can you give me an example?"

"Well, I feel that way when I read the poetry of Li-Young Lee."

"He's amazing."

"Do you get the same sense?"

"I think I know what you're talking about. But you're right; it's hard to explain."

"I don’t feel that way about your poetry. That’s not an insult; it’s just an uncanny sense. Your poetry feels different somehow, more vigorous in some respects."

"Some people have said that my poetry is raw and gritty. I'm not purposefully trying to be raw or gritty; it's just my way of looking the subject in the eye. But to your point, I'm not contemplative or silent in my bearing. I’m active. I like to do things."

"The Library Journal called you acerbic. I don't hear that word every day."

She laughs. "Well, that one makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, sarcasm is one of my love languages. Teasing is proof of relational love. It's proof that I feel comfortable around you."

"When did you start experimenting with writing?"

"A babysitter got me into writing when I was around seven, challenging me to make a story about one of her animal posters. I created a cast of funny talking animals who lived in an apartment together (think Three’s Company). I will never forget the sensation of reading something that I created. I didn’t want to stop! But I wasn’t the traditional literary kid who read The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle in Time, and so forth. Because I watched a lot of TV, I was very tuned to the rhythms of dialogue and would write scripts, playing different parts I would speak into my portable tape recorder. I dreamed of becoming a screenwriter."

"Did you write any novels?"

"I didn't have the attention span for that, but I did start collecting pen pals. At one point, I had over fifty. This was when I was twelve to fifteen."

"Oh my goodness!"

"I know. I had some in other countries, but most lived in different parts of the United States. They fascinated me. I was very curious about their lives. I would get one or two letters a day. This was back in the day when your mailbox was a mail flap in the front door, so the mail just dropped onto your floor. It was so rewarding! I would be by myself, and then I would hear the mail flap and there would be letters. I'd reply right away because I loved the human connection made through language. I've loved that connection ever since. "

"So writing poetry came later in life."

"It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that a creative writing teacher told me she thought I was really a poet at heart. I finally accepted that a few years into college and changed my emphasis from playwriting to poetry."

"Is writing poetry a way for you to explore life and untangle your thoughts?" I ask.

"Absolutely. I never write to teach anything or to express a truth. I write for myself. I write to figure things out. Even when I wrote ‘Second Sky’, about the Apostle Paul and his writings, or ‘What Will Soon Take Place’, about the book of Revelation, I was trying to grapple with those things, not to teach people about what I've learned."

"When you say that it's a way to figure things out, you're not talking about solving things or writing tidy poetry that puts a bow on your thoughts,” I suggest. “At least, I don't think you are because your poetry is very open-ended."

"Good, I'm glad to hear that," she says.

"How do you reconcile open-endedness and 'figuring things out'?"

"I guess when I say that I'm figuring things out,” she replies. “I'm not saying that I'm finding an answer. I'm sitting with it, engaging the subject honestly and allowing a sense of mystery to remain. That doesn't mean that I forsake the craft of writing poetry. I don't believe in emoting on the page or brain-dumping in hopes that my readers will discover something transcendent in my chaos. But at the same time, I'm not looking for a tidy bow to put on my experience."

"It's been a while since I read the book Poetic Knowledge,” I say, “but if memory serves, the author makes a distinction between merely informational knowledge and poetic knowledge. He asks who would know horses better, the veterinarian with an equestrian specialty or the ten-year-old girl who grew up with horses? The answer, of course, is both. But their knowledge is not the same kind of knowledge. The ten-year-old's knowledge of horses would benefit greatly from the information the veterinarian has learned, but the girl's poetic knowledge of horses is greater than bookish learning. Both kinds of knowledge are valuable, but one is two-dimensional and the other is three-dimensional. Poetic knowledge is richer, born out of intimacy with horses."

"I couldn't say it better than that. Yes, that's exactly it. I'm writing as an act of exploring in the hopes of gaining intimate, poetic knowledge of what I'm exploring. Whether it's characters in the Bible, everyday events, or people."

"I had a young person ask me once, 'What is poetry for?' How would you answer that?"

"My goodness, that's a difficult question. How did you answer her?"

I grin and shake my head. "I thought I was the one asking the questions here," I reply.

"You are,” she says, “I'm just curious."

"Okay, the honest answer is that I didn't have a ready response, so I asked her what the Psalms are for. It probably wasn't playing fair, but it got us started."

"What did she say?"

"Well, the question made her pause—which bought me time to think—and it made her realize that there isn't a quick answer to the question,” I say. “The Psalms are too complex and too beautiful. They're so meaningful, they resist reduction. My daughter and I talked about how the psalmists give us words to articulate what we wouldn't know how to articulate, they explore the full gamut of human experience in beautiful language that reflects the surging in the human heart. The Psalms give us language to talk to ourselves and to God. We also find comfort and encouragement in the Psalms, but those come from relating to the psalmists, not necessarily from getting more information."

"That's really good,” she says.

"Well, it was a fun discussion, but it was a long discussion because the question can't be answered concisely. It struck me later that the question presupposes a practical end. It starts by assuming everything has to be good for something, that a piece of art can't just exist for the sake of existing or for the sake of adding something beautiful to the world. Beauty doesn't bow to our pragmatism. Music doesn't either. Neither does poetry."

"I think poetry helps us drill down into what it means to be human. It gets to the heart of being a person."

"I was just reading the forward to Braided Creek, the exchange of short poems between Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. It’s a wonderful collection, but Naomi Shihab Nye comments on how the poems startle her in new ways each time she reads the book. She asks whether the poems have changed, somehow, in the time since her earlier reading or if she has changed. Do you have that experience?"

"Yes, certainly with the best poems. I find that it’s true with poems like Li-Young Lee's and others. You know, the first time I encountered his work was in college. My best friend took me to Barnes and Noble—or maybe it was Borders. I had never seen such a thing. So many books! We found the poetry section. I was astounded that there was such a thing as a poetry section because I thought poetry only came from anthologies and textbooks. Without much rhyme or reason, I bought three books: Li-Young Lee's Rose, Mary Oliver's American Primitive, and The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds. I remember the sheer wonder and charm of holding those books and then reading such approachable poems in them."

"Those poets wrote about everyday things,” I say.

"Exactly. And I didn't have to fight through the language to understand what they were saying. In graduate school, when I was getting my MFA, there were some poets that I just couldn't understand. I had so much trouble getting through the language that I felt, I don't know, a sense of imposter syndrome—like I was a fraud who didn't belong in this world of poetry. I would tell my professor, 'I don’t know what I am reading.' It didn't help that she told me, 'Some people's brains just don't work that way.' Not very comforting. The abstractions were so alienating. But those three poets were so concrete, so sensory. The who, what, and where of the poems were clear, so I could enter the poem and get my footing. When those things are clear, I can take my time with the why."

"One poet I talked to distinguished between ambiguity and mystery. She said the former was connected to confusion and the latter was tied to not knowing. She said that some poets relish confusion and ambiguity, confusing those for mystery."

"Exactly,” she says. “Those poets were concrete and clear, so I could be enchanted by the why as it dawned on me. And they earned my trust by being clear, so I was willing to follow them into mystery. The poets I encountered in that store wrote about regular things—parenting and pregnancy and nature. Now, after living into my fifties, I have more experience with those things, so the poems strike me differently than they did when I was in my twenties. At the time, they sounded beautiful in the mouth, but now their meaning has deepened. The poems are the same, but I have changed. For all that, they haven't lost their potency and charm. In some ways, it has increased with age."

"When I read your poems, I'm struck by how hard you work to honor your subject. None of your poems feel casual or flippant."

"I'm glad to hear that. I know that sometimes people are a little surprised when they meet me to find out that I'm so goofy and that I laugh so much because my poems are so serious and sometimes violent. I even have a few curse words in them, but I never swear in real life. I don't like violent movies. It's kind of funny. I'm not a serious intellectual. I don't sit there in candlelight while I write. I love colorful clothing and flowers. And I love to laugh."

"Tennyson was known for his laughter. People loved to be around him. The older he got, the more he laughed, even though his poems were increasingly about human depravity, failure, and loss. I wonder if the ability to look the ugliness in the eye freed him. He writes with such care and tenderness, so it's not a flippant laughter. He just enjoyed life."

"When I wrote A Thousand Vessels, I tried to write about those biblical women with great care and love, so hopefully that comes through. They were regular women, just like me, so I tried to write about regular, everyday things. I don't have a choice. I live in the suburbs. I drive a minivan."

"It's the material you have to work with."

"Yes, I'm writing out of the reality of my life."

"There's a poem in that collection called 'My Daughter's Hands.' In it, you describe the communion tray passing and the way your daughter tried to grab the cup. The line that caught my attention was, 'Yet I know the moment I say no / your world will begin to go wrong.' In our church, communion is a weekly thing and I love that. I love that my children and I get to partake of the sacrament together. I think it's an important yes that they are invited to the table with me. It's a yes that shapes them. Of course, being a parent requires that I say no to them often if I'm going to help them order their desires, but this is not one of those moments. I know that I’m on debatable ground here, but it seems to me that when we deny them access to the table, we're saying something about their Father in Heaven."

"Absolutely,” she says.

"I also know that my kids imitate me, so I want them to see me reaching for the cup of blessing rather than, say, reaching for my cell phone. I want them to see me communing with Christ, not communing with social media. As they navigate this life, I want them to return to the foundation of the sacraments."

"Well, that little girl is now twenty-one years old, so a lot of life has happened. When I wrote those early poems, I had no idea what my kids would face in the world. My daughter, like everyone in her generation, has been shaped by things I never imagined possible. Massive forces are working on this generation. Obviously, I can't change the fact that there was a pandemic, and I can't change the fact that social media is rewiring the brain chemistry of a whole generation of humans. I wish I could. And politics, too. When we were kids, politics mattered, but the political climate was not nearly what it is today. It's heartbreaking what this generation has gone through."

"I agree."

"They're growing up in a world that is so politically charged that nearly everything in their life is colored by conflict. They are being wired—we're being wired—to think in terms of conflict first.”

"You can't have a normal conversation about a minor disagreement,” I say, “because it's just too much, it's overwhelming."

"Yes. Unless it's about nothing at all, every conversation is supercharged, and we become more silent or tip-toeing through a field of landmines. And the phone's impact on their lives is massive. They have to navigate so much that's right at their fingertips."

"When we were young, kids had to go looking for pornography. Now it comes to find them."

"That's so true. It's a horrible, horrible situation."

"How does poetry help?" I ask.

"I think poetry helps us be more human, less artificial. There's so much gamesmanship and posturing on social media. There's so much fear. Reading and writing poetry allows you to explore your own soul or feelings without fear. Works of art can cut through all of the meanness in the world, all of the artificiality, and touch us deeply. We need to recover what it means to be human."

"I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that we read to know that we're not alone. That's also partly why people use social media. But there must be a difference between social media affirmation and poetry affirmation."

"Yes, poetry offers a deeper affirmation of our shared humanity. I use social media. I like using it. There's an instant gratification to it. The response is almost immediate. Connection happens quickly. It's not a far cry from my pen pals earlier in life. But if I could go back and get rid of social media, I would do it. I'm not sure where I read this, but there was an article that covered some fascinating findings from a survey of young people. When they were asked if they would prefer a world with social media or without social media, their overwhelming response was that if everyone dropped social media at the same time, they would be fine with it. They would even be willing to pay for that to happen. But if anyone still had it and they didn't, they would want to keep social media. Fear of missing out was that strong in them. Even though they know it's taking their joy away, they still fear being left out.”

“That’s an incredible finding.”

“Our lives are shaped and run by social media, but we don't really want it that way. Even kids know that they are more human when they don't have their phone and they have no access to social media. It's a crushing realization that knowing the truth doesn't compel us to do anything about it."

"Poetry slows us down,” I add. “I find that social media speeds me up inside, but poetry doesn't do that."

"I agree."

"I wonder how much of that slowing down has to do with gratitude. Social media doesn't help me be more grateful. It doesn't always make me more envious, of course, but it doesn't make me content. I wonder if reading poetry can help us become more grateful. There are many poets whose roots are in the soil of gratitude and it is evident in their poetry. ”

"Absolutely. Li-Young Lee and Mary Oliver certainly belong to that group. I think it's an important daily task to write down things I'm grateful for. Maybe it's only coffee and bird song, but I'm still taking a moment to pause. Poetry gives me the chance to live into my senses, to be more aware and, therefore, more thankful,” she says. “The act of writing, for me, is a way of staying connected to Christ. That, alone, is a worthy purpose for picking up the pen."

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Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.