About Catherine Abbey Hodges

Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Empty Me Full (Gunpowder Press, 2024); In a Rind of Light (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020); Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press, 2017); and Instead of Sadness, selected by Dan Gerber for the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Her chapbooks are A Spell for What Comes Next (Miramar Editions, 2018) and All the While (New Women’s Voices finalist from Finishing Line Press, 2006).

Her poems appear widely in venues including Narrative, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Plume, CALYX, Plant-Human Quarterly, I-70 Review, Cider Press Review, Atticus Review, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. They’ve been anthologized, featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Orison Anthology, and Best of the Net. Catherine serves as a staff reader for SWWIM and an advisory editor for Anacapa Review. With David Starkey, she is co-creator and -director of Canyon Wren Writing.

English Professor Emeritus at Porterville College, Catherine writes, edits, teaches privately, and collaborates with musician Rob Hodges on ancestral Yokuts land in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada.

Listen in to our Chat with Catherine

Tweetspeak Poetry (TSP): Give us a quick tracing of your life with poetry. Where did it start? Why have you remained a poet?

Catherine Abbey Hodges (CAH): For a long time, I’ve told people I started writing poems in October of 1998 on the night of the full moon. And that’s true. It wasn’t just the moon, it was the fall air, the friends we were standing in the street with looking up, the time in our lives when our children were young and everything was exhausting, beautiful, and fraught with uncertainty.

But recently I’ve recognized that I was a writer from the get-go, a writer who wrote everything but poems, until I became brave enough to write poems in October 1998.

I’ve remained a poet because it keeps me brave, it holds me still, and poem by poem it shows me why I’m here.

TSP: You’ve had work featured at The Writer’s Almanac. What an honor! Can you share an excerpt of the work? And… we’d love to hear how that feature came about for you.

CAH: Yes, an honor for sure. I cut my teeth on The Writer’s Almanac; when I encountered a poem I loved there, I’d find other poems by that writer, study them, try to learn their moves. When I got a call from my editor at Gunpowder Press letting me know that Garrison Keillor wanted to read a poem from my first book, Instead of Sadness, it was definitely one of those Big Moments.

As to how that came about, my book contract included something about the publisher providing the book to a certain number of reviewers and publications as requested by the author. The Writer’s Almanac was on my list until it stopped accepting submissions, and I’ve been fortunate to have four poems featured. Here’s one from Nov. 24, 2017:

Couch on the Beach

Someone dragged a hide-a-bed
onto the sand last night.
This morning there it sits, empty
as an open clam, clearly
slept in, face to face
with the Pacific. Less graceful
than a Massey-Ferguson
and less expected. Even the dogs,
after marking it theirs,
shake their heads. Still,
I recognize the impulse, the urge
to reach the furthest edge,
west of west, press up so close
and hard to beauty that it surges in,
then sweeps me new and desolate,
then enters me again.

—from Instead of Sadness, Gunpowder Press, 2015

TSP: A staff reader for SWWIM. Oh, that’s fabulous. (Jen Karetnick is a real friend of Tweetspeak, so this caught our eye!) How did you end up becoming a staff reader for SWWIM?

CAH: Jen’s wonderful, a true champion of poets and superb poet herself, as is her co-editor Catherine Esposito Prescott (my press-mate at Gunpowder Press, and a fellow winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize).

SWWIM had published a couple of poems of mine, and I value their mission to support women and women-identifying poets. Not long after I retired from full-time community college teaching in 2021, SWWIM put out a call for volunteer staff readers. I’d been exploring ways to deepen my literary citizenship now that my time was more my own, so I applied and was invited to join the team. It continues to be a gratifying experience, and my admiration for the work of SWWIM has only grown over the three years since I’ve been involved.

TSP: When you read poems for a place like SWWIM, what guides you? What, in your opinion, makes for a successful poem in general?

CAH: I’ll start with the second question—and what a great question for every poet to consider, an artistic accountability check of sorts: do my own poems live up to my standards for a successful poem? In any poem, what I’m looking for first of all is an experience. I’m not looking to be taught something; rather, I want to come under the influence of the world of the poem and return changed.

And of course when I’m reading submissions for a particular publication, I’m also looking for poems that speak to the mission of the journal and enter into a kind of conversation with the other poems published there.

I want to come under the influence of the world of the poem and return changed…

—Catherine Abbey Hodges

TSP: You collaborate with musician Rob Hodges. Can you share more about this collaboration? Is music something that’s central to your life? Tell us a little about your journey with it.

CAH: Music is indeed central to my life. Rob, to whom I’ve been married for 40 years, is a cellist, singer, composer, and conductor with a PhD in ethnomusicology. My home of origin was full of music as well, and I’ve come to realize that, to a large extent, I write by ear—that is, I follow the sounds as I draft and revise.

As to our collaboration—for readings, Rob often improvises on cello around and under the words. If time allows, he plays improvisational responses between sets of poems; we think of such interludes as sonic space in which (we hope) the words will continue to resonate and those in attendance can meet the poems with their own thoughts and experiences.

TSP: The collaboration with Rob is on ancestral Yokuts land. Can you say more about the land and the tribelets—and any personal connection you might have with either?

CAH: We live and work on two acres that were home to the Yokuts people in centuries past. Our connection is through the human family (neither Rob nor I can claim any tribal affiliation), and we’re reminded of that connection as we come across obsidian cherts, the occasional projectile point, and bedrock mortars in the rocks along the river that runs at the base of the property. Our intent is to steward the land while we’re here, learn from it, and let it welcome the creatures that live in this region of California.

TSP: You are a teacher who also does retreats. What’s one of your favorite retreat venues? What makes it a favorite?

CAH: Living rooms, rec centers, campgrounds, established retreat centers—these all can be wonderful venues. I think what matters, whatever the setting, is a dynamic balance between careful planning and openness to what will arise.

A recent retreat venue I’ve loved is St. Anthony Retreat in Three Rivers, California. The setting is oak woodlands, just before the entrance to Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. My husband Rob was commissioned to build a labyrinth at St. Anthony in 2019, and that labyrinth (and the walking meditation it invites) dovetails beautifully with a writing retreat.

TSP: If you could offer any advice at all to a blocked writer, what would it be?

CAH: Relax. Writers are always writing—whether or not we’re literally putting words on the page or screen. When you’re chopping tomatoes, driving to the pharmacy, worrying about a loved one . . . the writer in you is also at work. The fact that this work is subterranean doesn’t make it less “writerly.” It took me a long time to get to this recognition—I hope I can save someone some self-doubt!

Recently I’ve been making quick (10 minute) collages on 4×6 cards—images from magazines, scraps of colored paper, a few words, nothing I think long and hard about. This often gets my brain to a fresh place from which a new poem can assert itself.

Try It: Collage Poetry Prompt

We love Catherine’s collages. They definitely inspire! Using one of the collages above as inspiration, write a poem. Use the words in her collage, or not. Relax and play.