Julie Benesh is author of the chapbook About Time published by Cathexis Northwest Press. Her poetry collection, Initial Conditions, is forthcoming in March 2024 from Saddle Road Press. She has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, The Write Launch, and many other places. She earned an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She teaches writing craft workshops at the Newberry Library and has day jobs as a professor, department chair, and management consultant. She holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. Read more at juliebenesh.com.
“Creative writing relied on very basic emotions we could feel stored in our bodies.”
— Molly Daniels
Interviewer
You loved reading books when you were in grade school. What did you learn about yourself that carried over into your teenage years? As an adult? What were your favorite books?
Julie Benesh
Books helped me see how I could wait out certain circumstances in my life, by holding a space for them in my imagination, almost like planning a trip, or a series of them, (which is another thing I also still enjoy). I pretty much read everything, including the encyclopedia, paperbacks my mom bought from the supermarket, from the Portable Jung to pulp fiction. Later, I learned how not only does reading build worldly wisdom very efficiently, it also increases one’s capacity for empathy.
Interviewer
In college, you began to understand that literary writing was different from high-concept genre writing. What did each genre teach you about writing? Why did you choose the literary path?
Julie Benesh
I’m a person easily overstimulated who does not need a lot of external drama and cannot handle certain triggers: I make my own storms. I do have a sense of humor and gravitate toward hilarity mingled with heartbreak in both reading and writing.
Interviewer
Your journey was sparked when you took a class led by Molly Daniels who showed you “that creative writing relied on very basic emotions we could feel stored in our bodies.” She influenced your future as a poet. Takeaways for aspiring writers.
Julie Benesh
Yes—my Jungian analyst put me up to it, and I wanted to prove him wrong! But her approach worked well for me because I tend to be heady and disembodied and it helped me correct for that. Since then, in my professional life as an educator and researcher I learned more about how our nervous systems work, how our mind is in all our nerves throughout our bodies, and not just our brains, and how, different as we all may be, we have so much in common that connects us, and writers need to tap into that awareness. It is simple, not necessarily easy. Poet Major Jackson used the term “gut punch” in a workshop. For me that’s a powerful metaphor. That punch can go from literal to metaphor (as in a Western, say) or from metaphor to literal, but some kind of bio-chemical physical thing needs to be conveyed from writer to reader regardless of form or genre.
Interviewer
What is the title of the publication of your first short story? Who published it and when was it published?
Julie Benesh
My first short story was called “Habits of Happiness” and published in the Tin House anthology (2001) Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader. I remember the story being featured on their website, for, literally, years, back when most print journals barely even had websites. It was also nominated for a Pushcart prize.
Interviewer
You have an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in human and organizational systems. You taught psychology and “put creative writing on the shelf, where it remained as I worked to a get a foothold in a new career as a professor and department chair in business psychology.” How did you find your way back to writing and then, finally, to poetry?
Julie Benesh
Through reading. My responses to reading and experiencing that “gut punch” would always fall somewhere on a spectrum between that’s fantastic – my turn, to hmmm, I see that and raise you… this! It’s like a conversation that is impossible not to join. Kind of a combination of falling in love, being in a brawl, and being infected by laughter. Irresistible inspiration!
Interviewer
You began to write micro-memoirs—first learned from the book, Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly—when you perceived that you could break up pieces of your writing into poetic lines and stanzas and—voilà—into micro-memoir poetry. Then you sent the poems to various literary publications and publishers. Describe what it was like to enter the world of literary competition.
Julie Benesh
It seems like there are more venues for poetry than fiction. It takes up less space, and you hear back quicker, which is good because I feel the press of time as I age. It was a little overwhelming. One contest gave me the feedback that they received over 2000 manuscripts, and mine was in the top 20. I took that as encouragement. The place who published my chapbook, Cathexis Northwest Press, had published quite a few of my poems in their journal, so I was not surprised to win their chapbook contest.
Interviewer
During the Covid pandemic, you attended literary workshops and submitted your writing to various publications. What happened during this time that eventually culminated with the publication of Initial Conditions by Saddle Road Press (2024)?
Julie Benesh
Like many poets, I kept a continually evolving manuscript file that I updated and sent out weekly. I sent out Initial Conditions on the Sunday night deadline and got the acceptance the next day.
Interviewer
Initial Conditions has three sections: “I On The Constancy of Forgetting”; “II Confession, With Redactions”; and “III Something Else.” What did the sixty-one poems tell you about which poem to place in which section? What did you learn about yourself, your poetry, and your experience publishing these sixty-one poems?
Julie Benesh
I started with four sections. That first version of the manuscript, for me, seemed too similar to my chapbook. So, I removed most of the poems about my childhood that had appeared in the chapbook. I knew I wanted the most confessional poems in the middle, and the ars poetica and experiments in the end as a coda.
You accepted one of my stories and quite a few poems and I remember your saying, in passing, my poems were better. I feel like my poems are more sincere and, in a weird way, direct. They seem more revealing. I find it more settling to write them. Putting them into a collection complexified everything again, like a big logic problem, but I came to see the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Maybe I will write a novel one day after all!
Interviewer
You are giving a presentation of your writing journey to high school seniors who aspire to be writers: Your advice to them.
Julie Benesh
Consider whatever it is “writing” means to you. As you continue to mature, keep peeling it apart layer by layer, like an onion, and keep enacting it. It’s great to be open to exploring what others think or thought, but the most important thing to you should be what is true for you.
