ANOUK:  Hi Ben! 

BEN: Oh hello!

ANOUK: Thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. I'm Anouk,  I'm the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Temporal Lobe. 

ANDI: And I'm Andi, I'm the other co-founder.

ANOUK: We're gonna ask some questions. If you're not comfortable answering them, that's totally fine, but it'd also be great if you could give us some stuff to think about.

BEN: I’ll do my best, it's a pleasure to meet y'all and thanks for inviting me.

ANOUK: Yeah, no problem. 

BEN: I’ve never interviewed about my work so thank y'all.

ANOUK: “The Blank” is a creative nonfiction piece of yours and there's a lot of references to your occupation, which is therapy. And I wanted to ask you, in what ways did therapy and psychology inspire you to write this piece and other pieces, and were there specific moments that spurred you into writing, in general? 

BEN: Hmm. That's a great question. Well, yeah “The Blank” is a concept. I think I first started to think of it as something I could write about at some point in the future, way back when I was reading a writer. I guess he'd be called an existentialist of sorts. Walker Percy. And Walker Percy talks about this “3:00 PM on a Wednesday” feeling, which was really helpful for me as someone who's somewhat depressively organized. And it's this sense of, “oh my goodness, how did I get here? And what am I doing?” This strange sort of malaise that just settles down over you all of a sudden. And that's a feeling that I've wondered about my whole life. It's a bad enough feeling to visit upon you by yourself. Even worse, perhaps if you're trying to be around people…But where it became particularly difficult for me was as a therapist—this sense of futility, this unaccountable sense of blankness that visits upon one when one's supposed to be in the position of the helper. And so I guess, generally speaking, that's what I was trying to get at. More specifically the occasion in my life that got me writing about it was—I did my PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard, very research-focused. I had some training in therapy, but my clinical internship, which occurred at a community mental health center where I still work—a much different scene: Treating individuals with serious mental illness who are living below the poverty line, who are usually on social security of some sort. And one thing that I noticed is that blank feelings tended to show up a lot more often, In that form of treatment. One, because I think there is a sense of futility when you're working with folks who are very poor and very sick, but also from some theory on the driving force behind a disorder like schizophrenia. That we tend to focus on things like hallucinations and delusions, sort of all the hallmark Hollywood symptoms, but that there is this tremendous inner emptiness and loneliness that you, as the therapist, will start picking up on when you do work in this particular population. And so I decided to start writing about it, because it was sort of my way of coping and working through that emotion. So I guess that's kind of a long-winded answer, but I think that it's a general aspect of the human condition, ‘the blank’ is. But also…how it fits into the helping professions and into therapy. That's what really got me writing about it and in earnest. 

ANDI: What are you writing about currently? Or if you aren't writing about anything currently, do you have plans for what you want to write about in the future? I know you talked a little bit about that sense of blankness. Do you have any other current things that are weighing on you or that you really wanna write about? 

BEN: Man. Well, thanks for the question. I think for me often writing has been—I write about ‘the blank’ a lot in different forms. In this particular case it was sort of limited to therapy and public transportation, which seemed to have a lot to do with each other for some reason. But I've often felt like for me in writing, there's this hope that, man, if you're really possessed by an idea, there's this sense that the world takes on salience—it's almost like being in love. When I really feel possessed by an idea and really intent on a writing project, I feel that blank lift. I would love to have something I'm really onto right now but I do feel as if I'm in a bit of a blank over the past couple months. There are other side projects. I like to keep a couple of different side projects going all at the same time. So stuff that has been in progress, but that has perhaps stalled as of late. I'm working on a set of poems that are sort of memoirs about my experience in the military. I was on active duty in the Army for five years before I started graduate school. There's some poems about Achilles, pouting in his tent and what he's doing while he's pouting in his tent and refusing to fight. And I think ‘the blank’ shows up particularly for Achilles. This sort of blank rage that he's sitting in. And also with the military experience, these sorts of moments of blankness and wondering what on earth are myself and all of these other soldiers doing here? So ‘the blank’ shows up in those projects and I hope they come to something. But we’ll see. 

ANOUK: Thank you so much for that answer. I love it when Greek myths and timeless stories come up in our lives. This next question is a really weird one. 

BEN: Good. 

ANOUK: In ‘the blank,’ you mentioned very hesitantly that poetry and therapy are alike. But you say that that's true for people who want to get well. Are they also alike for you as a healer? When you write poetry, do you think that you “betray a lack of contact” with yourself?

BEN: You said betray, lack of contact with yourself? Like, do I have an anxiety about betraying a lack of contact with myself when I'm being the therapist? Oh man, that's such a good question. I guess to answer the question as directly as possible you really zeroed in on something there that is a central concern of mine. I think that therapy is a poetic enterprise. I think that psychiatry and psychology, or whatever we want to call it, have always sat astride the realm of science and the realm of the humanities. So the short answer is yes. I think that therapists should be poets and not that they have to be professional poets, which is a dreadful thought of a professional poet in the first place, but I suppose we have those. But the reason for that I think is that in our culture, in the culture I was brought up in, in scientific or research clinical psychology, we've started looking at humans as bundles of labels or bundles of diagnoses. This idea, if I can find the correct label or the correct diagnostic entity, then the correct treatment could be applied and in a sort of a pool ball mechanism, I could be healed. I think that's a very unfortunate way of looking at people and a very uncharitable way of looking at oneself, even if it arises from the best intentions. So where poetry comes in is if you've been diagnosed with depression, there's your diagnostic label. That may be of some help in getting your treatment reimbursed or maybe getting us in the ballpark for the right medication. But what is it like for you to experience depression? What is the phenomenological experience of depression? That's the realm of poetry that's to me, -depending on which philosopher mind you talk to- but for me it's in the realm of phenomenology and therefore poetry, something that I think therapists and poets are both after. Even though some might claim not to be trying to do this, I think what they're both after is they're trying to bring language to bear on preverbal phenomenological experience that can't really be adequately grasped in language. That's why at the end of that poem, I said “then more words and other attempts”, right? It is a futile process ultimately, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. 

So to wrestle with the act of faith in some sense that it's worth our time to try to communicate here, even though ultimately we will fail over and over and over and over again. I mean I don't wanna go on for too long, but I do wonder the extent to which therapists are sort of made the new clergy in our culture, this idea of talk to a therapist, they're these compassionate experts of mind who are gonna help you with this problem. Therapists have crises of faith all the time too. So I'm to some extent trying to undermine faith in therapists, not faith in therapy. But these are humans who have their own what's called countertransference. You as a patient perhaps, and I, as a patient I'm also in therapy. I have my transference to the therapist, but what's going on in that therapist's mind?

ANDI: This relates back to a little bit of what you were talking about before, this kind of blankness that's been in your life, especially in your writing life. Are you in writer's block and what helps you out of writer's block? How do you start generating pieces?

BEN: Oh man, this is such a good question. You're really honing in on my central anxieties. Y'all are good therapists. Yeah, I'm in writer's block. “My name's Ben and I suffer from writer's block.” I think writer's block is a good thing to go through because I've been in a lot of poetry workshops and stuff. People talk about their writing practice and how often they write during the week or for how long or how many words they're outputting. And it's this whole sort of weird productivity-based metric similar to the diagnostic system we have psychiatrically. How many words did you write? Or what's your specific practice? I think part of the thrill for me is, I have no idea what makes me productive. I have certain things as of late that seem to have been helpful. But that's the thing in a way it's like prayer. It's always changing. If I ever got it nailed down, I should probably start to get worried. As of late, what I've found to be most helpful for me is, I take a piece of paper and I get on the T, on the subway here in Boston. And I try to get out in the environment somewhere and just jot things down so that it doesn't seem like too big of a deal. And that way maybe I can sort of jar something loose and then once I've aggregated enough fragments, I'll sit down, and start typing stuff out but I think that being in that blank as a psychoanalytically inclined therapist, I also think that you are doing a lot of work in ‘the blank’ and in writer's block. It's just happening unconsciously. Or maybe, I just wanna believe that.

Well, here's one last thing. We know that one of the theories on the brain is that there's this task-positive network when we're focused in intent on something versus a default mode network you can think of that more as ‘the blank.’ It's not task positive, it's more mind wandering, sort of feeling out in space. And I think you have to have both in order to do creative work. I often experience ‘the blank’ as what would be called a lack of seeing the use in anything. But that can be if objects are no longer understood in terms of what they afford you, what they can be used for, it allows you to detach from them and perhaps see them in a different way. So even though that's painful and confusing and perhaps conducive to a subjective sense of despair, there's this idea of the mind releasing its hold on the way it moves through the world intentionally. So maybe I'm just trying to talk myself into believing that this period of nonproductivity is gonna be helpful for me one day. Those are my thoughts on that. 

ANDI: Yeah, really agree with that. There are a lot of writers who do what they call a kind of walking poetry, where in the city or out of the city, they will just walk or they will travel in some kind of way and just start listing things. And those turn into ways to get out of writer's block or to turn into poems or to turn into something else. Because they've just got these snippets as they experience the world. 

BEN: It reminds me of Wallace Stevens. The story about him is that he'd walk through New Haven and would use the rhythm of the walking and he would just compose these poems in his head, which I wish I could do. And then he would just write them down once he got to his, -I think he worked for an insurance company. But that's a really interesting idea. 

ANOUK: I think I need to ride the green line more. Ride the T to Park Street. Because maybe I'll be inspired.

BEN: I highly recommend the orange line.

ANOUK: The orange line! 

BEN: The orange line has done a lot of good things for me.

ANOUK: The green line is nice. 

BEN: Yeah, you got the outside. You have the outside. It's always delayed.

ANOUK: Kenmore’s always broken down. 

BEN: There are many existential possibilities afforded by the green line.

ANOUK: This next question is kind of more technical in your writing. But your piece (“The Blank”) contains a very unique mixture of verse poetry and prose, and the two different types of writing contrast and complement each other really well. I just wanted to ask you, what compels you to switch from prose to poetry in a piece like this? What's your process and are you in a different head space when you write either? 

BEN: That's a cool question. So when I was in workshops, I would sometimes get chewed out for putting too much polemic into poetry. I was writing a poem that was supposed to be about experience and I would try to sneak in commentary or various diatribes about life or whatever. And so for the longest time, I was struggling to be a poet and to write poetry things and to do the poet thing. And then I left workshops for a while. I was just kind of sailing out on my own and doing a lot of therapy and wondering if it was worth it at all. And then I realized one day that I really just needed to vent about how much frustration I was feeling as a therapist and training at the time. Sometimes it's a poem and sometimes it's prose. And if I find myself writing something that I'm trying really hard to be a poem at a certain point, I have to get honest with myself and I say, this is another one of Ben's tirades. I'm gonna put it in prose. It may or may not become a product of some sort that goes into collection. Maybe it's something I just need to get through so that I can write the next poem. So, one reason that I'm so happy that y'all picked up this collection is, it helps me to have a little more faith that I can toggle between those two forms. And I don't have to wrestle over this question about is this a poem or not?

It can be either. I guess maybe I just kind of stopped fighting the need to be a poet every time I put pen to paper because that's a lot of pressure. As far as the different head spaces, I do think they are different head spaces. At least I feel like they are. With a poem, I often feel a little more spacey and I feel almost as if there's kind of something coming through me and pushing out onto the page. Whereas when I'm writing prose, I often feel like I have more of a point to what I'm saying and I just have to say it. So maybe it's again that default mode network versus that more task-positive network. If we wanna get all neurological about the whole thing.

ANOUK: I love the neurology. I'm learning a lot. I'll pass it on to Andi. 

ANDI: Then this is also like a little bit more tech technical. What have your experiences in poetry workshops been like before, just highlighting that experience a little bit more. And then what advice would you have for other people who are submitting to journals?

BEN: Poetry workshops were really important for me, for the longest time I was just kind of writing on my own. Particularly like in the military, I didn't really talk to a lot of people about my poetry. It was this sort of shameful thing I did in my off hours. I got to be in a poetry workshop at Harvard with Jorie Graham, who was amazing. And I think the number one thing Jori did for me was she took a chance on me in her workshop, which I'm so grateful for, but she was also this just amazing presence. Like the number of ideas and images per second bursting forth from her was just incredible. And she would have opinions about your work. 

Whether or not you chose to take those seriously is your affair, but it kind of showed me that workshops don't have to be this extremely finicky analysis of different semantic choices. It can be kind of a take it or leave it thing, like here is my immediate response to what you put in front of me and do with it what you will. They were very helpful for me. Not everybody's like this. I had to do some time in the so-called desert and not be in workshops for a while because after a while I'd start hearing the voices and opinions of everyone in the workshop, before I even put my pen to the paper. I do recommend taking a sabbatical and just kind of getting out by yourself and letting your freak flag fly for a little while, and then reentering the workshop once you've been sort of cleansed. But everyone's got their own bag. It's so hard to find good workshops too. Before I got involved in a set that I liked, I did feel really lost.

As far as folks submitting work, I feel like I'm terrible at submitting work. I don't know if I'm the best person to ask about that. One thing I will say is that I have a lot more fun when I'm doing stuff like this. I stopped caring to some extent about, oh, am I gonna get published in Plowshares or whatever?A lot of the folks who are writing and getting published in Plowshares, they probably are better poets than I am, but, also more importantly, we're not really trying to do the same things and that's okay. There's something immensely gratifying about conversations like this.

I think the great hope of escape from ‘the blank’ for me has been: is it possible for me to talk about this and get into dialogue about this with other people who also care about it? So I try to take that ethos when I'm looking at which journals to submit to. Like do these folks seem like people that I would want to have a conversation with?

I guess that's my advice for submitting. It's such an intensely personal and painful thing. It's just so damn painful. Just so many rejections and it still hurts. It still hurts every time. And I guess that's just part of the deal. I wish I had better advice. It just sucks. 

ANOUK: Perfect. That concludes our official questions! Thank you so much!