RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.
Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?
Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.
So I was researching, and this is the first time I’ve ever done research related to a poetry project, and one of the things that popped up was that the lake is cold and really deep. And then I learned that an average of seven people a year drown in Lake Tahoe, and it’s not because they can’t swim. It’s because the water’s so damn cold. So that, for me, opened up this interesting complicating point that I was looking for. And I think placing the drowning poems early in the chapbook was a way to juxtapose the key questions of: what is the dream, what’s the fantasy, what’s the beauty, and then what’s the harsh, cold reality of Settler colonialism?
I learned that an average of seven people a year drown in Lake Tahoe, and it’s not because they can’t swim. It’s because the water’s so damn cold.”
RH: I wanted to ask that question about the lake first, but the drowning poems aren’t the first poems in the book. The first poem in the book is a Chinese title which, according to Google, translates to “inheritance”. And when we get towards the end of the book, there are more titles in Chinese, and in the correspondence poem, there’s Chinese sprinkled throughout. I love that you don’t include any translations or footnotes. I’m curious about how you decided to include Chinese in the book, because it feels very precise and pointed.
CM: The oldest poem in the collection is that last one, “高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺,” which is the very long epistolary poem to the two people named there. So it’s 太 爺, which is great-grandfather, and 高 祖 父, my great -great-grandfather, both of whom were my dad’s grandparents, but on different sides of the family. Writing this letter to my two ancestors, which took me several years of revision, informed the other poems of the collection because I was generating new poems as I revised that central piece. I think a lot of my decisions around using untranslated Chinese characters were taught to me by that poem. It taught me how I was thinking about it and why I included them, which was helpful. And a lot of that was about memory, language loss, and what Cantonese I had access to. Like, What words do I still know? I was semi-fluent as a child, certainly conversationally fluent, and a little bit literate by the time I was 11. That has slipped away, and so as I was writing there were a lot of placeholders where maybe I didn’t know the character but I knew the sound or words I always use. I never translate family names, for example. Like the word for grandmother is in there, and I never called her anything except 嫲 嫲, so of course I’m not going to use an English word there. I wanted to start using Chinese characters in those places. And for poems like the first poem in the collection, “遺 產,” I did not know those words. The title of that poem translates to “inheritance,” as you found online, which is really the subject matter of the poem. So for subsequent poems, I was able to think about, What do I want to be in Chinese? What do I need to look up? How do I need to learn or re-learn? First, it was remembering and looking, and then it started to be a more intentional decision.
RH: I’d love to hear about your decision not to translate for the reader. I had a lot of fun with Google Translate trying to figure things which felt like part of my process as a reader becoming a participant in the world. But there is an ongoing debate about how we translate, if we do it at all. What was your thought process behind that?
CM: Sure. I think I’ve definitely been attuned to conversations happening in books and even in cinema and other things about what gets translated, what doesn’t, how are we doing it, or who’s the audience. I thought a lot about who my audience is . In some ways it’s like, okay, my ancestors are one of the audiences I’m writing to, and they didn’t really speak English, so that’s like a fake audience. But also we’re often writing for ourselves, so I ask myself, what of this language do I have access to? And I think one of the big influences on me was Vyvyane Loh’s novel Breaking the Tongue. She has these big stretches, particularly towards the end of the book as the story gets more and more complicated and painful, of Chinese text. And I wasn’t sure if it was the same stuff that was happening in the English in the subsequent paragraphs. Like, was she translating it for us? What was different? What was the same? It was a really hard experience as a reader for me personally because that is a language that I used to know and don’t really anymore and there were things that were painful about not being able to access that text, but I also thought it was really, really beautiful as a reader, and I was really excited by it. I’ve been a reader for a couple of different literary journals, and a few years ago started seeing untranslated Chinese characters in a few submissions. I got so excited to see other people doing this, and it felt like the right thing to be doing.
RH: Yes! I’m a big fan of writers just letting the writing happen as it does. And when you are multilingual, it’s like certain words in certain languages make more sense.
The other notable structural thing in the chapbook is that there’s a lot of play with form. There’s a cleave, there’s a duplex, and there are probably others that I didn’t catch. Form is present in this book, and there’s also a way that you play with words on the page that makes the poems feel like they’re interacting with themselves. I’d love to hear about your process of working within form and structure like that.
CM: Sure. I love form. I find it very helpful for containing my otherwise sprawling and journalistic writing habits. I need a constraint. I also think I read a lot of people who write in form and I’m influenced by them. For example, I read Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly for the first time almost 15 years ago, and those poems have stuck with me. The way that Jess’s poems were framing conversations between historical text as the “official” (read: white) record and the poetic imagined voice of Leadbelly (read: as close as we can get to the truth), influenced, for example, some of the “Cold Shock” poems, most formally “Stage 1/Threat No. 2 Heart and Blood Pressure Problems”. And, of course, the duplex at the beginning was influenced by reading Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. So some of the form is coming from other people, and then some of it is me looking for different ways to say what sometimes feels like the same thing over and over again. You mentioned that the poems are in conversation with each other, and I agree. Different formal approaches are a way for me as a writer—and hopefully, for my reader—to avoid my obsessions becoming repetitive.
RH: I want to get back to the lake, specifically because I noticed about how it’s not actually named. In the epigraphs, we get those two quotes that kind of give us a place, but throughout the book, it is simply “the lake”, and I’m wondering about that. It feels like the lake is everywhere and nowhere. Why did the lake feel like the right setting to tell this story of ancestral ties? Why not name it, and how do you see the lake as a place of reclamation?
CM: Hmm. It’s gonna be a long answer, girl. Okay.
RH: Good! Go in!
CM: It’s been 10 years since my wife and I bought a home in the Lake Tahoe area. My grandparents had passed, we got some inheritance, and we’re able to have this tremendous class privilege of, “We can buy a house and we live in the Bay Area! But not actually here. So, where is the place that we can buy a home that’s not gonna cost a million billion dollars?” Lake Tahoe is a really special place to us – it’s close to the Bay Area, and we love to go there. My wife Sandy grew up on a lake in Maine, so she was so excited to have access to a lake, and then that introduced us to this new world. There’s this incredibly gorgeous landscape and in some ways, it’s a fancy place—like there are a lot of fancy people up there and it’s ridiculous. So I was like, “I’m obsessed with this place, it’s so beautiful, I love it so much,” and then also I was having lots of yucky feelings about capitalism.
And then about a year after we bought it, we were up there for a weekend with some friends in the winter and we were about to get snowed in. But I’m a teacher and I was like, “I’ve got school Monday and I can’t get snowed in.” I can’t drive home, it’s dangerous, they’re gonna close the road. So Sandy drove me the 20 minutes to a little Truckee train station and I get on the train and I’m riding on the train through the snowy Sierra Nevada and it’s so gorgeous. Again, gorgeousness is a lot of why I chose the setting of Lake Tahoe. It was so beautiful and I’m looking out the window at this snow and then I was like, oh shit like my ancestors built this, right? Like, these train tracks were built by our Chinese-American “ancestors”. But then I was like, No wait, they were built by my literal ancestor. I knew I had at least one ancestor who worked on the railroad and I didn’t know what part, but that was where it started to come together. These poems I’d been trying to write about Tahoe—“it’s so pretty but also capitalism makes me feel yucky inside” and now I have this possible personal tie to this place. Why do I feel so connected to this place? Why do I feel so swept up in its beauty? Is it just because it’s beautiful? Is it because my ancestor was here? What does it mean that my ancestor—a specific singular person, Mar Dun—or ancestors as the larger collective of Chinese railroad laborers were here and had access to this place that now not a lot of people get access to? So all of that kind of got swept up for me—why I wrote about the lake. And the second part was, why not name it?
RH: Yes.
CM: So in my full-length collection that’s coming out in April 2025, Water Guest, in which all of these poems appear, the lake is named more. There’s a poem with the title of it, so it shows up in some different ways that it doesn’t show up in the chapbook. I think that’s partly about the length of the chapbook and how many of the poems you can fit in. I think the one thing I would add about reclamation is that I couldn’t just claim it for myself as a 21st-century first-time property owner, you know, mixed race, complicated heritage, descendant of immigrants, and not also recognize the settler-colonial piece of it all too, right? So I took a year sabbatical from teaching sabbatical from teaching, and got to spend bigger chunks of time up in the woods and at the lake, which felt expansive and powerful and helpful. It also gave me more time to talk to people and collaborate and ask them what’s going on locally. I knew of the Indigenous people in this region. I could read online about the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, but now I had time to go to things like the ‘Itdeh, which is the tribe’s annual festival in South Lake Tahoe. Going to that, meeting people, following up, and asking, “Oh, you have a Cultural Resources Advisory Council, seems like I should talk to you all. Are you open to meeting with me? Can I learn from you? Do I have permission to write about some of these stories?” Like, let me drive to Nevada to the tribal headquarters—there was time and space to do that. I researched and read a wide variety of books. And I think that reclamation piece, both in the chapbook and in the full-length collection. I wanted to be intentional – I can’t just claim it for me, like, we can’t claim the land for anyone. Let me again try to complicate the narrative by thinking about who else might have claims to this place, who else might feel deeply connected here? Besides, you know, me and Mark Twain. [laughs]
I think so much of the mixed-race experience is about reconciling. Like how do I integrate these different parts of who I am and recognize that I’m not separate things? I am a whole person.”
RH: You mentioned part of the complexity of this narrative is the mixed-race piece, and I think we feel that push-pull throughout the book, especially how whiteness shows up. And then there’s this moment in that final correspondence piece where the “I” comes in and things start to feel like they’re fusing in a way. But it also feels like the “I” is seeking and trying to place themself within a cultural context that is kind of split. And I’m wondering how you see this book as maybe trying to reconcile those parts of yourself, and how it acts as maybe a space of reconciliation for other folks who are dealing with mixed-race lineages.
CM: I think reconciliation is a really interesting word to use because I think so much of the mixed-race experience is about reconciling. Like how do I integrate these different parts of who I am and recognize that I’m not separate things? I am a whole person. And I think having to reconcile is a big part of what it means to be an American, right? Like we have to reconcile ourselves so often to living within an Empire, contributing to an Empire, funding an Empire. I think especially right now in this moment, you know, with the genocide that’s happening in Gaza, like I am responsible. We are responsible. So then there’s this thing that happens for me when I’m writing that I’m often thinking about— whether it was in my first book where I was writing so many poems about being a teacher and working with my students where I was like, “I’m responsible for helping them. How am I also responsible for this jacked-up system that’s oppressing them?” In the subject matter Dream of the Lake is different, but I think that’s it. That’s a reconciliation that I’m often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What’s coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility? For a lot of different things, you know, like my own assimilation or my loss of language. What’s on me, what’s on the dominant forces of the culture at play?
RH: I love that you brought up that this is really the American experience because I am not a mixed-race person, but as a Black person, I feel a lot of conflict with claiming a country that my ancestry has such a bloody past with. So I feel that deeply, and while I am not clear on exactly where my ancestors came from, I relate to the narrator’s push-pull trying to figure out how they place themselves within this nation, within this beautiful space that is the lake, but that’s also treacherous. What are your hopes or wishes for the reader who picks up this book?
CM: I think a lot of the things that you said at the beginning are things that I hope. I hope that, as readers, they feel invited and challenged to learn some new things and to interact with the unknowns of the text, particularly if they’re not Chinese speakers. And I also hope that the experience of we’re from here/we’re not from here feels like a universal one. The grappling with what does it even mean to be from a place. Also something I was thinking about…not intentionally, but it emerged as the project came together, was the role of the pastoral—in the immigrant experience in particular, or in experiences of BIPOC folks more broadly. So often I think in poetry and in the history of poetry, the pastoral is seen as this leisure thing. Maybe a little bit like an agricultural/farmer thing, but was certainly very white, and many other poets have talked about this and written about this more eloquently than I can right now. But that idea of what does it mean to build a different relationship to this land with this horrible oppressive violent history? What does it mean to claim a connection there? What does it mean to envision a pastoral, beautiful, stunning landscape for my ancestors outside of the factual hard work? Grinding poverty, racism, trauma narratives—I already know and I’m quite familiar with and could write about those, but just felt like departing from or complicating them in some ways. And for my queer readers, I hope they see the possibility of imagining or calling forward their queer ancestors in a way that also felt important to me in that final poem of the chapbook. As in, “I don’t know you, ancestor, so then I also get to imagine, and again, I know the facts of the time and how bad things were, but like, what if you were a little bit gay?” Yeah, so the power of historical imagination as a way to affirm who we are here and now.
RH: I love that, and I think we’re in a space where BIPOC folks are reclaiming those stories. We’re seeing it show up in movies. We’re not getting the same kind of trauma porn narratives. Different conversations are happening, and this feels like it is placing itself within those conversations. And I’m curious to know, how do you see your full-length collection Water Guest expanding the world that we get in Dream of the Lake?
CM: Well, I think probably the biggest way is the larger narrative arc, if I can say the poems have a narrative arc. So Dream of the Lake ends with that correspondence to my two ancestors and it’s a long poem. In Water Guest, that’s the center section, so it’s smack in the middle of the arc. Other things are the same, like “遺 產” is still the opening poem in the full-length collection, but in a full-length collection, I think there’s a little bit more breathing room. There are sections so things can be a bit more spacious, and in particular, I think centering that questioning, that correspondence, that conversation I’m trying to have—that impossible conversation I’m trying to have with my ancestors—and then afterward moving out of that into thinking about what the landscape means for the speaker of the poems, what it means for the “I,” and what she’s going to do with all of those questions that she’s asked.
Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Water Guest, the Editors’ Selection for the 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series. She is the author of Special Education (Texas Review Press), which won the 2019 X. J. Kennedy Prize, and the chapbook Dream of the Lake (Bull City Press). Carrie is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a member of Rabble Collective, and serves on the board of Friends of Writers. She is a longtime ninth-grade health educator in her hometown of San Francisco and lives in Oakland, CA. She has been granted residencies at Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and Storyknife, among others. You can find her online at carolinemar.com
Raychelle Heath (she/her) is the Co-director of the Unicorn Authors Club where she also serves as a Sanctuary coach and Curriculum coordinator. Outside of her work with the Club, she is a poet, artist, teacher, yoga and meditation guide, and podcaster. She holds a BA in languages with a focus in Spanish, an MFA in poetry, and is a VONA alum. While Raychelle primarily writes poetry, she considers herself a storyteller. Her work explores the multi-faceted experiences of black women in the world. She is also an avid traveler and often weaves her travel experiences into her work. She has been published in various places including Travel Noire, Fourth Wave, Feelszine, Yellow Arrow Journal, The Brazen Collective, and Community Building Art Works. When she is not writing, she is engaging with the wellness community as a certified Kripalu Yoga, Yoga Nidra, and Mind Body Meditation instructor.
