January Interns' Choice of the Month

For our first post of 2013, Wake Forest University Press interviewed our very own intern, Gigi, for our monthly segment, “Interns’ Choice.” Gigi is a senior English major with a minor in Art History. When she’s not crafting blog posts for our readers, she enjoys volunteering in Winston-Salem and working for the Press with her best friends, Amanda and Mike.

Gigi selected Vona Groarke's Spindrift as one of her favorite collections and this month's Intern's Choice.

WFUP: What draws you to Spindrift?

G: I do a lot of work in English with spatial and landscape studies. What makes Groarke’s work so interesting to me is that she uses dialogues and the voices of those around her to develop a sense of her physical surroundings. It’s through these dialogues that you can tell whether she is writing about the U.S. or the U.K. I am also drawn to it because Groarke wrote part of the collection in Winston-Salem when she was teaching at Wake Forest. There were a few local references that were fun to pick up on.

WFUP: What is a “spindrift”?

G: According to Groarke’s definition, a spindrift is the excess spray of water that is blown from crests of waves by the wind.

WFUP: Why do you think she picked Spindrift for the title?

G: I personally like to think of Spindrift as a formal metaphor for the collection. Instead of illustrating her surroundings through images of the physical landscape, she gives us a sense of her physical location through the marginal details. In the same way, "spindrift" does not refer to the physical wave, but it refers to the fragile spray of water surrounding it. Groarke does provide images of her physical environment in the opening poem “Some Weather”, but what’s interesting is that these images are so personified that she gives the impression from the beginning that the roles of the physical landscape and surrounding voices are going to be reversed.

WFUP: Anything surprising about the collection?

G: Since I knew part of the book was written about Wake Forest, I expected to see a lot of images of the campus itself, but instead, the collection focused more on campus culture.

WFUP: What kind of cultural image does she develop?

G: I’m going to leave that up to other Wake Forest readers to decide, but I will say that it’s definitely a very honest picture. Her observations are some that most people do not acknowledge enough, so it was really refreshing to read and see that other people notice some of the same things you do. 

Interview Conducted by Michael E. Dempsey