The following interview features writer Jehanne Dubrow, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas and author of nine books of poetry and three works of creative nonfiction. I first met Jehanne seventeen years ago at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where we both spent the summer as fellows at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Jehanne was the first creative writer to serve as a fellow at the Center and, in the years since, I have watched Jehanne continue her adventurous journey as an artist who isn’t afraid to take risks and cross boundaries. Already a prolific poet, Jehanne recently completed an MFA in creative nonfiction and began publishing works of nonfiction as well. For inspiration, Jehanne has drawn on diverse life experiences, including a nomadic childhood as the daughter of two American diplomats, life as a military spouse, and victim of academic mobbing. Themes of trauma and frivolity, memory and nostalgia pepper our discussion, in which Jehanne speaks candidly of her creative process as well as the inspirations for several of her books, including her recent nonfiction works throughsmoke: an essay in notes and Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity, her poetry collections Red Army Red and Wild Kingdom, and her forthcoming book The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (University of New Mexico Press, 2025).
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich (JHG): Tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to become a writer and a poet.
Jehanne Dubrow (JD): My parents were US Foreign Service officers. I was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Belgium, Austria, Yugoslavia, Zaire, and the United States. We moved every three years my entire childhood. As a little girl I thought I was going to be either a visual artist, an actor, or a writer. By my early 20s, I realized that it was the writing life for me and, specifically, that I wanted to be a poet. Growing up in all those places which were often shadowed by tragic history shaped me and made me think about producing a kind of art in which the personal and the historical always intersected and overlapped.
By the time I finished graduate studies, I understood that my poetry usually combined research with personal experience and that I was interested in exploring Jewish identity as well as questions of how we represent atrocity. Those themes have remained consistent in my work. Ten years ago, I started working in nonfiction as well. In the beginning, I was trying to figure out what my voice sounded like and how my essays would work on the page. After a lot of experimentation and study and reading, I went back to school and I did another MFA, this time in nonfiction. I realized that my essays did some of the same work that my poems do. My prose tends to combine a lyrical voice with a lot of research, some theory, and frequently are engaged in the same questions.
For instance, in my latest book, Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity, the essays are largely ekphrastic, meaning that each piece takes as its point of inspiration a specific work of art and usually begins with a description or an observation about that work of art. And what I’ve learned is that ekphrastic writing is especially good for when you wish to explore trauma. That’s because, in a piece of ekphrasis, you begin by stepping back and looking at the piece of art and describing it. But inevitably, that description can’t continue forever, and so the voice of the essay turns inwards toward the self. And because you’re already in this descriptive, curatorial mode, what happens is you end up speaking in the same way about your own thoughts, your own experiences, your own trauma as you would examine a work of art. Sometimes it’s an ideal rhetorical mode for exploring trauma from a more distant and detached perspective. When you don’t want to write a piece that’s mimetic of trauma, that’s putting the reader inside the experience of trauma but, rather, is attempting to analyze and critique the trauma, then something like ekphrasis can be really useful.
So, now I move consistently between working on poetry projects and working on nonfiction. I’ve always been a writer who has several projects going simultaneously. I usually have two or three manuscripts in process at once. If I’m working on several projects simultaneously, I’m less likely to bore myself.
JHG: That’s great. Since you mentioned trauma and writing in trauma, I thought maybe it would be a great time to bring up the project that you’re working on right now. You’re working now on a craft book called The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, to be released in 2025 by University of New Mexico Press. Could you first tell me a little bit about what a craft book is, what it does, and then a little bit of what this book will offer, and what’s new about it for you. This is the first time you’re writing this kind of a book, right?
JD: That’s right. I’ve always seen craft books as an extension of what happens in the classroom. In other words, you’re providing guidance. You’re providing, in many cases, clear strategies for how to approach a specific problem or challenge of representation. The Wounded Line came out of twenty years of teaching creative writing and thinking about issues of representation when considering trauma on the page. About a decade ago, I noticed that all of my students in the creative writing class were trying to write poems that engage with trauma. Even at the graduate level there was, it seemed to me, a real struggle between reading published text that explore trauma and then applying the specific craft-based lessons of those texts to their own writing. I would have students taking literature courses that certainly dealt with trauma, but it was very rare to see them synthesizing these lessons into their own creative work. I began to think about the common devices or techniques that are used in literatures of trauma. I started making a list in my mind like fragmentation, nonlinear handling of time, fugue states, and eventually I had an inventory of about twenty different techniques.
The first half of the book are these techniques that are mimetic. In other words, they’re techniques that allow the poet to recreate the experience of being inside the traumatized mind. In the second half of the book, the techniques are largely rhetorical, dealing with ways that you make arguments about trauma, about the experience of trauma, about the narration of trauma. For instance, when you use the archive to write a poem, I want students to ask what kind of argument are they making—not only about the way they put trauma into a poem, but also what kind of claim are you making about the archive itself?
Each chapter in the book provides a very specific technique. I do close readings of a few poems in every chapter. All the chapters end with writing prompts as well. I tried to present a wide example of traumas in the book; some poems explore war, others genocide, others climate disaster. There are also poems having to do with topics such as medical trauma or sexual assault. One of the things I say in the introduction to the book is that it is not my job to tell a reader if something is or isn’t a trauma. That’s up to the poet to decide.
In the early portions of the book, I offer the reader theories to consider, theory that comes out of genocide studies, war studies, and trauma studies, much of which is grounded in my training in Holocaust studies (because so many of the early voices of trauma studies were connected to Holocaust literature in particular). I cite figures like Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, for example. But I always try to make very clear that this is my scholarly background—your background, your training doesn’t need to be the same as mine. I believe that when we try to write about trauma, no matter what the trauma we wish to explore, it’s the poet’s job to do their homework. No matter what the trauma is that you wish to represent, the danger is that people sometimes think just the emotional weight of the subject matter can do all the work for the poet. That’s usually not true.
I’ve noticed with prose you can’t be that strict with yourself really. You have to let the essay teach you the shape it wants to be.
JHG: Do you think that there is an aspect of healing involved in this kind of writing? I know some therapists and psychologists assign writing as a way for victims to write through their pain. Do you see that as an aspect of what you’re helping your readers to do?
JD: I do. But I also caution at the end of the book that some poets may need to do work before they can apply the poetic techniques that I recommend. They may need to receive therapeutic assistance or perhaps work with a trauma-based writing counselor before they can start writing. I explain that, for me, the poem is a document that is crafted after trauma and after the post-traumatic. Even when the poem is attempting to replicate the experience of being mid-trauma, it’s very hard to do that difficult aesthetic work if you are mid-trauma yourself.
JHG: Right.
JD: In other words, it’s an artistic effect that you’re creating, but really the poet should not be still deep in trauma when they try to do this work. No matter the kind of poem you’re trying to write, representations of trauma still require critical distance.
JHG: You mentioned how your work makes use of the personal and the historical, where you blend personal experiences, personal traumas, personal memories, with research and history. I’m curious about the process by which you chart this path—how you mine your own life and use it as a source of inspiration and content for your art.
JD: My work is usually grounded in the autobiographical. That’s easy for me to access in terms of image and sensory detail. But I’m not so conceited to think that I’m special. And so, I always feel like even if I’m beginning from a place of autobiography, I need to connect my experience to a larger story.
In the books where I’ve written about my experiences as a military wife, for example, I’m very aware that, yes, I’m telling my story but I’m also trying to explore how this kind of role has been underrepresented and underexamined in literature even though war literature is so essential to English language culture. The figure of the woman, or the spouse, or the wife has largely been invisible. When I wrote Stateside—and it came out in 2010—I wanted to see what had been written on the military spouse before. And really the only interesting example I could find was Penelope from The Odyssey. I would give readings from Stateside, and I would say to people, you know, here is Penelope as a role model and I want to remind you that The Odyssey is kind of an old book, right? In other words, I was asking, Really? We don’t have any updates on or new versions of this character? This is an example of how the research leads to discovery in the writing process. As I was writing Stateside, I realized that Penelope was an impossible role model for a 21st-century military spouse. And I wanted to reinvent her. But the research also made me very aware of the literary conversation I had entered. That’s often how the writing happens: the research teaches me, oh, this is what’s missing from the discourse, and this is how I can join the dialogue.
JHG: In some of your other books, such as Wild Kingdom and Red Army Red, you draw on other kinds of experiences; they both possess certain autobiographical elements. Maybe you could just say a little bit about those and the process of writing them.
JD: Wild Kingdom is what I call a campus poetry collection. We have the subgenre of the campus novel, which is a novel set on a college or university campus. A campus novel usually sets out to reveal the toxicity and disastrous administrative structure of most academic spaces. I wrote Wild Kingdom after having a catastrophic experience in my first tenure track job. I was at a small liberal arts college, and after eight years I left.
With Wild Kingdom, I wanted to look at a phenomenon known as academic mobbing. Mobbing is an extreme form of bullying. the concept of mobbing comes from ornithology. It’s something that birds do to a lone bird in a flock, the group will identify a particular bird and then essentially either peck it to death or peck it until it flies away forever. I was trying to write about my experience of being mobbed. I had severe PTSD after this experience. I kept trying to write the autobiographical poems, but I couldn’t. My entry into that book came through reading work by ornithologists. The first poems in that book that I wrote were these scientific fieldnotes about birds being mobbed, which were really just metaphors for my own experience. That was how I wrote my way into the collection—by looking for this alternative vocabulary. Later, once I’d written these fieldnotes, I was able to write more personal poems. The research gave me a kind of permission, first through metaphor and through scientific language, to eventually move toward the more electric, more sensitive material that were these little anecdotes about having been mobbed on this campus.
JHG: That’s so interesting. So it’s so much more than a metaphor—it’s your vehicle actually into your own voice, finding your own voice to talk about this experience and about this phenomenon of mobbing.
JD: Absolutely. Red Army Red was a book about my experience of coming of age while living in Poland in the Eastern Bloc. I started to think about the ways in which that moment, when I hit about twelve or thirteen and Communism was beginning to crumble in Eastern Europe, how this revolutionary historical moment was a little like the threshold when you cross into adolescence. That larger historical backdrop became a way to speak about adolescence and especially girlhood, a subject that is underexplored in poetry. Poets have always been very interested in young men and what happens when boys enter that new stage of life. But they haven’t been particularly interested in girlhood. Red Army Red was my way of writing about puberty. But I was also interested in this period of Eastern European history, a time in which people were beginning to forget the horrors of Communism and to experience nostalgia for what had been. This sometimes occurs when you’re far enough away from the trauma to no longer remember its specific hurts. I was especially interested in looking at what the Germans, as I’m sure you know, call ostalgie.
JHG: Yes. That’s right. And there’s films, ostalgie films.
JD: Yes, like Good Bye Lenin!.
JHG: Good Bye Lenin! is probably the most famous. It’s about a young boy who—well, he’s a young man. His mother slips into a coma right before the Wall falls. And because she loved East Germany and was a dedicated citizen of East Germany, he decides to try to hide from her the fact that East Germany has basically disappeared overnight. So he tries to reconstruct the GDR for her. It’s a comedy, but it’s also bittersweet and sad, and it really does create this effect of ostalgie. But it’s interesting because it’s also just about nostalgia for childhood, right? Everybody has nostalgia for their childhood, be it a capitalist childhood or a communist childhood, right? And so his ostalgie for the East is also really about his nostalgia for his youth.
JD: I remember in that movie there’s a scene where he’s like trying to recreate the communist dill pickles. And that resonated with me because I do have these vivid memories of the Polish equivalent; you’d go into a Polish grocery store where there was one of everything. There was one kind of pickle, one kind of cheese, and one kind of sausage; there was no choice. But you can understand how for some people that lack of variety and the safety that comes out of limitation might have been reassuring.
It was even overwhelming for me when we came back to the United States when I was seven years old. It was a great culture shock. I went from—and I talk about this in Exhibitions—I went from being in a house where access to TV was limited. Every week, I watched 15 minutes of a Communist TV show called Maya the Bee. And then we came back to the United States, and I spoke like a tiny little Martian; I didn’t know any of the language that a seven-year-old American child would speak, which was like the language of: What’s on television, and what’s on the radio, and what comic books are you reading? All those things were completely alien to me, and it was a terrible shock.
JHG: You mentioned the role of senses in your writing. So many of your books have been about senses, right? Throughsmoke focuses on fragrance. Taste focuses on taste. And Exhibitions, your latest work, is about vision and seeing. The senses seem to serve as a kind of a jumping off point for exploring these deeper issues of trauma and loss and memory and atrocity and even genocide. I’m interested how you came to write so much about sense, taste, scent, vision and what it means to you to write about different senses like this.
JD: I wrote throughsmoke: an essay in notes, which is about scent, in part because it had become clear to me that that most writers privilege sight above all of the other senses. But an effective image can as much be about sound or taste or smell as about what you see. Of all the senses, it’s smell that’s the least attended to. I had fallen in love with scent and fragrance during a very difficult moment in my life. It was as if fragrance were the way I came back to my body. Because I was probably in a state of dissociation, I started falling in love first with how I saw writers describing scents. At the time, there were all these bloggers who wrote beautiful posts about perfumes. As a writer, I was fascinated with the challenge of how do you capture something so ephemeral and fix it to the page. That was how I first began to smell things. I would read these fantastic descriptions of perfumes, and then I wanted to go smell the things for myself and see if the writer’s description aligned with my own experience. It usually didn’t, which made the process all that more interesting. That was how I came to write throughsmoke. I was thinking about the power of fragrance and the way it transports us, how much it’s connected to memory and emotion.
JHG: And they say in fact that scent is the sense most tied to memory, right?
JD: That’s right. Because scent travels lightning fast to the amygdala, these little almond shaped clusters of cells in the brain where memory and emotion are stored. You smell something evocative and, immediately, you’re launched into a memory from twenty years ago, a piece of the past that you had forgotten completely until that very moment.
I wrote throughsmoke because I was trying to figure out how to capture this ephemeral thing. The book begins something like “in a dark time I am in love with something frivolous.” And that notion of darkness mixed with frivolity is a central motif of the book.
As with throughsmoke, I wrote Taste because I’d been thinking about the challenge of describing foods and flavors. It’s a book divided into the five kinds of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The book was such a delight to draft. I just wanted to write about pleasure and the shadow that lingers behind pleasure.
Exhibitions is a little bit of a different because it’s such a Jewish book. It’s so obsessed with the history of Jewish trauma, and the Diaspora, and the way that the physical things that surround us can be a kind of temporary anchor. But art object can also become a repository of testimony.
Many of the works of art that I write about in Exhibitions are pieces that are meant to act as forms of historical documentation or testimony. In Exhibitions, I write about the Bosnian Muslim painter Mersad Berber who, in the final decade of his life, essentially used his art to create a visual history of the Yugoslav wars and of genocide. Yet the paintings are strikingly beautiful. They have a kind of classical beauty to them. They really feel as if they’ve existed since the beginning of the history of art. But these are important documents as well, important historical documents. In Exhibitions, I was very interested in art that does this kind of work.
No matter the kind of poem you’re trying to write, representations of trauma still require critical distance.
Another one of the essays in the book looks at a memorial, Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones). Stumbling Stones are these tiny little concrete memorials that are placed in the ground all over Europe. Each one marks a site of former Jewish life. They’re constantly present in the lives of those who walk over them. Sometimes they’re noticed and sometimes they’re not, but they’re there as a palpable presence of absence.
In that essay, which is called “You Must Stumble,” I’m writing about my efforts to try to track down what happened to my great-grandfather Markus Myer. It’s about how I essentially failed to get some of the answers that I was looking for. I found the date of his death, I learned that he died in one of the ghettos, but I couldn’t find the cause of death. That absence of information again becomes a kind of presence in the essay. I remember the moment where I was online trying to find information about him, and I found an image of his Stumbling Stone. I thought that nothing having to do with the Shoah could really deeply affect me anymore because I had spent so many years studying it. But in that moment of seeing his name on that stone and then clicking to see where it was in the world, and then seeing the apartment building that it was placed in front of—the sight of that stone created such an electric shock in my body.
JHG: You work in so many different forms, right, so you have lyric essays, creative nonfiction, a craft book, an essay in notes, free verse, prose, poetry, personal essay, autotheory. I’m curious: when you work in that many different forms, how do you come to choose the form? How do you move between these forms? Do you start with the concept and then ask yourself what audience do I want to reach, what would be the best form for that? Or does it happen all at once?
JD: Scale usually tells me. I’ve written three poetry collections about my experience as a military spouse, Stateside, Dots & Dashes, and Civilians, which is forthcoming in 2025. But there were still stories that I hadn’t told, because I couldn’t figure out how to make them into poems. And so, for instance, one of the essays in Exhibitions is called “Seventy-Seven Steps” and it’s about my marriage to a career naval officer. I had been working on this essay for many years. I knew it wasn’t a poem; it just was too big and unwieldly to be a poem. But it took me almost a decade to figure out what the form of the essay should be. It was only when I was doing research that I figured out its shape; I was researching mid-century modern chairs that were created during wartime conditions, specifically an iconic chair by Emeco which was designed for navy vessels.
I watched a tiny little film called 77 Steps that was made by the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames. The movie is called 77 Steps because that’s how many steps it takes to build one of these chairs. I was watching the film and I started writing down what I saw in each step. And then it occurred to me well, I’m trying to write about my husband who was a military officer and how he was made by war. What if he’s like one of these chairs? And what if it takes seventy-seven steps to make him? And that was how the essay eventually found its enumerated form in seventy-seven sections. The essay moves back and forth between personal meditations and researched sections on these various chairs that were designed in wartime. For instance, for the Eames LCW, the technology that was used to create this chair was originally used to create plywood splints for soldiers on the battlefield.
JHG: Oh, wow.
JD: Sometimes you give yourself an assignment: oh, I’m going to write a sonnet. I love to do that. But I’ve noticed with prose you can’t be that strict with yourself really. You have to let the essay teach you the shape it wants to be. There are essays in the book that are punctuated by little fragments that are almost like poems. There’s an essay about our time together at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I was doing research on the interwar period and I was also reading a lot of yizkor books, all while thinking about intergenerational transmission of trauma. That essay found its form because, at the Holocaust Museum, I wrote a series of poems in the voice of an imaginary Yiddish poet. In the essay, I brought back the voice of that imaginary Yiddish poet; she was such an interesting ghost, and I thought her presence could inform my prose as much as it had my poetry.
JHG: Who would you say is your ideal reader? What would you think of as your ideal reader? To whom would you like to be writing?
JD: My ideal reader is my father. But I don’t think he buys enough books to support my career. So, I’ll say I’m always looking for a reader who is interested in the intersection between the highbrow and the low. You know, high art and popular culture. And it’s not that I write about pop music or television that much, but I recognize that many of the things I love aren’t considered serious. Like perfume or clothing. Or these frivolous pursuits that often are attached to gender for instance—
JHG: Any type of pleasure, right?
JD: Yes. Pleasure is often considered unserious. I want a reader who is willing to celebrate and read about those parts of life that might not be considered entirely intellectual because they too have relevance. In some cases, these passions are not as frivolous as people might initially believe.
My writing is deeply connected to the experience of being in a body. Without images, everything we say remains diffuse and abstract. There’s real utility in being a writer who connects to the body. We are tethered to our bodies and to our senses. My poems and essays prioritize the senses so that readers can enter the text and be part of the narrative, living inside these breathing, moving, singing words. At least, that’s what I hope for when I write. 
This article was commissioned by B. R. Cohen.
Featured image: Jehanne Dubrow by Cedric Terrell.