Amy Gerstler: California Poets Part 10, One Poem

Amy Gerstler

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Amy Gerstler

One Poem

Nostalgia

You find yourself wearing clean clothes

from childhood. The sky clears, bathing the sun

in true-blueness. The lake changes shape.

Its beach sand glitters blindly. Strong winds ruffle

the lake, stir up images of canoes and piney islands.

Fish mumble complaints. Crustaceans' remains

crunch underfoot. Bright white loaf-sized

stones, visible after dark, mark the beach path.

The peculiar illness you suffered from begins to lift.

Your family disowned you by scribbling insults

on greeting cards. After that you felt blurry and light.

Something grabs at your ankles from between trees

near shore. You're welcome to shelter here if you like.

It's a nice place to hide if you crave a little solitude.

Interview

May 8th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Amy Gerstler, Poet, Playwright, Professor, Journalist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with your musical The Artificial Woman, a collaborative effort with composer and actor Steve Gunderson. My experience with writing for the stage boils down to two undergrad classes but I guess what I took away from the course is the instructor’s insistence that poetry is much closer to the stage than to fiction. Having, in your career, also written a fair share of prose, would you agree with that assessment?

AG: All due respect to your writing for the stage professor ... I think that their statement, like many generalizations, has truth in it but of course it depends what prose and what poetry specifically we're talking about here ... and what writing for the stage, right? There are cool verse plays, very prosy plays, plays that aim some brand of spoken "naturalism" that maybe a good deal of prose but perhaps less poetry aspires to, there are plays with wildly heightened language, ... and then of course plays can have wordless passages too, where actions and images are offered, without language at all. So those wordless sections of plays probably resemble neither poetry nor prose. I'm also a fan of the theory that each work of literature proposes its own unique genre, or can, and that genre is pretty fluid a lot of the time, anyway, and fascinatingly so. So, I tend to want to look at each individual work on its own terms as its own special cocktail with potentially all kinds of perhaps conflicting or unexpected ingredients.

DG: Could you also speak a bit about the actual collaborative process for The Artificial Woman and how that situated itself in the greater context of the work you’ve done with other people—for instance visual artists?

AG: The person I am lucky enough to be collaborating with on that musical, Steve Gunderson, is an actor, writer, composer, arranger, singer, etc. He's been involved in theater since he was a kid. So, there's a big learning curve for me in that collab because while I love theater and acted a bit in high school and college, and am a pretty avid consumer of theater, I'm a theater novice whereas Steve is a pro. Sometimes he has to bring me up to speed when I bring in ideas that are impractical/unproduceable. Also, I don't know much about music, to my great regret. So, we work together on the script ... the dialogue, scenes, etc., and when it comes to songs, he for sure writes every note of music (I love his music!). I probably do the majority of song lyric writing, but he participates in that too, to help make the lyrics singable, etc. Sometimes I sketch out lyrics first, and sometimes he writes music first and sends me MP3 files and I try to fit lyrics to music he's composed. When I've collaborated with visual artists, it has differed every time because they had varying requests ... text for an artists' book or wall text for an exhibition, or captions for something or a spoken text to be part of the "score" for a dance piece ... a commonality being that you always have to find a way to work effectively with that particular individual and their sensibility and to try to ease into being that third thing, the collaborative entity, which is new and hopefully exciting: the art your work can enact together.

DG: You have taught literature, writing, and visual arts. To what extent do you combine these elements in a single class, like visual arts in a workshop to produce ekphrastic poetry, for instance, or literature that incorporates art? So many books do that, but The Picture of Dorian Gray immediately comes to mind.

AG: Artistic hybridity is one of my fave concepts, so when teaching I try to bring that in as much as the students have an appetite for, and as much as the particular kind of class I'm teaching will allow. It often happens that students are multi-interested and multi-talented ... meaning that students in a writing or literature class also frequently have some kind of art practice, or are wonderful actors, and/or are in a band, or they make films, etc. so it's lovely when they can find ways to tap into that in their writing, and/or make hybrid work.

DG: In addition to working in a wide variety of genres, you also have an interest in speech pathology. A lot of research has been done about how poetry can serve as a therapeutic tool for various speech disorders, but I’m more curious about the other direction. How would poets enrich their understanding of language by studying logopedics?

AG: You taught me a new word! I had to look up "logopedics" (study and treatment of speech disorders). I love this question. “Normal” vs “disordered” language (those are kind of suspect terms anyway) ... isn’t one of the goals of a lot of literature to stretch language, to push it to new amazing places, to try to reinvent it and our relations to it? I have an undergrad degree in psychology and was immediately riveted when I began to learn terminology for and read examples of speech and writing that is fractured, chaotic, stressed, unusual, as part of clinical study. For me there is big overlap between that kind of language and elements of literature. Languages on the borders, that breaches boundaries. So much richness and beauty and surprise come from language use that is freed from or goes outside the bounds of quote unquote normal usage. Neologisms. And so much more. You get to experience language's wild elasticity, sometimes extremely, when those confines are breached. Even medical labels for such language (“word salad,” “pressured speech,” “echolalia” etc.) are beautiful and haunting and such writing or utterance is deeply human and revealing and can reach other realms, maybe, touch things sometimes that everyday speech or writing cannot.  

DG: Last year Penguin Random released your latest collection, Is This My Final Form? One of the topics which the book addresses is women’s courage to overcome gender boundaries. How would you assess present-day opportunities that women have when it comes to publishing and academia?

AG: Don't know if I'm a well-informed enough judge of this aspect of literary publishing and academic hiring and thriving to comment here ... I guess I'll just say that clearly much progress has been made ... and that there still is plenty more to do.

DG: From a situational point of view, the aforementioned collection is incredibly fascinating, in that it partly arose from how you experienced the pandemic and was then released four months after the wildfires in LA. In one case, people were confined in their homes while in another some had no homes to return to. From your perspective, how did the fires affect LA, its literary community, your friends, and to what extent have they all recovered?

AG: Not sure if a person ever completely recovers from a disaster as devastating as having your house (and/or your studio, if you're an artist or writer) burn to the ground. I did not experience that first hand, but know a good number of people who did, and I find it unimaginable ... it seems like the death of something, and a bereavement and loss that, while you carry on with life and move on and rebuild, etc. you also always have it rattling around inside you after that. As with other disasters, there were wonderful displays of human kindness and altruism, and nobility and strength in the wake of the fires. But I don't think life will ever be the same for people who lost so much ... people and families who had all possessions and homes in some cases artwork and manuscripts just vaporized, and then had no place to live, no address, many of them just got out with pets, a laptop and their wallet. Maybe their car survived, if they had one, if they were able to drive away in it. And there were deaths and injuries as well. So, I have been impressed by people's resilience, courage, and vast generosity, but also, wow, like COVID I think those fires indelibly marked the people of all ages who survived them.  

DG: The resources of physical libraries have been an important component in your writing process. What are your favorite places to do in-person research and how much does this approach still figure into your writing?

AG: Libraries are still part of my life. I do research in them, and I do write there sometimes. Happily, there's a nice one in Silverlake, near where I live. Used bookstores are also a great resource for me: to haunt them and look for weird, interesting texts that might spark something, that I could steal language or ideas or images from. Because I am an inveterate collagist. Looking at visual art, plays and film (providers of mood, images, and sometimes great titles) also sometimes feels like research for me.

DG: When looking at your first book in relation to the last one, which one did you have more difficulty in finishing? In other words, the real question is: Has writing become easier because of how many skills you’ve picked up or more difficult because of how much you’ve already said?

AG: The most recent book (IS THIS MY FINAL FORM) might have been a bit more difficult to complete because a lot of it was written during the COVID lockdown, as you noted, and that was a surreal and scary time worldwide. Time seemed to slow down and become a thick, sludgy substance.

DG: What is the last book you read, and did you enjoy it?

AG: Just finished reading THE OYSTER DIARIES by Nancy Lehmann (a novel) and I loved it so much I'm going to immediately read it again. Also, I have gotten obsessed with Claire Louise Bennett's novels.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

AG: Gertrude Stein is an author I have read very little of, so after I finished the stellar new-ish bio of her by Francesca Wade I checked some compendiums of her work out of the library and have been poking my nose into THREE LIVES. Work wise I am trying to see if I can write political poems, in my own weird way, and to teach myself to write short plays. Which is really hard!

Author Bio:

Amy Gerstler's most recent book of poems is IS THIS MY FINAL FORM (Penguin Random House, April, 2025). Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine and Paris Review. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to poetry she writes plays, journalism and art criticism.