Meet the Teacher” offers a quick introduction to the talented writers who teach for The Porch. Today we welcome Leah Nieboer, a poet, Deep Listener, graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and recent PhD graduate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her first collection of poetry, SOFT APOCALYPSE, was selected by Andrew Zawacki for the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2023) and named one of the top ten debut collections of 2023 by Poets & Writers Magazine.

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Tell us about a book you've recently read and enjoyed. 

Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat is the sort of novel-in-vignettes a lot of people have tried and failed to write—and is one of the best books I’ve read. One of the reasons I think Potted Meat works so well is because of its expert looping mechanisms, repeated hooks and rhythms that also work as the conceptual catch-and-release of the protagonist within his landscape. It also does some expert handling of its heaviness—abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and dead-endings in a poor, black community in rural West Virginia—within the dislocated and half-aware levity of a kid coming of age. I loved Anne K. Yoder’s The Enhancers, a polyvocal novel in which three teenage girls (and a few other entities) articulate a hyper-capitalist landscape running on the incessant fumes of the pharmaceutical—and its pills, powders, and strict surveillance mechanisms that shape their every experience.

I also reread a lot. Lately, poetry by 1) George Oppen, whose sharp, modernist consciousness of the relationship between the individual and collective holds clairvoyance of the contemporary moment we are in and 2) Dionne Brand, whose alternate documentation systems, grammars, and vocabularies release senses of the self beyond the lowest-common-denominator claims and definitions of the State.

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What’s one book or essay you return to again and again to help you think about writing, get inspired, etc.?

I like to be with artists in their processes, so I most often pick up texts that show an artist’s consciousness clicking around their projects—the unfinished works, notes, journals, conversations, and interviews. Here are a few I return to:

Clarice Lispector’s 1977 interview on Fundação Padre Anchieta (TV Cultura)

James Baldwin’s 1979 talk at Berkeley, in which he “[improvises], like a writer, on some assumptions," and whose terrific precision, wit, clarity, rhythm, and poise is unmatched

Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

The journals of Derek Jarman, which contain all the intimacies

A slim, cloth-bound volume of Paul Celan’s Collected Prose (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), in which he describes the writing-living act as one, en route, toward encounter

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What is your favorite writing rule to break?

Oh—I think I learned the rules to break them. I often make up my own formal patterns to work within and against. I like a juked quatrain. I like a sentence that turns around on itself.

I’m mostly interested in writers for whom experimentation and rule-breaking is a necessity for their articulation.

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Music while writing: Y/N? 

That depends on what we consider writing—and what we consider music! The short answer is no: I need to hear the music of the word, line, and sentence while I’m writing it. The long answer is that my writing is woven through my living, and I often live in music—including the “non-music” of incessant traffic, adjacent conversations, the overworked fan in a nearby grain elevator, a grackle-up in the local park. The book I’m currently working on contains all of that, as well as scraps of Salt-N-Pepa, The Talking Heads, Labi Siffre, Madonna, Bobby Brown, and other sounds.

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What do you love most about teaching writing?

I love how a shared, ritual attention to any creative practice—writing, reading, dreaming, listening—can create a diverse community that has no other demands for inclusion aside from attention and practice. I like how classes can then become these temporary zones of delight, play, connection, and liberation. I love what unexpectedly opens for each of us in our work together.

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For you, why does creative writing matter? 

For me, creative writing is a form of responsiveness to the world—a way of attending, beyond official measures, to the innumerable articulations of being, and being-with, that reality really contains.

I do think it’s important to recognize the moment when, to quote Oppen, “one need [not] fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” And yet, what we do with language is important. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how caught we are in a billionaire-induced state of reduction, consumption, and expediency and in the hardened, partial representations of ourselves and each other that state engenders. I’m wondering what forms of writing may upend that state—and what forms could engender more accuracy and more mercy. More real response-ability to each other.

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Tell us why you pitched your upcoming class or classes. 

I’ve taught “The Novella” once before, with a different reading list, and our class had such weird, wonderful discussions around the form that everyone suggested we do it again. This time, we’re reading a blend of classic and contemporary novellas that are very much en route, in search of something—but, of course, the novella’s characteristic unruliness means that uncanny encounters, mysteries, and digressions become much more important than the destination.

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Share something that has inspired your creativity lately, I read some terrific fiction this summer. a book.  

I went to a hybrid, improvisational performance at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. One of the performers was Brazilian dancer and choreographer Leo Sandoval, who tap-danced with a rhythm that could wake the dead and the living too. If not for the approximately 6 foot x 3 foot square of portable dance flooring that demarcated his space—a predetermined constraint because of concern for the main stage’s wood floor, as well as the room needed for other instrumentalists—he would certainly have flown across the whole stage. I keep thinking about the variance and exuberance he managed within those parameters.

The WNBA season was a source of joy.

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