“Once the need to conquer language fades, the poem has done its work.” (An Interview With Haley Wooning)
As part of the virtual tour to celebrate Haley Wooning’s Willows Wake and Walk Away, journalists, bloggers, and editors across the literary web have spotlighted the book for the past week in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss reviews by Kylie Ayn Yockey (“Wooning’s poetry of post-traumatic self-necromancy gorgeously puppets the reader’s sensory experience as well as deep emotional wrenching”) and Brandon (“This book is engulfing, cresting the peaks and ceilings of what it means to be grieving a self that is never enough, until it seems we cannot anymore”), a worldwide paperback giveaway hosted by Cal, and an essay by Haley for the Half Mystic blog (“Do we all feel that pull to write what hurts most, to put the aftermath of survival to voice?”)! Today, Haley joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of Willows Wake and Walk Away…
H/M: A central theme of Willows Wake and Walk Away is the reclamation of a life in the aftermath of trauma. I connected deeply with the speaker’s isolation and emphasis on self-reliance: “Nothing rescued me from my own myth. I walked out of it alone, silent and creeping.” It requires profound courage to face one’s pain, but the catharsis of releasing that pain is euphoric. How did you work to balance triumph and agony in this manuscript?
HW: Healing, at its core, is profoundly lonely. Even when we’re surrounded by friends and loved ones, the work we do within ourselves is work we must do alone. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? But that terror fades, leaving pride in its aftermath. Self-reliance becomes a kind of joy and celebration, if only in retrospect.
The first draft of this manuscript was written from a place of agony, with only a dim hope of ever leaving it behind. As I revised over the years, I had found real triumph in my own survival—triumph that bled into the book’s speaker. Yet it was important to me to preserve the original portrait of agony. I didn’t want to skim over it simply because it was unpleasant to face. The two sections of Willows Wake and Walk Away, named simply Part I and Part II, were born out of preserving the balance.
I’m in love with the title—the image of willows uprooting themselves and departing from their wood is a poignant and evocative metaphor for the speaker’s own escape from an unstable home. Could you expand on the relationship between the title and the collection’s examination of survival and freedom?
Since childhood, willows have been my favorite tree. I used to imagine they were the homes of fairies—and, having always maintained a complicated relationship with the concept of “home,” I came to idolize their great eaves as the ultimate ambition. A deeply personal symbolism formed around them: they were the kind of home we imagine growing up and continue to crave secretly in adulthood. An immovable, irrevocable place where we are held and safe to let our dreams wander.
A willow tree uprooting itself and moving elsewhere is a transformation, a shift from tragedy (one can imagine how long those roots have gone untouched) to triumph. The notion of the willows “waking” as they leave speaks to the act of carrying with oneself those tender, imaginative, loving parts of us, the ones that so easily wither when left untended. When we meet the speaker, it’s clear she has been static in her suffering for a long time. But that suffering births survival, and only through the awakening does her escape—her walking away—begin.
The text itself is highly musical, almost primal in its imagery: “bloated / waterlogged corpses” and “dried insect husks snuffed out / below our mindless, plodding feet” evoke the lyrics of Florence + the Machine and Björk in this interviewer’s mind. What are five songs that soundtrack this collection?
What a compliment, thank you! I love Florence + the Machine and Björk, and they absolutely populated the soundtrack of this collection’s making. As for other artists? Joanna Newsom, to an almost absurd degree. Without exaggeration, everything she’s ever touched. But if I had to choose five songs (and yes, they’re all Joanna), they’d be: “Go Long,” “Only Skin,” “’81,” “You and Me, Bess,” and “Baby Birch.”
As someone who is three years into writing a novel, I saw several similarities between the speaker’s journey and the drafting process. Navigating the path to a complete manuscript can feel like losing yourself in a dark and winding forest, “nightdrenched / and deranged” (as the speaker says). Take us through how it felt to draft this project. Did writing Willows Wake and Walk Away differ significantly from your debut collection, mothmouth?
I love your description of the drafting process as “a dark and winding forest.” For me, though, that forest looked more like revising than drafting. Willows Wake and Walk Away fell out of me—once I wrote the first poem, the manuscript took only a few weeks to finish. The writing was feverish, but the editing was arduous. Afterward, I was reluctant to pick the book up again. Over the years following the first draft, I could hardly make sense of the story I was telling, even with the pages laid out side by side.
Conversely, mothmouth took me years to write, but only months to revise. My approach was clinical, clean; once the draft was complete, I didn’t see much more work to be done. I was stunned by how differently Willows Wake and Walk Away unfolded. This book was a jigsaw puzzle, pieces scattered in every direction. It was impossible to see the whole narrative, and a conscious labor to find each fragment and fit it into place. The writing and editing processes never behave the same across projects, and I credit that not only to the nature of creativity, but also the differences in where and who we are as the work rises in us, demanding to be written.
In a book that employs both prose and lineation, how does form function for you? How differently does it feel to write across separate modes?
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with prose; my brain works in lineation, with an intuitive sense of where a breath, pause, or pulse should fall. Writing in lines lets emotion dictate rhythm. Prose, on the other hand, demands endurance. It stretches thought out, asks me to sustain clarity. Each mode is a different kind of listening: poetry to the heart’s cadence, prose to the mind’s.
Across the book, the two forms bleed into one another, reflecting how thought and sensation rarely arrive in orderly sequences. I avoided naming any individual piece—how could the speaker bear to name anything, even her own words, when it is language she’s struggling against? The fluidity between prose and lineation mirrors her shifting methods of survival. Language repeats, mutates, and echoes itself until it begins to change shape, as the speaker herself does.
For me as a writer, form is inseparable from purpose. It’s the architecture of emotion, a way of mapping the work’s movement through time and space. Poetry, especially, grants a freedom that prose does not. It’s the language of interiority, of feeling, of fairytales and folklore.
As you mentioned briefly, the speaker of Willow Wake and Walk Away is constantly struggling against the limits of language to accurately capture her experience. On the very first page, she tells us, “I was helpless against / language’s unpossessable fragments.” She goes on to describe language as a “strain” upon her; as “lonely work and violent;” as a “rare and capricious” thing that “abandons itself.” How did you approach the paradox of writing a speaker for whom language has failed?
I began with frustration. How could this speaker not be frustrated? She has a visceral need to express herself in order to be seen, yet that expression feels (and maybe truly is) impossible. Poets and philosophers have been lamenting this struggle for centuries: I must say something, and there is no way to say it. Language is limited, and I have found its limit. For the speaker, simply describing what happened falls flat; the words never reach the pit she feels in the middle of herself. And perhaps you’ll notice that she never explains her experience outright—the thing she most wants or needs to say. I think that absence is the heart of the collection.
But even in the failure to articulate, something shifts. The act of reaching for what can’t be said becomes its own kind of healing. The struggle is the poem. Through the effort of trying to name the ineffable, a fragile peace emerges—not because the speaker succeeds in articulating it, but because she accepts the limits of language and continues anyway. Once the frustration softens, once the need to conquer language fades, the poem has done its work. The paradox was never meant to be solved, it was meant to be lived through.
One of my favorite lines in the book is “yearning resembles hunger, hollowing / in its gravity.” How has desire served you, despite what it’s taken?
Desire is an incredible driving force—for love, for stability, for worth or purpose. Desire is the seed of action, yet its existence can also be deeply humiliating. Naming it requires acknowledging a lack. To long for anything means that one is not in possession of it. And there’s a certain shame in confessing we are missing something—or missing within something.
Desire propels me forward, but only when I submit to it by admitting to it. When day-to-day survival is uncertain, acknowledging longing feels impossible. We reach the speaker in Willows Wake and Walk Away after her escape, as she is forced to confront the desires that went unrecognized for so long. Desire becomes her driving force as well. What began as a simple wish to be rescued transforms into a richer and more complex yearning for articulation, for purpose, for the groundedness of sustained physical and emotional safety. And after the trauma that led here, I think even the ability to recognize that desire is a sort of privilege.
How does music fit into your writing process? Are there artists you regularly turn to for inspiration?
It’s impossible to overstate Joanna Newsom’s influence on my work—her attention to language and intricate composition were a compass for this book. I’m also inspired by all kinds of classical music and by the scores of Joe Hisaishi, which have an emotional clarity I try to echo in my writing.
When I’m feeling creatively adrift, I turn to lyricists who balance vulnerability with the uncanny, like Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Adrianne Lenker, Laura Veirs, Kate Bush, and Neil Young. The uncanny images, motifs, and symbols that pervade their work make the familiar feel mythic again.
Near the end of the book, the speaker notes the places where hope endures: “I am allowed this. Every novelty, the door, the evening, the garden, the book in my lap. The quiet. I built it all myself.” Where do you find hope in the life you’ve built today?
I find hope in many of the same simplicities as the speaker: my home, my rituals and hobbies, my work as a teacher, my books, and in the kind, loving, thriving community around me. I have the best of friends, something this speaker has, though she never quite pauses to see them. I’ve come to believe that hope lives in community, and in the practice of noticing small, overlooked generosities.
As I write this, a cliché vampire movie hums in the background, my cat sleeps at the foot of the bed, and I can hear a friend laughing downstairs. There is no sweeter moment I could be living. It’s in these fragments of ordinary joy that I find hope. And, from them, I learn how to carry it forward into darker days.
Haley Wooning’s Willows Wake and Walk Away is a dream sequence in the aftermath of trauma. As an unnamed speaker retraces her steps through mist-laced forests and crumbling childhood fairytales, she encounters ancient gods still alive in the faultlines of memory. These are poems of relapse and revelation, loneliness and liminality, asking: what happens after the haunting ends, when the serpent finally sleeps? What does it mean to carry the weight of a heart sloughing off its innumerable dead—and, in the absence of peace, learn to love a life wild, uncanny, and wholly one's own?
The virtual tour for Willows Wake and Walk Away features advance reviews, worldwide giveaways, interviews with Haley, and never-before-seen content on the creation of the book. The collection is available for preorder now.