Jeff Mann: An Interview

by

 Daniel M. Jaffe

Jeff Mann is a poet, memoirist and fiction writer. His poetry collection, On the Tongue (Gival Press, 2006), was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Gay Poetry. He’s also author of the poetry collection, Bones Washed with Wine (Gival Press, 2003), and three award-winning poetry chapbooks: Bliss (Birches Books, 1998), winner of the Stonewall Chapbook Competition; Mountain Fireflies (Poetic Matrix Press, 2000), winner of the Poetic Matrix Chapbook Series; and Flint Shards from Sussex (Gival Press, 2000), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Contest. His short story collection, A History of Barbed Wire, was published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2006, and his two memoirs have also been published: Edge (Harrington Park Press, 2003) and Loving Mountains, Loving Men (Ohio University Press, 2005). Over the years, his short work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. In addition, Jeff Mann teaches Appalachian Literature, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and creative writing at Virginia Tech—yes, at the university which suffered the tragic shooting this past April.

How did such a prolific writing career begin? Jeff credits his parents, explaining that they “encouraged me when I was very young to read—I was savoring The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Dracula in seventh grade—so from all that voracious reading it wasn’t that far a leap into writing. I wrote my first poem, ‘Crocuses Under Concrete,’ when I was in seventh-grade study hall. The playwright Maryat Lee, a family friend, gave me my first blank book when I was an adolescent, and I started keeping a journal and writing poems about the various handsome high school boys I was futilely and furtively infatuated with. In college, I kept writing love poems, and when I ran across the work of the Confessional Poets, Sylvia Plath in particular, I knew I wanted to become a poet. In the mid-nineties I began to write creative nonfiction, and in 2002 I started writing fiction.”

When Jeff finally left the small town of his youth for urban environments, did he experience culture shock?  “Many of my high school classmates did,” said Jeff.  “They fled West Virginia University after a semester and transferred to colleges closer to home. But my parents had given me enough of a cosmopolitan background that I relished WVU. I remember hearing professors as they read class rolls and marveling at the exotic-sounding names of my fellow students. Even then, difference was something I found stimulating rather than frightening. The culture shock came when I left West Virginia after grad school and taught part-time for a semester in Washington, D.C. My colleagues were cold, rude snobs, and the city crowds and traffic annoyed and overwhelmed me. That was when I realized that being near or part of a gay community wasn’t worth the price of urban living. (I’ve always been too somber, serious, and shy to be much of a success in the mainstream gay community anyway.) So I moved back to the mountains and have been here ever since.”

How does Jeff’s work fit into Appalachian literary traditions? Or, to pose the question differently—how does Appalachian literary tradition inform his writing? “Well,” said Jeff, “there’s the presence of the natural world and of folk culture in a lot of my work, both typical elements of Appalachian literature. Most importantly, Appalachian poetry is not intellectual and not elitist . . . which means that my work is deliberately comprehensible and accessible, and it deals, for the most part, with the heart and not the head. I hate defiantly oblique and stubbornly intellectual poetry, a variety so wildly valorized these days. ‘Language poetry,’ for instance . . . or that distanced, humorous, ironic, thoroughly impersonal stuff magnificently printed in all the ‘best literary journals.’ Arrogant, coyly inaccessible artistes. I call that vein of verse a waste of time, energy, and paper. These are people who don’t have the emotional and artistic courage to write about themselves, about real issues, about what Faulkner called the human heart in conflict with itself. Appalachian poetry focuses on real issues in an understandable way . . . Sorry, I love to rant.  Anger-management problems here . . .”

Jeff’s memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men received high praise. Danny L. Miller, co-editor of An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature, reacted by writing, “The sheer beauty of the prose in the memoir and the language of the poetry is incredible. This is one of the great watershed books of Appalachian literature. Its contribution to the fields of Appalachian studies and gay/gender studies is significant.” The book began, explained Jeff, “as a collection of poems submitted to the Ohio University Press Series on Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia. The editors of the press requested that I add prose to the poems (since books of poetry are generally very hard to market), and so I wrote the pieces of memoir over the course of about 2 1/2 months. The prose makes it much more comprehensive, much more of a breakthrough; it’s the first book about being gay in Appalachia.”

A central theme in the memoir is integration of various aspects of self. I asked Jeff to elaborate. “That integration is a lifelong project; it’s work I’ll never complete. Which is to say, there is no place where I feel like I entirely belong. For instance, when my partner John and I recently spent a few days at a gay-owned guesthouse in Lost River, West Virginia, I loved the mountain setting, but I found the other guests—sleek and snotty gay men from Washington, D.C. —thoroughly standoffish. I guess John and I were too burly, too hairy, too old or unfashionable for them to deign to speak to? That experience mirrors the alienation I feel in many gay contexts (with some definite exceptions). Much of gay life is too urban, consumerist, youth-oriented, and superficial for me. But, of course, in the country I feel alienated too. I’m surrounded by Christian fundamentalists who think I’m damned and don’t deserve basic human rights. My answer has been to live in or near university towns in Appalachia—Morgantown, Blacksburg—where the atmosphere is fairly liberal and where I feel safe as an openly gay man. (It helps to be big and bearded; you’re less likely to be interfered with.) So I’ve been able to stay in my native region; its values are pretty much my values (other than the obnoxious religion). I love mountain speech, mountain manners, mountain food and music. I am, to some extent, very much a logical product of this region. (Years ago, when I told my students that I liked country music and drove a pickup truck, they informed me that I was a ‘Bubba.’) As someone partnered for ten years, someone whose party days are long over, someone who’s been self-reliant from the get-go, I have little need of a gay ‘community’—my community is composed of straight and LGBT friends far and near with whom I have some sort of shared history or passion—but when I need a ‘queer fix’ John and I go to DC, San Francisco or Key West, and when I need a ‘cosmopolitan fix’ we travel overseas. Otherwise, I’m content spending my life in small mountain towns—I live in Pulaski, I often visit my family in Hinton, West Virginia—and working at Virginia Tech.

Reacting to Jeff’s poetry collection, On the Tongue, author Ian Philips writes: “Jeff Mann is the Sappho of Appalachia. I can think of no higher or truer praise. Like the legendary Lesbian bard, Mann roots the exquisite, fragmentary psalms and prayers that make up On the Tongue with extremely specific details and locales that become, word by word and beat by beat, universal and unforgettable flowerings and all because of these two poets’ deceptively simple art of singing hauntingly of that forever universal theme: desire, as deferred and sated by both gods and mortals.” One of Jeff’s trademarks, so evident in On the Tongue, is the tasteful, subtle way in which he renders sexual imagery in desire-themed poems. “My Southern upbringing helps there,” said Jeff.  “While I’m very frank in my fiction, which is likely to appeal only to gay men of a certain fetishistic stripe, in my poetry I’m more conscious of a mixed audience . . . and Southern gentlemen do not bluntly discuss sex around ladies. I know, I know, very reactionary. As we say around here, ‘Ah cain’t hep it.’ At the same time that the erotic is one of my most common themes, my old-fashioned manners make me go for the polite, oblique wording when I write poetry about sex.”

I asked Jeff if he wouldn’t mind discussing April’s mass shootings on Virginia Tech’s campus, his reactions and those of his students, particularly as reflected in everyone’s writings. He generously shared thoughts, feelings, experience: “Back to anger-management. My initial response, and the response that lingers, is rage. I’m furious that the mere mechanics of handguns gave that vicious, absurd, trifling creature the power to destroy many people, people obviously of better quality than he. I’ve been spared the full effect of the tragedy in that I personally knew none of the victims and I never had that little bastard in class, but, of course, I’m part of Virginia Tech—have been since 1989—so I’m experiencing the mass mourning that everyone else is. I should say that I wasn’t completely shocked, simply because I have enough darkness in me to realize how pervasive that darkness is in human nature, and I’ve lived long enough to have seen, from near and far, many sad and terrible things. Such events—forgive me if this sounds cynical or pessimistic, I think I’m simply being a realistic adult—such events can happen anywhere, anytime. Perhaps my attitude is tinged with Appalachian fatalism. At any rate, after that immediate rage-filled response and some experience with insomnia, I’ve been rereading The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius simply to strengthen my own innate stoicism, concentrating on what I call Carpe Diem Therapy, which is to say racking up pleasures and reminding myself of how transitory everything is, and trying to be kinder to folks. Kindness can mean a lot in hard times.

“As for writing, I tend to take notes during or soon after an experience and then process it, getting to the actual composition later. If it’s a shock, it takes some time to process it, obviously. But that’s what writing sometimes is, according to Virginia Woolf—a way to deal with shocks.

“In class, my students had only a meager desire to talk about what had happened. They preferred to continue with regular class procedure, to return to sanity and the daily. I did not ask them to write about the tragedy, though one student did choose to do so. Writing about such enormous and terrible events should be optional, not required, especially for young people who have not yet been hardened by the world.”

More of Jeff Mann’s heart and soul can be explored on his web site.


Dan is the author of The Limits of Pleasure, a rather controversial novel nominated by some for awards and by others for public burning (well, almost).  A former corporate lawyer, he shed his suits to become a rebel with a cause—creative freedom in life and art. Dan frequently publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers such as The Forward, Green Mountains Review and The Florida Review. He compiled and edited With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, and translated Here Comes the Messiah!, a Russian-Israeli novel by Dina Rubina. He also teaches fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and his web site is here.