Mojave Ghost

Yvonne Conza in conversation with Forrest Gander.

Forrest Gander is a poet, essayist and novelist. In 2019, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Be With and, in 2012, his Core Samples from the World was a finalist. His latest contribution Mojave Ghost is an action-packed novel-poem. It hikes through merging time portals, language vistas and the shifting seismic waves and tectonic movements of Gander’s natal geography where land and beloved merge.

“My mother gave birth to me in Barstow, an impoverished desert town close to a stunning geological syncline called Rainbow Basin,” Gander says. “She talked to me about the desert all her life. It was as though her love for her first child and her love for the desert had fused. Because inside me, I can still hear my mother talking about her walks through the Mojave, I see the desert through her eyes as well as my own.” 

The following interview has been edited and condensed. 

Yvonne Conza: Do you think of Mojave Ghost as a geological love story? 

Forrest Gander: I try at times to make that love story very specific. For instance, in one poem, Ashwini Bhat, my (now) wife— hiking the Carrizo Plain with me—brings her dusty finger to my lips and watches me “as the taste, part you part earth, brought a change to my face.” Land and beloved merge. 

As you probably know, I have a degree in geology, and those years of study trained me to look for relationships between the small and large scale, to be able to conjoin the conceptual— say, the rising and folding of mountains— with the very particular— say the microscopic crystal structures inside a shear zone. I’m often counterpointing perceptions. Not only large and small scale, but inside and outside. I’m interested in the way that place might be involved in human feeling, thinking, perception. But I’m not writing science. I only approach literature this way because it makes emotional sense to me.

I feel sure that the world around us, whether or not we recognize it, is always involved in our perceptions, in our experience. I’m drawn to a body of South Indian literature called Sangam, its trajectory of poems called akam, in which it was considered not only unethical, but impossible to write about the self without taking into account the landscape around you. Scholars say that the ultimate goal of that poetry is the dissolution of any split between self and world. 

So the poems of Mojave Ghost speak of eros and the love that holds people together. Of the quality of conversation in relationships and of a staggered hopefulness. But they also necessarily speak of a broken world, human and non-human, of failure, regret, and haunting memory. In one sense, the book is an exigent attempt at deep listening. But in my limited way, I also wanted to investigate, as honestly as possible, some familiar strata from the colossal geological depth of the human soul. 

YC: Was there one specific thing, image or sensory component that led to your entry into this work?

FG: I’d been waylaid, in just a few quick years, by the deaths of my wife, my adoptive father, my mother, and my younger sister with whom I was exceptionally close. There’s almost no experience I have these days—from hearing owls at night to browning garlic in the skillet—that doesn’t jumpstart my recall of moments from my past that I shared with others who are no longer here. 

Trying to find a way forward amid so much grief, I began to hike the eight-hundred mile San Andreas Fault. I don’t want to give the impression that I walked along a clearly delineated crack from north to south. What we call the San Andreas Fault is really a family of faults. Often, signs of the fault are subtle and distributed over a wide area. You can trudge a long way to reach, for instance, just one bent arroyo. But I walked it as someone might walk the stations of the cross, meditating between stopping places. For me, it was a reflective and resuscitative activity, a way of grounding myself during a tumultuous time. And unlike, say, Basho hiking the “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” I succumbed to the necessity of driving to many locations I wanted to explore. On many of my hikes, I was accompanied by a new immigrant to this country with whom I was developing a deeply tender bond. 

Very soon I came to realize that when I looked at the landscape around me, I was also observing the past in the present. Both physically and emotionally, I found myself straddling fractures. Those two circulation systems containing trauma and renewal, past and present, the personal and the geological, came to form the currents in Mojave Ghost.

YC: How does the act of disinterring memory—in the sense of loss, displacement, and erosion—offer you clues and a trajectory towards building this novel-poem’s shape? 

FG: Each section of Mojave Ghost maintains a resistant independence, but each is also porous as images and speculative statements slide between them. So the poems are a sort of archipelago of fragments. 

Like the land that I was walking, fractured and dynamic under my feet, I began to experience myself as relational, without a fixed essence. I became more aware of my moving parts, my minds, my interruptions, my craquelure. I felt more intensively than ever that what I called myself was an unstable collage, a multiplicity, a vigorous interchange of perspectives. That’s what accounts for both the restlessly shifting pronouns and the sometimes disjunctive and short stanzas. 

Toward the end of the book, I use even fewer words on each page. I wanted at that point to render the words quieter, smaller, to surround them with a desert of white space. And to slow down the pace of the reading. To build in longer moments of resonance. Also, I thought that turning the page to find only a few words and then turning the page again might give the reader a sense of journeying, of hiking the desert. Lifting your eyes, lowering your eyes with more frequency.

YC: What is the asterisk being tasked with in your material? 

FG: The asterisk is a kind of star, maybe the first star of an evening. A wishing star. An intimation of hope. Instead of a reader-orienting title, the modest star hovers over the poem outside of language. I think of it as initiating a new beginning with each poem while at the same time, it connects the poems, linking them under one sign, suggesting that there are no clear beginnings or endings, but only a continuous sequence in which past and present, self and selves, cycle through each other. *

FURTHER READING