Dr. Catherine W. Carter spent her childhood on the headwaters of the Choptank River on the eastern shore of Maryland with her parents, a master gardener and a biologist who have spent the last half a century rewilding land that was once a corn farm. For over 25 years Catherine has lived in Western North Carolina, where she is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her deep connection to land and reverence for wildness is what originally drew me to Catherine’s work. Her commitment to making poetry, both hers and others’, accessible, especially to young people, inspired me to reach out to her to discuss her work on the page and in the world.
Catherine has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Orion, Rhino, North Carolina Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, Ecotone, and The Cortland Review, among other places. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, two chapbooks, and a co-translated edition of the 33,000-line poem Confessio Amantis by 14th-century poet, John Gower. She has won the Jacar Press chapbook contest for her chapbook Marks of the Witch and received the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, as well as the James Applewhite Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review, and the 2025 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for her newest collection By Stone and Needle. This collection brings together meditations on science, love, nature, race, mythology, bodies, language, and more.
On a Sunday afternoon in October of 2025, I met virtually with Catherine to talk about By Stone and Needle, ecopoetics, teaching, and the great grappling that is writing poetry.
katie wills evans (kwe): Dr. Carter, your work reflects a reverence of Appalachia, where you have lived for almost three decades and now teach. I am from Appalachia but have spent my whole career writing and teaching in New Orleans, so I’m familiar with the position of being connected to a place that you cannot quite claim. How do you think about place generally and Appalachia specifically?
Dr. Catherine W. Carter (CWC): I tend to feel like all places either have or have had what we might kind of cautiously call “spirit,” whether that means a sort of literal animism or more like an accretion of all the thoughts sentient beings put into those places. I think place matters. One of the strongest factors in building or sustaining a place’s spirit is the extent to which it hosts more than one kind of life. So, at the most literal level, that’s biodiversity and ecosystems. The more relationships and beings in relationship there are, the easier it is for us human types to see the place as spirit-filled and sacred. And so Appalachia is really a pretty amazing chunk of the continent, despite having survived literally centuries of extractive industry of all kinds. But as they say around here, I’m not from around here. I’ve been here 27 years, and I’m never going to be from around here, never going to know it even as well as I knew Tidewater, and that was a drop in the bucket compared to the way some people know places. Some of my students, their families, have been here hundreds of years, literally working the soil. And if you want to go back a little bit further, the Qualla Boundary of the Cherokee is just down the road, and that’s thousands, tens of thousands of years that people have been knowing and walking and working this land. My relationship with Appalachia proper is that of, hopefully, a respectful outsider. It’s been a good place to live, and I don’t especially want to leave, but I’m not from around here.
One of the strongest factors in building or sustaining a place’s spirit is the extent to which it hosts more than one kind of life.
kwe: Since the early 2000s the field of ecopoetics has attempted to use language to interrogate the relationship between humans and our environment, which we are not so slowly destroying. In “One Cup” from Larvae of the Nearest Stars, you offer us “this Styrofoam coffee cup / reels its slow way / towards the Pacific’s / swirling tidal gyre / of trash four thousand miles / away, vaster than Texas.” Your work often engages with our relationship to and impact on the natural environment and I deeply appreciate how these lines illuminate the connection between the individual contribution and the great tragedy of our commons. Can you tell me more about how your beliefs about our environment inform your work?
CWC: If you figure ecopoetics is a lens on literature that accepts or maybe insists on the relationships between human beings and not human beings and human language, that’s like asking, what do you think about the world? It’s everywhere. But something that I sometimes feel inclined to inflict on my students is the fact that interconnection is not some kind of capital “R” romantic ideal. It is literal fact. It does not matter what we believe or what we prioritize, we still need air to breathe. Without it, we’ll be dead in five minutes, and that is true of everybody, even the people who think clean air is totally trivial and does not matter. It is a real, hardcore bottom line that, no matter what we believe or what we prioritize, we’d be dead without water. And all those things really depend on non-human life to produce them and maintain them. If the insect population crashes and the bird population crashes, it’s human crops that are no longer getting pollinated. When climate change starts shifting the migration pattern of bats out on the West Coast and down in Central America, it’s tequila that you can’t make anymore. When we choose to do nothing about global warming, it is our houses and our kids that get swept away in the landslide. When we poison the water, the heavy metals and microplastics are in our cells, and it does not matter whether we think it’s important or not. It is. It is.
Interconnection is not some kind of capital “R” romantic ideal. It is literal fact.
My father is a biologist, Nick Carter, and he has this thing he does at presentations, what he calls show and tell. He says everything you do, everything you have, everything you are, comes from the earth. If your thing is video games, and you think you never have to go out the door, those things need hardware as well as software. They are made out of things of the earth. They run on energy that has to come from somewhere, whether that’s solar or whether that’s coal. All the things that we value and believe are tied to our living bodies and brains which need particular conditions. So we can call it ecopoetics, but it’s everybody’s poetics.
kwe: Do you feel any sense of responsibility to the subjects of persona poems like the crows who become the “we” of “Crow cosmogony”?
CWC: Gayatri Spivak famously said that you can speak for the other, but not as the other. But then we go to write a persona poem, and what else are we doing except speaking as the other? So it’s a really fraught business. Maybe like translation in general, we could say it’s doomed before we start because I have no idea what it is like to experience life as a crow, even if it’s sort of a mythical creation crow. I don’t know the experience of a tendril of mold. I’m just kind of attempting to imagine this one possible version of that. You know, that can get us into trouble of various kinds, and we can probably both think of examples where it’s brought a ton of bricks down on the head of an otherwise well-meaning poet, but I still feel like it is worth doing. Although maybe I can say that just because the crows don’t speak English as far as we know. They can’t call me on it. But thinking just as human people, never trying to imagine any other perspective, that is not working out so well for us either. So maybe we have to try other things, whether or not they work out.
kwe: Many of your poems, especially the opening poem of By Stone and Needle, “What magic is,” reference or discuss magic directly or indirectly. What do you think about the relationship between poetry and magic?
CWC: It strikes me that maybe you are asking about the boundaries between literal and figurative, because that, to some extent, is what the poem is about. Those boundaries can get pretty gauzy. Is good poetry or good action magical? Sure, in the sense that they can both change literal things, but it also really depends on what we mean by magic. The poem says that magic is the human thing, the power of individual words or actions. And that’s maybe not a definition that most people would agree with. Maybe we’re kind of in the realm here of speech acts, of the times when to say something is to do something, as with a promise, or a wedding vow, or an oath of office. The act on which that poem centers is not what a lot of people would describe as magic. Mr. Dubey, he opened the door to fleeing protestors. No wands were involved. No projection, no manifestation. And he kind of played it down in the interviews. He said, “What did I do? I opened a door.” But what is more magical or powerful than that? The metaphors just write themselves. That’s the result of will, you could arguably say of grace. But with all the will and grace in the world, we still have to do things. If Rahul Dubey had sat in his apartment and written a poem about the fleeing protesters, who am I to say it wouldn’t have been a great poem? But it wouldn’t have done much for the protesters in that moment. He had to open that door.
kwe: As a fellow teacher, I admire your offerings on your personal website to volunteer to bring poetry to classrooms in a way that makes it accessible. How has teaching influenced your own work as a poet? Why do you think poetry is daunting to so many?
CWC: Teaching and writing are both so all-absorbing while you’re doing them that I’m very seldom doing both at the same time. It’s mostly just one or the other. And teaching tends to eat everything else. I’d like a slightly different balance that I don’t know if I’m going to achieve this side of retirement, assuming that retirement is still an option, you know, seven or eight years along.
On the question about poetry being daunting, I am working toward a book of lesson plans for secondary and middle school English teachers who want to teach poetry but are kind of daunted. I think one of the reasons for that is the way poetry often gets taught. And I’m not saying this to blame any particular teacher for any pedagogical choice. Teachers’ jobs are so incredibly demanding and complex that anything any teacher needs to do to keep their sanity, that is not mine to judge. And there are plenty of great teachers of poetry out there. Still I think many teachers get worried by poetry because of the way their teachers taught it to them, where the point is to just cram in as many literary devices as possible and find the symbol, and that’s no fun for students. It doesn’t help us connect the poem to our own experience. It’s all about the technical level instead of the expressive level, and so it is no wonder people don’t like it. I think those teachers teach it that way because they weren’t sure what else to do, because nobody knew how to teach them poetry either. That creates this generational cycle of daunting, and it’s such a waste. I think, given the chance, many kids would love poetry. So I imagine moving that needle a little bit and getting that book written and published and seeing if I can help teachers have some out-of-the-box things to help them do that. I do absolutely think it is something that can be changed.
kwe: In your poems, including “When you tell me I’m being racist,” you address issues of race and racism. What considerations do you make as a white woman when writing such works?
CWC: I think white poets need to write about issues of whiteness. That’s very much my house, and I need to deal with it, but it can get a little bit complicated. I’ll give you an example. There was a poem that I really wanted in this most recent book that did not make it in. The outside reader felt that it was not respectful enough of its subjects, and, truth be known, I did not entirely agree with the outside reader on that. I thought the reader might be missing a subtext of the sacred in the poem. I thought what the poem was attempting was important, and I wanted it in there, but the whole deal with privilege is that it’s invisible, right? We don’t know what we don’t know. So if somebody takes the time and energy to point it out to us, like I say in “When you tell me I’m being racist,” that’s a gift. Maybe it behooves us to listen. So first I worked on trying to make the poem clearer. I ran some revised versions by a friend who studies race and racism, and she said she thought it was probably all right, but she could also foresee it might still not be clear enough about its agenda to avoid misreadings. In the end, I thought, I better just accept the gifts I’ve been given and leave it out. And maybe the issue is that I’m just not a good enough writer yet, or maybe ever, to accurately chart that kind of moment, or that when relationships are just that complicated, maybe the most respectful and appropriate thing to do is just shut up. And at least that doesn’t take much effort.
kwe: A hallmark of your work is its examination and presentation of the natural world and the mysticism of it. This continues in By Stone and Needle. How is By Stone and Needle a digression or progression from your past work?
CWC: It’s really a good thing that you asked this now, instead of five years ago, because it’s a lot easier to see in retrospect. I struggle to organize books, and it seems like most presses really prefer a book to have some kind of cohesion and some kind of arc. But the poems all feel like one-offs until they’re not. So you could say I’m not trying to either find or create an arc, but once they finally get arranged, or maybe arrange themselves, then I can see that there are actually a lot of connections.
While I was thinking about this, I went and found a quote from one of Ursula Le Guin’s fairly early novels called The Dispossessed. The protagonist, who is a physicist, spends most of his working life trying to arrive at what he calls a theory of simultaneity. One of the things this book offers is a kind of narrative of creativity. And so there’s this point where this guy, he’s starting to really work on his simultaneity stuff, and he says, “The false starts and futility of these past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity.” That was kind of how I felt about this book, that it really was the next extension of everything that had come before, the way the figure of the witch and the figure of the compass shaped it, and all the ways they started interacting with each other. I felt like that had been coming a long time and it was maybe something I’d been working toward in the prior books, but I feel like it took off in this one. That also means that I have no real idea right now what comes next. What’s this book the foundation for? I’ve been in a fallow period since January of last year, and I don’t know how long that’s going to last or what it means. I assume I’m going to write something again, eventually, but you wonder sometimes, if you’ve used everything you’ve got, and that was it. I try to have faith that when it is time, I will figure it out.
Featured photo by Adonyi Gábor.
