Lisa Morin Carcia: Your first collection, Revising the Storm, traces a life from childhood through first marriage, present marriage, and new fatherhood. One of the great pleasures of the book is seeing the way this life unfolds in narrative on both the individual poem level and on the level of the book as a whole, with striking insights discovered along the way. How about your forthcoming collection, Night Angler, with its title that's reminiscent of the poems about fishing in Revising the Storm—does your new book continue to develop the narratives and themes of your first book, or does it strike out in a new direction?

Geffrey Davis: I hope both/and are true. The new book definitely picks up narratively and thematically where Revising the Storm left off—you might read Night Angler as an evolving, book-length, father-to-son love letter of my wondering and worrying about models of failure and models of care—but even as I chart and grow to understand what’s being relived about the fathering I received, all along I’m praying for the messy success of breaking certain family cycles. Naming the possibility of that newness has been the healthiest, if also the scariest, prospect of working on this book.

LMC: I'd like to help the RWW community get to know you as a teacher and mentor. Could you tell me about an especially influential teacher you had? How do you carry forward what you learned from him or her into your own teaching and mentoring?

GD: Something that Joseph Millar said during my very first poetry-writing class at Oregon State University resurfaced for me in a major way. I don’t remember which text we used that quarter, but I’ll never forget the gist of his instructions for reading the selections of poetry in it: read a poem; if you don’t like that poem, read the next poem; if you don’t like that one, read the next one; and so on until you find a poem that you do like; write an original poem that responds to the piece you like. As a struggling first-generation college student who had only recently switched majors from zoology to English, I found his approach vital in shifting the focus of my reading purposes from that of mastery and validation to that of mystery and recognition—I felt free to wander rather than cover the poetic field before me. Now, through my own teaching and mentoring, I have come to appreciate how his approach also quietly instigated a more engaged sense of reader responsibility and, in turn, the need for connecting my patterns of reading/writing with my habits of mind. As it turns out, influence is not innocuous. I try to carry forward that creative tension, challenging writers I work with to wander through our literary traditions with woke consideration, going as far as necessary to find and inhabit and study the wilderness of our own inspirations.