Ron Houchin lives on the banks of the Ohio River, across from his hometown Huntington, West Virginia, in a haunted house built by the grandson of an ex-slave, located near an opening to the Underground Railroad of the Civil War era. He is a retired public school teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Galway Review, Acorn, Alaska Quarterly, the Southwest Review, Five Points, Midwest Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. He has eight books of poetry published (including four from Salmon Poetry), as well as a collection of short stories and a novella. The Odyssey of Homer Atkinson is his new novel-in-progress.

Gerard Beirne: Ron, you have a long and curious connection with Ireland. I know we met back in ’89 or ’90 on the Eastern Washington University Dublin Summer Workshop, and I think I read somewhere that you have made about twenty seven visits over the years. Do you have a strong Irish heritage or what is it about the Irish connection that seems important to you?

Ron Houchin: Yes, Gerry, this August will mark my twenty-ninth visit to Ireland. I have no certain information that my family has an Irish heritage. All I know is that my mother’s family name is Fuller, which has connections to both Scotland and Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, as a trade name—Fullers “fulled cloth, that is, walked on it to form it; also they were known as Walkers.

I loved the idea of Ireland before I ever knew much more about it than that it was an underdog country taking on a world power for its freedom. I used to wear a green badge, as a middle schooler, that read “Honorary Irishman.” No one gave me that honor I just loved it before I ever saw Ireland, the same way that I loved and saw the face of my oldest daughter before she was born. Now, I have an Irish publisher, Salmon, and friends on both coasts of Ireland. It was a lifetime dream come true when in 1997, Salmon Publishing accepted my first book, Death and the River, for publication.

This all says nothing about the beauty of the country and friendly nature of the people that I love and that have made me invite everyone I know and care about to come to Ireland with me sometime.

I really dread the day when, because of health trouble or financial problems, I can no longer get to the “land of heart’s desire.”

GB: You have published four collections (including your “The Quiet Jars: New and Selected Poems” in 2013) with Salmon Poetry. Can you tell me how you first connected with Salmon and your ongoing relationship to the press?

RH: In the mid-90s, about 1995, when I’d found out that the not-yet-famous Billy Collins was conducting a poetry workshop in the Galway area, I signed up, sent in my poems, and paid my fees. I’d been going to the Eastern Washington University Summer Writing Workshop directed by Jim McAuley, for several years and was concerned that I was wearing out my welcome. The Billy Collins workshop  allowed me to get to know Billy better and discover that he also wanted to have a book published in Ireland. A reading was set up for the workshop participants at the Galway Arts Centre. I’d had a couple poems recently in Poetry Ireland Review and so decided I should read them. After the reading we went round to a pub, and in strides this blond lady in a cape. She was  being lead by two golden retrievers—like some Celtic goddess. She introduced herself as Jessie Lendennie, Director of Salmon Publishing. She said she liked what I’d read, and that I should send her a book manuscript. I reached down into my satchel and pulled out a book manuscript saying, as I handed it to her, “There you go.”  Of course, I became the laughing stock of the workshop, but two years later the book came out. 

GB: In total, I believe, you have eight books of poetry published. Have you found any significant differences between publishing in North America and Ireland?

RH: Yes, publishing is a lot less confusing in Ireland. I suspect Irish, and European, publishing houses have figured out the alchemical trick to publishing that Americans are still fumbling with. It just goes so much smoother in Ireland. They know what they are doing, and the covers are design masterpieces.  And the politics of publishing in America is so coarse, it seems.  Fads and fashions seem to dictate what sees light—less concern for why/how than who, if that makes sense.

GB: In addition to writing and publishing poetry, you are a retired public high school teacher. How was that experience for you and how, if at all, did it influence your poetry? 

RH: Teaching high school for thirty years made me write fast, keep each poem in my head for at least a day, and strain in the face of vigorous distractions to hold on to that poem. Sometimes I would share an idea with students and we’d have a kind of a write-off, to see who could get it done first. I was always the slowest, the last. It was fun for me, seemed to be for them, too.  Then we’d often have a read-a-round. I miss that sort of thing about the teaching: interaction with the young writers.  

GB: Who are your poetic influences? What Irish poets resonate with you most and why? Are there any up and coming Irish or US poets that are getting your attention?

RH: Sadly, about all we were exposed to in public school, when I was a young wannabe writer, were the usual suspects: Yeats, Beckett, Joyce—a little bit. It wasn’t until about college that I even heard of Seamus Heaney. After that, all of them have become my favorites. Nowadays, apart from poets in my own part of the US, called Appalachia, contemporary Irish poets are among my first choice of reads—Your good self, Peter Sirr, Enda Wiley, Theo Dorgan, and of course Paula Meehan. There are so many of the grand old guard of Irish poetry, that list could go on forever.  Eavan Boland, Moya Canon, Rita Ann Higgins, and dozens of others I love. I hesitate to say any more, younger names because there are so many that I fear I would accidentally leave out some. And to be honest, Ireland is a land of poets and writers, I read them the way some folks eat chips. When I see such and such or so and so from Ireland, I tend to give it a shot and read it. 

GB: You told me way back that your poems were composed entirely in your head, working on them over and back, and that when you finally committed them to paper, it was more or less the final draft. Am I correct in my memory of that and has your writing process changed over the years?

RH: You are right. I do still keep poems going in my head, especially when traveling. But, for better or worse now, I don’t have to do that most days. Once because of the rigors of teaching I had to and for about five years , my second marriage’s length,  I tended to keep poems up to about sonnet length in my head all week and write them down in a long session on Sundays. I was a bit of a henpecked husband then and my second wife didn’t like that I wanted to spend so much time huddled away with books in the back of the house trailer where we lived for the five years of the marriage. Understandable really.  

I was so delighted when word processors and personal computers came out. I was able to relax into a poem and not stay uptight all day or week for fear I’d jumble it about I my head the wrong way. Now that I’ve been retired the past seventeen years, each week for me is six Saturdays and a Sunday. I write anywhere, anytime. Oddly, it hasn’t change the quantity—can’t speak for the quality.

GB: You have also published a book of short stories and a novel. How do you find the fiction process versus the poetic one?

RH: Good question. I’ve been working in poems so long now that it is about second nature to me. Prose that I’ve always written from time to time, is a whole ‘nother breed of cat, as we say in West Virginia. Where I write word by word for a poem, it means a mind corralled and tuned to an inner voice that seeks the shapeliness of things, for want of a better way of saying it; in prose, I let the horse out to run on a paragraph at a time. Where I can be having a pretty bad day and write an essay or story—as I often do—to write a poem, even an angry one, I have to be in love with the world or some part of it.   

GB: As you get older, is there anything about poetry that you once believed or felt that you now feel differently about? What have you learnt about the nature of poetry and its relevance to the lived experience?

RH: Marvelous question: How does our view of poetry evolve as we age. For me, it went from being a fun luxury activity to one that is necessary. I must reply to something in the world, even if it is only in my head, about every day, occasionally, several times a day. That’s another change, I used to see poetry in the divine sense as coming down from on high, from some supernatural source external to regular reality, if I can use that word. Now, I know it is magic but it is decidedly human magic. Far as I can tell, we are the only creatures who must reply in this way to what we see and experience. About twenty minutes from my house, which sits right above the Ohio River, there is the Southern Ohio Wolf Sanctuary, a rescue farm for animals that are 80-95% wolf and have been given up by their “owners.” I drive out there regularly when I feel lost or alone to hear the wolves recite their poems to whomever will listen and to the moon. It is like human poetry in that if good enough it will raise the hair on the back of your neck. 

Not to be evasive, but I suspect that all poetry is lived experience. The Buddhists say each of us is a universe. Therefore,  all experience is in our heads.