Spotlight Interview with Julie Enszer

SAS Spotlight Interview

with Julie R. Enszer

Thank you to poet Julie Enszer for speaking with us about her most recent collection, The Lamed-Vovniks, Read our interview with Julie below!

Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is a scholar, editor, and poet. Her scholarly book manuscript, A Fine Bind, is a history of lesbian-feminist presses from 1969 until 2009. Her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, Journal of Lesbian Studies, American Periodicals, WSQ, Post45, Frontiers, and other journals. She is the author of six poetry collections, The Lamed-Vovniks (Indolent Books, 2026) being her most recent. Enszer has her MFA and PhD from the University of Maryland. She edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and a regular book reviewer for the The Rumpus and Calyx. She is an Instructional Assistant Professor with the Sarah Isom Center at the University of Mississippi.

Norah Clifford: Can you begin by talking us through the origin of this collection? Did you set out with this end idea in mind; how did it develop?

Julie Enszer: The Lamed-Vovniks started during the pandemic. Being in quarantine, I had ample time, and one night started scribbling lines. Originally, they were not poems, but only small snippets of language. Words that came into my mind to play with different women’s voices. At the time, I did not completely understand what I was doing but I trusted the process of writing and listening to the voices. Over a few months, I realized that I was writing dramatic monologues. The idea of these women’s voices being lamed-vovniks came later, and then it transformed into the animating idea for the collection. When I realized what was emerging, I read more deeply about lamed-vovniks. Through that reading the voice of Tirzah, the angel responsible for the lamed-vovniks in the world today, emerged and it helped me understand the organization of the collection and its overall arc.

NC: You explain the lamed-vovniks are traditionally male figures, how did using female characters for the lamed-vovniks change the way you told their stories or interpreted aspects of the Jewish tradition?

JE: That transformation from male to female is a fundamental feminist insight. Now it seems quite ordinary because of the many contributions of feminism, but asking questions like, what would happen if what we understand as male is switched to female?, is revolutionary—and has fueled interesting, vital work in the world. That strategy of feminist transformation animates The Lamed-Vovniks. Jewish feminists, particularly Jewish lesbian-feminists, gifted me with a range of imaginative texts that consider the role of women in Jewish history, stories, and folklore. I drew on work by Enid Dame, Evelyn Torton Beck, and many others to have a free imagination to reconsider and rewrite what we know about the lamed-vovniks. In one way, like all feminist and lesbian projects, imagining the lamed-vovniks as all women is quite ordinary; in another way, it is revolutionary. The collection asks, what happens if? And what are the consequences of all the lamed-vovniks being women?

NC: Using the monologue form gives your characters the power of first-person narrative. Why do you feel this was important for both the reader engaging with these characters, and the ways they were in conversation with each other and Tirzah?

JE: As we know from the Bechdel test, Miriam Toews’s extraordinary book Women Talking, and other feminist insights, when women talk with one another extraordinary things happen. Part of my interest in writing these poems was to voice a range of women and more importantly to be in conversation with a range of women—some are women I know, some are women I fancy as part of me, some are women I imagine, all are women that I would like to be in conversation with—and I want them to be in conversation with one another. Right now, in our world today, having radical open conversation across differences is vital and transformative. I think of The Lamed-Vovniks as a raucous conversation, a lively dinner party, a noisy room of activists and dissenters. At the same time, it is also a collection of quiet and personal conversations—conversations that women have with the divine.

NC: You arrange the collection in Chazaras all starting with a Bromide and you call the pieces “story-poems”. Can you speak to these formal and structural decisions and how you feel they augment the overall narrative of the collection?

JE: Chazara is a Hebrew word that means return or circling back. When I was organizing the book, I realized that I was putting the poems in sections, but the narrative was not linear. Partially that is because the entire idea of the lamed-vovniks, that there are thirty-six righteous people who hold up the world, is a very old idea, and, if true, if a small group of righteous people have been holding up the world since the beginning of human creation then there is a circularity of life and of the lamed-vovniks. I wanted sections that contained that circularity, and worked to hold that long history of humanity; I wanted the book to have a sense of return to the place we have been but it is now a new place as well. The bromides are of course the wry, ironic voice that often accompanies me in the world. The bromides remind me and readers—do not take any of this too seriously! I am telling you stories, in poems, not reporting the news!

NC: Many of your pieces involve ideas of labor, righteousness, and queerness, can you speak more about the relationship you find between these themes?

JE: My interest in work and money and the value of things in the world weaves throughout my poetry and my scholarly work; collectively I think of work, money, and the value of things as labor. For a long time, I thought that my interest in money, work, labor came from my mother; then I read The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, one of the earliest books in Yiddish by a woman, and I realized that the concern about labor, production, money, and value in the world predates either me or my mother! Part of what I am working through in The Lamed-Vovniks is the relationship among those three things you mention: labor and righteousness and queerness. I vacillate between thinking of labor as associated with righteousness; that is, sometimes I believe that if one labors with honesty and devotion, good and righteous things will emerge. Though, of course, that is not always true; sometimes people labor with honesty and devotion and do not get anything good in return. Sometimes, righteousness feels entirely severed from labor. I am interested in that paradox, in living inside it and examining it. Queerness is of course a continuous interest of mine and one that society often would have us believe is not connected to or even the opposite of righteousness. And yet I encounter so many examples of intertwining for good and for bad of queerness and righteousness. Just as the connection between labor and righteousness being a paradox, so is the connection between queerness and righteousness. Combine all three and there are layers upon layers interweaving work and labor and money and righteousness and queerness. I am interested in teasing out all of those layers.

NC: Where do you find righteousness in the modern world and the women with which you surround yourself? How do you hope to represent and honor these women with this collection

JE: The magical appeal of the lamed-vovniks is the idea that they are good and righteous in every minute of every day. That is my fantasy about them—and I want to be near that kind of idealized goodness and righteousness. In the book, though, I am reckoning with the idea that the lamed-vovniks are human. As humans, the good and the bad, the righteous and the selfish, the profane, the evil, all come together in one messy package. There is not exclusively goodness and righteousness among humans—even among the lamed-vovniks. Yet, there is goodness and righteousness in the world. I find incredible moments of righteousness in my own life that are small and fleeting. I try to recognize and savor them. Moments when people do things to help other people with no gain for themselves. Times when people lift up values and principles that have no benefit to themselves but that benefit others enormously. I want to be attuned to righteousness in the modern world and hope that these poems will help others attend to those small, fleeting moments.

Thank you Julie for a wonderful interview!

If you haven't yet, order your copy of The Lamed-Vovniks HERE.

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net

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