Place As Container for a Very Specific Memory: an Interview with Emily O’Neill by Raina K. Puels

Author photo by Jackie Downey

Last May, I did a poetry prompt a day. One of them was to write about place. I chose to focus on Allston, MA, where I’ve been living the last six years. I wondered if any other Boston poets had written about this dirty, loud, fun, and transient place. Somehow I came across Emily O’Neill’s 2015 poem “don’t know how not to beg” in Split Lip. The poem really captures the trash magic of Allston, and how it’s a neighborhood you grow into, and then quickly grow out of:

like this boy kissing the girl I had been

instead of kissing me & aren’t I older

than the owner of this tremor

& wasn’t the girl anybody’s to take

home anyway no one owns satisfaction

or Allston or what changes without warning

Raina K. Puels: What parts of yourself changed the most when you were living in Allston? Do you miss those former versions of yourself, or are you glad to have left them behind? 

Emily O’Neill: It’s funny to answer this question, because I’ve never actually lived in Allston. I did spend plenty of time there because many of my friends did when I was in college and my early twenties. When they were living in Allston, I was still living in Northampton and then Providence, kind of commuting to my social life in Boston. During that time I was going through a lot of pretty serious growing pains: falling in love with people who did a lot of damage to how I felt about myself, smoking too many cigarettes, never sleeping, always feeling like I was in the right place at the wrong time. I was learning a lot, but most of who I am now didn’t exist yet. My life then felt like I was trespassing on a lot of other people’s stories and didn’t really have one of my own. I don’t miss being that lonely, but I do think about who I was then often, especially now that I’ve been in Boston for more than ten years. I wish I could tell my younger self that everything would sort itself out, to just be patient or set better boundaries, or both.

RKP: How does it feel to revisit this poem seven years later?

EO: Revisiting the poem after a long time is like looking at an old picture of myself. I wrote it about dating someone who was a few years younger than me and lived there when I felt a little too old to be crashing in punk houses with no toilet paper. It’s hilarious to think I felt that way when I was twenty-five. I’m thirty-two now and don’t really feel like I’m too old or too young for anything. I overhear twenty-somethings talking about how old they are when I tend bar and have to restrain myself from telling them to shut the fuck up. They’re not old at all, and neither am I. But there’s definitely something about being twenty-five that makes you think you’re wiser than you want to be. This poem reads that way to me. When I wrote it, I missed the chaos of being nineteen, how everything was acute and unfocused, how it always seemed like I was getting away with something. At twenty-five, I felt a lot more responsible to myself and others, which was good. But it had a different weight, which I was just beginning to notice and process. Being twenty-five and feeling responsible for the feelings of someone closer to the chaos of nineteen than I was intimidated me. The relationship didn’t work out for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one was that I think the other person liked who I was in my poems more than they actually wanted to get to know me well.

RKP: Two times in the poem, you refer to Allston as Rat City (which is also one of my favorite nicknames). Originally, Allston was dubbed Rock City because there were so many concert venues, but that quickly morphed into Rat City because there were many more rats. Do you have a favorite, or most memorable, moment with Allston’s mascot rodents? 

EO: There was a couch on the porch of a place a bunch of my friends lived in Allston one summer, and I definitely rolled and smoked many, many spliffs on that couch while it was simultaneously being chewed apart by rats. We didn’t bother each other though. As someone who's worked in restaurants for seventeen years, that's the most peaceful relationship I’ve ever had with rats.

RKP: From internet sleuthing, I see you’ve moved across the river. This Boston-lingo means that you’ve “aged out of Allston.” The joke being, the closer you get to thirty the more likely you are to leave Allston for a quieter more “adult” place to live, since it’s such a young neighborhood (people ages 18-34 make up 78% of its population). How has your writing about Boston changed since you moved? 

EO: I never lived in Allston, but in general I think my writing about Boston has shifted from romanticizing places like Allston that have such specific personalities to letting place in my poems behave more subtly. Place is important in all my books and chapbooks, but it’s only one character or positionality in the lyric. The longer I live here, the more the scale of the city changes in my poems. My second collection is very much about places within the place. For falling knife, I wrote a lot about food and drink and the community bars and restaurants foster both for guests and the people who create and maintain those spaces, and Boston’s food scene is a really unique ecosystem because of a lot of baked in cultural things about Massachusetts, so that guided what I paid attention to for sure. I’ve worked in hospitality on and off for seventeen years, so those spaces are a lot like the city to me: they’re important to the composition of my world but not all-consuming.

RKP: Do you have any favorite poems about place?

EO: Rebecca Lindenberg has a wonderful poem called “Illuminating” in Love: An Index (there’s a version of it here in an issue of DIAGRAM) that I love because of how the place is somewhere you could point to on a map but also a container for a very specific memory. I think of places that way a lot of the time. I have an eidetic memory so my memories of places are extremely vivid and even a place I only physically spend time in once can become really powerful in my imagination or dream life, meaning as much as what happened to me there.

RKP: If you could live anywhere, where would it be and why?

EO: I have a bad habit of falling in love with most places I visit. It makes traveling dangerously romantic, especially because I usually travel by myself. The summer of 2019 I took a road trip from Nashville through Arkansas, then down to New Orleans, and then to Austin. I’d happily live in any of the places I visited during that week on the road. I have a really intense love for Pittsburgh because of many excellent memories made there during really formative times for me as an artist and as an excuse to spend more time in the city, I’m working on a novel set there, which means I have to visit again soon to make sure I’m rendering it right. I have a similar love for Providence, where I did live for short periods twice, but moving back there isn’t out of the question, especially if I ever want to stop renting and buy (truly a pipe dream on writing and bartending money). Most places have something lovable about them, so it’s so hard to choose a dream location. I’m pretty well settled in Boston right now though. My partner just opened a bar here and I work at a really cozy restaurant in our neighborhood that I adore, so I’m not in any hurry to decamp to somewhere else. 

Emily O’Neill (she/they) knit twenty-five sweaters in 2021. She is the author of two award winning collections of poetry, Pelican (YesYes Books, 2015) and a falling knife has no handle (YesYes Books, 2018), as well as five chapbooks, most recently You Can't Pick Your Genre, a collection of poems inspired by the Scream movie franchise and published as a do-si-do with Lauren Milici's Final Girl by Big Lucks. O’Neill’s prose and poetry recently appeared in The Arkansas International, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Redivider, and Salamander, among others. They are represented by Danielle Bukowski at Sterling Lord Literistic and live in Cambridge, MA, where they tend bar a short walk from their apartment.

Raina K. Puels is a queer/poly Boston-based writer, educator, and kinkster. They hold an MFA from Emerson College and read poems for Split Lip Mag. You can find their writing published in The Rumpus, Hobart After Dark, PANK, and many other places listed here: rainakpuels.com. Follow them on Twitter: @rainakpuels.