She’s the Saturday editor at The Rumpus and was recently named a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University. Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction there, she studied with the writer Sherman Alexie, whose mentorship she discussed below. “I can name my pain so well,” she writes, in an indicative line, “that people are afraid of the consequences and power.” What brings it all together is the oracular power of Mailhot’s voice, which speaks into the silence: amplifying aspects of experience that have been muted, animating despairs and passions we tend to hide from view. It turns its gaze on a constellation of fraught subjects: Mailhot’s upbringing on British Columbia’s Seabird Island Indian Reservation her caring grandmother and abusive father her teenage marriage, and all the wrong men afterward her children, one lost in an custody battle her tumultuous affair with Gray the pregnancy she carried through both a graduate fellowship and a mental health facility. Heart Berries makes for a slim volume, but it feels as though it weighs a thousand pounds. We discussed how love and writing both require adopting a willful blindness to everything we’re “supposed” to do and be. As Bluets reminded Mailhot that “you can do anything,” she also found herself falling for the professor who’d assigned it to her-the writer Casey Gray, now her husband. In the end, the book afforded both romantic and creative license. In a conversation for this series, Mailhot discussed a book that gave her the courage to break rules: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, an ode to a mysterious “prince of blue,” written in short, numbered sections, more like a philosophical proof than a traditional love story. Heart Berries is a reminder that, in the right hands, literature can do anything it wants. In short, the book does everything it technically shouldn’t, brushing off the familiar regimen prescribed by MFA programs, and slipping the strictures of commercial publishing. A crucial scene might be just three lines of unsparing poetry. There’s barely any exposition: Major characters enter the narrative intimately and without fanfare, almost as though we know them already. A little over 100 pages, it’s far short of the 80,000 words most memoirs need to be deemed viable. There’s nothing conventional about Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot’s debut.

Book heart berries