Carrie Mar (poetry ’13) Interviewed in Eastwind

EW: How did you become a writer?

CM: Somewhat unintentionally and somewhat intentionally. I always wrote these weird little books as a kid. A family friend and a colleague of my mom was a writer, Susan Ito, who invited me to read a poem I had written as a school assignment at a poetry reading. I think I was nine or 10 and being treated as a legitimate serious writer at that age was a pretty magical thing and I think I was kind of hooked from there. I didn’t take my writing super seriously until I was an undergrad. In my senior year, there was this poetry workshop that I had always wanted to take but was too scared to apply for and finally it was like, I’m going to graduate…I have nothing left to lose so I’m going to submit some poems and see if I get into it, and I did. I had an opportunity to work with Eleanor Wilner, an incredible poet and teacher, and from there it kept me connected with the work and I continue to do it.

EW:  What sort of things were you writing about?

CM: The poem I wrote as a kid was about the Japanese American internment. In the workshop in college, the main text we were reading that semester was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so like, Greek myth and tragedy, but always I think my poetry has been a lot about identity. It’s something I think about a lot as a person and something I think about as a writer.

EW: Did you Journal as a young person?

CM: I did. I journaled a lot. There are many, many, many diaries sitting on my bookshelf. I journal less now probably because I’m writing in other ways, but yeah, I was sort of a compulsive journaler as an only child with big, big feelings, and yeah, I gotta tell somebody all this stuff and it sure is not going to be my mom and dad.

EW: It’s a really good tool. As a kid, I would journal and I would also ride the bus just to journal; it’s kind of an observational thing.

CM: Yeah, the bus, you see good things on the bus. I have a poem about all the good shit I saw on the bus one day.

EW: You mentioned that identity is a big issue for you. How do you describe your family background?

CM: Well the easiest way to describe me in terms of racial identity is the term Hapa, which is a little fraught and problematic in terms of whether it’s been appropriated from native Hawaiian folks. It’s a term I stopped using over the years, but I’m mixed-race Chinese and Irish. My father is ABC, American Born Chinese, born and raised in Chinatown San Francisco, and my mom’s family background is almost entirely Irish American going back several generations all the way back to Ireland. My mom and I are actually planning to go to Ireland next summer, a trip to the motherland.

Read the rest of the interview and listen to Carrie read some of her poetry here: https://eastwindezine.com/caroline-m-mar-herstories/