Interview with Nimrod

​Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts: what inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.


“The Woman Who Rode Through a Tornado in a Bathtub and Survived” was inspired by reports last year that a woman in Texas did just that. I grew up in Texas and suffered nightmares about tornadoes and once was stranded on a roadside near Caldwell, Texas, as a tornado passed, so the story struck a chord. But the image of the white bathtub also reminded me of a sheet of paper, how it must have been like a magic carpet flying through the sky, how writing is the perspective of power but feels sometimes powerless, a desire both compelling and prone to fearfulness. Like me, the woman is reckoning with seeing herself from such a great height, coming to terms with the truth of it when she lands in someone’s (Marianne Moore’s?) garden.

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I began writing “Crossing the Potomac in a Supershuttle Van” at AWP 2017 in DC. Going there so soon after the inauguration, I wasn’t sure how I would feel seeing sights I was so familiar with. But the experience of the city became for me less about the inert structures and more about the people I met and saw, the living tableau that felt like love, a familial love that felt like home. The writer James David Duncan writes about the more-than-human feeling of love he woke up feeling one night, and wrote to the ornithologist responsible for saving the peregrine falcon from extinction, asking him, “Have you felt it?” The morning I woke up in DC, I did.