Amelie Meltzer: Gone in a Different Way
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Amelie Meltzer is a San Francisco native studying in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a medical student and activist, working to address racial bias in healthcare and promote the needs of queer and gender nonconforming patients. She writes poetry and nonfiction.
Olivia Samimy speaks with Amelie about her poem below.
I love the images and emotions you create in “When they drained the canals of Amsterdam.” What inspired you to write it?
I have always been bothered by the concept of loss. When I was a kid I got a tiny figurine of a lion from the gift shop of a zoo and insisted on carrying it around with me from exhibit to exhibit. But at some point during the day I must have set it down somewhere and forgotten it. When it came time to leave and I realized the lion was missing, I was sure I would be able to find it by retracing my steps. I guess it was the first time I’d lost anything, so it just did not occur to me that something could be intact and nearby, but permanently gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere, and eventually I had to give up and go home. I’ve been back to that zoo as an adult and I always wonder if it is still there, maybe in a bush or something, and if I spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time and energy looking, could I find it? I do this a lot, actually, with various things I’ve lost. Like, I’ll imagine if I had unlimited resources and time and made it my singular mission in life to find that lion, or the sweater I left in a café in France four summers ago, would it be possible? Those things feel “gone” to me in a different way than if they had been destroyed, even though I’ll never get them back. I guess this all fascinates me because loss is such a strange kind of separation. It is arbitrary, but permanent.
The project that inspired the poem came about when the river Amstel was drained to allow for construction of the north-south metro line and suddenly hundreds of years of lost things were returned to the visible, locatable world. That seemed supernatural to me, almost like bringing someone back from the dead. It made real this silly daydream I’d had about turning the world inside out to recover things. I guess all it takes is a mass infrastructure project.
What was the most challenging aspect of creating this piece?
Originally I had a half idea for the poem but I couldn’t put it all together, so I started listing random things about loss with the idea that I’d use all these bullet points to write a poem. I had a very hard time accepting that that list was the poem. I kept trying to make it more poem-y, but all those drafts were extremely bad. Eventually I left it alone, except for removing the bullet points.
When did you first become serious about writing?
Writing has been a part of my life since I was very little. In preschool I had a running “series” about two mice who lived in a mushroom house that I would tell to other kids on the playground. I kept telling stories up until second grade, when I got self-conscious about being such a dork and decided I should just write things down instead. Then when I was a teenager I had an incredibly sulky Myspace poetry blog which I sincerely hope no one ever finds. I even went to a pre-professional arts boarding school for creative writing briefly in high school, but I’ve had trouble taking myself seriously as a poet and giving myself permission to devote attention to writing. It wasn’t until I was in medical school and saw how little time I was going to have for anything else that I realized how important writing was to me. That pressure made me get serious about it in a new and more urgent way, and prompted me to submit my work for publication for the first time. I guess I wanted to put down roots so that I would stay connected to this part of myself.
I understand that you’re a medical student. How do you balance that with your life as a poet?
The honest answer is that I am actively failing at that. It is so amazing to me that many poets are able write in spare moments between other obligations, and I very much hope I will find a way to work like that too. But this last year has been incredibly difficult, and I have had very little bandwidth for anything other than being present with the people I am caring for in the hospital, and coming home to rest and recover. So I have not been able to write much, and that has been very hard to accept. I suspect many other writers have felt the same sense of exhaustion and the same annoyance with themselves for failing to overcome it and be productive. The way I am finding balance is by accepting that I am not able to write as much as I would like to at the moment, and forgiving myself for that. I have to remind myself that being a poet is a permanent part of who I am, not a membership that will disappear if I don’t meet some imaginary quota of poems per month.
What advice do you have for fellow poets?
Read a lot of poetry. Forgive yourself and read a lot of poetry.
Are there any current projects you’re working on that you can tell us about?
I write in little bursts. If I sit too long with anything I’ll end up deleting it. So right now I have a lot of half stanzas on various bits of paper and scattered throughout my Notes app and several weirdly titled google docs, and soon I want to gather those all together and make them into some poems.
Thanks for speaking with us. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Thank you so much for publishing my work alongside so many incredible writers, and for interviewing me!
Read Amelie’s most recent Roanoke Review publication here.
