“There Are No Mistakes, Only Choices”: Inside the Mind of Robert van Vliet
Robert van Vliet’s poetry collection VESSELS is a deeply contemplative, sonically rich exploration of presence, process, and the porous nature of the self. In this candid and wide-ranging interview, van Vliet shares thoughts on the traps that snare aspiring writers, how to treat time with reverence and recklessness, and what to cook (or not cook) for literary heroes. His answers are generous, musical, and full of delightfully unexpected wisdom—much like VESSELS itself.
1 What are common traps for aspiring writers?
A very common trap is thinking that you must know what you’re going to say before you say it—that writing is about saying something you already know rather than an act of discovery.
This comes from the mistaken belief that writing is always about communicating, and from forgetting the musical aspect of language, and from not understanding that art is always an experience but almost never a lesson.
2 If you could write an inspirational quote on the mirrors of aspiring writers, what would you write?
Probably one of three things I keep posted over my desk:
* Don’t look for ideas, listen for sounds.
If you create things made of words, you should be attending to their sound, their mouth-feel, as much as the ideas that they carry. In fact, ideas take care of themselves and can be left to themselves. Readers will find all sorts of ideas in your writing that you never intended anyway, so why worry about it? If you have something to say, go ahead and say it. But if all you’re here to do is talk at me about your ideas, you had damn well better be interesting, entertaining, or beautiful. Otherwise you’re just another crank at the end of the bar listening to himself bloviate. Save it for your diary.
* Think slow, act fast.
There is no fixed gestation period for any work of art, of course, but generally, the longer you think about it, the easier it will be to trust your quick decisions once it is time to act. Ponder, doodle, stare into space, but the minute you pick up the pen, just go! You know what you know. There are no mistakes, only choices. Indeed, mistakes are part of the weave, they are what make something real.
* Waste more time.
Don’t be precious with your time. Be wasteful with it, and give all the time you can to your art. That is the only way to show it the respect it deserves. The more you focus on your “return on investment,” the more you’ll be fixated on the product, on the result. But you don’t know what that is yet. There is no shortcut, and to look for one cheapens the process, the experience, and the outcome. You have to explore. There is no timeline for this.
3 Have you ever gotten reader’s block?
I’ve heard “reader’s block” defined in two different ways.
The first is when you have a hard time starting something because it’s been hyped up so much that you’re worried that it won’t live up to the hype, or the overwhelming peer pressure to read it repels you. And if you do manage to start, reading it feels like a chore because instead of enjoying it, you’re constantly evaluating whether it actually deserves all the praise or awards or whatever.
The other kind is when you’re done with a book that was so incredible and immersive that you lose your taste for anything else, and you keep bouncing off everything else because nothing else compares, nothing else is the same, and you really just want to go back and reread it forever.
I’ve experienced both types, and I have very different strategies for dealing with each of them.
The first kind of reader’s block is, at root, a social problem. I usually do one of two things. First, if I can’t filter out all the hype, I’ll wait till it dies down and only then take a look. A few months, a few years, however long it takes. I’ll pick up it up when there are thirty cheap copies at the used bookstore. (And if all the spines are only broken about a third of the way in, I may not bother at all.) On the other hand, if I think I really do need to check the stupid over-hyped thing out, I’ll go at it like homework: in cold blood, and with a pencil in hand to mark all the eye-rolling nonsense—or the unexpectedly good bits. Maybe I’ll come back someday and reread it for pleasure. But in the meantime, I grit my teeth, carb up, and power through. After all, one of the principal goals of education is to help us learn how to do things well even when—especially when—they aren’t “fun.” I may have been a terrible student in other ways, but this I learned very, very well.
Now, if it’s a book of poetry specifically, I find it’s usually quite easy to dip into it, read a few poems, and get out again without feeling the pressing weight of the whole world shrieking that I must must must love everything about this poet and their amazing wonderful incredible book.
If everything else fails, I imagine I’m listening to the audiobook version and it’s being read by, say, Tom Waits or Will Lyman or Laurie Anderson or Vincent Price.
The second kind of reader’s block is what I call “book freefall.”
With fiction and nonfiction, I’ve definitely read books in which the reading experience was so immersive and overwhelming that I couldn’t find my way out and into another universe when I finished. There have been several books where I simply started over from the beginning again. I remember doing this when I was kid, with Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books and Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Years later, I did this with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, and Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm.
But on the other hand, I’m not sure I’ve experienced “book freefall” with poetry so much—once I’m done with a book of poetry, I’m almost always ready to move on to something else. But then, I’m usually shifting between several books of poetry at any given time, anyway. So in a way I’ve already moved on before I’ve moved on.
I’m sure there must have been at least a few books of poetry I felt this way about over the years, but the the only one I can think of is Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend.
And now that I think about it, I’m almost always reading more than one book at a time—regardless of the genre—and I wonder if I got into this habit as a way of managing potential freefall: always having a few other books in progress whenever I finish any one of them.
4. If you could cook dinner for any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you make?
This is was a surprisingly difficult question to answer because I simply couldn’t narrow it down to just one author and just one meal. So I’m just going to throw a bunch of possibilities out there.
I’d cook my chili (based on my dad’s recipe) for Jim Harrison and Bill Holm. I would be a little concerned that no matter what, it might not be spicy enough for Jim, and it would probably be too spicy for Bill. So maybe instead of my chili, we’d all go on a grocery run together for supplies. First to that new fancy Lunds–Byerlys on Ford Parkway, then the Kowalski’s on Grand Avenue (their wine shop is small but mighty, and recently I bought a cheap Malbec to cook with, which turned out to be far better than its price-tag would have suggested; I’d buy a half-case and hope it would be enough). Then Bill and I would let Jim loose in the kitchen and we’d be his tipsy sous-chefs.
My wife suggested that I should prepare a full English breakfast (followed in short order by a second breakfast of mushrooms!) for JRR Tolkien, because, she said (and I quote), “You’re both such Hobbits.”
Also, I make a pretty good pan-seared gnocchi from scratch, and I would invite Maxine Hong Kingston over. And, hey, if Ursula Le Guin just happened to stop by as well, that would be totally okay with me.
I would prepare an enormous cheese board for Robyn Hitchcock.
I’d love to walk around Manhattan with Thomas Pynchon. I wouldn’t cook anything for him. Just coffee (light & sweet) and a cheese-and-egg sandwich from a cart; later on, maybe a slice standing up somewhere. And then we would just yo-yo on the subway, people-watching, for a few hours. Maybe after that, we’d have a movie night. At first, I’d suggest Repo Man or maybe introduce him to the series Lodge 49 or Wonderfalls (both criminally cancelled before their time) assuming he hadn’t seen them already. But he’d probably want to just watch whatever dumb sitcom marathon was on—Full House, maybe, or Alf. Or, God help us, The Brady Bunch. But you know he has the complete John Larroquette Show on VHS, so I would demand we watch that. And we’d just make sandwiches if we got hungry.
5 What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?
Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency. Hoban was famous (with good reason) for his brilliant childrens’ books—all the Frances books, as well as the chapter book The Mouse and His Child—but he also wrote many novels for grownups. Other than Turtle Diary, however (which was adapted by Harold Pinter into a movie—it was quite good, but it was a Harold Pinter movie, not a Russell Hoban movie), and the breathtaking Riddley Walker, most of them are relatively unknown.
They are all excellent. Some are whimsical, like Kleinzeit, Fremder, or Linger Awhile, others are intense and harrowing, like Riddley Walker and Pilgermann. Many of the later novels have overlapping characters so they can feel, at times, like a single interconnected series of stories. And almost all of them take place in London, often with such detailed directions for walking or riding the Tube that it almost seems like Hoban had a similar goal that Joyce did for Dublin and Ulysses: that if the city were ever to disappear, it could be reconstructed from the text.
I love all of his novels, but I think The Medusa Frequency may be my favorite. Or let me say it’s first among equals.
6 Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?
Yes, absolutely.
Strong emotions might move you to sit down at your desk, but they won’t keep you there. The work of writing lasts much longer than any emotional wave can sustain. And strong emotions are no guarantee that your writing will be any good.
Writing is made of language, not emotions. If you want to be a writer, you had better like sentences, otherwise maybe you should go do something else. Your strong emotions won’t help you. They aren’t even in the Top 5 Important Things To Have If You Want To Be A Writer. Discipline, for example, is much more important. A room of one’s own, and a deep comfort at sitting alone in that room for very long periods of time, during which you may very well completely miss major holidays, mass media events, loved ones’ birthdays, and other irksome distractions. And it helps to have a high tolerance for rejection and failure.
And, of course, a large supply of pencils or pens that you enjoy using, or maybe a stable software program and a good, reliable keyboard. All this is more important than “feeling emotions strongly.” I have more strong emotions about paper quality and ink color than I do about the things I write.
Look, I get it: there’s a mystique about people who have a facility with words. They describe things that seem indescribable to the rest of us. They seem to have easy access to their inner landscape and the ability to translate that landscape into words. And it takes great patience and concentration to observe others, to understand how our behavior can be an outward manifestation of our inner intent. And then to use nothing but words to describe that relationship? Incredible! If a writer evokes the experience of grief or passion with greater clarity or vividness than we could, it’s reasonable to assume that they have a deeper emotional familiarity with those experiences than we do. But is this true? Do writers really feel more deeply than other people?
Let’s ask your original question in a few slightly different ways: Do you think someone could be a potter if they don’t feel emotions strongly? Do you think someone could be an architect if they don’t feel emotions strongly? A stand-up comic? A therapist? A babysitter? It can seem like magic to be able to describe what emotions feel like, and this in turn might lead us to believe that a deep emotional life is actually necessary in order to be a writer. But strong emotions are no more necessary to being a writer than they are to being a potter, or an architect, or a babysitter, or whatever. I mean, you wouldn’t ask, “Do you think someone could be a chef if they don’t feel hunger strongly?” What would that even mean? Who’s never been hungry? And how does that experience possibly inform the task of being a chef?
There are times when our strong emotions will, in fact, be the very hindrances and roadblocks that keep us from just getting the work done. If I’m too hungry, I can find it nearly impossible to cook dinner. I’ll be cranky and impatient, and my dinner will probably end up being just a bowl of cereal while standing helplessly in the kitchen.
Emotions are like ideas: everyone has them. Think an idea, feel an emotion: this is human. Our inner emotional lives come out in everything we do, from writing to playing music to cooking dinner to driving a car to folding laundry. (Also: don’t drive angry!) It’s what you do in the total absence of strong emotions (unless “unquenchable curiosity” is an emotion) that matters. And it’s what you do next, after you feel your strong emotions, that matters. And how do you do what’s next? If you’re a writer, you sit down, and you write, and you keep writing. Even when the only strong emotions you’re feeling are profound boredom or frustration.
And in the end, the only strong emotions that are important are the reader’s, not the writer’s. Otherwise, we’re kinda like the guy that laughs at his own jokes.
7 What inanimate object would you thank in your acknowledgements?
My pocket stone.
Some time in college, I picked up a small stone and put it in my pocket. I carried around for a few weeks, just as something to fidget with. It was smooth and somewhat kidney-shaped. I liked the feel of it, and I began to carry it with me all the time, always in my right pocket. I’ve had it with me, more or less all the time, for over thirty years. At some point it occurred to me that no matter how long I eventually carry it with me, I will, from the stone’s perspective, be like a small bird that lands near my window, studies me deeply for a couple of seconds before flying away again, and which I barely registered as a flutter of movement in the corner of my eye. If someone were to ask me thirty years later to describe that bird, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t even remember. This stone, once it’s eroded down to a large grain of sand on some distant beach, won’t remember me.
8 As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
Maybe Crow because they’re such intrepid scavengers (and, if you watch them long enough, you realize they can be, at times, extremely goofy). But I should probably say Sugar Maple because they’re excellent climbing trees, because their roots run everywhere, often just below the surface, because they make dying beautiful, and because the best periods of my life have been spent surrounded by them.
9 How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
I have two unpublished poetry manuscripts (one mostly finished, one so unfinished it hardly deserves the term “manuscript”) and three unfinished novels in various states of disarray, decay, and decrepitude.
The novels are from a time when I was taking a break from poetry. After a decade of high poetic productivity—1993 to 2004 or so—I felt like I was losing the path. By 2007, I simply couldn’t see a way forward. I wasn’t writing much poetry (and what little I was writing seemed, to me, pretty terrible) and I wasn’t really reading poetry. I wondered if maybe I was done with poetry, since it seemed poetry was done with me.
Meanwhile, beginning in 2001, I’d been participating in Nanowrimo each November. Almost every year ended the same way: crashing far short of the 50k word goal due to work commitments, or the flu, or whatever. But I didn’t care. Nanowrimo was a low-stakes way to just goof around, commit to some daily writing time, and cosplay as a novelist for a few weeks.
So as poetry seemed to fade, I turned to fiction. Or, rather, returned. Before poetry, before songwriting, I had imagined that I would become a novelist, writing one “large, loose, baggy monster” after another. But it had been decades since I’d seriously considered fiction-writing as something that was part of me.
For a few years, that all changed. When Nanowrimo 2007 ended, I just kept writing through the winter, and I swiftly found myself overflowing with ideas, drafts, drafts of drafts, and enough characters to fill an auditorium. By the end of 2008, I was actually writing three novels at once.
Then something interesting happened. The more fiction I wrote, the more poems began to reemerge. By going deep in the shed, immersing myself in long, messy stories, I was remembering what I loved about writing, regardless of the genre.
10 What did you edit out of this book?
My method for writing the poems in Vessels involved using different source texts from which I would choose a line or fragment at random which I would then have to integrate into the poem somehow. The final version of Vessels used three different books — the I Ching, Thoreau’s Journal, and the Nag Hammadi Library.
But there were three or four others, all of which proved, for one reason or another, impossible for me to build anything out of. One text that was particularly disastrous was The Oxford Shorter Dictionary. I kept landing on lines like “L cadere; see -ANCE)]”. Another poet could probably have made something of this. Maybe, at another time, I might have, too. I realize now I might have employed a method similar to Zukofsky’s Catullus, making a series of near-homonyms. The selected fragment would therefore have supplied me with the phrase “elk, deer, seance.”
But that just wasn’t where I was in the summer and fall of 2020.
So after a very messy, frustrating week, I moved on, leaving a handful of orphaned and unfinished poems behind. Much later, I did manage to build one longer poem from them. It certainly has a flavor similar to the rest of the book, and it probably wouldn’t have seemed out of place. Only after I had subjected it to another vigorous round of editing, long after Vessels was finished, did I see it as a successful poem.
The poem, called “Leaving the Story Unfinished,” has since appeared as part of Dusie’s Tuesday Poem series.
11 Does writing energize or exhaust you?
Yes.
This interview offers just a glimpse of Robert van Vliet’s thoughtful, immersive voice—but the full resonance of his language comes alive in VESSELS. If you’re a lover of sound-rich poetry, philosophical nuance, and writing that challenges the idea of the self as fixed or knowable, this is a collection for you.
📚 VESSELS is available now—grab your copy today and experience the poems that live between thought and sound, silence and speech.
