This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Austin Araujo, whose debut poetry collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country, was published by Mad Creek Books on Monday. At the Park on the Edge of the Country was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the 2023 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. In the collection, Araujo maps the intricacies of memory and immigration through the experiences of his Mexican American family in the rural South. Tensions between childhood and adulthood, citizenship and belonging, as well as the human and nonhuman propel the book forward. These fierce and moving poems recreate origin myths to reveal the contradictory possibilities of contemporary Mexican American identity. Ross Gay said, “The lushness of the language, the precision of the images, the humor, the deft and digressive narratives—these poems are so beautiful. But I am most moved by and keep going back to the wrenching, complicated, grown-ass poems about fathers, and about fathers and sons: by how patient Araujo is in those poems, how he lets them answer to music, and love.” Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, his poems have recently appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is at work on a book about Prince.
Austin Araujo, author of At the Park on the Edge of the Country. (Credit: Kendra Wilson)
1. How long did it take you to write At the Park on the Edge of the Country?
Drafts of the earliest poems in the manuscript were written in the winter of 2017–2018, I think, while the last poems were written in the winter of 2023–2024. So, I wrote the material over six-ish years, and I was sequencing it all the while, just in case I’d discover that I’d finished a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I think it’s a common problem, but I found it challenging to trust the limits set by my obsessions. In my case, the poems were largely preoccupied with charged family dynamics, fragmented memory, and place, and I sweat a lot over whether I was a repetitious, narrow poet. On the other side of completing the book, I find those subjects to be as rich as they were when I first started thinking about them.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I have a poem or essay that I’m invested in making come into being, I find it easy to shirk other tasks in favor of attending to the writing. During these periods, which can last a few days to a few weeks, the writing/drafting/revising can happen pretty much any time, anywhere. The rest of the time—the majority of the time—I’m just looking around and taking notes.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading Correction (Knopf, 1979) by Thomas Bernhard, Bibliophobia (Random House, 2025) by Sarah Chihaya, and An Authentic Life (Copper Canyon, 2024) by Jennifer Chang.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
janan alexandra, Noah Davis, and Ajibola Tolase are all fantastic poets, and all have terrific new books.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
For a long time I held onto an instinct to try to make the organization of the collection as invisible or illegible as possible. The idea of grafting a structure onto the book—whether that meant dividing the poems into sections or developing a narrative arc—seemed to me unartful, or somehow stale. Many of the books of poems that mattered to me over the course of writing my own collection, such as Louise Glück’s A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), don’t use sectioning and instead rely on a subtle dilation of themes to organize themselves. My ambition was to write something that could operate in a similar fashion, and I struggled mightily.
Of course, I do love a lot of books that are in sections, too. And I found that once I admitted one conventional organizational tactic, like sectioning, to be an option for the book, the overall strategy for ordering the poems became much clearer to me. It allowed me to see that I had many beginnings and several endings, and I tried to arrange the poems in a way that might ask why that was.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
That I was right to want to change the manuscript’s title from what I’d originally submitted.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started At the Park on the Edge of the Country, what would you say?
Get your wisdom teeth removed already! Keep reading! You’re okay!
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of At the Park on the Edge of the Country?
I worked as a writing instructor, graduate assistant, editorial assistant, tutor, odd-job hanger-on at a distillery, and literary magazine editor while I wrote the book. Crucially, I also benefited from fellowships that afforded me the chance to be more choosy about what non-writing work I took on.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Ross Gay says, “Study what you love.” I think that’s the fundamental impulse I try to encourage in my writing and reading practices, and in the practices of my friends.
