Interview with Willie Carver

1. In your poem, only by hushing is a new world of wonder revealed. How are silence and sound bound to each other?

I write a lot about time and consider its limits and boundaries. Increasingly, I feel that the boundaries between past and present are more permeable than we think because they're not separate concepts, just opposite points on a circle. I feel the same about silence and sound. I have felt silence that, in its absence of external sources, feels loud on the inside—sometimes because we're lost in our own thoughts, and sometimes when we've melted into our surroundings. I have known sound to silence the depths of my thinking, to undo me just as much as silence can. I think when the human being acts as medium or witness, sound and silence begin to mirror each other with blurred boundaries.

2.  What was one of the earliest significant sounds that you can remember in your life, and how did it affect you? (For example, the sound of an ice cream truck, or a thunderstorm, etc.)

It's the first few wispy notes preceding the theme song to Reading Rainbow—that panflute-like oscillation that pattered up and down while cartoon graphics changed the reality on screen. I remember the excitement when it heralded Reading Rainbow, which was so hopeful and joyful that it made the universe feel like a good place where good things might happen. I grew up in a rural area with a fairly homogenous culture and almost no regular experience with people of color, so those notes—that song!—paired with LeVar Burton smiling at me and telling me about books with diverse characters taking place as far away as New York and California left me with a faith that I would find comfort and kindness anywhere I looked. It ended up being true.

3. If you could only choose one song to record and save for the future, what would it be and why?

I hope I am never given such a difficult task! If it were for only my future, the last song I'd ever hear, then maybe my mom and aunts singing, "I Want us to Be Together in Heaven." They would gently sing this with a wooden guitar during altar call when I was a kid, and there was a sweetness and finality to it that felt like hope. My extended family, perhaps like most, has since been destroyed by politics and drug abuse, so the idea that there is an ending in which things resolve themselves in a harmonious way bringing us all together is a gentle promise. But if it were everyone on earth, the only song saved, I'd choose any lullaby. They are sung the world over as a way to welcome newborns into the world, into song, into rhythm, into connection with others. If there are songs that should survive humans, let it be them, music that reminds us we are ultimately here for each other, for love.


Willie Carver is a Kentucky Teacher of the Year, an author, and a public speaker. His work has been featured in 100 Days in Appalachia, Another Chicago Magazine, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, Miracle Monocle, Good River Review, and Salvation South, among others. His collection of narrative poems, Gay Poems for Red States, has been named a Book Riot Best Book of 2023, An American Booksellers Associations must-have book of 2023, a Top Ten Best Book of Appalachia, an Over-The-Top Book by the American Library Association, and was named a 2024 Stonewall Honor Book.