An Interview with Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel, authors of the upcoming Glass Cabin

As Pulley Press prepares for their next release, Glass Cabin, we sat down with the authors, James Braziel and Tina Mozelle Braziel, to discuss their work.

Your glass cabin was slowly built, by hand, over a decade. How did you balance this with your writing, your family, and each other? 

JIM: For me, there’s no separation between words and working with my hands. For example, building the cabin got me closer to the characters in my stories—they work in fields, factories, convenience stores. Labor is integral to their survival and mine. One thread in my poems is the thread of work, what it takes to do, what it takes from you, what it gives in return, and what it reveals about everything from aching to love. A hammer’s strike, a saw’s cut, the lifting of wood and glass into place stay with me in the evenings when the work’s done, just as I carry a poem, or a character’s voice, with me into each day’s labor.

The glass cabin is a 30’x30’ box, so Tina and I are around each other pretty much all the time. We’ve made building and writing part of our daily routine. Other parts of our routine include taking breaks to dance, to go for walks, to check on our bees, to cook and eat suppers. Yesterday when I told Tina I loved her, she said, “I am surrounded by your love. This cabin is love.”

TINA: Building the cabin inspired my writing, especially when I was doing repetitive tasks like framing windows or staining boards. Such tasks allowed me to hear ideas bubbling up from my subconscious. As for a balance with family, we may have tipped the scales with too much time with Dylan during the big push to get the cabin finished in the summer of 2013. We were living and building with him, and it was hot and sticky. When he has come to help out since–especially when we were putting in the floors recently– it made for a lovely cabin-family balance. He helped us, we made him food, he brought over friends, and we all had fun together.  

Pulley Press seeks to publish poets that live and grew up in rural places. How has your relationship with rurality shaped your lives? How does it inform your work? 

TINA: I grew up in a trailer park, so it took me a while to feel like I could claim rurality, since trailer parks don’t fit neatly in the divide between farm vs city. But that compelled me to claim the rurality and dignity and beauty of trailers. I don’t know if I can fully express how deeply validating it was for me to find images of trailers in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work. Writing about living here, in a cabin, without running water while we built it, comes from a similar impulse. Jim says it's the trailer park chip on my shoulder talking. He’s not wrong, but I also want to share how gorgeous and rich places are that often overlooked or belittled.     

JIM: My writing comes from the dirt and weather of South Georgia where I grew up—a 200-acre farm of sand and clay, of pines and peanuts, melons and pastures for my pop’s Brahma cows. A short walk took me to the beginning of the Alapaha River. Weather shaped our work—you had to watch out for coming storms, you had to be respectful of the sun, of humidity and heat. I spent my days wandering the fields and woods whenever I could. At night I snuck out of the house to walk the sand road that runs through the center of Pop’s farm just to watch the stars and listen to the toads that Tina loves so much.

I’ve carried that with me to rural Alabama. The dirt here is full of chert instead of sand—you need a rock bar to dig through it. The land is hillier—the glass cabin Tina and I are building sits atop a ridge we call Hydrangea. But everything we do begins as a creative act. Every day we try to connect with nature.

Where did the desire to write come from in the both of you? When did your poems become about the cabin and, directly, your own lives?

TINA: When I was in 7th grade, a teacher accused me of plagiarizing the poem I submitted for a school anthology. That made me want to write because I loved reading. I was thrilled to think  that the teacher thought my poem was something I copied out of a book and that maybe my writing could appear in a book one day.  

I began writing poetry about the cabin almost as soon as I began helping Jim build it. Building terms such as nail apron and tread are so evocative. 

JIM: Because Pop did so many creative things, I was looking  for what would be my creative thing. I think it was third grade and I wrote a story about me and my best friend Ray flying a spaceship to Venus. My mom loved it. I’ve been writing ever since. I always say never underestimate the praise of a parent. My mother also read to me and my younger sister at night. Her voice is the first voice I connected to words on the page. And, Pop’s not a writer, which allowed me to carve that space out for myself.

Once I found the land in rural Alabama, I started writing about the glass cabin I planned to build. Once Tina and I moved out to the cabin, I started writing about the land and our lives here.

Who are your own literary inspirations? Who are some of your favorite poets?

TINA: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Ada Limon, Camille Dungy, and Rebecca Gayle Howell have particularly inspired my work. Philip Levine and Seamus Heaney are a couple more of my many favorite poets. 

JIM: Emily Dickinson, the scraps she wrote on, and her small desk. Seamus Heaney — his words feel like the earth. Louise Erdrich. I go back to Richard Wagamese’s novel, Medicine Walk, all the time. Someone wrote of Medicine Walk, “Feels etched into something more permanent than paper.” 

Interview has been edited and condensed.