Interview by Amy Beth Sisson
GO ABOVE YOUR NERVE:
An Interview With Linda Norton About Cloud Of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages (BlazeVOX [books]) 

Linda Norton’s latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages, contains essays about life, literature, and writing; collages made of paint, documents, and photographs; and poems she assembled from the volumes she used to prop up her screen for Zoom calls during the pandemic lockdown. Norton describes her writing process before the pandemic as informed by a “life in public places” and what she calls “urban gleaning.” Lockdown put a stop to her customary ways of living and writing. The book—about aging, loneliness, whiteness, and literary life—explores how a writer who was dependent on being in the world for inspiration continued to work during the COVID lockdown when life in the streets was replaced by life in the internet cloud. In conversation with Cleaver contributor Amy Beth Sisson, Norton discusses this collection, her work-in-progress, and her process.

Amy Beth Sisson: I see you as an expansive writer who’s comfortable making leaps in time and space. Maybe because this book was written during the pandemic lockdown, it feels different from your previous work. I’m interested in your thoughts on that.

Linda Norton: Women’s work and daily life are such a big part of Cloud of Witnesses because it uses the framework of the day. In Cloud, I’m not trying to tell a story of 20 years or 50 years or from before I was born. Because of the narrower focus, this book was such a relief for me compared to all my other projects. 

And this book gave me the opportunity to write about the poet Charles Reznikoff, one of the great walking poets, and a documentary poet. I love that Reznikoff was a lawyer who on some level decided not to go as high or hard as he could have professionally so that his poetry was primary. He’s such a peculiar and interesting and deeply ethical figure. It is beautiful that he self-published. It shows his combination of modesty, self-confidence, and awareness of the largeness of his project. 

I used the structure of the book to make the essay about him part of a cohesive whole. I foreshadowed him in my opening essay, which is very much about important concerns of his writing and mine: walking and looking. I’ve wanted to write about him for 30 or 40 years and I finally figured out a way to do it. 

Amy Beth: Cloud of Witnesses and your first two books are hybrid. What attracts you to hybridity?

Linda: My idea of hybridity is collaborative. A poet once told me that my collages are collaborative because I’m using things that are already in the world, and I’m incorporating them and remaking them and responding to them. Reading is also a kind of collaboration and has always been one of my main ways of being a writer. 

Amy: How much do you think about the audience when you’re writing? 

Linda: I was thinking about that yesterday because I’m writing an introduction to my new book and I have an urge to say right up front, “I’m 66 years old, my kids are grown, and this is the vantage point from which I’m writing.” I do hesitate to do that because I feel like I will just be dismissed. But usually I claim my age, and I don’t think there’s any hiding it.

Amy Beth: Readers will have very different experiences of Cloud of Witnesses depending on their age and experience because it is made up of centos, poems created from quotations of other texts. Your poems are rich in references that a reader may or may not know.

Linda: When it comes to my audience, I would rather have some of my cousins who didn’t go to college read my books than have only readers who have PhDs. Writing for this audience is a clear value decision on my part.

I feel like anybody could write my books. All you have to do is pay attention, take notes, and put them together. My methodology is a way of living, not just a way of writing a book. I’m thinking about maybe six women in my family. They didn’t go to college, but they all have a writerly urge and a need to tell truths that people don’t want to hear. If I can do it, anyone can do it, too. Now, I know that’s not quite true because what’s required to be a writer is a tremendous amount of stamina and not everybody is going to have that, but people can still get a lot of satisfaction from writing for themselves. You never know when people will be interested. You just have to come from the deepest place and write. It’s a huge leap of faith. 

Amy Beth: I’m excited about your new book, which tells an Irish story. Can you say more about it?

Linda: For now, it’s called The Ruins: A Memoir of Irish Women Lost and Found. It’s about Irish women who’ve been erased from family histories in the old country and here. I am thinking about our history through the stories of our mothers. In an early draft, I included long quotes from many thinkers I admire, which is something I do in my earlier books. But for some of my early readers, my reliance on quotes was putting them off. I understand. It’s always been a challenge for me to claim my own authority. But being this age does give me a certain boldness to claim what I know. 

The book is about the sin of pride and the way I was imbued from before I was born with this fear of making something of myself. I think of the first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem 292:

If your Nerve, deny you –
Go above your Nerve –
He can lean against the Grave,
If he fear to swerve –

I love that because it sounds like a death-defying jump-rope rhyme. 

Linda Norton is the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History  (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Wite Out: Love and Work, and Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages. She won the 2023 nonfiction award from Nomadic Press & the San Francisco Foundation for The Ruins: A Memoir of Irish Women Lost and Found, a work in progress. An excerpt from The Ruins was published in issue 63 of Harvard Review. Learn more at lindanortonwriter.com.

Amy Beth Sisson‘s poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Plant-Human Quarterly, and others, and will appear in the upcoming anthology Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga, edited by Frances Cannon, in 2026. She is a 2025 winner of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia’s Joyful Abundance: Emerging Artist Commissioning Award and of the Lambda Literary J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50. Currently, Amy Beth is Fence Magazine‘s Steaming (online) visual poetry editor and serves on the board of Blue Stoop, where she helps with educational programming.

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