Leslie Ullman is a fluent, effervescent poet and author of the award-winning collections Slow Work Through Sand, Dreams by No One's Daughter, and Natural Histories. She teaches poetry – although she considers that all of us, including her students, are "interdisciplinary beings" – at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is professor emerita at University of Texas-El Paso. Melody Nixon saw her read on the last day of 2012 in Montpelier, Vermont. Taken by the lyrical language of her poetry, she invited Ullman into an email dialogue about the light of New Mexico, absence, and the experience of being interviewed.

1.

The modern novel is probably an unintended consequence of nineteenth-century European cities. James Wood glosses the idea in his handbook How Fiction Works.The breakthrough narration in Madame Bovary, for instance, a stylish authorial voice that seemingly dissolves into the consciousness of its subjects on a wash of image and detail, corresponds to a boom in European industrial urbanism. Its vector is the flâneur: the young and loitering, the unemployable café-sitters, the arcade-browsers. These onlookers adapted their eyes to the city’s “large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail,” says Wood.