In his debut poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes explores a journey from Detroit to Los Angeles, reflecting on the complexities of manhood, the lingering pain of childhood trauma, and the universal search for belonging. Through the lens of pop culture and personal memories, these poems capture a struggle for identity and healing beyond simple definitions, questioning the origins of the myths we carry and whether we can release them.
We had Janes answer our recurring A Life of Books questionnaire so readers could get to know the writer and also get some book recommendations.
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
Books in general were a huge influence. When caught in those liminal hours of childhood (what I think of as the “latchkey hours”—after school, during long summers) I would haunt the local library or bookstore, often accompanied by my dad, who was himself an avid reader. This means there were many books that made an impression on me, but two in particular stand out.
The first book to change the course of my life was Winter Garden by Pablo Neruda. This was the first collection of poetry I ever encountered, practically at random. I was wandering the halls of Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor (since lost to time) and happened to land in the poetry section. For whatever reason, the poetry section spoke to me. Maybe it’s because the volumes themselves were so slim, which appealed to a young reader like me. Neruda’s book was one of a very few facing out from the shelf, and its cover—of a bare tree in winter—tugged at my Northerner’s heart. I picked it up, sat down on the footstool in the corner, and consumed it in a single read. I didn’t know, then, that I had happened upon one of Neruda’s last collections, written with melancholic retrospection, and full of the many images, motifs, and tools he had acquired over a lifetime of writing. What I did know was I had discovered someone whose writing moved in the way I felt my mind moved. I was hooked. It was the door I passed through into a lifetime of poetry. (To this day, the first stanza of Neruda’s poem “Gautama Christ” is among the most striking openings I’ve ever read in a poem.)
The other book that defined my childhood is The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. (The entire His Dark Material series, really, but nothing quite compares to that first book.) To explain why this book was so impactful requires a little expository summary. Spoilers ahead.
For the uninitiated, The Golden Compass is a fantasy novel that takes place in an alternate universe where people have “daemons.” A daemon is an extension (or embodiment) of each human’s soul that takes the form of an animal companion. These animals can talk, often provide guidance or comfort, and cannot wander far from their human without excruciating pain. (And even then, only for a short time.) As children, daemons can shape-shift based on their moods or needs. As adults, a person’s daemon takes permanent form—as a marmot, a monkey, a leopard, etcetera. During the course of the novel, the book’s heroine Lyra discovers that children are being abducted from their homes and violently severed from their daemons. This severing kills the daemon and leaves the child hollow-eyed, vacant, adrift.
This is only one thread in the novel, but it’s a powerful force of narrative propulsion, and it is, in my opinion, the most potent metaphor for childhood abuse I’ve ever encountered on the page. (I can’t say for certain whether author Phillip Pullman intended this interpretation, but considering the villains in this story are agents of The Church, it isn’t a reach to recall the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests in our own universe.)
My debut collection Find Me When You’re Ready is, in part, about confronting a complex experience of childhood sexual abuse. It’s clear to me, looking back, that The Golden Compass spoke powerfully to this experience without needing to tackle it outright. By using escapist fantasy—full of wonders, adventure, hope, and a struggle that could be fought and won—The Golden Compass created an allegory that externalized the emotional experience of childhood abuse. Now, at the time? I’m not sure I possessed the self-awareness to understand why I felt so compelled. But I nevertheless recall feeling a deeply personal affinity to the story. It became a novel I re-read again, and again, and again. As a result, it gave me two things: a way in which to process the facts of my own life, and a strategy (in my own work) to Trojan Horse challenging thematic subjects inside the materials of the imagination.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or, what’s your philosophy on what children read?
Absolutely. On the one hand, I believe it’s important for kids to read books that deliver the pleasures of a good story while also resonating with hidden depths—with subtext, with intertextuality. I believe that those qualities stir beneath the surface of a book in ways that children innately feel, even if they can’t articulate, say, the allegory being constructed. (For instance, I was not especially aware that Pullman put Lyra in a wardrobe in the first chapter of The Golden Compass as a direct nod to C.S. Lewis’s Christian fantasy series Narnia, but the familiarity of that space—a child hiding in a wardrobe—worked on me unconsciously, even nostalgically, in ways I also believe enriched my experience.) A novel like The Golden Compass delivers all the surface-level thrills of an adolescent fantasy adventure, while promising richness for each subsequent re-read. This, I think, is one of the reasons our favorite and most beloved childhood novels stay with us forever: they never stop teaching us.
I also powerfully believe in reading children poetry! Poetry, on the sonic level, is often built to be pleasurable. (There’s a reason we read Mother Goose rhymes and Shel Silverstein to young kids.) As a sensory experience, I believe it offers something unique that children naturally spark to. In its associative leaps from thought to thought, poetry also creates the kind of surprise that often delights children. At its best, I believe that poetry can encourage a different kind of thinking, one that looks at dissimilar subjects and finds their hidden connectivity, that challenges us to set aside our need for answers in favor of determining our own meaning. What could be more valuable?
I discovered some of my favorite writers in high school. What writers did you discover then? Either ones that were assigned for class or ones you found on your own.
My junior year in high school, I was given Sarah Manguso’s poetry collection Siste Viator and it’s not an overstatement to say it changed my understanding of what poems were capable of. I had already discovered a love of poetry, but I didn’t know poetry could do that—that, here, meaning: be dryly funny; cork familiar aphorisms with strange turns of phrase; strip language to its barest expression; and speak with granular specificity to our current moment. I still avidly read Manguso’s work. Her book 300 Arguments is the most deceptively light volume you’ll ever pick up.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
There were—The Room Where I Was Born by Brian Teare and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado are two of the most influential, I can’t recommend them enough—but the truth is that some of the biggest influences on this particular book were films.
One film that changed the course of this book would have to be Sarah Polley’s confessional documentary The Stories We Tell. [Beware—more spoilers ahead.] In The Stories We Tell, Polley turns the lens on her own life by investigating the family joke that she never looked much like her father… and maybe he wasn’t her father after all? Polley’s mother died when she was young, so unpacking that mystery meant interviewing family members, seeking out her mother’s old friends, and diving deep into the archives of her mother’s home video footage. Those home videos regularly play over the interviews (and Polley’s own narration) to striking effect. It’s abundantly clear that Polley’s mother was, herself, an artist surrounded by artists, because this footage is nothing short of gorgeous.
As the film progresses, Polley’s investigation proves that, in fact, she isn’t the biological daughter of the father who raised her. As she digs closer to the truth of her own origins, and her understanding of the story (her mother’s, her own) begins to collapse, Polley does something surprising: she reveals that at least half of that archival footage we’ve been watching all movie long was filmed by Polley herself. (She goes so far as to film herself filming this footage.) It’s a pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you moment, where what you believed, what you took as fact, is revealed to be artifice. And it’s breathtaking. The result is a meta commentary on how the stories we tell ourselves, true or not, become a part of who we are, and how our own attempts to retell those stories can also irreparably change them. When we first encounter them, those home videos feel real to us, just as they were real to Polley. Revealed to be constructed, they become more poignant, as they represent Polley’s efforts at reconciling two fathers, two mothers, two Sarahs.
Find Me When You’re Ready is not about the interrogation of my own biological origins. But it is an attempt to agitate, upend, investigate, and revise the stories that make up a life. By telling a coming-of-age story with a single speaker that arcs across five acts, the book initially presents one version of the story, as experienced in childhood, before later revising that story. Wherever possible, the poems enact that revision right there, on the page, injecting a meta self-awareness of the speaker’s struggle at telling his own story. The more these themes emerged, the more I returned to Polley’s film as a model for how to embody this struggle in the materials of the writing itself.
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
Any of the books named above, for starters. But if I had to pick another one, I might say The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, which marries a poet’s sensibility—the care for detail is incredible, and the double-break between each paragraph often reminds me of the volta in a good poem—with a sweeping adventure.
What have you been reading lately that you can recommend to Debutiful readers?
I’ve been consumed by The Sorrow Apartments by Andrea Cohen. For a glimpse inside, check out her poem “Something” originally published in The Adroit Journal and featured (beautifully) on episode 1099 of The Slowdown podcast.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
Breaking new ground.