INTERVIEW: Millie Tullis and Alyssa Quinn

In their new poetry collection, These Saints are Stones (Signature Books, 2026), Millie Tullis reassembles the fragmented, gap-ridden history of their great-great-great-grandmother, Martha, a Mormon woman who married her step-father at sixteen, thereby becoming sister-wife to her own mother. Spare, precise, and often eerie, the poems in this collection evoke the many silences and violences that pervade women’s history. I sat down with Tullis to discuss this powerful and haunting debut.

Alyssa Quinn: You open this collection with the poem “God Sees Everything,” which explains that “Mormon God / has eyes / pupils / a tiny God / shaped window / for Picture / to crawl / through.” This godlike vision is quickly contrasted with the vision of the poet-speaker, whose knowledge of their Mormon ancestors is riddled with holes: “I know / some things / about how / you lived / here,” they declare, addressing their great-great-great-grandmother Martha. “But there is more / I can’t see.” How do you think about the limits of vision and knowledge in the collection?

Millie Tullis: The image you mention in “God Sees Everything,” came in part from something I read years ago in an undergraduate philosophy course. Some pre-Socratic Materialists (Atomists) believed that vision occurred because a miniature copy of all things enters the eye through the air. I was interested in that image of the pupil as a door and it stuck with me until I wrote this poem. Materialism has always been interesting to me. It was interesting to me as a believing Mormon (I was raised to understand that Heavenly Father is a physical, embodied man) and afterwards (when I became more interested in the world-of-things, struggling to see things-as-themselves.)

The act of researching and writing poetry went hand-in-hand for me with this book, and I think of researching as a kind of looking (searching again). When I am deep in research, I feel half-haunted, half-detective. But it’s easy to equate seeing with understanding, which of course it isn’t. In the middle of writing this book, I read “Le Manteau de Pascal” by Jorie Graham. In this poem, Graham obsessively examines René Magritte’s painting of the same name (“Pascal’s Coat”). It’s a great poem, elliptical and mysterious. The poem asks several times, “You do understand, don’t you, by looking?” Each time the question is asked, it sounds less certain to me. So that question also drove me, even if my answer was a shaky “no.”

But the desire to picture was an important pull for me in this book. The images of these poems had gravity to them. Part of their power probably came from finding so little: sewing, apples, eggs, a comb, a pocket full of rocks. More personally, I think I’m bad at visualization, like near the bottom of that Aphantasia apple picture chart. Visualizing is something I have to try to do very consciously. So even while these poems (like most poems) use images, I still felt very stuck in the words-themselves. I am bad at and very interested in the act of picturing.

In a later poem, “Work,” I write about sewing “ancestor dolls.” This was a church activity for young girls and “I made my namesake / working from mind / rather than picture.” That’s partly because there were few pictures of my Mormon ancestresses (some have one or two photographs, but few more.) When you have no pictures of someone, one picture offers so much. But a picture is also always limited, already enframed.

In “God Sees Everything,” I was interested in playing on the idea of a Platonic form of “Picture” (capital P), as if Picture could have one form, be made into a hard-noun-idea. But when you’re talking about a photograph, that is a firmed-up noun. You can see a photograph online or hold it in your hand. It has a center, corners. It has hues. While picture is generally a verb for me in this book (I am straining to picture), I am also interested in its nounness, and I like that flexibility in the word itself.

AQ: That reminds me of a quote I return to often from the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who argues that “knowing and looking absolutely don’t have the same mode of being”—that, in fact, looking consists of “not-grasping the image, of letting oneself be grasped by it instead: thus of letting go of one’s knowledge about it.”

One of the ways you augment that lack of knowledge in the book is via imagination, speculation, and invention. How are those forces at work in these poems? What is it possible for the poet to imagine, and where does that imagination break?

MT: I love that—”letting oneself be grasped by [the image]... letting go of one’s knowledge about it.” It makes me think too: my default picture of “knowledge” is a kind of movement from internal to external—understanding exists inside me (somewhere) but it also only really becomes “knowledge” when it is used/extracted, cast in relation to something else out there. And it’s easy to picture seeing as a kind of taking in, but I like thinking of it as being taken in too, and, when it comes to writing, “being taken in” feels more accurate. May Swenson said, “a poem happens to me.”

I thought a lot about imagination and invention writing these poems—working with/through the gaps of what I didn’t/couldn’t know. One poem titled “Helpmeet” (the first of two poems with that title) offers a very conscious attempt at imagination and construction. Family stories claim that Alice suggested David—her husband—marry Martha—her daughter. How could this conversation happen? I tried to sort of plot the scene: did it happen during the day? The middle of the night? Was Alice nursing the new baby, or was he sleeping with his older half-sisters? How many rooms were in this house? Where did everyone sleep? But my imagination broke trying to think of Alice instructing her husband to marry her daughter: “The words / won’t come / out // of the mother’s mouth.”

AQ: As you’ve alluded to, many of the book’s poems share titles with other poems in the collection. There are, for example, three poems titled “Dream” and two titled “I Dream,” two poems titled “Pinto Cemetery” and one titled “After Pinto Cemetery,” and so on. This creates such an uncanny effect throughout the collection, a feeling like déjà vu or haunting. It also lends cohesion to the collection as a whole. How did those titles come about? How do you conceive of the relationship between poems that share names?

MT: Organizing this collection felt like arranging so many echoes. In my mind, many moments or phrases in one poem seemed to bounce through space, touch another poem. Sometimes I visualized the book like a big net or web; if I pulled a string over here, a string over there could move or change. This isn’t how writing always feels to be me, but very early on these poems felt like a “project.” I knew many of the poems belonged together, like siblings. I think the repetition in titles is one way of drawing out those close relationships. It also reflects my thinking—I was constantly returning to the same questions, details, and places in my mind.

Another kind of repetition in the book happens through erasure. Section two of the book is made up of epistolary poems, and section four is an erasure of section two. I think the erasures in section four amplify this feeling of being haunted in the text, or by the text. On the page, the erasures can also look like holes through the cloth, where the gaps are the poem. I’m also generally interested in how erasure operates as a form—I love that every text already holds more texts, these other texts lying in wait, and how all texts come from this big shared library of language. An erasure is also an interesting way to think about inheritance, working with, in, or against something you were given.

AQ: While we’re on the subject of form, I wonder if I can ask about your line breaks. As a prose writer, I’m always interested in how poets think about the line, where to break it, and what that break achieves. Many of the line breaks in These Saints are Stones surprised and thrilled me. Do you have a line break philosophy? What makes a line break satisfying to you?

MT: Thank you for saying that! What a dream come true, to have some thrilling line breaks. I love thinking about line breaks. For anyone interested, generally, in line breaks, or teaching new poets about line breaks, I highly recommend James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line. I read it as a youngish poet, but it’s a book that I wish I had read even sooner. Longenbach cracked open my thinking about how much meaning a line break can bring to a poem.

Primarily, I think about a line break as an opportunity in the language—an opportunity to create an interesting unit of meaning and sound within a sentence, or across sentences. In other words, my poems are usually made up of sentences, and these sentences operate as one level, one unit of meaning in the work. And line breaks bring in an additional unit of meaning, so meaning in the poem gets layered. Line breaks offer a way to send more than one message in a poem because the line and the sentence can bring different units of meaning and coexist.

When I initially draft a poem, I usually write, and think, in sentences. Playing with line breaks makes up most of my thinking when I’m editing the poem. I am always reading and re-reading a line to ask myself, is this language interesting, standing on its own? Is the line up to something interesting? Because a line has so much room to be up to something interesting, and it's often a good way to generate surprise.

I am rarely a formalist poet, but I still invent rules and restrictions for myself, and these often help me through editing. Trying on a form, or a formal restriction, helps me see the poem differently, even if I don’t keep the form around. The first poem I wrote from this collection was “Martha dreams,” (the second “Martha dreams” in the book) and it was definitely a poem that happened to me. It surprised me when I wrote it. I was in a class, the Poetics of Wandering, and taking a lot of walks and trying out weird prompts on myself (like, “Go on a walk where you only make left turns.”) After that poem, I kept writing dreams because they felt like very useful imagination-boxes. I could put in a few things I knew and invent around it. It didn’t need to hold a narrative or answer a question. I wrote several more dreams, and as I was revising them, I gave myself arbitrary syllabic rules to help me think through my edits. For example, I told myself, this dream can have lines that are only eight or nine syllables, or this dream has to use five or six syllables per line (basing the line-length around one line I knew I liked). Having a ruleset helped me think about where and why I wanted to break the ruleset. I thought hard about whether or not this line would stay in this little box I’d set up, and which lines I would let wander outside of it. I think all the dreams ended up wandering away from their rules at some point.

AQ: Yes, dreams tend to do that! I’m always interested in how a piece of writing carries ghosts of its former self–how the architecture of its earliest drafts will always exist inside it somewhere. I think this happens on the level of the book, too. Books go through so many lives on their journey from inception to publication (and beyond, of course, in the countless iterations spawned in readers’ minds). How do you conceive of the pre- and after-lives of this book? How has your relationship to it evolved over the course of its existence?

MT: In the earliest versions of the book, I was writing about fairy tales alongside family history. I was interested in the ways oral family histories and fairy tales use variant and repetition, the way they tell these simple and wildly complex stories, especially about gender, sex, and violence. Several of those fairy tale poems ended up in my micro-chap, Dream With Teeth, instead. But some of the dreams in These Saints are Stones remain at the intersection of those two interests—family and fairy tale.

I was also working with more branches of family history initially. But there was so much strangeness around so much of the history, and a poem isn’t the place for a lot of historical explanation. So I focused on just Martha’s family, a dynamic which was plenty strange and hard to explain all on its own. And that choice felt right because Martha was where I started writing. By narrowing the scope, I had more room to wrestle with strangeness.

I remember many of the books and poems I was reading/thinking about when I wrote/edited this or that poem too. Those texts float on behind the poems when I read them. Sometimes an influence is a clear presence in the poem—Lorine Neidecker’s “Poet’s Work,” for instance, heavily influenced the first of my “Work” poems—while other times it’s more like fingerprints. I can still see them because I know they’re there. The two of us have talked about this before: the weird way what you read lives alongside you, inside your days. What I’m reading is always part of my thinking, so it is part of my writing. There are also those poems that stick like a burr in my brain. Sometimes, I read a poem and remember it because of a particular move that struck me. I kind of carry that poem-memory around in my pocket. Days or years later, something about my memory of reading that poem will help me write this next one. Probably a lot of writers think that way.

I like your question about the after-life too. It’s so strange that this book has a final/physical form, and it's strange knowing that this is the form most readers will encounter—that it’s kind of fixed, solidified. For me, there are so many versions of this book, all layered together, so it can’t feel fixed or solid. There were many rounds of “six-months-in-a-drawer” for the book. Each time I pulled it out, it read differently to me, and each time I put it away after editing, it was a different book again. I’m grateful I had that time to work on and avoid working on the book, that I had space to keep editing after I’d started to move on and obsess about other things.

The day my copies of the book came, I read it straight through. In a weird way, it felt like a new thing to me, in its solid state. I’m genuinely excited to have new readers for the book because I’m interested in what the book looks/feels like to them. That’s the book’s after-life, being with others. I will just catch glimpses of that life.

Millie Tullis is a poet, editor, and researcher from northern Utah. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her poetry has been published in Dialogist, Sugar House Review, Cimarron Review, Dialogue, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Her digital micro-chapbook, Dream With Teeth, was published by Ghost City Press in 2023. Her research has won awards from the Utah Historical Society, the Folklore Society of Utah, and the American Folklore Society. She is the editor-in-chief of Exponent II. Find more at MillieTullis.com.  

Alyssa Quinn is the author of the novel Habilis and an assistant professor of creative writing at Kenyon College.