Margaret Yapp is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate with a Master’s in Fine Arts in poetry. Her works have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Peach Mag, Apartment Poetry, and more. She is the managing editor of Prompt Press and runs Rampage Party Press.
Her debut book, “Green for Luck,” is a poetry collection that was released on April 23. On Friday, Yapp read from her book at Prairie Lights Bookstore and Cafe in Iowa City.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Iowan: You mention in your contributor spotlight for the Midwestern Gothic that the “Midwest makes its way into almost every piece regarding poetry.” Why do you think this is?
I think I was an undergrad or close to it. I’ve only ever lived in the Midwest — Iowa and Minnesota — so it is part of my life and part of my writing. It’s hard because it’s the only place I’ve lived to really distinguish where and how that’s showing up and how my writing may be different if I’d grown up somewhere else.
The Midwest shows up in the place the poems are set in, like the plants I might mention or parts of the landscape. A lot of my poems too are dealing with and using everyday speech as material so if I’m writing how I speak, that’s going to show up in my poems, too. I’m not setting out to write about the Midwest, but because it’s part of who I am it shows up in what I write, through language and place.
What is the story behind the title “Green for Luck”?
I submitted this manuscript under the title “Chump.” The etymology of that word comes from a block of wood. A book, depending on what the paper is made out of, could literally be a block of wood. “Chump,” after talking with friends and teachers about that title, that was the title of my thesis when I was in the poetry program [at Iowa]. I decided that it was a little too playful and I wanted a more serious-sounding title. I decided on syllable and word count first. I knew I wanted three words, and three syllables — counting and numbers are very important in my poems. “Green for Luck” got on the list pretty early. It’s a line that repeats in the sort of central poem of the book which is a long poem called “Sea.” It felt like the right title instinctually. It sounded and felt right. Content-wise, it worked for the book. There’s a lot in the book about reckoning with one’s own brain, and the concept of luck and wishing comes up a lot and so does the color green in terms of the life cycle of nature and newness. “Green for Luck” hit on a lot of the different threads that are in the book and could work for both the older poems that are mentioned and the newer stuff that’s in there and could bring it all together.
Who inspired your book?
My friends and my family show up in my writing a lot. I always joke that half of what I write is just stuff that people say to me — a funny line or a word, I’ll just quickly type it, and that stuff makes its way into my writing, and so I’m extremely inspired by the people around me, the people that I love.