Melissa Ginsburg: During this time I was immersed in Freud–I was reading his case studies, H.D.’s book about him, and Louis Breger’s biography. Freud’s obsession with history and legacy fascinates me. His desire to make an impact on history seems desperate at times, cocaine-fueled, paranoid, racing against time and his detractors. I had also been teaching Mark Levine’s Debt to a group of graduate poetry students, and thinking about the Holocaust and social structures of power, and the aesthetics of Victorian middle class respectability–a certain frilliness, a doily edge that marks clear boundaries. H.D. helped Freud escape Austria when the Nazis took over. I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote Boxwood Hedge.
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and the noir novel Sunset City, forthcoming April 2016. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and other magazines. She has received support for her work from the Ucross Foundation and the Mississippi Arts Council. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.