Rebecca Baggett was born in Wilmington NC and grew up on the North Carolina coast at Carolina Beach. She moved to Garner, NC at 13 where she later graduated from Garner Senior High. Rebecca graduated from Salem College, the oldest women’s educational institution in the U.S., founded in 1772. She earned a degree there in Classical Languages. Rebecca came to Athens with her husband for him to attend grad school at the University of Georgia. She had a long career in Academic Advising and retired in 2019 from UGA where she was a lead academic advisor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Over the decades, Rebecca published individual poems in numerous journals and several chapbooks. In March 2020 she won the Terry J. Cox Award and her first full-length collection, The Woman Who Lives Without Money, was published in March 2022. She has been a volunteer with Friends of the Library and Books For Keeps. Rebecca lives on the Eastside of Athens with husband Elmer Clark, and the wildlife that frequent their backyard habitat. She also has a little free library in front of her house.
What do you love most about being a poet?
The places it takes me and playing with words. I have always been fascinated with words for as long as I have memory. I could read when I was really young, I don’t know quite how old but I was reading chapter books in kindergarten so I was an early reader. I loved the sound of language. I loved dictionaries. I loved just going through and looking at words. When I got old enough to understand what those abbreviations in parentheses behind a word meant, I loved looking to see what languages it came from and how words evolved. My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and we would visit her family every summer – one of my cousins and uncle by marriage spoke PA Dutch as their primary language (it is a German dialect). The idea that languages used different words just fascinated me. If I had attended a large university, I think I might have gone into something like linguistics or linguistic anthropology rather than classics but all of that fascination has stood me in good stead with my poetry because it feeds it. I like the act of revision. I enjoy that a great deal because in the initial writings, you have to be in another space and in some ways it is almost like automatic writing. You try not to think too much about what you are doing with it, but if I go back later and realize there is a real poem there somewhere, I begin chipping away at it and thinking about line structure and verbs and whether this is the best choice for this line and the sounds of it all together. So, there is a creativity and a detail aspect in there and they are sort of in balance. A lot of my life involves trying to balance opposing issues, opposing feelings (being a feminist and a classics major required some real juggling). Poetry is a way of doing that balancing act on the page.
When you are not writing, what things do you like to do in or around Athens?
I like going out to the Botanical Gardens, that’s a favorite excursion. We have not done so many of the things we love in such a long time, but there were restaurants we enjoyed going to. We have friends with whom we would go fairly regularly to home.made for dinner and that was always a real treat for me. I love hanging out at Avid. I have done some of that since they have been careful about things, but there was a long interval where I was just ordering books online and that is really different. We like Lake Herrick. We go there frequently since it is close by, and I enjoy going out to Winterville. I have a couple of close friends who live out there and the Firefly Trail is a fun walk.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
If I could snap my fingers, I would go all sorts of places but if it were somewhere right now and I felt comfortable traveling, it would be Florence and that part of Italy. I have never seen it and I would love to. I have some folks I know in poetry land who are there right now, I am seeing their pictures and thinking oh I want to be there. I have been to England but I could go back multiple times. I would love to be there as well.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I would tell her her kids are going to grow up way faster than she realized. Every mother says that I think but it is absolutely true and wish it would slow down a little bit there. I would tell her you can’t do everything and it is going to be okay, but travel while you still have good knees.
Do you have a favorite book, or a book you find yourself rereading, referencing or gifting most often?
Oh, I have so many books I love. I have writers that I go back to again and again. In poetry: Mary Oliver, Ada Limon, Ellen Bass, Danusha Lameris. Novelists, Kate Atkinson, I will read anything that woman ever writes. Emily St. John Mandel, who wrote Station Eleven; she is amazing. Louise Erdrich, I stopped reading her for a while but then picked up one of her more recent books and fell in love all over again. And Jane Austen, I love Jane Austen. I don’t know how many times I have read Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, which are my two favorites. I reread her pretty regularly.
Do you have a favorite movie?
I can never pick a favorite. There is a film called Antonia’s Line that I saw many, many, many years ago and that one has really stuck with me. I think it was a Swedish film. For a serious film, yes that would probably be the one I would mention. I loved The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn, Genevieve Bujold and Vanessa Redgrave. It was just heart-wrenching. And, fun movies, Galaxy Quest. It is hilarious to me, but I was part of Star Trek and science fiction fandom in my teens so I was the target audience.
If you could put any message on a billboard, what would you put?
Think About the Children. If we thought about everything we did in this world as what will this mean for the children, for the children who will come later, not just the ones that are already here – what is this action going to mean to future children? I wonder what this world would be if we considered what children need, because there is so much going on they don’t.
If you could see any band or show, what would you like to see and where?
I would like to be able to understand Ancient Greek and go back in time to Greece and hear Sappho read her whole poems instead of just the snippets we have – and see original performances of Euripides.
What is something interesting about you that most people might not know?
When I was in my teens, I edited a Star Trek fanzine. I published several issues, and through a series of connections, because of that fanzine, I met my husband.
If you could have lunch with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and where?
Honestly, I would like to meet my grandmother. I never met her, and I would like to have lunch at her house. She died before I was born and my mom missed her all of my life; I know that she missed her terribly. I have no idea what she was like, really. Mom was not a big talker, the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t talk about their feelings a bunch, I just know she missed her mom. So, I would like to know what my grandmother was like.
What three words or phrases come to mind when you think of the word “home?”
Elmer, my husband. The ocean because I grew up at the ocean and that has always been home for me. And garden, because wherever home is I would want to have a garden.
