Water Is Life and Life Is Water: A Conversation with Todd and Noah Davis

Todd and Noah Davis have a lot in common. They share a birthday. They are father and son, and they write poetry, essays, and other forms of prose. Both men’s poems have been published in Chautauqua, and we are delighted to include their work again in Issue 18: Water.

In the places where each writer lives now and where they grew up, water figures prominently. It’s not surprising then that Todd’s poem, “Foot Washing,” and Noah’s short story, “What the River Hides,” explore ritual uses of water—from cleansing and purification to youthful rites of passage and inner growth.

I interviewed Todd and Noah a few months ago when spring was in full tilt in eastern North Carolina. Because we live in different states, we met at the confluence of that great river, Zoom, and it struck me how the pulses and waves streaming through cyberspace facilitate modern communication and travel in much the same way rivers and waterways have done for millennia.

Although the sun had just risen in Montana, Noah connected first. With an exuberance I envied, he asked me whether the daffodils had popped up in North Carolina. They had. No flowers were blooming in Missoula yet, but his poet’s eye was wide open, attuned to the seasonal shifts that prompted robins to return and build nests, snow to melt, and the frozen ground to thaw into mud.

Noah recognized early on that poetry ran in his blood. Like the Little Juniata River near his boyhood home in central Pennsylvania that flows into its parent, the Juniata River, he felt an elemental pull to chart a course along similar paths as his father. His debut collection of poems, Of This River, was published in 2020, and its central theme is a fictionalized river valley based on the Little Juniata.

Noah looks up to North Carolina writer and poet Ron Rash as a mentor. He follows Rash’s method of starting with an image to write a poem, and if the poem isn’t working or doesn’t completely capture the image, he expands it into a story or novel. This is how “What the River Hides” came into being. Noah began with an image of boys daring each other to jump from a bridge and wrote a poem called “Small Histories” (which is included in the collection, Of This River).

It might have ended there, but the original image of teenage boys ritualistically jumping into the river to retrieve items from a sunken refrigerator continued to fascinate him. So, Noah kept working, developed the characters who became Billy, Earl, and Connor, explored their motivations, and brought them to life. The story has no tidy ending. Billy has considered enlisting in the Army (or the Air Force, he can’t decide) over his father’s strenuous objection, but he’s still uncertain of his next step in life. Blinded by the glare of lights on the dam, he jumps feet first from the bridge rail into the river, not knowing how deep he wants to plunge or how far he wants to drift.

Todd joined us from Pennsylvania, where he teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. I asked if there was anything significant about the Chautauqua water theme that resonated with him. He reflected on the many hours he and Noah have fished for native brook trout and bushwhacked on game lands of the Allegheny plateau. “Life is teeming around water,” he said. “In the places where we live, water is life and life is water.”

The words reverberated like a mantra. Todd is deeply interested in the primal aspects of who we are as human beings and human animals. We forget or neglect our animal nature and the primacy of nature to our detriment.

As a rule, Todd values clarity and accessibility in writing. He allows for some exceptions, for example when an author writes about personal trauma, because any reader who hasn’t experienced it will most likely not comprehend the suffering. The editorial values at Chautauqua align with his aesthetic philosophy that art is about real, meaningful connections for the human community. He tells his students, “Ideally the writer takes a step toward the reader, and the reader takes a step toward the writer in a continuous process until some connection, relationship or meaning-making takes place.” A one hundred percent connection may not be reached, but if there is no connection at all, no meaning-making will occur and therefore no art.

Like his son Noah, image is a dominant force in Todd’s writing. The predominant image in “Foot Washing” is a ritualistic act associated with the Biblical story of the woman who washed Jesus’s feet. At its core, the foot-washing ritual symbolizes cleansing, both physical and spiritual.

The poem is set in rural Appalachia in a farming community, like the one in Kentucky where Todd’s father grew up. The tone is nostalgic with a hint of unease, and readers experience the ritual from a girl’s perspective. She loves the natural world and yet the minister is telling her to shed the world. We sense her wariness and skepticism. The powerful image and emotions linger and give rise to questions: why does someone already pure, an innocent child, need cleansing; in whose opinion is this necessary? Readers, like the girl herself, may question the adults’ motivations.

Todd firmly believes in the cleansing effect of water, “whether you’re standing in the rain, or swimming in a river, or sitting down in a small mountain stream on a hot July day.” He also maintains an expansive view of the parameters of art. The institutionalized teaching of writing creates a false notion of its acceptable parameters—for example, that it is plagiarism to take an existing poem and develop it into a story, or respond to another writer’s work with an original work of your own.

Todd explains, all stories and poems are interconnected, part of “one big fabric.” You can take certain narrative elements from a writer you admire and use them as a starting point for new, original work. He’s written poems that highlight “how closely stitched we are to another story or another writer.” Among them are “Learning to Tie a Fly,” dedicated to Ron Rash, “After the Elk Hunt,” written in response to a few elk hunting stories by Rick Bass, and “Denomination,” a poem dedicated to Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Noah and Todd have corroborated on several nonfiction pieces: “The Healing,” about a stream in Montana that was devastated by fire, and “Reading the Water, Reading Each Other,” a call and response piece published in Anglers Journal about a fishing trip in the Green Mountains of Vermont and their love of trout, art, and spending time together.

Todd Davis is the author of six collections of poetry—Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—and a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. A new poetry collection, Coffin Honey, is forthcoming soon. For more information about Todd Davis, visit http://www.todddavispoet.com

Noah Davis is the author of a collection of poems, Of This River, published by Michigan State University Press. He has authored numerous commercial nonfiction articles and his poetry and prose are published in Orion, North America Review, Atlanta Review, Sou’wester, River Teeth, Water-Stone Review, and Chautauqua, among others. For more about Noah Davis, visit https://noahdaviswriter.wordpress.com