Personal Minutiae: The Millions Interviews Sasha Pearl

Author, artist, and bus driver Sasha Pearl recently republished an extraordinary book of poems with McSweeney’s. Pearl’s tender observations of the world come filtered through the eye of a lover. There’s humor in our bad behavior and grace that emanates from the steel box of Pearl’s bus. 

Samantha Hunt: Can you tell me the birth story of Bus Poems¹ and II Plus. How did you come to write this collection?

Sasha Pearl: I was driving a school bus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a job, and every morning after dropping off the high schoolers, I had about 45 minutes to kill before picking up the first student on the middle school run. The bus company called this “staging”—when you wait somewhere in the bus before starting a route. I went one of two places: the Blake’s Lotta Burger parking lot (usually to use the restroom) or the Lobo Stadium parking lot. The break was from 7:15 to 8AM. I tried different things to take up the time. I watched a lot of TikTok. I did Pimsleur language lessons. Then my friend Annie Bielski, who is an Albuquerque-based artist and writer (and now a professor at UNM) suggested writing poems, so I tried it. When I showed people the poems they laughed, which was very encouraging. So I made little Xeroxed books of them to send to friends.

SH: I was lucky enough to receive one of these books and was struck by so many things, including the way Bus Poems captures the ghostly presence of the children who rode your bus. Their insecurities, personalities, bravery and odors populate the space even after they have disembarked. As a bus driver, what did you notice, or learn, about young people and the ways they operate? 

SP: People in elementary school are incredibly honest and emotionally accessible. They trust you right away and will be very direct. Little kids will talk to you about head lice, astrology, what kind of dragon you would be, and then ask you if you have a house. I also thought it was so interesting when people this age (five to nine years old) start to figure out how to lie, and start to try that on. In middle school they start to be hyperaware—of themselves, of everyone else. They put on little airs, and also seem sort of afraid. People always ask me if high schoolers act bad, or if I ever had to punish anyone or break up any outlawed activities, but high school students don’t make a peep. They want to be left alone on their phones.

SH: I suppose that age—high school—has a lot of thinking to do about the self. Bus Poems is internal too but also glows with your deep, nearly scientific observations of the outside world with moments that are both singular and universal, like: “They are always calling/ Mr. Toncho (bus number 135)/on the radio / and he never responds./ They say his name/over and over/with exasperation/like an angry mother/ to a child who leaves/dirty socks on the kitchen table.” Did these poems arrive more from the inside or the outside? 

SP: I think I’m sort of lucky to be easily amused and so I think a lot of really ordinary things are very funny or have unintended significance or meaning. I’d say all the ideas for the poems come from the outside—somebody says or does something normal but it dings a little bell in me that resonates for a long time. So much of real life is poetic or made-up-seeming. I don’t know how to explain truth being stranger than fiction without sounding like a nimrod Pollyanna.

SH: No nimrod Pollyanna at all—you are a truth teller. I first read your poems during the pandemic when a microscopic virus was making huge waves. With poetry in general and Bus Poems in particular, I feel the might of the miniature. These tiny pieces, written under a time constraint, have a wholeness, a largeness though some are tiny as haiku. “My car won’t start/the traffic flow,/these things that make me late./ My old lead foot,/the spring winds blow,/and still the children wait.” You zoom a reader from the micro, say the small enclosure of the bus or specific rules, “no friendly waves or salutes/to buses with numbers starting with ‘11’” all the way to the macro, say, the Han Dynasty, childhood bullies, desire. Is there something magical about the small space of the bus that permits large contemplation?

SP: I don’t think for me it had to do with the physical confines of the bus so much as having a routine and a route doing something very practical—and frankly very boring. My world was small. It made me look for drama and notice all the small variations: so-and-so not wearing a jacket, tiny slights or acknowledgments between students, passing daily a rose bush or a billboard advertising cemetery plots, the weather. Everything seemed important and powerful and allegorical. Then the pandemic happened and they closed schools. My world got even smaller, while the world got even bigger, even more tempestuous. And then you have to hold both the shared reality of earth and the hive mind, and the extremely personal minutiae of living, and synthesize them somehow.

SH: You’ve had many jobs beside writing poems and driving a bus. You’ve worked as a sign painter, a cook, an artist, musician, bartender, film projectionist rug hooker, truck driver, flower farmer, not to mention, you are an incredible dancer. Where do labor and art intersect in your life? 

SP: I’ve also worked as a lighthouse keeper, an inn keeper, a postal worker, I’ve made a lot of pizzas, road managed bands, been a janitor, a shoe girl, a food stylist’s assistant, drove truckloads of art, done field and green house work and run equipment at farms, washed dishes, waitressed. I never considered art or music or writing or making anything to be jobs or ways to earn money. I have always worked since I was 13. I have always made art meant to be given away. Both things were encouraged and/or expected of me. When I was 14, I was a janitor at a movie theater and I would draw little comic books, Xerox copies of them, and leave them around the theater for people to find. In my twenties I did the same thing with short stories about my family, jobs, and people in my village. I worked to earn money but also to learn how to do things. Like dancing—you learn to dance by dancing with as many people as possible, learning little moves and style and steps from each partner. Anything I’ve learned in the way of job skills, people, or the meaning of life has been from listening to people tell me about themselves or the world while we chop lettuce or plant potatoes for 10 hours. And those things add up and carry over—being formerly a bartender would make someone a better doctor.

SH: I agree. I was a waitress for years and always say that only people who have been servers at some point should be allowed to eat in restaurants. Years ago I had worked at the Village Voice and spent a lot of my time there at the Xerox, making tiny little books I’d hide in around the bars of New York City. I am a devoted admirer, maker, and distributor of cheap art, so I cherish my original handmade copy of Bus Poems, but at the same time I’m glad McSweeney’s wanted to collect your work into this beautiful volume, with cover art by Yann LeBec. I am glad your work will find a larger audience and be read by people all across the country. What has it been like to have your handmade book printed and distributed by a small press? Have you heard from other poets or bus drivers or poet bus drivers? 

SP: I couldn’t be prouder or more honored to have my silly little poems in a real bound book with beautiful art work and compiled with real writers. I’m so grateful to you and to Claire Boyle for working with me and for seeing something in the poems. To me it’s unreal. I was tour managing my friend’s band (Chris Acker—a wonderful songwriter) in Portland, Oregon, when it was released and got to go buy a copy at the big downtown Powell’s Books where I got to ask a bunch of sales associates where I could find it in the store. I have heard from some McSweeney’s readers that they enjoyed the poems, but none have revealed if they were bus drivers.

SH: I love Chris Acker! “I want to feel you on my skin like Coppertone.” His lyrics make me glad. Also, how do you get to do so many things? 

SP: Probably important to note that I don’t do any of the things for very long. I am more curious than ambitious. I like the momentum of change and I like exciting instability. I’m a quitter, or I get bored easily, or I like to learn new things—depending on who you ask. I don’t have any debt or dependents, or a partner which all set me up to change my mind a lot, change direction a lot. Generally, I have a lot of doors open to me because of various privileges.

SH: What are you reading? Listening to? Looking at these days? 

SP: I love American hot-rod and low-rider art and truck painters from all over the world, traditional story quilts, classified ads like Craigslist, Want Ad Digest and Yelp reviews (Yelp reviews are the greatest free verse poetry). Art forms which are personal, autobiographical, ordinary things which become extraordinary when lovingly and wildly embellished, and often art forms that don’t recognize themselves as art forms. I listen to a lot of classic truck-driving songs, old country, doo-wop, and R&B. And I am reading Mark Baumer, Morgan Parker, and Dennis Johnson.

SH: You already have a new book poems, one after Bus Poems, called Untitled Feelings. Tell me about it. 

SP: Untitled Feelings is a xeroxed book of poems I made this spring. Some of it draws from bus driving or miscellaneous job experiences, love, living as a woman, and other things I have mixed reviews of.

SH: The new Yelp review category: Life as a Woman. Three stars. Mixed reviews and untitled feelings.