About Allison
Allison Cobb (pronouns she/her) is the author of four books: Plastic: an Autobiography (winner of the Oregon Book Award and the Firecracker Award); Green-Wood; After We All Died; and Born2.
Cobb’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
A native of Los Alamos, NM, where the first atomic bombs were made, Allison collaborated in Suspended Moment performances with Hiroshima native and visual artist Yukiyo Kawano, Butoh dancer Meshi Chavez, and sound artist Lisa DeGrace.
Allison sits on the board of Fonograf Editions, and contributes to environmental and climate justice efforts at Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
What led you to writing PLASTIC?
We live at a time when our smallest daily actions (turning on a light, starting a car) have planetary impacts. It’s a difficult concept to grasp because climate change so exceeds the scale and scope of the human. Plastic, on the other hand, is concrete. Many of us have an intimate, daily relationship with it. But plastic takes so many shapes and qualities, and is so ubiquitous, we never really see it. It’s everywhere, but invisible. I thought if I could experience plastic as present and visible, I could maybe give some sense and shape to these vast planetary shifts that we all are implicated in and affected by, even if we can’t gather that evidence with our senses and so can’t really imagine our situation.
You work as a writer for the Environmental Defense Fund. How did your day job affect the writing of the book?
I have spent twenty years in the environmental field and every day I process a deluge of information about planetary trauma and emergency. It grinds on my body, mind, and spirit. Writing books is the way I chart my own survival. My writing comes from desire—a desire to know, to understand, to be amazed, and maybe just to weep and mourn. I love what the scholar Eve Tuck has to say about desire-centered inquiries. Tuck is Unangax, an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. She writes:[i]
…desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand that joy—that staying connected, looking clear-eyed at our situation and maintaining compassion and connection, with self, with other—is much wiser, and harder, than despair.
You grew up in Los Alamos, and your dad was a physicist. What kind of effect did that have on your upbringing, and eventually on PLASTIC?
I came out of Los Alamos with a weighty sense of history, a history of violence tied to my own biography. My poetry teachers, Carolyn Forché and Susan Tichy, encouraged in me a serious engagement with that history through my writing. I was so fortunate to study with them and to learn global traditions of poetry as witness and resistance.
This book weaves together several narratives, from a baby albatross to a Navy pilot to your own personal history and stories. How did you meld the many different narratives into the story of PLASTIC?
I knew that I wanted to find as many threads of connection between my life and plastic as I could. I envisioned making this web of connections visible in the writing, to make real for myself and maybe for others the implications of the human imprint on this planet. I knew I wanted the threads to seem disparate and for the book to reveal their interconnections as it progressed—like, how can all these really different things be connected? From that basis my inquiry progressed intuitively and often by chance.
I first became intrigued by plastic after reading a piece in the Los Angeles Times in 2006 about a piece of plastic from WWII found inside a dead albatross chick.[ii] I decided to do a bit of investigating. I discovered the plastic likely came from a Navy squadron whose pilot was born and raised in Oregon, in a farming town not far from me. So there was a connection. I also by chance came across a reference to plastic, an early form of polyethylene, used in the thermonuclear bomb. That was another connection. Those two discoveries cemented my obsession and propelled the book.
If you could change only one thing about how America, and the world, deals with plastic, what would it be?
I would have people recognize the utter insanity of creating single-use, throw away objects out of a material that lasts virtually forever. The purpose of such a practice is not to benefit people. It is to enrich corporations.
What do you think is the most important thing that readers take away from the book?
That every manufactured object we touch contains the blood and breath and life of another being in it, or many beings. What does it mean to consume and discard such things on a mass scale?
Globalization, technology, instant gratification internet shopping and delivery: all of this brings things close (objects, images, texts) and distances or obscures living beings. This is by design. Manufacturers and retailers prefer consumers not to know the details of how the computer you type on arrived in its pristine white box. If the true cost remains hidden corporations don’t have to pay it. Our survival as a species depends on our knowing. I think really embodying this knowledge would make our current way of life in wealthy countries impossible. And that is exactly the point. What we do with that knowledge? Well, that’s what happens next. It’s a huge question, full of possibilities for how we incarnate the future.
[i]Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage, a Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review Vol. 79 No. 3 Fall 2009, 409-427.
[ii] Weiss, Kenneth R. “Altered Oceans: Part Four: Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas.” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2006.
