Level Watch by Mary Ardery
June Road Press, 2025
Whitney Rio-Ross: The word that I would use to describe Level Watch is “haunting.” In fact, the first poem opens with “I see my dead around town.” While the book is largely about your experience working as a guide in a backpacking recovery program, more of the poems dwell on relapse and death than “overcoming” addiction. Why was it important to you to embrace these themes?
Mary Ardery: When I was new to the job, I had this singular and perhaps even romanticized notion of recovery because my father is one of the lucky ones who did recover. (He would remind me here to use a different verb tense—recovering alcoholic—because the process is ongoing.) I grew up with his long-term recovery as my main representation of what it looked like to live with addiction. But substance abuse and addiction are thorny problems where progress and recovery are often not linear nor even statistically probable. Relapse and death felt prominent in my experience as a guide partly because I’d been unprepared to encounter so much of it. And though the book grew to contain more elements, it definitely originated from an elegiac impulse.
WR: I love how viscerally you write about the discomfort and danger of wilderness. Yet we know that, as the site of this recovery program, the mountains were also a place of potential salvation. How did you try to hold that tension in the poems?
MA: That tension is one of the things I most strongly believe in as a benefit of wilderness therapy. The goal is to offer people real challenges so that people can grow mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I tried to lean on images and stories from the natural environment to convey this tension. In a poem like “River Crossing,” there’s the bodily threat that the river will pull someone under. And the river does do this. But the woman pushes up, even with the weight of her pack and the rushing water all around her. My hope is for the poems to convey how the wilderness challenges us—and then teaches us that we can rise to those challenges.
WR: Some of the wilderness poems keep the subject matter at a distance, acting more as a description than a personal narrative. Others are very intimate. I’m thinking especially of the poems about dreams and “Lead Guide,” which describes an erotic longing for the co-guide lying next to you. How did you decide when to insert yourself in a poem about someone’s recovery/relapse? And why was it important for you to include some poems that were about your individual experience on those trips?
MA: When I was first considering writing this book, I kept wondering what all writers confront when writing from real experience: where’s the line between my story to tell and other people’s stories to tell? It became imperative for me to ground the book in my experience, to tell the speaker’s story. In a poem like “Lead Guide,” I wanted to show how the wilderness was transforming the speaker in addition to transforming the people who were in treatment.
I also came to think of the subject of the poems—and the book as a whole—as less “about someone’s recovery/relapse” and more about an employee’s experience in a treatment center where recovery and relapse are the topics at hand. So I wasn’t thinking so much about when/where to insert myself but more about how to represent the realities of my role, presence, and experience as a guide. Sometimes that reality created a poem with more distance where the speaker is positioned as an observer. Sometimes the reality created a poem where the line was blurred between being an employee tasked with responsibilities and simply being a human with emotions and a past.
WR: Throughout the book, you include poems that touch on your personal relationship with substance abuse—both your father’s recovery and your own complicated history with alcohol. How did your experience as a guide shape how you chose to articulate those stories?
MA: Including my father’s recovery always felt like a natural framework for the book because it was one of the reasons I accepted the job in the first place. Writing about my own history with alcohol felt much less straightforward. My experience as a guide showed me that while I didn’t identify as having an addiction, that didn’t mean everything was hunky-dory. When I wrote the poem “History of Fire,” it unlocked something for me. The poem opens: “What did it mean? That I wanted pain / to be where I lived. That I made my home / alongside addiction.” I had to articulate my questions in an explicit way because I was genuinely searching, trying to figure out how my own story with alcohol fit into the bigger context of this experience. Ultimately, this line of questioning became a crux of the book.
WR: As someone who knows the Blue Ridge Mountains, I expected most of your imagery to be visual descriptions of animals and vegetation. While you certainly include some of that, I was struck by how much of your imagery was sonic—references to music, humming, basic human sounds like snoring. Why are these sonic elements so important for this collection?
MA: I love this question. Thanks for such a thoughtful observation. I see two reasons behind these sonic elements: the first is simply that I’m a musical person (which perhaps is part of why I’m drawn to poetry in the first place!). I grew up singing and still sing in a community choir. The second reason, though, speaks more to the unique experience of the wilderness and how I remember my time in the woods. Out in the backcountry, you become more attuned to your body and your surroundings when you’re not distracted by traffic or your phone or Starbucks. Singing becomes a way to pass the time on the trail. And just as you get to intimately know the flora and fauna, you also get to intimately know yourself and the people you’re backpacking with for days and weeks at a time—what songs your companions absentmindedly sing, the sound of their snores and coughs, etc.
WR: You include poems about your time in North Carolina when you weren’t working as a guide, especially around Asheville and the opulent Biltmore Estate. In the poem “Shift Work,” you lace together your experience working at the Biltmore and a specific week on the trail. How did these distinct environments in the region inform how you wrote about the other?
MA: Asheville is a vacation destination—tourism is one of their biggest industries (even their baseball team is called the Tourists!). Because I was working eight days on, six days off, I had the freedom to explore—to live almost like a tourist on my off-shifts. That exploration of these tourist destinations—such as the opulent Biltmore Estate—was such a contrast to my shifts in the woods where I was sleeping on the ground and eating canned chicken. Or, on shift we’d drive to a 12-step meeting near the four-star Grove Park Inn, where I’d been just a few days earlier while off shift, sitting in a rocking chair and staring out the window amongst all the actual guests. It felt disorienting to experience these two different realities in the same physical space. Kind of like I was living two parallel lives.
The impetus for the poem “Shift Work” was because I’d initially thought of these two jobs and their environments-—wilderness therapy versus bussing tables in the Biltmore dining room—as total opposites, but the reality was that they did share some commonalities. Working in a fancy dining room still has its interpersonal stressors, and it’s definitely hard physical work. And like any new job, there’s a culture you have to learn. It takes time to see how you fit in with new coworkers.
Where the poem lands, though, is with the realization that the emotional stakes (and toll) of the two jobs did not feel equivalent to me. When I left guiding and began working in the Biltmore dining room, I was so nervous before my first shift. I remember telling myself, “Mary, you used to work 8-day shifts. You can survive a 6-hour shift.”
WR: Who would you say you wrote this book for? And what is your hope for its readers?
MA: I wrote this book for people who are living in the questions—the grey areas—around substance abuse, whether that’s their own substance abuse or that of a loved one. I don’t claim to have many answers, but I hope that the questions asked in the book help people feel seen and comforted amidst so much uncertainty.
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Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press, 2025). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review online, RHINO, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband, son, and Boston Terrier named Bug.
Whitney Rio-Ross is the author of thunder makes us (Belle Point Press) and poetry editor for Fare Forward. Her poetry has appeared in Image, ONLY POEMS DAILY, Pinch Journal Online, Last Syllable, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and dogs in Nashville, Tennessee.