Photo: Pete Duval.

Spencer Reece’s memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark, feels like what it is—a product of remarkable time and care. It took Reece seventeen years to write the book, and however much he wanted it to be done earlier, he kept waiting for and working toward a rightness that eluded him. I can’t remember anymore how I stumbled into that process. I’d occasionally written to him over the years to tell him how much I admire his poems and to share what I’d written about them, and somehow, at some point, that resulted in him sending me a draft of the book.

By then, Reece had already discovered the structure he credits with unlocking the book—one in which he defines and shapes each part of his life through the life and work of a poet who was important to him at that time. But he still wanted help, which, as Reece presents it, is one of the defining features of his life. For all of the ways in which he once struggled to make a life for himself outside of—and then, eventually, inside—the social structures that refused him and his queerness, he has also inspired a remarkable number of people to help and shelter him. Just as salient, though, is the abundance Reece offers those who enter his life. Little communities pop up around him like mushrooms. Working through edits and revisions with him felt like being admitted into a sacred space.

Sacredness is fundamental to the story Reece tells. After years of suffering from alcoholism and rebuilding himself in recovery, unable to find the literary recognition he longed for, and confined by self-loathing, Reece in short order found himself singled out for publication by Louise Glück and the subject of attention from publications like the New York Times—whose profile spurred him to begin working on the memoir, hoping to correct for the sense that he had worked and lived in isolation, without help or love. He then began his journey toward the priesthood. In his telling, poetry and Christianity seem inextricable, which is also the case in his writing, where his audible love of accuracy abides in an equally audible humility—a willingness to move in mystery and honor the sometimes-slow-to-manifest potential for beauty and love.

For all Reece’s patience, though, he isn’t still. Since 2004, he has published two books of poems—The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus—and a third, Acts, is due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024. He edited an anthology of poems from Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he taught for two years, and he founded and ran the Unamuno Author Series during his years as a priest in Madrid. He now leads a church in Jackson Heights, Queens. The Secret Gospel of Mark has just been published, and All the Beauty Still Left—a collection of his watercolors combined with quotations into a small, tender book of hours—comes out next month.

We discussed his memoir through a flurry of emails over two days in January, as hatred and disease continued to flare up all around us.

INTERVIEWER

The Secret Gospel of Mark is doing a lot of things—it’s a writer’s memoir, a book of religious devotion, a record of the lives of poets you’ve cherished, a portrait of your parents’ complicated love, a story of healing into queerness and of the wounds that preceded it, a narrative of addiction and recovery, and quite a bit more—and yet it all feels unified. In the book, you describe the moment of its inception seventeen years earlier, a need to fill in a story that “talked about how I had jettisoned out of oblivion,” and a desire to recognize all the people who had shepherded you. How did you get from that original impulse to an understanding of how all these elements could work together?

REECE

I’m a slow creator—I’ve begun to think I’m on the Bishop plan, or equally the Larkin plan, of about a thing every decade, or a thing every two decades. This prose took a long arc of seventeen to eighteen years from that first impulse to what went to print. I don’t plan for this to happen—I just can’t seem to pull it all together quickly. Some inspirations come quick, surely, but the final product, no. Regarding the emotions, I’m notorious among those who know me best for not understanding something in real time, and only in hindsight can I seem to sort something out. Maybe that’s why I’ve turned to poetry, as a way to make sense of real time.

I am a poet. I walk, talk, and think like one. I think I finally accept that. I ended up writing a prose book dedicated to poetry. What “unified” it, to use your word, took a long time to see and was actually something very simple. Structure unified the book. My goal was to take all this complexity and make it a fluid read. While what I was attempting was complicated, I wanted it not to read as “complicated,” maybe like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. When you explain that book, it gets complicated, but it doesn’t feel that way when you read it. You flow right along with all those references. The structure of my book came when I assigned poets to periods of my life—Plath and my early life, Herbert and my first turn to faith, et cetera. The poets needed to enter the narrative organically, which meant I needed to think back to when the poets entered my life and recall what was happening then. The whole thing kind of fell into place after that, which happened about seven years ago. Then there were seven more years of editing and honing. The final chapter is a swirl of contemporary poetry, poets in real time, friends, along with the decline of my mother’s health. But only in the last year of editing did I see the figure under which these things swirled—Jesus. Thus the final chapter is called “Follow me” and concerns my past ten years as an ordained man. So it goes! Read More