Ashley

“I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical church. Everything, every issue, was so black and white—right or wrong, good or bad. But when I was a child, my dad fell out of a tree and broke his spine in a hunting accident. He was paralyzed from the waist down and has been in a wheelchair ever since. I couldn’t understand why God let my father suffer when he was such a good man. If I had been older, perhaps it wouldn’t have affected me the way it did, but as young as I was, it really shook my faith. 

“The title of my first book, Into These Knots, is taken from Dante’s Inferno: ‘Tell us how the soul is bound and bent into these knots, and whether any ever frees itself from such imprisonment.’ Much of my work tries to come to terms with loss and religion, God and death, and in some ways, those root concerns trace back to my father’s suffering. W. H. Auden said ‘Poetry is a clear expression of mixed emotions,’ and I think that if there’s one thing poetry can offer the world, it’s a greater appreciation of ambiguity, a deeper understanding of the gray areas in our lives—the internal conflicts, the changing of our minds.”

Ashley Anna McHugh's book, Into These Knots, is available on Amazon.  You can also read a short bio and a selection of her work on the Poetry Foundation Website:

• Into These Knots
• Shepherd Road
• The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths is All But Blinding

To avoid the distraction of her new heavy-metal neighbor, Ashley does most of her writing from her studio at The Art Factory.

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