1. How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your
most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
JOAN will be my first published book! Honestly, it has changed my life
in a way that still feels a little surreal because I never thought I would
enter the world of traditional publishing. Before this, I had been in the
practice of writing zines and chapbooks and circulating them amongst friends
myself, or creating poetry projects and making them freely accessible online.
2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to fiction or
non-fiction?
I never set out to
write poetry. In college, a close friend of mine, the poet Jamie Thomson, said
the craziest thing I had ever heard, which was that he wanted to be a poet. I
really wanted to be his friend, and so writing my own poetry became a part of that. So...I became a poet because I wanted to make
friends!
3. How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does
your writing come quickly, or is it a slow process?
I think copious
notes is more my style. First there is a ritual, observation, interaction, or
attention to the body or environment. Then notes, accumulation or accretion,
then editing, which is like sculpture and collage. I'm trying hard to use as
many words as possible to make writing not sound like writing, because the act
of writing is hard for me, so I use every method possible to trick myself into
thinking what I do isn't writing.
4. Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you working on individual
poems or a book from the beginning?
Always a book or a
project from the beginning as a container for the poem writing process. I like
to start by outlining a structure, choosing a title, creating a piece of art, and
assembling what I think of as a little shrine of objects, images, and texts. I
usually make a ritual or constraint for generative writing before I begin
drafting, and then the poems arrive inside that container.
5. Are public readings part of your creative process? Do you enjoy them?
Reading out loud to
anyone, or even by myself is central to my creative process! It creates an easy
way for me to find the parts of a poem that aren't working.
6. Do you have theoretical concerns behind your writing? What questions
are you trying to answer?
My life is full of
questions, so my poems are full of questions, too. Maybe whose language is
considered legible or illegible, and what does it mean to inhabit illegibility?
How can you maintain ambiguity or plurality and resist authority (of the
narrator or of grammar or even text itself) in narrative forms?
7. What do you see as the role of the writer in larger culture?
Writers have many
roles, or at least we should imagine that we do. One is to transform and renew
language, taking it back from systems of empire and capital that
instrumentalize it for their purposes. Another is to simply document, record,
witness, testify. Another is to listen deeply. And another is to find the
limits of language, what is communicable, use language as a mode of
exploration.
8. Do you find working with an outside editor difficult or essential?
I love the times
that I have been able to collaborate with an editor. It is so fun! I love
talking about poems, trying new things, and experimenting with work.
9. What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard?
Honestly the best
advice I ever got was "keep going", which doesn't sound like a lot,
but it changed my practice. I had, I thought, finished an observational
drawing, and a friend of mine who was an artist came over to look at it and
just said, calmly, "keep going". I had resolved the image too soon,
without taking any risks in the composition. It took me a long time to
understand that, and apply it to my writing, and it's still something I think
about every time I work, when I am trying to ask if I have committed myself to
the page, have I said the truth yet, have I found what was at stake.
10. What kind of writing routine do you keep?
I don’t have a daily
routine. Because my work is project-based, I may not write at all for months,
and then design a project and write every day for a sustained period until a
draft exists. So I have no daily writing practice.
11. When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn?
Reading, and being
outside. I try to take pressure off myself, remove any self-imposed deadlines,
and return to the world for perspective. I used to feel really bad about these
times, but then I read, I think in The Importance of Being Iceland, the
idea that periods of time when you aren't writing can be conceptualized as a
fallow field. So you might look at it and say, why isn't anything growing here,
when really, what's happening is nutrients are returning to the soil so new
growth can occur. It's just harder to see.
13. Are there other forms that influence your work besides books?
All of them. I came
to poetry after years of thinking of myself as a musician and visual artist, so
writing feels like an expansion from those earlier practices. Nature and
ecology are especially influential for me, I grew up in a small rural town,
where your constant interlocutor was the outdoors, and I don't think that ever
really leaves you.
14. What other writers are important for your work or your life?
Writers who have had
an outsized impact on how I think about poetics are Bhanu Kapil, Alice Notley,
Akilah Oliver, Jack Spicer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nikky Finney, Eduardo C.Corral, Tiana Clark, and CAConrad to name just a few, but I think constant
companions for me are my friends, people like Catherine Niu, Jamie Thomson,
Lena Tsykynovska, Saba Keramati, whose work I am always in direct conversation
with.
15. What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
I just started a
literary magazine, and I would love to see it flourish. Reading the work of new poets has been one of
the most inspiring things that's happened to me lately.
16. If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
I'm a teacher now,
but I've had a lot of random jobs before this: delivery driver, barista,
stablehand, construction worker, volunteer organizer. I think I would have a
job that involved meeting new people. A waiter? If I got to wear something
fancy.
17. What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Honestly, what made
me stick with writing was practicality. Music and visual art weren’t as
sustainable for me at the time when I turned to poetry more deeply, and poetry
was something I could do by myself for free!
18. What was the last great book you read? The last great film?
I recently read Bloodmercy
by I.S. Jones and loved it.
19. What are you currently working on?
Thanks for asking!
I’m working on a second poetry book. It's a strange kind of memoir/anti-memoir
about a time in my twenties, when I was moving around the country frequently,
doing part-time sex work and manual labor. The poems are written in prose, lyric,
and experimental forms, and are structured to reflect the nonlinear experiences
of queer time, grief, and intimacy. It's much more directly autobiographical
than my first book, and I'm trying to let that vulnerability guide the writing.