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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?
When I first encountered this question my instinctual response was, it didn’t change my life. I’m referring to my first book since it’s the most recent first for me. But over the past couple months that the book has been out, and having read from it several times, I’m realizing that I do feel a shift, a subtle change in life, with regard to my relationship to myself as a writer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the publication of Common Amnesias has given me a sense of accomplishment. I received an email from Dan Owens of Ugly Duckling Presse letting me know they wanted to publish the book just after a field trip with high school students to the Whitney to see no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. It was December 23rd and had just begun to snow, and I was walking the High Line to visit my partner at work. I was used to so much rejection by then and had sort of steeled my heart in a way that I hadn’t expected to have room for the small joy of a YES. Between that moment and the publication in May 2024, the shine of the yes flickered but the shift was that no matter how awful anything writing-related seemed, I knew that an intelligent & generous group of people were taking care of a collection of my poems and preparing them into a beautiful object that I could share with friends. At the moment of answering this question–5 months from publication–I feel a sense of gratitude. I’m a person with many unfinished projects and I’m still amazed that I wrote poems, organized them into a manuscript, shared them with other people and asked for feedback, and sent them out to many presses and contests. The other shift that I didn’t expect is a deepened intimacy with the body of poems. A sense of relief that came with the acceptance of the book for publication was a feeling of getting to cut the umbilical cord from these fucking poems I’ve been looking at for a long time. But now that I’m reading from the book, and having to select which poems to read in a given amount of time in a particular sequence to an audience who has heard or not heard the poems has forced us—me and the poems--to say heyyyy more often than I expected. And reading the same poems again and again with different people receiving them, and different types of responses, has helped me gain some tenderness and perspective toward poems I thought I was tired of. It’s hard to say how my most recent work compares to previous because much writing that made it into Common Amnesias has been written over the past ten years ago. I think I’ll need a lot more distance from my writing to be able to look back and know what has changed.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think that keeping a journal led me to poetry. I started keeping a journal when I was 8 years old – I only know this because I still have the journal–and journaling has been the most consistent writing I’ve done in the almost forty years since. I think that the type of writing that is journaling for me–jotting down notes and fragments–most lends itself to becoming the form of writing that we call poetry. I don’t remember reading any poetry before college though I’m sure I did in high school. I do recall I appreciating what felt like opacity in poems I first encountered. First perhaps because it matched how I felt moving through the world—a sort of heaviness and confusion—but also because it was a genre where adults seems to say it was okay to not understand, and I encountered not understanding many things I read, but poetry was like something it was okay to say we didn’t get.
I’ve never had any desire to write fiction. I enjoy reading it but would never have the stamina, or the planning capability or interest that goes into what I imagine a fiction writer needs to do, to create fiction. I don’t know if I can hold onto a beginning, middle and end at the same time in my head. I have written non-fiction – a couple of essays about teaching that I worked on with the support of an amazing editor and writer, Matthew Burgess, and both were painful experiences that I could not have done without an editor. I simply would have talked myself out of the necessity of the piece. The stamina I have is to return to what’s been written as opposed to the stamina to write one sentence after another sentence and have them together move towards some meaning.
I relate 100% to how Tonya Lailey answered this same question for you: “And I’ve also always been a day dreamer, space-cadet as we called it when I was a kid. I think poetry is kinder to dreamers than fiction might be.”
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Nothing writing wise ever comes quickly for me. There are two poems that I can think of that remain close to their first drafts. One is a poem titled “Noun Noun” which is basically a transcription of a series of text messages between me and my dad. The other is titled “Desire” half of which is a recounting of giving myself an enema, and the other half is a list of catalog items I read about while encountering the aftermath of the enema. I journaled about the experience afterwards and that’s basically the poem.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I dreamt once that a friend, the painter Jamie Chan, told me that if one can create the perfect sculpture then there’s no reason to write poems. I don’t agree with this because I don’t know if I can separate the process of sculpting or writing poems from the more or less finished piece that a reader experiences. But I like thinking of poems as sculptures and in that analogy, my process is less like creating a sculpture from a mass of material, and more like piecing found objects together into some sort of whole that constellates like a group of magnets that snap together once they are placed in each other’s orbit. I’m definitely, in your words, “an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project.” There is a project I’m working on now in which the idea precedes the writing, which is new for me, and I’m understanding that even in that case, the writing is stringy and fragmented and has not yet found its form.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I appreciate this question because I’ve never thought of public readings as either part of or counter to my creative process. While public readings definitely cause a good bit of anxiety for me, which at the time leading up to the reading absolutely feels counter-everything, I have to say that reading end up nurturing my creative process because they help bring to focus which poems feel most necessary to share in a particular time and place. Preparing for any reading ends up inscribing the sounds and articulations of the poems into my body. I get super nervous at readings and rely on muscle memory to deliver the poems – if the poems aren’t embodied, my brain will be elsewhere during the reading and I get lost in the language. Additionally, I inevitably end up continuing to revise the poems that I practice for a reading – even poems from Common Amnesias have changed over the past few months of reading from the book.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
This is a difficult question for me because I really do not think of my writing as trying to answer questions. My relationship to writing is so fraught that it’s hard for me to zoom out to that level of thinking! I feel like this is a bad answer though. So hmm what is immediately present for me when I sit down to write a line, or revisit some lines I have written, is the question of whether I can communicate tenderness and thinking at the same time--the poignant feeling I walk through the world with, one that makes it both gorgeous and terrible to be in a body, in a way that others can relate to, and in a way that isn’t unbearably cliché. I am also curious about the question of whether the speaker of any poem I write can be separate me as an author, from my own subjectivity.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think there’s space for all sorts of writers having different roles in the larger culture. I’m grateful for the writers thinkers artists activists journalists who are currently putting energy into bringing attention the genocide in Palestine, and organizing to change systems that normalize genocide and war. I know there are particular people who identify as writers (as they should!) but I also think it is difficult to distinguish the writer from anyone else who is creating and communicating in our world. But yes to people who write and create: wake us up, make us feel, help us think, make us realize that we aren’t alone. I can’t speak for others but in this moment I am believing that my role (as a writer, as a teacher, as a friend, and community member) is to stop dissociating long enough to overcome fear and lethargy in order to act in a way that interrupts the harm caused by systems that only give a shit about wealth + power + land accumulation.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I think collaboration in general to be essential, and in the few times I’ve worked with an editor, my writing got a push that I don’t think I could have achieved on my own. I’m grateful to Kyra Simone and Lee Norton from UDP for their editorial guidance over the few months of preparing Common Amnesias for publication—from the macro level of structure, to a few lines or words that I can spiral for hours wondering if I should cut. And for the years before that, many friends had read through the manuscript and contributed to its evolution. Nope I couldn’t imagine being a writer without editors!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.”
I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
It’s rare for me to wake up without being totally soaked in dream images. A typical non-work day begins with coffee asap and then I sit at my kitchen window and write my dreams down. The only other writing routine I consistently keep is journaling in the morning. I do this on the bus to work or at one of the windows in my apartment if I’m not rushing off to work. My partner knows to not strike up conversation during these early moments. Really the only other times I tend to writing, to poetry!, is when I’m enrolled in a writing workshop. So I try to do that yearly.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Once I had a dream featuring a scroll unrolling to reveal yards and yards of text. About 95% of the text was in an unremarkable font, but every now and then I’d see a word or phrase glowing yellow as if it was burned into the scroll and glowing like coals. In the dream, I realized that my unconscious was revealing my writing process to me. The scroll represented all of my language – not necessarily everything that I'd written down, but all of the language that lives through me and in me and arrives through dreams. What I learned was that my writing process isn’t linear at all and in some ways, I need to trust that it is accumulative if I keep jotting it down when I can. So when I’m stuck, if I have energy, I search past scrolls aka google docs. Otherwise I move on with my day.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean. A Catholic church. A pizza place.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t influence my work. But I don’t work with a particular form to inspire writing. At this point, I’d say dreams and relationships with other humans have most influenced the poems I’ve written.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This question is what makes me feel like a fake writer. I started reading contemporary poetry around age thirty so since then I’ve felt like I’m in catch up mode so I there are few books I’ve read more than once. Every writer I read and love, every book or poem, gets filed into my waxy brain as important. I will say though that Dorothy Allison was the first writer I recall reading and thinking about the person behind the book. I thought they were so brave to be writing about shame.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I think it would be cool to write a long poem or a chapbook over the course of a couple weeks. My writing practice is so sporadic and collage-like that I can’t imagine showing up to the same piece of writing daily for several weeks and have it like a dysfunctional family stick together in one poem.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
My occupation really is more educator than a writer. I spend way more time in my life as a teacher of reading and writing than as a writer of poems. But my alternative callings are: herbalist, caretaker at an animal sanctuary, farmer, seamstress, arborist, paid non-competitive swimmer, film-maker (once there is technology that allows us to download our dreams into film).
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
LOL I do almost everything else instead of writing on a daily basis.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This is a hard question but I’ll do it. Not that I believe in a strong line between what we call genres but…for non-fiction, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger. For poetry, Saretta Morgan’s Alt Nature. For fiction, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I just rewatched all of the Alien films so gotta say Alien.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Answering these questions!
Bigger picture: A few years ago I dreamt that I was in a basement rummaging through stacks and piles looking for anything of value, and I found a desk I knew to be my uncle’s, and I found a stack of poems he’d written and realized, in the dream, that he had been a poet. A few weeks later IRL my partner and I were helping my parents clean out their basement and I found a suitcase full of hundreds of letters that this uncle had written to my grandmother while he was in seminary, studying to become a Catholic priest, in Rome, Italy, during the early 1960s. I’ve been working with those letters on and off for the past couple of years. In fact I’m waiting for emily brandt to host another Docupoetics workshop so that I can get back to that project.
I also have so many dreams written down and have been inspired to shape years of dreams into a book along the lines of Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang. I’d love to collaborate on this with a visual artist!
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
