Eleni Sikelianos, Make Yourself Happy

WHY WAS I SMOTHERING small raccoons. Comical now, but not so under the spidery gauze of sky. We were the bodies moving below misunderstanding like lumps of saddened [damaged, weakened, wounded, lacerated, suffering, insufferable] coal. My ribs turn in their sockets, axle sideways and burst to tell it: the huge raccoon on hind legs thumping on the top of the car. What is this animal encounter, what, this animal misunderstanding. All raccoons are enemies. (They survive as well as we do.) (“The use of weapons for protection…from aggressive animals is a…morally neutral action” [Survivalcache.com].” It looked so evil when I killed it, but once it was dead I saw it was no bigger than my hand. What is this animal anger. That is the question. What, love? What if it were The Last Animal on Earth?

From California writer Eleni Sikelianos comes Make Yourself Happy (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2017), a collection composed as a study around human cause-and-effect of environmental destruction, connecting the human pursuit of happiness (including travel, drug addiction, restaurants, therapy, self-harm and home décor) to the ongoing extinction of multiple species. As she writes to open the poem “NOT-ENTHEOGEN (ANTISTROPHE)”: “We all began to think about the end / Of the world. We thought / We would / Kill / All the Animals.” Make Yourself Happy is an incredible book-length study on our relentless and often irresponsible pursuit for human happiness, and the destructive force our species have become on the planet, eradicating species after species to such an extent as to become the architects of our own extinction. Through the title section that opens the collection, Sikelianos explores the very idea of happiness, asking what exactly happiness means, what lengths some have gone to attain it, and how destructive that endless chase, for some, has become. In a recent interview, conducted by Srikanth Reddy and posted at BOMB Magazine, Sikelianos responds:

What do we mean by self-help? I don’t know, but I do know that poetry helps me all the time, to remember and question what being human is, to feel the articulations of where it might be in space, in relation to other living and nonliving things, to the political, the whole proprioceptive range. The poetry that most draws me tends to allow me to feel what’s at stake, which is both pleasure and pain.

We resist the self-help genre because it often ignores complexities of the world-problem. If you're helping yourself, what happens to the Other? I spent many years vehemently rejecting the notion of poetry as therapy. And I still do, because above all, it’s an art. But, at its most potent, it also does make things happen—it changes the writer and the reader.

I am definitely for claiming poetry as a space that does things. I am for claiming poetry as a space for most things we think it shouldn’t or doesn't do. Poetry is contested space, and the battles about what is allowed to go in and stay out are important. For example, there’s been an anti-didactic sentiment in the so-called experimental American poetry community for a while, and I understand where it’s coming from. Maybe at our most generous we could say it’s coming from an anti-hegemonic stance. It seems cousin to the ban on epiphany, which might be linked to the late 20th-century obsession with the materiality of the poem, of which we still feel the remnants. I am for that, but I am also for allowing things to appear out of the nonmaterial world.

One of the forces behind the poems in the first section was a desire to reclaim the pleasure of the poem, the hedonistic experience of sound and light and movement as they rush through language, in that sensorial buoyancy that, for me, is singular to poetry. To celebrate and to sing. (Whitman and I share a birthday, by the way!) We are living in an era when we have to reflect a lot of darkness, when the poem needs to work through a lot of calamity. Anne Waldman has recently referred to Agamben’s notion of looking into the darkness of our times, using darkness as a generative rather than a privative space. That’s important. But I wanted to rekindle that space of joy in the poem, for myself. But then of course Hedon gatecrashes and smashes up Eden.

Poetry is an original anti-growth movement, plowing back into itself, surviving “in the valley of its making,” to quote Auden. It is an original autopoeitic art form.

If poetry isn’t allowed to be self-help, how will it survive?

The second section, “HOW TO ASSEMBLE THE ANIMAL GLOBE” (which also includes the materials to assemble an actual physical paper globe, if one is willing to take scissors to the book), is sectioned into geographies, composing poems on now-extinct species that one populated Africa, “Islands,” Asia, Americas, Europe, “Australia/Oceania” and Antarctica. As she writes to end the poem “BUBAL HARTEBEEST,” subtitled “(ALCELAPHUS BUSELAPHUS BUSELAPHUS) / (nominate subspecies, North Africa, EX 1925?)”:

when viewed head-on, the horns

formed a U: the last captive female

died November 9, Jardin des Plantes, 1923

Get up, you can see that the people have not respected you, get up and walk away

sings the hartebeest, according

to oral tradition

Given the thematic nature of this collection, composed as a book-length accumulation of short lyric fragments based on extensive research, there is something reminiscent of the ongoing work of American poet Cole Swensen in Sikelianos’ Make Yourself Happy. While Swensen’s works might seem exploratory in comparison, Sikelianos’ Make Yourself Happy comes with a clear and omnipresent purpose from the beginning, one that asks “how did we get here?” as well as wondering, not only where it might lead, but how long we all might have left.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marty Cain

Marty Cain is the author of Kids of the Black Hole (Trembling Pillow, 2017), a book-length pastoral elegy about punk rock and southern Vermont, as well as www.enterthe.red, a digital poetry supplement. His creative and critical work appear in Fence, Jacket2, Boston Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Banango Street, Action Yes, and elsewhere. Presently, he is pursuing a PhD in English Language & Literature at Cornell University, where he studies rural poetics. With Kina Viola, he edits Garden-Door Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote my first book, Kids of the Black Hole, three years ago, halfway through my MFA, over the course of about three months. The original draft didn’t change very much between then and when the book was eventually published, but my relationship to the book feels hugely different. When I first wrote it, it felt like a viscerally intense catalog of things I’d been thinking about for years; it also felt like the first time I’d been able to represent my own experiences in any kind of totalizing way. But since then, I’ve begun to feel more like the book has its own kind of unconscious. I’ve realized, much after the fact, that it was a way of thinking/writing through trauma I didn’t yet have the language to process. My second (currently unpublished) manuscript, The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, largely attempts to dig deeper into these ideas—to analyze and understand trauma rather than to merely depict it in an immediate way.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first, and have a draft of a god-awful novel the world will fortunately never see. In college, a professor encouraged me to write poetry instead, and being ridiculously dependent on external validation, I quit fiction and became a poet. It was a good decision!

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?
It varies from project to project, but I tend to write pretty quickly. Preserving the immediacy of poems is very important to me, so I tend to not revise too much. (I do, however, obsessively shift around the way I sequence and frame pieces in manuscripts.)

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 think pretty much exclusively in terms of larger projects, and the books that have influenced me the most are almost exclusively “project”-oriented (Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Frank Stanford’s Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, everything by Aase Berg, etc.).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are integral to my process. I was really excited about punk music when I was growing up—its ethics of self-sufficiency and communal performance—and I strive to reproduce the same philosophies in my practices as a reader. When I have the money, I try to tour as much as I can.

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?
Again, it varies from project to project, but most of my work—and particularly my first book—is interested in the limits of narrative and the temporally confined literary “self.” What happens when poetry—through excess, through ecstatic feeling, or whatever—explodes this narrative frame? What happens to the self, to time? I’ve studied the pastoral for a number of years, and what interests me the most about this literary mode is its representation (and often, concealment) of time and labor. In contemporary culture, we’ve witnessed the violence of ahistoricism—of ahistorical whiteness, of “alternative facts,” and so on. But rigidly linear, rational versions of history feel oppressive, too. I’m interested in how we cope with this problem through writing—how we might envision new histories, new expressions of subjectivity, new versions of time that gesture towards utopian possibility.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There’s many different kinds of writers, so I don’t think I can ascribe a universalizing role for all of them. But for poets? I think it’s the job of the poet to defy authority; to fuck shit up; to gesture towards new ways of living and surviving. (I’m not claiming that I fully achieve any of these aims, but I try my best.) Perhaps most importantly, poetic language can represent living, feeling experience in a way that rationalist language cannot.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Most editors I’ve worked with have not been terribly prescriptive, which tends to work well for me. Shout-out to Megan Burns at Trembling Pillow Press, who is amazing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Jane Springer told me not to worship prize culture, institutions, and the other forms of capital that dominate the poetry world, and I’ll never forget this.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m working towards a PhD in literature right now, which forces me to move between genres whether I like it or not. While I identify as a poet more than anything else, I also get excited by having to work within (and subvert) constraints—like, say, scholarly conventions. My creative work continues to move in more of a multi-/anti- genre direction, so this feels natural, anyway—and my work is also very influenced by critics and theorists with wild and provocative prose, like Glissant and Kristeva.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I tend to write in cycles. I hardly write at all for most of the year, and then maybe for several weeks or a month, I irresponsibly push aside all other obligations and do nothing but write. Taking that time away from actually producing text—to just read, think, experience—is important to me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to my other obligations, to my friends, to anything. When I don’t feel like writing, I just stop.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of wood burning.

14 - 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?
Definitely music. And bookmaking. That’s still book-related, I guess, but hand-making chapbooks with Kina Viola at Garden-Door Press sometimes feels more empowering to me than writing poetry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ve already mentioned a few, but must of them have been older, so here’s a few contemporary folks that have influenced me greatly, or who I read recently and loved, or who I just think are really fucking good: Tim Earley, Carrie Lorig, Lucas de Lima, Joe Hall, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Steven Dunn, Sara Nicholson, and many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
An art installation. I’m interested in the relationship between text and physical space, but haven’t had many chances to explore this.

17 - 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?
I’d probably be a visual artist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
No idea. I start to feel extremely anxious if I’m not doing something creative, and writing is probably what I’m best at, so that’s what I do.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which somehow, ridiculously, I’d never read. The last great film… I thought It Comes at Night was incredible, though a lot of people seem to have disagreed with me.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m not working on anything right now, but I’m starting to send out my second manuscript, which is concerned with trauma, the essay, temporality, and rural life.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ploughshares : an interview with Michael Blouin

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my fifteenth post is now up: an interview with Ottawa-area poet and fiction writer Michael Blouin, author of a novel out this fall with Talonbooks, and another next spring with Anvil Press!

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with Erín Moure on translation, Montreal writer Jacob Wren, Toronto poet Marcus McCann, founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing, Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

Eve L. Ewing, Electric Arches

This book is about my life and maybe also your life. And it is about the places we invent. Every story in it is absolutely true. Some of the stories are from the past and some are from the future. In the future, every child in Chicago has food and a safe place to sleep, and mothers laugh all day and eat Popsicles. Every Fourth of July there are big fireworks and no one shoots a gun, not even police because there are no police, and when you go downtown and look up at the sky, the electric arches stretch so far toward heaven that you feel like you might be the smallest and most important thing ever to be born. (“A note of introduction”)

Chicago writer, scholar, artist and educator Eve L. Ewing’s debut poetry collection is Electric Arches (Chicago IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), a powerful montage of prose, sketches and lyric poems. Given the prose elements of the collection—moving between short fiction and memoir—at first I wasn’t sure why such a collection should be structured as poetry over, say, a more overt prose structure, but there is something about the use of poetry and other lyric elements that open the collection the way pure prose might not have been able to. Electric Arches includes handwritten script, short stories, memoir, images and banner-texts, moving between genre as easily as I’ve seen.

Throughout the collection are a series of “re-telling” poems, opening with a prose re-telling of a personal experience with racism that, mid-sentence, shifts into a handwritten script that alters the narrative entirely, shifting into a kind of magical dream-state, and are some of the most powerful pieces in the collection. In a recent article on Ewing and her new collection in the Chicago Reader, Aimee Levitt writes: “When she was a little girl and had nightmares, her mother would ask her to come up with an alternative ending: the monster wasn’t chasing her so he could eat her, he was trying to warn her that her shoe was untied. This was a way of learning to control the things that caused her anxiety. In a series of poems called ‘re-tellings,’ she recounts a series of potentially traumatizing events—being called ‘nigger,’ a time she saw four boys accosted by cops in Hyde Park—and imagines that instead of feeling paralyzed and helpless, she has magical powers to make things better. And so a racist woman becomes ‘possessed by a mighty and exuberant ghost-spirit’ that makes her dance, and the boys float into the air, leaving the cops grasping at their shoelaces.”

The first time [a re-telling]

I was six years old. I know I must have been six because I was on a two-wheeler bike by myself and my dad gave it to me for my sixth birthday. We lived on Fletcher. I was riding my bike up and down the block. I was allowed to go from one corner to the other by myself because that way my mom or anyone could see me if they just looked for me. The old white lady came down the block from time to time and sometimes she was nice and sometimes she was mean. She had short brown hair and small eyes. She always wore a heavy coat. This time she screamed at me. “You little nigger! You almost hit me with that bike? Go back to your nigger Jesse Jackson neighborhood! I told my mom and she told me the flying bike should only be for weekends, but okay, I could use it just this once. I ran back out and the lady was still there. I flew up on my bike and started going around her in small tight circles until she got very dizzy trying to watch me. Just as she was falling over I scooped her up with my giant net and flew her to the lake. I was going to drop her in the water but I felt bad so I left her on a rock and went home and had a paleta.

Electric Arches is a collection of black girlhood and survival, composing evocative and thoughtful poems such as “What I Talk About When / I Talk About Black Jesus,” “Note from LeBron James to LeBron James,” “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife,” “why you cannot touch my hair” and “one thousand and one ways to touch your own face [.]” She writes in such a way to be completely and critically aware of the space and time in which she exists, and to work to rise above the racism, ignorance and brutality she has both repeatedly witnessed and experienced. Reminiscent of recent collections by Morgan Parker [see my review of such here] and Tonya M.Foster [see my review of such here]. Eve L. Ewing and her poems are clearly a force to be reckoned with, composing declarations that see far beyond mere survival. Writing out the darkness, Electric Arches is ultimately a positive, provocative and even affirming collection.

how I arrived

1.

in flight from a war for my own holy self,

clinging to a steamship.

the old farmhouse one day fell in cinders

but today, first, burned into my corneas

still visible when I close my eyes.

a tangerine aura with no center.

I told them I would not fight.

2.

they mailed me from Mississippi

in a metal ice chest.

I taste salt at the sight of honeysuckle,

recalling some kind of way

the last bacon grease to touch

the back of my hand.

I danced, once

from Alabama westward

the longest cakewalk.

3.

I rode in on a bumblebee.

4.

I fell out of the dirt.

5.

I disguised myself as a painter in a time of artless men.

6.

I remember every note you ever wrote to me.

7.

when you pull all day from the coldest water you can find

and do not mind carrying your bicycle up the stairs,

July twilight comes so late

you might forget to end the day at all.

my (small press) writing day : new essays + a submission call,

I’ve been curious for some time about The Guardian’s occasional feature “My Writing Day,” and thought it might be interesting to do a blog of the same, “for those of us who might never make it into The Guardian.”

[note: this isn’t a dig at The Guardian; I just thought it might be fun to play with the format]

So, like a fool, I’ve started a new blog: my (small press) writing day.

Short essays have already appeared by Amish Trivedi, Colin Morton, rob mclennan, Sonia Saikaley, Amanda Earl, Jean Van Loon, Karl E. Jirgens, Lisa Pasold and Robert Martin Evans, with forthcoming pieces by Jennifer Pederson, Carla Hartsfield, Jason Christie, Eleni Zisimatos, Christian McPherson, Chris Johnson, Sacha Archer, Jared Schickling, Paul Carlucci, Gil McElroy and plenty more! And submissions are very welcome...

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Shira Dentz

Shira Dentz [photo credit: Ellen Maddick] is the author of three full-length books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), and how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming, 2018), and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her books have been reviewed in many venues including American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and Boston Review, and interviews with her have appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and OmniVerse.

Her writing has appeared widely in journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Entropy, Brooklyn Rail, and Western Humanities Review, and featured at The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah. Shira was Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor from 2011-2016, and is now Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com. 

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?

I don’t know that the publication of my first book changed my life, except that I certainly was no longer eligible to submit to first book poetry contests. As Francis Picabia wrote, “our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’m not sure that I came to poetry first, or even that it came to me first. When I was seven, I made a pact to try to be a writer, and when I became a teenager, I decided it was time to start work on this (even in my imagination there was a felt time for initiation?). My first piece happened to be a poem in response to a poem that I felt angry at in Seventeen magazine. This being said, most of my life I referred to myself as a writer, not a poet, as I didn’t really differentiate // there’s poetry in all genres. In fact, I practiced as a visual artist too and “artist” is a term that I still go back and forth with. Now that I write a lot of hybrid stuff, I say that I’m “mostly a poet”—go figure.

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?

No set time: small, medium, long, infinite. It can come quickly and done in one-go (not so-often). It can come piecemeal and extend over many years and still not reach closely enough to what I’m reaching after; these open-ended attempts have become a genre of poem in my mind. Nascent poems that arrive like imaginary friends when their triggers reappear.

Sometimes what I’m writing leads me to do some research which I love because I get to learn a lot of interesting things outside of what I’d otherwise encounter.

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?

A poem for me usually sprouts from a strong sensation or feeling, an image, a sudden connection that I find enigmatic that I’d like to probe further, or from free-writing. I always tell my students that writing happens when you’re writing even though it’s hard for me to practice what I preach (I tell them that too).

I think there are writers/artists who generally work from the “outside in” and ones who generally work “inside out,” and that I’m one who most often works from the inside out. Each approach comes with its own challenges, and I am an expert now at talking at about the challenges of having the “inside out” orientation. (The period is like a belly-button too, signifying the independence of phrase. Implicitly within a context.)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Giving public readings, for me, are part of being a writer—it’s a way of giving voice to the lyrical component of one’s writing, one’s voice being a medium—and another way for others to access one’s art. I love to be invited to read HINT HINT, and especially love readings accompanied with an honorarium.

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?

Channeling Francis Picabia again, “our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To connect (fill the blank) __________________________

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Insightful articulate editors rock. Among my most instructive experiences with an editor was with Maria Anderson at Essay Press.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

From Jean Valentine—you have to be there (at your “writing desk”) in order to be there when it comes.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Easy, except from poetry to fiction and perhaps back again. (Wow, food for thought, maybe I have trouble moving to fiction because I’m afraid that if I do, I won’t be able to access writing poetry again. Thank you for this question!!)  Why do some painters draw and sculpt, too? My art medium is language and I like to explore what I can do with it as much as I conceive possible.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Depends on where I am and the nature of my employment. I do feel that having a writing routine is important to keep me flexed as a writer. My typical day begins with me wishing I hadn’t woken up so early and relishing not having to get out of bed yet.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Peer writing groups, readings, art exhibits (“art” is defined here as anything artistic: concerts, visual art, dance, etc.), nature, art residencies, setting a time to write and sticking with it even if what I write feels totally (for lack of a better word) uninspired. Try to remember what I tell my students, writing happens when you’re writing. Once I’m “in it,” the process takes over—

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

the smell in the air midway between summer and fall; essential oils like eucalyptus, lavender, and sage clary; chocolate gelato with chocolate chips; peace.

14 - 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?

Yes, all of the above.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So many I can’t list them otherwise an avalanche will bury us. Different ones at different periods and for different reasons.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Travel to a lot of places including Alaska and Vietnam. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

17 - 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?

Astronomer. Visual artist. Musician. Multi-media designer of the opening credits of films. Someone who’s very critical (in a smart way) once said that if I were a lawyer, they’d hire me. I think I would’ve been a very good lawyer if I hadn’t needed to be an artist, and I’d be rich, though I’d probably be a social advocate lawyer so not-so rich.

Also something to do with eyes. Eyes are suns.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

my brother’s death, childhood, the word “never”

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy Publishing Project, 2017). My Cousin Rachel, a 2017 film based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel.

Other recently experienced standouts: Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Moure (Wesleyan, 2017), Certain Magical Acts; Alice Notley (Penguin, 2016); Monsters, Karen Brennan (Four Way Books, 2016); Dear Data, a collaboration between Giorgia Lup and Stefani Posavec (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae (Wesleyan, 2017). I Love Dick (Amazon Video, 2016). And Stephen Colbert’s opening monologues, like poetry, on The Late Show almost every night during the agonizing current and ongoing political nightmare in the U.S.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Writing whatever in order to find what I’m writing, peer writing group prompts, and a Dream Box centered around constructing a nontraditional sense of “home.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;