Originally
from Iowa City, Josh Fomon is a political operative in
Seattle. His
book, Though we bled meticulously was
published by Black Ocean in 2016.
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
can’t say for certain how having a book has changed my life. I probably have
less anxiety about writing and publishing—I feel like I can permit myself to
have a more measured approach and relationship with my writing. Maybe that’s
just growing older though.
There
is an incalculable feeling of someone even telling me they read my book—it’s
even better than when Carrie Olivia Adams and Janaka Stucky initially accepted
my manuscript with Black Ocean, which had been a seemingly impossible dream.
My
recent work has my same obsessions—death, longing, and articulating the
physical and metaphysical, and where the two intersect—but I think the work is more
overt in finding precision in moments of unknowing the everyday, the treachery
of nostalgia, the tangible effects we have on the world—overtly apocalyptic and
finding the language held within the detritus. And existential dread always,
because we have so much capacity for hope and despair.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say,
fiction or non-fiction?
I
never had the patience or attention for plot or narrative when I was younger—I
was an addled youth. That’s changed now, thankfully, but poetry’s music and
abstraction drew me in and never let go.
The
musicality of language became a preternatural obsession, which I don’t think
I’ll ever be able to escape no matter the genre. Poetry feels like a natural
way to think.
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?
With
Though we bled meticulously (TWBM),
the poems grew out of necessity after having abandoned a full manuscript that
became tedious—and a rupture in my personal life. As silly as this sounds, it
felt as though the book intuited itself through me—I think the core poems and
shape of the book were written in about six months. Many of the early drafts for
TWBM are similar to how they appear in the book.
Once
a project shows me its trajectory, the thinking and poems tend to obsess and
preoccupy me—and I need to constantly find a way out to keep from stagnating
the energy, yet maintain the necessity of the work. I write in spurts—sometimes
prolifically over days, then nothing at all for months. My process is always a
work-in-progress until it isn’t—the absence of writing is itself a kind of obligatory
percolation.
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?
For
me, writing is an incantatory process that slowly unravels and reveals itself
to me, especially through the music of the line—more than anything, I feel like
a conduit through which an idea sings. In this sense, I think I write most
often when I have the capacity to sustain thoughts and can read—my writing
begins with an urgency to react and reanimate dead things.
I’m
a project writer, though the project is never something I set out to write—I
find it when it wants to announce itself and captivates me in its thinking. Poems
often begin as longer, sprawling pieces that share similar obsessions that
finally relent into something fully formed.
Lately,
I’ve been trying to approach writing in a way that feels foreign—I’m more
interested in how poems betray so much within themselves and to the reader,
which feels more divinatory and uncharted.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I
love readings and the opportunity for writers to articulate how they envision
the work aurally. It’s such a great way to dig into the music of the poem and
connect with readers. Readings are such a vital part of poetry and the writing
community—as many as there seem to already be, we always need more reading
series, and people dedicated to creating community, because what is poetry if
not community.
I
think there is sometimes a huge resistance toward performing a poem—but it’s one
of the few ways readers get to hear the poem as the writer intended. In my
writing, I feel out what the music and poem demands—performing gives me the
opportunity to take this off the page and delight in the sonic shape of the
lyric. Sound matters because it taps into the vitality of the work—a life
force—poetry is the vocals and the backing band. I think we need to put more
care into sculpting our performances—poets should be more interested in
professional wrestling, standup comedy, drag, and glam rock.
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?
I
like poetry that ideates on the page—language has the capacity to explore and
engage with an inexhaustible amount of knowing and unknowing. I’m drawn to
poetry that explores existential and metaphysical spaces—poetry that thinks
toward questions, and lingers.
I’m
obsessed with writers like Edmond Jabès (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Jaime Saenz,
Mina Loy, and Will Alexander who utilize language as means to contemplate
greater existential inquiries. They are incredibly complex thinkers, but they
also conjure a process of destabilizing experience within their work and use
language as means to an end for their philosophical concerns—they capture the
experience of thinking.
I
like yelling toward a void and seeing if anything echoes back. I think that is
itself a question.
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?
Writers
have the ability to articulate the changing world—they are keen observers. I’ve
been working in politics for the past few years and have begun to see the
importance in art’s ability to outlast—writing and art typically are separate
than a news cycle and ask questions that defamiliarize context and outlast. I
suppose there is a kind of brutal truth to this. Writing has the opportunity to
exist outside of time as an artifact of a particular moment—and it has the
means to articulate the complexity of it.
I
think art, at large, is a reactionary interpretation of the difficulty our
society faces—I think our world is reshaping itself wholly right now, which is
great and long overdue, but we have centuries of inequalities and racism to
deal with. We need writers for this.
As
for the role of the writer? We write because we must, and assuredly, this is a
reaction to the culture we live in. I don’t think this is particularly
profound. Art is created from a void of our own making—our need to say
something and be heard. We should be better about lifting up voices unlike our
own.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside
editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working
with outside editors has been a way to recognize my worst impulses, and learn
how to excise them. Outside perspective untangles the internal logic of the
writing, and recognizing and identifying this is an essential means of learning
how to edit. Before TWBM was accepted at Black Ocean, a few incredible friends
and mentors began the process of exorcising the book’s excesses in early drafts,
and they were able to parse out the restraint it needed.
Working
with Carrie Olivia Adams was great--I think by the time my final draft got to
her there were few major edits, but she also interrogated the writing where it
needed to be interrogated and the book was better off for it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not
necessarily given to you directly)?
To
paraphrase, Jane Gregory once told me a writer needs to believe in their work
or else no one will care. I think that really extends to everything in life,
but having a certain confidence or swagger about knowing you don’t know
anything is truly life changing when you face an empty page—you begin with
intent.
Just
as important, Joanna Klink taught me an invaluable lesson—always write beyond
the natural, intuitive ending into the uncomfortable, unsettling feeling of
finding out what the work actually has to say.
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?
Lately,
I’ve been an infrequent writer and haven’t held a solid routine. I write when I
can and am grateful for whenever I can find a block of time where I can sustain
my focus on writing. I’ve also been scheduling writing dates to be liable for
producing new work. Solidarity is a hell of a motivator.
I
write best in the middle of the day to the late afternoon—coffee and beer, and Broken
Water allow me to enter an embodied trance
where the destabilizing magic begins.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or
return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m
a firm believer of letting writing stall out and having many projects going at
once until something captivates me. The work lives on—and allows me to refine
everything later. Thinking is an important part of my process—allowing myself
to hate something and realize why it isn’t working may be more important to me
now than anything else.
Oftentimes,
I stall out because I simply don’t have the time to write, or the anxieties of
life demand more than I can give to writing—I think this is fine, though. Given
my line of work over the past few years, I’ve had to often put my writing on
pause as a political campaign envelopes me—it’s hard to write when you don’t
have a day off for months in a row and you’re working 60-70 hour weeks. It’s
kind of tragically charming how binary and siloed off the two worlds are—they
can’t coexist no matter how hard I’ve tried.
Parquet
Courts have a great line in respect to this: “It never leaves me,/just visits
less often”.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I
grew up in Iowa City, and the earth creates thresholds of life. For me, the
petrichor and fecundity of spring is home. The deep rawness of thawing black
earth overtakes you there—even in the city. I currently live in Seattle, which
washes away its scent too readily and too often—its smell is distinct yet thoroughly
elusive.
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?
Film,
visual art, sound art, and science all inform my writing—physics is profoundly
wild. I lived in D.C. for a short time and spent all the time I could in
museums, during which the exhibit Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950
at the Hirschhorn became a master class in how to create and destroy—Ori
Gersht’s “Big
Bang” taught me how to revise my book.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your
work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Prageeta Sharma, Elizabeth Robinson, Jane Gregory, and Peter Richards have given me
incalculable support and guidance. Black Ocean has been a foundation for me,
and I admire Carrie and Janaka for their dedication and I’m so grateful to have
a book with them. In Seattle, I’m looking forward to new books and projects from
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Richard Chiem, Jane Wong, Bill Carty, Quenton Baker, and Don Mee Choi—to name just a few of the phenomenally talented writers
in this city, which has a genuine abundance of amazing writers. Willie Fitzgerald’s Twitter is the national
treasure America deserves. Seattle might have the best writing community I’ve
ever encountered.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I
would love to write and direct a film.
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?
I
wish writing could be an occupation for me—I currently work in politics when I
can, which is its own crazy, bizarre, and insular world. I wish I would have
gotten into filmmaking or woodworking—I love working with my hands—though, I
suppose, there is always still time to do that.
EDIT:
Hilariously, since starting this interview, I started a new job writing
remotely for a political communications firm in D.C.—I love every moment I’m
writing so far, but will have a better read come January. To say 2018 is going
to be an interesting year in politics might be the understatement of the year.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something
else?
I’ve
been in a pretty constant tug-of-war between my two lives—politics is wholly
consuming, and writing and art is always fighting for more of my attention.
Writing, more than anything, is something that can be done anywhere, at any
time, with little capital investment—the musicality and physical experience of
writing just can’t be replicated.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the
last great film?
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve
been working on prose lately—a handful of short stories in progress and a
novella that may never happen, but a new poetry project just took hold, which
is exciting, grotesque, and existentially curious. It feels all very connected.
