1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book came out just before I moved to Minnesota to take my first full-time job, and just before Jessie and I got married, so it's definitely something I remember as a sign of change! It was also a book about adolescence, about feeling unfinished and full of undirected energy, and also a book about being semi-closeted and having open secrets, and it was a book addressed to a wildly varied set of imagined readers, some of them in what we used to call the soft avant-garde. Some of the people from that soft avant-garde are still friends (I think and hope!) and I still love to read and write about poems that wholly defy prose paraphrase, but I'm more comfortable now with writing poems that have prose sense as part of their projects (someday I want to have a conversation with Jennifer Moxley about these questions!), and I'm also a happier, more secure person, someone who feels like I'm part of a supportive and joyful, if very strange and sometimes imperiled community. Also everyone knows I'm a girl, and I use rhyme more, with fewer apologies.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn't! As a teen I wanted to write essays and science fiction short stories and poems. It turns out that I'm only capable of creating extended narratives under three sets of circumstances: 1. translating or "translating" from ancient Greek verse, 2. writing fanfiction, 2. collaborating with a close friend who's good at narrative. That leaves, in terms of work that I can do on my own intended for publication, poetry and critical or expository essays. And that's what I write!
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 All Depends. We Are Mermaids has poems that took five years to finish, and poems that took three hours to reach final form. Either way I do go back and look at drafts days later to see whether they seem finished. I've learned a bit more over the past few years-- when I've been more confident in my own skin-- about when and whether to leave drafts alone.
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?
Short pieces, almost always. Sometimes I realize after I've written five or ten poems that "belong" together that I've got a project, and then I ask Eric and Kelly from Rain Taxi whether I can do a chapbook, and so far they've been wonderful about saying yes. The Callimachus book (2020) came about because poets and editors I trust saw me translating, or "translating," him and asked if I wanted to do a lot more.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings, perhaps alas. I like attention, and I do sometimes meet people that way! I've been known to read brand-new poems at readings to see if they sound right, and to tweak or edit them from the lectern, unobtrusively (or "unobtrusively").
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?
*flails wildly hoping a critic will bail her out* How do we find community, friendship, love, and how do we honor our obligations to those we love? What can we expect? How do we reconcile the possibility of personal happiness with the fact that the world is going to purgatory in a 2-5ºC handbasket, and what can we as speakers and actors with our own private emotional lives do? Does anyone like the X-Men or the Legion of Super-Heroes as much as I do? for the same reasons, even?
Those are some of my questions. There are others!
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?
Depends on the writer. Don't let anyone tell you what The Role of the Writer should be. Some writers find it creatively essential to take on public, or pedagogical, roles that would absolutely eviscerate other writers. Seek or shun the spotlight as you need. And honor and assist people who are *not writers,* who are, for example, climate advocates, or candidates for local office, or inventors of assistive technology, or providers of free dental care. All of those people do more for social justice, I think, than I as a poet can. But I can write poems about them and their goals.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I've been lucky in my editors: Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, Lara Heimert at Basic, and (most recently) Philip Leventhal at Columbia and Sharmila Sen at Harvard. Poetry editors have very different briefs than editors of critical prose! The latter can make all sorts of recs, and I often follow them. The former... Jeff has helped me organize my collections, and helped me decide what to leave in and what to leave out; it's rarer for him to make suggestions re individual words and lines in particular poems.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
For poets? Translate. Whether or not it's intended for publication, whether or not you are fluent in the language. Don't present your translation as accurate if you're not sure it's accurate: present it as "based on" or "indebted to." But translate.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Criticism is an applied art: it serves its readers as well as its object, and it's responsible to something outside itself. Poems aren't like that, or not ordinarily. I don't know that I move between genres so much as I feel moved. I definitely find it easier to work on poems when I'm reading a lot of poems by other people, or when I have more free time (ha!): sometimes (this week included) I'm absolutely trapped under the weight of critical writing I've promised to do (not complaining: I do enjoy doing it). And that's increasingly critical writing that's not, or not only, about how to read poems. (I've been writing about how to read poems for most of my life and I have no plans to stop, but it's fun to write on other things too.)
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?
Typical weekday: I get up, make coffee, take trans meds, and see what I need to do to help kids get to school, and to help other people I love get where they need to go. That can take half an hour or....much, much longer.
Then, if I'm teaching that day, I go to campus and teach. If not, I get some time at home to write things. What things? IDK. It depends on my afternoon. And on my kids' afternoon.
I'm sorry that's not more fun as a "writing routine." My day is really dictated by what I owe other people, what I've agreed to do for them, what I think they need. Wow, that was more revealing than I expected!
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My friends and partners. Superhero comics. Obscure pop music. Also Taylor Swift. But also: Yeats, Donne, Muldoon, Laura Kasischke, Angie Estes, Terrance Hayes.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Autumn leaves. Briscuit. Apricot chicken breasts.
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?
So many so many so many that I remember promising Jeff (Shotts, my editor) that one book would include No More Poems About Works of Art By Other People.
The science fiction stories of James Tiptree Jr. The fantasy novels of Rachel Hartman. The queer realist YA novels of Rachel Gold. Music! Unisex by Blueboy. Rites of Spring by Rites of Spring. Anything by Game Theory. Any of the bands with Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, from Heavenly to Catenary Wires. New Mutants comics by Claremont and Sienkiewicz. New Mutants comics by Claremont and Bridgeman. New Mutants comics by Ayala and Reis. And I'm currently trying to learn from hyperpop.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I just named some! I'll also name a few early-career poets whom I see pretty regularly, who have turned out to be important to my life *as people,* whose writings I admire, who live in our town: Rachel Trousdale and Catherine Rockwood. I'll also name the poets Allan Peterson and Liz Waldner and the late Lucia Perillo as poets I want everybody to read. And the late Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, the best 19th century poet you haven't heard yet.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write superhero comics.
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 would have tried to be a culture journalist and a music writer in the NYC nonacademic publishing world, realized I couldn't keep asking my parents for money, and tried to go to graduate school later in life than I did: I probably would have ended up teaching high school or getting a creative writing degree. Or both! I think I'd be happy teaching high school but I wouldn't have nearly as much time to write books as I do teaching college and graduate school.
Sometimes I think I would have been more socially useful had I tried to work for progressive politicians, becoming a speechwriter for Tammy Baldwin or something like that, but I am not sure I have anything like the temperament, let alone the talents, for that, and I'm definitely happier doing what I do now.
For a long time I wanted to be a drummer in a touring rock band. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that any more.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I can't sing very well, I'm not a great keyboard player, and you don't want me in your molecular biology lab: I'd spill the pipettes. That left writing poetry, and writing about poetry, and writing other kinds of cultural criticism, as the big thing that I (a) like doing and (b) maybe do well enough that it could be a path for a fulfilling adult life.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Watership Down by Richard Adams (meaning the great one I read for the first time most recently, not the most recently published great book). People who read it in childhood seem to remember it as crushingly sad, and they could not be more wrong! It's a vision of a just and sustainable society, of kindness and resourcefulness and sometimes emotionally difficult collaboration. Also almost all the characters are bunnies. (There is a seagull, who speaks rabbit language with a strong seagull accent, and if no one has written Kehar fanfic I may have to do it myself.)
I am going to dodge your film question by objecting to the way we elevate film above other visual media and instead recommend comics: among company owned superhero comics, Vita Ayala and Rod Reis's run on New Mutants, and among independent comics, The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Revised rules for the science fiction role playing game that we play in my science fiction class! After that, an essay on time and queer and trans identities in a poem by Danez Smith, with possible reference back to John Donne, and after that, a collaborative novel and a collaborative short story!
Thanks again for the chance to do this!
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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