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 don't know that I would say that my first book changed my life. It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory. I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force. My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I'd just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church. The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.
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?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project. I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I'm trying to stay with them, I'm trying to see how they bloom. Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus. I'd definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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'd say I'm a collector. I am constantly collecting language, and images, and methods along the way and not knowing how I will use them right away. I'll see a video about how a visual artist uses the xerox photo transfer, and then a year later read an essay about disarticulation and will see a connection and will write something, but the notes are foundational. I'm definitely not working on a book from the beginning.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings definitely provide information about the work. How I want to experiment with its sound, how it resonates. I'm testing things in performance.
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?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing. How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, "does one narrate the loss of loss?" He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative. So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence. This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence. I don't have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.
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'm not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture. I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I'm less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It's definitely both difficult and essential to work with an editor in my experience. I could not have done the necessary work on Without Terminus without my brilliant editors. And it was so so hard.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To "look where it ain't." Acknowledgements here to Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think I've always been moving between genres, even while writing poetry, and that is not something I find difficult or even necessarily innovative on my part, it's a part of an ongoing conversation with Jean Toomer's Cane, and Audre Lorde's Zami, and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, and John Edgar Wideman's Fanon, and Alexis Pauline Gumb's M Archive, and Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes, and Dionne Brand's The Blue Clerk and Renee Gladman's TOAF, fahima ife's maroon choreography and none of these books are just one thing, and this list could go on forever.
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 have four kids, and teach during the academic year, and raise chickens, and work in my garden and read when I can find quiet space during the day, and am taking notes always, and just trying to be present. So, my process is not structured around a number of hours I have of unbroken writing, it's a slow accretion of close observations.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I go back to Renee Gladman, to James Baldwin, and Morrison, there are others too, but Gladman's Plans for Sentences, Baldwin's Go Tell it On The Mountain, and Morrison's Beloved, the magic of those three book's sentences can lift me from anywhere.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Home is a complicated term for me. But there is a memory I have with my nana, that showed up as a recurring dream where I am picking at her moles in the backseat of her Volkswagon and I could distinctly smell smoke and the sweetness of apples.
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?
Music and visual art deeply influence my work. I wrote Without Terminus while listening to Moses Sumney on repeat, and the paintings of Caroline Kent, the drawings of Renee Gladman, the memory art of Naida Awad. So much art outside of literary art marks the work I do.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I'm gonna lift up Mirene Arsanios' The Autobiography of a Language. Ever since I read that book in a seminar course a few years ago it has lived inside my mind.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd love to time travel, barring that I'd love to see a whale.
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?
If I could pick any occupation, it would be an horologist, or clockmaker.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know if I'd say anything made me write, but it is now a part of the condition of my living.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Salvage: Readings From The Wreck by Dionne Brand.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on a book length essay on madness, and blackness and glossolalia.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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