12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nicole Zdeb

Nicole Zdeb is an editor at Airlie Press, a consulting astrologer, and a writer. Originally from Vermont, Nicole spent her formative years on the East Coast before settling in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, writer Jamie Cooper. Nicole holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and works at the University of Kansas. Her first full-length collection of poems, The End of Welcome, was published by Airlie Press in 2025. www.nicolezdeb.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This is my first full-length book so I am experiencing  how my life is changing. It came out the same year my father died, so it’s been a year of initiations.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry is the genre that has the strongest grip on me. It calls me back, continuously. It reflects the natural state of my thought process - elliptical, associative, elusive, and fragmentary.

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?
Starting? I am a quick starter. When drafting, the words flow like cheap merlot. I turn my executive mind off and my receiving mind on and enter the current, banging away with utter freedom. But that’s not how I polish, revise, or craft. There’s a great divide between the drafting process and the rest of it. 

When I was working on The End of Welcome, I collated all the versions of the poems in it and that manuscript was close to 800 pages. So the process with The End of Welcome included wrestling with an 800-page tiger. 

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?
The End of Welcome was individual pieces that found themselves cohabitating in the same manuscript. The manuscript evolved over a period of about six or seven years. The manuscript I am working on right now has started as a book - it’s thematically linked and being written with the end shape in mind. The methodology is project dependent. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I find readings enchanting. There’s something ancient and nourishing about humans gathering to hear other humans. 

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?
The End of Welcome has social concerns around abuse of power and tyranny. It engages in questioning who has agency, who controls progress and our bodies, and who dictates the direction of our collective hope. The name itself is a nod to that - the age of America as a welcoming agent to the dispossessed, the searching, the poor and resilient is over. It’s becoming a plutocratic dystopia. Who belongs? 

Here are a couple of the questions on my mental altar:

How do we keep world-centric and human-centric without becoming cynical, exhausted, and hopeless?

How do we keep ourselves tender enough to rest and eat good food and laugh when the emperor is running around naked and stark? 

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 don’t know what the role of the writer is in larger culture - we are treading in waters that reject the intellectual, complexity, liberalism, and the humanities. Throw AI into the mix and it’s a watershed moment. Society is reshaping and so is the role of its gatekeepers, champions, and pillars.

In terms of the ideal writers role, it depends on the writer. If the writer is a small-minded bigot from Dogpatch who uses their platform to spew orange vomit, then a NPC role would be preferable.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Personally, I’d rather stick my tit in a Cuisinart. 

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to stories to essays to reviews to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?
Its natural to glide between painting, photography, poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews, but I can’t sing or dance, and that’s why I never made it as a Rockette. 

The appeal? There’s pleasure in multiplicity. Different genres let you do different things, offer different quests, and present different challenges.

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’ve been writing for 41 years and I don’t have a Routine. I have provisional routines. Sometimes they will last a week, sometimes a month, sometimes a season. I’m in flux.

Right now, this is my routine: Monday through Friday, get up at 6 am and write for 1.5 hours in the morning before work. When I am done with my work day, I need to unfold my mind and let it flutter on the breeze. I am in bed by nine pm, so there’s no night writing sessions anymore. But thirty years ago? I’d be writing till dawn’s wine-stained fingers ripped the pen out of my fist.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Astrology. I have a system where I use horary charts (charts of the hour) to unlock when I get locked up. I engage with the universe as a creative partner.  

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pierogies and onions and Emeraude.

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?
Visual art - I get juiced when I am at a gallery or museum. Spending time with visual art changes my brainwaves and unlocks escape hatches and secret doors. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
For my life outside of my creative work, I read a lot of astrology since I have been a consulting astrologer since the late 90’s: William Lilly, Liz Greene, Demetra George, Chris Brennan, Renn Butler, and Steven Forrest are a few of the names on my shelf.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Build a yurt.

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?
Perfume designer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Absolutely no choice in the matter. Makes me wonder about free will, tbh. I’ve been writing creatively since I was 11 years old. In a dynamic life filled with reinventions, writing is the throughline.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve been on a Han Kang kick lately and was absolutely blown to bits by Human Acts. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
A fun project that marries my two favorite things: poetry and perfume. I spent about a season waking up early and starting each day with a perfume. I’d sit in the semi-dark and smell the perfume, put it on my body, smell it as it developed, and then write about it. Then I explored what the public was saying about each perfume and what the perfume house itself was saying. I’m layering those three axis of language around each scent: the personal, the social, and the corporate.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mia Kang

Mia Kang is the author of All Empires Must (Airlie Press, 2025), which won the 2023 Airlie Prize, and the chapbooks Apparent Signs (Ghost City Press, 2024) and City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, wildness, and elsewhere. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest, she has also received awards and residencies from Brooklyn Poets, the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Millay Arts, and University of the Arts. Whatever prizes she has won, she paid for three-fold in submission fees. www.miaadrikang.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?

My recent book All Empires Must is my first full-length, and I'm not sure if its publication has changed my life. My main feelings toward its release have to do with the strangeness of being nearly a decade removed from the process of writing it. The years I spent working on those poems (2015-2017), however, certainly changed my life. It was my first experience working on a project at that scale, and it was also my deepest experience with writing to date, in the sense that I discovered how an immersive conceptual engagement could process personal experience into something else. I think the book is more serious, maybe braver, than what I've written since, but it's also less honest, or self-accountable. I guess that's the description of being young.

The best way of describing the difference between my recent work and my previous is probably to say I have become less precious about poetry. Part of that is that I've become less ambitious, in the sense of some external idea of "achievement" as a writer. I want to be serious, but I do not want to be prestigious, which I desperately did want when I was younger. That allows me to be looser, to try more varied approaches, and to let things take the time they take.

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

As a kid, I actually tried to write fiction first. But I could never get a story to go anywhere. I would get mired in description. Plot held no interest for me. When I first started getting serious about poetry, after I moved to NYC in my late teens, I also tried to write non-fiction intermittently. I could only really do it in email form. There's a trove of long emails I wrote to family members from the years I was 17 and 18, plus a bunch I wrote to a mainly email-based lover the years I was 18 through 20 or so. But I've never succeeded in connecting with the essay as a form for my own thinking. I have the vague memory––possibly fabricated––of my first poems being written on scraps of paper. Poetry writing, in that sense, was easier to hide. Haha. 

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?

Total variety. I tend to start from some kind of fixation. I've probably grown more attuned over the years to what kind of fixation might be likely to hold up as the basis for writing and what might not, but I still get surprised. I think I used to be closer to writing on a day-to-day basis; I used to find that first lines or sticking phrases would pop up and I would go from there. Since having my relationship to reading and writing completely reconfigured by various engagements with institutions (that's the avoidant way of saying graduate school), I've had to work much harder to make space for language to show itself. I'm not very disciplined about it, frankly, and sometimes I feel bad about that.

The poems in All Empires Must often came in a single sitting, but each poem (and the book as a whole) was at one point or another completely taken apart, edited, and reformulated. Some of the early drafts would eventually kind of splice into each other and become different poems. My second manuscript (unpublished, titled PERISH / ABOLISH) arrived more intact––individual poems still required refinement, but not in the same "down to the studs" kind of way. More of the thinking was done exterior to the poetry, in the second book. Also I was really, really, really angry all the time. Poems would get spit out in an already hardened state.

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 guess I jumped the gun and answered the first part of this above. I'm always thinking in terms of projects, whether the project is a "book" or something else. I can't stomach the notion of a poem that stands alone.

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

Still trying to figure this out! I do enjoy readings, kind of. I like the physical act of reading aloud, and I'm interested in the thing that can happen when that happens with an audience. However, I am also someone who finds it hard to track a poem when I'm listening to it being read aloud. I greatly prefer reading from the page. I know not everyone is like that, but it always makes me feel weird about reading publicly myself.

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?

Yes. What is writing? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? What does writing do?

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?

See questions in answer above.

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

I can't say that I've had too much experience working with an outside editor on poetry. With my first chapbook, City Poems, I got some great edits from the folks at ignitionpress. There was one long poem in particular that they helped me refine over several versions. At the time, I hated the process, but it absolutely made the book better, and I think I would be much more appreciative of that kind of editing now. I wish I had had the chance to work with an editor on All Empires Must. It won a book contest, so it was published basically exactly as I submitted it.

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

I don't know if I think it's the best piece of advice, but it's the first thing that comes to mind: don't give up on a piece until you've gotten 100 rejections. Sadly, much about publishing is a numbers game, given the total lack of infrastructure for poetry.

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?

Alas, I have no routine. My day begins with feeding cats and making coffee. From there it unravels.

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

To writers and books I love. I'll reread the poetry books that have been most important to my writing life. I'll especially turn to the work of dear friends. But also, and maybe more importantly, I need to go outside of writing. Learning something new helps, as does engaging with the material world (cooking, gardening, cleaning). Visual and performance art have often been the things that get what's stuck to move.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Copal. 

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?

My study of art history has run alongside my writing since the beginning, I guess. Architecture moves me more than probably any other visual form. Watching and thinking about and sometimes making dance and performance have been central to my writing as well.

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

Wayyyyy too many to name, so I'll just say Cam Scott because everybody knows it already.

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

You're catching me in August, and I've been to a lot of baseball games recently. I really, really want to be able to walk on the field at the Phillies' ballpark, with few or no other people on it. Maybe this is the memory of the proscenium; I just feel I need to experience this.

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'm a nonprofit administrator, occupation-wise. I'm also qualified as an art historian, though I'm not teaching much these days due to the terrible conditions of that occupation. I'm working toward sitting for a CPA license. I wish I could be an NBA player (I have never played basketball at all). I estimate I will attempt 5-7 more occupations before I die. 

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

I do many things else. Mainly else. I started my life as a dancer, and I got injured. Writing is less expensive than say, painting, which I have no talent for anyway. Language is a source of pleasure and the stupidest kind of cage (the one you make yourself!). Everything is writing.

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

The last great book was Emily Skillings' second book, Tantrums in Air, which came out recently from The Song Cave. I first read it in manuscript form over a year ago, and it is beyond fantastic and everyone should read it. I barely watch movies. The last great film I watched was probably Scarface, because I watch it once or twice a year, and I don't think Center Stage (with which I maintain a similar schedule) counts as a great film.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a book tentatively titled Rookie of the Year. The book centers around a long, overdetermined metaphor between my failed engagement and the so-called Process, the strategy by which the Philadelphia 76ers have been trying to build a team and win a championship since 2013. I'm still early on in the project, but I think the book is really about the beauty of devotion and the incongruity of the devastation by which it is accompanied. Several basketball-related poems from the project have appeared on The Rights to Ricky Sanchez podcast over the past year or so. None of these are published in a normal way yet, but you can hear Spike Eskin read "Breach of Promise," or you can see me give a live performance on the occasion of the NBA Draft Lottery. I have a lot of problems. Daryl Morey, please give me a press pass so I can write this book.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Mia Kang, All Empires Must

 

Travelogue

I faint
in flight and fall and fall. I come to 

a hill above the city.
There’s Rome, at a nice 

remove—seems like
itself from here. Each day, retrieve 

book from shelf. Out
the windows, in the pages 

figures of
a wall that might 

as well be mine. Aureliana
suits me; each gate opening 

new ways
not to arrive.

The full-length debut by Philadelphia poet Mia Kang, following her pamphlet debut, City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020), is the impressive All Empires Must (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2025), a title I found unexpectedly second-hand at Books Upstairs in Dublin, of all places. “I summon my cruelty / but cannot / name him.” she writes, to open the poem “The Author Calls Him X,” “I am // failed / by my rage, / love // embodied in / an ardent relation / with limits, voice // made by not / doing, not saying.”

All roads lead to, and away from, Rome in these poems, as Kang writes around and through an empire and a series of moments across the stories of ancient history, specifically the founding of Rome. There’s a coyness to her directness and vice versa, writing specific and slant through figures and stories known and less-known, getting to the heart of each character and encounter across a wonderfully delicate lyric. As the poem “In a Roman Story” offers, writing Rhea Silvia: “That wasn’t / what she wanted: she asked // to face the wall / to more fully be // -come the gate he sought. / Oh Mars, you mistook me // for someone / I briefly was.” There is such thoughtful and incredible pacing across these poems, one reminiscent, slightly, of Canadian poets George Bowering or D.G. Jones, the slow hush and halt and play and propulsion of Canadian postmodernism an accidental (I can only presume) patter across her lines. “I have to tell you: I made two. / Didn’t know how else // to make it.” begins the poem “Roman Couplets,” “I put them / a double return a // -part on the page, let them / fall through sky // side by side. I oppose / these maneuvers, but the truth // is there were two— / one left me, one loved me, // they were the same.”

There’s something magnificent in the way Kang articulates elements of Roman history, offering elements on how to hold to a single thought, or reach across decades, attempting to articulate the ways in which one might live, might be; each poem a small moment, each of which together collect and pool into accumulations of large movements. Through Kang, poems and books are composed out of moments, providing a powerful precision of thought, story and word. She writes a book-length narrative, one that provides both an expansiveness and a pointed specificness, held in space, in amber. As the poem “Mars Falls / Honeymoon Suite” begins:

Mars at the podium, Mars in his gmail, Mars on the platform, Mars in the elevator, Mars in the park, Mars in his office, Mars on the steps, Mars at the door, Mars in his kitchen, Mars in his room, Mars on the couch, Mars on the floor, Mars at the river, Mars on the phone, Mars at work, Mars at a conference, Mars in a paper, Mars by text message, Mars in a daydream, Mars in midtown, Mars across town, Mars in the heat, Mars at his desk, Mars at his books, Mars on the train, Mars in the mind, Mars in a memory, Mars in the summer, in May, as in May I?, but it was too soon, we were wrong, it was spring.

 

Valerie Witte, A Rupture in the Interiors

 

[ 2.2 ]

We are bodies of evidence | a cadaver’s skin found frozen
in a glacier | To recover from shedding she discovered
a wall of pungent herbs | impressions
made in minerals disturbed | where winters pass dormant, the physical
record is sparse | A root ground to powder: why were things so difficult
to swallow | eaten by warblers or washed away | rain, then two opposing
clines conceal armor | external, evolution
of feathers | Fleeceflower, the blood cleaned cold | and the female
bigger still, without a mouth does not feed | but draws | for draping
fabrics, belts | repel a moth
mugwort, babies by rocking | a cigar waved carefully
as if rolling could alleviate | Absence extinguished before
contact but once it was dropped | And singed her |

I’m struck by the lineation and threads of Portland, Oregon poet and writer Valerie Witte’s latest full-length poetry title, A Rupture in the Interiors (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2023), following a variety of her poetry and hybrid titles including a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015), The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (with Sarah Rosenthal; Operating System, 2019) and the chapbook Listening Through the Body (above/ground press, 2021), not to mention her forthcoming collection of experimental essays, One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (punctum books, 2024). A Rupture in the Interiors is structured through nine numbered sections—“1. IN THE COILS,” “2. FURS FOR THE FIELDS,” “3. AND THE MANY SHAPES OF CLAWS,” “4. AN INFERIOR BLUE AND FAST,” “5. IN UNPROTECTED WATERS,” “6. WHERE FEW LINGER,” “7. A FAITHFULLY RENDERED MARK,” “8. TO BE RENT AT THE SEAMS” and “9. AND IF WE DISAPPEARED PERMANENTLY”—with individual poems numbered within (the above poem, “[ 2.2 ],” for example, being the second poem in the second section), offering the assemblage as a single, ongoing book-length poem-thread. Witte’s lyric is knitted, stitched; a lyric that plays not simply with threading as imagery and content but as structure, and her threads are myriad, almost polyphonic and multi-directional, writing on perception and the body, and the very idea of what holds, however precarious it might sometimes seem, everything together. “When we are transformed clawless | out of water,” she writes, to open the poem “[ 6.4 ],” “| Also / red | garments are tents of deprivation by means of leaves / or lungs: ventilation | lost | Any organ unusable at times, decayed / could resemble | bellows [.]” Each individual poem propulsive, a kind of self-contained pulse across the larger and much broader, quilted, design. Or, as she offers in her “AFTERWORD”:

One night years ago, I dreamt I wrote a book called Silkyard.

I didn’t know then what the word meant—an orchard of mulberry trees; a length of fabric, measured; an open space where one might wander or forage, that could be transposed onto the written page. A story of transformation, metamorphosis. Various threads like these brought together to form a tapestry of sorts—their own rendering of a random night’s dreamscape.

With this series of images and interpretations in mind, and the compulsion to follow the directive delivered to my dream-self, I began to write this book. I interwove the language from texts exploring the history of silk and the anthropology of human skin with my own experiences, in particular the minor physical traumas related to skin and hair, seemingly superficial flaws that nonetheless, over a lifetime, take not only a physical but also an emotional toll.

The result was Silkyard [until the time of spinning], which became A Rupture in the Interiors, a text that traces the path of an individual through the course of a personal journey while also tracking that of the human species as a whole.

Jon Boisvert, BORN

DIVORCE

When mother divorces him, father moves out, onto the roof. He takes only the record player & his copy of the 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds. Every night at midnight, the Martians land & kill everybody. He comes down eventually, & mother lets him back inside. He still plays the record though, & sometimes says with fearful eyes: Whenever they take something, their world gets bigger & ours gets smaller.

I’ve been an admirer of the work of Oregon poet Jon Boisvert for some time now, so am immensely gratified to finally have a copy of his first full-length collection, BORN (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2017). As Karen Holmberg writes on the back cover: “Like a Mobius band, BORN is a fluid continuum, an extended poem in which the speaker circles back to his childhood loss of his father, then toward, into, and through the loss of his own newborn son.” Writing through, of and around multiple and even incremental losses, Boisvert’s prose poems exist as small, semi-surreal snapshots, capturing a single, small moment and highlighting its component parts; sometimes the effect is one of tone, or texture, or even of relaying and absorbing a particular piece of information. As much as the poems are stand-alone, they accumulate in their own way into a sequence, suggesting a linearity that shimmers, shifts and occasionally floats across a span of years (and even lifetimes). While there is a sadness and grief that permeates every poem in this collection, the collection is both heartbreaking, and somehow not overwhelmed by that same sadness; the poems exhibit an odd matter-of-factness to them, a storytelling aura that exists in a lyric haze of stunning subtlety and force. Structurally, there are echoes here of the prose poems of American poet Jennifer Kronovet, if it were merged with the overall wisdom and darker tone of Bill Callahan’s songs. These are poems to be absorbed, not merely read.

MUSIC

I buried my true love one afternoon. I made a mandolin out of her hair & bones & gave it to her mother, who had lost two other daughters, a banjo & a double-bass. We don’t talk anymore, but sometimes I can hear her singing. I hear them playing simple music through the pines, through the pines, through the pines.