12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kelly Krumrie

Kelly Krumrie's first book, Math Class, was published by Calamari Archive in June 2022. Other creative and critical writing appears in journals such as Annulet, DIAGRAM, La Vague, Black Warrior Review, Full Stop, and The Explicator. She also writes a column for Tarpaulin Sky Magazine called figuring on math and science in art and literature. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. https://kellykrumrie.net/

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, Math Class (Calamari Archive, 2022) is my first book, so it’s probably too soon to tell, except, perhaps, I think I could say that I feel a little like I’ve taken a breath, or I feel a little stiller, something like that. In order to write the book, however, I quit my job and started a creative writing PhD program—nine years after my MFA—and this did change my life. I had fallen away from writing almost completely, and I was hardly reading at all. I was teaching middle school and was so tired all the time; I couldn’t think straight. But teaching allowed me to learn a bunch of new things—like math—without which I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to get back into writing and what to do once I got there. I started this book about two months before beginning my PhD. So maybe the book did change my life.

My recent work feels very different from this. I wrote a book-length series of prose poems/fragments called No Measure (that I’m currently submitting to publishers) right after Math Class, and it’s different in form and content though thematically still touches on scientific language, particularly measurement, scale, and documentation. It’s a kind of love story rendered in the most technical language… I let myself let go of narrative, scene, and fictional conventions and puzzled together bits of language and landscape. Longing pushed back by objectivity.

Lately I’ve turned toward fiction again, and I’ve been writing about infrastructure, sidewalks, radio, sound. Something novel-like is taking shape. I recently described my current projects as Anne Carson’s Eros meets Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This work is much looser than Math Class or No Measure: freer, not quite as constrained.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Oh, I don’t know what’s first. I always oscillated back and forth between poetry and fiction, settling more into fiction. In school, I focused on fiction. My mom likes to tell people about how quickly I read, how I memorized stories and poems and recited them, and at not much older than two, I begged her to teach me to write, and I would cry. I wanted to write my own stories. So, fiction first, I suppose. But even as a teenager I was most curious about language-driven fiction, messy stuff: I was gaga for Faulkner, Joyce, carried Ulysses around in my tennis bag in high school. That’s why the genre line is difficult for me. I’m more interested in language than narrative or character, more interested in how I can make the thing than what the thing is. But—Renee Gladman said something to this effect in a talk recently—fiction provides a fun frame to splash around in. Nonfiction doesn’t speak to me usually, except for criticism.

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?
All of these examples describe my process! I research a lot, a lot. Too much. And I take lots of notes: quotations, phrases, little bits of language, and I make word banks, kind of like a dare to myself to use as many words from the pile as I can. I’d say I’m slow, but most of my writing is pretty short and fragmented, so it doesn’t take too long to get to the end. First drafts appear close to their final shape. I’m careful, and I don’t like revising very much (that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it, though).

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?
Oh, interesting question. It usually begins from something I’ve read, or something someone has shown me: theoretical writing or some kind of fact or work of art. I’m definitely someone who writes short pieces that then combine. I know now that this is probably what will happen. I keep writing the same thing; I get really hung up on stuff. Math Class was first one short story, then another, then… here it is. I’ve written a few prose pieces over the last year about sidewalks and infrastructure. I’m not sure if they’ll accumulate into a book (a pretty strange book that’d be), but I can’t stop.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like attending readings, and I’m happy to do them, but I don’t think they have any real role in my creative process. (Except that it is nice to be around other people.)

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?
Oh, gosh, yeah, this is pretty much all I think about. Math Class includes a list of sources at the end of the book—quotations that helped me shape the individual segments or that I found later and thought were applicable; they add a layer. I often begin with some kind of theoretical idea… For example, in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford says something about there’s nothing perfectly circular in nature, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I liked thinking about it, and that launched me into the major plot point of Math Class (as well as its form).

What questions am I trying to answer? The question I’ve wondered about the longest is… well, maybe not a question, but a concern: I’ve always, always been super interested in grammar and syntax (I studied linguistics as an undergraduate), so as I’m writing, I’m navigating and playing around with words, phrases, and sentences through that lens. I’m most curious about “syntactic” words (function words, little words) that don’t really mean anything. What if I threw a bunch of them together? Can I make a sentence that way? A story? The past few years, I’ve been wondering most about math (hence this book) and what mathematical language means. With a number, there’s the idea, the sound for the word, the word written, the numeral, the number in an operation or equation, the number representing objects in the world… It’s a weird little thing.

I’m not sure I can answer this question. The question I’m trying to answer is something like: How can I use language in a particular way to manifest this thing that’s kind of outside language? (Which could be said for any writing? Or most of it?)

Currently I’m wondering about how to render sounds and radio waves.

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?
Yikes! I don’t know. Like any other artist: a mirror, a storyteller, a questioner. I think the role should be to be as curious as possible. To learn and share out. To not be siloed.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Neither! I like it, and it’s often very helpful for me. I’ve been lucky to have some really lovely editors who give useful feedback and help me make the work better. Derek White and Garielle Lutz at Calamari gave such close attention to Math Class—really unbelievable attention and generous feedback. And to get sentence-level edits (and explanations!) from Garielle was a dream. But I’ve also published work with no editorial comment or modifications, and that’s fine too. Rarely has it been difficult.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
For writing? Don’t do anything you don’t believe in and have faith in your work.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s easy for me to move that way when I’m working—I do whatever I want, I follow the work, it manifests how it manifests. Sometimes I set up little puzzles for myself but mostly it’s out of my control. That’s what’s fun about all this, right? I’m a very curious person; I like to do and think about lots of different things.

What’s not fun, or what becomes challenging, is naming the thing later if you want to submit it to a journal or press or even workshop it. I had a hard time in MFA school because I was there for fiction, and the program wouldn’t let me take poetry classes. Once in a fiction workshop, a professor said (in front of the whole class) that I should give up on fiction, stop trying, and switch to poetry—which was rude and inappropriate, of course, but also, they wouldn’t let me? Confusing and a little silly, if you ask me. Who cares? I do care—I do think interesting things happen when you put a name to a thing: you might read it differently, you might push and pull in different ways. But for me, I just try to have the confidence to make what I want to make and figure the rest out later (and have faith in it).

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 wrote about this for you! I don’t usually have a writing routine. I definitely do not write every day, or even close. When I have chunks of free time, like summer or when I was in school, I schedule writing time, but I’m flexible about it, and I do best with a long stretch—not quick moments between things or in the car. I write best in the mornings, but I also like to run in the mornings, so I have to be aware of that and alternate. On a day when I might write, I begin with breakfast (I pretty much almost always have fruit and yogurt and coffee), then I putter around and clean and tidy, and then I get to work.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I flip back through notebooks and then start flipping through books. My husband is an engineer, so we have tons of science books around: physics textbooks, fluid dynamics, who knows what else. I like to flip through them and usually something clicks into place. I also walk and run a lot. When I’m stuck in creative writing, I’ll walk. When I’m stuck in critical writing, I’ll run.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Oh, none? I’ve moved a lot—both as a kid and as an adult. Maybe I’m not very scent-forward, sense-wise.

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, yes. All of my answers so far probably answer this question. Most lately math and science, but also visual art and film. If I could be anything, I’d be a painter. I’m not sure I can easily articulate how these forms influence my work, but (maybe this is a simple and obvious answer) sometimes I see something and then I try to make a version of it. Several moments in Math Class were made better after studying movement and composition in a handful of films. I also spend a lot of time outside.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Endless—and I’ve been lucky to write about / through many of them in my column for Tarpaulin Sky. But my oldest, tried and true friends are probably Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Hmm… I feel like I should have a big answer for this (like skydiving!), but I don’t. I took a ceramics class this winter, wheel throwing, and I was surprisingly (to me) bad at it. I’d like to make plates and bowls I can use, but this feels impossible—or at least something I could only accomplish many, many years from now.

For writing? So much, and most of it I don’t know about yet.
 
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?
Oh, I said earlier that if I could be anything, I’d like to be a painter. This is true. Maybe I’ll start late, like Grandma Moses. As for official occupation, I was a tennis coach first (my post-college plan was to teach tennis and write), and then I became a teacher (and got another degree in education). I think what I’m best at is teaching. I’ll probably always do that. “Writer,” though I’ve been writing since I was a toddler in tears, feels new to me. I’ve always been it and am freshly now it.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s always what I wanted to do. I have no memory of not wanting that. But I wasn’t always sure how, and early on I gave up easy.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Oh, let’s see. I’ve read a couple of great books lately. One I got all bug-eyed about—and I can tell when this is happening because I make noises when I’m reading: I go god! and ah! and oh! and whisper to myself—this most strongly happened with Fleur Jaeggy’s The Water Statues, but also Christine Schutt’s Florida. And Asiya Wadud’s Syncope. I watched a lot of films this winter as I was living in an incredibly cold and lonely place. I think I’ll say the director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World and Platform by Jia Zhangke. Both are funny and sad and slow.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Many things! I have a long list. For critical work, I’m revising a paper on Gertrude Stein and math—maybe this will be my life’s work, or a monograph, because I just keep finding more, and it’s a wild topic, plus she wrote so much. I just saw an exhibit of Mel Bochner’s drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago (very different from his word paintings—lots of geometric shapes, grids), so I might write something about that. This fall, I’m presenting a paper on what I’m calling “mathematical affect” in the work of Pamela Lu, so I should start thinking ahead. And I’m noodling on an essay on syntax and adolescence.

As for creative, for the last year I’ve been working on what I think will be a novel, or a novel-shaped prose thing, about invented languages, radio waves, and sound. This combines all the topics I’ve been dancing around, and I’m excited about it, and I feel like it has a sort of vibrancy I’m trying to harness—I’m putting this project before others (for now). There are also nuns! An excerpt is forthcoming in a sound arts journal this July. Oh, and more writing about sidewalks, since I can’t stop, and I spend a lot of time on them.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Miranda Mellis

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex); The Quarry (Trafficker Press); The Spokes (Solid Objects); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press). She teaches writing, literature, and ecological humanities at The Evergreen State College.

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?

Beginnings can go on for years. Sometimes a beginning gets worked over so much, so hard, that’s all there is. Beginning can feel precarious, so uncertain. A beginning is a kernel, an idea, a resonance of some kind, an attraction, an arrival, a rumor, an invitation. The middle space is more grounded, like when you know love is reciprocal and you can start to count on someone – when, in the story, you’ve got enough material to shape it, to work with. It’s also still indeterminate – how long might this be, or take?

Like starting to ask, in middle age, how long will I live?

Having been so preoccupied with just getting off the ground in the beginning of a story (or a life) one is still working out: what is this? Over time you begin to understand it (which is another beginning, as if every insight is a beginning), to know its shape, to be able to tack more knowingly, more intimately between chance and intentionality.

An edge may start to flicker into view – “the sense of an ending” – a horizon; a cliff; a place beyond which you’ll no longer write (or live); a closure that also opens out. Ending shapes everything that comes before and usually leads to more revisions, as the ending casts its light back; writing an ending is beginning all over again; seeing things anew (re/vision) is playful, rather than goal-oriented. Writing is more like an organism than a machine or tool in that sense. You don’t make it, plug it in, set it going, use it until it breaks. Instead you are created, you create, you change something, it changes you, in a symbiotic enacting, auto-poietic and transformational, of spiraling co-creative cyclicality.

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

I started out writing poetry and couldn’t understand why anyone would write fiction. How would anyone every decide what story to tell, among an infinity of possible narratives? I had a word for this: infinitivity. Fiction-curious, I took a weekend workshop with Rikki Ducornet.

She spoke of seeing an enormous jackrabbit in France, an impossible rabbit the size of a deer, and how that image became emblematic, a point of departure for writing. I wrote a piece in her workshop, as a way of exploring my skepticism about fiction (infinitivity). It was called “Novellas by the Hour.” It took place over 24 hours at 24 different moments: “8:13AM – a squirrel sticks her head out of a gas pipe.” “9: 45PM – a veteran naps on a park bench; has a flying dream”, etc. I found pleasure pursuing these images, figments and fragments of diction, seeing where they might lead, what they might say. I wrote stories from that weekend onward.

Coming from poetry has shaped my approach to fiction. Love of and curiosity about language, about where it leads, interest in metonymy, sound, all that remains. I find writing about culture, writing essays, writing about what other people make and do a welcome respite from vicissitudes of fiction. Poetry is a constant, a way of thinking and being that we could describe, if we imagine it in relation to liberation movements, as a multilinguistic front line where opacity, difference, and multiplicity are at the fore. 

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The Revisionist (2007) was my first book and it did change my life, or in writing it I was changed. I was writing this strange book in the early 2000s very much in the minor key, taking up the positionality of someone paid to lie about climate change. This narrator was in my head as I tried to imagine the psyche of those who understood the dynamics of global warming and nonetheless lied, Exxon et al. (See Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway for a precis of the actions of the corporate mafia of the fossil fuel industry and their paid minions, terrorist members of what McKenzie Wark calls the “carbon liberation front.”) Those executive facilitators of our current extinctions should be tried for war crimes. They have waged a war on all species, a war on animals, a war on futurity. My book was a response to the dissemination by the Bush administration of junk science about climate and the refusal of that administration to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, an existentially disastrous mistake and a cause of despair. The Revisionist was very much a working through of environmental depression. I got revenge on my narrator by causing them to lose the capacity to perceive anything at all by the end, as a result of knowingly lying about climate change. That was almost 20 years ago. Think how different things might be now if the government had not been in bed with big oil, not only lying about climate change with propaganda campaigns, but invading Iraq on false pretenses to control the oil supply.

As for how my recent writing compares or connects, the venality, stupidity, and the infuriating, fatal incompetence of the reactionary capitalist state continues to be a source of inspiration. Ha ha! As we flee fires, floods, and droughts.

My current manuscript is a piece of forest writing that centers on a house sliding down a ravine due to monsoon rains and clear cuts which destroy stabilizing root systems causing mudslides and soil erosion. But it’s different from The Revisionist and other books in offering a vision of a good enough future, and pointing, in homage to The Dispossessed, to an ambivalent utopia.

Where does a 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’ll start to draft something and often I just abandon it after a few revisions. (What about an anthology of most successful failed beginnings? Call it False Starts.) Other times the whole gesture is there. It’s compressed. One dream; one idea; one move; one scene. Other times something takes hold that’s too complex and indeterminate to sense its duration. It’s not a gesture, it’s a problem, a cluster-fuck, an open-ended question, something you’re going to be wrestling with for a while, that won’t let go of you, maybe for the rest of your life, for example grief.

Those can end up being “books” –  I like that you’re putting quotation marks around that word. The quotation marks hold the telos of the “book” in suspense, in a state of potential. It’s fraught to have “book” in the mind, but it can also be generative, whether the imagined book comes to be or not.

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

Especially if sharing from a work in progress, public readings can become part of revision. Hearing the work out loud, anticipating real listeners, this can be clarifying, a tool for editing. You gain extra eyes, extra vision with that sense of address. If the work is complete – in a “book” – there are still questions about which parts you will read, in what order, and why, and you keep learning about how your writing registers in ways that might be surprising and that teaches you about the work itself, about the relationship between techniques and effects, especially comic effects, because you hear the laughter.

There are other things you can sense going on in the intersubjective space of a public reading, absorption, disinterest, identification, empathy, criticality, amusement, surprise, curiosity, judgment, care. You can also sense your own projections, what you imagine is going on; what you hope is going on; your own conflicts and intentions, your own befuddlement and absorption, curiosity and surprise, etc. Feeling into why you might feel drawn to reading one thing and not another at a given time develops sensitivity to what might be uncooked or overcooked in the work in progress.

Parts of your text can feel saturated for you, weighed down in a way that makes it difficult to read from. Conversely, it can be energizing (if also vulnerable and risky) to read something you’re unsure of, or haven’t read aloud before.

As for enjoyment, I’d say I have mixed feelings. You’re dealing with a whole range of things: how much sleep did you get the night before? How many other demands on your time, energy, and emotions were you dealing with that day? What shape are you in? People drink coffee, alcohol, take beta-blockers, find all kinds of ways to try to regulate themselves to be in the right frame of mind for appearing before a public. It can be terribly dysregulating. Readings can evoke a range of feelings, from enjoyment, excitement, curiosity and pleasure, to nerves, dread, shame and resistance. Over time one gets to know what the ride is like, as if a reading is a mind-altering substance: set and setting matter, but there is only so much you can control. After you’ve given a lot of readings over years, you’re not surprised by the feelings associated with the lead up, the range of things that can happen during a reading, and the roller coaster ride that it can sometimes be. You learn to phase shift, to discern, and not to get too caught up in any of it.

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 disability and premature death of my mother, who was a communist, an activist, a teacher, an actress and a single mother (so a really complex interesting person who I didn’t get to know for as long as I wish I could have) is what started me writing seriously. Death is still my subject, but presently I am writing about it, in a manuscript called Two Problems in Three Parts, in different contexts: the context of sacrifice in a polarity with tyranny; and the context of ecologic in a polarity with industrialization.

Ecology and sacrifice are interrelated. Some people write (or live) towards an ending. Ending is a death, and deaths happen in a wide variety of ways. Some lives/stories have satisfying conclusions. They end with integration and closure. Others end abruptly, inconclusively, wrongly, unhappily, unfairly, tragically, suddenly, broken off, leaving wounds in their wake, so to speak.

Some endings allow for mourning to change its tenor. Others leave us with interminable, persistent melancholia.

The eco/logical way to think about it is that what dies is recycled, becomes and feeds new life. When we begin a new story, it is as if it begins where something else was left unfinished, as if every beginning points to something left. Something left that is usable is something that, in dying, gives itself to new life. It breaks down, is used, and is changed, rather than breaking and becoming an immutable, problematic object that can’t be used or changed, like tyrants who refuse to step down. Of what use is a tyrant who won’t give up power, to a democracy? Not only are they useless, they are toxic. The difference between squirrel bones or a gun, for example. Or a fallen tree, which feeds millions of microbes and life forms, and a microwave. Or a plastic bag thrown into a river which feeds nothing and no one, and chokes out life. Of what use are guns, microwaves, and plastic bags to the living biosphere? None whatsoever.

For life forms, every ending is a new beginning. For non-regenerative manufactured things, they never begin again, because they can’t rot, so they don’t accommodate change, and that is the true meaning of garbage. Nothing that can rot is truly garbage. Anything that can become something else, that can change, partakes of the genius of the living world and is not garbage. Only things that refuse to rot, to be transformed, to be changed are garbage, and they are filling up the world such that we have two worlds: a living world that self-regenerates, transforms, and symbiotically evolves through reciprocity, and a garbage world of tyrants, objects and toxins that don’t have lifespans but instead death spans: they are forever dead, never coming back to life, never changing. This is reflected in the culture of productivism, supported by necro-political, capitalist formations that require factories, mines, and extractive industries and police violence to enforce exploitation.

The normalization of all this produces people who misconstrue existence. A friend once told me about a neighbor of his who wanted all the trees on their street cut down because she thought of the leaves that fell from the trees, and the soil in which they grew, as garbage. Imagine how she feels about her body, which produces waste every day. But this would be a great person to write a story about, to do a character study of.

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?

The writer is in a hard position. The culture doesn’t really support artists, so to be a committed artist is automatically to have to find a way to live against the grain. Artists are set up to compete, the way athletes are. In other professions, you learn your trade and hang a shingle, get a job. U.S. artists are precarious, have trouble getting a salary, getting work, and constantly have to scramble, unless they were born wealthy. That means that automatically privileged people have an advantage: they can make art, write, without worrying about how to make a living. Thus men of leisure with wives, servants, wealth have historically been very productive, and it’s no mystery why. It’s not because of any innate talent, it’s because they were free to do as they liked, supported by armies of working class people, including their wives: wives as servants.

Historically inequality resulted in men with tiny purview and very limited experience of life, having enormous platforms. Still to this day, some writers are rewarded over and over again in huge ways, while most struggle.

So my answer would depend upon the writer’s position. If you are someone who has already been highly rewarded, then stop hoarding awards, opportunities, social capital, prizes, grants, and start finding ways to redistribute the affordances that foster social ecologies in which working class and poor artists can make their work.

Don’t believe that those who are most rewarded are most talented and deserving, it’s simply not true. They are more likely the most well connected and the most economically advantaged. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have done great research on the self-licking ice cream cone that is the literary prizes circuit. It’s shocking but not surprising. Coteries, schools and scenes are part of literary world-making. Social capital accrues as people reward each other and cliques build their reputations. It begins as community building rather than careerism. But when and as these scenes become reified, self-enriching, and self-involved, ethical contradictions must be addressed.

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

Simone Weil: “All true good carries with it conditions which are contradictory and as a consequence is impossible. Who keeps attention really fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good.”

What fragrance reminds you of home?

As someone raised in San Francisco it would be fog, nasturtium, eucalyptus, wild fennel, gas fumes, pot smoke. I love this question. Thanks rob!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with J'Lyn Chapman

J’Lyn Chapman serves as Assistant Professor in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Her most recent work is To Limn / Lying In (PANK Books, 2020). Her book Beastlife was published by Calamari Archive in 2016.  She has also published the chapbooks A Thing of Shreds and Patches (Essay Press, 2016) and The Form Our Curiosity Takes (Essay Press, 2015), both of which can be found online.

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?

The publication of my first full-length book, Beastlife, made me feel happy and satisfied, and also a little embarrassed because I didn’t feel confident about every element of the book. As well, I had been in academia for a long time without a book, so a book helped me to feel legit. Of course, that feeling didn’t last for very long.

My most recent book, To Limn / Lying In, is less an experiment with different registers and voices as the first had been and more an immersion into a single experience. And while it does engage with the thought of other writers and artists as the first does, I wrote it in a much more contemplative and private way—in my body, in my space, in my immediate life, which was a life of caring for very small children—whereas the first book seemed to be written more publicly—by writing from primary and secondary sources, in archives and nature.

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

Well, as a young person, I came to fiction first, but then I eventually thought I should write poetry. Poetry was a way of giving the private life form, and people I really admired wrote poetry. Poetry also seemed like a permissive genre that allowed a list, for instance, to be art. I didn’t understand what non-fiction was, or cross-genre work or hybridity or lyric essays. Nowadays I feel much less concerned about genre and more interested in “the form our curiosity takes,” as Lyn Hejinian would say.

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?

Sometimes I’m not sure that I have started a writing project. I think quickly, but I write slowly. I take lots of notes, and usually they transform or inspire writing in just a few drafts. I believe in having an idea or intention, taking it seriously, and trusting that it will find its center. Sometimes this takes a long time, but I have faith in creativity. I am a hopeful person, even if I inevitably have moments of doubt and discouragement. I listen to messages that come from within and from without. It all happens in a scattered way, but then something gets made.

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 do tend to think of a book from the very beginning. This drive to make a book is not always productive, and derives from academic pressures. Yet, these pressures have also helped me to feel that my writing is actual work to be taken seriously. I also just try to pay attention to any kind of pleasure. If an idea or object pulls me toward it, I try to make note of that. I get a lot of excitement from the potential of writing. So, I am not always beginning a piece, but I am noting how I feel about something or what it spurs for me and then I let it grow and develop.

I should also say in regard to these questions that I get a lot out of writing workshops. I need accountability, deadlines, and readers. These strictures are very helpful in getting what is inside outside.

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

Readings are definitely part of my creative process. I am privileged to be able to read pretty regularly at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. I’ve become accustomed to thinking of this as a group of my dear friends, and quite regularly there’s a writer in the audience who I admire. This gives me a lot of energy. Recently, though, I’ve read to audiences of strangers, and it’s made me aware of how dependent I’ve become on the perception of familiarity and good will.  I think I need to stretch myself in this regard, but these days readings are virtual, and all the anticipation and performance energy feels dulled. I’m usually reading and trying to kick my children off of me before they show up on camera. And yet, I feel accepting of this emulsion of my private and public life.

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?

Right now, I am interested in minute, largely unconscious phenomena and how they affect the choices we make in our day-to-day material life. Maybe I would call it the hyper-mundane? Mostly, I’m thinking of pleasurable attachments or orientations. Regardless, though, the challenge is both how to express these sensations in text but also to understand the ways in which text or language manifests these orientations.

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?

I’m not sure what larger culture is—I think of a sloppy, digital recreation of landscape that loops. I don’t think writers have any role in that but should work to reject the semblance of it—the rhetorical gestures, the easy pleasures and outrages, the homogeneity—in their work. I still believe in truth and beauty. Our work, which is our lives, should be committed to these. 

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

Working with a good editor is essential.

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

After I had my first child, I wondered if I should give up writing, at least for a few years. The poet Jessica Smith told me that she can’t be the mother she wants to be if she can’t be the writer she wants to be. She doesn’t remember saying this, so I may have ventriloquized my own advice to myself, but, regardless, thinking of these roles as equally necessary and mutually inclusive has sustained me in the last four years.

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

Cross-genre and hybrid writing, as well as the movement between genres, is ethically necessary. They express states of being, orientations, identities, etc. that traditional generic restrictions can subsume or erase. Yet, I do think that poetry and fiction, for instance, involve different methodologies and approaches, and for that reason, it’s not easy for me to move between genres. I think genres do different things to language, they have different sensations and meanings. I don’t necessarily have experience working in different genres, even if I have a sense of their theoretical concerns and I try to read across all genres. Yet, the challenge and difficulty are important to me. I like to be in a position of disorientation or estrangement when I write.

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 no writing routine. Most days a child wakes me, or I wake reluctantly to run before the heat of the day. I write when there’s a rare spare moment. Mostly this happens at night. But I do manage to read often, and when I’m reading, I’m also thinking, and that’s kind of like writing.

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

Visual art, film, and music inspire me, in addition to books of all sorts. Found language—simply writing down or cutting out others’ or my own language—can perform like a kind of yeast to make things grow. I also find it helpful to do something with my hands—to make a collage, to sew, to cook—or to move my body to the point of exhaustion.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sage brush after a rain storm.

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?

While I am inspired by books as primary phenomena, that is as an object in and of itself, very often I am thinking of the choices a writer makes in a book. I feel most inspired when something emerges unexpectedly. Sometimes that’s a book or even a small passage in a book, but more often it is something I experience with my body, all of my senses and even more often it’s something entirely mundane—not a sublime mountain peak but the backyard garden, not a great piece of literature but something strange my kid said. I should also add that I love learning about the history of material culture. The history of an object or how humans have engaged with objects is endlessly fascinating.

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

Although I think of them as very different writers, I am inspired by Bernadette Mayer and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Also Etel Adnan and Clarice Lispector. Lisa Robertson’s writing has inspired me for a very long time, and even now I’m returning to it. Recently, I’ve been reading Tim Ingold, for the exciting ways that he approaches anthropology, and Sara Ahmed because I’d like to learn more about affect theory.

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

I want to live, temporarily, in another country. I want to become more proficient at sewing. I would like to volunteer regularly at a local charity.

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 attempt another occupation, I would like to be an urban archaeologist or a fashion historian. It’s almost painful how badly I wish I could return to school to study these.

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

I feel like I am mostly always doing something other than writing, so this makes me laugh. I write because I love to build worlds or to lay down my thinking and animate it. I love language, I love making things with language and finding power in it. It is endlessly challenging and unrestricted. But writing also feels connected to the other things that I love—images, music, the body, prayer, film. I feel when I am writing or even thinking like a writer that I am connected to other people, that I am able to be with other minds all at once. Out of all the things that I love, writing feels the most plastic, the most capable of being itself and everything else.

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

I just read, actually I listened to it, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir. I also ripped through Caren Beilin’s Blackfishing the IUD—I think she’s terrific. And before that, Sarah Vap’s Winter: Effulgences and Devotions stunned me. The last great film I watched was Parasite.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m writing a book about a skirt.

12 or 20 (secondseries) questions;