12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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;

chaun webster, Without Terminus

i am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed up their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula. i am trying to extend the sentences that arrived to me from my mother, and later the railroad’s archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point, to see where their lines fracture and whether ii can step into the space made by their splitting. i am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line, a speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts.

I’m deeply impressed by American poet chaun webster’s debut work of nonfiction, the remarkable Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a book that follows on the heels of the author’s two Minnesota Book Award-winning poetry titles—GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean, 2023)—both of which I’m a bit frustrated at not having seen. As the back cover offers: “chaun webster traces how anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He begins with his grandfather Reginald, a Pullman porter who was denied rest and a pension, and follows Reginald and the train into a gloriously wayward exploration of comportment and confinement, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and his relationships with his mother and child. Pushing sentences to their limits and troubling the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach.”

It is interesting how webster articulates and utilizes the archive, history and family history in a way comparable to the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my piece on Howe's latest here]: offering narrative threads and extended sequences, layerings of visual collage and an otherwise poetic structure. As well, this is a title that connects directly (inadvertently, I’m sure) to Calgary writer Suzette Mayr, through her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Through Mayr’s fiction, she writes of R.T. Baxter, a Queer, Black man in 1929 working as a sleeping car porter on a train that moves across Canada, including the prairie provinces. webster’s narrative writes of a maternal grandfather known predominantly through family story and the archive, who also worked as a sleeping car porter, across the American Midwest, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “a mass of stories get imposed on experience, on the archive,” webster writes, early on in the collection, “comporting its materials to its shape, becoming the less by which not only the events and sequence of the past are determined but also their meaning. you are a student of story: a familiar one is that of uplift through adversity, that those who work and toil do so with the eventuality of ascendancy.”

This reads as a reclamation project, working through the archive, whether newspaper or family story or other records, to discover the possibilities of what otherwise the author can’t access. This is not the archival process of a poet such as Edmonton-based Jordan Abel [see my essay on Abel here], attempting to access the touchstone of an absent father and, thus, a distance from a particular culture and foundation, but one in which webster seeks, quite directly, the touchstone of an ancestor known only through these stories, one that can only be better known, at this point, through this piecemeal process of abstraction, unverifiable stories and unstoried facts. As webster writes:

you cannot bring together the complex material of your grandfather’s life through story, something is always erased from the surface when you attempt to constrict the dimensions of his living with that of a scene or chapter that takes place in the forty-two-inch-by-twenty-five-inch sleeping car and is reproduced on this five-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-quarter page. even the one hundred twenty pages from Reginald’s employment files, which you have purchased photocopies of from the National Archives in Atlanta, are compressed, comport less to a life than to its abbreviation.

As webster works to write a way through the archival facts and family stories into something known, possible and tangible, Without Terminus offers the structure and cadence of a long poem through prose narrative, the strength of such a project compounded through the layerings of narrative structures. Through researching the grand elements of history and archive, webster seeks the intimacy of their grandfather.

your mother tells you a story about retirement, your grandfather’s twenty-five years of service as a pullman porter. every time you say the title you feel the word pull stretching itself out in your mouth, a pulllllllllman porter. she told you of the constraints of his labor, its years, and how they pulled from him, pulled years from him, how he would retire without pension and then would die with no triumphant ballad, your mother is the inaugural archive, your point of origin for what you come to know about your grandfather, archive here being a slippery word, one that could indicate a physical geography where the collected materials of history have been stored or something more ephemeral, a body of knowledge, the archive of material experience, both are full of elisions and gaps, you step into them.

 

Land of hope and glory, : Victoria, part one,

Is that too obscure a reference? The Kinks, after all, their song “Victoria.” Okay, so maybe that is too obscure. Or this Billy Bragg classic, as well (but my point was The Kinks, here), although both pulling from a British patriotic song from the turn of the prior century. I recently had some adventures in Victoria, British Columbia, doing two readings and a podcast in three days, which was a bit of a whirlwind. When was the last time I'd travelled for a reading? Dublin, last July with Christine. Or Vancouver, last year with Christine as well. Or Calgary, also with Christine. I am very fond of reading and/or travelling with Christine, as you might imagine. Do you remember when I read in London, Ontario, some two-plus years ago?

The blossoms [reminiscent, slightly, of our trip to Washington] were everywhere! Thanks to Planet Earth Poetry, The League of Canadian Poets and The Writers Union of Canada, all to help promote my University of Calgary Press poetry title from the last fall, the book of sentences. Thanks predominantly to current Victoria Poet Laureate Kyeren Regehr for bringing me out! I mean, it has been twenty years or possibly more since I've read in (or even been to) Victoria, despite the annual or semi-annual I did for a stretch beginning in 1997 or so. Maybe 2003 was the last time I was through? I can't even recall.

Thursday, April 23, 2026: Had a 3:45am alarm for 4am cab and 6am flight, landed in Victoria by 11am or so, local time. The Ottawa-Toronto part of the flight I think I slept, but the second flight I spent most of such reading through Phoebe Wang's Relative to Wind (Assembly Press, 2024), a really interesting memoir by the Ottawa-born Toronto poet [see my review of her second poetry title here] on being part of a sailing crew across Lake Ontario. The memoir begins with language in a really interesting way, and expands across a whole slew of details on the minutae of working such a craft, and how she's learned to navigate other elements through the lessons approached here. 

I landed, and my pal (from high school, even) Jennifer collected me from the airport, and we had breakfast (I had to eat something, even though I was exhausted) at Spoons, the coolest little diner. It had posters all over of classic (up to early 70s) Marvel and DC comic book covers, some of which I even have, kicking around. Then I had to crash, where I quickly discovered I'd managed to leave my computer cord at home, so my machine (and subsequent phone) were soon to die. I slept for an hour, before I caught up with my host, poet Rhona McAdam, who was kind enough to drive me out to Staples, where they sold me the incorrect cord (I was at least smart enough to also pick up a way to recharge my phone). From there, a short walk to downtown, to eventually meet up for a pub night, organized by the delightful (and Ottawa-born) Victoria writer and journalist Sara Cassidy. I figured, maybe hit a bookstore if possible, sit with notebook and read for a bit, hang about until I met up with them, all good.

The short walk, with my huge bag of books and envelopes (for that pub night, handouts, etcetera) was ninety minutes, so I completely miscalculated on that. Walked by a gallery show (gallery closed) that looked interesting, You Do Not Have to Be Good (apparently a line from this Mary Oliver poem, which is interesting), "a multi-media debut solo exhibition by Mila Rio," but more on that later. I caught C A V I T Y, a curiosity shop, which was pretty cool. Comics, records, books (I did pick up some stuff, including a back issue of The Paris Review, but was gratified to see some Barry McKinnon poetry titles in there; I nearly picked up an extra copy or two, just to carry around). Blasting punk music. Very nice. You should go to there.

From there, I finally made it downtown, wandering by this sign that led into an alley of Victoria's Chinatown Museum and little slips of history, making me aware just how unaware I am of Victoria history generally. I mean, I have a general sense of Vancouver history, but know absolutely nothing of Victoria. The little corners of history was reminiscent of the Hogan's Alley Society over in Vancouver, attempting to salvage a period and geography of Black history specific to Vancouver, most of which had long been lost (and which every city should attempt to do, acknowledging lost histories and spaces).

The alley threaded between buildings with slips of site-specific history of Chinese immigrants in Victoria, amid a sequence of quaint little shops and curious other spaces. It really is a remarkable (and very cool) array of small spaces, intersliced with histories that deserve not to be forgotten.

Given Ottawa has a Royal Arch (in that we are capital), I've been curious to see Chinatown arches in other Canadian cities, having caught Vancouver (years ago), Montreal (once, while completely lost) and in Winnipeg [during this trip, but I appear not to have taken a picture].

I eventually found my exhausted way to The Drake Eatery and Craft Beer Parlour, where I figured I could decompress with notebook and some reading before heading over to where Sara Cassidy had organized a pub night with a few local writers for me to meet. She'd originally picked one spot, and then relocated to another, neither of which I could remember properly, so when I presumed the Drake was the original spot, so I landed there (thinking this would allow me to see two different Victoria venues), asking Sara where we were ending up, and she said I was already there? So that's on me. A delightful spot, and even, at one point, Sara's teenaged son slipping through to deliver me a computer cord, so my machine wouldn't die. This is from Sara, he said, handing me a cord and disappearing. Relief for the save (but he was like a ghost, albeit far more polite).

I first met Sara [waving, in the pic on the left] back in 1998, after Rhonda Batchelor had told me if I could get myself to Victoria, she'd give me a chapbook and a reading, so, thanks to the ottawa international writers festival's 1998 Via Rail Tour (I participated all the way to Vancouver), it was a quick hop and jump to Victoria, as Sara and I both read from our newly-published Reference West chapbooks (the press ran from 1990 to 2000, co-founded by Batchelor and her husband, the late Charles Lillard). I hadn't seen Sara in more than twenty years, and then the extra delight of being able to meet poets such as Julie Paul [see her '12 or 20 questions' here], Melanie Siebert (both photos, on the left) [see my review of her latest] and Maleea Acker (above, right) [see her 2009 '12 or 20 questions' here], as well as an appearance by Kyeren Regehr and her partner. A lovely evening! Maleea landed early, followed close behind by Melanie, so it was very good to hang out with them, especially given the years we've been interacting over email (and through writing). And honestly, not only are Melanie and Sara extremely cool, but Maleea is an absolute delight (and completing a new manuscript, by the way, shhhhhh). I was worn out by the end of the night, naturally, as I'd probably been up for some uncountable array of hours. Next up? Two readings [part two to follow].

PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow

 

            Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof), and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives. These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher. Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies. Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
            And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
            Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how. (“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory, and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)

Newly out is the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put together an impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive, working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,” writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUT TERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is a method to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought that if you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow place yourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that you could gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something of a complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozen poets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses, from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and global conflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical and ongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In the obits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentioned that they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // a laughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto a floating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”

On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:

QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.

The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:

the curse is simple, and it begins with water

  the water my mother bathed me in was crab water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)

like a spell, like a spell !

when i close my eyes i am wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees

As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19^TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:

The third of an almost anything
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids
than possibilities