Ashley Farmer, The Women

 

Women Relax (And Be Yourselves)

Passionate women relax in a hotel bedroom. Steaming women relax in a natural hot spring. Pregnant women relax at a summer camp. Passive women relax in a dry sauna. Intimate women relax in the bathroom with cigarettes. Stock women relax in a spa stock photo. In Rio de Janeiro, women traveling on rush-hour trains find havens from harassment in single-sex cars and sun-beds. In societies where women are oppressed and harassed, enjoy is what they say. Eventually women relax is what they say. Be yourself: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, she finds it.” Float on the river with ease. Before that summer: I was at home in the world. My body, my prize. I was happy then.

I recently picked up Salt Lake City, Utah writer Ashley Farmer’s poetry title, The Women (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a book that emerged out of a very specific set of prompts, as she writes in her opening “Author’s Note”:

I started The Women in 2011 when I began Googling various women-related phrases: “happy women,” “sad women,” “women say,” and so on. Knowing that my online habits, browser history, and geographical location would all shape my results, I wondered what might show up. The searches returned fragments that ran the gamut of media types and texts: advertisements, news headlines, celebrity gossip, feminist websites, beauty tips, and relationship advice all filled my screen. Also among the results: anti-women screeds, men’s rights activists’ propaganda, misogynistic ramblings, and tired tropes about women’s lives. Using the first seven pages of search results as raw material, I sought to collage and reconfigure what I found. While this project began with a concept, it is not conceptual. Instead, I found value in not simply copying-and-pasting these findings but in actively chopping up, stitching together, and writing through the texts. Through this process, the Google results that might have simply washed over me in the past acquired new meaning.

Even without knowing that Ashley Farmer is predominantly the author of works of prose—including the forthcoming essay collection Dear Damage (Sarabande Books, 2022), the chapbook Farm Town (Rust Belt Bindery, 2012), the short story collection Beside Myself (PANK/Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014) and the novella The Farmacist (Jellyfish Highway Press, Inc., 2015)—the pieces in The Women might suggest that. This isn’t a swipe or a complaint, but an acknowledgment that her poems are constructed very much out of sentences, allowing one to build upon another, and allowing that accumulation, or even that collision, to inform each piece’s short narrative. Sometimes the narrative is a collage of ideas around a particular phrase or thought, and other times, the narrative is more straightforward, allowing one foot to step directly in front of another, towards a conclusion.

The poems included here are constructed via selecting threads and phrases from Google searches. Through her searches, Farmer collects sequences of threads and interweaves those searches into poems that each sit beneath titles that one might suspect were lifted from her original search phrase, but for the acknowledgments that include that certain “of these pieces previously appeared, sometimes in slightly different forms, under slightly different titles.” It would suggest that the searches, however they were conducted, utilized an array of phrases and sentences, sorting the barrage into bins, and from each of those bins, crafting each poem from those materials. The Women plays with elements of exploring and documenting how women are seen, depicted and discussed, pulling at a variety of depictions of cultural space, worked neither as flarf nor conceptual, but shaped into poems that write of domestic labour, violence, home, love, fear, strength and community, body image, health, leadership, marriage, weathering storms and notions of being bad or inherent goodness.

Her poems include shades of the works of Cindy Sherman and Francesca Stern Woodman, in that all three determined their gaze on and around the form and cultural ideas surrounding women, from the abstract, the absolute and the absurd to concurrently acknowledge and document as well as strip away those layers of overlaid determinations by a male-dominated culture; all three of these artists, in their own way, allowing the women they were viewing and/or discussing, their subjects, to determine the shape of their gaze, but also shaping that final result. “See two young women harvesting hope in Marion County, / 1944,” Farmer writes, in the poem “Women Land,” “cultivating new pathways to the boardroom.”

Stop Women

Sometimes one wonders if our nation is a public strip club. A mother and daughter who run a brothel for truckers fight back when the mafia tries to take over their operation. Men’s fragrances smell like excuses for getting home late. You will not stop women.

Three short reviews: June Gehringer, Tess Brown-Lavoie + Paul Zits,

Some of these books I’ve been carrying around and flipping through for months, writing up notes so long ago I can’t even find those notes anymore. But I wanted to at least get something writ up to acknowledge, so there are some short-form reviews:

I’m behind on everything (as is everyone else, I know), but I’m finally sitting down to write up my notes on New Orleans poet and editor June Gehringer’s full-length I Don’t Write About Race (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018). Self-described as “a mixed Chinese trans woman who is somehow still alive,” Gehringer is the co-founder of Tenderness Lit and author of I love you it looks like rain (Be About It, 2017) and EVERYONE IS A BIG BUG TO SOMEONE (self-published, 2017). Through the lyrics of I Don’t Write About Race, Gehringer writes about attempting to simply be healthy, human and self-accepting in her body, writing out the external complications and bullshit of gender, race and sexuality. “the physicists have informed me that the universe is curved, / parallel lines do not exist. // it’s 2017. / none of y’all are straight.” There is an openness to these lyrics, a generosity and an exhaustion at having to cover the same ground for the sake of cultural push-back. These are poems of survival and intimacy, of searching, reaching and becoming. “Anxiety is a house where I live with my hot amazing friends,” she writes. “Hello, / Welcome to my house. // I live here with my hot amazing friends. // We don’t go outside.”

 

I read one ignorant tweet and I think about it all day.

I don’t care about gender,
I just wanna dress how I want,
fuck who I want,
and take drugs.

whenever someone was being a dick in the seventh grade,
they’d say:
“it’s a free country”,
and I think the principle holds true.

it’s still a free country
if you’re an immature little shit.

Providence, Rhode Island poet and farmer Tess Brown-Lavoie’s full-length debut is LITE YEAR (NY: Fence Books, 2019), published as part of the “Fence Modern Poets Series.” LITE YEAR writes as extended suites of lyric, epistolary prose through the agricultural year: a rhythm of seasons and weather and rural movement. There is such music through Brown-Lavoie’s prose, a long flow of sentences that stretch out the length of accumulated days. “Literature approaches desperation,” she writes, to open the piece “OXBOW LAKE,” “with the same emotional resonance as harmony in an acoustically perfect church— your favorite vowel sound to speak or sing.” There is also something quite compelling through her lyrics-as-journal, writing out her days and her hopes and her loves through the day-to-day mechanics of moving through agricultural labour, reading and thinking, all composed with such an open heart. She writes, as much as anything else, against the very volume of silence, and the blank page. “My heart is not so surrounded by lungs and bones but by the space and time through which you never wrote back. The brass I pour around it forms an instrument. Toot along sweet demon. My whole horn section is the lack of You.”

My implicit,

Our mutual delay is a predictable let down. I thought of you in the lap pool, and in the field today as my fingers snapped each tomato plant’s aspirational shoot. A virtual sticky note updates. It has been six or seven intentions toward you. They dissipate in negligence through hours of labor and corporeal demands.

Mine is a classic spring brain now: clarity of day usurped by dull night—a natural, sad cave. I get home, boil potatoes, brush my teeth, and oil my boots.

Your emails are a pleasure to read. I get the same feeling from a fine book or my sister’s poem written in secret language, the key to which is generously shared. I had a thought for you— really for you— like the firecracker that zips and then pops off. Underneath the crackling residue the sky darkens. I swear my firecrackers were loud as the backyard shows off Elmwood in July. The ensuing silence congruently vast. I don’t know what to say.

I like your email because it casts the shadow of your interior shape. From your writing, I know something of your breakfast recipe, your subway way, your worry scape, and probably even your intimate style, to be lewd/direct.

Writing you reveals distance even as it is my most personal work. Abstraction on my end always indicates a failure. I know I’ll never reach you. From the swimsuit of my poem habit. Don’t blame anybody. It’s just the nature of email: disorganized, and stewed in filial pain.

Edmonton poet Paul Zits’ third collection is Exhibit (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2019), following Massacre Street (University of Alberta Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Leap-seconds (Insomniac Press, 2017). I’m frustrated in that I don’t even think I saw a copy of that second collection, and only received a copy of this latest collection a few months back; why is Paul Zits so silent on these books he’s been publishing? As the back cover to this new collection offers: “In the winter of 1926, Margaret McPhail went on trial for the murder of Alex, and throughout, maintained her innocence. More than a retelling of her trial, Exhibit chronicles the path to a verdict, misstep by misstep. Unique and rewarding, this is a masterful work of collage poetry that rests in the spaces where reality is constructed and where reality is blurred.” I’m immediately fascinated at Zits’ exploration of the prairie document, retelling the bones of a story of early prairie history through the shape of poetry, putting him in a lineage of multiple prairie writers such as Dennis Cooley, Monty Reid, Robert Kroetsch and Kristjana Gunners, among others. Zits applies the elements of the story into short, sketched lyrics, presenting and capturing moments that accumulate and shape into a larger narrative of what might, or may, have happened. He writes out the spaces amid the spaces; what is known and impossible to know. Unlike Kroetsch or Cooley, Zits’ collage-story attempts the impossibility of truth, even through the knowledge of that impossibility. His lyrics present with the facts as best as possible, allowing the reader the space to get inside.

Leaves on the ends

that is a tree-trunk and it is turning into a man the pendulum

stream of the trunk whirls round the axis the circulation of fluids

the flow of the spinal fluid that gently pulsates with the breathing

the tree’s branches reach out into space and are provided with

leaves on the ends.

 

the arms grow disproportionately long and make contact with the

world about them they are formed like organs of perception the

hands flashing out rays the hands ending in whirls.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with June Gehringer

June Gehringer is the author of I Don't Write About Race (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2018) and I Love You It Looks Like Rain (Be About It Press 2017). She tweets @june_gehringer.

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

my first book gave me the confidence to keep going. it brought me a small but loving readership. it made my parents really proud of me, which is probably the most important thing. my parents and i live in very different worlds, and i think it can be hard for them to understand my life. my first book was, in many ways, a gift to them, one of the few things that's truly mine that i can share with them. my recent work is more confident than my earlier stuff, and maybe a bit subdued by comparison. the early stuff has a lot of insecure bravado masquerading as maturity. try as i might to escape my voice, my work still has the same concerns, the same neuroses, the same humor as it always has. it just manifests differently from time to time.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
i fell in love with poetry in college. my whole life i'd been a fiction reader, and i wanted to be a fiction writer. i still do, really. but i had good teachers who assigned good readings, and i fell in love with poetry. i liked the funny stuff, the surprising stuff. mary ruefle, frank o'hara. I think most of my life i had a lot of misconceptions about what poetry was. all i'd been exposed to were the romantics and the moderns. The most contemporary thing i'd read in school was Howl, probably. It is probably unsurprising that growing up, i had no love for poetry, as most americans had no love for poetry. the second i started reading contemporary anything, something clicked.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

it depends. sometimes collection emerge at the end of years of toil. sometimes they come together in days or weeks. it just depends. sometimes a poem only needs one draft. sometimes it needs dozens over the course of months.

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?

a poem begins with a line, usually, a phrase that comes into my head that surprises me or shakes me up. something that makes me notice words again. my first book was a collection in the truest sense - it included all the work i had written and was proud of at that point in my life. my second book was written as a book. most of my future books, i would imagine, will be written with the entire book in mind. i'm very interested in the book as a form, maybe more so than i am interested with the poem. i'd imagine at some point i'll release another true collection, but that'll probably be years and years down the line.

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

I used to do a lot of readings. I spent about two months on tour in 2017. I probably did a total of 50-60 readings that year. This year my total is probably around 10. I used to love reading, before I felt like i had "made it" or whatever. the attention felt good. now that i feel i've made it, reading makes me deeply uncomfortable. the attention makes me uncomfortable. i think getting sober has something to do with that anxiety, as well. i don't "enjoy" it exactly but i think it's probably important to feel that discomfort and try to understand it. i think it's also important for me to physically take up space in certain rooms. probably.

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?

this is too much for me to give away, i think. i will say that i take a decidedly anticolonial approach to most things, and that my recent work is concerned with the fiction of the self. or something. i try not to think of the current questions. i try not to think of how people might situate my work within the context of the current questions. i'm just writing what i want to write. the questions i am trying to answer are my own, and i'm just answering them with more questions anyway.

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 think the role of anybody alive in 2018, especially anybody with money and means and white skin in america, is basically the same fundamental role of people everywhere throughout history: be good. it's really that simple. we're here to take care of each other and the earth, and we are especially here to protect the marginalized and disenfranchised among us. i think that all art is political and that anybody pretending otherwise is kidding themselves. i think that the political moment we're in necessitates decisive action. i think most moments do. i think we have a responsibility to each other. writers can mobilize, articulate, console. we can defend, canonize, or condemn. i don't trust writers who are too silent about their politics. i don't think everyone has to proclaim their Very Radical Politics all the time, but silence is a statement in itself. i thinking picking up the pen is a responsibility. i try to treat it like one, at least. we either fight oppression in its many forms or are complicit in its machinations, i think.

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

i can't imagine my first book happening without alexandra naughton at be about it press. i can't imagine my second book without everyone at CCM, michael, janice, chiwan. im too anxious a person to be able to do all this stuff alone anymore.

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

my friend amelia who co-runs tenderness lit with me once told my drunk weepy ass that not every bad thing that happens in the world has to be my problem, and i try to remember that.

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?

questions about my routine make me anxious. i'm working from home now and so far i haven't really been able to impose a routine on my life. generally i wake up late, stay in bed for several hours, and the day begins eventually. in complete seriousness, i have no idea when i wrote my books.

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

i try to turn outward, toward friends. i like to take breaks. i like listening to kendrick lamar and mitski. i like smoking cigarettes. if i get really desperate i return to the handful of poems i have written and liked, as a reminder that i can do it. i try to think of my friends and get emotional, amped, inspired, teary-eyed whatever. anything to get words out.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

my mom made a lot of popcorn on the stove and so that smell reminds me of home. not the movie theater butter popcorn smell, though. the smell of super-hot oil in a stainless pot and a few burnt kernels. made that way, popcorn barely has a smell.

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 books have come from the people in my life.

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

the list is too long for me to write and im 100% sure i'd forget important folks so instead i'll just say that the current generation of LGBTQ Asian-American authors is... incredible to witness and be on the periphery of. thanks y'all.

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

i would like to have enough money to pay rent for all my friends for a year, pay for all their medical expenses, and pay off everyone's student loans.

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?

if i hadn't been a writer i have no idea what i would have been, but i'd like to learn to draw. it seems comforting.

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

i don't really know why i started writing, or why i kept writing. probably i kept writing because when i was in school people kept telling me i was good at it, and that felt good. now, i don't know what else to do, and also i think writing makes me feel better for several reasons, some simple and some complex, and all of them too saccharine to explain at length.

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

i'm re-reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It's a new classic, i think, a perfect artifact of the moment it was written in. i don't watch many movies. i fell asleep watching Howl's Moving Castle a few weeks ago. I love that movie. i saw a production of Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play at the Wilma in Philly recently, and it really rocked my world.

19 - What are you currently working on?

lately i'm working on just getting through the days.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carolyn Zaikowski

Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the hybrid novels In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published widely, in such publications as The Washington Post, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, Everyday Feminism, PANK, and Dusie. She lives and teaches in Massachusetts.   

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

The act of holding my first book in my hand challenged a lot of self-doubts, at least for a few hours. Both books are pretty dark, fragmented, and hybrid-ish, but the first has the skeleton of a more recognizable narrative. The second is quite chaotic and, well, I sort of call it a novel to be annoying or subversive. Novel means “new” and I believe we need new types of textual bodies that attempt to mirror the experiences of bodies in society, particularly traumatized ones. Such bodies rarely inhabit a space that is linear or easy to comprehend.

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

I sort of just came to all words at the same time. I wrote and read in different genres going back to when I learned how to write and read. Words are my faithful buddy, just in general.  

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 first draft of my second book, In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse, vomited itself out of me within the span of a few months, almost entirely in notebooks. My first book, A Child Is Being Killed, was a much longer process, and was directly informed by my studies/work in the field of trauma. My current unpublished novel is a much more traditional, linear fiction narrative and it tells a story that I’ve been repeatedly rewriting from scratch for maybe 15 years.

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?

It shows up and asks me to write it, and to just to start somewhere, anywhere, and it asks me to pay attention.

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

I don’t always mind being in front of a crowd, but I don’t think readings should be an expectation. Some writers frankly aren’t good at it, and why should they be? Their expertise is writing, not performance. Writing happens on a page, I like reading it on a page, and I don’t always get a lot out of hearing others read because I have a hard time processing auditory info. I’ll still happily show up to support readers.

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?

What is trauma? What are bodies? Does anyone, any human or nonhuman, have a linear, clear body? How does that reality shake hands with the reality of constructing a book/text? What does it mean to be personally or socially or spiritually shattered—or not shattered? What are the different roles of both linear versus fragmented texts? Do we all have a basic core neurosis that forms our personal selves and the selves of our texts? When it comes to getting ourselves to not be such dicks, does art play a role?

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?

Shaman? Witness? Ego? Overcomer of ego? Sacred and/or profane guide? Compassionate contrarian? Truth speaker? Liar? Purposeful failure? Lover? Friend? Decoder ring? Scientist of the mind/heart? Anarchist? Animal? Fool? Someone who dies and lives repeatedly, for various reasons? I recently read poet Yi Sang’s quote, “I believe that humans should be plants.” That seems about right.

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

It obviously can be hard, but I’m unsure how it’s possible for writers—at least those who publish—to have polished pieces if they don’t get outside feedback. Writing happens when we’re absorbed in our own minds, which necessarily leads to blind spots, because we can’t ever fully see ourselves. At the same time, I really reject some of the things that are common in the (relatively new, yet somehow taken for granted) MFA workshop culture.

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

Well, on his deathbed the Buddha said to be your own lamp, to light your own path to liberation. And Thich Nhat Hanh says that when you eat an orange, be aware that you’re eating an orange.

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

I just like words. I’m not very worried about genre. I just trust whatever the words seem to want. I try as hard as I can to tune into that, and to notice when I’m hyper-identifying as a Certain Type of Writer. As a result, I’ve written poetry, fiction of all lengths, essays, articles/editorials, journals, picture poems, lyrics/music, hybrid work, instructions, incantations, fake interviews, Likert scales. This seems postmodern and maybe pretentious, but it’s something writers have been doing since the beginning of writing. One of the first written forms was basically a fiction poem, the epic poem. Or look at the educational chunks about sewers in Les Misérables that divert from fiction elements, or all the sprawling scientific guides that chop up Moby Dick. It’s worth considering why we casually think of those as pure novels. For some mind-blowing—I mean absolutely bonkers—texts that don’t fit into simple genres, read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (990). This relative inattention to literary containers—that’s not something critical theorists and hipsters thought up.

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 often doubt it when people claim they have one of those writer’s life routines you see in a Buzzfeed list. The expectation messes with people’s heads and discourages socially underprivileged people. The privilege needed to write every day is an elephant in the room. Writing routines, at least as they’re usually discussed, arguably have a connection to the psychology of capitalism. Writing is your job and your hyper-individualist identity; you only earn your title if you’re a Type A worker bee. If you’re not somehow strong-arming yourself into making a product, fire yourself. And, wouldn’t you know it, this is usually only something you can achieve if you have no kids, no sicknesses, no need for a full-time job or the decompression that requires, no social structures of gender or race stacked against your finances, psyche, or safety. I see so many of my students and friends get lost in some version of all this.

I go for months without writing. I’m 35 and have been writing since I was 5 and have become comfortable with the idea that writing is a part of how my life operates and that I’ll always come back to it. In those months, seeds are planted and growing. Space is being taken to let the overcrowded brain-rooms breathe. When I force ideas, they come out lopsided. I think of this metaphor used by Buddhist teachers of a plant that’s being neurotically watched and overwatered and dug up and replanted to see if the roots are okay. I’m convinced there’s a subconscious aspect to most good writing that requires patience and self-compassion, and that ignoring this leads to writer’s block, self-hate, and writing that doesn’t fulfill its potential.

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

I’ll read a lot or work on submissions. I meditate, which helps loosen my mind/heart and water seeds. But, as in #11, I usually don’t feel moved to always remind myself that I’m definitely a writer or to prematurely rip ideas from their wombs.

           

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The tiny scent of those weird gray dusts from lottery scratch tickets, cat litter/fur/food, hummus, grass, dirt, tomato sauce. 

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?

Bjork, music in general, the dharma, friends, personality typology, the cosmos/star-related things, all animals.

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

Kathy Acker, Selah Saterstrom, Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine, Renee Gladman, Virginia Woolf, Kenneth Patchen, Toni Morrison, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Molly Gaudry, Claire Donato, Elena Ferrante, Clarice Lispector, Walt Whitman, Akilah Oliver, Kafka. My close writer friends Ben Hersey and Kate Senecal. Dystopia. Dharma texts. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is, to me, an example of a perfect narrative. And the author most responsible for changing my life is Judy Blume, including that when I was 11 I wrote her a letter and she wrote me back.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to see the aurora borealis and also start a revolution where I turn everybody vegan.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I wanted to be a psychologist; that’s what I originally studied. I think seriously about someday becoming a death doula and am currently in the process of becoming a hospice volunteer. But in some ways, these are the same as being a writer.

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

Intuition, not knowing really how else to successfully navigate existence, having an almost torturously spinning linguistic brain whether I like it or not, etc.

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

The last great film was undoubtedly The Florida Project. Please, please watch it. For books, the prose in Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi completely blew me away. Other amazing recent encounters include Silk Flowers by Meghan Lamb, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, and Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently in the process of acquiring an agent for my newest novel. I also have a poetry manuscript in progress which sort of revolves around things like incantations, repetitive secular prayers, and secret cosmic instructions.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;