12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Huizache, Círculo de Poesía, Periódico de Poesía, The Missouri Review, Epoch Magazine, The Nation, Poetry, The Progressive, Poets.org, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer's Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

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

I actually started with short fiction in high school and undergrad. My last semester of undergrad I took a poetry workshop with C. S. Giscombe. It was interesting but I was still very new to poetry. After I graduated with an English degree I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I started going to the public library where I discovered contemporary Poets of Color. Octavio Paz. Marcus Wicker. Joy Harjo. Francisco X. Alarcon. Alurista. Victoria Chang. That’s when I realized I could not only study poetry but write it as well.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually start with a title or a striking image. I often like to write about iconic Mexican and Mexican American imagery or symbols like boxing, piñatas, sombreros, mariachis, jaguars, famlia, etc. Also, in my prose poetry, I tend to create characters and write from persona and third person, like the Man in a Pink Floyd Shirt or the Man in a “Kafka for President” Shirt.

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

I enjoy doing readings in moderation. Sometimes they can be surprising and thrilling. Sometimes they can be disappointing and low turnout. Sometimes I have social anxiety. Sometimes I embrace it and go with the flow. Oftentimes, though, I spend more time on writing and reading and teaching than performing.

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

“Don’t compare yourself to others.” I heard Eduardo C. Corral tweet that before and I think it is solid advice.

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?

Right now a lot of my writing has been responding to prompts I create for my generative workshops.

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

Prompts. Reading. Music. Space. Time away from writing.

Not looking for it. When it finds me it will come.

Maybe I need time away from it?

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

From childhood? Chlorine from the pool in the apartments I grew up in. From adolescence: pan dulce from the panderia.

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?

MF DOOM, Chicano Batman, Ramon Ayala, The Get Up Kids (music), the beach (nature), Philosophy (academics), Picasso, Kahlo, Rivera, ASCO, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Basquiat, my friends who wrote graffiti for DFLK, JPAK…

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

Teach full-time at an MFA Program, working with up and coming poets!

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?

Maybe boxing or guitarist, not for brutalist reasons, but I would’ve had to have started young.

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

Instructions for the Soon-to-be Beheaded by Shivani Mehta. The Williams Sisters movie a couple years ago brought me to tears; inspirational.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Teaching workshops online. Readings and interviews for Bad Mexican, Bad American. The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025); Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025).

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Caleb Curtiss

Caleb Curtiss is the author of Age of Forgiveness, forthcoming from Sundress in September. His poems appear in Gettysburg Review, Witch Craft Magazine, Image, New England Review, and TriQuarterly.

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?
I published a chapbook before Age of Forgiveness that probably changed my life, though it’s hard for me to say exactly how. I’m probably more anxious now.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Growing up, I had a little bit of contempt for poetry. Protesting too much. Eventually, in my late twenties, I took a poetry class at my community college and was, for the first time, able to imagine why someone might choose to read, write, and think about poems. The syllabus was more or less Dickinson to Whitman to Frost to Stevens to Frost to Brooks to Frost to Sharon Olds. Ended the semester with some “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

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?
I’m kind of a slow learner and my process tends to reflect that. It feels like I’ve been working on Age of Forgiveness for the last ten years or so. Probably I have been, in some ways. A few of the poems in the book are from early on in my writing life, but I didn’t start working on it as a book until 2019, and it won’t become one until September 2023.

So, between 4 and ten years.  

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?
Oh, I’m definitely a combiner of shorter pieces. Notes or ideas I’ve been rolling with with start to take shape, etc. Eventually, those shapes start to fit together…or they don’t and they end up buried on a hard drive somewhere.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
There’s plenty to like and dislike. I look at readings as an opportunity to tune my audience’s ears to the frequency my work is on. As a teacher I feel pretty comfortable in front of a crowd, and I put a good amount of thought into what I read and how I read it. Can it be stressful, to stand in front of strangers and share your precious art? It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

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?
Probably not? I think I’m mostly interested in all the first-year-poetry-student stuff still. I think a lot about form and voice, repetition, order, metaphor. Other stuff, too, but those are the main ones. My main question always seems to be, how am I supposed to write this poem that my brain is trying to make me write?

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?
Writers think and create artifacts of their thoughts. There’s plenty of evidence that the current role of writers in our larger culture is to create marketable artifacts. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but maybe there isn’t. I don’t know what a writer ought to be in our larger culture, and that’s the truth. I just know writers should definitely be in the larger culture.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s essential. It can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. I was lucky to work with Tennison Black at Sundress who was a constant source of creative energy for this project. Kit Frick edited my chapbook at Black Lawrence, and that experience was equally generative for me as a poet. Caitlin Rae Taylor helped me solve a really formally and emotionally difficult problem in a poem she published at Southern Humanities Review. I’m forever grateful to these editors and all the others out there like them.

Of course, I’ve also had ~not great editorial experiences~, but this isn’t a Taco Bell, so I take what I get and do what I can to learn from it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’m paraphrasing an old friend here who advised me to not die and to keep writing at whatever pace I could: “eventually enough people will start to like your work.”

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?
I parent and adjunct, so my writing routine works best in summertime when the children are at camp. I’ll drop them off and go to the gym where I write for about an hour, play basketball, stretch, and then return to what I’ve written until it’s time for pickup. The day is always short, the writing often sparse.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I play pickup basketball and then stretch for six hours afterwards. That usually gets me to where I need to be. Sometimes pickle ball helps.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
School library.

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?
I’m inspired by visual art. I seek it out, hang it on my walls, think about it, and write about it, too. A few years back I became a little bit obsessed with this visual essay called First Adventures in Beauty by Lia Purpura. Technically a book, I guess. Books that are art interest me a lot. I’m thinking of Book of No Ledge by Nance Van Winckel, Mary Reufle’s erasure books, both of Karen Green’s books and a handful of other Siglio titles.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Nance Van Winckel’s oeuvre inspired a lot of what you’ll see in Age of Forgiveness.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d really like to visit Mérida.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don’t really see myself primarily as a writer. I’m a parent, a teacher, a family member, a displaced midwesterner, etc. I’m a writer, too, though. Sometimes I’m more of one, other times I’m less of one.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing has always felt special to me. I have great memories of learning how to do it.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Heat 2 by Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner and Heat (1995).

19 - What are you currently working on?
Right now I’m preparing for the Lewes Creative Writers’ Conference where I get to present next month. I’m also starting to think about the coming semester and all the changes I’ll make to my syllabus. Promoting the book, of course. Some writing is making its way in, too, but I wouldn’t want to overstate that at all.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jason B. Crawford

Jason B.Crawford (They/Them) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is out from Paper Nautilus Press. Their third chapbook, Good Boi, is out from Neon Hemlock press. Their debut Full Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz was published in 2022 from Sundress Publications. Crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and is the co-founder of The Knight’s Library Magazine. Crawford is the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, Vella Chapbook Contest, and Variant Lit Chapbook Contest.  They are the 2021 OutWrite chapbook contest winner in poetry. Their work can be found in Split Lip Magazine, Glass Poetry, Four Way Review, Voicemail poems, FreezeRay Poetry, HAD, among others. They are a current poetry MFA candidate at The New School.

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

My first chapbook, Summertime Fine, gave me the space to understand what MY poetics were and how they fit into the context of the larger conversation. I spent so much of my undergrad in writing trying to fit the mold of what I was being taught. As a rebel, I also tried to push against the “typical” poetic path and forge my own sense of what my poetry would hold. This pushed me to watching and reading poets such as Danez Smith, sam sax, Desiree Dallagiacomo, Porsha O, the list goes on. As a young poet, I often tried to pattern my poetics after these poets, losing my own voice in the process. Summertime Fine helped me step into my own;  Year of the Unicorn Kidz is further proof of what I can do when focusing on my own narrative and voice.

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

Funny enough, I started as a fiction major at Eastern Michigan University. My professor, Rob Halpern, had me read my poem in front of the class that he encouraged me to rewrite. My love of poetry grew from there.

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 typical first draft for me is not that long, maybe a few days per poem at most. Year of the Unicorn Kidz was completed in 3 weeks for most of the poems (some poems predated the start of the collection) however with edits, it did take a few months to hash out.

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?

Most of my work is project based. I work best when thinking of a set goal or selected outcome of the poems. When I have an idea to work towards, I am able to put out a few poems a day towards it. However, when I am just writing to write, I often feel aimless and it takes awhile for me to produce any work that feels worthwhile.

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

I love going to open mics, reading in front of people (even in zoom), checking to see if parts of the poem go off the way I intended during the writing process. I use reading to my friends and at public events  as an editing tool, honestly. I actually use reading out loud as a tool to double check the way the poem sounds. Not only am I huge on the rhyme of my poems, but I want to make sure what I am trying to say is coming through in the poem.

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?

My work focuses  mainly on Blackness and Queerness in terms of survival and joy. Every poem, essay, fiction piece, anything I write will somehow include Blackness and Queerness because it comes from me.

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?

This is a complicated question, we as writers are: the Visionaries, the idealist, the creators of space, the pacifist, the protesters, the builders, the Believers, and so much more. People are looking to writers to help guide society in the right direction.  Sometimes this feels like too much pressure, I would love to just be a writer without the added weight, but I honestly I agree with how society looks toward writers at this moment

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

All my work goes through other writers and editors before I send it out. My little sister Taylor Byas and my darling Sofia Fey are some of the first eyes to see my work. I also go to a few workshops every couple months when I feel stuck on a piece. I believe collaboration when it comes to editing is the best form of community.

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

There are two things I have been told that I hold true everyday when it comes to my craft and skills in writing: 1. You  are not going to write something successful everyday nor will you successfully write everyday but that does not make you any less of a writer. 2. Taylor Byas once told me that she posts her drafts on Twitter because her favorite part of writing is sharing it with her friends.

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?

I typically write when I can or while I’m moving around. I did, however, start a practice of writing every single day for 2022, my goal is to write 365 pieces this year. The writing is still sporadic and sometimes ends up is being completed at the end of the night, but the work is being created.

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

In the creation of Year of the Unicorn Kidz, I found myself returning to Danez Smith’s Homie, Sam Sax’s Bury It, Sam Herschel Wein’s Fruit Mansion, and Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cheesecake, walking into an empty basketball gym, grilled ribs and mac and cheese, and Malibu cologne. Maybe hot chocolate with too much french vanilla creamer and marshmallows.

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?

For my first two chapbooks, music influenced me a lot. In “Twerkable Moments,” I wanted to be able to create a SoulTrain feel for the poems. We spend so much time dying, why not spend some time celebrating? In the collection I am polishing up to send out, nature and climate change play a very big role.

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

It goes without saying for the first two, Danez Smith and Jonah Mixon-Webster. sam sax is also a huge influence, especially when it comes to Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Taylor Byas, not just because she is my little sister, but because she makes me want to write better. I love the ways she challenges the page. I am always working towards what she is doing (I also said I need to stop mentioning her in my interviews and here we are.)

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

My dream is to open up a nonprofit literary center for LGBT youths. A space where you are safe to be yourself and love who you want. A space filled with books that reflect who fills the seats. A space where wonderful LGBTQIA artist and writers can come speak to share what “It Gets Better” could really mean. Offering resources and space, but most of all, offering love that they might not be experiencing at home. That is something I started in 2019 and I would love to get back to that.

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

I actually started off in the education program at Eastern Michigan University, as a math major on top of that. My passion as a child was always to write songs and play basketball, however, my father told me I had to do something practical so I chose to follow in his footsteps and start teaching. I soon learned I had a passion for teaching as well, but I could not sustain that passion during undergrad. The politics of teaching turned me off to being in a classroom. One class did help me realize I loved to write and that I could do it full time if I wanted. I am not there yet but I’m getting there.

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

I have just started Joshua Nyugen’s book Come Clean. It is brilliant in the ways he folds language like laundry. As for most of us writing our first full lengths, it is a coming of age story, but those never get old. I am currently STUCK on Disney’s Encanto it is such a beautiful film with amazing music. Also, I can’t wait to see SING 2 because the first one has had me in a chokehold for five years.

18 - What are you currently working on?

My current project centers around colonialism and migration through storytelling and Afrofuturism. I am looking to tell the story of “what if  we left this planet? What does leaving look like? What does colonization of different planets mean? Who do we leave behind in our leaving?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jason B. Crawford, Year of the Unicorn Kidz

Some debts can only be paid with the body. And in jason b crawford’s rebellious and desirous debut, a life is the cost of an errant belonging. Crawford shows that to exist outside of the paradigms of a racist and homophobic society, one becomes even more indebted to it. Blood is the price, token money, a down payment. The poems in this collection are full of everything a queer Black boi should and should not say, should and should not do—‘i went where the boys found me irresistible and i made it out alive’—now what must be paid for that? Throughout this collection is the paranoia that the piper/the collector/the reaper will show at any minute. Yet, despite the foreboding, there is a precarious life that continues as it must. (“Forward,” Jonah Mixon-Webster)

American poet Jason B Crawford’s full-length poetry debut, following chapbooks through Variant Lit and Paper Nautilus Press, is Year of the Unicorn Kidz (Knoxville TN: Sundress Publications, 2022), a book that works through trauma, cruising, sex and what one keeps from one’s father. “What is the act of playing with dolls,” Crawford writes, to open the poem “Boys and Dresses,” “other than putting the boy in a dress? // What is the act of homophobia / other than ripping the doll from the boy’s fingers? // What is this act other than calling your own kin / a faggot, removing him from every family photo?” In certain ways, Crawford mines a similar terrain as does Toronto poet Jake Byrne, guest editor of the recent “Daddy” issue of CV2: queer identity and sex, experiences with homophobia and marked or broken connections including family, personal and intimate. “The way to a man’s heart,” Crawford writes, as part of the poem “Anatomy of the Jaw / Lessons on giving head,” “is through his gutting/how much / of him you digest in a single sitting / It is through the slick slit / and how it hungers / to be filled/with him / it is never a question of when is dinner / rather where/and what limit / is he allowed to consume [.]” Composed through forms including the English-language ghazal, the pantoum and the sonnet, there is something interesting in the way Crawford utilizes formal constraint and poetic form, quite possibly, as a certain kind of stability through which to explore and articulate deeply personal, intimate and occasionally messy content. In this way, one might also think of Diane Seuss, and the one hundred and twenty-eight sonnets that make up her frank: sonnets (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. As part of the poem “A Pantoum of Yellow Fields,” Crawford writes:

I am piss drunk off love for you
or the 5 shots of whiskey that smoke like
midsummer and stain the chest like drenched leaves
We roll around the dry grass, dogs shattering in heat

or the shots barreled into the moon still smoking
He asks if he could kiss me on the rough edge of my thigh
Rolls around me like a field of shattered glass
and this time I am not too drunk to tell him yes

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His previous books are Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks.

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?

I feel like writers are supposed to say that the first book doesn’t change anything. Like, that’s the pure response. In some respects, certainly, it’s true. Having a book doesn’t make the next poem any easier to write. It doesn’t get rid of impostor syndrome. For me, at least, and for most poets, it didn’t come with life-changing money, or, like, any money at all. But still, publishing that first chapbook — The Insomniac Circus from Hyacinth Girl in 2014 — and then the next year my first full-length collection, Ha Ha Ha Thump from Sundress Publications — well, it was a huge personal achievement. The fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I was 44 when that first chapbook came out, and I remain super gratified by its publication. The ability to say yes when someone asks if I’ve published a book? It means something to me. It matters. My fourth full-length collection — Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy — came out in May. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written, but I don’t know that it’s hugely different from my first books. It’s just the next step.

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

I went to fiction first. Thought I was going to write the Great American Novel (I kind of still think that). But a poetry workshop in college, and a couple of workshops in my first, failed attempt at grad school changed things. One fiction professor used my piece in class as an example of a story that wasn’t actually a story. Another writing professor asked me how serious I was about being a fiction writer instead of a poet; I think maybe she meant to praise my poems, but her tone definitely implied something not so great about my fiction. Anyway, I got more praise for my poems than for my prose, and as an approval-seeking older child, that was probably what did it. I also try to watch my tone with my students, because I know how long they might remember even the most unintended dismissiveness.

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?

I tend to write either rapidly or not at all. Periods of getting nothing done followed by periods of getting lots done. Some drafts come out near their final form; others require numerous and extensive revisions. All of which is to say I’m all over the place. I envy writers who have a regular routine or 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’m definitely a one-poem-at-a-time kind of writer, which of course leads to challenges when it’s time to assemble a manuscript. Poems start all sorts of places for me: with fragments of language, with images, with experiences I want to make sense of, sometimes with a title. My chapbooks have been projects where I’m circling the same concept or topic, but in general I’m writing only the poem in front of me. How it might fit into a collection is a question for later.

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

I am very much not a performance poet, but I love reading my work to an audience, and I love hearing other poets read their work. At least, when it’s a poet who understands how to read their work and who understands which of their poems work well when read aloud. Reading my poems aloud to myself, over and over, is a huge part of my composing process, so by the time they’re done, I think I have a sense of how or whether they work aurally as well as on the page.

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?

My new book explores fatherhood and masculinity and mortality. I think all poetry is about mortality. I don’t know if I read this somewhere or if I made it up, but I think one of the defining characteristics of a poem is that it knows it’s going to end, while prose is in denial about that. Every poem is an elegy.

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?

Let me quote Jen Benka here: “We know the secret to survival. It is saying. It is naming. It is telling. It is recording. It is singing. To soothe our fears. To fuel our inner fire. To remember all those who came before on whose shoulders we stand. To illuminate and ignite new guiding lights.”

That’s the role of the writer.

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

Working with a good editor is an amazing, inspiring experience. The best editors know how to help you unlock what’s possible in your writing. I worked with Maggie Smith on both Boom Box and Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy before they were accepted for publication, and her care and thoughtful response made both books better. my experience with the editors at Sundress has been similarly excellent. Erin Elizabeth Smith worked with me on Ha Ha Ha Thump and Boom Box; Jeremy Michael Reed was the editor for Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. Again, the books are so much better for their attention. 

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

My friend, colleague, and collaborator W. Todd Kaneko talks about the need for writers to keep the “life of art” distinct from the “life of commerce.” One is about writing poems, the other about getting them in front of an audience. Both are work. Both are important. But they are not the same.

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

I have this kind of half-baked theory. All writing is, at its core, about the human experience: how we live, love, grieve, and die on this planet. But each genre brings different forces to bear on that experience. Poetry centers language: the search for words to describe what cannot be described. Fiction centers narrative: the cause-and-effect relationships between events in a character’s life. Essays center memory’s flawed relationship to truth: the leaky vessel that holds all of our experiences. There’s overlap, of course, and you can’t always draw a bright line between genres, but for me, as I approach a piece of writing, the questions that interest me most in relationship to the topic determine what genre I work in.

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?

My days begin by getting teenagers out of bed, fed, off to school. They end with soccer-practice carpools, choir concerts, nagging about homework, laundry, what’s for dinner, what’s for dinner, what’s for dinner. I’m not complaining, it’s all good stuff. But as for writing? I have no routine. I fit the words in around the edges of my life the best I can. Some seasons are better than others.

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

Sometimes I just let it stay stalled. We need breaks. But the answer is reading. I always go back to the page. Find the poems that make me feel something. Those are the ones that make me, like, “I want to make something like that.” Reading refills the water trough, even when the season is dry.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Kudzu blossoms in spring.

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, for sure. I almost always listen to music while I’m writing. Many of the poems in Boom Box, my 2019 book, are explicitly engaged with music, specifically the metal I listened to in high school. Plug here for Jason Isbell, probably my current favorite artist.

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

Wow, that’s a long list. My favorite poet is Traci Brimhall. My favorite book is Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. My favorite poem is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” And if we’re looking at poets who were early, formative influences on my writing, the list includes David Kirby, Bob Hicok, Jorie Graham, Adrienne Rich, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Robert Lowell, and Emily Dickinson. I could go on. More recent influences include Matthew Olzmann, Natalie Diaz, Rebecca Hazelton, Jericho Brown, Catie Rosemurgy, Karyna McGlynn, Franny Choi, Natalie Shapero, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaal May, and Leila Chatti. There are others. Like I said, it’s a long list. Not that I think anyone would necessarily see those poets’ work in my own, but still, their poems have arranged my brain, changed how I see the world and the possibilities of poetry. I read a lot, and read like a sponge soaking up pieces of pretty much every poet I read and wringing their language back out into my own.

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

Visit Paris. Watch a game in Dodger Stadium. Attend the Manchester Derby at Old Trafford. Writing-wise, so many of my ambitions are the usual foolish ones involving fancy kinds of recognition that are beyond my control. Maybe finish and publish my novel. That one is at least partly within my control.

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 mean, the honest answer is playing first base for the Dodgers, though I guess the window has closed on that. I was a newspaper journalist for a lot of years, and sadly, the window has kind of closed on that, too.

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

Writing has just always been there. I can’t imagine not doing it.

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

Presently re-reading the amazing book of poems 1919 by Eve L. Ewing. I read it last year and knew immediately I was assigning it in class someday, and so this spring I put it on the list for my advanced poetry section. I recently finished The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones and can’t stop thinking about it. As for last great film, I’m not sure. I saw Knives Out and Emma right before the pandemic shut everything down, and both were super fun. Does that count?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m making my way through a third draft of the novel I mentioned above. It’s historical fiction, set in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Writing a novel is a trip. 98,000 words, multiple drafts, and I still don’t know if it’s going to turn out to be anything worth reading.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Amorak Huey, Dad Jokes From Late in the Patriarchy

 

Pa & Michael Landon & Buddy Ebsen
& Daniel Boone

He moves through dark woods, checking traps & splitting logs. The work of keeping a family alive against another long winter. The cruelty needed to survive & no more; the particular gracelessness of a thin man with a large beard. A caught fox screams. Or a rabbit. Because blood needs blood. Because a man has a duty. My father moves, then moves again. America is fond of its rootless men. I walk beside. I carry a bow & arrow. I do not know how to shoot. He will not ask for help. He teaches me the names of blackbirds, the songs of trees. How to peel back bark & tap the sugar beneath. I imagine such sweetness, a cold wind. We stand & press on in the deepening snow.

The fourth full-length poetry title by Michigan poet Amorak Huey is Dad Jokes From Late in the Patriarchy (Knoxville TN: Sundress Publications, 2021), a collection of first-person lyric narratives or monologues that explore notions of fatherhood, childhood and masculinity. Huey works through personal history and pop culture writing notions of television and movie fathers from the 1960s and 70s to his own father, and then to his own sense of fatherhood, exploring expectation, cultural presentation and the confusions that can exist within the collisions between. As he writes to close the poem “To the Dads at Buffalo Wild Wings Watching the / Tigers Game on a Monday Afternoon in April,” “On our separate drives home / we will chew gum / to cleanse our breath; / we will forget to pick up / the dry cleaning. / We lose track of the score, / blame the bullpen, / over-tip the servers, / we expect a kind / of sympathy we have not / earned. This is what it looks like / to have inherited the earth.” Through reading these poems, I think back to cultural depictions of the North American father as hapless, distant and incapable of accessing emotions, even to my own irritations at the more-recent Eddie Murphy film Daddy Day Care (2003); the limitations to how fathers are depicted, an idea that far too many latch onto as how one is supposed to act, and refusing to move beyond those boundaries.

Huey writes on fatherhood and boyhood, and the cultural weight so often put upon everyone, in terms of performing gender, from parents to media to classmates, falling exactly into the pitfalls of such limitations. “I cannot believe how stupid I am. I cannot believe,” he writes, to close the poem “Looking at Men,” “I’m more than halfway through with this life / & still molded out of ninth-grade humiliations. / I do not dare to admit weakness. I cannot / tell the truth about want. I am not / this body. I am not this sex. I am not / strong enough to be anything else.”

I find it interesting the ways in which Huey writes through such histories, including notions of nostalgia, something he discusses as part of an interview conducted by Frances Donovan and posted at Garden of Words on April 21, 2020. Discussing his third collection, Boom Box (Sundress Publications, 2019), Huey responds:

Nostalgia has always been one of the driving forces of my writing, as I assume it probably is for many people. And I’ve definitely always been interested in using the language of pop culture — whether it’s movies, music, literature, television, sports, whatever — in my poetry. My first collection has a lot of that in it. At some point, I realized that I had been mining this territory (high school, hair metal) a lot, and that’s when I assembled this group of poems into Boom Box. I tend to work in poems, not in projects, which causes problems for me when it’s time to shape what I’ve written into a book, so the threads and links between these poems are something that I discovered after I written them.

Huey steers clear of toxicity, but leans into a masculinity that defines as distant, sports-minded and friendly enough, those fathers who might favour the “dad joke,” but be unable to hold conversation beyond the weather, work or statistics. The closest he comes is through the poem “FMK,” that opens: “You can leave me & I will not kill you. / That this needs to be said is insane / but I am a man, & this is the world.” Huey attempts to shift, and even open, the narrative of what is possible for men, and for fathers; of what is possible in the ways in which we treat each other, and simply exist. “I have so much to live up to.” he writes, as part of “The Seventh Anniversary is Salt & I Do Not Know/ the Gift for That,” later on, ending the poem: “I am probably still not myself— / one of my sons, or both, or some / version of myself I’ve invented / from television characters / & game show hosts. I am so tired / & still I have nothing to show / for all the hours of my life. / We are miles inland but the air / is dense with saltwater, our / tongues slick with brine.”