Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2026: Julia Drescher, Sarah Anne Wallen + Michael Goodfellow,

Yesterday was a snow day over this way. Were you somewhere warm and safe, hopefully reading a copy of my Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025)? I mean, this is the right time for such. 

We’re kicking off our VERSeFest spring season (leading up to our festival in March) with our Volunteer Recruitment and Appreciation event very soon! Sunday, February 1, 3-5pm at Cooper’s Creative Kitchen (main floor of the Embassy Ottawa hotel at Cooper and Cartier, one block east of Elgin), featuring performances by Myriam Legault-Beauregard, Daniel Groleau Landry, Margo LaPierre and natalie hanna. Might we see you?

Garner NC: I’m always pleased to see new work by Julia Drescher, and her latest is the small chapbook-sequence Notes on Film (Further Other Book Works, 2025). I’ve published three chapbooks by her to-date through above/ground press, and I’m always eager to see more. I’m admittedly surprised she only has one full-length collection to date—Open Epic (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]—given how much work she seems to have worth compiling (although this is a frustration I have with a few other poets as well, including Jessica Smith and Amish Trivedi—these writers are clearly brilliant, why aren’t they getting published more often?). I’m intrigued by Drescher’s endlessly long lines, the way she continues a thought-line, layering movement upon movement. There’s a flow akin to a meandering across this essay-stretch of lyric, writing the ebbs and flows of notes on film and whatever else might slip into her view. “everyone’s middle of wood wound tight around a whistle / & eviction notices.” she writes, mid-way through the sequence. “there’s the edge of something & then there’s water / I feel in you in, you said, like atmospheric variations then / it’s the hardest way, how people enter a room.”

at noon, someone is standing, at noon wide open. there is a feral friend & daunting
wood—flocks of leaves, a copse of birds & unbearable lighting, there is whimsy
& then there is harm. the film gets started after the crowd departs, after the figs & the contact improv,
the ghosts of fallen grasses, drowning.
you said, country is monstrous art is merciless, thus
there’s an ear to do, imperfect. we build boats of rocks & then we burn them. you are walking in a film
& then you are eaten. I said, this is a test, a squandered passage & you said not knowing
where any thing is, we move from building
to building & I said what

Brooklyn NY: I’m intrigued by what appears to be the chapbook debut by Brooklyn poet and bookseller Sarah Anne Wallen, the chapbook Same Day (ugly duckling presse, 2025). Assembled as short poems and extended stretches of lyric, many of which feel variations upon the New York School aesthetic of first-person movement—the poem “DAYS OF THE WEEK,” for example, is dedicated “for Lewis Warsh,” and includes:

Monday the sun comes in hot through the window
Tuesday the heat is off and I can see my breath inside
Wednesday my toes never warm up
Thursday the line for the grocery store goes out the door
          and around the block
Friday I leave work feeling nothing at all
Saturday I think about love letters
Sunday I write a poem about wanting to write a love letter
Monday I do not write

There’s such propulsion to these lines. As the extended sequence “ISSUE OF PULP” begins: “today I feel / like the clouds / deflated / last night / I made / a phone call / dreamed / I had sex / in a laundromat / against the / dryers / warm / when I cry / I go out / on the balcony / press the back / of my hand / against / my forehead / there are other / people / down there / it’s easy / to feel / lonely […]” These poems are smart, wry and observational, sharp and quietly witty. The use of different rhythms is interesting across these pieces, from the staggered layering of lines to the extended stretch, one step against another, offering declaration and observation twirled and parried in delightful patterns. I think I need to see further poems by Sarah Anne Wallen.

WHY 

did the girl
fall off the swing? 

because
she was born 

 

when you’re a dog
your mouth
is your hand 

today in therapy
I talked about birds

Kentville/Lunenburg County NS: One of the final titles by the recently-outgoing iteration of Gaspereau Press (currently in flux as the new publisher sets himself up) is Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow’s chapbook Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2025), a title that follows his full-length collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set as a curious sequence of short bursts, the poem holds as kind of call-and-response between two works, interwoven, with one poem furthering on each left page, and the other poem furthering on the right. As the note that opens the collection offers: “The collection contains two interwoven poems. The poem ‘Snakemouth Orchid’ first appeared in Literary Review of Canada (July, 2022) and will also appear in Cape Cod to Nova Scotia: Art, Ecology, Poetry of the Gulf of Maine (Hachette, 2027).” And yet, why offer the title for one but not the other? Presumably “Cleft” sits as an umbrella-title, providing name to the combination between these two pieces, and not, say, an extension composed around the poem “Snakemouth Orchid.” If these are two poems, composed (seemingly) independently of each other, and interwoven here for the sake of a new, third piece, why not include? As the first page reads:

mallow, flower of borders
and western light, where
breeze caught the house’s corners
moonflower, his hands
against your other night, hard
windows double paned
the sky was river bottom, curved
where silt had gathered
wind, none of this could be stopped

Goodfellow’s work is known for a lyric attention to landscape, to his natural environment, crafting sharp first-person meditations around the understanding that humans are part of, and not separate from, the natural world, and these pieces, this piece, continues that exploration. It is interesting to see him working to shift the context between these two poems, interplaying the narrative, the lyric, and the italicized sections, presumably all part of the same “other” poem, offer themselves as curious asides to the main (so called) unitalicized narrative line. Less, almost, a call-and-response, perhaps, than the italicized lines as asides. Either way, the experiment is an interesting one. As the second page reads:

orchid, sky propped,
snakemouthed, July bright 

and star dark
it penciled the sky

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kate Colby

Kate Colby's books of poetry include I Mean and Reverse Engineer. A book of lyric prose, Paradoxx, just came out with Essay Press. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, and her recent writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, Literary Hub, The Nation and The Paris Review. She lives in Providence.

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 was picked up quickly and then selected for a post-publication award by Rosmarie Waldrop, which set me up for some disappointment with subsequent my books! I had to adjust my expectations. All my books are quite different, but my newest manuscript is probably closest in form and philosophical rigor to my first, so things come around again. But I was in my twenties when my first book came out and now I am in my fifties. I am wiser in a lot of ways, and also much more tired. I am still looking forward at life, but it looks a lot different than it used to and is scarier for reasons that don’t even have to do with mortality. The poems in my first book feel very youthful to me now.

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

Actually, I started as a—sort of—fiction writer. When I was 26 I had my dream job as an art curator and was miserable, so I applied to MFA programs in the Bay Area, where I was living at the time, on the strength of two short stories I’d written. I started at California College of the Arts (at the time it was California College of Arts and Crafts) in 2002 as a would-be fiction writer. My first semester I took a hybrid poetry class with Kathleen Fraser, who was an incredible and uncompromising teacher. Now I write essays and “prose” as well as poetry, but haven’t written fiction since (with one misbegotten exception mentioned in question #12).

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?

Things usually begin as an outgrowth of something I’m reading. Often, there is a lot of note-taking. I’ve hardly been writing at all the last couple of years (except when I’m writing about how I’m not writing, which is not not often), so I have been trying to find a new way into things. No matter how they begin, almost nothing in my first drafts makes it into the last. It’s all about editing into submission for me.

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 think starting with the idea of writing a book would shut me down immediately. Once I have a mass of stuff then I can look at it and ask what it is. I don’t usually know if I’m writing a long or a short thing until late in the process—I try not to ask it those kinds of questions until it become unavoidable.

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

I wouldn’t say they’re part of my process, but I enjoy giving and also going to readings very much. Given exigencies of the world and culture at present, it is increasingly rare to be in a room full of people actively engaged with art and questions about language. I want and need this more than ever.

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?

I like big abstract questions about consciousness and memory and their relationships with language. For a while now I have been obsessively concerned with theoretical physics and how much humans are capable of knowing about the physical world given the symbiotic limitations of our perception and language. I look for and want ride the line between how the world is and how it seems. My friend says I’m a phenomenologist because she knows I like hearing it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t think there’s one answer to this question. Some writers’ work is of a piece with their social and political lives and others’ isn’t. Language is historically loaded and political, so writing is always social and political, including arcane language experiments. I think writers who pay attention to the origins and mechanics of language are important. Niels Bohr said about studying atomic behavior with a microscope made of atoms, you can’t measure a phenomenon with a tool it acts upon, and I think that’s true of language too, but we can’t give up trying to understand what our physical and psycho-social worlds are made of. You just have to acknowledge the limitations. There are writers who have something to say and I just want to see how we say. I love discovering how words work and what they can do.

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

I’ve mostly had great experiences with editors at the presses and publications with which I’ve worked. The older I get, the less I bristle. I love it when others make me sound better.

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

My friend Kate Schapira is better than Ben Franklin. I think I’ve learned more from her about how to be an honest and ethical person than from anyone in my life. One thing she says that I think about all the time and which I believe first came from her mother is that what you practice you get good at, including the things you don’t want to be good at (e.g., beating yourself up, being selfish, etc.).

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

I suppose it’s easy, but it’s also a necessity. Per the previous question, I get good at doing one thing in a particular way and then have to do something different to cure myself of it, which I think is the main reason I move between poetry and prose. Otherwise, I’d keep doing the same thing ad nauseum. If I look away and think in a different form for a bit, I come back with a new mind.

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 don’t have a routine, unfortunately. I wish I did, but my day starts at 6:30 with a scramble to get my kids to school, walk the dog, clean up, etc. Before I had kids I never did a writing residency because I didn’t think I needed one, but now I fantasize about it.

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

Visual art, usually. I’m kind of stuck in my method of unsticking at the moment though, and have been trying to write about Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning for five years. I think I’ve written three things now about not being able to write about it. I even started a novel, which didn’t go well at all.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Rotting window sashes

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?

It all goes in there. I think and write about consciousness itself, so everything tips into the work, high and low. Saussure, Barthes, Fran Drescher and Weird Al Yankovic all make repeat appearances in Paradoxx.

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

What a hard question. There are the cornerstones—or what I think of as the cornerstones—but are they really? Do I still need the Black Mountain and Language poets? And Stevens. I think I do. I began there, but my work has gathered and shed a thousand more influences. I think I return to those early influences to remember where I started and to recalibrate. I’m impressionable and have to actively push away trends in writing because I find them easy to adopt.

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

My answer is inspired by your Question #11, above: I’d like to do a writing residency. Three weeks would be nice. I want to write every day, crank something out, take some walks, and then talk about it in the evening.

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 can’t imagine doing anything that isn’t intensely concerned with language. My favorite part of being an art curator was writing catalog essays. Before AI replaced me, I was also a commercial copywriter for a long time and I loved that work—it was like trying on costumes. When I was younger I trained as a dancer but it never quite clicked for me—I think I try to do with words what I never achieved with ballet. I love working with formal writing constraints.

My other answer is waitress. I enjoy the constant motion and intense focus that food service requires.

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

I have two kids, a husband, a dog, and a job! I am mostly doing something else.

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

I’ve read a lot of great things lately. I read Barbara Comyns’s entire oeuvre twice in two years, which was a joy. I want to write about her, but she’s perfect in a way that I can’t find words to apply to. I just read Duras’s Destroy, She Said, which I suppose is great because I hated it but am still thinking about it. I adored Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead, which is a must-read for any woman with a mother.

I go to bed early and read so am not up on film. I will get back to it one day. The last film I saw in a theater was Mickey 17, which wasn’t all that great. I did finally see Melancholia last year, after boycotting Von Trier for 25 years for the Bjӧrk movie, and that was a great film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

For the first time in years, I’m not working on any big writing projects. I’ve been slowly writing some essays and a poem here or there, but otherwise waiting for something to find me. I wish it would hurry because I need to write in order to survive this time of life and history.

But I am also starting a press and art collective called Red Nun with my friends Mary-Kim Arnold and Darcie Dennigan. We’ve talked about it for years, and have only just decided to go for it. In  many ways, it’s a ridiculous time to start a press, which also makes it the best time.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Es Lv, footprints

 

Everything people say about owls is a lapse because everything they say
Comes from reading or hearsay but owls do not live in information or other
People, owls live in hollows      inside this shell there is nothing
Inside this shell is nothing, all sound of ocean      everything I say is
A lie because everything I say comes from the same source as what they say
I am disorder I am on the side of disorder, the theoretical end of entropy
Is uniformity      everything I write is true because everything I write
Comes from my life that is a nontransferable path no one else can live it
Not any better or any worse      lack of proof is the fatal flaw of
Retroactive manifestos I can know how things happen but never quite the
What or why in histories      untended hedges straggly oleander bushes
Cement walls with bits of colored tile pots in a similar style with tangles
            (“NO ONE ELSE CAN LIVE MY LIFE”)

I was intrigued to discover this new full-length poetry title by the mysterious Es Lv, the book footprints (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a title physically set as a graceful square, due to the lengths of the lines. Despite being less than one hundred pages, footprints feels an expansive text; so big it nearly overwhelms. Only by entering the collection can one see the forest for the trees. “The violence is fresh today.” writes the poem “COMMODITIES,” “There is no need / for spices.” The poems in footprints collect into an assemblage of lyric expansiveness across poems set in four quarters, including a section-length sequence. There isn’t anything within the book that provides details on the author themselves, but for a couple of threads in the acknowledgements, including “My relationships with the words in this book became poems slowly.” and “The labor and artistry that transformed my manuscript into this book are a kind that effaces itself, making effort look easy or special efforts go unnoticed.” and “Every poem in this book was made with other wayfinders, authors whose words and trailwork found me when I was looking for them, star patterns, swells, color of clouds, my origin.” There is a charming and wistful sense of appreciation in these lines for the almost mystical knowing and unknowing that makes writing, specifically their writing, possible. As far as author biography, the publisher’s website offers only this: “Es Lv’s poems are invitations to build together, connections and worlds. Born into a Taiwan under martial law, they have lived many places and many roles. In art framing, in solidarity movements, in seasonal work, and many others. In her writing live those nested sensibilities, exhaustion and possibilities beyond, and the camaraderie. And much luck.”

“Why might a person change their name.” asks the opening of the poem “STRANGE IF THERE WERE NONE FOR US,” a poem that also offers, further along: “It isn’t a lie. right now we’re living / In a world where anyone with any motive at all can come / In anywhere at any time in any manner. / It’s the lack of policy that creates / Chaos. theoretical physics chaos is efficient. / The events of last night / No longer exist. it’s more of a story [.]” The shift in capitalization adds for an interesting alteration of rhythms, although for these poems, propulsion is key, and the poems are hefty: not only are they footprints, set as a kind of witness or demarcation of where one has been, but an ongoing list of considerations for possibility, and directions still to come. “Have a sense of self,” the poem “NO ONE ELSE CAN LIVE MY LIFE” writes, further on, “gods and heroes are strictly / For the masses      is it fairer that you obey nature / Or that nature should obey you      incommunicable / Language used for communication with individual persons / Will not contain other forms of relationship [.]” The poems, individually and as a single unit, exist as monologues; poems that feel as performative as they do meditative, and set on the page; sweeping gestures of line and length and sound. “History is not about the past  this story my story is about the present and / what i choose to do with it,” they write, mid-through the collection, “My lived experiences are my most precious credentials / If i want a better world i will have to be a better person // If we want a better world we will have to be better people [.]”

Grace Nissan, The Utopians

 

bring any country     to a standstill
take the same form    with everyone 

say it’s hard to find
it’s hard to find 

hold up their hands
their hands 

start thinking up arguments
and that’s farming (“The Utopians”)

I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”

Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

“I feel almost ashamed to send you this little book about the Utopian Republic.” (That’s how you started Utopia—with a letter, to introduce Utopia through its messenger, Raphael.) “Some people say that he has died somewhere on his travels. Others that he has gone back to his own country. Others again that he has returned to Utopia, partly because he felt nostalgic about it, and partly because he couldn’t stand the way Europeans behaved.”

The bulk of the collection exists as “The Utopians,” with two further sections—“THE WORLD” and “Passages 1, 2, 3”—interestingly enough, are interspersed throughout the collection, held as fading text (something Ellen Chang-Richardson recently played with as well, through their recent above/ground press title) and even text set backwards. The interplay, the interlay, feels akin to less a series of interruptions than a layering, held as a critique of where we currently are, but through the translated and transposed language of English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, statesman, theologian and writer Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), and their infamous book originally composed in Latin, and published in 1516. “Utopia / wasn’t retailing,” Nissan writes, “like a talented   author / had seen absolutely    nothing // to get an even clearer picture / died somewhere    on his travels / and whispered / More [.]” There are few poetry titles, one would think, responding to texts by one simultaneously held as Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII and venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. If More’s Utopia offered a fictional, perfect, island republic or commonwealth, Nissan’s The Utopians writes of a population set within a bubble, offering an articulation of and counterpoint to contemporary western society. How does any utopia turn in on itself, and twist its own impulses? How can any society find its way out of such dark? Held as critique and counterpoint, The Utopians occasionally write directly to More, writing out his limitations, his declarations, through lyric fragment, layering and narrative interplay, and into what More could never have imagined. Or, as Nissan writes:

What I mean is, transmission hurts. Utopia was not always an island, you wrote, it was a peninsula first. Because your new world is dripping with passage, territorial lust and imperial phantoms, as well as all that could not come into being. Thrilling call for the abolition of private property. But you are sullied by the name of one (yours), puppeting as total social structure. You are sullied by personage itself.

Sometimes it helps to think like a child. More: there is no point outside the world, there is only mouth.

Let me enter the picture. Notice me like a low and constant breeze. When it stops.

On Kendra Sullivan’s Reps

My review of New York poet and academic Kendra Sullivan’s latest, Reps (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), is now online at Seneca Review.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

Alex Cuff is learning to metabolize grief into a presence that keeps her in relationship to herself and community. A public school educator, and an editor of the Brooklyn-based poetry magazine No, Dear, she is the author of Family, a Natural Wonder (Reality Beach) and I Try Out A Sentence to See Whether I Believe (Ghost Proposal). Her first full-length collection, Common Amnesias, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse on May Day in 2024. She lives in Flatbush, Lenapehoking, with her partner, and feline extended family: Karl, Kuma and Medb.

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?
When I first encountered this question my instinctual response was, it didn’t change my life. I’m referring to my first book since it’s the most recent first for me. But over the past couple months that the book has been out, and having read from it several times, I’m realizing that I do feel a shift, a subtle change in life, with regard to my relationship to myself as a writer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the publication of Common Amnesias has given me a sense of accomplishment. I received an email from Dan Owens of Ugly Duckling Presse letting me know they wanted to publish the book just after a field trip with high school students to the Whitney to see no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. It was December 23rd and had just begun to snow, and I was walking the High Line to visit my partner at work. I was used to so much rejection by then and had sort of steeled my heart in a way that I hadn’t expected to have room for the small joy of a YES. Between that moment and the publication in May 2024, the shine of the yes flickered but the shift was that no matter how awful anything writing-related seemed, I knew that an intelligent & generous group of people were taking care of a collection of my poems and preparing them into a beautiful object that I could share with friends. At the moment of answering this question–5 months from publication–I feel a sense of gratitude. I’m a person with many unfinished projects and I’m still amazed that I wrote poems, organized them into a manuscript, shared them with other people and asked for feedback, and sent them out to many presses and contests. The other shift that I didn’t expect is a deepened intimacy with the body of poems. A sense of relief that came with the acceptance of the book for publication was a feeling of getting to cut the umbilical cord from these fucking poems I’ve been looking at for a long time. But now that I’m reading from the book, and having to select which poems to read in a given amount of time in a particular sequence to an audience who has heard or not heard the poems has forced us—me and the poems--to say heyyyy more often than I expected. And reading the same poems again and again with different people receiving them, and different types of responses, has helped me gain some tenderness and perspective toward poems I thought I was tired of. It’s hard to say how my most recent work compares to previous because much writing that made it into Common Amnesias has been written over the past ten years ago. I think I’ll need a lot more distance from my writing to be able to look back and know what has changed.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think that keeping a journal led me to poetry. I started keeping a journal when I was 8 years old – I only know this because I still have the journal–and journaling has been the most consistent writing I’ve done in the almost forty years since. I think that the type of writing that is journaling for me–jotting down notes and fragments–most lends itself to becoming the form of writing that we call poetry. I don’t remember reading any poetry before college though I’m sure I did in high school. I do recall I appreciating what felt like opacity in poems I first encountered. First perhaps because it matched how I felt moving through the world—a sort of heaviness and confusion—but also because it was a genre where adults seems to say it was okay to not understand, and I encountered not understanding many things I read, but poetry was like something it was okay to say we didn’t get.

I’ve never had any desire to write fiction. I enjoy reading it but would never have the stamina, or the planning capability or interest that goes into what I imagine a fiction writer needs to do, to create fiction. I don’t know if I can hold onto a beginning, middle and end at the same time in my head. I have written non-fiction – a couple of essays about teaching that I worked on with the support of an amazing editor and writer, Matthew Burgess, and both were painful experiences that I could not have done without an editor. I simply would have talked myself out of the necessity of the piece. The stamina I have is to return to what’s been written as opposed to the stamina to write one sentence after another sentence and have them together move towards some meaning.

I relate 100% to how Tonya Lailey answered this same question for you: “And I’ve also always been a day dreamer, space-cadet as we called it when I was a kid. I think poetry is kinder to dreamers than fiction might be.”

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?
Nothing writing wise ever comes quickly for me. There are two poems that I can think of that remain close to their first drafts. One is a poem titled “Noun Noun” which is basically a transcription of a series of text messages between me and my dad. The other is titled “Desire” half of which is a recounting of giving myself an enema, and the other half is a list of catalog items I read about while encountering the aftermath of the enema. I journaled about the experience afterwards and that’s basically the poem.

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 dreamt once that a friend, the painter Jamie Chan, told me that if one can create the perfect sculpture then there’s no reason to write poems. I don’t agree with this because I don’t know if I can separate the process of sculpting or writing poems from the more or less finished piece that a reader experiences. But I like thinking of poems as sculptures and in that analogy, my process is less like creating a sculpture from a mass of material, and more like piecing found objects together into some sort of whole that constellates like a group of magnets that snap together once they are placed in each other’s orbit. I’m definitely, in your words, “an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project.” There is a project I’m working on now in which the idea precedes the writing, which is new for me, and I’m understanding that even in that case, the writing is stringy and fragmented and has not yet found its form.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I appreciate this question because I’ve never thought of public readings as either part of or counter to my creative process. While public readings definitely cause a good bit of anxiety for me, which at the time leading up to the reading absolutely feels counter-everything, I have to say that reading end up nurturing my creative process because they help bring to focus which poems feel most necessary to share in a particular time and place. Preparing for any reading ends up inscribing the sounds and articulations of the poems into my body. I get super nervous at readings and rely on muscle memory to deliver the poems – if the poems aren’t embodied, my brain will be elsewhere during the reading and I get lost in the language. Additionally, I inevitably end up continuing to revise the poems that I practice for a reading – even poems from Common Amnesias have changed over the past few months of reading from the book.

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 a difficult question for me because I really do not think of my writing as trying to answer questions. My relationship to writing is so fraught that it’s hard for me to zoom out to that level of thinking! I feel like this is a bad answer though. So hmm what is immediately present for me when I sit down to write a line, or revisit some lines I have written, is the question of whether I can communicate tenderness and thinking at the same time--the poignant feeling I walk through the world with, one that makes it both gorgeous and terrible to be in a body, in a way that others can relate to, and in a way that isn’t unbearably cliché. I am also curious about the question of whether the speaker of any poem I write can be separate me as an author, from my own subjectivity.

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 think there’s space for all sorts of writers having different roles in the larger culture. I’m grateful for the writers thinkers artists activists journalists who are currently putting energy into bringing attention the genocide in Palestine, and organizing to change systems that normalize genocide and war. I know there are particular people who identify as writers (as they should!) but I also think it is difficult to distinguish the writer from anyone else who is creating and communicating in our world. But yes to people who write and create: wake us up, make us feel, help us think, make us realize that we aren’t alone. I can’t speak for others but in this moment I am believing that my role (as a writer, as a teacher, as a friend, and community member) is to stop dissociating long enough to overcome fear and lethargy in order to act in a way that interrupts the harm caused by systems that only give a shit about wealth + power + land accumulation.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I think collaboration in general to be essential, and in the few times I’ve worked with an editor, my writing got a push that I don’t think I could have achieved on my own. I’m grateful to Kyra Simone and Lee Norton from UDP for their editorial guidance over the few months of preparing Common Amnesias for publication—from the macro level of structure, to a few lines or words that I can spiral for hours wondering if I should cut. And for the years before that, many friends had read through the manuscript and contributed to its evolution. Nope I couldn’t imagine being a writer without editors!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

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?
It’s rare for me to wake up without being totally soaked in dream images. A typical non-work day begins with coffee asap and then I sit at my kitchen window and write my dreams down. The only other writing routine I consistently keep is journaling in the morning. I do this on the bus to work or at one of the windows in my apartment if I’m not rushing off to work. My partner knows to not strike up conversation during these early moments. Really the only other times I tend to writing, to poetry!, is when I’m enrolled in a writing workshop. So I try to do that yearly.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Once I had a dream featuring a scroll unrolling to reveal yards and yards of text. About 95% of the text was in an unremarkable font, but every now and then I’d see a word or phrase glowing yellow as if it was burned into the scroll and glowing like coals. In the dream, I realized that my unconscious was revealing my writing process to me. The scroll represented all of my language – not necessarily everything that I'd written down, but all of the language that lives through me and in me and arrives through dreams. What I learned was that my writing process isn’t linear at all and in some ways, I need to trust that it is accumulative if I keep jotting it down when I can. So when I’m stuck, if I have energy, I search past scrolls aka google docs. Otherwise I move on with my day.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean. A Catholic church. A pizza place.

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 don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t influence my work. But I don’t work with a particular form to inspire writing. At this point, I’d say dreams and relationships with other humans have most influenced the poems I’ve written.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This question is what makes me feel like a fake writer. I started reading contemporary poetry around age thirty so since then I’ve felt like I’m in catch up mode so I there are few books I’ve read more than once. Every writer I read and love, every book or poem, gets filed into my waxy brain as important. I will say though that Dorothy Allison was the first writer I recall reading and thinking about the person behind the book. I thought they were so brave to be writing about shame.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I think it would be cool to write a long poem or a chapbook over the course of a couple weeks. My writing practice is so sporadic and collage-like that I can’t imagine showing up to the same piece of writing daily for several weeks and have it like a dysfunctional family stick together in one poem.

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?
My occupation really is more educator than a writer. I spend way more time in my life as a teacher of reading and writing than as a writer of poems. But my alternative callings are: herbalist, caretaker at an animal sanctuary, farmer, seamstress, arborist, paid non-competitive swimmer, film-maker (once there is technology that allows us to download our dreams into film).

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
LOL I do almost everything else instead of writing on a daily basis.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This is a hard question but I’ll do it. Not that I believe in a strong line between what we call genres but…for non-fiction, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger. For poetry, Saretta Morgan’s Alt Nature. For fiction, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I just rewatched all of the Alien films so gotta say Alien.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Answering these questions!

Bigger picture: A few years ago I dreamt that I was in a basement rummaging through stacks and piles looking for anything of value, and I found a desk I knew to be my uncle’s, and I found a stack of poems he’d written and realized, in the dream, that he had been a poet. A few weeks later IRL my partner and I were helping my parents clean out their basement and I found a suitcase full of hundreds of letters that this uncle had written to my grandmother while he was in seminary, studying to become a Catholic priest, in Rome, Italy, during the early 1960s. I’ve been working with those letters on and off for the past couple of years. In fact I’m waiting for emily brandt to host another Docupoetics workshop so that I can get back to that project.

I also have so many dreams written down and have been inspired to shape years of dreams into a book along the lines of Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang. I’d love to collaborate on this with a visual artist!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;