The Prairie Schooner Blog

"In a way all stories are about mental health": an Interview with Molly Quinn

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 18:46:36 +0000

by Gayle Rocz

Molly Quinn’s writing has either appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Post Road. She was recently published in our Spring issue with the short fiction story, “Babies in the Water.”

Gayle Rocz: Your short fiction story, "Babies in the Water," is based around the relationship between a grown, unstable, and distant daughter, Kim, and her mother who is suffering from dementia. Their relationship is rather strained because Kim believes her mother intentionally poisoned her as a child. How did this scenario present itself to you? What were some influences that helped you create this situation between these two characters?

Molly Quinn: I’m interested in relationships between caregivers and the caretaken, and how these roles inevitably blur and sometimes reverse. Sometimes compassion turns into pity. I’ve seen this pattern to some extent in every family system, at the hospital where I work, and in our culture at large. It’s maddening because it’s so hard to call out: those who thrive from others being unwell can hide behind the guise of competence. I knew I wanted to write about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—when a caregiver induces illness—because it’s the most extreme example of this kind of scapegoating. Kim’s mother, unable to contend with her own vulnerability, intentionally makes Kim physically weak so she can get her needs met through her daughter. I realized this made the mother too purely villainous, so I gave her dementia. Not only does this show her frailty and humanness, it pushes Kim into the caretaker role, challenging her perception of herself as a victim.

GR: Throughout "Babies in the Water," Kim's mother appears to be completely within her mental illness. However, the two share brief moments of tenderness and clarity. When Kim says, "I know how you made me sick," the narrator states that "Her mother locked eyes with her. Searching them, Kim saw, for an instant, what she was looking for. Her mother knew that she knew." As a nurse, have you experienced moments like this, when people are able to break through the haze of their mental illnesses to find clarity? Why did you choose to include these moments of tenderness and clarity within this story?

MQ: Often with mental illness, there is no haze. Sometimes people are acutely aware of what they’re going through, which can make suffering particularly painful. Even when someone’s perception seems bizarre or absurd, I try to remember that my view of the world is only a perspective. People whose minds work differently have a unique window we can learn from, and those who have lived through the worst trauma often have the most wisdom.

In cases of dementia, I’ve experienced many moments of connection with my patients. When logical conversation isn’t an option, emotions are communicated through eye contact, facial expression, and body language. I wanted to capture this kind of tenderness in the story for the sake of tension, to show there’s a relationship of sorts at stake. Even in her resentment, Kim recognizes her mother is just a human being who must navigate confusion and fear at the end of her life. When Kim confronts her, I dangle the possibility of a genuine reckoning between them. Even if her mother does grasp what’s happening, she chooses not to admit it, leaving Kim retraumatized without hope of resolution. This moment of clarity lays the ground for Kim’s cruelty. Making her rage and frustration palpable implicates the reader when she acts them out at the end of the story.

GR: I also read your short story, "Little Red Mouths," that was published in the Kenyon Review Online. I noticed some similarities between the two stories, mostly in that they deal with mental illness. The main character in this story seems to be dealing with anxiety. Why do you feel compelled to write stories that deal with mental illnesses? What is your goal in writing these stories?

MQ: Between my family history, my own struggles with anxiety, and working in a psych ward for fifteen years, it was inevitable that I would end up writing about mental health. In a way all stories are about mental health because all stories are about human minds, but there’s a lot of fear around admitting this because of stigma. Having witnessed many healing processes, including my own, I believe the most essential piece is realizing our common humanity: understanding that we’re not alone in our suffering, that it’s a part of life. I hope these stories do some small part in normalizing mental health issues and inspire others to tell their own.

GR: Are there any other writers or pieces of writing that have influenced your writing style or subject matter?

MQ: I’m sure they have but it’s not something I keep track of. Figuring out my style seems self-limiting. Instead I try to cultivate curiosity—I read as much as possible and see what comes out. Voices that are always in my head include Zadie Smith, Carson McCullers, Stephanie Vaughn, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Enright, and Roddy Doyle. Nobody writes about mental health like Elizabeth Strout; her observations are so sharp and honest. Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the most delightful and imaginative collection I’ve read in a while. Right now, I’m finishing Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and it’s inspiring me to spend even more time alone than I already do.

GR: Finally, what are your current projects? Will your upcoming collection of short stories be similar to the two previously mentioned?

MQ: I’m getting close to completing this collection, which I’m calling “A Danger to Ourselves” after my piece that was published in the Iowa Review. I think this is the right title because it addresses the misconception that people with mental illness are violent to others, when in reality they’re much more likely to hurt only themselves. The entire collection is themed around mental health. Many of the stories are set in the psych ward where I work, and some are interconnected. Others are about those coping with issues like alcoholism, chronic pain, and sex addiction outside of the hospital. I’ve also started outlining a novel, which I won’t say much about except that the protagonist is a nurse.

Gayle Rocz is a Prairie Schooner intern.

"Poems as an outlet for shock and grief": an Interview with Marianne Kunkel

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 17:52:47 +0000

by Kelsey Conrad

Marianne Kunkel is Editor-in-Chief at Missouri Western State University's national undergraduate journal, The Mochila Review, and has been published in several journals including the Missouri Review, the Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Rattle. She is the author of The Laughing Game, and her book of poetry, Hillary, Made Up will come out in September.

Kelsey Conrad: Your book, Hillary, Made Up, is set to release in September. The book seems political by nature, but one thing that I found particularly interesting is how much it seems to revolve around makeup, and the idea of putting on a face. When during the writing process did that idea start to emerge, or was it one that you started with?

Marianne Kunkel: I’ve always liked persona poems, and poems that make me laugh, so the kookiness of the project—an entire book from the voices of makeup and hair products to Hillary Clinton—stemmed from the poetry I like to read. The topic of makeup specifically, though, emerged from a more serious place. The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I was scheduled to conference with students at the university where I teach, and something about putting on my makeup felt eerie. For me, I connected the loss of a woman candidate seeking the highest office in American politics with the tightrope of femininity and masculinity she had to walk—I saw in my own application of makeup an intent to hide flaws and to look more approachable and pleasing to the eye, and I felt sad for myself and for Clinton that our professional duties are tied up in this particular artifice. Now, that’s not everyone’s experience with makeup—I celebrate that some find it empowering, an artistic expression, and more. But it was mine that morning, and in Clinton’s recent book What Happened, she expresses her own frustration about the many hours she spent in the campaign makeup chair before meeting with voters. After that morning, I couldn’t shake the poetic potential I saw in makeup; I’d never read many poems about makeup, and certainly not a catalogue of persona poems from the voices of each product. There’s tension in the notion that these little items have such direct access to such a powerful woman, and yet she and many makeup-wearers don’t feel much personal attachment to them; all makeup, after all, is disposable. So I started to think: what would they say about her, about all women? What stories do they know about beauty standards and the history of the beauty industry? Are they fundamentally kind, shallow, jealous, encouraging, or something else? In the end, the poems took on many different attitudes that reflect the dizzying spectrum of feelings that Americans hold toward Clinton.

KC: What does this book mean to you? What was the process of writing it like?

MK: This book is about my own grief watching a woman aspire to the highest American political office and lose. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying Clinton’s loss was symbolic of every professional setback I’ve experienced that feels tinged with sexism. Once I formed the idea for the project, the poems came very quickly—almost one a day last summer. One reason for my fast pace was that I knew that time was against me because with the speed of our country’s news cycle, a book about the 2016 election wouldn’t be relevant for too long. But more than that, I found myself hungering to write the poems as an outlet for my shock and grief. I had attended the Women’s March, and soon after got involved in my local chapter that we named Persisterhood, and the poems kept me in a headspace of political activism; the same summer I wrote the poems, I also helped create a local directory of LGBTQ+-friendly businesses and fundraise to plant trees along our city’s parkway. So the writing process led to a more public life of trying to make peace with Clinton’s loss and mobilize with other women to bring good into the world, and that public life in turn led me back to my desk and writing the poems.

KC: Do you think that art is innately political?

MK: I grew up hearing in many wonderful women’s studies courses that “the personal is political,” so, yes, more art than we realize is political. Yet the poets I really admire these days are bringing politics to the forefront of their work. I think, with all the divisiveness and bigotry in our country right now, we need poems that shock us back into our humanity and connection with each other and that remind us of the worth of meaning-making and awe. For me, I dove into the subject of makeup because I saw in our society’s treatment of Clinton an assumption that we know her even as we expect her to disguise herself in makeup, hair products, designer clothes, and gender-coded speech and mannerisms. Clinton’s makeup, for all its direct access to her, is, like us, concealing her as it looks upon her, and that’s what I hope to get across with these poems—that the more disguise we demand of someone, the harder it is for her to deliver herself to us as genuine, which is what’s so frustrating about holding any woman to gender-specific, time-intensive, and often complicated, expensive, and racist beauty standards.

KC: You previously worked as a managing editor here at Prairie Schooner, and are now Editor-in-Chief at Missouri Western State University's national undergraduate journal, The Mochila Review. Do you think that your experience working at these journals has changed the way that you write and submit your work?

MK: Definitely! I’d be lying to say I don’t get discouraged when my work is rejected, but I try to roll with the punches because I’ve seen just how many submissions journals get and how competitive the publishing market is. Working with literary journals also helps me to see the standard of writing that’s getting published and to know what the styles and trends in content and form are right now; when I was writing the poems for this book, I often went to literary journals I liked to get inspired. Literary journals give readers access to the most current writing—even more than books, which have a longer draft-to-publication timeline. Mostly, my experience working with literary journals has inspired me to keep producing poetry and encouraging others to do the same; it’s invigorating to see how many thousands of writers are coming up with new ideas and new words for old ideas.

KC: Are there any writers that you think have influenced your style or subject matter?

MK: I’ve been on a Bob Hicok kick for the last several years, and the twists and turns in his poems, the quick mood shifts from head to heart, intellect to raw emotion, inspired a lot of the risks in my book. I read Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds with my poetry class the semester before I began writing the book, and his powerful political content gave me courage to write my own. Also, Grace Bauer’s and Julie Kane’s anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Anthology of Subversive Verse, one of the first post-election anthologies to be released, featured a poem from my book and showed me other women writing their way out of that historic election. Other beloved influences include the poetry of Natalie Diaz, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Nikki Giovanni (whom we brought to our campus last spring!). Also, my book features seven sonnets in Shakespearean sonnet form, so of course Shakespeare was an influence. Finally, a major influence was Clinton herself; I did a lot of research to fill in gaps in my knowledge of her political career and understanding of her personhood—so much research that I ended up writing a four-page “Notes” section that appears in the back of my book.

KC: What's next? Are there any upcoming projects that you're looking forward to, or are you focused on your book release?

MK: I’m learning that to really send out a book properly into the world, there’s a lot of advance work. Every day this summer I’ve been trying to do one thing to promote my book, while also focusing on new writing and a move to a new house. I’m pleased that most of my marketing efforts are paying off, and that so far I haven’t felt too pushy in my coordination of book readings and pre-order sales; time will tell! My dear friend Johnathan Loesch made the beautiful cover for the book, and he’s been so helpful in brainstorming artistic marketing strategies; right now we’re working on customizing crayons to give away at readings so attendees can color in Johnathan’s black and white sketch of Clinton that’s featured in the back of the book. Also, I had fun working with a graphic design student at my university, Sarah Zahari, on a book trailer. I feel buoyed in my marketing of my book by the fact that the poems point to Clinton’s tireless advocacy and leadership throughout her political career; it’s easy to get excited about bringing attention to her historic achievements, as well as to the wacky and mesmerizing world of makeup.

Kelsey Conrad is a Prairie Schooner intern.

Alberta Clipper: 6/27/18: "On Friendship and Maxine Kumin" by Alberta Arthurs

Prairie Schooner — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 19:27:34 +0000

by Gayle Rocz

On June 27, 1693 the first women’s magazine was published in London. Titled Ladies’ Mercury, it was a spinoff of John Dunton’s The Athenian Mercury. This “magazine” filled one sheet front and back, and was mostly made up of an advice column aimed to attract both women and men. Admittedly, Ladies’ Mercury was no feminist crusade. It only lasted for about four issues and it was published by a man. However, it was the first time anyone thought that women might need or want a specialized publication.

Fast-forward 325 years to the first women’s march in Lincoln, NE on January 21, 2017. Thousands of people braved the 24° Fahrenheit weather in order to show their support for women’s rights. Since then, there has been a second women’s march held in Lincoln on June 8, 2018. Thankfully, a more welcoming temperature of about 70° Fahrenheit greeted the marchers this time around.

It might be an understatement to say that many things have changed for women between 1693 and 2018. From women being granted the right to vote in 1920 after decades of fighting, to the revival of the fight for gender equality during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, there have been many advancements for women. In the Winter 1997 edition of Prairie Schooner, Alberta Arthurs wrote about her experience as a female professor in the 1960s. Alberta and her friend, Maxine Kumin (Max for short), experienced gender inequality in the workplace, which is still a hotly-debated issue to this day. Here’s an excerpt from Alberta’s essay:

“We were teaching, she and I, and two or three other women, in the Tufts English Department. She had been recommended by John Holmes, the Tufts poet/professor, and I had edged and elbowed my way into the classroom from my administrative job at the university. We are there, with our Master’s degrees, teaching mostly part-time, mostly freshman English, mostly male students. We share offices in the attic of the English department, and we have no parking spaces or restrooms, no telephones, no help with the typing, although the men do. I remember that we were very grateful to be there at all, and the men felt very generous for allowing us to be there at all. That’s how I met Max.

There was nobody leading the way for women back then; in fact, we turned out to be the leaders, others lacking. Our expectations were domestic. We were credentialed by skirt lengths, car size, cooking skill. Even then, I was awed by Max. She was already publishing her poems and her children's books, despite the system. She was meeting regularly with a group of poets- John Holmes was their mentor-who inspired each other, dared each other, with critique and competition and comradeship. Probably her great gift for friendship stems from the inspiring that took place then and from the faith that her friend John had in her. Max in the early nineteen sixties was already a fierce and loving teacher, a fierce and loving friend, and perhaps the first woman I ever met who could be called a feminist.”

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 111-116

The Alberta Clipper is an occasional gust of history—brushing the dust off of a piece from our archives and situating it in the current events and local Nebraskan weather reports of days gone by. Explore the Alberta Clipper archives here.

"Read. Read read read read read.": an Interview with Carmen Maria Machado

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 19:23:38 +0000

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Our Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest is open for submissions. Want some insight into what this year's judge, Carmen Maria Machado, is looking for? Read on!

Your most recent book, Her Body and Other Parties, is a collection of short stories; your forthcoming book is a memoir. How do you conceptualize genre? Much of your work resists arbitrary borders, bending boundaries as part of craft—how does the construct or fluidity of genre influence your choices as a writer?

I think about genre and form all of the time: the negative space around them and the boundaries alongside them and their histories and iterations and strengths and weaknesses and tropes; the way they inform each other. It gives me an entry point into my writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. Sometimes I abandon or submerge this entry point once I’ve gotten into something; other times, I embrace or even center it. It just depends on what the project demands.

Your next book is described as “an experimental memoir told through a sequence of rotating narrative tropes.” How do you approach structure in this book? How does form help create the meaning? Are there any memoir constructs you resist or rewrite?

I’m still working on it, so it’s hard to say! The structure is in flux. But the narrative tropes help by giving me a framework to explore specific elements of my memory, and that is both fruitful and satisfying.

Your use of experimentation and alternative reality complicate our understanding of nonfiction as a genre defined by fact. Why is questioning, rewriting, and complicating truth necessary for writing? For nonfiction, in particular? Do you see your craft choices making larger commentaries on our current social and political realities?

There’s a really beautiful memoir by Kevin Brockmeier—A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip—about his seventh-grade year. In the middle of the memoir, time freezes, and Kevin’s young self finds himself having a conversation with his adult self. It’s obviously a fictional gesture, but it does important work for the memoir. Similarly, Brian Blanchfield’s Proxiesis a book of short essays on certain topics which he is writing entirely from memory; the final essay is comprised of corrections for all of the preceding essays. Sofia Samatar also has some beautiful essays that use speculative elements. There’s definitely precedent within nonfiction to push the boundaries of how reality is portrayed, and I’m very interested in those boundaries.

What works have you turned to while writing your memoir? What besides reading the works of others (music or travel, for example) has shaped your process and prose?

Alongside the memoir I’m reading (or re-reading) Hilton Als, Maggie Nelson, Mary Ruefle, Alice Bolin, Brian Blanchfield, and Sofia Samatar. I’m also influenced by film, television, and video games.

Cultural hierarchies like the idea of high and lowbrow culture, for example, are becoming less stratified—what does that mean for the essay? What cultural spaces do you see the essay occupying?

I recently devoured Alice Bolin’s essay collection Dead Girls, which just about took off the top of my head. She writes beautifully about true crime and detective novels and crime shows and teenage witch guides and shows us how all of culture—from our most beloved literary novels to our tawdriest shows and everything in between—echoes connected ideas about gender and bodies and violence.

Her Body and Other Parties was released to wide critical acclaim, but what struggles did you face during the writing? What advice can you offer writers who are struggling?

My main struggle was that I was writing an utterly unmarketable book. Weird gay feminist short stories of uncertain genre are not precisely a best-selling formula, and every step of the process—publishing individual stories, finding an agent, selling the book—was difficult and almost didn’t happen. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel confident in my work—I loved my stories—but rather I had no idea I’d be able to do anything with them. Luckily, everyone who told me “you only need one”—one magazine editor, one agent, one publishing house to believe in your work—was totally right. The advice I’d give is to not compromise your vision and write the stories you want to read in the world. Don’t worry about anything else.

Similarly, we often dispense advice to “beginning” writers, though much can be applied to writers at any stage of their careers—what broader advice do you have for writers?

Read. Read read read read read. You cannot enter into the literary conversation unless you know what the conversation is.

Finally, Prairie Schooner receives and publishes a wide range of essays—memoir, personal essay, literary journalism, lyric and experimental essays. What are some of your favorite essays? What kinds of stories or craft choices grab your attention? What might you be looking for in the submissions?

I love the perfume writing at The Dry Down, Lia Purpura’s “Autopsy Report,” JoAnn Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” Andrea Long Chu’s “On Liking Women,” Sarah Marshall’s “Remote Control,” Sofia Samatar’s Monster Portraits & "Meet Me in Iram,” Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies,Maggie Nelson, Jenny Zhang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samantha Irby. I want beautiful sentences, formal experimentation, being taught something I didn’t know before, intelligent criticism, bodies and their nightmares, humor, risks. That essay you’ve been sitting on because you’re wondering if it’s too weird? I want that essay.

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir(The Ohio State University Press 2018), and the poetry chapbooks Regenerate: Poems from Mad Women(Dancing Girl Press 2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide(Finishing Line Press 2017), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch(Finishing Line Press 2014). She has worked as Prairie Schooner’s Nonfiction Assistant Editor since 2011 and is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University.

"But I prefer to answer zero questions about it": An Interview with Terrance Hayes

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 20:15:28 +0000

by Ilana Masad

A few weeks ago, I received an advanced reader copy of Terrance Hayes's new book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, out June 19 from Penguin Poets. I set up an interview with the poet through his publicist, and then sat down to research everything I didn't know about him. Of particular interest was this video from the MacArthur Foundation, where I discovered that Hayes is a visual artist and musician as well as a poet. Imagine my surprise when, after writing to Hayes with my questions, he responded with a question of his own: since this is a blog, he wondered, would he perhaps be able to incorporate images in his response? I told him he absolutely could, imagining he may use one or two to illustrate his points or to give examples of something else he was working on. Instead, Hayes apparently used a snowy day to, as he put it, "engage with" my questions. Oh, he engaged with them, all right, and the result is something quite unlike any interview we've published before. Plus, he provided a video of what can only be termed performance art, with zero context, and indicated he would rather not give it any. To see the video for yourself, click here, then, please enjoy the following interview...

QUESTIONS/ANSWERS

1. Your sonnets in this book engage with so many themes, where words like "assassin" can take on so many meanings, from the person you see in the mirror to assassins remembered by history to the stranger on the street who can shoot you for no reason. What made you think of this term, assassin, when you set out to put together this book?

ANSWER: C1 / C2 / C3

2. I noticed in the sonnet index at the end of the book that each sonnet grouping is 14 lines, so that the first lines of each 14 sonnets make up their own kind of sonnet. You're known for this kind of formalistic play. What interests you about form, and how does it inspire you?

ANSWER: D4

3. There are several refrains in this book: But there never was a black male hysteria is one, and Probably all my encounters are existential jambalaya is another and The names alive are like the names in the graves is a third. How do you choose what lines to repeat and how to repeat them? Is it the sounds, the rhythm, the meaning you find in them?

ANSWER: B4

4. In general, there's a lot of linguistic play in your work, but particularly in this book. There's no attempt to hide the way you play with sound and language, the way words sound together and make rhythms and sometimes rhymes. Perhaps this question is too broad, but what do you love about language play?

ANSWER: A3

5. You're a visual artist and a musician as well as a poet. What do different forms do for you? Are they all in service of poetry, or does poetry serve your musician and artist self?

ANSWER: B

6. You often engage with masculinity in your work, and there's a line in this book that took my breath away, especially as a queer person: "...men like me / Who have never made love to a man will always be / Somewhere in the folds of our longing ashamed of it". Can you tell me more about this line?

ANSWER: B

ANSWER KEY

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:27:48 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Stephanie McCarley Dugger, winner of the 2014 Vella Chapbook Contest, talks about letting go of deadlines, dashes vs. white space, and the importance of feeling connected to a larger writing community.

How many books have you published, and where?

I have one full-length collection, Either Way, You’re Done (Sundress Publications), and one chapbook, Sterling (Paper Nautilus Press).

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

It took me about ten years to write the poems for the collection. I didn’t write with the manuscript in mind; I was just writing poems—most during my grad programs. Once I had enough to consider putting them together, I went through countless drafts. I landed on the poems that became Either Way, You’re Done, but struggled with ordering them. Nearly every friend I have has had these poems strewn out over their living room floor at one point or another, us shuffling and reshuffling and scooting around on all fours to reach this paper or that one. Eventually, I realized the poems were about journeying; that was the lightbulb. I was able to see the two sections clearly (“home” and “leaving home”), and then the order came fairly naturally from there.

Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

I did! I’m sure there are many that I haven’t noticed, but one that I found pretty early on was an overabundance of dashes. There must have been at least three or four in every poem. I figured out that I was using the dashes as space filler, indicating some pause or deep breath. Once I caught on to that, I replaced many of those dashes with white space, which helped me better understand the form for the poems. There are still a lot of dashes, but I cut them down quite a bit.

Someone pointed out that several poems had qualifying phrases associated with voice/speaking (“I should say…,” “What I should have said…”). At first, I tried cutting those phrases, but they were necessary to many of the poems. Once I realized how much the collection was about voice—about needing to speak and not being allowed or able—I decided to go with it. I also ended up mentioning a lot of kids’ games in the book, which wasn’t intentional. I still haven’t completely worked that one out.

How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

That was one of the hardest parts of putting together the manuscript. I had this vision of what I wanted to include, and it certainly didn’t turn out that way. I was having trouble finding cohesion in the poems. I shifted the order around over and over, kept writing new poems, but I couldn’t find the thread. Then I decided on a whim to enter a chapbook contest. I think it was helpful that I hadn’t planned it and didn’t have time to obsess over it. I picked a handful of poems that I thought spoke to each other and worked to create an arc. Once Sterling was published, I realized I actually had two different arcs—one larger (that became Either Way, You’re Done) and one smaller (the chapbook). For the full-length collection, I pulled out the poems that worked with the larger narrative, wrote some new poems, and that became Either Way, You’re Done. It broke my heart because I had to cut some poems that were important to me, but they served a better purpose in the chapbook, and I’m happy with that.

How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

I have two very different experiences with submitting. Sterling, the chapbook, was an anomaly. I sent it to two contests; it was a finalist in one and won the other. But I submitted the full-length collection to almost 50 presses (most of them contests) for about 5 years before it was really ready. I submitted to the presses that were publishing my favorite authors, publishers that I knew from submitting to journals, and any press that offered free submissions (submissions are expensive! Especially for students). Once the chapbook was published, I heavily revised Either Way, You’re Done and then only sent it to a few places. It was a finalist in a contest, but ultimately it wasn’t through sending it out that the book got published. After I had given a reading one evening, an editor at Sundress approached me and asked if I had a manuscript. I sent it to them, and they decided it was a good fit.

What does current-you wish you could have told past-you about the whole process?

I’d tell her to be patient. I spent so many years thinking I had to get a book out right away (and it had to be done a certain way), that I was running out of time. Maybe it’s because I’m older and came to this whole process later in life, but the closer I got to 40, the more I felt like I had to catch up to something (I don’t know what). It was only after I decided to be slow down that things finally came together.

And I want to tell her to trust her voice. I struggled (and still do) with understanding if and where my work fits in with the larger writing community. I think much of that comes from where and how I grew up, and it’s something that can paralyze me—has sometimes kept me from writing, submitting, or reading, even when I was feeling pressure to beat that ridiculous self-imposed deadline. But then an editor heard my poems, found value in my work, and published the collection. That was a dream-come-true (I know that’s cliché, but it’s accurate), and it was very far from the rigid process and timetable I was imposing on myself. And it proved that I was part of this community that I so fiercely admired. I wish I could tell the younger me that there is a magical outcome to all that work.

Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

Yes. I have done some of my best (and most aggressive) revising after publishing a poem in a journal. I might be the worst person about revising. I have a hard time knowing when something is finished. I think it’s done, send it out, and then it goes live or arrives in print, and I suddenly find all sorts of problems with it.

But as true as that is, I also think it undermines the purpose and joy of publishing. I do love publishing individual pieces and it’s a very important part of the process for me (outside of revision). Getting to read a poem of mine alongside other writers’ and artists’ work gives me a new perspective on my own work. I can see where a poem might move within a manuscript or where it might help another poem in the collection. But I think more importantly, it helps me see value in my poems. It took me a very, very long time to call myself a writer. It’s something that was so far out of my reach when I was younger that I wouldn’t even consider taking on that label, so I often have a hard time believing my poems have value to anyone other than me. Publishing individual pieces reminds me that this work is part of something much bigger than my own writing space.

What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

It’s all a blur, but I had several celebration dinners over the next few days. The first was with my friend, Susan, who was in the office with me when I found out. She’s the one who got to see me nearly fall off my chair. There was an email that included a list of comments the editors made after they read the manuscript. They were encouraging and uplifting and all-around beautiful, and I remember thinking that I would need that list in the coming months to remind me that this was actually happening and that the book really was deserving of publication. I read those comments to Susan and we gushed about them, then I printed the list and used it as my tether for the next year while the book was in the editing phase.

Stephanie McCarley Dugger is the author of Either Way, You’re Done (Sundress Publications, 2017). Her chapbook Sterling (Paper Nautilus, 2015) was winner of the 2014 Vella Chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in The Boiler Journal, Gulf Stream, Heron Tree, Meridian, The Southeast Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University and is Assistant Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 19:41:34 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Ángel García, winner of the 2018 CantoMundo poetry prize, talks about resisting the expectations of the first book, the usefulness of self-imposed limitations, and eavesdropping on your own poems.

How many books have you published, and where?

Teeth Never Sleep is my first book, forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in the Fall of 2018.

Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

The manuscript has changed dramatically over the years. With every contest cycle, something about my editing process has changed. But when I graduated with my MFA, my thesis was a mess. It was just poems I threw together, to be honest, without much thought about its sense. I knew I would do this work after graduation. But because I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, I didn’t know how or where to begin. I kept expecting something magical to happen, like I would wake from a dream and the structure would appear to me. For many years, I fluctuated between stagnation or mostly tinkered with poems. But really, I didn’t know how to do to work. Most of my educational experience has been to make and think about singular poems. But a manuscript was foreign to me. It wasn’t until I realized what kind of narrative I wanted to tell that I begin to arrange poems. Essentially, the order of the manuscript starts at the end and ends somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want to rely on the arc of birth to death (even though I’m clearly alive). I wanted to start somewhere else. Really, I wanted to fight against the narrative(s) and expectations of the “first” book. I wanted to think about my manuscript as different or new. But this too was a myth I had to dismantle, and it wasn’t until I was able to do that that the manuscript became more realized.

The tics helped me think more deeply about the manuscript and what eventually gave me some order or sense of what the manuscript would be. I made lists of tics or threads. While writing through some of these threads, I found that some were going to work while others weren’t. But the poems revealed this for me. I set up a criterion, initially, of writing ten poems in a series. It was an arbitrary number, but it was a good starting place. Depending on how these poems worked together or how they worked in conversation with each other, I’d keep them. If I could only write one or two poems, I’d abandon the series. But this really helped me think of poems in partnership, or how they converse with one another. I have a series of mirrored poems, and this was another way for me to recognize patterns and order poems.

How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

This was one of the more difficult challenges I faced. I kept thinking about revision not as a process, but as a way to save the poems I “liked.” I would highlight titles in red, I would put them in separate piles, I would tell myself over and over again that I would make certain poems work. Eventually, after I had a mentor read the manuscript, he made suggestions for initial cuts. That made it easier. He told me this poem or that poem don’t really work. But so often, this was something I already knew or suspected. But trusting myself is something I had to learn how to do. Slowly, I began to take out more and more poems because they just weren’t doing enough work in the manuscript. It became easier to omit than try to save a poem. The poems that are in the manuscript now (possibly with a few exceptions) don’t need me to save them. They are doing just fine on their own or in conversation with other poems. I’m now just that person eavesdropping, knowing they can hold their own while speaking for themselves. Because I’m empowered, I think the poems too, are empowered.

How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

The main (but not the only criteria) I had for submitting the manuscript was to submit to presses that made beautiful books. But the more I learned about the process and the more I read, the more presses I included. More presses; more money. After years of submitting, I began more and more to send to first-book contests, and only submitted to a few “open” contests. But again, I was considering what press, what kind of books they made, and what contests are advocating for or are open to underrepresented populations. Since the Fall of 2015, when I began seriously submitting, I’ve probably submitted to more than 40 contests.

What does current-you wish you could have told past-you about the whole process?

I would tell a past me to be more patient and more deliberate. There was this sense of urgency to make a book happen—a mixture of getting older, feeling like I had nothing or little to show for years of work, and a sense that everyone and everything was passing me by. But had I had a book picked up in 2012 or even 2015, it would not have been ready. I’m certain of that. While there is still doubt about the current manuscript, and I think there will continue to be doubt, the book is better because it’s more realized. I’ve made deliberate choices and deliberate moves to create a whole. More importantly, though, I would tell myself that the process of the book becoming more and more real is an emotional process. I've spoken with other poets like Sara Borjas and DaMaris Hill (whose books are coming out soon) about how emotional (fluctuating between depression and anxiety and a slew of other emotions) the realization that a book will be out in the world can be. I don’t know that I had ever heard anyone talk about that, or at least talk to me about it. As elated as I am, I’ve had to deal with doubt, fear, insecurity, etc. and that has been taxing. It’s labor, of an emotional sort, that I wasn’t really prepared for.

Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

The most useful thing to think about when individual poems were published was to think (even just initially) of those poems as “done.” It cleared my mind to work on other poems and to keep making new poems. Eventually, most everything has been revised, but in my mind it helped me compartmentalize work and keep pushing forward.

What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

I took the call when I was in my TA office, so there wasn’t much room to celebrate. I did get emotional and while walking home I made calls to my partner and then one of my best friends. As great as it was to hear and share that I had won a prize and that my book was going to be published, the elation lasted only for a short while. As usual, shortly after, the fear and worry began to settle in. But there was something too about not being “home” to share and celebrate with other friends and family. This past December my brother, Juan, hosted a dinner and that was special. My family (not all) and friends (not all) were there. That resonated more closely to heart. Later, we went out and I drank and danced in celebration and that, or the hangover, was when things felt realized.

Ángel García is the proud son of Mexican immigrants. Born in Texas and raised in Southern California, he is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, recipient of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize which will be published by University of Arkansas Press in the Fall. His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Huizache, among others.

So You Wanna Win a Book Prize?

Prairie Schooner — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 01:13:45 +0000

In honor of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (open now!), we've revived our interview series about publishing the first book. This week poet Kristi Carter, author of Cosmovore, talks about the importance of becoming familiar with the agendas of presses, wearing out your obsessions, and the surreal feeling of having two books picked up in the same month.

1. How many books have you published, and where?

I've had two collections published, both in 2017, Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press), and one that is forthcoming this year from dancing girl press.

2. Describe the process of constructing your first manuscript. How did you conceive of ordering the collection?

Cosmovore was the first and the ordering was something I returned to about six times throughout its gestation. Perhaps there were even more that I'm forgetting! In the beginning, it seemed logical to focus on the relationship between the ex (a triangle-playing "you") and Cosmovore (the speaker of the poems shares her name with the title). However, as I went down the line the priorities of the manuscript shifted in such a way that while the weight of the ex-partner's abuse didn't become unimportant, poems that seemed more wistful about that failed relationship took second-place to the hateful thunder of the others, as those poems are where you really see what Cosmovore is capable of.

3. Did you notice poetic tics once you’d put the poems together? How did you decide which tics were fruitful (interesting in that they accrued throughout the collection in a meaningful way) and which were not?

Us poets, and all writers and artists, are a really obsessive bunch. It was liberating for me to learn during grad school to lean into those obsessions, to really wear them out. Because Cosmovore is so transparently about consumption and reproductive rights, there was a pull toward the litany form that isn't as obvious now as it was during the construction. The use of dry humor was another concern, and when I re-read the manuscript I think it gets buried because of the rage that dominates the louder poems.

With Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem, the voice of the speaker was a major preoccupation. Since that manuscript isn't constructed around the use of a persona, like Cosmovore, the tics I noticed were some I hear about from many writers, mainly trimming the bookends of the poem. That and finding ways to make sure the reader knew who the poems were addressed to, without brow-beating it into them, were formal concerns I returned to consistently.

4. How did you decide which poems to include in the collection?

For Cosmovore, it was very simple which to include as the poems erupted in a short amount of time and were so clearly demarcated from the other things I was writing which weren't in the voice of that persona. I did also try to create a mirror series of poems from the perspective of Celeste, Cosmovore's opposite of sorts, but that didn't pan out.

It was a different story with Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem. I was working on a few different series during that time so I had to consider which poems should be kept separate and why. This was difficult as DSSBA carries that tradition of many poet's first books in that it functions somewhat like a poetic (auto)biography. I'm obsessed with the body and the confines of gendered experience, but what made poems ready for DSSBA was if they were about motherhood or daughterhood in some regard. Many of the poems that do this but didn't make it into DSSBA are in the full-length unpublished version (wink) or in the chap coming out from dgp later this year, as those focus on sexual orientation and gender performance.

5. How did you decide where to submit the collection? How many places did you submit?

Oh my. Well, embracing uniqueness and the reinvention failure can provide, here are the statistics as my best record-keeping seems to depict, with the inclusion of withdrawals, presses folding, etc. Cosmovore was sent to 14 places over the course of 5 years, with a submission hiatus of three years between 2013-2016, which I get into the why of in the answer to the following question. DSSBA I sent to 29 places over the space of ten months.

As for how I decided, I always look at the mission and the track record of presses and contests with attention to diversity and description of aesthetic agenda as well as artistic politics. It's no small accident that all three of my manuscripts got snatched up by feminist presses. I consider it an honor to participate in the continuation of those establishments and all the productive disruption they continue to bring.

I am also really excited that both manuscripts were embraced by presses that had interest in the content as part of their specialties, again that whole matter of aesthetic agenda as well as artistic politics. Porkbelly Press is feminist and queer inclusive with interest in the mythical and the body, so DSSBA made sense to Nicci Mechler (the editor there). Cosmovore plays with reality a lot, so Timmi Duchamp and the other editors saw potential in that aspect within the context of the press's other titles.

6. What does current-you wish you could have told past-you about the whole process?

Keep going! I got some interesting ink on Cosmovore that discouraged me at the time before it found a venue with Aqueduct Press. There are more than a few peculiar things about the book, editors would respond to them while also telling me some form of "we don't know what to do with this," and those often felt more like setbacks than flags of interest cropping up. I returned to it when I started working on DSSBA because the spark was reignited plus it was fun to alternate between two very different manuscripts. I started getting ink and tiered rejections on DSSBA much sooner, and I'm glad I trusted the encouragement that lent me. As of now the extended version is getting personal rejections, finalist positions and that sort of thing too, so I'm persisting as best I can.

7. Has publication of individual pieces in the collection changed your writing or manuscript construction processes?

This question is cool and pretty necessary in the recent streak of politically themed call for work. Political as I am, I have been so refreshed seeing that movement grow after surviving many experiences with the guard that wants to pretend art and life do not overlap. It's always encouraging to have an individual piece find a place to fly its flag out in the world before the manuscript it belongs to is published. I'm always writing about a lot of things, so sometimes the thematic calls get a faster response. That said, getting any acceptance is important to the continuation of the production at some point—writers don't write in solitude in that sense. All I can say is I'm grateful, and luckily, stubborn.

8. What did you do when you heard it was accepted?

Quite freakishly both of these collections were taken in the same month, though submitted at different times, frequencies, and far apart. During that time my partner and I were both navigating the last throes of our PhDs (I do not recommend this), so there was a sense of being stunned, a surreal sort of detachment that the acceptances forced me to look at. You see, when you're toiling day in and day out like that then someone comes and says, "Hey great job, we think this is pretty much done," you feel some sort of opposite pull is happening. Because of that, I did not know how to promote myself and my work, nor did I make the time to do so I wish I had. The books landed and everyone around me said, "What? You had a book taken—wait, two!?" So don't do that; instead blast it to the world that someone wants to make your book real. As soon and as much as possible, to bearable extents. The community-building most writers are participating in online makes this possible, but it requires good judgment and manners.

And of course, more than anything, before and after I shared the news, I was thrilled and honored.

9. If your book was a landscape, what would it be? How would people navigate it? [Editor's note: As a former Prairie Schooner Book Prize Coordinator, Kristi used to conduct this interview series. As part of our interview, I asked her to choose a question she used to enjoy asking other writers and this was her choice!]

With Cosmovore there is obviously the galactic element, but there is also a rapid-fire vacillation between urban and suburban ruins as well. It isn't that the book is set in a dystopia, it's just that the feminist themes allow regular dystopic tropes of everyday life to shine through! Like many books, it forces the reader to trust the poems, but I know it comes on more hot and heavy even in a predictable aspect of the reader-writer relationship like that.

As for DSSBA, there are so many trees. Yew, birch, unnamed—all those trees create this dark, intimate space that's scary as well as nourishing and full of potential, much like relationships, such as motherhood. I would recommend entering the darkness of that forested area with a strong stomach and hungry eyes to get the most out of it. Maybe the reader can find there's a clearing with a fire somewhere inside.

Kristi Carter is the author of Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem (Porkbelly Press) and Cosmovore (Aqueduct Press). Her chapbook Red and Vast is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Oklahoma State University.

On The Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

Prairie Schooner — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 20:47:13 +0000

by Katie Pryor

When I started Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Night, I felt naïve. I felt young. Facts about American history, Irish legends, and words I did not know gathered in the drain of my mind and I embraced it. I embraced it because sometimes Twitter exhausts me, sometimes the weight of my desire for youthfulness disgusts me. The truths of Gubernat’s collection are blunt and revealed slow. They take time. They have taken time.

Mary Ruefle, commenting on our obsession with talking about poems instead of reading them, says that no poet can teach us anything until they’re dead. I would argue, perhaps, that no poet teaches us anything until they are older, until some time has passed. I don’t mean to undermine the young; I am twenty-nine years old. What I mean to say is that I needed Gubernat’s longer view, I needed her to confound me, to further me along past the current limits of my senses.

The sounds Gubernat makes in this book do not scream. They come from the lower register. They haunt. They are formally astute. The second section called ‘Analog House: A Cabinet of Curiosities’ is made up of 19 sonnets—a collection of objects: the washboard, a piano bench, a meat grinder, over which I stumbled because it is night time at this zoo and most of the lights are off. This invitation to stumble and wander is the book’s power. It proves there is no other way through memory. Take, for instance, “Spirit Level,” one of the sonnets, assumingly about a father’s death. Here is the whole poem:

Spirit Level

What could we do but measure ourselves
and be found wanting? The straight shall be made
crooked. But I was a cock-eyed optimist
for a time, convinced the air bubble would hit
the exact spot: equanimity. Souls
can do no better. You only needed
tools, and we had them. Voices and minds, willing.
Place it down on the cold ground, in the midst
of a city crowd, a slick corridor
of power. And it will list and founder. Try
again: it will disappear. Off the chart.
He had a roomful of tools that couldn’t
save him in the end. My father rode it
like a dolphin and drowned. Mind over matter.

What is the it in this poem? The air bubbles of a level? It evades me and grips my shoulder gently. We cannot will what we love to stay here forever. Our minds do not conquer matter. Gubernat grew up in a working class Catholic family; she is also an opera librettist, which means she writes operas.[1] At times, the journey through this book, this memory, feels baroque—we’re walking around a cathedral with only a flashlight and the permission to touch everything. Here, we’re in the father’s room full of tools, just another corridor to the spirit level.

Gubernat is funny; we’re given dark humor in this church, after of course we’ve survived our mothers. In a poem about JFK’s assassination and affair with Marilyn Monroe, she ends with, “Go on, honey, blow.” But let’s see the whole thing, because she successfully weaves together two metaphors, a device that often makes a poem feel crowded:

I Was in Gym Class When Cronkite said They’d Shot Him

Last night the party boat blazed in Reynold’s
Channel, like the birthday cake they spent days
decorating for JFK, and then,
when the waiters carried it out on a huge tray,
wobbling between them, all you could think is
oh god, they’ll drop it—the way you feared
Marilyn’s dress would split open at those straining
seams he must have run his finger down. “Well,” as
students say when they take up a topic
reluctantly on the page, they’re both reruns
anyway: The drawbridge cranks open
every night for the gamblers’ homecoming,
win or lose. The ship glides through, still lit
up. All a little silly really, faux naïve in its
moue of girlish expectation. Go on, honey, blow.

This poem gets at how history does and does not penetrate us depending on where we are at the time of a significant event, pun intended. It gets at the guise of propriety, our ghoulish desire all caged up in a cake and a dress, excited about the idea of devastation. We hear her biting humor again in “Day Lilies,”

But in a vase
the next day they seize up like insects
the spider has sucked dry.

What am I doing here but arranging for death?

Gubernat’s sounds—the formal qualities and tone of this book—communicate that the aches one feels in youth, though transformed, remain aches. We do not want to accept this about life. Thank God Gubernat has. Thank God she wrote the poem “Our Road,” which chronicles one person taking their hands off the steering wheel with a beloved in the car: “…when you take your hands off / the wheel, with me beside you, // you take me down too, and I’m not yet done / with this imperfect life.

[1] See her major work, Korczak’s Orphans, written in collaboration with composer Adam Silverman.

Katie E. Pryor is originally from Atlanta, GA and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College; she received her BA in Spanish. Her work has appeared in The Rio Review and Prairie Schooner and is forthcoming in Five Points (as the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry) and Southern Indiana Review. She was recently recognized with a 2017 Fall Fellowship at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her academic interests include 20th century American poetry, translation, borders, and gender.

"We’re all constantly messing up and all constantly changing": an interview with Andrea Gibson

Prairie Schooner — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 22:31:33 +0000

by Ilana Masad

Andrea Gibson’s newest book, Take Me With You, is a pocket-sized collection of one-liners, couplets, greatest hits, and longer form poetry. Reading straight through it will fill your heart to the brim, while taking it slow will provide droplets of necessary insight and humor into otherwise gray days. Andrea Gibson was kind enough to speak to assistant nonfiction editor Ilana Masad about their work. Click here to buy Take Me With You.

Ilana Masad: Because your poems often include a musical element, a rhythmic element, but also work on the page, written down, I wonder—what is your writing process like?

Andrea Gibson: You know, that’s been a process I’ve learned more about over the years, because when I first started writing spoken word poetry I was writing so much for sound and so much for rhythm that it was really difficult to get those poems to live on the page in a way that I felt represented them. And then over time, just having done enough books at this point and learning the editing process, it’s actually changed my writing. I think there are ways that I write maybe similar to a songwriter—I know the sound of the poem before I even know the words to it. But over time I’ve gotten to marry those elements a little better, learning how to have them live in both places and be powerful in each.

IM: You’ve come out publicly as genderqueer recently, and spoken about the power of language and labels for understanding ourselves. How do you think coming out has had an effect on your recent work?

AG: You know, it’s wild, because I think that I wrote my first genderqueer poem maybe eight years ago, and five years ago I started using nonbinary they/them/theirs pronouns publicly. But I think a lot of people have been experiencing that it’s a recent come out, and I think it sort of is—I don’t think there’s ever one coming out moment. But I think that with the new poem, “Your Life”, I went into it a little bit more deeply than I have in the past and so there’s just been new talk about it. That’s what folks are talking to me about when I’m at live shows and meet people.

I think one way it has [changed my work] is it’s almost impossible for me to not bring gender or gender identity into nearly every poem I write now. I can feel its presence every time I’m writing, and that conversation feels relevant in literally every other thing I’m talking about. For a few years I noticed that Jesus had made his way into nearly every poem I was writing, and these last years I feel like gender is one of the more pressing things on my mind and it’s just popping up everywhere. But I’m also in a different place with it where it’s more fun for me to explore. There was a time when I was existing in my gender in a more painful way, and a more oppressed way, and since I’ve gotten to a different place with it, it feels more like fun and celebration. I’m also fueled by the idea that I’m not at a landing point with it; I think it’s something for me that is constantly evolving. I have no idea where I’ll be in my gender five years from now and it’s exciting to be curious about what that will be. At this point for me it can be a fun process of figuring out.

IM: I saw this very interesting argument recently on Twitter—someone was talking about how they’re scared that destroying the gender binary before we destroy the patriarchy will somehow mean that we don’t discuss the patriarchy anymore. I don’t think I agree but it was an interesting concept, and I wondered what you thought.

AG: You know, I think about that all the time because a lot of my community where I live in Colorado is a generation older than me and there can be a thought that goes around that nonbinary and trans identities are against feminism. I feel like something’s been set up in that whole conversation that is misleading, because today all of those things can exist at once. I also think it’s not about saying that gender doesn’t exist. It’s also simultaneously really important for me to be really celebrating the voices of women and understanding how important that is, because patriarchy is still this ugly monster in our culture that comes into everything, that comes into homophobia, and I think it’s also the main thing hating on genderqueerness and trans identities. I think we can be working for it all at the same time—to bring down patriarchy and also to be lifting up folks that don’t exist in our cultural boxes of gender. I’ve had some conversations in the past where folks were assuming that because I identify as genderqueer that I have this desire to do away with the concept of men and women and that’s not at all the case and also that can often be harmful to trans people who very much want to identify as one or the other.

IM: Your new book, Take Me With You, includes fragments of poems, couplets, and drawings. Are the drawings your own?

AG: No, I wish! They’re drawings by an artist friend of mine in the UK named Sarah J. Coleman and I’ve loved her work for a long time and she’s just a wonderful person. I really wanted to collaborate with a woman artist on that project and so I loved doing it with her. That’s the reason why I started reading poems to music, I think—I always prefer to be making art with other people as opposed to by myself.

IM: What was the process of having your poems broken up this way, made into small bite-sized pieces as they are in the book?

AG: The book is made up of a lot of things. If I’ve had ten different people come up and show me the same tattoo of a particular line that they’ve gotten tattooed on their body, I would think, you know, let’s include that line in the book even if it’s from an older piece. And then I was just looking through everything I’ve ever written. Half of [the book] has been previously published somewhere, and the other half might just be lines I wrote for the book or lines from new poems that aren’t published.

I was looking for things that were inspiring on their own. I have this thought about myself, and I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I’m a better writer if I’m only writing one line at a time as opposed to a full poem. I can point to every poem I’ve written and think, that line right there is the heart of that poem.

I wanted [the book] to be something where if someone was having a hard day they could just flip to any page and maybe something would spark their creativity or make them feel more hopeful or more awake or more inspired. And that was sort of a response to—do you have a phone where the news is coming in on your phone like every five minutes, you’re getting bad news popping up everywhere? So it was sort of in reaction to that—I wanted to make a smaller book that someone could carry in their pocket and maybe a few times a day instead of opening to the awful news coming in on their phones, they could take out something different that might make the day better.

IM: “I hope never to be an honest poet. I hope to always forgive faster than I write.” This is one of the fragments in the book, and it’s one of the ones I’ve found most puzzling. What does it mean to you?

AG: Oh gosh, I’ve been thinking about that all the time. That line was actually sort of heavy for me. To be honest, it was specifically about my experience with writing about my family. It’s a tricky thing too, because spoken word is a really vulnerable art form known for being really willing to just put all the truth out there and I love the art form for that reason. And I also want to be careful with how I’m speaking about people who may have hurt me in my life. I don’t love the idea of putting things down in stone when we’re all constantly messing up and all constantly changing and learning. I have friends whose poetry I love, and whose character I really respect, and they’ll just write anything about any experience that they’ve had—and it’s different for me. I don’t know if it’s just that I grew up in such a conservative home and conservative town where you don’t really talk about people… I don’t know. Some of that is dangerous, and I’m certainly willing to talk about, for instance, the man who sexually assaulted me. That’s something that I wouldn’t censor. But if it’s about my mother or a relationship that I had that was painful—I do, I want to give some space before writing that down and so that’s what that line is about.

IM: In another poem, you tell the story of how you learned that Gandhi said women shouldn’t fight off their rapists, and you write, “I believe there is such a thing as a nonviolent fist.” This feels incredibly potent to our time, to the idea of resistance, to the #MeToo movement. How would you define a nonviolent fist?

AG: I haven’t, since I heard that [about Gandhi], been able to stop thinking about it. The idea that it would be violent to protect yourself—I don’t get down with that, for myself or for my community. I can respect people’s decision to be pacifist, but I also think you can be a pacifist and punch somebody off of you. And so I’m just thinking about what’s been called violence that doesn’t resonate with me as violence. When I’m watching folks in the Black Lives Matter movement get called violent, none of that is resonating as violence to me—it’s self-defense.

Andrea Gibson is a spoken word artist who regularly tours, performing poetry which focuses on gender norms, politics, social reform and the struggles LGBTQ people face in today's society. A devoted fan base sees Gibson's work as a rally cry for action and a welcome mat at the door of the heart's most compassionate room. Born in Calais, Maine, Gibson now resides outside of Boulder, Colorado.

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