Thursday, May 31, 2018

too many books! big sale! etc;

Okay, so moving boxes from our storage unit back into our house (from our Hallowe'en flood; yes, Hallowe'en...), I'm realizing I have more copies of certain of my trade books than I had previously thought, so I'm offering a sale!

Until the end of June, I'm offering the following titles for TEN DOLLARS EACH!
(add $2 for shipping; for each subsequent book, add $1 more for same)

They include my poetry collections:
A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011)
wild horses (University of Alberta Press, 2010)
The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere Books, 2007)
red earth (Black Moss Press, 2003) OFFERING THIS ONE FOR $5; CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?
Manitoba highway map (Broken Jaw Press, 1999) OFFERING THIS ONE FOR $5 ALSO I MEAN REALLY


My novels:
missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009)
white (The Mercury Press, 2007)


And my short story collection:
The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014)


(I have others of my books for sale, but not for such a super-awesome discount; see my list of books here; chapbooks here; if anything appeals (lots I have, but lots I don't have), shoot me an email and we can talk)

If you are interested, shoot me an email (rob_mclennan at hotmail dot com). I take paypal (use the donate button on the sidebar) and e-transfer, both of which work at my hotmail address. Or cheques, even!

No livestock for barter (anymore), please. Thank you.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Robin Richardson, Sit How You Want



SUCH AN UGLY LITTLE DUCK

This morning’s pink ass. Last night’s sadist.
    Suppose he came to know me as he wrote
in Sharpie on my belly: whore, or heroine,
    or both. I’m no good at sleeping. High-strung
in a hurricane of public access broadcasts
    while the city’s men parade their bulges
on the F train waiting to be licked
    back into living. This is how a book begins:
protagonist unburdened by her husband
    blunders through the belly of a whale.
One day she’ll emerge dismantled, all decked
    out in Swarovski Crystal halos. Imperfect,
picturesque as childhood hallucinations.

There is a sharpness and a confidence to the first person monologues in Toronto writer Robin Richardson’s third full-length poetry collection, Sit How You Want (Vehicule Press, 2018), even as the poems explore trauma, terror and powerlessness, and the ways in which one might finally emerge. In an interview conducted by Madeleine Wattenberg, posted at So To Speak, Richardson speaks of “unsympathetic poems,” an idea I found quite fascinating:

The sympathetic poem is crafted in service of the author. It makes one look intelligent or innovative, or, in the case of this “universal” notion you put forth, which I can’t get out of my head now, it makes one seem a masculine sort of authority. I think of all these poems written by white men about the strife of the third world and so on. It comes secondhand and from a sense of the author’s own importance and “seriousness.” It puts nothing on the line, offers up no vulnerability, and does nothing to actually portray the truth of its subject matter, because only the subject, speaking for herself, could provide the “truth” of her experience. It’s somewhat colonial to me, and difficult to digest.

In contrast to this, the unsympathetic writer puts herself on the line, risking vulnerability and exposure of the unflattering angles the sympathetic writer dodges with skill and preoccupation with externals. So, in a world where only the flattering photos are posted, and the easy to digest stories shared, it is a crucial service to one’s fellow to expose the ugly, the sad, the unflattering. It’s in this sharing that we begin to feel less alone.

This is where isolation ends, and empathy, solidarity even, begins. I could go on for pages about the illuminating and healing power of sharing true stories but I’ll stop here with the urge to start listening and asking questions; to start sharing the things that make you feel most unlovable.

While Sit How You Want isn’t, specifically, a collection of “unsympathetic poems,” the idea is one not unrelated to the poems at hand, in which the narrator/s speak of love and damage, depression and regret, and fearlessness versus fear. As she writes, both in a kind of mocking self-dismissal as well as declaration of being and purpose, in the poem “ABOUT THE SPEAKER”: “I am built of myth and girly bits.” These are poems pushing to break free from abusive relationships, both familial and romantic; poems composed via a narrator (or narrators) that has survived, although not without scars, such as the gloriously-titled “EARTHQUAKES ARE MY FAVOURITE WAY / TO MAKE ISLANDS,” that begins: “We ignored the cries of the carbon monoxide / detector, coitussed in a pose like Pompeii / corpses while the cabbies grew irate outside. / This is the last day of our lives, until tomorrow. / When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy [.]”

BLUEBEARD FOR BEGINNERS

It was love at gunpoint. It was cuffed, diamond-studded-ball-gagged,
    that I found my strength. You follow? Break to rebuild better
like the hero in a DC comic’s bludgeoned to the point of brilliance.
    Blood’s the best incentive, said the dove, slayed, laying in the hooks
of her beloved. Bellevue mid-march making plans with our hallucinations.
    We were stylish in our shared delusion; rings were not enough
we went for ink and more. I can’t complain. It is the thrill of ruination
    makes us innovative. I do my drugs, my lovers, with the discipline
of Kung-fu film star choreography.



Tuesday, May 29, 2018

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an MSt in Women's Studies from the University of Oxford. His debut collection of poems, THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, was named the best Canadian poetry collection of 2017 by CBC Books and is a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize.

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

Before I started writing poetry, I neatly envisioned a future in which I was an academic and nothing else. Poetry has opened me up not only to the seductions of experimentation, but also to another sort of relational practice, that of being with others via text. It changed my perception of where, how, and under what conditions one can pursue something like Indigenous and queer freedom. The book, THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, has definitely changed my life; it has brought me into conversation and kinship with a host of other writers and artists throughout so-called Canada. It was also recently shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, which is still something I'm trying to wrap my head around! The book is deeply queer and Indigenous and youthful and campy and sad, so it seems almost impossible that it's getting that sort of attention.

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

I should admit that I was writing academically first, which is a type of non-fiction. I think this mode of articulation is always underneath the poetry, it is its ideational infrastructure. Perhaps the theory with which I was grappling paved the road to poetry. Today, these slip-slide into one another and produce something that exceeds that which they do on their own. Poetry, like theory, was where I could turn an idea inside out, enflesh it, and make it vulnerable to others.

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?

Questions about my process are tricky, because my hunch is that each poem or each project is differently motored. On days when I'm feeling any number of bad feelings but not slowed by them, the writing can come quickly. In my next book, NDN COPING MECHANISMS, I have a few poems that are procedural, which I experience as less resistant, as smoother. I'm not one, however, to throw words onto a page and be done with them. I edit as I write; I think on form and word choice and syntax, etc. So, I'm not sure that there is a "first draft" but something that is always being agitated, whether by me or others, an editor or an audience, etc.

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?

The poems that make up THIS WOUND IS A WORLD began as feelings. They were shorter pieces that then were bound together, but they nonetheless orbited around key axes/thematics. The poems and prose that became NDN COPING MECHANISMS were differently composed so as to become a text, a unit, an assemblage.

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

As a queer Cree poet, I often read with other Indigenous peoples and/or queers. These are almost always enlivening and joyous! We visit and laugh and cry and it usually leaves me feeling inspired and readied to write again. I also dig readings because I get to test out jokes - I'm still holding out for a side gig as a comic haha.

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?

Absolutely. I am bent on attending to the ways in which settler colonialism stymies livability for Indigenous peoples and how this is done by way of the entangled logics of white supremacy, homo- and transphobia, heteropatriarchy, etc. I am also part of a school of Indigenous thought that is about futurity, about how we might dream up and perform a world without dispersed suffering, one that is utopian and flourishing.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don't think that one can speak about the writer as a position that is emptied of other loci of identity. So, the role of the queer writer and the role of the feminist writer might intersect with but are not the same as the white writer, for example. Perhaps I will say that Indigenous writers ought to ensure that their/our work gets to those who need it most/ to those it is about. This means creatively engendering new sites of distribution, review, and performance.

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

I think it can be either for a whole array of reasons (i.e., politics, ethical tenants, point of view, location (social and geographic)). 

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

Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) recently tweeted: "be brave enough to be kind." As I see it, this is not, however, a call to disappear that which needs to be addressed out of anger or upset. Tracey Lindberg called the blending of kindness and critique "critical kindness." That is the mode in which I want to be in the world.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I'm a grad student and community educator, so my days are usually erratic. But, when I do write it's usually at my desk in my little apartment with folk music humming about. But, I tend to think up things on the go, so will write poems in the notes app on my iPhone.

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

I routinely retreat into texts I've read a bunch when I am stuck.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of TIDE pods lol.

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 study contemporary First Nations art, poetry, and film, so those do transform into sources of inspiration. One of my next projects is non-fiction and a bunch of it is writing vis-a-vis the art of artists like Fallon Simard, Joi Arcand, and Postcommodity.

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

I am influenced by writers like Anne Boyer, Fred Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Claudia Rankine, and Maggie Nelson. I talk a lot about the first poem in Trish Salah's LYRIC SEXOLOGY.

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

It's been a quiet goal of mine to get on a reality TV show, especially The Amazing Race. Perhaps I should try speaking it into existence more. I also would like to eventually get into short filmmaking, but that is a long-term goal.

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?


Sometimes I think about how I could've become a medical doctor, which is perhaps even more political an occupation in this day and age when Indigenous peoples and queer and/or trans people are subject to discrimination when seeking medical attention.

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

I often joke that poets are poets because we can't sing well (we'd be musicians otherwise). But, seriously, I write because it is a potent time and place to connect with those like me who might be hungry for writing about queerness and indigeneity.

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

A book that is underneath everything I write is Jose Esteban Munoz's CRUISING UTOPIA: THE THEN AND THERE OF QUEER FUTURITY. Two films I've been most affected by over the last couple years are MOONLIGHT (dir. Barry Jenkins) and LILTING (dir. Hong Khaou).

19 - What are you currently working on?

I just wrote a bunch of final papers for seminars I took this semester, so not a whole bunch right now. Soon, I will get back to my next project on Indigenous joy.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Monday, May 28, 2018

Queen Mob's Teahouse : Justin Eells interviews Eric Blix

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the latest interview is now online, as Justin Eells interviews debut American short story author Eric Blix. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevostan interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkhaman interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkhaman interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimoran interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollarian interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Franka conversation between Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay PressFive questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker),"overflow: poetry, performance, technology, ancestry": kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric SchmaltzMary Kasimor's interview with George FarrahBrad Casey interviewed byEmilie LafleurDavid Buuck interviews John Chávez about Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ WritingBen Fama interviews Abraham AdamsTender and Tough: Letters as Questions as Letters: Cheena Marie Lo, Tessa Micaela and Brittany Billmeyer-FinnKristjana Gunnars’ interview with Thistledown Press author Anne CampbellTimothy Dyke’s interview with Hawai’i poet Jaimie GusmanHailey Higdon's interview with Joanne KygerStephanie Kaylor's interview with Kenyatta JP GarciaJaimie Gusman’s interview with Timothy Dyke,Sarah Rockx interviews Gary BarwinMegan Arden Gallant's interview with Diane SchoemperlenAndrew Power interviews Lauren B. DavisChris Lawrence interviews Jonathan BallAdam Novak interviews Tom SternEli Willms interviews Gregory Betts and Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Kasia JaronczykKaren Smythe and Greg Rhyno, Chris Muravez interviews Ithica, NY poet Marty Cain, Róise Nic an Bheath interviews Kathryn MacLeod, Heather Sweeney interviews J'Lyn Chapman, and Lisa Birman interviews Portland, Oregon poet Claudia F. Savage.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: 
City of Ottawa Poet Laureate JustJamaal The Poet, Geoffrey YoungClaire Freeman-Fawcett on Spread LetterStephanie Bolster on Three Bloody WordsClaire Farley on CanthiusDale Smith on Slow Poetry in AmericaAllison GreenMeredith QuartermainAndy WeaverN.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way, check out my "about submissions" write-up at Queen Mob's; you can contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com
 

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Ewa Chrusciel, Of Annunciations



Left-To-Die Boat

The helicopter hovered above our boat, dropped eight bottles of water, biscuits, cubes of sugar and left. The fishermen dried out their nets, almost capsizing our vessel. And left. The coastguard left. We drank water and urine. Where were our Guardian Angels? The oceanographers saw us. Trapped in waves, we yearn to exist. The water, left to witness. Let sorrowful longing dwell in our sugar-cube spit, lost in the waves. Shall we arrive as grebes or pelicans?

Bilingual New Hampshire poet and translator Ewa Chrusciel’s third full-length poetry title in English—after Strata (Emergency Press, 2011) and Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here]—is Of Annunciations (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2018), a book exploring the idea and details of the migrant, from the Biblical to the contemporary, as she writes to open the poem “Guardian Angel of Exodus”:

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

This is an incredibly powerful collection of poems that strike with such beauty. Moving through poems both lyric and documentary, Chrusciel writes of those displaced by war, including those across Europe, connecting stories in the news to those scattered across history, and connecting a variety of displacements across multiple borders, traumas and losses. Hers are poems that respond to the fear of the “other,” articulating how such fears misunderstand how fragile such distinctions really are, and how so many stories can be connected, from the settler to the migrant to those exiles experiencing exodus from Biblical Egypt. In the poem “Exilium,” for example, she lays bare those connections through a sequence of contemporary migrants fleeing war, each with but what they could carry, itself a gathering of unbearable loss:

I took fear with me. When it strikes, I take my children and run. When we ran the first time, we took a plastic bag with documents and photographs. My daughter took her Tweety Bird. She keeps her eye on it and in the evening she puts all the candies she has inside it. My name is Muhammad. I am 38.

I took photos of my family and friends when I left our house in Tel Kelekh during the gunfire. Bullets perforated the walls. After crossing the border with Lebanon, I saw on YouTube that our house was demolished. My name is Joanna. I am 22.



Saturday, May 26, 2018

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Josh Fomon


Originally from Iowa City, Josh Fomon is a political operative in Seattle. His book, Though we bled meticulously was published by Black Ocean in 2016.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I can’t say for certain how having a book has changed my life. I probably have less anxiety about writing and publishing—I feel like I can permit myself to have a more measured approach and relationship with my writing. Maybe that’s just growing older though.

There is an incalculable feeling of someone even telling me they read my book—it’s even better than when Carrie Olivia Adams and Janaka Stucky initially accepted my manuscript with Black Ocean, which had been a seemingly impossible dream.

My recent work has my same obsessions—death, longing, and articulating the physical and metaphysical, and where the two intersect—but I think the work is more overt in finding precision in moments of unknowing the everyday, the treachery of nostalgia, the tangible effects we have on the world—overtly apocalyptic and finding the language held within the detritus. And existential dread always, because we have so much capacity for hope and despair.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I never had the patience or attention for plot or narrative when I was younger—I was an addled youth. That’s changed now, thankfully, but poetry’s music and abstraction drew me in and never let go.

The musicality of language became a preternatural obsession, which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to escape no matter the genre. Poetry feels like a natural way to think.

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?
With Though we bled meticulously (TWBM), the poems grew out of necessity after having abandoned a full manuscript that became tedious—and a rupture in my personal life. As silly as this sounds, it felt as though the book intuited itself through me—I think the core poems and shape of the book were written in about six months. Many of the early drafts for TWBM are similar to how they appear in the book.

Once a project shows me its trajectory, the thinking and poems tend to obsess and preoccupy me—and I need to constantly find a way out to keep from stagnating the energy, yet maintain the necessity of the work. I write in spurts—sometimes prolifically over days, then nothing at all for months. My process is always a work-in-progress until it isn’t—the absence of writing is itself a kind of obligatory percolation.

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?
For me, writing is an incantatory process that slowly unravels and reveals itself to me, especially through the music of the line—more than anything, I feel like a conduit through which an idea sings. In this sense, I think I write most often when I have the capacity to sustain thoughts and can read—my writing begins with an urgency to react and reanimate dead things.

I’m a project writer, though the project is never something I set out to write—I find it when it wants to announce itself and captivates me in its thinking. Poems often begin as longer, sprawling pieces that share similar obsessions that finally relent into something fully formed.

Lately, I’ve been trying to approach writing in a way that feels foreign—I’m more interested in how poems betray so much within themselves and to the reader, which feels more divinatory and uncharted.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings and the opportunity for writers to articulate how they envision the work aurally. It’s such a great way to dig into the music of the poem and connect with readers. Readings are such a vital part of poetry and the writing community—as many as there seem to already be, we always need more reading series, and people dedicated to creating community, because what is poetry if not community.

I think there is sometimes a huge resistance toward performing a poem—but it’s one of the few ways readers get to hear the poem as the writer intended. In my writing, I feel out what the music and poem demands—performing gives me the opportunity to take this off the page and delight in the sonic shape of the lyric. Sound matters because it taps into the vitality of the work—a life force—poetry is the vocals and the backing band. I think we need to put more care into sculpting our performances—poets should be more interested in professional wrestling, standup comedy, drag, and glam rock.

There is graciousness in the act of reading out loud that both the reader and audience need—as poets, we’re facing existential crisis, when "the number of Americans who had read at least one poem in the past year had declined by 45 percent between 2002 and 2012, down to 6.7 percent of the population." We need more readers and readings are an easy entry point to grow readership.

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 poetry that ideates on the page—language has the capacity to explore and engage with an inexhaustible amount of knowing and unknowing. I’m drawn to poetry that explores existential and metaphysical spaces—poetry that thinks toward questions, and lingers.

I’m obsessed with writers like Edmond Jabès (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Jaime Saenz, Mina Loy, and Will Alexander who utilize language as means to contemplate greater existential inquiries. They are incredibly complex thinkers, but they also conjure a process of destabilizing experience within their work and use language as means to an end for their philosophical concerns—they capture the experience of thinking.

I like yelling toward a void and seeing if anything echoes back. I think that is itself a question.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Writers have the ability to articulate the changing world—they are keen observers. I’ve been working in politics for the past few years and have begun to see the importance in art’s ability to outlast—writing and art typically are separate than a news cycle and ask questions that defamiliarize context and outlast. I suppose there is a kind of brutal truth to this. Writing has the opportunity to exist outside of time as an artifact of a particular moment—and it has the means to articulate the complexity of it.

I think art, at large, is a reactionary interpretation of the difficulty our society faces—I think our world is reshaping itself wholly right now, which is great and long overdue, but we have centuries of inequalities and racism to deal with. We need writers for this.

As for the role of the writer? We write because we must, and assuredly, this is a reaction to the culture we live in. I don’t think this is particularly profound. Art is created from a void of our own making—our need to say something and be heard. We should be better about lifting up voices unlike our own.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with outside editors has been a way to recognize my worst impulses, and learn how to excise them. Outside perspective untangles the internal logic of the writing, and recognizing and identifying this is an essential means of learning how to edit. Before TWBM was accepted at Black Ocean, a few incredible friends and mentors began the process of exorcising the book’s excesses in early drafts, and they were able to parse out the restraint it needed.

Working with Carrie Olivia Adams was great--I think by the time my final draft got to her there were few major edits, but she also interrogated the writing where it needed to be interrogated and the book was better off for it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To paraphrase, Jane Gregory once told me a writer needs to believe in their work or else no one will care. I think that really extends to everything in life, but having a certain confidence or swagger about knowing you don’t know anything is truly life changing when you face an empty page—you begin with intent.

Just as important, Joanna Klink taught me an invaluable lesson—always write beyond the natural, intuitive ending into the uncomfortable, unsettling feeling of finding out what the work actually has to say.

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?
Lately, I’ve been an infrequent writer and haven’t held a solid routine. I write when I can and am grateful for whenever I can find a block of time where I can sustain my focus on writing. I’ve also been scheduling writing dates to be liable for producing new work. Solidarity is a hell of a motivator.

I write best in the middle of the day to the late afternoon—coffee and beer, and Broken Water allow me to enter an embodied trance where the destabilizing magic begins.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m a firm believer of letting writing stall out and having many projects going at once until something captivates me. The work lives on—and allows me to refine everything later. Thinking is an important part of my process—allowing myself to hate something and realize why it isn’t working may be more important to me now than anything else.

Oftentimes, I stall out because I simply don’t have the time to write, or the anxieties of life demand more than I can give to writing—I think this is fine, though. Given my line of work over the past few years, I’ve had to often put my writing on pause as a political campaign envelopes me—it’s hard to write when you don’t have a day off for months in a row and you’re working 60-70 hour weeks. It’s kind of tragically charming how binary and siloed off the two worlds are—they can’t coexist no matter how hard I’ve tried.  

Parquet Courts have a great line in respect to this: “It never leaves me,/just visits less often”.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I grew up in Iowa City, and the earth creates thresholds of life. For me, the petrichor and fecundity of spring is home. The deep rawness of thawing black earth overtakes you there—even in the city. I currently live in Seattle, which washes away its scent too readily and too often—its smell is distinct yet thoroughly elusive.

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?
Film, visual art, sound art, and science all inform my writing—physics is profoundly wild. I lived in D.C. for a short time and spent all the time I could in museums, during which the exhibit Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950 at the Hirschhorn became a master class in how to create and destroy—Ori Gersht’s “Big Bang” taught me how to revise my book.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Prageeta Sharma, Elizabeth Robinson, Jane Gregory, and Peter Richards have given me incalculable support and guidance. Black Ocean has been a foundation for me, and I admire Carrie and Janaka for their dedication and I’m so grateful to have a book with them. In Seattle, I’m looking forward to new books and projects from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Richard Chiem, Jane Wong, Bill Carty, Quenton Baker, and Don Mee Choi—to name just a few of the phenomenally talented writers in this city, which has a genuine abundance of amazing writers. Willie Fitzgerald’s Twitter is the national treasure America deserves. Seattle might have the best writing community I’ve ever encountered.
                              
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love to write and direct a film.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I wish writing could be an occupation for me—I currently work in politics when I can, which is its own crazy, bizarre, and insular world. I wish I would have gotten into filmmaking or woodworking—I love working with my hands—though, I suppose, there is always still time to do that.

EDIT: Hilariously, since starting this interview, I started a new job writing remotely for a political communications firm in D.C.—I love every moment I’m writing so far, but will have a better read come January. To say 2018 is going to be an interesting year in politics might be the understatement of the year.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve been in a pretty constant tug-of-war between my two lives—politics is wholly consuming, and writing and art is always fighting for more of my attention. Writing, more than anything, is something that can be done anywhere, at any time, with little capital investment—the musicality and physical experience of writing just can’t be replicated.

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

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve been working on prose lately—a handful of short stories in progress and a novella that may never happen, but a new poetry project just took hold, which is exciting, grotesque, and existentially curious. It feels all very connected.