Featured Writer: Amorak Huey + Interview

On Thursday, February 29th at 7:30 pm, Poet and writer Amorak Huey will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

Amorak Huey, a poet and writer, has authored four poetry collections, including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021) and Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018). He co-authored Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and won the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize for Slash/Slash (Diode Editions, 2021). Currently a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, Huey hails from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and has a rich literary background.

Assistant Editor, Ahmad Bilal interviewed Amorak Huey for the blog.

Ahmad Bilal: You’ve had a fascinating journey from journalism to poetry. How has your experience as a journalist influenced your approach to poetry, and vice versa?

Amorak Huey: I have a couple answers for this question. The first one has to do with language: my years as a copy editor were spent considering the sentence. How efficient is this sentence at delivering information? How does it connect to the sentence before, the sentence after? What work does each word here do? Are they necessary, and if they’re not necessary, are they important in some other way? I think (hope) this practice has shaped my poetry.

The second answer has to do with audience, purpose, the larger world. When you’re writing or editing at a newspaper, you have a very clear sense of audience and purpose with every story, every image, every headline. You’re communicating in a very real sense with a very real and very local audience: the 65,000 people in the Tallahassee area who subscribe to this paper or grab it from a newspaper box because they care about what’s happening in their community, for instance. So, you always have them in mind. I hope this practice, too, carries into my poetry: a sense that I’m writing to a real, human audience interested in what I have to say about the world, in how I make sense of the mess that is the human experience. 

AB: Your poetry often combines humor and social commentary, as seen in titles like Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. How do you perceive the impact of this blend within your poetic work?

AH: I don’t know if I think deliberately about the effect or rhetorical outcome of blending these things, humor and commentary. At least not when I’m writing a poem; if I were writing, say, a newspaper column or a speech, it would be different. But in a poem, for me, it’s more about how we’re always operating at multiple levels of language. Think about code-switching, how we’re all using different diction and vocabulary for different facets of our life. Poems are looking for layers of meaning, right, like, instead of code-switching it’s code-layering — all the versions of yourself can be present at once in a poem. We contain multitudes, etc., so yeah, sometimes the joke-making self and the grief-drowning self and the self with something important to say about the planet (among myriad other selves) — in a poem, they can converge, coexist, contradict each other. 

AB: In your poem “BROKEN SONNET WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AND OFFICE HOURS,” how effective do you find the use of dialogue in addressing intergenerational perspectives on climate change?

AH: Effective within the confines of that particular poem? No idea. That’s a question for a reader, not the poet. But as a reader, I do have a fondness for dialogue in poetry. There’s something about the use of quotation marks that changes the poem’s relationship to truth; the quote marks are a kind of promise that what’s inside them is what a person (perhaps an imaginary one) actually said, though certainly a poem has no obligation to keep that promise. And of course, dialogue is a great way to explicitly give a poem multiple voices, to explore contrast and juxtaposition. 

AB: You’ve also published several chapbooks. What draws you to this shorter form, and how does your approach differ when writing chapbooks versus full-length collections?

AH: For me, a chapbook happens when I have something I’m interested in exploring for 10-15 poems or so. A chapbook is the perfect container for something like this. As a reader, I prefer chapbooks that stand alone, that aren’t just a bunch of loosely connected poems that will eventually also be published in full-length. As a writer, I’m not really a project poet, not enough to fill out a whole collection. My attention span, my willingness to listen to myself go on the same topic — it tends to cut off after a chapbook’s worth of poems. I can’t imagine writing 48-60 or however many poems that are as tightly connected as a chapbook allows. I would bore myself way before that point. I’ve said before that I don’t write books, I write poems, which can cause problems late in the process when it’s time to assemble my poems into a manuscript. So, I tend to have to write double or triple the number of poems a book needs before finding the ones that speak to each other, that coalesce into some larger form: the book. 

AB: Co-authoring a textbook on poetry is a unique endeavor. How did you and W. Todd Kaneko approach creating Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology? What insights did you gain from collaborating on this project?

AH: Our process began by spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we wanted the book to be like, what sections and ideas we wanted to include. Helped that our offices were right across the hall from each other at the time (again, the value of local community). Once we had a rough outline, we just each drafted the chapters and sections and dumped them into a Google folder; once we had everything drafted, we went in and edited each other’s work. Because we trusted each other, because we knew we were on the same page about the direction of the book, it was easy to set ego aside and know that the other’s edits were always about moving the project forward, helping it find its final form. We learned a lot about our own writing process and about trust. After we finished that first edition, we also collaborated on a collection of poems about the rock guitarist Slash, following virtually the exact same process. Because we’d done the textbook that way, we had the kind of trust you need to let someone else mess around in your creative work, right? By the end, these were not Todd’s poems or my poems, but our poems, which is kind of magical place for a project to end up. The chapbook is called Slash/Slash, and diode editions published it. 

AB: As a professor and an active writer, how do you engage with the literary community? What advice do you have for emerging poets seeking to connect with other writers and readers?

AH: My advice is: find your people and hold onto them. Make cool shit with your friends. Share your work with people who are excited about what you’re doing. Don’t think of it in any kind of mercenary or reciprocal sense—what can I get out of this—but because you value the kind of connection, the kind of relationships that art makes possible. It’s not about collecting followers on social media or networking on LinkedIn or whatever, it’s about finding people who value what you value, people you can talk to about reading, or writing, or the beautiful messy chaotic work of shaping our lives into and around art.

––Ahmad Bilal, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Alisson Wood

I recently got the chance to talk with Alisson Wood about her incredible memoir Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020). The book maps her journey from being a high school student struggling with her mental health to being a victim of grooming to being a woman ready to rewrite her own narrative. During high school Alisson takes refuge in her writing and her English teacher, Mr. North, offers to mentor her. Instead of building a student-teacher relationship built on care and support, Mr. North goes on to exploit her. One of his tactics is to give her a copy of Lolita, framing it as the ultimate love story rivaled only by theirs. In the years after the abusive spiral of their “relationship”, Wood learns to see the truth of both her story and the story of Dolores Haze. Being Lolita is a must-read memoir of redemption, survival, and breaking free of dangerous narratives. 

In addition to Being Lolita Wood’s writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Check out her Instagram, Twitter, and website to learn more.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Memoir writing is an incredibly vulnerable art form, especially when it involves the topics you address in Being Lolita such as grooming and misogyny. How did you decide you were ready to write and publish this book? 

Memoir is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable art form. So many other mediums such as sculpture, fine art, theater, and music involve working with an object outside of yourself. Writing is intrinsically an attempt at making the internal external. Memoir is particularly vulnerable because it is explicitly centering oneself. When a memoir is circling trauma, or some sort of traumatic experience, that can be really tricky.

My number one recommendation is if you are thinking about or in the midst of a project that involves trauma, is to find a good therapist. Because this sort of work is difficult. It’s not only difficult on a craft level, because just like writing a novel, there are all these things that you need to be working with like plot, theory, dialogue, scene setting. You need to do all of those things, all of that same craft work,  while you are also navigating your own emotional experience, your past, your present, even your future, in a memoir. 

It wasn’t like I decided to write Being Lolita. It didn’t feel optional. This was the book I needed to write. Which I was not thrilled about. I did not enjoy the process of writing this book. I did not experience the writing of this book as an act of catharsis or as any sort of healing experience. A lot of times people expect that. They’ll ask questions in interviews like, Do you feel healed now? And it’s like fuck no. No, writing out my trauma in detail on a page for an audience of strangers has not made anything better. I do think that that sort of question comes from a place of care and from sort of a place of hope. Someone reads my book, and it’s pretty awful at times, and they sort of hope like, oh, this helped, right? I read this awful thing, but you’re better now. Right?  I am better, but that had nothing to do with the book. Writing this book did not change what happened to me. It did nothing to change my trauma. However, work in therapy has done a lot of that. 

Publishing is always a choice. I’m very proud of the book, and I’m very glad that I published it. But there was a lot that I did to prepare myself for publication like therapy, talking and getting support from close friends, and connecting with family. When the book came out I spent about six months talking about my trauma over and over again in readings and on podcasts and in interviews and then in a documentary. So it was something that I had to prepare myself for. Which, again, is why I always recommend therapy. 

Can you share a bit about the recollection and writing process that went into Being Lolita? Was there anything that surprised you when you revisited the memories and archives of your younger self? 

Your own memory can be fallible. There was a very explicit crossing of the line from this man being my teacher to this man making sexual advances to a seventeen-year-old year old girl. There was this moment where my teacher was talking about the size of his penis in a note to me in study hall. In my memory that had happened towards the end of the school year, it had happened like in May or something. I remembered it being close to when I graduated, when I was already eighteen. But when I was going through my high school journals I found an entry referencing it. The entry was from November, so I had known him for at most two months. It was really shocking to me when I realized that my memory was not accurate, in a way that only made things worse. That just underscored how quickly the relationship had escalated from a teacher paying attention and giving me support with my writing to grooming and sexual abuse. 

I still have a box of photographs and receipts from our “relationship”.  As an aside, it frustrates me that there’s no word for what happened between he and I. That just feels like a reflection of the misogyny in our language. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I would prefer not to use the word relationship, but that’s all that we got. But anyways, in the process I kept having to confront the fact that this was actually much worse than I remembered. I had been sort of lying to myself about the severity of how quickly things escalated. There was one experience where I was in the school play. He was directing it and I remembered this moment of him taking a photograph of me backstage in my costume. I remember how it felt to have that photo taken, how I felt sexy and powerful. I was like, look at me, a cute little Lolita, just like you want. Then when I was writing the book I found the picture. I looked so young I could have been fourteen or fifteen. I looked so young and so sad. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t some seventeen-year-old girl who looked much older. I was a young girl who looked really sad. That reckoning was hard. 

 My experience of going through my archives, including my high school journals, was both incredibly painful and helpful to the project. I was expecting moments of, Oh, I thought this happened. Oh, that’s not actually what happened. Instead, I found myself more disturbed by people remembering what actually had happened. I was expecting to hear from people from my high school, from my past, from his friends who would push back on my memories. Instead people reached out to me, saying things like Oh, my God! He was so creepy! or I tried to talk to another teacher about this because I was worried, but no one cared or I was a teacher then and I didn’t know what to do or, most awfully, this happened to me too. I also found out that my teacher was still teaching. Until very recently he was still teaching high school. That was particularly difficult, but it also wasn’t surprising. 

I’ve had to read Lolita many times for my own project and noticed a narrative structure similar to your memoir. Can you talk a bit about the structural choices you made and how it does and doesn’t mirror Lolita? 

I very explicitly mirror the structure of my book to the structure of Lolita. Part one in both books is sort of the escalation of this “relationship”, this escalation of the grooming and the abuse. Part two of these books are these kind of extended road trips, trying to not get caught. Then part three is the aftermath, which is where I separate from Nabokov’s structure. Dolores Haze is dead, and her story ends. But unlike Dolores Haze, I am not dead. I get to keep going, which is very nice. 

Nabokov really sneaks in the violence of the book in so many ways. Starting from the first line, readers have the point of view of Humbert: this is love, and so on. But before then we have the opening from the doctor and the criminal charges Humbert is facing. It is just tucked in there that Dolores ends up dead – they use her married name. And the thing is, that’s all at the beginning of the book. Nobody knows who this person is. We haven’t been introduced to this character. We don’t even know that her name is Dolores Haze for quite a bit. Unless someone goes back to the beginning and carefully reads through that opening again, they will miss it. They do not know that she ends up dead in childbirth. She never even gets to complete her life cycle. Her moving from girlhood to womanhood (where she becomes a mother and is no longer a child) is where she dies. I think this is just so reflective of the book as a whole. Those most vital pieces are hidden and hidden in plain sight. That’s very frustrating to me. 

 Mirroring the structure of my book to Lolita was a choice that I made in the editing process, not something I decided at the very beginning. At first I was just writing the scenes that were the clearest in my head. I began with the scenes that were the hottest, and I don’t mean hot like sexy, I mean hot emotionally – the ones that are the most emotionally packed. I made the structural decision later, when it revealed itself in later stages of the book

On the topic of structure, particularly memoir structure, I believe that if you’re going to make some sort of interesting craft choice, like making your memoir non-chronological or from the second person, I deeply believe that you need to have a reason for doing that. Why is this non-chronological? Why should this be the way the story has to be told? There needs to be a good reason, because I really believe that chronology can create empathy. We all love to follow a hero’s journey. To see something happen from the start to the end. And I think that, especially in memoir, it really helps an audience follow the main character to the end of an experience. 

I’m also a big believer in a really strong beginning. A hard truth is that unless you are in an MFA or other writing workshop, no one has to read your book. No one has to read your essay. No one has to read your short story. That can be a big shift for people exiting a writing program. You have to earn your reader’s trust. You have to earn their time. You have to earn their attention. 

The opening of my book is, “The first time he kissed me wasn’t on the mouth.” This was both instinctual and a craft choice: the opening line allows readers to get right into the story. There’s immediately questions. Who is he? If he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, where did he kiss you? What is the context here? Who are you? Opening with questions isn’t always the right choice for a book, but I felt like it was the right choice for mine. The diner scene immediately (hopefully) brings in curiosity and stakes. In the short space of that chapter – it is under 2,000 words – I tried to establish what was important: I’m in high school. This is my teacher. We’re meeting secretly. Lolita is important. Writing is important. There’s also a few moments where there’s this innate reference to violence present, with the slamming of the lockers, with the ink bleeding. 

You spend a lot of your memoir unpacking Lolita, especially when it comes to cultural legacy and the role that it had on your own story. What do you wish was more commonly understood about Lolita, both as a novel and also as a cultural touchstone? 

I wish people took Lolita seriously, in a way. Far too many people see Lolita as a piece of satire, and undercut what is actually happening on the page. Now, I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that. Books are made to be read, and should be. However, I do think that Lolita needs to be read in context, both in cultural context and in literary context. Lolita has to be read with a very critical eye. Culturally, people don’t think of Lolita as a victim of rape as a child who was kidnapped. We think about Lolita as a shade of lipstick or a makeup line. We think of Lolita as in Lolita fashion: short little frilly skirts and low-cut tops and ribbons in your hair. Lolita is in place of sexy: she’s such a Lolita. Culturally, we don’t acknowledge the reality of Lolita. 

After the first time Dolores Haze is raped, they stop at a gas station. Humbert has this laundry list of things that he picks up for her: magazines, lollipops, candy, and so on. And right in the middle, just snuck in there, are menstrual pads. If you’re not a careful, critical reader, you just gloss over that when the reality is she needed menstrual pads because was bleeding from violent rape. She had a physical injury from it. That’s something that’s hard for readers to acknowledge. It’s much easier to think of Lolita as if she’s a little Jezebel, like some sexy thing. That’s also linked to the fact that, due to patriarchy and misogyny, women are primarily valued on their looks and younger is considered better. There’s all this power linked to being a young, sexy girl. In many ways Lolita is both a reflection of that point of view in our culture and part of the problem. 

Lolita was in my own story from the beginning. Everything in the book connects in some way to Lolita. My teacher gave me Lolita. He read Lolita to me. His favorite drink was one that he made up called the Humbert Humbert. It was gin, and whatever it is that Humbert drinks. He gave me a stamp collection that was all Nabokov butterflies. Even the sections about fairy tales or Greek myths. That’s the kind of stuff that Nabokov loves.

Now, as a professor, I teach an excerpt from Lolita in my course, the opening. But Lolita is always the last thing we read. I found that when we read Lolita in the beginning of the semester, before weeks of practicing critical thinking about literature, people often got swept up in the romance and the lyricism and the beauty of the prose. Contrarily, by the end of the semester, we’ve talked about poetic devices. We’ve talked about choices and point of view. We’ve talked about narrative. We’ve talk about all these things. So they are ready to do the work of critical thinking and come to the text ready to ask questions. That’s the way Lolita should be read. Lolita is a beautiful book. I mean, it is a little bit masturbatory in its excess. Nabakov famously hated editors. I think the book could be shorter, honestly. But there’s a lot of beauty, and a lot  hat is worth reading and talking about. I think that it’s the lack of critical eye and cultural context that lets down Lolita, and lets down women.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor

Interviews with Robert Anthony Siegel and Raza Ali Hasan on Setting

Robert Anthony Siegel is a writer and writing coach. He is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other places, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Robert taught in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for 22 years, helping students write and publish their first books. He has also taught at Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and is a regular at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard. You can reach him at robertanthonysiegel@gmail.com. 

Sheeraz: Your story “Flight” brilliantly uses setting—doors, borders, roads, tree branches, air, water—as metaphors of fluidity, abandonment, and departure. It also juxtaposes two spacetimes, one in the close-up of Violet’s basement defined by its slow, careful motions, while the other in the narrator’s mental long shots of speedily changing places as he imaginatively follows his father driving from Buffalo to the Canadian border, “eating packets after packets of peanuts” in a plane, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv, looking at his passport. What is the magic that layers the setting into the architecture of a story like “Flight”?   

Robert: If I’m understanding you right, Sheeraz, you are asking what makes the setting important to the emotional movement of a story like “Flight,” which is about growing up while your family is falling apart. Maybe the best way to answer that question is to go back to first principles for just a second. A fiction writer’s most basic task is to show what a character is feeling without explicitly stating that feeling. One of the most interesting ways to do that is through character perception, by which I mean revealing what a character is feeling by tracking what they are seeing. Instead of saying “I’m sad,” your character glances outside the window and notices the bare branch or bedraggled patch of old snow (apologies for the cliché, but you see what I mean.) In “Flight,” doors, roads, borders are all images of loss. 

Using perception to reveal emotion does all sorts of interesting things to a story, recasting perception as a form of expression, and making setting into a mirror in which a character’s feelings are reflected. There is nothing artificial about this; it is true to the way we experience life: when I’m happy about something, the bare branch just looks austerely beautiful.  

Sheeraz: Irene in “The Silver Door” lives in an old-age home and doesn’t like its silence at night, “the way the tree outside her window threw shadows on the wall,” and “the residents—shrunken, hunchbacked, tremulous, hard-of-hearing, foul-smelling, caked with rouge.” At the same time, she is haunted by the fear of being sent to the memory care unit, where every door is locked with a key. How does our memory define and decide our relationship with a place? How does a place—despite all its silences and shadows—become a character’s desire? 

Robert: Place and desire are intertwined in wonderful ways in fiction. In “The Silver Door,” Irene looks down on the other residents at the old age home, in large part because they remind her of her own vulnerability. The problem is that she is losing her memory, and she doesn’t want to be transferred from independent living to the memory care unit across the courtyard because that building is locked; she won’t be able to go outside anymore. In a sense, the geography of the story is the story: two buildings staring at each other across a courtyard, one of which represents life and the other loss—loss of freedom, loss of memory, loss of self. You can’t live in the first building without staring at the second. But what Irene learns by the end is that you can stay in life just a little bit longer if you open yourself to the people around you and accept their love. In that moment, the victory feels total, even if it is short-lived. 

Sheeraz: How would you define the setting in creative writing? Your award-winning story, “The Right Imaginary Person”, is set in Japan. In what ways can a writer’s firsthand experience of a place be beneficial? Is there anything like knowing more or knowing less about the setting? 

Robert: For me, direct personal experience of the place I am writing about is crucial. The more I know about the place where my story happens, the more lines I will be able to draw between the character’s emotional experience and the details of the character’s physical environment. I spent three years as a student in Japan, just long enough to feel myself a kind of intimate stranger there, speaking the language but not of the language, full of a yearning I couldn’t quite define. That is the feeling I tried to capture in “The Right Imaginary Person” by evoking my memory of the place as accurately as possible. 

At the same time, I know that many other writers work differently. I’m rereading The Ambassadors, for example, a wonderful book that left a big mark on me when I first read it, and I’m surprised to see how little time Henry James spends on the physical reality of Paris, even though Paris as a place of personal transformation is crucial to the story. What matters to James is what people say and don’t say, and what they think about each other. 

One last thing—it’s humbling to be read with such close attention and generosity of spirit, and to be asked such deeply considered questions. Thank you, Sheeraz, I’m truly grateful. 

Raza Ali Hasan, the Pakistani-American poet, earned a BA and an MA from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MFA from Syracuse University. The published collections of Hasan’s poetry include Grieving Shias (2006), Sorrows of the Warrior Class and 67 Mogul Miniatures (2008), which loosely follows the Urdu poetry structure of musaddas. Ali currently lives in Boulder, where he teaches at the University of Colorado. You can reach him at ali.hasan@colorado.edu.  

Sheeraz: Your musaddas poems in 67 Mogul Miniatures successfully invoke far-flung places and different historical periods. How does a poem shape its landscape and history?  

Ali: Each musaddas poem in 67 Mogul Miniatures is only tangentially (not by subject or place or historical context) related to each other via a narrative questioning arc about the state of the global south, and the urgent answers sought and found. And so the places and history and times all change from poem to poem. Different landscapes are hinted at in each six lines of poem, but cannot be built over a set of poems. Thus the formal constraints of the architecture of my book’s borrowed from the great Pakistani (South Asian) poet Muhammad Iqbal’s “Shikwa” and “Jawab-e-Shikwa” leave little room for anything other than clay models for larger unwritten versions. With such a tight space for words, pictures of different places and occasions are made with as few words as possible. A description of musical night out, in poem no. 3 in the collection, to see a Qawwali concert starring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, does not even have enough space to spell his name out. The whole thing is evoked with “Khan”, “Karachi”, “tabla” and its “unsteady beat” and a “harmonium” and its “wheezing.”  A poem about Prophet Muhammad’s companion, only has two words that set up the historical context for the poem: the name of the companion, “Bilal,” and the hyphenated word “crescent-world.”  Sometimes literary landscapes are invoked by just two names, “Qais” and “Leila,” or the cinematic world with “Zeba” and “Waheed Murad,” or the Iraq War with just one word, “children” and one line, “unburied littering its smudgy, tar highways.”  

Sheeraz: Most poems in Sorrows of the Warrior Class are set in the Cold War. What is the process of giving a clear sense of time?  

Ali: The Persian poet Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnamah, or more accurately, the miniature illustrations of its heroes (Alexander the Great, Sohrab, etc.) and stories serve the role of antiquity in my poems here. The 1950s and 1970s are evoked via American movies shown in Pakistani Cinema houses and by the poems on the ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the fifties and the coup and hanging of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. For the first half of the American Cold War, the tropes of heroism, valor, dignity, and hope from Shahnamah still seemed timeless. 

Sheeraz: How do you conceptualize the role of setting in poetry?  

Ali: For my work, the setting (in place, in culture, in history) of my poems, however achieved, with much labor or just a word or two, is crucial. My serious, somber poems, have to announce their origin and their place of denouement. A perfect example of that is my long poem “In That Part of the World,” published in my first book, Grieving Shias, whose very title alerts the reader to its crucible, its location: Afghanistan.   

–Muhammad Sheeraz Dasti, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times ‘The Shortlist’ pick and a Chicago Review of Books ‘must-read’ book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and teaches occasionally through the University of Washington Rome Center and Tin House Writers’ Workshops, among other universities and arts organizations. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @GabrielleBates

We published your poem, “Monologue with a Flat Hand,” in vol. XXXVII no. 1 in the Fall of 2016 which eventually appeared in your debut full-length collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) under the title, “Should the First Calf of Winter Be White, You’re Going to Hate.” The poem changed quite a bit before the recent publication in your collection. How do you negotiate that need for revision after initial publication?

That poem tortured me! Before Mid-American Review published a version of it, and for years afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the poem had a lot of potential, if I could just figure out what it wanted to do or say—something about it was eluding me. I wish I could pull that issue off the shelf and compare the two versions, because I don’t remember exactly what all I changed between the journal and the book publications—I know I changed the ending (and the title obviously) but there are other moments too, I’m sure, that are different!—but I’m house-sitting right now, so I don’t have access to the original. 

It doesn’t matter if a poem has already been published or not; if I sense a way to make it more alive and resonant, I make those changes. Just because I’ve published a poem doesn’t mean the poem has found its most energetic language or form. In fact, it’s often only after I’ve published a poem in a journal that I see places where I could cut back and release more energy into the poem. 

You have a very extensive list of publications in the acknowledgements of Judas Goat. When do you know a poem is ready to go out as a submission to literary magazines/journals?

My approach throughout my twenties—the decade I was working on Judas Goat—was “throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.” I’d write, workshop, revise, and then send a poem out to journals in a fairly speedy cycle. Sometimes way too speedily: I’d write a draft and send it out almost immediately, awash in the creation afterglow, though I always regretted that later. In general I thought: If an editor thinks it’s good enough to publish, it must be. Who am I to say or know when a poem is “done” or “good enough”? In my early twenties especially, I was anxious for others to tell me about my work and its worth. I believed myself too ignorant to perform that role reliably for myself. And because I was a young, unknown writer from Alabama, who didn’t go to NYU or anything like that, I felt like I could trust editors to judge my work on its own merits. I don’t feel that way anymore (I have trust issues!), so I haven’t been submitting much at all since I finished Judas Goat. I’m trying to slow down and hone my intuition about when poems are ready to live in the world outside of me. 

When do you know a poem needs to stop being submitted for publication?

If I’ve pushed a poem as far as I can, and I believe in it (a rare occurrence), and a trusted friend has read it and told me they love it, then I will never stop submitting it. Otherwise, I tend to stop submitting a poem once I’ve realized it’s not done or alive enough to be worth putting out into the world. 

How do you find the final shape a poem aches to be?

Oh, I love the verb “aches” here. So interesting—poem framed as a living being, capable of ache. I try to find a poem’s most-alive shape by employing an alchemy of time, reading aloud, and sharing with trusted readers for feedback. Often the first interesting sentence or line of a draft will carry a clue for me in regards to how the poem as a whole wants to approach lineation and stanza, like a blueprint.  

The writing and publishing process takes time as we published your poem in 2016 which then later appeared in your collection in 2023. How long did the process take from the moment you realized you had a book, to submitting your manuscript for publication?

Someone advised me to start submitting my first-book manuscript before I thought it was fully ready, so I did that for a few years, using contest deadlines as a prod to try and wrangle what I had into book-length shape. I felt close to having the manuscript done for years, but it wasn’t until after I had the book deal with Tin House, and after I’d gone through some final editing rounds with my editor Alyssa Ogi that I actually felt the book was ready to publish. 

Some of us are, pathologically, never content with what we’ve made; it’s a constant push and pull between honoring the hopes and standards we have for art, while not becoming overly precious or private about it. 

What most surprised you after your debut published?

Anytime a person I don’t know posts something insightful about Judas Goat on the internet, I’m shocked. I’m like: How did the book even find its way to you?! The population of people who buy and read contemporary poetry collections in the U.S. is fairly miniscule, compared to other genres especially, and yet Judas Goat has ended up in places I never expected—It’s all very wild and surprising to me. The most surprising moment was probably when Jorie Graham said kind words about my book on Twitter. I’ve never met her and had zero reason to believe the collection would be on her radar at all. Still doesn’t feel real.

How has your relationship with Judas Goat changed since first holding a copy of the book in your hands and seeing it out in the world?

The book publishing process, like any major life event, is full of emotional vertigo, moments where you think you’re supposed to feel one way, and you actually feel another way. I panicked when I saw my book in person for the first time, I’ll be real with you. I thought: This is it? and then: WHAT HAVE I DONE. I don’t feel that way anymore, luckily. Friends and generous, thoughtful readers have helped me step into a more celebratory mode around the book. I wouldn’t say I feel detached from it now, but I feel more detached than I did when I held it for the first time—in a healthy way.

The first poem in Judas Goat titled “The Dog” is shocking with its unforgiving portrayal of the violence we cause. The poems in the collection keep returning to this motif of violence and ruin; however, there are also intimate moments within the collection like in the poem, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” What is the relationship between the violence and the more intimate moments within the collection?

I’m interested in what happens in the small theaters of life, where there are very few witnesses; when private, intimate moments and conversations are imagined or dramatized and made public, through art, that’s really interesting and evocative for me. There’s an inherent tension. In juxtaposing or otherwise engaging aspects of violence and intimacy, I think I was trying to understand something about my relationship to vigilance, abandon, and risk. 

Many of your poems reference mythical, fairytale, and religious figures such as Eurydice, Gretel, and Mary all of whom you give voice or space within the collection. How have these women impacted your life and your writing?

I’m interested in the ways stories shape our lives. Fairytales and myths from various traditions have always haunted me, particularly the stories about young women in danger, which felt designed to teach me something about what it meant to be a young woman in danger. 

Judas Goat is such a stunning collection full of poems that are both inviting and frustrating which, I feel, the best poems usually are. What makes a poem for you?

What makes a poem, for me, on the most basic level, is a surprising and evocative progression lines. My favorite poems impart both clarity and mystery—Reading them, I feel something intense, but I also don’t quite know exactly what just happened to me, or what I’ve taken from it. I love that tension between vividness and endless interpretation, vulnerability and privacy. “Both inviting and frustrating”! I love that you said that. There is an element of frustration, isn’t there? Frustration keeps me alive, keeps me writing. It’s a form of closeness, and a kind of belief.

***

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

An Interview with Marisa (Mac) Crane

If you’re looking for a beautifully queer abolitionist novel that isn’t afraid of asking hard questions, Marisa (Mac) Crane’s debut I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is for you. In the world of this novel people who commit acts considered punishable by the government are assigned an extra shadow by The Department of Balance and forever labeled a Shadester. Shadesters are publicly shamed for their actions, watched by the state, actively discriminated against, and harassed. We follow a Shadester named Kris as she navigates life as a single mother to her daughter who was given an extra shadow for “killing” her wife Beau in childbirth. In order to do this Kris must learn to live with her grief over her lost wife while also establishing a new understanding of love in an authoritarian state which denies both her and her daughter humanity. Throughout the story Kris encounters challenges making us consider complicated questions of addiction, family, betrayal, and, perhaps most importantly, forgiveness. 

Crane’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Joyland, The Offing, No Tokens, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, Catapult, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well an American Short Fiction Merit Fellow and Sewanee Writing Conference fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is their first novel and it was a January Next Pick and New York Times Editors Choice. 

They were kind enough to answer a few questions for us here at MAR. Please note Crane uses they/them pronouns, so take care to use they/them when discussing them and their work. Thank you! 

Gen: One of the many things I admire about your novel is the depth and intentionality you bring to your world-building. How did you come up with these ideas for shadows and “Shadesters?”

Mac: Thank you, that means a lot to me. About eight or nine years ago, when I struggling with a lot of shame, self-hatred, and regret, I wrote a short poem that read, “If the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” I foolishly thought shaming myself would help me avoid hurting people, but it of course did not. Years later, the first line of the novel popped into my head: “The kid is born with two shadows.” Eventually, I connected this line to the earlier poem I wrote and soon was able to build a world that runs on shame and punishment, a world, much like our own, that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and beyond, a world that is the very antithesis of healing and growth. I wondered, “Even if the government abolishes the prison-industrial complex, how can they still manage to mess it up? How can they still foster a harmful and punitive society?” I was really interested in the intersection of shame, oppression, parenting, queerness, and the power of community.

Gen: What stood out to you in the process of writing about parenting?

Mac: It was incredibly hard because I felt like I was method acting as a widow grieving her wife, because I had to lean into the trauma of that, into the pain and fear of the unknown around raising a disenfranchised kid under an oppressive government. And also the everyday fears of parenting: Are they happy? Am I a good parent? Am I failing them? Will I mess them up? How do I keep from messing them up? How do I give them a beautiful future? It was emotionally trying and draining, especially because I was more or less writing into many of my own fears. I wasn’t a parent yet when I started drafting the book but my wife and I had just begun talking about family planning. Attending seminars, learning the ins and outs of fertility treatment. I was scared for a thousand reasons, and I used those fears to channel some of Kris’ experiences, in order to access a deep and painful part of her.

Gen: Though your book is a work of fiction I’ve found myself thinking of it as an abolitionist text which is able to use dystopia as a platform to discuss questions of surveillance, marginalization, shame, and punishment. What role do you see dystopia having in the examination of social issues?

Mac: It thrills me that you think of it that way because that really was my intention. Honestly, maybe I’m biased, but I see dystopia as the best way to examine social issues. Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, George Orwell, Jessamine Chan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, Lois Lowry, on and on and on—writers that I admire the hell out of, writers who have written stories with staying power, stories that touch and move people, that force them to examine the world we live in. With dystopias, the unfamiliar (yet familiar!) setting provides a necessary distance to get readers to pay attention, to engage with the text. I mean, I know that realism can and does provide social commentary as well, but sometimes, I think, if it isn’t done expertly, it can feel too much like hammering readers over the head with ideas. I view dystopian work as an act of distancing in order to close the distance.

Gen: Can you share a bit about your writing process for this book? Did it change in any major ways after finishing it?

Mac: Yeah my writing process changed considerably in that…I will never write a book the way that I did Exoskeletons ever again. I was on unemployment and basically racing against the clock to get a draft done before I got a new job. Which was fine for what I needed at the time, but it meant I had to do countless drafts afterward, which felt very daunting. And it didn’t help that it’s written in about a million fragments because I wound up moving the fragments around obsessively like a puzzle until they clicked. I’m such a brat about revision. I really don’t like it. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time thinking and brainstorming and writing notes before I ever actually decide to write a story, essay, or novel. Once it takes shape in my head, I sit down and write very slowly. The resulting draft is much much stronger and something I feel confident I can polish and fix up without blowing it up. Plus, I’m a parent now. A lot of the “writing” has to happen in my head when I’m doing other things. The most generous thing I ever did for myself was to view everything as writing. Living is writing, doing the dishes is writing, rocking my kid is writing.

Gen: Do you have any advice for novelists starting out?

Mac: Oh goodness, I am always hesitant to give advice because it tends to feel so prescriptive and well, through the lens of what works solely for me! But if I have to give advice, I would say: Don’t forget to play and delight in your work. Take risks, throw yourself into whatever your obsessions are, and be unapologetic about it. 

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor