Please tell us about the making of “Fashioning.”
I wrote a ton of sonnets this past summer. just every day I’d sit down and make myself write into the form in the strictest sense, & not edit the poems at all. which is very hard for me, to not go back to “fix” them or whatever. it ended being really generative, & really difficult. I was writing about things, in a confessional sense, that I hadn’t ever interrogated. “Fashioning” is one of those poems, and I think is an example of one dimension of that difficulty: as a trans person, it can be super hard to cross-examine and unlearn being socialized in a toxically masculine gender. the sonnet’s a useful way, for me, to move towards that unlearning.
What annoys you about your writing process?
how obsessively recursive I am. writing the whatever-it-is for the first time is no thing, but I’ll end up revising the same poems over, for like, three years. or even just in the writing, I’ll say something & immediately back away from that statement — do I trust this line, this image, this voice? which is good because it disabuses me of any notion of the work as not-ephemeral. but like, damn. being yr own unreliable narrator can get tiring.
Which is the best description of your workspace — an altar, a construction site, or the surface of the moon?
ooh, can it be all three? I’m queer, I’m not good at picking just one thing. my work space is always changing, in transit, whatever. & like so are my altars, so is the moon, so is any construction zone. an altar-in-progress to the moon. yeah. lol.
Name some influences on your writing that are not literary.
my grandmothers, the way Gillian Welch says “Lazarus,” Phantom Thread, queer people from the South, my Gemini moon, Frances Quinlan’s singing voice, rosewater, the color yellow, my friends, the idea of the future.
What are you working on now?
I’m simultaneously of the mind that I’m only ever working towards the next poem/essay and that I’m someone deeply invested in projects. there’s evidence of both being productive approaches. right now I’m herding some poems together for a chapbook-length thing, which is taking up most of my brain space. also an ongoing essay/poem-sequence/investigation/obsession with Harry Styles, fanfiction, gender, & memoir. so that’s fun.
I wrote a ton of sonnets this past summer. just every day I’d sit down and make myself write into the form in the strictest sense, & not edit the poems at all. which is very hard for me, to not go back to “fix” them or whatever. it ended being really generative, & really difficult. I was writing about things, in a confessional sense, that I hadn’t ever interrogated. “Fashioning” is one of those poems, and I think is an example of one dimension of that difficulty: as a trans person, it can be super hard to cross-examine and unlearn being socialized in a toxically masculine gender. the sonnet’s a useful way, for me, to move towards that unlearning.
What annoys you about your writing process?
how obsessively recursive I am. writing the whatever-it-is for the first time is no thing, but I’ll end up revising the same poems over, for like, three years. or even just in the writing, I’ll say something & immediately back away from that statement — do I trust this line, this image, this voice? which is good because it disabuses me of any notion of the work as not-ephemeral. but like, damn. being yr own unreliable narrator can get tiring.
Which is the best description of your workspace — an altar, a construction site, or the surface of the moon?
ooh, can it be all three? I’m queer, I’m not good at picking just one thing. my work space is always changing, in transit, whatever. & like so are my altars, so is the moon, so is any construction zone. an altar-in-progress to the moon. yeah. lol.
Name some influences on your writing that are not literary.
my grandmothers, the way Gillian Welch says “Lazarus,” Phantom Thread, queer people from the South, my Gemini moon, Frances Quinlan’s singing voice, rosewater, the color yellow, my friends, the idea of the future.
What are you working on now?
I’m simultaneously of the mind that I’m only ever working towards the next poem/essay and that I’m someone deeply invested in projects. there’s evidence of both being productive approaches. right now I’m herding some poems together for a chapbook-length thing, which is taking up most of my brain space. also an ongoing essay/poem-sequence/investigation/obsession with Harry Styles, fanfiction, gender, & memoir. so that’s fun.