The ThinkND Podcast
The ThinkND Podcast
Letras Latinas, Part 13: A Conversation with Oliver Baez Bendorf
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Well, my name is Sebastian Boswick and I am an MFA candidate in poetry here at University of Notre Dame. And I'm joined with, wonderful Oliver Bias. Who I will be interviewing today for the Institute for Latino Studies Oral History Project. today's date is November 7th. It is in thousand 19. It's around 2:30 PM and we're currently in the Scholars Lounge in Bond Hall in the University of Notre Dames campus in South Bend, Indiana. so I already mentioned this, but we kind of just start off like a background information like where and when you were born. any family history, significant childhood memories, moments that inspired you to pursue writing, things like that so you can get a little sketch of who you're as a person and a poet. Sure. Yeah.
2:It's got a lot. Okay. Yeah, let me see here. I'll start with some basics, which I'm pretty sure to be true. I was born in Iowa City, Iowa in, on June 21st, 1987. Gemini Cancer Cusp for the record. Love that. and let's see. I lived in Iowa City until my 21st birthday. my father grew up in Iowa, and my mother grew up in Chicago and then had gone a few hours west to the University of Iowa, which is where they met. and they met on the first day of freshman writing at the University of Iowa. I have one older sister and, I, my favorite chore was taking out the compost. My parents always had a big garden and I would take out the compost, which we kept in like a. Like an old, you know, gallon ice cream container. and I hated that part'cause it was, you know, it smelled and, but I liked staying out there and just gorging myself on raspberries from the garden. So I'd be like, you know, take out the compost and then half an hour later
1:still be out there.
2:Yeah. I drew a lot. I was very obsessed with song lyrics and as soon as the internet came around, I would look up song lyrics for songs that I had heard on the radio or things like that, and print them out and just carry them with me everywhere and memorize them. Looking back now, you know, I can see the ways that like lyrics were a portal to poetry for me, because at some point the music part of it sort of dropped off and I started writing my own song lyrics that just sort of, you know. I can track it to poetry, even though at the time I was like, these are song lyrics. we always had dogs. There was some fish and lizards around. and my father's family was part of the Amana colonies in Iowa, which was a communal living situation that was one of the longest lasting and one of the largest in the United States. and it ran, they were communal from about 1855 to around 1930 Oh wow. In Iowa. and that was a group that had started in Germany, although it also included some French and some others. And were, they were a group of mystics and they were persecuted in Germany, because they wanted to homeschool their kids and. poor, you know, conscientious objectors and all of these things and didn't believe in signing oaths. so they came here, and my mother's father grew up in Puerto Rico, was born there. He now lives in Florida. and my mother's mother is, was Southern Italian, and her family fled Italy during Mussolini and went first to Montreal and then to Chicago. so that's some family history, that's some childhood memories, some pet information. If there's anything else, feel free to ask,
1:on that one or others. Yeah. And you touched on what, Well, I wanted to ask about that actually. so you would write your own lyrics. Did you play instruments at all or was it just you kind of were just like, oh, this is what we set to music? Eventually?
2:I did play instruments at a certain point, so I played trumpet for one year in the school band, and my parents had the foresight to only rent the instrument. and then I played guitar. My dad had a guitar and he taught me some things. And so that was really when it was like I am writing song lyrics to be played with guitar. I wasn't very good at guitar and I dropped that off at some point, after playing a few of my songs that opened mics in town. and so that was when like the, when the lyric writing sort of kept going. It wasn't really until college when I took a class that I was like, oh, this is poetry, or a version of it is poetry.
1:Yeah. Okay. And then, just one more thing about that Is and I know you are in Kalamazoo, right? Uhhuh, so you're teaching there. Yep. Yeah. Little bit about that experience.
2:Yeah. Yeah. so I, this is my second year teaching at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, which is just about an hour and a half north of where we are right now. and I'm an assistant professor there. I teach creative writing and poetry. and before that I was at the University of Wisconsin Madison, which is also where I went into graduate
1:school, which also, and I saw online you learn to be a librarian there.
2:I did. Is that fun? I got my MFA in poetry and then, you know, I had applied to some post MFA fellowship and I was a finalist for one, and I didn't get any, and I didn't have any idea what else I was going to do. During my MFA, I had started working part-time at a library on campus, and I had already kind of been thinking maybe this someday, because I had been working with this incredible collection of like modernist, mostly modernist literary journals, but the collection was still like, had active subscriptions to contemporary journalists as well. And it was amazing, you know, it was like having subscriptions to, so I thought that was really cool and I started to get interested in librarianship and so I just decided at that point to do that sort of right after my MFA. so I did that and I kept working at the library on campus.
3:and
2:I guess it's, it started kind of as a backup, but I don't mean that as anything about the, I mean, it was great and I think of it as sort of, it shapes a lot of the ways that I teach now and,
1:so yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I've, yeah. Never heard of, I guess. I just never thought about it. It's like one of those, those jobs you never really, think about you get trained for. Yeah. Like different things and like I've already, I've been around libraries and libraries my whole life.
2:Yeah. Librarians are amazing. Audrey Lorde was a librarian.
1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. okay, so we can go to another question. I was thinking we could maybe, talk about if there was any like specific models or poets that, influenced your work at all, or I know you've talked about before and I did a little bit of interview research Yeah. past like professors who Uhhuh, I think Lydia Berry is name Linda Berry. Linda Berry,
2:yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, as far as I think about my influences as a poet, as rather eclectic, which I love, and. Sometimes I get jealous of, you know, if there's a poet that's like I am of the lineage of this one poet in particular.'cause it's so clear and it isn't that clear for me. But, you know, I'm, I read Amorously and also deeply, and I feel blessed to have had some really amazing teachers in my life. my first one, my first poetry teacher was at the University of Iowa when I was an undergrad. And her name was Caroline Man Ray. She lives in Finger Lakes region of New York now teaches there. And she was a graduate student in the Iowa Raiders workshop at the time. And, introduced me to Elizabeth Bishop and Scansion and Monds and an Afra. I mean, so many of it. I still think back on all that, on that class all the time when I'm teaching. And, let's see, others at w Constant. I mean, Linda taking a workshop with Linda Barry was like a peak, pinnacle moment for me. And I, took her workshop in the last semester of my MFA and poetry there, and she's not in the creative writing program there, although a lot of writers will take workshops with her. she's got this amazing title that's Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity, which I love. and the workshop that I took with her was about like creativity and the brain. So we all got assigned different parts of the brain names by I was amygdala for the semester. And, man, it was amazing. You know, we, you and I were talking earlier about, teaching, you know, outside of our genre. And one thing that was really intimidating for me when I started to teach, actually, and this isn't even genre specific, it was like. You know, the week on imagery, like the week on the imit, and I was teaching it, and I was at the same time that I was trying to teach it. what even is this thing? You know, like I, and so taking her workshop where we were like in the about like memories and imagination and we were also actually physically drawing a lot. And that just changed everything about the way that I taught the image, the way I think about the image, the way that I work it in my own writing. I was really just seeing it on a spectrum of the literal image that is in a drawing. and also not just the visual, but those details that seem so dumb and are like a portal to an entire, like life or an entire, part of your life. It's like the smell that like holds the key to something or, so that workshop, it's hard to even put it into words and it just changed everything. you know, teaching and, writing and drawing. And I, and Linda became a really important mentor and friend to me. and I just feel so lucky and blessed to have found my way to that workshop. And, all of the faculty at Wisconsin, I felt I don't know what I did to deserve it, but that place was really good to me. And, Ahad, Jamal Johnson, continues to be a mentor there. Jonathan Sentin, who became a mentor to me in library school, and also had kind of come from like a literature background into the library school. and, yeah, so, so eclectic influences at times. It's just like an individual poem, you know, like one of, there's a Pablo neighborhood of poem right now that is like my teacher this week. so yeah,
1:it comes from all
2:over.
1:I feel like that shows up a lot because I feel like you experiment lots with different forms and different like movements happening in, in all of your, well, I guess with the chat it, the pro problem, but Yeah. But the other ones, it's very, I don't know, I feel like that shows up and it's it's a good amalgamation of things.
2:Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. yeah.
1:but one thing that does come up in all of your writing is, is nature of course. but and specifically Midwest landscape, like there's lots of corn fields, farmland, and like specific names that are mentioned. and then the, it, ascribe like a sacredness to like, to the land, to the space around us. and I'm curious if there are other like, maybe less overt, influences that like nature has on like just like your writing process itself or, or how you see your poetry in relation to nature.
2:Yeah, I think it, this has shifted over the years for me and continues to shift, you know? but I mean, I was telling you like my favorite thing as a kid was like when I would just get to go hang out in the garden a while, and I was a lonely kid. I was a weird kid. I felt very different from like most of the other kids around me. and, and one thing that I really am grateful to my parents for was, that was just, we spent a lot of time outside and cultivate, like the outdoor space was like an extension of our home. my dad is a very talented and serious birder. And so that sort of like observation, I feel like I got kind of as osmosis growing up. and you know, I also am prone to anxiety. And when I could remember that just like going outside, like sticking my feet in the dirt or even just like opening a window or something that like brings it back down into the body and like connects in that way. it's just, it's a nice thing for me. So there's sort of that element and then there's also, you know, in advantages of being evergreen, like it was great solace to sort of feel like there were days when it could feel like, oh, like literally no one around me is changing right now, which is of course not true at bogus. But it can just, you know, there's a kind of like awkwardness to it, or at least like having a second puberty when like literally no, none of your peers are. And so it delighted and comforted me to, just feel and cultivate a kind of solidarity with actually the amazing, like transformations that are happening all around us all the time. and as in, in recent work also, you know, I'm kind of trying to think through a little bit more explicitly the connections between the aesthetics and the ethics, just as it relates to a climate crisis. Yeah. And, what like a poem is good for or can do now. So I've been thinking a lot about that and, and I'm interested not, I actually don't think that the only mode or even the most interesting one for that is like IES to nature because I. It's we're not there yet. And so I've been playing around with just how different modes can respond and feel useful right now. So, like drastic or really just witnessing documentation, os that was the po one of the po root poems right now that I mentioned. and also like instructional poems, like I think a lot about, you know, poetry of course was an oral form before it was written and was used a lot for passing on information and instructions and things that you needed to remember. And so in this sort of pre apocalyptic or like wherever we are in that, I'm kind of like, how can poetry help us now? Right? what is like a poem that I would want to like, have memorized, like to go into this unknown future of climate crisis. Or what information or, you know, have so many tabs bookmark. what if, like how that's all just like in this, you know, like it all feels quite fragile. and so I've been interested about poetry as a way to know a thing by heart and going into this unknown future. so yeah, the na the nature, there's many parts of it and it's all just, I mean, it's like I feel like it's the stew that I'm in and as a poet, but it is, it's evolving.
1:Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like that's interesting too because I feel like it's almost also like a documentation of how it is now before it gets, I mean, it seems like it will get worse, right? hopefully it won't, but, you know. Right. So it's almost like preserving in a way.
2:Yeah. And I, I find Ca Conrad so inspiring in this way of you know, his. I feel like his work around this is really what made me first aware of all of the sounds that are disappearing as, as different species go extinct and just the, the possibilities that creates. And also I think responsibilities to be as precise as we can. like to name the specific bird in the poem. Like it matters these things. and I think about what Gertrude Stein said about how it's easy to be ahead of one's time and more challenging to be like exactly in one's time. And so that, that kind of shapes what I'm like, I'm not interested in like writing allergies to things that are still here, but actually like writing mode to them. Yeah. You know, and just still being present with them.
5:Yeah. I like
1:that. and okay, so we'll change those numbers a little bit. Uhhuh, reading your three collections, it's clear that they, are all in conversation with each other. there's instances where like lines become titles and then there's an image of the, dancing in a blue dress. That happens a lot. And, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how, you see, how you see them, like kind of woven or connected together and, within and across your collections.
2:Yeah, I mean certainly and also that exact question, I feel like I learned the most about it from other people. And you know, that's like funny how that happens. Where to you, something can feel either so scattered or like you've just written the same book again. And often I'm so grateful for other people, like the ways that the. They see connections or, trajectories. It's interesting to have. So the gospel according to X, which just came out the chat book, I actually wrote it right after the Spectral wilderness came out. So it has been maybe four years at this point. and writing advantages of being Evergreen, which came out a few months ago, came later. and
6:well, that's fun. all
2:right. Okay. and. I mean, what I mentioned a few minutes ago about trying to get more intentional about the relationship between the aesthetics and the ethics, that's something that's on my mind. and that feels like a marked change from certainly the spectral wilderness where ethics on a kind of interpersonal level, like relational level was certainly on my mind as I was writing. but not really wider than that. And with advantages of being evergreen, I felt just sort of thinking in different ways about the communal. And also I started that book really in kind of the immediate week after the 2016 election, which just felt like, I mean, there are certain, I. Ways that we can like force or nurture our own trajectory as a writer. And then there are other things that just happen externally. Yeah. And really the, I mean, the election was the main one. But leading up to that and my poem and the book, gosh, NOA, inside a Year Long Funeral kind of refers to like this pile up events that was like, pulse Orlando, the Ghostship Fire, the election, and all of these things that felt like they were sort of like threat to like safety and, creative sanctuaries that, my communities and people like my communities had built. so there were just different sort of circumstances on my mind when I wrote that book. and I, and that is sort of continuing on. With the things I'm working on now, I mean, not exactly in the same way, but I feel like I'm writing more in conversation with, this climate stuff and with the total like, just unknown of like where humans are in our lifespan of existence, in our time that we have on this planet. so that I think is a little bit of what my sense is of, of the trajectory. and I, you know, when I wrote the Spectral Wilderness, I was so in the thick of really like my first few years of like physical transition with hormones. And I feel at times like I was writing. I mean, I'm so glad I wrote those poems when I did because they're, you know, I. I, I think sometimes that wisdom only accumulates and it doesn't, we totally forget things when we get just further away from them or we're not immediately in it. and so I feel grateful that I wrote that book sort of from that moment because there are things about the immediacy of that transition that I feel like I take for granted now. We just don't really have access to anymore. So, yeah, I don't know if the trajectory is even, I mean, hopefully there are some things about it that the books can build on. But the books also hold things I feel that I don't really anymore so
1:Well, yeah. I feel like that kind of goes back to talking about documentary or preserving nature. Yeah. The documentary Preserving like bodies and in Time, yeah. Time, but the times our bodies have been in, I dunno if that makes sense, but Yeah,
2:totally. And I, so, I mean, gosh, I wish that I had written down every like ev like so much more then, you know, and I, so all I can do is. Do that now. I, even though it's, yeah, I got different things, you know?
1:Yeah, I know. Yeah, because I transitioned as well, Uhhuh, I remember, I did videos for a while and then I just stopped doing it. So like now I just lost that, so I'm like, it's kind of a similar thing.
2:Absolutely. Is. Yeah. But yeah, I'm looking. You do. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah.
3:I mean, at a certain
2:point I was like, I have to think about other things. And I was grateful for that. You know, like it needed to, I don't how do, how to be both present for a thing and document it adequately and just show up for the rest of your life, you know? I don't know that we can do all of that at the same time. And so it's, yeah. It is what it is, but
1:yeah. Yeah. It kind of goes back to the other, like the gr grinstein quote you said of Right. you're in, you're always ahead of your time, not in the present.
2:Yeah. That is, yeah. The harder to be like in your time. Yeah. Yeah.
1:Especially, yeah, with like transition stuff too.'cause it's just like yours. At least for me, I was like, so I want to be like two years in the future, like right now. Right? I don't wanna go through the inner interim time.
2:Yeah. Yeah. I, this is really, I mean, one thing that I have been interested in, recently, both in advantages of being evergreen and in newer work that I'm working on since then is, pleasure and pleasure. The relationship between pleasure and desire. and how to actually be, it was, I'm at this point, my second book just came out. I got this tenure track job, all these, a lot of things that were sort of for a while on the horizon are now like here or have happened or, right. Yeah. And noticing within myself how quickly things move to okay, what's next? Right? tenure in six years, like what's like the next book? And I've really become interested in like language as a house that I can build to just. Be inside pleasure, without sort of immediately looping to the next desire. So Brian Tier has a great piece on the Poetry Foundation website called Textual Preference, and it's about the pleasures of reading. That's really great. and Adrian Marie Brown's new book, pleasure Activism, the Politics of Feeling Good. Those are a couple things that I've been speaking to and feeding into this for me recently. But
1:yeah. Does that sound good? I'm gonna take note of that. Yeah,
2:check.
1:Yeah, for sure. okay. And I guess kind of going off of that a little bit, It's clear that like the, your work is also in conversation with queer theory and queer histories. either explicitly like this, like after Juice Butler, like the histories of different, mentioned different like people and time. but I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about the process of accessing those histories, specifically those that have been poorly or inaccurately, documented or if you or something in along those lines.
6:Gosh, yeah.
2:So yeah, where to start? I was a women's studies minor in college. It was then women's studies. It is now University of Iowa has since renamed it as many programs I have as women, gender, sexuality, or some order of those three words. And so I took, you know, I took feminist theory, I took, a class that I don't actually think was in that department on queer media representation. and those courses kind of started to lay some groundwork. But really since then, trying to learn about these histories of what I, you know, what I call my queer side, has not been an academic pursuit. one thing that got me interested in librarianship actually was learning about this project in Milwaukee called the Queer Zine Archive Project, where they, it's just it's run out of some guy's house, maybe, you know, like so many amazing of these things are. and they're. Collecting, you know, a trove, an archive of queer zines and also digitizing them on this website. and I found that really inspiring and, yeah, just kind of been cobbling pieces of it together since then. You know, watching United in anger, learning about Act Up, you know, we have to teach ourselves so many of these things and really actually that's not even quite right, like teaching each other or learning together. and the Zine Archive project, the Queer and Archive Project in particular, excited me because, I mean, like the beauty of a zine, right? Anyone can make one. Like they're all about economy and simplicity. and as a way to publish and circulate as really has historically been like a more accessible path. and I feel that so much of queer history must be in zines and, just others like, you know, Ray, like Rayna Royo as a writer who has become really important to me, who I only sort of learned about his work, you know, years after his death. And so that has been like, working my way through, his poetry and like what I can learn of his life. and I think of him and Linda as I don't know what they seem, they occupy sort of just special positions for me, and.
3:Yeah, this, the piece that you said
2:about, histories that have been sort of under documented. I think that, you know, we have, we, it's, it is a history that has been marked by loss, you know, like almost a complete entire generation of gay men and, you know, people that are, in whether it's like their obituary or a book that is written about their work, you know, sort of put back in the closet. so I try when I teach also just to. I think of Langston Hughes as someone who is not always remembered as like part of the like queer community. so when I teach, I try to just flag these in certain ways so that I mean, all we have is sort of like these little signals that we give each other into the future of queer was here. and so I think there's like kind of a responsibility to, just make that visible as much as possible. because I don't think anyone else is gonna do it for us.
1:Yeah, I totally agree. Like my syllabus this semester is almost all I'm teaching almost all queer people.
2:Yeah. Yeah. And do you tell your students that or do you just let the work stand on its own? Like how I do it both ways sometimes, depending on,
1:yeah. I think, I mean with some it was obvious. Like I, I taught, the anthology, the nela anthology Uhhuh, Queer post Uhhuh. yeah. So like that one was obvious. Yeah. Yeah. Other ones wasn't so obvious, right. yeah, someone actually complained about my syllabus, so what can you do? So, but yeah, you're right. no one's gonna, it always falls on like the, on the minority person or like whatever to do the teaching and to sta it becomes a responsibility.
2:Yeah.
1:It's not right.
2:Yeah. But, and I think, and what I find so amazing also is like, you know, queerness as far as we know isn't passed on genetically, and yet it finds its way into the future, into the present in these most amazing ways. Like it is just here every single time and is not something that, like in most cases, someone, you know, gets from their parents. And I love that about it. I think it is so miraculous and beautiful. maybe that's off the topic. No, I mean, that's great. Apropos of everything kind of,
1:yeah. Yeah. I guess this is also kind of related, so, I wanna also talk about pronouns, uhhuh, like throughout all your, work uhhuh. because I felt I felt I really resonated with like the, he, the me, him, he versus the, she her like as in a uhhuh, a trans dialogue of like past self uhhuh or something like that. Uhhuh. but then there's also other instances where it's like, it seems fairly clear that it's another person, uhhuh like a partner or something. So I was wondering if you could talk about maybe like the intention there, like the ambi ambiguity maybe there, if between the Yeah, or if maybe I read it on, I dunno.
2:No, it's in, I mean, you're not the first person who has picked up on that ambiguity. And as for intention, I'd rather not lie and say that it was intention. I, let me, okay, let me peel back some of those double negatives. I'm not sure that it was intentional, and yet, you're right that it's there. And partly, you know, there are poems that are sort of drawing from like an externalized relational, pro like pronouns. And then in other places that's referring sort of to parts of self or pieces of self throughout history. And I'm totally fine and interested in what happens with those two sort of contexts rubbing up against one another. and to me it, I it's not important that, you know, a reader knows when the she is someone else. And when it's just you know, sort of getting at something about the historical description or remembrance of self, And I think also, you know, there's, we do try to find, I think, pieces of ourselves that others sometimes in generative ways and other times in, you know, subconscious or project like projection ways. Yeah. And so I feel like that ambiguity, there's, yeah, it makes sense. There's truth to it. And I, and it isn't really something that I did intentionally, although I think in Field guide, the first poem of advantages of being evergreen, you know, there were ways that I was intentional about the kind of the, an ara, the repeated elements throughout the poem that I was, I kind of knew that I was cultivating that ambiguity. So that poem stands out in that, and with X in the gospel according to X, you know, X Started out as a placeholder for what I thought would later become a name. And then it became very clear to me that, you know, the placeholder was sort of the point. Yeah. Like this gesture of a sort of ambiguous symbol piece of a formula that holds space that can become something else that maybe isn't yet, but also already is. And that too is, just yeah. Something that I picked up in Linda Berry's workshop where we were, you know, writing exercises of just like using X as a way to, as a placeholder for maintaining speed while writing with the intention of coming back to it later. And I just didn't in that project. And that, and I just realized at some point that, that it was just x.
1:Yeah. That's so interesting. I, when I first read it, I was thinking of, I. Because now in some states you can get X as like your gender marker on your id. Yeah. I don't even think I was aware of that at the time, but, well, I don't know if it was written so, so soon after spec, I don't know. If it was a thing then,
2:yeah, maybe in, maybe it was just starting to become a thing, but it certainly wasn't on my radar. But I mean, it's funny why I, why, I mean, it makes sense, right? But yeah, YX is like this queer letter. I don't know.
1:Yeah. he said something, I was gonna say something and I totally forgot, but it was about, tension with the unos. Maybe I'll come back to me. Okay, sure. XX, yeah. Okay, so, I also wanna talk about home. And the concept of home. And, like throughout history, like I feel like home is, it's complicated enough as it is just everyday, you know, everyday people. But I feel like with, specifically with queer people, I think it's always like a loaded term. And, I just wanted to talk about how like, in a lot of the times the speakers in your poem, like mourning a loss of like familiarity and a loss of, a loss of home and well also creating space and I was wondering if you view home as a place that exists already or a place that like we have to create for ourselves, maybe even with within ourselves or talk about home.
2:Yeah. Great question. I do still think of Iowa as a kind of home, but maybe a little bit in the way that like you misremember a song. Yeah. You know, but then the version that you misremember it as also becomes true. Yeah. Kind of. like I, when I think of Iowa as home, I don't know that there's a physical place really that matches that I could go back to. My parents have since moved. you know, other relatives have passed and are underground there. I do still have some in Iowa and it has been nice to go back and spend time with them there. But, you know, I think it is particular for queer people and I mean, we know that it is, we know that vastly disproportionate amounts of youth experiencing homelessness are from the LGBT community. Going back to, you know, what I mentioned about, queer and trans experience most often being something that is not shared with someone's, you know, family that they're raised with. and so, you know, for the, I mean, I, yeah, kids getting like rejected by their families kicked out of their homes. And so, and you know, you can go as far as like the basic needs, I've been spending a lot of time recently looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs and, they say that you can go three hours without shelter, which might sound like you could go way longer than that, but when you. A snowstorm or 120 degree heat or whatever, all of these extremes that are becoming more common with climate change. so this is something that I've been thinking a lot about, just shelter and, and queer people and how, you know, for me it has been as this sort of it's a bit, you know, it's, there's like wonderings about home or longings for home chosen family, trying to cultivate what this is as an adult. and I'd you know, just as I, like I was mentioning, I feel like I like have these things now that were on the horizon for me for a while and I'm trying to figure out how to show up more for people for whom home isn't really like. There's like a metaphorical question in the ways that I feel like I get to wonder about it today, but is like something much more like immediate. there's these great guides now online that are geared toward helping shelters transition from like sort of not doing anything special geared toward being LGBT LGBTQ friendly to, like really knowing what the particular needs are and accommodating them. so I feel inspired by that and I feel like hopefully things are moving in a good direction, but yeah. Yeah.
1:we kind of already talked about this with a little bit of nature and then also, talking about like transformations and I think with that, but, So I'll just, yeah. So, nature is specifically the volatile ways in which she grows and transforms in order to survive is prevalent throughout all your work that I've read. the speaker in the spectral wilderness at one point says, I farm not for the countryside, but for the tumbling sense inside me that everything has to transform eventually with these thoughts of minds. How do you, see these transformations as, creating spaces within which the queer body can both live? And so at, which is kind of also touches on what we were just talking about, but
2:can you say that one more time? Sorry. That's okay.
1:how do you see these transformations as creating space or spaces within which the queer body can both live and survive? Like the transformations of nature and stuff.
3:Well,
2:no. That's okay. That's okay. I mean, you can, I'll just say some things and you can let me know afterwards. yeah, I mean, adaptation is a lot of what was on my mind with advantages being evergreen. and also, you know, this question of going back to, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which has the physical physiological needs on the bottom, food, water, shelter, air, and then all the way at the top is like art and self-expression. and my partner actually was just telling me that those, what was it? It was like, debunked is maybe a strong word, but there's a, it's a false idea that one moves through those linearly. As though. Art only becomes important, like after all of these things, right? When for me it's like there's this matrix of needs sort of happening all at once. and I might, I'm not saying that I would die in three minutes or three hours without push, but three weeks would be pushing it. and so when I think about adaptation, I feel excited about, the, our planet is obviously changing and, I feel like that only presses up against what our already urgent needs. and I think at the same time that surviving is important and great and hard work many days. And also who doesn't want to thrive on top of that?
3:and so
2:a lot of what I was thinking about with the advantages of being evergreen was sort of these like slices of like pleasure and paradise and, beauty alongside everything else, alongside, like navigating threats and dangers and,
3:it's a kind of
2:line being walked between what I feel like is an important sense of belonging with the earth, like the earth. Especially for people who have been made to feel like we don't belong everywhere. Or if we have been alienated from our families, like where did we come from? Who did we belong to? Right? So I think it can be very powerful to say we belong to the earth, right? we are here and it is our home just as much as it is for anyone else. And at the same time, it seems like it's that exact attitude from humans that have sort of gotten us to this place of just I know that's really different from this sort of extractive sense of entitlement that, has precipitated this human impact on the climate. And at the same time, it's a little. It's a little crunchy there and it's like a question that I'm interested in my work. Does that make
1:sense? No, totally.
2:Okay.
1:Yeah, I've actually never thought about that like that because I felt I feel like personally, but then also like with like when I reach your work too, Uhhuh, like the, of like this connection of to nature into that we all of the same particles, like Uhhuh are article, we're all mixed up. Right? Right. but thinking about that's what got us into this mess. The first place. That's, yeah.
2:Or maybe it's the difference between, you know, the feeling like I belong to the earth versus like it belongs to me. Yeah.
1:Yeah. That's interesting. it's actually funny. Okay, so when I originally wrote that question, I had live and thrive, but then I read, I read a interview that you were in with, Haba Akbar a couple years ago, Uhhuh, and you said, I've been trying to think of a word that I hate less than Thrive. I still, I'm still searching for a better word to describe going beyond surviving.
2:Oh, that's funny.
1:And so now I'm curious if you've, you still feel the same or if you found a word that's better or it's just totally like not even on your mind anymore.
2:Well, that's funny. Thank you for reminding me of that. I do not feel a strong aversion to thrive currently, but I think what I was saying about, pleasure has taken some of the place of that, like acknowledging its role as something important that keeps us going and that we can't just work all the time. there has to be pleasure and it can be part of the work. We can't just organize all the time. There has to be pleasure and it can be part of the organizing. so yeah, I think I would locate some of it there now. And I also, I. Yeah. I think the way that I feel about that I apparently felt about thrive In the dive dber interview. I would locate it back now with the word tolerate. I just, that one to me is it's not enough. When I read about, you know, ways organizations are trying to become more tolerant or how to show that you're tolerant, I'm just like, yeah, that one is insufficient for me. You know, we tolerate things that ul ultimately are still unpleasant and that we wish we didn't have to. And so, yeah. I'm much more interested in places becoming, affirming or, you know, any other sort of number of these things. So I'd like to move my aversion to the word top tolerance in this interview for some interviewer in the future to check back with me on.
1:That's so funny. Cycle. yeah. so this is kind of going off, in a different direction. I tried to look online Uhhuh to find information about this. I couldn't really find a whole lot. but I know that you read at the trans community briefing in the White House at, in thousand 16. I did. And I'm wondering if you wanted to talk about that, a little bit about that, how it was experience, because that was, Obama was still in office. Yep. But then it was just after barely, yeah, after the Yep. Election, so,
2:yeah,
1:that's right. Must an interesting time to be there.
2:Yeah. I mean, it was a then annual trans community briefing. it was annual at the time and like definitely has not happened since then. and briefing, I'm not sure how many other briefings at the White House looked like this because it was more like a. How to describe it? A celebration, a variety show, a salon. I mean, it was just kind of like an amazing cross section of 60 or so presenters. Talking about their work or I read a few poems. Some people were talking about their activism. There were other poets. There was, I don't even remember what else. It was a beautiful, just sort of like conglomeration of things, mostly trans people of color. and I almost didn't go and I didn't realize that until just now. When you asked me about it, I totally almost didn't go. And I remember talking to a friend who was like, you should definitely go to that. you should definitely go. And I don't know why it was something that seemed so all consuming at the time. Like I was nervous, you know, I think I was like quite nervous. And and it was like. A big deal. I'm pretty sure I wore a tie and like we had to go through the whole sort of elaborate security process to get in, which was actually a process that started weeks before that where like I had to send the text ahead of time of poems that I planned to read. Oh wow. And I'm pretty sure there was like a background check weeks ahead of time. So it was, I almost didn't go, I think I just kind of psyched myself out or I don't know. I mean, it felt, I don't even remember. I don't even remember why, but I'm really glad I did. yeah.
1:Yeah. I feel I know that must have been, I dunno, so wild to be in the White House and then just be celebrating that. That would be great. It was a good time. Yeah. But I feel like with that kind of stuff, it's a, maybe sometimes it's like the things you're most apprehensive about. You're apprehensive. Maybe it, the fact that it turns out so well or that it goes well, it's makes like the contrast makes it into something. I mean, not saying that it wouldn't have already been like something great, but,
2:yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I feel like it does work that way and it's, I think, harder to see it work that things work that way in my own life and easy for me to see, for example, with my students, it's often like when they are on the edge of something amazing that like they'll get freaked out or wanna put down a particular draft or, you know, anything like that. And so I hope that we all just keep going. It's a particular kind of intuition that I think can sometimes. There's other kinds of intuition when you feel like freaked out about something that it's yeah, don't do that. yeah. Don't do that. But there is a particular kind that's this is an amazing opportunity, or I'm really close to some kind of like breakthrough or something amazing and I totally wanna walk away from it. Yeah. And yeah, I hope, hopefully I get, get better through at recognizing that, but I don't, it's kind of ongoing.
1:Yeah. Well, yeah, I feel like I get that sometimes and I feel like with probably lots of writers where it's especially if you're writing about something that's like hard to write about or dramatic, it's I know that writing it, I'll feel better and it'll get it out, but then the process of getting there is so hard.
2:Yeah. And I've, and I have read, you know, several interviews recently, or even just writers, you know, posting on Twitter who have had memoirs come out. Recently Saye Jones one I can think of who described the process as terrible. Like not sort of pleasurable, cathartic at all, but actually like quite awful. and I've been kind of interested in that. Yeah. And I think have people like always felt that way about writing memoirs and just haven't said so, or yeah, I don't know. That's a totally a tangent. I found it interesting. Yeah.
1:well I'm out of my printed questions, but we, I think we still have some time. we can spend more time just talking about the, your chat bot. Sure. I feel I mean, it's obviously called the Gospel Court acts accent gospel, has religious connotations. Yeah. But then, maybe I just, maybe was wondering if you could talk more about that process and, And like the way you use like spirituality, in this topic. Yeah. that's kind of a big question. I'm sorry.
2:no, it's fine. I was actually thinking about this on my drive down here. I went to Catholic school from second to eighth grade, and I was not Catholic. I mean, my mom was raised Catholic, but we were, we didn't go to a parish in town. and so my experience at Catholic school was kind of, I was one of four kids at the school who wasn't Catholic. So I kind of like in it, but also observing it. And, so, you know, one, I think it was once a week, you know, they would bring in four. Priests, one from each parish in town, and each one would set up in a different corner of the gymnasium, and the entire school population would go to the gymnasium. And all of my friends would be like lining up for like their priest to, you know, do their weekly confession. And me, and like these three other kids would just be sitting on the bleachers, like talk, like talking. And so, which just seemed normal at the time. And now when I think about it, I was like, it's kind of odd. It's a little odd. I mean, I don't know what else we would've done during that time. There were so few of us who weren't like going through the act of confession. But, so I feel like, you know, I sort of like during what was an impressionable time, this kind of like act of confession, the impulse toward it and then the act, it was just like in there. And it's something that I've carried with me and that also kind of had a layer added onto it where I feel that, you know, queer and trans people, there is this whole thing about like coming out, it can, I mean, it can. Be amazing. Of course. And also at times it is something that is owed to other people or, you know, trans people experience violence for not like disclosing their trans status to a potential date soon enough. Like soon enough according to who. Yeah. So these things around confession, and there's a few lines in there that are kind of about that in particular. But I was also interested, you know, I felt really prepared for like the physical aspects of transition. Very prepared. Like I had got like handouts from my doctor, you know, and read like everything that I could on the internet and for the more spiritual aspects of it, I felt very unprepared and in a way that was sort of freak, like it kind of freaked me out, you know?'cause I do think it is, holy and beautiful and in part was just kind of trying to write the type of thing that I wished that I could read about it. I think, you know, confession, prayer, there's the impulse of them, there's the act of them. There's also you know, is there someone on the other side of it? and I transition to me too seems like an act of faith. Like something that, you might not know exactly how it is going to work out, but it's still important to you to do it. and like you believe that, that it matters. and so all of those things were just sort of blurring together for me at this particular point, which was still somewhat early in my transition. And the particular relationship that I had been writing about in the spectral wilderness with these questions of sort of like how much change can love handle had, you know, been answered in kind of particular ways. And so it was a hard time and all of these things were kind of kicking around. And I wrote that and I drafted that in one weekend. It was a very intense weekend and I was living in a house that I'd now in retrospect understand was like totally a haunted house. It had this blocked off attic and was right on some train tracks, but at the time I was like, oh, this is like a cute rental bungalow. But I felt like I was the one who was haunted also. And I don't know to what extent that comes through in there, but yeah, so all of these kinds of things of just like kind of, navigating the becoming and integrating and walking with total fear about actually will I, is this all at the expense of a life that will be alone? So,
1:yeah. Wow. That's serious though.
2:Yeah. So it was very like, it's super, it's deeply meaningful to me. At a certain point, I wasn't sure whether I. It would be published anywhere. You know, I, at first I had it sort of bundled just as like a section with some other poems and I was thinking of it as an actual book link manuscript. And I had sent that out a few places. It was a finalist at, night Boat who had said, you know, we love this, but it's it's not done. it's not like in its final form. And they were right. They were totally right. And over the next few years I had it just in the drawer for a while. and then I ultimately just stripped everything out of all the other poems that I had in there slash from this. So that's kind of wild to me to see it in person now. I just got the boxes this past week and yeah, it's a trip. Yeah.
1:it's actually funny that you said that it was a haunted house.'cause there's the home in here that's,
2:yeah. That was one that my body, that one that I had originally had in the end, the full length with this. Oh, that's the only one. I think of those that I pulled forward from that and I put it in here.
1:Yeah. Yeah. Was that inspired by that house you lived in, or do you think it was
2:yes. It wasn't so specific to that, but that was certainly part of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, everything that I just described, yeah, totally.
1:Yeah. Yeah. yeah. And so you mentioned that like when you were writing this, image of being evergreen, you were thinking more of like pleasure and like community and and Yeah. Just being together. Yeah. Wonder if, you wanted to talk about that a little bit or,
3:yeah. I think I am learning.
2:The older I get that there is really kind of so little that we have to do alone. And I feel like I have gotten really used to, you know, I mentioned like I was a lonely kid, like I was to a certain extent. It was just like, life is lonely and it is a little bit, but it also totally isn't. And it doesn't have to be. And there's ways to make it that are much more, together than I think like the modern world has designed it, you know, don't really feel like we're supposed to live alone. And I've lived alone before and it felt great at the time, you know, and also terrible. so, and just becoming more interested in people and, what we can do for each other, what we can do together, what we owe each other. And just that life is, life to me is better that way. And I think particularly in that time of like right after the election, it was like critical for me to just remember that even though I felt very alone and freaked out, like I, I wasn't, it didn't have to be. and so particularly the Pollier River I dream about is really to me, like the one where I'm like, oh, finally, everyone that I love is in one place.'cause also, I feel like my heart is just sort of scattered everywhere and these people that, you know, are really dear to me and just live in many different places at this point. and so at least in that poem, I feel like everyone is there. That's really nice. That's
6:a be
1:I feel like there was another thing I was gonna ask and I just forgot it again. So,
5:I can't tell what time it's, do you know.
3:4
2:27.
5:Oh,
2:if I'm reading that right.
5:So I mean, we're pretty much cluster. Was there anything maybe else that you wanted to talk about at all as in relation to your work or?
2:I don't think so. Your questions were great. I feel like we covered a lot of ground and I can't think of anything else that I would want to bring up. So just, yeah, it's been really nice to talk with you more and I was a little nervous going into this. Oh, me too.
1:I specifically wore a shirt that you couldn't
2:tell anyone what was happening. yeah. No, just thanks. Thank you. Just thank you.
1:Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much for being part of this.