BY DANIELLE MONIQUE & CIARA ALFARO

We asked Issue 68 contributors Ariana Benson, Arielle Herbert, George Kovalenko, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Daniel Lassell, Jessica Franken, and Jake Bailey the same four questions about writing, process, and community. Here's what they had to say.

what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

Memory, to put it simply. And not necessarily memory in the most literal sense, as in recall of actual experiences, but memory as in re-membering, as in putting something, most often the body, the mind, the spirit, back together on the page. A lot of my work contends with "generational memory": the idea that memories, experiences, traumas, joys, are passed down to us. That these things live within us and shape our lives, even if we haven't experienced them directly. So, I think writing is an act of remembering in the sense that it gives us concrete tools, space on the page, to put together ideas about our histories, our knowledges, and who we are. 

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

Right now, I'm reading the works of Vievee Francis, specifically Horse in the Dark and Forest Primeval. Her poems are so challenging—more than being complex, her poems really push the reader to consider what is being said, and how the terms she's laid out on the page may apply to their beliefs, their ideas about the world, particularly about beauty. I'd say the same about poems by Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Luther Hughes, and I. S. Jones as well—they've been taking up a lot of space on my reading list lately. I'm also really into poetry podcasts and craft talks right now. Just trying to take in as much discussion about poetic practice as I can.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

I really hope that "About Solace" accomplishes two major things in the eyes of readers. First, that it challenges them to think about the origins of the language they use, particularly English, the violences behind the histories, and how words do so much work beyond what is being said. Whose tongues has the language you write in consumed, and if, like me, you're a person of color whose language was, in many ways, stolen from them, how do you grapple with this in your poetry, in your everyday language? Second, I hope it encourages readers and poets alike to explore what a poem can look like on the page. How can using shape, using image, using shading and various typeface adjustments bring the poem to life in a unique, challenging way? I'm so heartened by all the experimental forms I see by poets like editor Tarik Dobbs and torrin. a. greathouse, and I hope my work adds to conversations that theirs seems to be leading.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

This past winter, I had the privilege of being part of the first Obsidian UK retreat: a fellowship designed in the likeness of the United States' Cave Canem, encouraging the works of Black poets globally. It was the first time I had ever attended a retreat, and the first time I had ever felt like a "real poet," whatever that is. My work was read with tenderness and taken seriously, and we never felt the need to apologize or explain the way our Blackness colored the work, which has been a really rare experience for me. They've really become my poetry family, in more ways than one. They're the first people I bring poems to, and more than anything, we read each other's work with care, which I believe should be at the center of any community. I'm deeply grateful for them and other poets of color, like Janel Pineda and Precious Musa, whom I truly trust with my work. More than anything, I'm excited to build with them, and to continue advancing the radical possibilities of poetry.

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

I believe all writing, at least my own, starts with need: to find meaning, to digest experience, to catalog memory, to capture a moment or an image or a feeling, to praise or protest or discover or mourn.

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

Lately, I find myself returning again and again to Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich (Persea) and Hag by Tamara Jobe (Half Mystic). The song I have on repeat right now while I’m revising is “Hummed Low” by Odessa. The weekly Wild and Precious Life poetry reading series run by Dustin Brookshire has been an essential lifeline of nourishment and inspiration.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

I don’t tend to think about my poems in terms of what readers might take away. I write first for myself, for what I need to hear in the moment, for what will give me life. If I’m lucky, perhaps there is a reader out there who also needs some of those words in their own moment.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

Just before the start of the pandemic, I began writing poems every Sunday with Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Tyree Daye, and Matthew Wimberley. This weekly dedicated writing time with such generous poets has been the lifeblood for my work through the past year. I’m also incredibly lucky to have a close-knit group of first readers, my poetry coven: Erin Rose Coffin, Chelsea Krieg, and Liz Purvis. No one does anything alone; writing and sharing with these poets nourishes my work in endless ways.

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

I’m certain I’m not sure. I does seem that, in writing I love, there is a mourning for the possibility of writing, for something that writing—or art, in general—has failed to achieve. This isn’t to suggest that this failure is a failure to achieve something practical or even imaginable. However, it does seem to me that to describe the world is to elegize what the world might be. If every moment is a positive limiting of possibly, an ossification of redemption under the perpetually progressive present catastrophe of history, then writing must be something that looks to negate this process: a limit to the limit. This is something, it seems to me, that writing essentially fails to achieve. Nevertheless, I find that there is something potentially like hope in this failure. In representing the world as it is, art invokes what it isn’t and what it could be. Maybe, at the heart of this kind of writing, is the overtone of an otherwise.

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

I tend to think a good deal about questions of form in what I write. I don’t mean “form” in terms of what gets called “craft”: form as a form of something or form as the container of a poem. Rather, I think of form as a constituent part of the poem, something that stands in relation to it and its other parts. Because of this, form, I’ve been thinking recently, is something that can turn inward. Form, in mediation, has the potential to be the poem turning against itself. In terms of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about both the poetry and prose of Ingeborg Bachmann. There is a sense in her writing that most every sentence or line is, on the one hand, burning with precision and, on the other, unsure of its right to exist. This reads like something gravely casual, the ultimate sense of direction conditional to being ultimately lost. It looks to intimate the form of formlessness in language, bound to a voice so subjective that it vanishes into the word. Bachmann’s writing looks to hold true to an aesthetic ban on images while, at the same time, presenting their prohibition imagistically. This is something I’ve been considering.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

I try not to think too much about my poems directly in terms of contribution or reception. I do hope that someone reading them might have some sense of the process of their being made. Poetry, I think, is a kind of labor. Like all labor, it exists in history, and so I try to leave some fragments of the work of poetry—or, its possibility—in the poem. More often than not, this work is not my own. The poem, I hope, suggests possibility of poetry, both poetry that has been read and poetry that has yet to be written. When I think of poems in conversation or “reverberation,” I think of them suggesting what they aren’t. My hope is that some of my poems try to do this.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

I feel extremely fortunate to have spent so much of my life thinking and talking about art and literature. My writing would not be possible without this dialogue. As a kid, my Russian family offered an initial path through the brambles, something musty and iambic and well-remembered, a clarity in words that made things richer and more textured. Since, I have been and am nourished by the grace, turns-of-phrase, and company of many others, especially during my time living in New York. Jeffrey Schultz, Taylor Lannamann, Carlie Hoffman, Jihyun Yun, Nicole Lachat, Devon Walker-Figueroa, Devin Kelly, and Alana Grambush—to name just a few—are all writers I admire deeply on and off the page.

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

Desire. That's quite broad, so let me get specific within that. The desire to capture an idea, image, or moment, the desire for expression, the desire to be heard or seen, the desire to document or remember or invent, the desire to create something or recreate something. I suppose the desire to eat or pay the rent or get a degree. The desire to process a difficult or complex thing or fill time or hear ink or graphite worked across paper. I find myself writing from a desire to share my perspective or to get people to see an object or argument from my vantage point. I hope some of my writing will always be on the level of "wow, check out this thing I saw." I want to be seen sometimes too. Not in narcissistic ways, although sometimes that I'm sure. Because I'm Black in a country that favors whiteness and I'm big in a world that favors small bodies, I have a desire to upend two-dimensional notions of who people might think I am. 

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

Necessities? Time outside. I have two young dogs, and they claim it's necessary for them to go out about six times a day. But, credit where credit is due, observations made while walking our neighborhood are behind at least half the poems I wrote last year. As for art - music. Within that, I'm all over the place. I get reminders about art from musicians. Digable Planets have this song called "Pacifics (Sdtrk "N.Y. Is Red Hot")" that helps me remember to be wild and roam around in the world of possibilities. I've been listening to them a lot lately. I usually write without music on or while listening to classical music, but music is a big part of my prep. My wife and I masked up and went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art last week. Seeing familiar and new work filled my spirit and got me thinking about the role of art in times of adversity. Being in a museum after so much time away was instructive. I understood better how much art meant to me in the past, and I had a better sense for what had been on hold in my life during the past year. Last, as always, other writers and their writings. I've been reading a lot of Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Cameron Awkward Rich. Douglas Kearney's new book is on its way in the mail.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

Oh I love that idea. I don't imagine you meant a literal field, but I'm visualizing one anyway - a sunlit prairie of native grasses and wildflowers and maybe I could be one of them - a blade of grass or a bracted spiderwort. I'd consider that a sufficient contribution. I have themes that show up in my work a lot - community, empathy, noticing are among them. Ross Gay recently described himself as a forager. I really liked that idea. I see myself more like a benign raptor. I have these big eyes, and I like to notice things. I don't have a specific expectations for what readers take away from my work. I hope they'll find something to admire, a shared experience, maybe a new way of looking at an object or idea.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

This is such a good question, and I feel I could offer many words in response. To prevent me from going on at length, I'll define community as writers who are in my geographic area. I believe the writers I live near, writers in the Twin Cities metro area - established and emerging, my mentors and teachers and students, people I hang out with and people whose work I read - those writers have informed my work directly and indirectly. I assume something organic and wonderful happens when I'm at a reading with poets like, to name only two of dozens, Roy Guzmán or Su Hwang. Not that my work becomes like theirs, more like something of what they share resides in my bones in ways that aren't visible or obvious in my work but shape who I am and become part of the writer I am. Beyond those kinds of organic processes, I've also benefited a tremendous amount from the intentional exchange of ideas with generous teachers and mentors, and thoughtful students. So much of what I've learned about poetry I've learned directly from people in my community.

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

All writing stems from lived experience. And while not everyone has the same experiences in life because culture and privilege shape perspective, there is still a commonality at the heart of being human. We all have known moments of suffering and happiness, for example. (And because I have kids, I’m also thinking of the children’s book, Everybody Poops, ha-ha!) To put it simply, there are inescapable aspects of living, which for me makes good writing dependent upon first establishing what we have in common. Once a writer has connected into this universal experience, then writing can empower exploration and ultimately, learning in the areas less familiar to us. 

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

My writing process varies on any given day, but when I can, I always try to compose poetry with another poet’s book beside me. As you know, writing can be a solitary act, so having a book nearby adds a bit of community to my writing process. If I get stuck on revising a poem, I open the poetry book. It affords me an opportunity to refresh my approach, to seek advice from a trusted source. 

A few recent books that have nourished me are Obscura by Frank Paino, Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark, Half-Light by Frank Bidart, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse, Of This River by Noah Davis, The Village by Esteban Rodriguez, Shoreless by Enid Shomer, Through a Small Ghost by Chelsea Dingman, Horsepower by Joy Priest, Bone Music by Joel Peckham, Space Struck by Paige Lewis, and Night Angler by Geffrey Davis.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

All writers engage with the time in which they live, and I am proud for having written what is, to my knowledge, the first book of poems set on a llama farm. But at the same time, my thoughts on how my poetry contributes to the wider realm of “Literature” are essentially irrelevant—in the end, that’s a question only readers, critics, and future literary scholars will argue. My ultimate goal as a poet is to explore what haunts me, but I want to do this work and publish without feeding into the white supremacist structures of our society. Being a white cishet writer, I certainly have my own privilege to reckon with, which I try to do on and off the page. Coming to terms with the trauma whiteness has inflicted on all the earth is not a one-and-done thing either; it is a continual process of bettering oneself, of turning acknowledgement into greater societal change.

My poetry, indeed, has subjects and themes that I return to often. However, I don’t want to write the same collection twice—which is why my chapbook and full-length are intentionally different from each other. As I look ahead to other writing projects, I expect that my next collection will be equally different. All this leads me to say: what I hope readers will take away from my writing is anything that might make the world a more peaceful place. 

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

I often find a kindred community in the words of other poets. Reading poetry helps me grow as a person, and as I grow as a person, so too does my own writing grow in its intention, scope, and craft. And there is so much joy to gain from connecting with poets off the page as well—I am lucky to have made many friends as a result of poetry. From the poets who have fostered me over the years to the poets I’ve helped foster, the poetry community has always been one that feeds my creativity. We’re all in this together.

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

You’re in a cave.  All you have is a linen sack brimming with smooth, thin tiles made of bone. On each tile is a symbol, twenty-six different marks in all.

You’re in a cave, alone, so you lay the tiles on the dusty ground, move them around, discover that some groupings please you and that some, astonishingly, create feelings. (Just symbols, rearranged—how?)

You get the idea to visit other caves to see how the people in those caves have put their tiles together. Oh, how their symbol combinations make you weep and laugh and think about your dead cockatiel. You want to know why.

Walking back to your cave, you remember the tile clusters you saw and the images they conjured. (Twenty-six marks, jostled one way then another — how?) Their tiles are no longer in front of you, yet you get to keep what they painted in you.

You recreate your favorite combinations, joyous in the act of building, then begin to clump the tiles in ways you’ve never seen. Your cockatiel had red clown cheeks and walked with the rushed hunch of a businessman in the rain. You’ve never had this thought before. Now, through the tile-shuffling, the searching for the dead cockatiel pattern, you have learned this new thing about a cockatiel you haven’t seen in thirty years.

You’re in a cave with nothing but twenty-six symbols carved on bone. You’re in a cave alone and you have everything, everything.

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

Lately, a great day for me includes walking around the neighborhood with my beloved trash-grabbers, stuffing cigarette butts and Big Mac wrappers into a bag while listening to Clarice Lispector’s “Letters to Hermengardo” on repeat.

Before the pandemic, theater and dance were important nutrients for me, especially contemporary performance art. My days get so stuffed with language language language—writing is my art and my day job is writing; I read a lot, etc.—so my brain really responds to non-text-based creative expressions, especially dance and movement. A couple dance performances from recent years that I still think about a lot are the Henrietta Lacks-inspired “One,” choreographed by Uri Sands and performed by TU Dance, and “minute papillon” by cie. toula limnaios at HALLE Tanzbühne Berlin.

I’m drawn to durational performance, which somehow seems tied to the compressed, short-form writing I do. Last year, I sat on the ground of the Cedar Cultural Center and listened to a 28-hour drone. The year before, I was lucky enough to experience Taylor Mac’s 24-hour-long performance A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. And have you ever spent four hours in front of the same photograph at a museum? I do feel like my attention and concentration abilities are continually scrambled by what living now demands of me—of all of us—so, especially in this period when I’ve been unable to sit rapt and sentient in a darkened theater, I find great solace in a practice as simple as locking all screened devices away somewhere and lying on the floor listening to Alice Coltrane records start to finish.

As you see in my essay, I am greatly inspired by the art of basketball, and women’s basketball in particular. I love the argot of basketball commentators and its delightful poetry. I love basketball’s mix of agility and power, the emotional arc of a game, the rising action and subplots. I love the alliances and rivalries, the drama, the tea. The WNBA season starts May 14; I hope everyone reading checks it out.

What probably shows up most directly in my writing, though, is my experience as a musician. I started learning piano very early, alongside learning to read, and I now realize how musical and spoken/written language are inosculated in my brain—trees joined at the trunk. Later, I also became a percussionist, and it was a major part of my life for many years. Rhythm and melody have top priority in my writing. Many of the revisions I do on any piece are rhythm revisions. If there’s a two-syllable word squeezed into the true home of a one-syllable word, I feel that squeeze and can’t relax until I right-size it. Every paragraph is a chord progression; if a sentence sounds in a different key, its content must call for this dissonance or I must transpose it. Written prose can play with musicality at all levels, from the tempo of the entire composition, to the phrasing of each sentence (legato? portato? staccato?), to the timbre of a single word.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

I’m very interested in complicating the space between genres and stretching out the membranes holding “creative nonfiction” together. Many of us were raised on the idea of “an essay” as essentially an argument or a fact-conveying vehicle. It has been liberating for me to discover how far apart the boundaries of “essay” really are; I keep running toward my perceived walls of the genre and finding only open field. What can nonfiction do that we didn’t know it could? 

As far as the reader goes, I endeavor to write in a way that celebrates the reader’s role as collaborator. The very same piece of writing will catalyze differently in each person who reads it, and even in the same person reading it twice. Isn’t that kind of wild and exhilarating? The visual and conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson, who speaks of his work as co-produced with the viewer, reminds us that rainbows don’t exist unless we look at them—they form in the triangulation not just of light and raindrop, but of light, raindrop, and eye. If you are not there, there is no rainbow; the rainbow only exists through your participation. When I write, I send a light through the raindrops of language to your eye, and the rainbow is the thing beyond either of us that we make together.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

In the geographical sense: Minneapolis is a city that loves literature and makes room for lots of different types of writers. Writing is a continuum, rather than an ivory tower—there’s the sense that everyone can and should be writing in some way, even if just for themselves or their friends. Beyond the literary community here, I’ve been incredibly moved by Minneapolis’ giant radical heart this past year. The mutual aid networks, the young Black activists, the students cooking food for unhoused neighbors—so much care is happening outside of the formal structures. 

In the artistic sense: I know a lot of playwrights and am a bit obsessed with the collaborative process of theater. Words spoken in together-space, moving, alchemized by their speakers, continually regenerated in real time with an audience… Prose and poetry writing can feel quite isolating after that, so I’m grateful for writers I’ve connected with online, through classes and writing groups and volunteering at lit journals. It’s an honor to spend time with someone else’s work-in-progress, asking questions, teasing out themes, sharing admirations. I’ve learned much from these discussions. And of course, when someone gives that attention to my works-in-progress, I feel it as the greatest gift.

In the somatic sense: The community that I am—the fifty-seven percent of cells in me that are not human cells, my mother’s biome that I inherited during birth and still support, the microbial genome that entwines with my human genome—guides my writing. “I” am a multi-species collection of chemicals and electricities creating currents and ideas. Sometimes I write them down.

As far as future community, listen up: I’ve been whispering with a few other lyric prose writers here about starting some flavor of Twin Cities CNF Cabal or Lyric Essay Collective or Experimental Prose Coven or something similar. It’s all very nascent but I hope to kick things off within the year. (Contact me through my website if you’re interested: jessicafranken.com.)

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what do you believe is at the heart of all writing?

This is such a complex question! I like that it is asking the question, not as a logical ‘what do you think is at the heart of all writing?,’ but what do you ‘believe?’ I have all sorts of thoughts about the idea of centrality in writing and this goes all the way back to my undergraduate years studying philosophy and the notion of codified language, how that appears in the world differently than the spoken word, the way the two converge, how writing manifests in the triadic relationship between author, the written word, and the reader. I feel as though I do not have authority to speak on writing outside of poetry and academic writing, so I will only address the question in relation to poetry. I majored in philosophy in my undergraduate and briefly attended a PhD program in philosophy, so it colors a lot of the ways in which I think about writing and reading.

For my answer, I will draw from phenomenology or Edmund Husserl’s school of thought regarding the appearance and manifestation of phenomena and Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace.’ All of that being said, it is my belief that the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of manifestation are at the heart of poetry, their relationship to the speaker and audience, and their relationship to Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace.’ Here, drawing from Martin Heidegger—another phenomenologist—I would argue that we exist as being-in-the-world, as embedded in a nexus of macro and personal history, family, society, spatio-temporal regions (such as the time in which a piece appears or is written into the world or the locality of the author in both space and time), ethics, morals, spirituality, communality, etcetera. We are, as Heidegger would say, thrown into the world. We do not choose existence, as far as I know, barring perhaps some form of reincarnation or Plato’s myth of an afterlife in The Republic wherein one elects what to come back as in the next life.

In many ways, poetry, I think, is trying to get back to the central question of being-in-the-world and does so in a myriad of ways. As for the ‘hows’ I spoke of, this includes how we show up in the world—whether that be the way we perceive our showing up in the world, the ways in which we might want to appear in the world, the way others appear in the world, the ways in which we wished the world would appear or disappear—how covered truths appear in ways that call for us to unearth them, how the light reflecting off of the dew of a flower appears, etcetera.

So, the first component of being-in-the-world is much more of a scientific approach to reality, looking at the ways in which things appear, their how or their manner of appearance. Another side to that is the question of why—why do things appear in the world? Why do things appear a certain way? Why are we at all? Why is my beloved dead? The convergence of hows and whys dovetails into metaphoric processes wherein we try to capture the thisness of a thing or experience of reality—the ways in which phenomena manifest to the speaker or poet or the ways that phenomena do not manifest—and the logic or illogic of why that is the way things are or simply leaving the question for the audience to ponder too: how? Why? Both of these questions, though, focalize around something which is central to all writing: who? Who is the speaker of the poem? What sorts of things are revealed or concealed in the act of writing for the writer? How does this affect the hows and whys of the poem when taken into consideration with the speaker or writer?

A lot of these various processes of examining writing reflect some of Jacques Derrida’s work regarding writing in relation to what he calls the ‘trace.’ In writing there is, for Derrida, “the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.” In other words, Derrida sees the signifiers of writing as manifesting presently but, at the heart of the matter, there is no real presence at all. Furthermore, the ‘illusion’ of presence creates a dislocation that displaces and points toward something else, as if a signpost, as if footsteps in the sand leading us somewhere. I think that the hows and whys explored in writing often manifest in a trace-like manner for both the writer and the audience (even when the audience is the writer themselves re-reading what they have written). There is something that lingers in writing—especially good writing—that points beyond itself toward something almost ineffable. Maybe it means that the hows and whys are infinitely explorable or infinitely open to excavation and this is why there will never cease to be poetry. Certain hows and whys will, of course, be hyper-specific, but the trace is what draws out and magnifies the moments of a poem for the audience to insert themselves into the world of the speaker, it brings the world of the speaker and writer into a universalizable sphere. And there are of course proverbial hows and whys pertaining to existence in the broadest sense possible, to questions of spirituality or the divine, and all of the other dimensions of the questions that have existed since the first human put finger to paint, paint to cave.

The notion of the trace also reminds us of the thread of history running throughout writing, the ways in which we write, the forebearers’ shoulders that we stand on, our own particular histories, those of our ancestors, etcetera. We are always thrown into a world and the hows and whys help us explore our being-in-the-world. I guess, in a roundabout kind of way, I would say that the ‘trace’—which encompasses the hows and whys—is what is at the heart of all writing, probably including forms of writing other than poetry. Beyond the phenomenological framework I set up earlier to address the aforementioned questions, I think we have all had the experience of writing something without intention—perhaps a ‘free write’—language overflowing from a fount of being, something untouched by our hands in many ways. Upon reading what we have written, we may not be able to make sense of it, it may seem alien or other, we may not be able to understand the speaker, their aims, their intentions. I have experienced this both when I write ‘schiZo’ poems and non-‘schiZo’ poems—those poems that I write while manic/psychotic/depressive or when I am in recovery. While in recovery, this phenomenon appears in much the same way that I imagine it does for other writers. I feel compelled and drawn to the white space of the page, language pours out of me almost more quickly than I can write, there is an urgency to say something. While psychotic/manic/depressive, the emergence and overflow of this language comes from a place of schism, of the mind deconstructing itself and the world around it, often transmuting into lyrical language, repetitive phrases, looping thoughts, and other odd manifestations of linguistic disorders (in the instance of my poem in Great River Review, the words gave themselves to me in the form that they appear, I did not ‘consciously’ go through the poem looking for meaning or specific areas for erasure).

Some, in the past, would have likely called what I experience ‘possession’ and, while the religious implications of the term are outdated—I can attest to the feeling of being possessed by something ‘outside’ of myself (or perhaps central to myself). In both instances—and for neurotypical writers—I think this is similar, if not the same experience, to the notion of duende or even divine inspiration. There is language coming from somewhere or a when or a place without name and there is no ready answer for it. Is it God? Is it the unconscious, the collective unconscious? Is it a muse? I do not have an answer. What remains in the willows of writing in these moments, in all of our explorations of the whys and hows of being, is a kind of trace, a presenced-non-presence pointing toward something without or beyond understanding, something we always aim and look toward, the horizon of possibility and meaning.

What necessities and pieces of art are currently nourishing your writing process?

 Oh, man, what a great question! I suffer from schizoaffective disorder, PTSD, major depressive disorder, severe generalized anxiety disorder, mild agoraphobia, ADHD, and a whole host of other grey matter concocted ailments of neurodivergence. Because of this, my necessities often focalize around things that maintain homeostasis for my mind. As for remaining stable, I take antipsychotics, antidepressants, benzos, Adderall, and other medications to cleave to a healthy functioning life as much as possible. Furthermore, I am a medical cannabis patient and use it to treat the aforementioned ailments to varying degrees, using all parts of the plant in the process. For example, I use THC to treat my PTSD, anxiety, and depression, CBD for my anxiety and for its antipsychotic properties, THCV for focusing and energy, and CBN for its sedative properties for both anxiety and sleep. I actually just started a new web series called “Poetry and Pot” where I talk about the medical benefits and recreational effects of different strains and intake methods. After using the cannabis, I talk about the effects it has on me and then read a poem and discuss it at length or offer a writing prompt or offer a tidbit of ‘wisdom’—hopefully!—that comes to me in the moment. I think, beyond keeping me stable, cannabis has opened so many doors for me creatively, using certain strains that are partially bred for things like creativity. It untethers me from the weight of the world long enough to step back and observe my being-in-the-world and the hows and whys I spoke of earlier. So, as far as the question goes, cannabis really nourishes my writing process. Beyond medicine and cannabis, some pieces of writing that are nurturing my writing process right now are Lucie Brock-Broido’s Trouble in Mind, Jorie Graham’s The Dream of the Unified Field, Jean Valentine’s Break the Glass, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, Ada Limón’s The Carrying, Victoria Chang’s Obit, and Paul Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory. There is so much to be gleaned from these poets and philosophers and I am constantly reading and re-reading their work because of the ways in which new epiphanies occur in each unique reading, epiphanies that speak to something related to my own writing. Like, for example, maybe I am struggling on a landing for a poem or with the middle of a poem and I will encounter another poem from one of the aforementioned poets or a piece of writing from one of the philosophers and it helps guide me toward an answer for those struggles, even if it simply means abandoning the piece for now. I am also an avid cigar and pipe smoker insofar as they give me a certain kind of meditative headspace. Many schizophrenics, if you talk to us, have, likely had, or have considered using tobacco because of its ability to negate some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Studies are currently being done to find a non-addictive chemical that has the same chemical structure as nicotine to provide another therapeutic for schizophrenics, but for now, I will puff away on my cigar and expand into being.

How do you feel your work in particular contributes to the reverberations of the literary field; or, rather, what do you hope readers will take away from it?

 I feel as though my work, hopefully in some small way, provides insight into a schizophrenic mind and the way the world shows up for persons like myself in the aesthetic realm; this is why I call myself a schiZotypal experientialist. Whether this be in ‘schiZo’ pieces like the one in this edition of Great River Review or in non-‘schiZo’ pieces, I think that the kind of unhinging that I spoke of earlier shows up in all of my writing and I really want to show people what that is like, like your skin peeling away from your body, like another self emerging, like multiple selves emerging, like a long-toothed beast looming in the corner, ready to tear you to pieces. I think that my work, in addition to showcasing a particular way that the world appears—specifically for me and, hopefully, for other persons like myself—synthesizes various schools and strains of thought regarding poetry and poetics. For example, some of my writing is very lyrical, but in a way that is jarring, disruptive, and non-linear at times. At other times, my writing uses repetition or space on the page to diagram the shape of a mind. I am sure I could think of other ways in which my writing could potentially make a contribution, but I am not at a point in my career where I feel like I can make a large enough impact yet. Hopefully, that day is coming soon, because I truly feel as though my largest contribution to the literary field would be not only insight into neurodivergence in ways that readers have not encountered before, but providing a voice to the voiceless, a voice for all of those who are not currently rational or coherent enough to share their experiences of the world. I am very lucky that I have remained largely stable due a combination of therapies and medications and, because I am where I am, I feel as though I have a duty to draw attention to the realities of schizophrenia, especially with regard to the trope that we are unfeeling, potential mass-shooters. In response to the second part of the question, I hope that readers will take away, specifically from this piece, the plight of schizophrenics and the feelings of erasure closing in on language itself, but also the notion that we—schizophrenics—can deconstruct narratives about ourselves into our own words, in this instance, taking Freud’s lecture and deconstructing it into another voice housed within his words. I want to return agency to the agentless.

How does your (current/former/future) community inform your writing?

 I was so lucky to have earned my MFA from an incredible program at Antioch University, Los Angeles and the writing community there shaped my poetry in immeasurable ways. I remember my first poetry workshop—my first workshop ever—at Antioch and how terrified I was. But my fears were quickly assuaged by my wonderful future mentor, Carol Potter. Not only did she meet my writing where it was at—which was in its infancy—but she gave me suggestions for reading that would help accentuate and draw out the seedlings that she saw in my writing. This process continued throughout my MFA wherein I had various mentors ranging from Jim Daniels to Jaswinder Bolina and each one of them had a huge impact on my writing. They aided me in finding my voice by meeting my work where it was at while providing divergent avenues that I could explore, ones that would give rise to my current voice. Beyond my MFA community, I take part in a writing workshop in Chicago run by Maya Nordine and Eva Swiecki called Study Hall. The group consists of writers from all walks of life and we workshop writing from any genre that you can think of, including things like poetry, fiction, non-fiction, flash fiction, playwriting, songwriting, and more. It is so refreshing having my poetry looked at from the perspective of someone who, for example, is a playwright or a non-fiction writer. This informs my writing insofar as I am able to see how my words are encountered by those outside of the poetic sphere and the ways in which my work could be more inviting for a larger audience. Equally so, it is refreshing to analyze various forms of writing from the vantage point of my being a poet. It influences the way that I approach poetry by learning to add in various components of things like non-fiction, fiction, playwrighting, etcetera. I am so grateful for all of their feedback and constructive criticism and would be much less of a writer had I not been welcomed into such a wonderful community in Study Hall. Thinking of both communities, I am unsure if I would even still be writing without their encouragement, support, and guidance. I am, and always will be, indebted to both groups.

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