A Virtual Interview with Rachelle Toarmino

Background

Thursday, November 12, 2020  7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.

Rachelle Toarmino is a writer, editor, and educator from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag, and is the author of the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Shabby Doll House, Sundress Publications, The Wanderer, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She will be an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst in the fall. *That Ex *is her first full-length collection.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry?

RT: In fourth grade, I wrote a poem for religion class in which I made the impressive mistake of thinking thong—a word I had heard on Sisqó’s hit single “Thong Song”—was a synonym for soul. Horrible.

CH: When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

RT: I’ve always kept a diary, so I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I still have my very first one from when I was about five years old, which flaunts a pink plush princess cover and is filled with pages of fat glitter crayon of all the words I knew that rhyme with cat.

CH: How did the poems of the first chapbook, Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016), come together? How did your process change with your second, Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019)? Is there a common through-line for these books?

RT: For Personal & Generic, I embroidered thirty micro-poems into needlepoint hoops of various sizes, shapes, and colors. I was interested in exploring what it might mean to make a poem solid—to approach poetry in three-dimensional space. At the time, I was really into Roni Horn’s sculptural representations of Emily Dickinson’s poems, and I wanted to explore a similar intersection of reading and looking in my own work. That intersection is also a big part of Feel Royal, in which I constructed poems by finding text on the clothing worn by celebrities in paparazzi photographs, but my process was opposite of Personal & Generic in that I began with three-dimensional objects and put them on the page.

CH: Tell us a little about your full-length collection, That Ex. How did the process of composing this longer work differ from that of collecting your chapbooks? What did you learn from the process?

RT: The poems in That Ex, unlike my two chapbooks, were not written with a project in mind. Instead, they catalog themes of heartbreak, rage, desire, conflict, and trust—the emotions and experiences that characterized much of my twenties. The poems began to take shape as a book when I became interested in looking at the character of the ex-girlfriend and how she is represented in pop culture and works of art, including, as in my chapbooks, how she is made both solid or flat.

CH: Hera Lindsay Bird writes about That Ex, “This is a sensitive, self-aware collection full of Britney Spears references, emotional vulnerability, and digital nostalgia.” Tell us a little bit about the role of pop culture and digital life in your writing.

RT: I don’t believe in shying away from the digital in my writing. Digital technology and communication are so part of my life—I spend hours looking at screens every day—that it would be insincere to exclude them. As for pop cultural references, the poems in That Ex are specifically interested in representing a heartsick lineage. The speaker calls on her various models of exes—pop stars, fictional characters, poets, musicians, artists, and others—to teach her how to navigate her world post-breakup. I think there is an emphasis on Britney because I grew up with her. She was my first real example of an ex-girlfriend, and I watched what the publicness of her breakup did to her. The speaker in That Ex is likewise interested not only in the experience of heartbreak but the spectacle of it, too.

CH: What was your vision in founding Peach Mag? How has your experience as an editor influenced your writing process?

RT: My two cofounders and I wanted to create a space for emerging writers and artists to discover and celebrate each other. The greatest effect of Peach Mag on my writing life is having found a way to be constantly surrounded by creative people. It has given me access to a community I’ve read, admired, learned from, and had fun with.

CH: I understand you’re an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass. How did you decide on making this investment in yourself, and how did you choose UMass? What do you hope the MFA will bring you?

RT: I had always wanted to pursue an MFA for the time, focus, mentorship from professors, camaraderie among a cohort of readers and writers, and exposure to new writing and ways of thinking about writing. I appreciate UMass Amherst’s program for many reasons: it’s three years of funding, requires candidates to take at least one workshop outside their genre, and provides editorial and arts administrative opportunities that prepare us for the world of creative labor post-MFA. I’m also totally star-struck by many of the writers who went through this program or teach here now. It feels wild to have this experience in common with them.

CH: What is your writing life like? How has it changed over time?

RT: Chaotic and bewildering. I’ve found that I favor long and sporadic stretches of uninterrupted time to write—in that one analogy, I relate more to the sprinter than the jogger. As my lifestyle and responsibilities evolve as I get older, though, I’m learning to balance this preference for spontaneity with a more disciplined routine.

CH: Who are some of your favorite poets, contemporary or otherwise?

RT: Some of my favorite poets are Anne Carson, Frank O’Hara, Ocean Vuong, Hanif Abdurraqib, Hera Lindsay Bird, Tommy Pico, Kimmy Walters, and Jakob Maier. I’ve also been blessed both to discover and to publish some of my favorite contemporary poets through Peach Mag—our print and digital pages are full of work that challenges and excites me.

CH: What is the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

RT: Two books of poetry that I recently read and loved are Greyhound by Aeon Ginsberg and Not I by Sebastian Castillo. I highly recommend them.

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A Virtual Interview with Deborah Bogen

Background

Deborah Bogen  will be the featured reader Thursday, May 10, 2018 from 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX),

Deborah Bogen’s four books of poems are In Case of Sudden Free Fall, Jacar Press Poetry Prize, 2017, Let Me Open You a Swan, Elixir Press Antivenom Prize 2009, Landscape With Silos, National Poetry Series Finalist and XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize winner 2005, and Living by the Children’s Cemetery, ByLine Press Chapbook winner 2002. Bogen has also published two novels set in medieval times: The Witch of Leper Cove and The Hounds of God.

She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teaching occasionally, playing ukulele in the Highland Park Mini Band and writing lots of prose poems for a new manuscript, Selfies.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry? What first sparked your interest in writing?

DB: I recall all the children’s books from the fifties – notably – A Child’s Garden of Verses. Music, rather than content, drew me to the sing-song of nursery rhymes.

CH: When did you first begin to think of yourself as a poet? As a writer?

DB: I was always a reader of poems & spent a year at Oberlin College studying with Stuart Friebert & David Young. That was the year of the Kent State shootings. We closed down Oberlin early and went en masse to Washington DC – scared and determined. When we came back, college didn’t seem to make sense anymore. I dropped out, married the first hippie I could find, and proceeded to have a couple hippie babies. That left time to read (Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg et al) but no time to write. My phil classes in college convinced me I could think and write logically –  but poetry was still a dream, other peoples’ work. I loved reading & read a lot, but I was 47, remarried with kids in high school, before I tried writing poems. As soon as I started, the first night of the first workshop I attended, I was hooked. I could tell my writing wasn’t bad but at the same time it was mysterious to me. Where did all this stuff come from? I was encouraged to send out work.  A good magazine took four poems right away so that was a positive push. My first chapbook came out in 2000 (I was 50!) Ed Hirsch chose it so once again I was encouraged. By 2007 or 8, I felt okay calling myself a poet.

CH: You’ve written both novels and collections of poetry. How would you describe yourself as a writer? Do you have a primary identity as a writer?

DB: I’m a better poet than I am novelist. This is probably because it takes time to learn craft and I probably won’t have enough time to get really good as a novelist. Still, lots of people seem to enjoy the medieval books. I started them because I wasn’t sure I had anything more to say as a poet. I didn’t want to keep writing “the dead father” poem again and again. I also had a granddaughter dealing with a Crohn’s diagnosis – and I wanted to write a book for her. At the time she was only 10 so the book doesn’t have lots of sex or serious violence (sorry.) It does have real relationships, honest fears and questions, and young people stepping up, being brave, learning to evaluate and outwit a monstrously large institution. Relevant for us today, yes? After the second novel, the poetry just came back. In a flood. It was a new kind of poetry for me. I’m glad In Case of Sudden Free Fall seemed nominally dystopian when you read it. It has to do with our shared world, the dangers facing our children and others, the fact of our mortality (which is easier to handle for me than political and environmental trauma) and things I started to notice as I got closer to 70.

CH: How would you trace your evolution as a writer?

DB: I was already old when I became – officially – a writer. At 47 I had a full-time job, a family with several kids ready for college and a rich life outside of work. But “just for fun” I took a community writing seminar with Doug Anderson, a terrific poet (now memoirist as well) and as full as my life already was, I could not let the writing go.

Or was it the writing that would not let me go? You know this feeling, this wild, almost irrational feeling that you have found something in the writing that you were looking for.

You have to have it, to make it, this word art. Your life changes.

Poetry was the form that called me, and newbie that I was I took direction. I’d been an avid reader for decades but now it was not just read, read, read. The direction was also to write, write, write – and eventually to send out the work. First there were poems in journals, then a big old stack of poems people referred to as my “manuscript” and finally a much refined version of that which became Landscape with Silos— my first full-length collection. Somewhere in there was a chapbook chosen by Edward Hirsch which was a lift, and along the way there were other blessings and anointings. These are important in the poetry world. Poets whose work I loved were kind enough to tell me that I too was actually a poet. Those were rich years of summer workshops (I had too many bills to pay to afford an MFA) and correspondence with generous busy professional poets and weekly writing group meetings with my pals. And of course there were the poems, opening me up, saving me in a way, keeping me company in places where I had once felt alone.

Eventually there was the second book, Let Me Open You a Swan and I started to feel rather official. Small-time, yes, but official. Not entirely unknown. A working contributing poet. The chapbook and the two long books had been published via contests and were put out by small literary presses (thank you, Elixir, for being the best.) I hope I am safe from ever finding out what I spent on entrance fees, but if you are a poet who uses contests as way to find publication you will know what I mean.

At some point I was even older, 58 maybe, and had started to think of myself as done with new literary horizons. Enter two 10 year old boys in a class I was teaching as a “poet-in-the schools.” One was named Billy, the other was Jacob. They were opposites in a way, one rambunctious, involved and talkative, one nearly silent and thoughtful. But they both got under my skin. One was intrigued by everything I told him about the Middle Ages (long story – for another day) and the other was suffering from a tear in his universe that I understood and wanted to speak to. That combination got me started on a book that takes place in the early 13th century in England. It’s a book for all ages – at least for 10-year-olds on up, and those boys gave it to me. They made me write it.

I had never written a novel – or a novella – or a short story. I was a poet who wrote at a slant, elliptically. I had not tried to tell a story before. But now I did, or (as you novelists know) it told itself to me. Eventually I had a book, The Witch of Leper Cove.

CH: How did you become interested in the medieval as a subject of writing? What similarities do you see between writing a novel and creating a collection of poetry?

DB: It was the art of the medieval age that first drew me, those rich colors. I started buying books because I loved the covers, most of which were medieval paintings. Once I read them (I can’t stand having books on my shelves that I haven’t read) I was in. The parallels to our current age are real, but of course the technology to take out millions of people quickly, to poison so much land and water and air etc., had not been developed. The disparities between the rich and all the rest was very like what we can see today.  Also, I got interested in How We Got Here. Whether you’re interested in science, art, religion, scholarship, farming or almost anything else, the middle ages have a lot to say about that. Oresme on education is fascinating!  I find novels and books of poems entirely different – the first is more consciously directed. My poems start from a place of intuition. They do require intellectual rigor later but they need to be able to call the shots themselves longer than a novel does.

CH: I love the compressed, evocative language of In Case of Free Fall, and its redolence of dystopia and myth. How was this book inspired?

DB: Like a lot of writers I have many journals that include writing, both from groups stuff I wrote on my own. Maybe 20 or 30 of these.  I decided to review them with a yellow marker in hand to see if there was anything that still interested me. There was (also a lot of drivel.)  I painstakingly typed up the things I had highlighted and started to see if any of those things spoke to each other. If there was a conflict, a collision or even an expansion I could exploit. I found out that some obsessions never go away – they just evolve into larger obsessions. If you begin writing about and experience that was salient for you, along the way you find out it is salient for many and that’s interesting. There were poems in all of that material, but many of them felt like poems I needed to write for other people.

CH: When you began this book project, did you conceive of the poems as all being prose poems? How did you come to the decision to bottom-justify the poems?

DB: I didn’t really begin it as a book project.  I just wrote one poem.  I tried lineating it, but nothing better happened when I did. I wasn’t moved. It didn’t read better. So I just put the lines in a box. The question became – what belongs in this box? What will make both music and meaning although we’re inside this little box?  An earlier poem from my third books says “She began to wonder what you can do in a small space.”  I didn’t know it when I wrote that line, but I was already deeply interested in that. I am ongoingly interested in that.  As I kept writing I started to see that a book was happening. The poems were talking to each other. The bottom justification came by happy accident. My publisher and editor, Richard Krawiec, was printing out the MS when a printer error occurred. The poems were landing on the bottom of the page. We both liked it so we kept it.

CH: Writers are known by their obsessions. What are a few of yours?

DB: Like lots of writers I first wrote about my very unfortunate, disrupted but hidden childhood. I’m from a family of much grief, some stupidity and even a crime that resulted in a very public suicide –  yet the rule in our home (to the extent that we had one by the end) was “we don’t talk about that.” What a deadly hurtful rule – both for the enforcer and for those forced to mute themselves. But by the time I was writing Free Fall, I had written all that. I knew I had to stop. That’s when I took up my life more fully as mother, grandmother and citizen, but most importantly as an artist. Artists have to own themselves as creators and create. That’s what I do now, in a number of forums. Death is significant to any thoughtful persons so that will always show up, but I am now more obsessed with our communal human condition – the situation we all share. When I wrote Rue St. Severin I was in Paris and aware that there was no where I went anymore that did not have a homeless community sleeping on stones. I couldn’t figure out what to do or say about that (and I tried) – but I could sense “something is here and something is coming.” I wish those words had been less prescient.  I do like the fact that Free Fall is full of poems for other people. For lost friends, for my brother(s), my children, my pals alive and dead, even your kids (“and every day the sun comes up like a guillotine.”) So many people who have enriched my experience and I wanted to write to their experience.

CH: To which writers do you find yourself turning, time and again, for inspiration and instruction? 

DB: Marilyn Hacker, Anne Carson, Elizabeth Bishop, Lynn Emanuel, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, Miroslav Holub, Kuno Raeber, Martin Espada, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Gunter Eich, Jean Valentine, Mary Jo Bang – and yes, there are many more. For fiction there’s no one better than Jane McCafferty.

CH: What is the most recent book of poetry that you’ve read?

DB: Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust which I read for a project I’m into now. I don’t recommend it, although when he wrote it (1975) it would have been very cutting edge. It’s dated now and the language is not compelling.  Recent books I do recommend include Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, Martin Espada’s Imagine Angels of Bread. I also love Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets though I cannot explain why they are so important to me. And no one should miss Lynn Emanuel’s New and Collected, The Nerve of It.

A Virtual Interview with Sasha West

Poet Sasha West will be the featured reader on Thursday, December 8, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX).

Background

Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Forklift Ohio, Third Coast, American Poet, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellowship, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.

The Interview

CH: When did you first become interested in writing? What is your first memory of writing?

SW: Writing has always been a way I’ve processed the world. My first memories were writing poems as a small child—maybe 6? 7?—to try and explain how I was experiencing little things in the world: watching the lights of my town come on at night from a friend’s house on the hill, the death of a zinnia in my garden. I wrote stories and plays in my youth, too, but those seemed to fall away as I got older, while poetry stayed.

CH: How did you become drawn to poetry? When did you begin to identify yourself as a writer? As a poet?

SW: Given the answer above, this took a really long time. I didn’t start to realize until after I’d graduated from college how unusual it was to always be writing poems, how much it marked me. It was so much a part of myself that it was invisible to me as something to identify. Isn’t that odd? So, it has been a way I know myself since I was very small. But I don’t think I learned to say that to other people, to call myself a writer out loud until I started publishing work in my mid-twenties.

CH: How has your educational background contributed to your work as a poet? Which pieces of formal education have been especially helpful in your growth as an artist?

SW: I gained a living appreciation for a wide range of styles and approaches by taking many literature classes with people who loved and studied eras that seem to be as dissonant as postmodernism and medievalism, for instance. That sense of being in a large and elastic tradition has been very valuable to me. I have also been lucky to have teachers in writing who opened up to me craft techniques and their own enthusiasms. Accessing poetry through the minds of some of my most admired teachers has changed me, given me a deeper ambition for what a poem can do and how it can last in the world.

CH: I was first introduced to your collection, Failure and I Bury the Body, at Poetry at Round Top 2016, and continue to be astonished by its landscapes of elegiac allegory. How was this manuscript conceived? Did the poems arrive from an idea for the book as a whole? Or did idea for the book grow from a series of poems?

SW: Thank you so much for saying this! I feel lucky to get to know that my work has a life for readers. I thought the book would be a single poem—maybe 6-8 pages long—about the speaker and Failure on a road trip in the desert. But the world kept unfurling and the characters started being sites of discovery for me. It grew piece by piece as I tried my best to listen to what it wanted to be. Every new thing I learned opened up other problems to solve: for instance, if this is a big road trip, what is the change, what creates the narrative arc? That answer led to the introduction of the Corpse and to a different relationship to the history of America, as his body is the site for all our violences to each other.

CH: What drew you to the allegory of Failure?

SW: Oh gosh, everything. Developing a relationship with failure is vital to being an artist—vital to our ability to risk and thus to find. Plus, I feel like our sense of self comes partly from the narrative that we give ourselves around our own failures. So I felt like I needed to come to terms with failure as a person and as an artist. Having Failure be a person, not an idea, deepens the speaker’s relationship with him, which allowed me to see the idea itself differently. As the book came along, I realized I was also really drawn to exploring how the U.S. deals with its failures—or really, doesn’t. Think about the water cannons being sprayed on protesters at Standing Rock in sub-zero temperatures just days before Thanksgiving. Can you think of anything stranger, darker, more ironic, more repetitive? The fact that those kinds of cruelties still exist is a sign that we as a nation have not developed a healthy relationship with our failures. We have simply tried to pretend they don’t exist. And so, we keep playing them out in new tableaus.

CH: The road trip with Failure that links the poems of this collection pulls the reader along, awake to the ruin and rot that strew highways everywhere. How did you arrive at the road trip as a central element in this book? Were there particular books, movies that influenced you?

SW: I wanted a way to talk about a lot of space. I love road trips and have been lucky enough to have annual pilgrimages across the American Southwest as a big part of my adult life. Starting in college, I’ve lived a state or two over from my families in Arizona and northern New Mexico for all but three years. That means the I-10 in particular has been a backbone of my holidays and vacations since I was 17—first arriving at it from San Diego and then traveling it across Texas. The landscape and sprawl of the horizon, the quiet of all that space against the small strangenesses that appear lives very deeply in me. There are days and days of my life in this book noticing small things out the windows. Plus, there’s something about the road trip that’s really American, right? I didn’t consciously go back to any of these, but I think things like On the Road or The Road or Easy Rider are a part of how I understand long travel, so they must be there somewhere.

CH: It was wonderful to encounter Failure’s Accounting of Influences, to see and feel the some of the cultural landscape that permeates these poems. How did you decide on aggregating this accounting, rather than relying on epigraph? What compositional strategies inform the inclusion of these influences in the work?

SW: This book wanted to draw on so many things. I wanted my speaker to be inside of a life always being built by other people, other things, information and poems and paintings and space—the way each of our lives is. But I also wanted those things to get their own lives in the poems, to be remade in them. When I see notes at the end of books that tell me where influences/collage starts and ends, those pieces start to feel other to the poem. I wanted readers to know the poems owed a debt elsewhere, but I wanted that knowledge to send readers back to the sources themselves. Maybe I was trying to make Frankenstein’s monsters but without seams? In terms of composition, I was thinking a lot of visual artists like Anselm Keifer and Joseph Cornell, and of poets like Marianne Moore—all of whom worked with a kind of collage—either with actual outside material or, in Keifer’s case, with media like sand and metal that one wouldn’t expect to find in a painting.

CH: How does your work as a teacher of creative writing influence your work as a writer? Were there particular teachers / classes in your undergraduate studies that inspired you in your current career path? Or did your vision for your career gel much earlier?

SW: I am lucky to get to spend a good portion of my time thinking about why poems work and where they could be sharper. That constant training—going back and forth between poems I’m teaching, poems students are writing—makes my mind stay alive in poetry. I couldn’t be more grateful for that.  I guess I started teaching, on a very small scale, in junior high and high school, working with fellow students who’d immigrated and were learning English for the first time. Trying to puzzle through language together always felt like such a discovery. When I came back to teaching in graduate school, I re-recognized that human value in being in a room together, looking at the world. It felt familiar. While teaching very much feels like a calling for me, I’ve also tried other things in my adult life—working in non-profits or publishing or legislative editing. I thought for a while I wanted to be in something that was more public—as in: trying to impact the world more directly. But of all my work, I’ve loved teaching best, and I’ve come to accept that it’s probably the way I can best contribute to the world. I met Jorie Graham at an overseas conference once in Poland. We were talking about visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau earlier in the day, and I asked her how she felt the call to a public life, to the tragedies of history. She told me that she thought if she taught someone to read a sentence really well, it could change that person’s life. That was so exactly not what I would have expected her—or any poet—to say, but as I’ve lived with that over the years, I think I’ve come to believe that she’s right. Teaching is the gateway to empathy, to critical thinking, and thus to understanding. I feel so lucky to have that career alongside my writing life.

CH: Who are some of your favorite poets?

SW: I love so many poets that the answer to this feels constantly shifting. The poets I have gone back to most consistently across the years are probably Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson (especially her early books), Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Phillips, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Claudia Rankine, and Jorie Graham. But I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll think of ten other people I’m forgetting to mention.

CH: What is the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

SW: I’m in the middle of reading Eileen Myles’ I Must Be Living Twice and Emmy Pérez’s With the River on Her Face. Both are wonderful.

A Virtual Interview with Logen Cure

Poet Logen Cure will be the featured reader on October 8, 2015 from 7:15 to 9:00 at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar) for October’s 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic.

Background

Logen Cure is a poet and teacher. She is the author of three chapbooks: Still (Finishing Line Press 2015); Letters to Petrarch (Unicorn Press 2015); and In Keeping (Unicorn Press 2008). Her work also appears in Word Riot, Radar Poetry, IndieFeed: Performance Poetry, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Dallas-Fort Worth with her wife.

You can learn more about Logan at www.logencure.com.

The Interview

CH: When did you first become interested in writing? When did you first begin to consider yourself a writer?

LC:I’ve always loved words. I grew up in a house full of books. My parents took us to the library for fun. My great aunt was an English teacher her entire career; she introduced me to many of my favorite poets. I am fortunate to have a supportive family. They’ve always valued my work and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. Thanks to them, I can’t think of a time in my life when I didn’t consider myself a writer.

CH: What motivated you to get an MFA? How did you choose the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for your program?

LC: To be honest, I hit my junior year at Texas A&M and realized I had no idea what I wanted to do with my English degree. I talked with my English professors about my options for grad school. I wasn’t aware MFA programs existed until I started having those conversations. My mentor told me she didn’t think a PhD program would be the right fit for me and essentially dared me to apply to as many of the top MFA programs as I possibly could. So I did.

At that time, UNCG was ranked in the top ten. I visited Greensboro and found that it is just relentlessly gorgeous. I had a connection there, Alan Brilliant, the founder of Unicorn Press. I took a class on bookmaking with him at A&M shortly before he moved to Greensboro. Those things made UNCG my top choice of the eight programs I applied to. Strangely enough, it was my only choice; I got seven rejections and one acceptance. I was fortunate to be accepted at all, given how competitive those programs are. I was one of six poets in my year.

CH: How did your writing change in the course of obtaining your MFA? What were the MFA program’s greatest contributions to you as a writer? What were its biggest drawbacks?

LC:I never set foot in a poetry workshop before my MFA program. As an undergraduate, I took fiction courses because I saw prose as my weakness. I had poet-friends and regular readers I could depend on for feedback, but the immersion in workshop was a big change for me. I am a slow writer by nature, so the structure and expectations of workshop forced me to adapt. I learned to not toil too hard over the first draft; just write it. That alone changed my writing significantly. My work took turns I never expected.

The greatest contribution would definitely be the time. During those two years, I had the space and support to make poetry my first priority. Before that, poetry was something I madly pursued between other obligations. That was a tremendous and life-changing gift. I made lasting connections with people whose work I am still learning from; I was introduced to authors and ideas I’d never considered; I worked hard on poems that still make me proud today.

The drawbacks: I was 22. I know I could have gained more from the experience had I been smarter and more mature. I’m better at networking and advocating for myself now. If I could do it again, I would take full advantage of all the available resources. I wish I had learned more about the submission and publication process. I wish I had asked more questions to my mentors and the writers they brought in to visit us. I wish I had gained more teaching experience.

I think it all happened the way it did for a reason. My MFA helped me get my foot in the door as a higher ed professional (I’m an academic advisor and creative writing instructor), so my post-grad-school life has been pretty great.

CH: How do your three chapbooks (In Keeping (Unicorn Press, 2008), Letters to Petrarch (Unicorn Press, 2015), and Still (Finishing Line Press, 2015) relate to one another? Tell us a little about each.

LC:In Keeping is a spoken word chapbook and CD. It was originally conceived during the bookmaking class with Alan Brilliant. In 2006, I self-published a book, Something of a Mess. Another member of Al’s class partnered with me to create In Keeping as a companion to Mess. Together we selected the best spoken word pieces, then recorded and edited them. Al decided to move forward with the project via Unicorn and my first chapbook was born.

Letters to Petrarch and Still were written largely during my MFA years. Together, they’re pretty much my master’s thesis. I started working on Letters to Petrarch my senior year at A&M. I took an independent study to research and read Petrarch’s Canzoniere and other works, so I arrived at UNCG with this very clear goal in mind. The poems in Still were the result of my mental breaks from Letters to Petrarch over the years. The poems in Still were not written with the idea that they would occupy a book together.

Petrarch was the 14th-century Italian poet who popularized the sonnet and romantic love poetry. The Canzoniere contains 366 poems, composed over decades of his life, all centered around a figure he calls Laura. The story goes that he met Laura once, maybe from across a room, and fell in love with her instantly and permanently. There’s speculation that she was either a figment of his imagination or a real woman who was already married when he met her. Either way, this was not someone he knew personally. All the love poetry tropes we think are cliche now—her lovely eyes, her lovely hands—that’s Petrarch. His poems are complicated: he loves her but he’s furious with her; he praises her then blames her; she is at once an angel and his captor. So here’s a guy who not only changed poetry as we know it for a woman he never knew, but also managed to render perfectly so many of the feelings I had about my own love and loss.

I had so many questions in response to that. How could the work of a 14th-century sonneteer resonate so deeply with a modern-day queer woman poet? How could he feel all these things for someone he never spent time with? How much does anyone ever really know anyone else? To what degree are we all figments to each other, even in our most intimate relationships? I think everyone has a Laura—someone they love in this big, overwhelming way, even if it’s doomed or impossible or unattainable. I decided to tell Petrarch the only thing I knew about that he didn’t. I conflate my Laura with his and recount for him a single day spent with her. The poems alternate between letters and prayers corresponding to the canonical hours, which is how Petrarch would have conceptualized time. Petrarch also wrote a lot of letters, including one to posterity—me, you, everyone. I thought it was the least I could do to write him back. Letters to Petrarch is far and away the most challenging project I’ve completed thus far.

Still, like I said, wasn’t originally conceived as a project. I realized I had enough poems to make a second chapbook. When I sat down with what I had, I found the poems were not as disparate as I thought. The speaker in these poems is grappling with coming of age, trauma, loss, and identity. I won’t lie, some of the poems in Still are pretty bleak. The book is certainly more optimistic near the end. Fun fact for the Austin audience: the collection opens on a poem called “Sixth Street.”

CH: What would you describe as your obsessions as a writer? How do these obsessions figure in your chapbooks?

LC: I’m definitely a confessional poet. The poems and poets that have meant the most to me come from that tradition. Confessional poetry at its best can be liberating, life-changing. I’m obsessed with several questions surrounding truth-as-liberation. How do you be yourself? What is honesty? What can I do with my voice? How can I make connections with the world, other poets, and readers? How can I tell stories and render emotion in an accessible way? My chapbooks are all different iterations of the attempt to reach out for connection.

CH: How did you go about find publishers for your chapbooks?

LC:I was fortunate to encounter Alan Brilliant and Unicorn Press so early in my writing career. In Keeping was a very right-place-right-time situation. Letters to Petrarch is sort of a peculiar project. I wanted it to come from Unicorn because that’s part of what they do—publish peculiar projects—but also because Al has been such an influential force for me. Unicorn Press makes books by hand; they always have. Letters to Petrarch is a gorgeous, artfully-made hardback chapbook. I am honored and humbled to be a part of Unicorn’s venerable catalog.

Still is published by Finishing Line Press. I learned about the press from an editor that rejected me, actually. I received a printed form rejection with single hand-written line at the bottom: “Try Finishing Line.” I submitted the manuscript to a Finishing Line contest. I didn’t win, but the editors wrote to me and said they wanted to publish my book anyway. Finding publishers has been a combination of dogged persistence and random luck, I think.

CH: Of the authors whose work you first encountered during your MFA, which are your favorites? How has their work influenced your writing?

LC:Oh, there were so many. I was introduced to the work of CK Williams and had the opportunity to see him read. Same with Ellen Bryant Voigt. I went to AWP one year, where I saw Natasha Trethewey. I read Lynda Hull, Anne Carson, Robin Ekiss, and Terrance Hayes, among others. Good writing comes from good reading. My MFA taught me about the value of imitation as a generative and educational process. When I read, I’m always looking for ways to raise the bar on my own work. How do these poets do what they do? How can I do that?

CH: As a poet, I find community essential for giving me critical feedback as well as to help me expand my exposure to published and performed works. Post-MFA, how have you found community that has supported you as a writer?

LC: Yes, I agree that community is essential. I won’t lie, I had a hard time post-MFA. I burned out for a while; didn’t write a single word. After we moved back to Texas, it took some time for me to start writing again and find my people. I scoured the internet for readings, critique groups, and open mics around DFW. I finally attended an open mic in Dallas where I met a few people to cultivate friendships with. Those connections lead to more connections. You just have to show up. Support people. Engage on social media and promote each other. Say yes. Yes, I will read for you. Yes, I will teach that workshop. Yes, I’ll spread the word about your publication. Yes, I can help you make this event a reality. My DFW community is gracious and wonderful; I am so thankful to have found it. I do my best to branch out and find my people where they gather. AIPF (Austin International Poetry Festival), for example, where I met you, Cindy!

CH: What’s your next project? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

LC: I’m working on a full-length manuscript right now. I grew up queer in a super conservative West Texas town. The project includes a coming-of-age arc alongside poems about my hometown and the desert. So you’ve got these growing-up moments through a queer lens, like prom and learning to drive a standard car, next to poems about bizarre desert creatures, weather, historical events, etc. The common thread is survival in a harsh environment. My project is research-heavy. I’ve been working on it for about 3 years. I’d like to have it completed and find it a home within the next 5 years.

Right now, I’m a full-time academic advisor and adjunct instructor for Tarrant County College in Fort Worth. I love both jobs, but I am super busy all the time. In the next 5 years, I’d love to have a full-time teaching gig and only have that one job, leaving more hours in the day for poetry.

CH: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

LC: I keep coming back to Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler lately. I’m trying to spend time with books that are a similar concept to my desert manuscript. Smith writes in the voice of Hurricane Katrina, shows us New Orleans and some of its characters. She incorporates true stories and excerpts from the media. The book is heartbreaking and difficult and I learn something different every time I pick it up. I highly recommend it.