A Virtual Interview with Renée Rossi

Thursday, February 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-presents-kb-brookins-and-renee-rossi-tickets-230165259487

Features KB Brookins and Renée Rossi will be reading to celebrate their recently-released titles from Kallisto-Gaia Press. 

Background

Renée Rossi’s chapbook, Motherboard, was selected as runner-up in the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize contest. Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, Triage, and two additional chapbooks: Third Worlds, and Still Life, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places she finds compelling.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry? What draws you to it?

RR: My first memory of poetry was really in high school English, and it was mostly formal poetry (aka Emily Dickinson) and, also, I would read Kahlil Gibran. As a kid, I read novels and Scientific American, and other arcana. I love the use of imagery in poetry, but I also am really drawn to all the moving parts that happen simultaneously in good poems: syntax, diction, imagery, meter, sound etc., and that it is a venue for the creative expression of feelings.

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

RR: When I was practicing in Boston in the early 90s I was able to take some night classes in essay writing and poetry. I was also writing some technical medical articles at the time that for medical journals. I have always written in personal journals, and sometimes it’s just snippets of images, found language from reading, or overheard conversation bits. I see myself more as a creative person than anything. I also love the art of collage making and really began to see poetry making as a type of collage making.

CH: I understand you’ve had a career in medicine, and I know that puts you in excellent company (I’m thinking here of Dr. Rafael Campo and William Carlos Williams, among others). How would you describe the intersection of your interest in human health with your interest in poetry?

RR: I practiced surgery (Otolaryngology) for many years, but I also pursued a master’s degree in Ayurveda (one of the oldest forms of holistic medicine) so there’s an “integrative” bent. I have always been interested in how illness can be a manifestation of the mind (particularly in holistic medicine) — Hippocrates famously said “look not at the disease a man has, rather the man who has the disease.”  I also believe my work serves as an investigation of our transience. In medical school, they told us we would be adding 20,000 new words to our vocabulary…how could I not use some of those Latinate words in my writing? I think it’s kind of magical to weave medical terminology into poetry…sometimes, it almost feels like code switching.

CH: I understand you received an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. How did you decide on that path? How did your studies there affect your writing?

RR: About 20 years ago I had a near death experience in a rollover car accident right after my mother’s death and I had to take a year off from working because I couldn’t fully use my arms. That didn’t work for a surgeon! I started writing in earnest and was involved in a community writing center, the Writers Garret, in Dallas. The late Jack Myers suggested I think about VCFA. I think more than anything the opportunity to attend the low residency MFA and engage with serious writers from all genres was an absolute gift, and so inspirational. We would be immersed together in writing, attending lectures, reading our work, etc. for ten days straight twice a year and it was a chance to dig deeply into the writing life and to have a vibrant exchange of ideas with others that just doesn’t happen in everyday life.

CH: Your chapbook, Still Life (Gertrude Press, 2009), was the winner of the 2009 Gertrude Chapbook Poetry Competition, and your chapbook Third Worlds was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Please tell us a little about these earlier chapbooks. What changed for you in collecting Third Worlds? What was the same?

RR: While at the Writers Garret I took a class on making chapbooks with Joe Ahearn which was fantastic. Though I scrapped my first chapbook, I really found that the chapbook length was ideal for selecting poems thematically and practically for organizing. I know some writers write thematically from the start. I don’t. I let the ideas come to me organically for the most part.  Both of the chapbooks were generated mostly from material after my MFA. The first time I sent out Still Life to contests, it received a few finalist nods. I kept revising it and sending it out again. Finishing Line Press also accepted Still Life, just as I was about to withdraw it. They asked if I’d send some more work and that ended up being Third Worlds, so the work in those first two chapbooks evolved simultaneously.

CH: Your full-length collection, Triage, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2016. Please tell us a little about this book and how it came about. What did you learn from the process of putting together this full-length collection?  

RR: About half of the poems in Triage came from the first two chapbooks and the rest was newer material. The word triage comes from the French verb trier, to sort. But it also has the connotation from WWI battlefields in its current usage in western medicine –which is to triage patients into three groups: those who will make it without any intervention, those who will not make it regardless of intervention, and a third group who will make it only with intervention. To triage basically was to identify that third group and prioritize helping them. I think it also works for poems! I put the book together keeping in mind the concept of three thematically and ended up intertwining or braiding when I put the poems together:  medical poems, origin poems, abstract poems, etc. Only selecting about a third of the poems I had on hand! I remember having printed poems all over the floor for awhile in the living room and just moving them around to braid them. For Triage, I sent out the manuscript to several presses cold and a couple contests. I really liked how Christina Holbert at LHP put together her books—it’s an art form for her, and I appreciate how the book came out aesthetically.

CH: Congratulations on the publication of Motherboard, runner-up for the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize. Tell us a little about this new work. What was the inspiration for this collection? Over what period were the poems written?

RR: The poems for Motherboard were mostly written after 2016, however, a few were older. I think the inspiration for this work was a meditation on the concept of “mother” in a universal sense, and I started to see poems with that theme aggregating. Everyone has a mother, and most animal species do as well. But, I didn’t start thinking of it that way originally— it came about organically as I have “phased out” of motherhood (my sons are both in their 20s now!) and am entering the crone stage of life.  Being a mother was singularly the most important experience in my life and I wanted to pay homage to that from the ground up in all its joy, trauma, trials, and beauty. During the pandemic, I had some extra time to work on revising the poems for the manuscript.

CH: How do you see your development as a writer over time?

RR: I see it as an evolutionary process and for me, being true to voice seems to be most important, whether I’m writing a narrative, figurative, or persona poem.  Writing has been a way for me to try and understand the ineffable in life, to have a conversation with the universe. To send a postcard to the universe.

CH: What are you working on now?

RR: I have become more interested in writing persona poems, ekphrastic poems, and honing the image narrative. I think it’s a real challenge to write a persona poem that maintains the writer’s voice and doesn’t sound like it’s been misappropriated or disingenuous.

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

RR: Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath, which won the National Poetry Series award. It’s a wonderful figurative rumination about a ruined place. I adore the title and its double meaning; the name of a town which is anything but “a place of learning” as the place one hails from.

A Virtual Interview with KB Brookins

Thursday, February 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-presents-kb-brookins-and-renee-rossi-tickets-230165259487

Background

Features KB Brookins and Renée Rossi will be reading to celebrate their recently-released titles from Kallisto-Gaia Press. 

KB Brookins’ chapbook, How to Identify with a Wound, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize from Kallisto-Gaia Press by ire’ne lara silva. KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle: a poet, essayist, educator, and cultural worker. In addition to authoring How To Identify Yourself With A Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), their debut full-length poetry collection, Freedom House is forthcoming in 2023 from Deep Ellum. KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and an African American Leadership Institute – Austin fellow, and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry?

KBB: Probably around the time I was 12 in a 7th grade class. My English teacher did a reading of one of her former students’ poems, and I remember it really impacting me. Though it was essentially about a boy not texting the girl back, I — for the first time — felt like I felt all the emotions the girl felt, and it felt heavy! That piqued my interest in poetry, and I started writing poems of my own 3 years later.

CH: What draws you to poetry? When did you first begin to think of yourself as a writer?

KBB: Reading and experiencing other people’s poems draws me to poetry. Since the beginning, I’ve been a communal poet — one that really thrives when other poets are doing their thing around me. Though I had been writing on and off since I was 15, I think I thought of myself as a writer around 23. It was the year I started really moving inward and seeing my body as less of a nuisance and more of a mainstay. I guess that’s when I started being embodied, so I started being a writer.

CH: You are an essayist as well as a poet. How would you describe your identity as a writer?

KBB: I don’t know that I have an identity as a writer; just vision and purpose. I write to acknowledge my feelings, learn about my emotional/physical self, be reminded of my genius (we all have some genius in us), and to archive my life. A Black, queer, trans life that often goes unarchived. I share that writing to validate the feelings/ideas/experiences of folks like me, to give others access to new feelings/ideas/experiences, to connect to other writers writing on similar topics, and to contribute/offer material for movement work — especially movement that leads to justice for marginalized people. Whatever medium that’s necessary to help me achieve this vision and purpose is fine with me. 

CH: I understand you were a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow last year. Tell us a little about that program, and how it has impacted your life.

KBB: The PEN fellowship was exactly what I needed at that moment in my writing path. In my application, I shared that I was feeling like I didn’t have mentorship, or affordable education opportunities, or a consistent community of writers that were passionate about the work of words. I’m a Black queer & trans poet without an MFA or the luxury of money/literary industry access, so these things are often hard to get. During the duration of my fellowship with PEN, I was able to connect with other writers in similar positions as me, get education on things like “getting essays published” and “getting an agent”, and have the confidence/mentorship to finish a manuscript of poems. I also got connections to folks that could answer questions the fellowship couldn’t, due to my mentor and PEN staff generosity. I don’t think I would have my amazing agent (Annie DeWitt), my debut full-length forthcoming with Deep Vellum Publishing, or other awesome connections fostered from June-October without PEN. And for that, I’m very grateful.

CH: Your focus and determination have been evident for quite some time. How have you charted your path toward the writing you want to do? Where do you seek sustenance?

KBB: Thanks for that! Due to (honestly) anti-Blackness and queerphobia inherent in many literary entities, I’ve had to do a lot of digging. Digging in books, digging in myself to write the most authentic stuff, digging out of the holes made for me to fall in/for others to patch up with me in them… it’s been a lot. Over the years — especially from 2018-now, I just marketed myself super hard. On social media, at open mics/readings, in Submittable. I’ve shot a lot of shots! To this day I’ve submitted to 500+ opportunities and maybe…. 75 of those have been Yes’. The Yes’ come as you work on yourself, I think. I’ve been just staying alive and staying dedicated to what I believe is my purpose and vision. I seek sustenance in community, and in the words I produce. I also seek sustenance in reflection and listening. 

CH: Congratulations on the publication of How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize. Over how long a period were the poems of this chapbook written? How did you approach sequencing the work?

KBB: 90% of the poems were written from 2018-2019. There’s maybe… one poem from 2020 and one poem from 2021. I think I went to an event at Malvern Books in 2019 where Ire’ne (the 2021 judge) was speaking with Natalia Sylvester I believe. Ire’ne said “when you identify yourself with a wound” at some point in an answer during the Q&A, and I was so struck by that phrase. I went home and researched and wrote what ended up being the How To Identify Yourself With a Wound poems (all of which have the same name) and… the chapbook just happened from there I think. I thought I had another chapbook, but I abandoned that because the premise of this one felt more interesting. Then I sent it to 7ish places, and KGP picked up. Also, sending the manuscript to friends and trying out like… 5 different orderings of the poem helped.

CH: I understand your first full-length collection, Freedom House, is slated to come out from Deep Vellum in 2023. Tell us a little about the book. How does it relate to How to Identify Yourself with a Wound? How did the process of collecting a full-length volume differ from that of putting together a chapbook?

KBB: I honestly think they’re polar opposites; haha. Though some themes like Blackness, queerness, and gender come up (I can’t escape my life’s context), the premise is a bit more place-based, and large in scope. I see How To Identify as this self-facing debut that’s so much about me trying to find my place in poetry/the world, and Freedom House’s process is different. These poems are more 2021, more critical of politics, gender as a construct, and more. If I could give it a sentence, it is a speaker exploring personal, systemic, and interpersonal freedom through the metaphor of a house. 

Collecting it was surprisingly easier than How To Identify. I was a lot more confident this time around, since it doesn’t have the pressure of being MY FIRST BOOK, haha. 90% of the poems were written during my time as a PEN fellow. Hint: a number of individual poems that got picked up by me last year are in that book. I think people will like it, and see my growth as a writer after reading both. 

CH: Your bio identifies you not only as a writer, but as a cultural worker. How has your work as a cultural worker impacted your writing?

KBB: Cultural work is what I’ve done for almost as long as poetry, so I see them as inherently linked. When I say I’m a “cultural worker”, I mean I work toward dismantling harmful cultures through education, art, and community-building. For me, that looks like offering workshops, keynotes/lectures, conflict facilitation, and publishing art that critiques culture — especially the rampant cultures of anti-Blackness, queerphobia, transphobia, ableism, and other things inherently American.

In the past, my cultural work has been participating in protests, being a part of advocacy groups, starting the nonprofits Embrace Austin and Interfaces, and other things. All of that has been in the name of finding justice. Writing is not just words on the page; I can’t act like I don’t live a politicized life. And I hope that comes off in How To Identify, Freedom House, and all other writings I choose to publish. My hope is that my words start much-needed conversations and actions that create a better world. 

CH: What’s your vision of yourself in 5 years?

KBB: My vision is that doing the things I’m already doing with more financial/social support. I’d like to have stellar physical, mental, and spiritual health. In December 2021 I started doing artivism and consulting full-time, so I’d like to be doing that still — performances, workshops, etc. — in 5 years.

I’d like to have a CNF book out, and a 2nd full-length out or under contract. I’d like my work to be translated to at least one other language — Spanish especially since it’s the 2nd most spoken language in Texas. I’d like to be fluent in Spanish and ASL. I’d like to be exploring work in other genres — plays, songwriting, TV writing, and Afrofuturism intrigue me. I’d like to have tried stand-up at least once. I’d like to have a band, and assistant, and some video-poems out.

I’d like to organize toward an Austin and Texas that is livable for poor, disabled, Black, queer, and trans people through my art and cultural work. I also envision being able to do some kind of artivism fellowship, and regularly contribute to literary/social good causes that I love. Last is that I’d like to be somebody’s poet laureate, and at least a finalist for an NBA/NBCC/PEN award. Those are my manifestations. We’ll see. Haha.

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

KBB: Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.