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profiles in linguistics: Selah Saterstrom (II)

26 March 2025

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How clearly and explicitly interwoven is shame into the grit of trauma, erasure, and oppression? How does one honor the intensified humiliation of rape personally, publicly, and in shared spaces? How does society participate in the bondage? How does isolation from similar experience lead to shame and learned helplessness? Who must do the healing; their feet unbound? And how can community instead be a leading illumination of experience, the recognition of ignorance, and the witness of it?

Today is delightedly the exact 13th year anniversary of my first interview with Selah Saterstrom in ’12. And in the power of this transformational number and this second interview, we are encouraged to committedly sing into this lamenting space. We reflect on her novel, Rancher out from Burrow Press, ’21, where she confronts the ricocheting illumination of erasure, humiliation, and violence asking first of her own rape as a child: ‘what is an essay of rape supposed to do?’.

Selah’s essay-excerpts traverse back and forth, in form and interrogation; resisting the linearity of the essay form in dream, memoir, research, and reflection. As she describes, this ‘call and response’ jazz funeral embodiment, beholds the breakdown of ideals and exposes the uprising of the accountable. She expounds the necessity to bear witness and hold space to sexual violence and to unify the self between what we do and what we feel. This is a space that confronts illusions of mass shame, where survivors instead are visible and supported in affirming their truth and dismantling saturations of power and violence. As a writer who has recently moved to the striking beauty of the Vashon Islands with wife and daughter, she says she is ‘forever unfolding into new constellations of possibility’.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the innovative novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, as well as two nonfiction collections, Rancher and the award-winning Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. She is the co-founder of Four Queens Divination, a platform dedicated to the intersection of divinatory arts and creative writing. With over twenty-five years of teaching experience in graduate programs and diverse settings worldwide, Selah now lives on Vashon Island with her wife and daughter. Long version HERE

– excerpt from Rancher

What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? How has your work changed over time and why?

Thirteen years ago—to the day—I first answered this question on your lovely questionnaire! Can you believe it? I can. #13 is my lucky number. I returned to my notebooks from that time and found myself caught in the architecture of an earlier self. What I couldn’t have known then was how profoundly life would reconfigure me—that both of my parents would soon die, that I would fall in love, marry, become a mother, that I would write three more books, that I would walk away from a Full Professorship to build a life where writing was not a pursuit woven around the edges of living, but its very center.

And yet, the original summons to writing remains unchanged—to cross the threshold where articulation meets erasure, to stake one’s life in language, that volatile, fugitive medium that both composes and exceeds the self. It is a continual reckoning with meaning’s emergence—unstable, recursive, forever unfolding into new constellations of possibility.

Your latest project, Rancher, addresses the question: What happens to the sexual assault victim? We read, “The sucky paradox about any kind of abuse is the way the traumatic event absolutely isn’t the victim’s fault even as she is ultimately responsible for her own healing process.” Can you comment on this?

When I set out to write an essay “about rape,” I put out a call to close friends and asked: What is an essay about rape supposed to do? The first quote you share comes from my friend Teresa Carmody’s response.

Call and response is one of the oldest structures—a rhythm of being met, a recognition that meaning is forged not only in words but in the space between them. It is an act shaped as much by listening as by speech, a testament to the necessity of witness. Growing up in the South, I first understood this through the Blues and the great lamentation-celebration of the Jazz funeral and second line traditions, where a voice calls out in grief and praise and is answered—not to solve, but to witness.

Witnessing is an act of defiance against erasure. Recognition affirms. Without it, suffering risks slipping into invisibility, and what is unseen is too easily dismissed. To witness is to engage, to take responsibility—to insist that no voice should exist in a vacuum. Healing requires resonance—pain left unrecognized remains closed, looping inward. But witnessing creates an opening, an echo of connection that reminds us suffering does not have to be a private exile but can be part of a shared human condition.

Enter: friendship. Trauma isolates, pulling a person out of the shared world. But the sacred call and response of friendship insists that even the hardest truths can be spoken, received, held. It affirms that healing, like harm, happens between us.

In Rancher, you also write, “another aspect of life after rape: the unforgiving public.”  Can you unpack this sentiment?

The hero Gisèle Pelicot’s ordeal (at least 51 rapes) inspired rare solidarity, yet the very exceptionality of her acceptance illuminates a deeper, systemic mistrust of survivor’s truths. Even now, from the highest corridors of power—the White House itself—comes public support for formally accused rapists (Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Conor McGregor), a stark reminder that truth remains captive to those whose power depends on doubt.

Eric Aldrich’s review of Rancher meant a great deal to me in part because it articulated something fundamental about the structures that enable violence. He wrote:

“Saterstrom offers glimpses of…the community that harboured her rapist… As a person who grew up in a rural community, I recognized the types of dumbness and awfulness endemic to…the victims of sexual violence in my own hometown. Rancher clarified the connections between humiliation and sexual violence that I’d only sensed before.”

His review recognizes a world where insularity breeds impunity and where cruelty, left unchecked, becomes culture. Rancher was, in part, an attempt to make these forces legible.

Violence does not often arise in isolation, nor is it merely the sum of individual acts. Rather, it is embedded within a culture—normalized through its failures to intervene and its tacit permissions. Humiliation and sexual violence are not separate forces, they are interwoven, reinforcing each other in ways both insidious and overt. This is also very much about the mechanisms of shame that ensure suffering remains private, unseen, and unchallenged. 

In 2023 – 2024 (according to RAINN), out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, approximately six of these resulted in the actual incarceration of the perpetrator.​ These numbers lay bare the staggering gap between the prevalence of sexual violence and accountability.

Communities uphold these injustices when they protect perpetrators over survivors and when accountability is framed as an individual burden rather than a collective responsibility. 

The question, then, is not just how the community sustains this reality—but how it might dismantle it. And it is this question that I was interested in exploring in Rancher.

Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

I may not be answering your lovely question directly, but if you’ll indulge me . . .

So many extraordinary writers working beyond the mode of the straight male author are shaping this moment—not as emerging voices (a term that often obscures how long they’ve been making essential work) but as forces sharpening our capacities for thought. My attention isn’t on career arcs—visibility is a strange currency, and what we call “new” is often only newly recognized by the machinery of big publishing.

Recently, I’ve been very excited by Chanté Reid’s Thot and Jade Lascelles’s Violence Beside. Gabrielle Civil’s work continues to be astonishing—Experiments in Joy should have a wider readership. Queer Southern writer Justin Wymer’s essay, Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift, is incredible – it cuts through political erasures with razor-sharp knowing. And Chris Marmolejo’s Red Tarot—from a queer Indigenous and trans perspective—is one of the most significant contributions to divination studies in decades as far as I’m concerned. 

What are your plans for the future?

I’m about to send my new novel, The Delirium of Negation, to my agent—it is a mystery set in the underworld that revolves around missing women. Alongside that, I’m wrapping up a collection of essays on queer rurality and writing, work that feels especially alive to me right now. And if fortune favors me (and I don’t disappear entirely into the labyrinth of my footnotes), my very long book on the theory of divination should see completion by 2026.

Recently, my family moved to a small rural island. Life is contemplative, the Salish Sea dramatic! In the days ahead: more writing and spending as much time as possible with the people I love and of course, resisting autocracy.

BNI

profiles in poetics: Kristen E. Nelson (II)

8 March 2025

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We slip into this interview with Kristen Nelson, on the meditative comfort of “Octavia Butler’s concept, ‘God is Change.’” Women’s writing in the past twenty years for Nelson has taught her to be ‘brave’. Explaining, “Female, transgender, non-binary, and BIPOC writers have come up against the towering white male wall of the cannon and rather than try to scale it, they’ve veered off in different directions.” Kristen Nelson dances across labels and genres, playfully considering herself to be a ‘genre-queer’ writer, or perhaps a ‘genre-slut’ expressing her deep commitment to “queerness, experimentation, magic, and play”.

In this second interview, we visit Kristen’s second full length poetry book, In the Away Time, out from Autofocus Books, ‘24. The collection, although raw and present, is written about an intimate breakup that took her the length of ten years to write; intimating first the experience of the wound, and then writing from the scar. The book embraces ‘the away time’ and answers how to “let go of the hope after a promise is broken”. It looks at the, “painful pulling back and reabsorption of the mangled or blossomed” parts of the relationship. But also, how queer communities ‘shift’, “through different containers of relationship”. In this way,” resisting ownership in relationships” and “heteronormative paradigms”. Ultimately illustrating how to “[stand] back up after you’ve been taken to your knees.”

Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, scholar, and performer. She is the author of two books In the  Away Time (Autofocus Books, April 2024) and the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018); and two chapbooks sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). She has published creative and critical writing in Feminist Studies, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Trickhouse, and Everyday Genius, among others. Kristen founded Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years and co-founded Four Queens, a platform for divinatory poetics with Selah Saterstrom. Kristen is currently a Ph.D. candidate and instructor of creative writing at the University of California – Santa Cruz in the Literature Department’s creative/critical writing concentration. Her current research centers on Creative Writing, Divinatory Poetics, Feminist Autotheory, and Witchcraft Studies. 

Websites:

www.fourqueens.org

www.kristenenelson.org

Fleshing the Archive of Witches

AutoFocus Books,

  • What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? 

Same answer as I wrote to you in 2012! [gosh that’s a long time ago]

  • Who have been mentor writers in your career?

There are so many folx who have mentored me in my writing career. I’m thinking about mentors in three categories. First, my peers, friends, and beloveds in my writing community; Second, teachers and guides who have supported me over the years; and third, writers who taught me to write with their writing. First, my writer friends are the folx who have read my work, remind me that I’m good at this when I falter, bolster me through rejections and celebrate my successes: Selah Saterstrom, TC Tolbert, Hannah Ensor, Jenna Korsmo, Kristi Maxwell, Teresa Carmody, CA Conrad, Julia Saterstrom, Maggie Zurawski and others. In the second category, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without guidance from Andy Solomon, Rebecca Brown, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Pollock, Anne Waldman, Susan Stryker, Micah Perks, Ronaldo Wilson, fahima ife, and Vilashini Cooppan. The third category is vast and deep and grows every year. It’s hard to name ALL of the writers whose work has influenced me, but in addition to everyone I have listed already, I would add Carole Maso, Sophie Calle, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Lidia Yuknavitch, adrienne maree brown, and so so so many others. 

  • How has your own work changed over time and why?

The last time you asked me this question, in 2012, I ended my answer with this line: “My work has been more influenced by loss, grief, and the body as my life has become more concerned with these topics.” This is still true, plus 13 more years of leaning into these topics. And also, I’m producing a lot more critical writing than I used to, primarily feminist autotheorical essays. 

  • Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how? 

I’ve always been a cross-genre writer, finding excitement and inspiration in the liminal space between poetry and prose. But these days, I’m also working in the liminal space between creative and critical writing. I’m interested in what happens when you combine creative writing, research, and theory in different ways. I started my career writing mostly short stories. In my MFA program, I shifted to work that looks more like poetry. I’m still writing poetry and don’t think I will ever not write poems, and also I’m writing a book that looks more like prose now. 

  • What are your plans for the future?

I’m a fourth year PhD student at UCSC where my research focuses on Creative Writing (specifically poetry, creative non-fiction, and divinatory poetics), Feminist Autotheory, and Witchcraft Studies. I am very focused on writing my dissertation and finishing my degree in the next few years. My diss is a combination of essays about witchcraft and a creative non-fiction manuscript called The Witches of Benevento. It draws inspiration from my ancestral stories and the legends of witches that have surrounded my ancestral home of Benevento, Italy for centuries. Beyond finishing this degree and book, I’m not sure. I never believed that I would leave my 20-year beloved home in Tucson, until a pandemic happened and I left to pursue this degree. I’m not sure what the world is going to look like in a few years and what our country will look like in a few years. Will it still be safe(ish) for me as a queer woman to live in the United States? Will the humanities still exist in academia? Will there be a job for a queer creative writer? Will academic institutions still exist with all of the federal funding being cut by the current administration? I’ve been taking comfort in Octavia Butler’s concept, “God is Change.” So rather than make gods laugh by planning, I’m learning to embrace change and stay in the now until I have to move on to the next now.  

  • What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?

I think writing by women in the past twenty years has taught us all to be brave. Female, transgender, non-binary, and BIPOC writers have come up against the towering white male wall of the cannon and rather than try to scale it, they’ve veered off in different directions. With these new paths, they’ve stretched and manipulated genre, given credibility to writing about pain, language, and the body, and have continued to be brilliant, thoughtful theorists. There is no going back to a time when women’s voices, transgender voices, non-binary voices, and BIPOC voices were silenced. I include a variety of identities in my response here first because gender is fluid, and second because I believe it’s important to acknowledge all of us who have been comrades in this movement of expansion and bravery. 

  • Who are promising women writers to look at in the future? 

The world is burgeoning with women writers to look out for. I find new voices to be excited about every day! I’ve gotten to know some incredible writers and their writing since moving to Santa Cruz and folx I’ve met during my recent book tour. Keep your eyes peeled for writing by Annika Berry, Melissa Mack, LuLing Osofsky, Maria Pachon, and all of the other creative writers at UCSC. I’ve been particularly excited about the first books of poetry by Hannah Kezema (This Conversation Is Being Recorded)and Emily Mundy (What Blooms in the Dark). 

  • If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

It’s taken me far too long to answer this question…I think at this point “writer” is the label that is the most flexible and most accurate. “Queer writer” describes me with more accuracy, and “poet” is a label I will always use to describe myself. I wish there was a term for writers that holds the same space as “queer” does in the LGBTQIA+ community. Something that signals, hey I’m a creative writer who writes in multiple genres, and across genres, and in-between genres and I’m interested in stretching the containers of genre while also deeply loving all of those genres. Also, I’m deeply invested in queerness, experimentation, magic, and play. How about Genre-Queer? Or what about Genre-Slut? Can I claim that without offending too many people? When you look into the etymology of the word slut, you find words like wanton, dirty, muddy, idle. I like those words. I’ll probably have a different answer tomorrow, but let’s go with Genre-Slut today.

  • In the beginning of the novel we face a break up. We read, “Now: You are gone. Poof. / Keyser Söze. // I had forgotten: Love exists in pain or right beside it. Love remains de­spite the absence of the beloved. / Fuck.” (12) There are different ways in which we cope with loss; from a spiritual lens or a psychological one. Attachment theory or perhaps a nervous systemantum entanglement, the later of which requires the falling away of boundaries. How do you relate to each of these ideas in this sense of love and loss in your book and what are your personal views on the topic of love and attachment and our process of healing?

I love that you refer to this book as a novel. You’re not wrong—it is a book-length narrative. I have been thinking of it as a prose poetry collection, but I like the word novel, too. Your question made me think of Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is ‘I desire you,’ …” I think that when two people fall in love there is a third entity that is created: the relationship. When that third entity dies, there is a painful pulling back and reabsorption of the mangled or blossomed or enlarged or shrunken or otherwise changed parts of you that made up the relationship. Sometimes you have to shore off a finger/word or a word/finger that is too changed to become a part of the whole again. It is a painful process of healing what can be healed and releasing what needs to be let go. When I was writing this book, my book companion was bell hooks’s All About Love, in which she writes, “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” Boundaries get necessarily tangled in this act of risk, this act of dependency. If a relationship grows into a durational healthy relationship, it is because the two individuals chose to work on healthy boundaries and to avoid codependency. If it ends, to some extent, they did not. One of the things I love about being queer is the normalization in my communities of shifting through different containers of relationship until you find the right one for that individual connection. It’s not unusual to date a friend, who might become a partner or evolve back into friendship or even a family member. Resisting ownership in relationships is one of the ways we resist heteronormative paradigms. Some of my closest friends are partnered with beautiful humans that I dated, some of my “failed” romantic relationships evolved into close friendships. I think the most painful breakups for me are those relationships that simply end. There is nothing, in fact, simple about an ending when there could have been an evolution.

  • The stages of loss are anything but linear. Wounds provoke us to face ourselves, beliefs; our shadows. And in this passage, we also must take action beyond just knowing, turn inward to address ourselves. We read, “I get drunk every night. I think of you—your physical. I cannot breathe. … it would be easier to die. Right now, I die.” (27) But also, the opening sentiment you lead with the book is, “I made a choice to ignore the one bleeding beside you, ‘She is going skinny-dipping. Wanna come?’.” Can you speak more to this notion of knowing and action and how this book took part in this process of healing. 

I do not think that writing this book healed me, but I sure did hope that it would. It took me about ten years to write this book. I started writing it from the wound, then I healed me, and then I came back and finished this book from the scar. In the Away Time started as a daily journal I kept during the six months after an excruciating break up a long time ago. One of those breakups which ended a connection that I thought could have been evolving and life-long. I kept that journal in order to continue a discourse with my lover (which Barthes tells us is always a conversation with the self) that I was not ready to end. I would not have published the journal as is, because it was not art, it was not poetry, it was a break-up journal. Thinking with Sophie Calle’s project Exquisite Pain in the years afterward, I collected stories from friends, acquaintances, and strangers about their excruciating breakups. I took some bits of the journal, wove in bits of these stories and tried to tell the story of a universal pain. I do think it is healing to write, to read, to listen to the narratives that reflect our own exquisitely painful experiences. If nothing else they make us feel less alone in our pain.

  • Desire, obsession, and grief; the chaos of the loss break down the structure of the ideal. We slip into intimacy, “I took a bath last night or was it two nights ago? … I laid a Monk snake shed ac­ross my neck. // Let go / Let go / Let go / Let go / Let go / Let go / Let go.” (56) And then after a long silence, you cannot. But this obsession transforms into a powerful sentiment in a memory you have of a conversation where it is revealed that, “I want to know that when things get choppy that you won’t go away. All of these things that I expect from you, I expect from myself. / One of us keeps her promises.” (81) How do you hold these sentiments, that you were taken to your knees. And at once also, held this promise?

I think what you are describing here is a central impetus of writing this book. There are some universal truths when someone is left “in the away time.” What I mean to describe with my title is the liminal space when one beloved says to another that they need some time and space, but do not offer the clarity of an ending. How does one let go of the hope after a promise is broken? How does one trust that that promise was true, but is not true anymore? How does one move through the process of healing when the beloved is gone, just gone—no communication, no explanation, no opportunity for questions and answers. After years of love, promise, and hope, you now sit with the slow fading of those things and then with absence. How do you let go without knowing for sure that the other wants you to let go? At some point you have to make a decision to do what you need in order to claw your way out of “the away time” you have been left in. The book is my answer to your question, or at least it is a book-length description of how to sit with these based on my own experiences, the experiences of others who shared their stories with me, and queer models of loving. I hope people feel less alone in their grief when they read it. Of course, this book is not a comprehensive or direct reflection of my experience. In real life, I was intentionally celibate for a year after my relationship ended. In real life, I spent a lot of time in therapy processing this sudden absence in my life. In real life, I shifted deeply into avoidant attachment strategies and it took me years and years to trust another beloved. In real life, I spent years engaging in romantic relationships, only if they had clear expiration dates in order to keep myself safe. At least in these relationships, I could be sure of an ending. I gesture towards some of these things in the book, but I don’t directly address them, because this book is an experiment in autobiography—something crafted from, but not a direct reflection of, my real-life experience. I think it comes across in the book that this relationship fucked me up big time, but I hope it also offers some reflections on standing back up after you’ve been taken to your knees.

BNI

profiles in poetics: Erika Lutzner (II)

1 March 2025

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How does grief transpose from the personal to the private? How do we process the grief of a nation and at the same envelop the deepest private sorrow of our intimate life? How is the political interwoven in this narrative? Does the public and private share glasses or merely hold hands with their eyes turned downwards. Are we perhaps so much more intimately connected than we care to realize, picking out our fresh vegetables, looking for dimples. How is our grief connected and separate and how do we negotiate and process these necessary steps? 

In this second interview, Erika Lutzner shares her book, While Everything Slipped Away, published by Calypso Editions, 2016. The book straddles the public private spheres of bereavement in the experience of losing her husband in the 911 rescue attempts. In Erika’s words, these poems which began out of the surrealist necessity of grief, love, and elegies, “told her what to do”. And furthermore, in this transformation, she says, “I let go of so much to write the poems and when they formed a book, I felt a huge release. They became part of the world.” 

These poems are filled with political insight, beauty and horror, mind body juxtaposition, and a deep yearning that is cut with honest gratitude and reflection. There is a music in all of her lines that leaves the carved space of a loved one. And at the same time this is a space filled with memories of saturated wholeness. An attempt to share the intimate love that although all at once lost, also became shared.

Erika Lutzner has written one book, While Everything Slipped Away From Me (Calypso Editions) and five chapbooks; four with dancing girl press and one with Kattywompus Press. Her work can also be found in journals such as Jet Fuel Review and Harpy Hybrid.  She is the publisher of Scapegoat Review, an online journal. She grew up in Garrett Park MD, next to Porcupine Woods and behind the train tracks. She is a former violinist and chef and loves cats.

https://calypsoeditions.org/title/while-everything-slipped-away-from-me/

https://www.scapegoatreview.org/

  • What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer?

When my husband died, I started keeping a journal. I thought I was journaling, but my mother said that I was writing poems. I stopped, took a look and realized I could write poems. And it helped me so much with my grief to write about what was happening to me. I feel tongue tied much of the time and writing helps me to ‘speak’. I was told I was inarticulate as a child and writing made me coherent.  I could say the things I needed to say. 

  • Who have been mentor writers in your career?

Ilya Kaminsky, Paul Celan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nin Andrews, Shel Silverstein, Carson McCullers, Anne Sexton, Maurice Sendak and so so many others. For me, whether I meet a writer or if he/she is alive doesn’t matter. I take so much from their writing. The exception being Ilya Kaminsky. I learned an immense amount from working with him. He taught me a different way of thinking about writing, thinking, and poetry.

  • How has your own work changed over time and why?

I have started writing centos and that is a whole new genre for me. I started writing them because I had so many lines of poems I loved saved up and I was having trouble being creative. It gave me a new outlet for creativity. I am a musical writer but over time, I have learned not to rhyme, although I throw them in from time to time. I am writing more surreal poetry and also writing about new subjects but always with a dark edge.

  • Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?

I would say that tragedy and horror have influenced me quite a bit. I like to write things that are full of horror at the same time as being haunting and have beauty in them. Music is a huge influence on me. When I wrote this book, I listened to jazz, especially Miles Davis while I wrote so that has also impacted my writing. I love humor but I can only get it into my writing infrequently. I wish I could more.  I’ve been asked to write love poems but except for the book on Jon, which I consider a love story, I have a lot of trouble writing them.

  • What are your plans for the future?

I would love to write more political poetry. And definitely more centos. I don’t know if I have another book in me, but definitely a few chapbooks.

  • What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?

Everyday women writers are becoming more prolific. Their voices are growing. There are so many strong women writers. So many more than in the past. Their voices are finally being heard.

  • Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

Dianne Seuss and Diannely Antigua are two brilliant women writers.

  • If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

I write juxtaposing beauty and horror. I write about what I know; death and evocative imaging; bitter truth. 

  • In While Everything Slipped Away, we are faced with the destitute field and aftermath of 911 both literally and psychologically. Your husband was a computer programmer killed in the rescue attempts. For you then, 911 was both public and private. In this question I would like for you to focus on the private and how this was negotiated, one of which is detachment. We read, “Regret is the color of blood – the color of blood splattered.” (16) And “my left eye is / somewhere on Main Street or maybe it’s / still in the mulberry stained cup.” (29) Spiraling into, “They amputated your thighs from my hips.” (36) Was there a difference between writing it all down on the page and later constructing, editing, and crafting each poem? What was your writing process and did you experience any enlightenment through these acts of radical examination and self-discovery?

I was so raw when I wrote these poems that I didn’t think about public vs private. A lot of the poems are surreal. That was a form of detachment. I had to do it in order to keep sane. I don’t know that I really had a process other than spewing out all that was in my cluttered mind. I definitely had some form of enlightenment. Writing the worst things you possibly can, it brings truth forward. I was faced with my worst fears, and I survived. I discovered I was a lot stronger than I knew. I didn’t know any other way than to write what was in my mind. It was therapeutic.

In my process, I just wrote without thinking about the outcome. I couldn’t think about it considering the topic. I wrote about grief as a way to get it out of my system as a way to grieve. It ended up being very public but that wasn’t my intention. If I had thought about the very public aspect, I probably could not have written it at all. After he died, I kept to myself and only talked to a couple of people about his death. I was extremely private in my grief until I wasn’t.

  • It is impossible not to address the political as well as the personal in your book. As well as the micro and at the same time macro all-encompassing entrapment of this occasion. At one point we read, “This country is run by a man who sends men and women to war over oil // America needs more sugar in her diet. / my husband dies in 2001 // The President says: “The Middle East is responsible” (23). How were you able to address the political messaging? What was the function by including it in your work? Did you learn anything from these actions of resistance in the visibility and sharing of your experience? Has the self-reflection of these issues changed over time and how do you feel about poetry being political?

I wasn’t thinking about private vs public at the time. I was vomiting out thoughts. I was writing love letters to Jon. Later, it became more difficult when everyone ‘celebrated’ 9/11. I had and still do have a difficult time with that. Because it is such a private thing for me. But at the time when I was writing, I just kept writing everything that was in my mind. Some people really related to my poems which made the visibility worth it to me.

I don’t believe in war. I used to believe in capital punishment until Jon died. Then I stopped believing because it would never bring him back and would just be more murder. I wanted horrible things to happen to Bin Laden though. Didn’t make sense in my mind. I put a lot of blame on him. I didn’t believe in God when Jon died. Now I have become spiritual because I feel there must be something more, something else. There definitely was a bigger picture in terms of what happens to us when we die. I thought all politicians were horrible people. That the WTC could be bombed before and we did nothing to catch the criminals and then 3000 people died. It was overwhelming to me. As for Trump, like I said he didn’t have anything to do with it but I would say today he reminds me of Hitler and we are letting this happen with him. It astounds me and saddens me and creates a lot of fear in me.

  • In While Everything Slipped Away, intimacy and death hold an interchangeable exchange in the 911 movements of sorrow. Grocery Shopping, is “More intimate than sex / I do it with everyone / Harder to choose the perfect peach / Then to give a good blow job.” (48) This gives insight into how you were forced to face the public and private sphere of the towers and your love sacrificed in its destruction. All the while in an attempt to protect the public. You remind us that the emotional and innovative value we feel in our lives must be centered in physical reality. And, that intimacy and grief is indeed a public as much as private act. You write, “tell me how to capture sadness.” (51) How were you able to revolutionize your own will, without allowing it to dissolve your healing and spirit in such a public and private way? Can you speak more to this idea of your private grief and the public grief around you? Did your personal and public grief collide in any way? Were there different stages of writing and relating?

I actually felt better the more I wrote. I did not think of the private/public aspects very much when I was writing. I found writing to be cathartic. It allowed me to heal because I got out the horror of what was in my mind at the same time as writing about my love for Jon. I am actually a super private person but I don’t think I could have survived without writing this book. I just didn’t think about the public too much as I wrote. And in general, when I write, I tend not to think about the public. If I did, I would be stuck. I could not write. I had a really rough childhood, and I do write about it some. But because my parents are still alive, I do think about the effect it will have on them. It doesn’t stop me from writing, but it gives me cause. With this book, because I thought of it as a love letter, I didn’t have problems writing about Jon. I was so angry and sad and full of grief when I wrote it that I just said what was in my mind. And I wrote honestly because that is all I know how to do. When people ask me about poems at readings, I tend to get very tight lipped. I want the work to speak for itself. I don’t want to share my private self with the audience except through my writing. There, I will bare it all.

The editing was very intentional. It was very different than the writing of the poems. Some poems I wrote in forms while others were free verse. The poem told me what to do. I wanted to have well rounded poems. I started out writing poems of grief and Ilya Kaminsky told me I was writing a book. Then he said that the poems were actually one long poem so I worked with that and cut up the poems. It was all intentional. There was a lot of musicality involved in the writing and splitting up of the poems.

When Ilya told me I was writing a book, the work went from private to public. I realized all the poems were interconnected and could become something more. I wrote a book of grief, love and elegies. Once they were part of the book, I felt they could enter the public and I could still maintain my privacy. I didn’t have to share more of myself than I wanted to. I let go of so much to write the poems and when they formed a book, I felt a huge release. They became part of the world.

BNI