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Madder: A Memoir in Weeds by Marco Wilkinson Coffee House Press | October 12, 2021 | 208 pages | ISBN: 978-1-56689-618-4 Laura Villareal (LV): I want to set the scene a little bit for readers. You and I met at a 5-week interdisciplinary residency at Oak Spring Garden Foundation. The residency is housed on Peter and Bunny Mellon’s 700-acre property that has a farm and multiple gorgeous gardens. You asked a group of us how we each got into our respective craft one day after lunch while we sat in one of the gardens. You wanted to know what our spark point was— what triggered us to pursue our craft. I loved your story about how you came to writing. Could you tell it again? Marco Wilkinson (MW): Well, one place to begin that story, is at the very end of 2010. I had been the farm manager for a regenerative-practice farm that was part of a larger non-profit. It had been an amazing and amazingly difficult year and I can honestly say I had engaged in wholehearted effort: 100% -- more than 100% of my life – had been devoted to my work. At the end of the growing season, the entire staff was unceremoniously laid off, and I was left with this gaping question of what to do next. My partner is a writer and he had heard me hemming and hawing about how I would like to also write “one day.” “Now’s your chance,” he told me as I was licking my wounds after losing my job. So, in my mid thirties, I applied to Stonecoast, the low-residency MFA program. The irony is that 12 years before I lost my job at that farm, I had been an English major who, in the midst of a personal crisis over not knowing who my father was, got my BA, turned my back on literature and academia, and apprenticed on an organic farm in rural Pennsylvania. That launched me on my career as a horticulturist and farmer, which culminated with me, if not turning my back on farming, then at least deciding to engage the world in a radically different way. My day job became teaching sustainable agriculture and English composition classes at the local community college and my nights were spent making my way through my MFA. The funny thing is that I went in thinking I would write essays on farming and ecology, and instead I found myself plunged right back into that initiating crisis of my missing father way back when. I tried to plant a nicely rowed field  but instead all the weeds burst forth. LV: Your memoir primarily focuses on your search to know who your biological father was which became a well-kept family secret or a “willful forgetting.” Everyone told you his name was Donald Wilkinson. I think sometimes we try to understand family, especially parents, in order to better understand ourselves. I also think secrets reveal a lot about what’s being intentionally obscured. Did you learn anything about your family as you worked to find out who your father was? MW: That’s a great question. While the book is about coming to terms with this overwhelmingly absent father, it’s also as much if not more really about the one who required/demanded/ensured his absence, my mother. She and I have never had what I would describe as a particularly “good” or “easy” relationship, precisely because of her denial that there ever was a father, and so as I began writing this memoir I had to reckon with how I would depict her. In my imagination, she reared up in my life like a monster, a kraken, a catastrophizing shadow. Part of the problem is that she is incredibly private, revealing even to me very little about her life before me.  When I started writing, I also went about “researching,” which in this case meant asking relatives the impertinent questions I’d held inside me a whole lifetime. They were incredibly generous, telling me story after story I’d never heard. I think the first thing I learned in the process of writing Madder: A Memoir in Weeds was that all I had to do was ask, that it was in fact possible to be in relationship with all these other people who my mother’s silences had closed me off from. The second thing I learned when I started to put some of these stories down in writing was empathy. My mother has through my writing of this book, despite her mortification and horror that this book exists, become human to me. A complex, hurt human worthy of love and care even in the midst of what I perceive as her grievously mistaken decisions. LV: In the van on the way to Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland we talked a little bit about identity and our relationships to being Latinx. Your last name Wilkinson doesn’t automatically trigger recognition of your Uruguayan heritage. You described yourself as “cryptolatino.” Could you define that and talk a bit about what that means as you move through the world? MW: This feels so tricky to address. My last name, “Wilkinson,” comes from the name, “Donald Wilkinson,” my putative father all through my childhood. The few times I asked who my father was, that was the one and only name provided. The reality, as far as I know, is that my mother married Donald Wilkinson in order to secure citizenship, only for him to turn out to already have been married. Nevertheless, she kept his last name. (How much must she have hated her family to be happy to get rid of her family name? Or how xenophobic had she found the U.S. to be that she thought it prudent to hold on to a “white” name?) And so I too, was born a “Wilkinson.” That last name, the fact that I grew up like all my cousins speaking English in response to my mother’s and relatives’ Spanish and so have no accent inflected by mother’s native tongue, and that my heritage as a Uruguayan is completely (as far as I know) from Europe and so my skin is “white” all means that, in my experience, the casual observer does not read me as Latinx.  And yet I am. I drink maté, love a good asado and some morcillas dulces, grew up on a staple diet of milanesas and tortillas, speak Spanish fluently, have gone back to Uruguay many times to be with family. The rac(ial/ist) dynamics of American culture, though, mean that because my skin is light, my voice is bland, and my last name is blander, I must actively assert my Latinidad. This is undoubtedly a privilege with very real effects in my life, but it has also for me always felt like a curse. LV: The memoir also focuses on your maternal family’s life in Uruguay and in the U.S. Growing up you spent time living with extended family like your Tí’Bibí and your madrina Teresa, her husband Andrés, and their son Andrés since your mother was often working. I guess this is a question of nature vs. nurture, but who in your life has had the most impact on who you grew up to be and the person you are now? MW: Probably more of us than we know grew up in familial realities that explode nuclear stereotypes. Yes, from my earliest days to about five or six, my Tï’Bibí (short form mangling of “tía Bibí) was the primary figure in my life. I have vague but potent memories of being potty-trained – by her. I have memories of being put to bed in a crib and the glass animal figurines that lined a windowsill beside it – in her house. I remember her making tallarines caseras (homemade pasta) by hand, rolling out the dough and cutting it into thin strands with a knife and then opening all the cupboard doors of her kitchen and hanging the pasta to dry on them through the afternoon. Then, as a child up until about eleven or twelve, I would sleep over at my Ina Teresa’s (short form again for “madrina”) because my mom worked third-shifts at the chemical factory. I remember many hours watching TV, playing with their dogs, doing homework at their dining room table, mostly withdrawing into myself because by that age I felt the weight of the weirdness of being someone “extra” in the nuclear family of my madrina, her husband, and their son. When I think of the bright sides of my life and personality, these two women come to mind. They were the ones who were most present and nurturing. When I feel hopeful and alive, that is them in me. My mother, on the other hand, was in many ways my “father.” She was the provider who worked 12-hour shifts and took every opportunity for overtime and clean houses on the side on top of it all. Her sternness precluded questions, fostered silence. She is my shadow, the one who fed from an early age my tendencies to self-criticism, the negative, the doom-addled. But she is also someone who would give of herself selflessly if someone needed assistance without a second thought. Her simplicity – her simple silence, her simple work ethic, her simple generosity – is also my inheritance. Though I yearn for the light and though most of my childhood was spent there (even if feeling misplaced there), I would say that the shadows of my life are long and lasting. LV: What I immediately loved about Madder is the formal flexibility of it—it’s rangy and fragmented. At times your prose is richly narrative, at other times it has all the sensibilities of a lyrical essay. You’ve invoked the metaphor of plants, most often “madder,” as a framework to guide the book. The structure feels alive and shapeshifts as your story unravels. It often renders surprising parallels between relationships with people and relationships among plants. For all these reasons, it's truly a memoir I know other poets will adore. What was the process behind choosing this structure and these— I guess I’d call them form(s)— to house your memoir? Were there any books that inspired this form? MW: The first book I read that opened up the possibilities of creative non-fiction was Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. No surprise I suppose that it’s a poet’s memoir that caught my attention. I love how it opens with a ghostly visitation and wanders restlessly, lusciously, through Lee’s life. It carries a prosaic narrative thread but Lee feels completely at ease with embroidering the prosaic fabric with lyric language, sometimes language whose beauty seems to be there only for its own sake. There are whole paragraphs and pages of rhapsodic flights that, even after I’ve read and taught this book many times, I still can’t claim to understand.  That feels really fundamental to me when thinking about creative nonfiction. Yes, facts matter. But so do fantasies. So do (mis)perceptions. So does pleasure in language. If we’re ready to accept that the Enlightenment aspiration for total knowledge is no longer a possible project, then of course our lives (and memoir is, after all, about how we structure our lives through remembrance) will be haunted houses, crumbling houses, houses with drafty windows and slanted floorboards, houses that house not only our selves but also rats in the walls and roaches in the backs of the cupboards. Because of all that, and because my memoir was predicated on accurately (in some way truly “factual” at some deep level) depicting my experience growing up in the absence of a father and the shadow of a mother, and because that absence and that shadow came alive in my life through withholding and secrecy, it felt like the fragment and the vignette were the most appropriate form to tell this story in. (And maybe the only way to tell it, in the manner of reliving trauma in small manageable bites.) Because my life (still) doesn’t make sense to me when I look back on it, it also felt like it was completely appropriate to write a memoir that in many ways is a collection of essays. They don’t all fit together neatly because that’s just how I experience my life. When I re-member it, it’s in pieces. So there is a through-line of three main chapters, but sprouting up around them like weeds are all these other pieces (a foraging list, an erotic encounter with a masseur in southern India, mushroom hunting with a mentor in the Catskills, a retelling of Cenicienta’s (Cinderella’s) story). How else could it be? You might call it being experimental or rangy or eclectic, but really I want to make a claim for this being non-fiction in a really deep way, for it being accurate not only in content but in form. LV: Your background as a horticulturalist informs much of your memoir. Bunny Mellon who was also a horticulturalist, once wrote, “gardening is a way of thinking.” Michael Pollan said something along the same lines in his book Botany of Desire and that the “seeds” of his book were planted as he was sowing seeds. I wonder, how much of this book began as you worked in gardens and on farms? MW: It’s funny. When I think about the trajectory of my career/life with plants, you could say it has been one deepening mistake. Of course, I mean that a bit tongue-in-cheek. After my stint on the Pennsylvania farm, I committed formally to working with plants by training as a horticulturist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a year and then continuing that training at a school for horticulture in the Hudson Valley called Stonecrop Gardens. This is where I learned botany, and the practical skills of pruning and planting, and long lists of scientific plant names like a doctor learning the names of all the bones in the body. At Stonecrop, without warning one day we’d be led into a room filled with forty small glass vases each with a twig or a leaf or a flower if you were lucky. From scant evidence and without any preparation we were expected to give the common name, scientific name, plant family, and place of origin for each of them. Scoring a 30% on these exams could be considered a worthy effort. Regularly, at least once a week, one of us students could be found weeping after a long day or week. It was grueling and immensely satisfying to distill into one’s body and mind this essence of crafting beauty from plants via this discipline of ornamental horticulture. I worked for the next six years or so in gardens both private and public, eventually working as a horticulturist at The Cloisters, where I first encountered my book’s namesake “madder.” But right from the beginning there had always been this nagging feeling that perhaps there was something immoral, decadent, privileged, about growing plants for beauty’s sake alone. That’s when I found myself returning to farming after a move to northern Ohio and for three years or so, I worked raising vegetables in rows and beds, hacking down lettuces with field knives, tearing kale and chard leaves off one or two from a plant down rows hundreds of plants long, running harvests through the wash bin stations and the industrial-size salad spinners, driving them to our local farmer’s market, putting them in the hands of my neighbors. Such satisfying work! But some time at a permaculture center in the Argentine Andes and later a certification in permaculture design, as well as a long-time interest in foraging made me feel like there was something not quite right about this large-scale model of growing foods (I say “large-scale” when the farm I worked at was only a few acres. How much more so, conventional monoculture farming of thousands of acres!) by focusing on them as resources or units or pounds. I found myself increasingly wanting to understand what was available to me in my environment, what was being offered to me by the world, rather than laboring (and what labor farm work is!) away at the imaginary idea that food comes only from my own hands. So I really started investigating wild edible foods and foraging. At that point, I was relishing all that the weeds I had hitherto been battling had to offer and what it might mean to live a life of relationship with them. This all a really long way of saying that I find myself now gardening my yard in San Diego as a garden/farm/foraging space, planting primarily edible or otherwise useful plants in ways that I find beautiful (not so my neighbor with his astro-turf lawn. I am the anti-Christ as far as he is concerned), and also giving space and appreciation over to those plants that grow there without any intention of mine. The mallows, the sweet alyssum, the goosefoot, the nasturtiums, the chickweed. All of these weeds have their place, their beauty, and their uses as food. All three of those experiences – gardening, farming, foraging – culminating in the last informed my writing process. My horticulture training and practice gave me the deep fund of knowledge to weave botany and mycology and plant folklore into Madder: A Memoir in Weeds. Farming and foraging gave me the experiences and the insights to draw from to think on the page, even if obliquely, about how humans relate to the more-than-human world. My hope is that this book is read not only as a literary work where weeds and plants and fungus appear as metaphors for human experience, but also as a work in which human (my) experience is read as a metaphor for better understanding the world around us. I sincerely hope readers learn something not only about me but maybe more importantly about plants and foraging and “weeds,” that their relationship to “weeds” shifts in some positive way and that maybe they even take some of the foraging instructions in one of the pieces in book and try them out. LV: You write, “For much of my adult life I have worked my mind through folklore and Latin names, soil and air; worked myself into this semblance of a garden, staving off the weeds. But the more I garden the less I weed.” As someone who loves folklore, I enjoyed the inclusion of plant lore like that of Our Lady’s bedstraw. In the library at Oak Spring, there’s a section of books on weeds. It’s amazing to read how many are edible or medicinal. Weeds usually carry a negative connotation in our culture—they’re something to be removed or destroyed. This viewpoint is not shared elsewhere in the world. In your memoir it feels as if you’re in the weeds so to speak of family history and you’re balancing the concept that weeds can be at once bothersome but also beneficial. You write, “A weed is of no use to one who has no use for it.” How did you decide which weeds to highlight as a framework for the book? What use did you have for weeds in this book? MW: It started with two images, one that made it into the book and another that didn’t. One of my earliest memories was playing with my two older cousins, the children of Ti’Bibí and Ina. We half-stepped half-slid our way down what seemed an immense hill to me as a young child and on the way down burrs from burdock plants stuck on my clothes. When I was a little older and in Cub Scouts, the other boys and I played in a homemade fort under a thicket of bushes and balls would be made of collected burrs from burdock plants and hurled at each other. It also happens that burdock, known in Japanese as gobo, is one of my favorite vegetables, and one day I was in a grocery store picking some up and these two memories flooded into my mind as I realized that in this story I was trying to write I was a burr myself, this hanger-on, this pest, and that the burr and burdock might help to explain my mother’s own childhood and migration to the US. Once burdock offered me the specific metaphor and the more general conceit of the weed, I started thinking about what other weeds might prove useful metaphors. Though I am a Zen Buddhist, I was raised Catholic and I kept finding myself returning to the mythology/cosmology of Christianity. At the same time I remembered growing madder in the gardens at The Cloisters in New York City and researching the folklore associated with it and its close relative, bedstraw. I also immediately was drawn to the sonic/homophonic orbit of “madder-mater-matter.” By this point I found that the weeds began to take over, impelling the kinds of stories I might tell, offering structure. The last major weed, shepherd’s purse, is one I’d often read about in foraging guides as a worthy green for salads or stir-fries, but I’d never seen one before. Then, one day, walking back to my car after teaching classes at the local community college, there was one solitary shepherd’s purse plant growing at the edge of the lawn by the concrete walkway. In full flower and with its beautiful lobed foliage, it felt like it was a messenger waiting for me. The next time I came to campus and looked for it, it was gone, dutifully ripped out as just a “weed” by the grounds crew. I had been stuck on how to write into my adolescence and early adulthood, where I knew I wanted Madder: A Memoir in Weeds to end, but this experience with the shepherd’s purse made me lean into the name of the plant and the image of the seedpods, the so-called “purses” or bags that also look so much like hearts. Imagining shepherds wandering the hills with just a bag, their heart, to carry gave me the structure of travel and desire and searching for that chapter of the book. I did indeed have a use for weeds. They helped me make sense of my life. But also they are useless, that is, they have a life apart from usefulness or uselessness. And that’s my life, too. I hope that readers find in this memoir a lesson in finding a way to see people and the more-than-human world around them – be it plants or animals or landscapes – as valuable simply for existing, for simply altogether making up the world as it is. In the opening of the book, I write, “Remember that the little and the useless are what knit the visible world together.” That for me feels like the central point of the whole book, whether thinking of my life or the life of that shepherd’s purse plant quietly blooming by a walkway or a bedstraw plant scratching its way up through some shrubs or a burdock plant’s burrs catching a ride on the hem of a shirt. LV: Writing memoir must be tricky. Besides revealing your own life, everyone else in your orbit—friends and especially family—are open to speculation and examination. Our stories are inextricably bound to the stories of other people. In your book the narrative is often interrupted by parentheticals where your family interrupts to say, “You’ve got it all wrong.” Also, these interruptions are visually offset from the body of the text through centering like this: (“You’ve got it all wrong. This is not how any of this happened,” my mother says.) In this way you’ve given agency back to your family to dispute the narrative you’re crafting. Were the voices of your family in your mind as you were writing? How did you make peace with the inevitably that memory is flawed? MW: Their voices were and weren’t present. I did worry about how to write a book all about not knowing the facts of my life and about those facts being actively withheld. Given that this was the thing that must never be spoken (at least according to my mother), how would she and others receive it? “Madder” refers not only to mothers and the dye plant, but also to anger. This book was born out of anger at this secrecy, and so I decided when I started writing that I wouldn’t speak to my mother about it, knowing that her response would likely be to try and shut it down and that regardless of her response it would warp and deform my own ability to recover my story. I also decided that I was not going to worry about this issue of disputed truths or the potential for hurt feelings until I had completed the whole thing. My hope was that by the time I had finished a solution might magically appear, but the whole way through the worry gnawed at the back of my mind. One day, sitting there worrying, I heard my mother’s voice clearly in my head: “You’ve got it all wrong. This is not how any of this happened.” It suddenly seemed obvious that this antagonism to my narrative, my reality, rather than requiring a response and rebuttal, might simply be given space and presence. Like the weeds, why not appreciate and encompass that which is unwanted, and in giving it voice undo its power to silence? I never approached this memoir from a place of articulating and defending a series of true events. What events? I hardly knew any of the events that drew me into being. Rather this was about searching through the fog of memory for bits and pieces, more blind exploration than surveying and map-making. So the flawed nature of memory as a recording device wasn’t a problem to be solved or skirted. Instead it was that “flawed” nature I wanted to explore, letting fantasies and hypotheses and theories and the pleasure of language serve as real and true “facts,” landmarks toward a map of “the little and the useless.” LV: It seems as if most of what you learned about your father was hard won. At one point you write, “My father’s presence at my birth is something I only learn about well into my thirties. This story is still unfinished, dripping and spilling across decades of my life.” How long did it take for you to get the answers you were looking for? MW: Lol, I’m still looking. It was conversations with relatives, particularly my madrina and my cousins, that revealed so much to me, once I was able to get over the hurdle of feeling like asking anyone any questions at all would be a betrayal of my mother. Every time I broached the topic another morsel of information would be revealed. I don’t think any of them were trying to conceal anything. Far from it. I think my madrina especially was wondering why it took me so long. But it took many separate discussions for each new memory to surface. I learned that my tío Julio (Ti’Bibí’s husband) had been good friends with my father. I learned that my father had left my pregnant mother, returned for my birth, and then left months later on Christmas day. And then, years after this process of conversations started, I learned something detailed at the very end of the book that reoriented everything I thought I knew about my childhood. Even within the past year, I’ve learned major new things about my father, but that’s a story for another time. LV: I absolutely loved the essay/section on fungi/mushrooms which weaves your experience of learning to forage and Jae Rhim Lee’s green burial project (a mushroom shroud/suit) with a contemplation on death and the afterlife. Of the afterlife, you beautifully put it as, “Smoke, spores, this swinging door, this future life.” It’s moving to read about how fungi are excellent stewards of the earth. Admittedly, this essay/section felt like an outlier in terms of its image system and topic. For writers who are grappling with what to include in their manuscripts, could you tell us about how you decided what essays/fragments/verses would go into the final draft of Madder? MW: I’m not sure if this book would look this way if it hadn’t been begun as my MFA thesis. It was a time of a lot of experimentation and roving about for writing material. I was trying lots of things and, as someone in the CNF track of my program, that meant writing about all sorts of experiences in my life. I have to credit my partner, a poet, for encouraging me to think capaciously about what might “fit” into this book. I knew this was a book about my mother and my father, and once I knew I wanted to alternate and give space to expressing this absence of my father in my life, it made sense to think about all the places where his absence either distorted my life or was filled in by substitute fathers. Thus an essay originally published as a lyric set of foraging instructions can become a searching plea to not be left behind. An essay about getting a shave from a barber in Kerala and another about a man showing me how to find mushrooms in New York can both absolutely be about my father, the one who never taught me how to be a man like these two incidental figures did. I think it’s completely fair to be adventurous in understanding one’s life as a whole indivisible thing, contradictions, ellipses, and all. What can be important is the skeleton, the overall structure and frame you give to a project as a whole. Then part of the pleasure for a reader can be to puzzle out how to think about the pieces hanging off this skeleton. LV: I’d like to hear more about one of the final parts of your book titled “Succession.” For that sequence the pages are split into a white half with black text and a black half with white text. The language is fragmented so at first I wanted to read it as an erasure because I felt like I was hearing echoes of the book’s earlier pages, but then I wondered if it was more of a palimpsest. Could you talk about “Succession?” MW: That piece initially appeared in a different form in Seneca Review’s “Beyond Categories” issue. It was printed as one long scroll as part of an amazing box of material text-objects that was a supplement to the issue’s traditional journal form. “Succession” is still up online at Seneca Review’s website where it can be downloaded (https://www.hws.edu/offices/senecareview/beyond-category/succession.aspx). When printed it is approximately three feet long. I knew that this piece would be super-important to include in the book as part of the concluding movements of the memoir as a whole, but it just wasn’t possible to include it as the fold-out I imagined, much to my chagrin. (I’ve since learned that even today, fold-outs have to be individually hand tipped into books at the printers, a cost that would have been exorbitant.) After feeling sad for a little bit about the impossibility of including it in its original form, I took on the challenge of rethinking how it might be presented. This meant reimagining and revising the piece into two iterations. The first tinkers with the formatting so discreet pieces of the sideways scroll could inhabit each page. From verso to recto there is continuity but then the page flips. I had always thought of the original piece as being divided between conscious expression “above ground” and subconscious fragments composting “underground.” Reworking it for the book opened up the possibility of using that stark division between the black and white parts of the page to emphasize this aspect that was already there in the original. In the original, one could read each level of the piece as a single sentence. The codex format of a book prevented that continuous flow, so in the second iteration in the memoir, what were first read as fragments are coalesced into clear sentences, letting whatever glimpses of meaning a reader might find in the first iteration be confirmed or challenged or complicated in the second. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and now think of it as a blessing that I had to re-approach this piece for the book. “Succession” began as a visual exploration of the ecological idea that one landscape or environment and its suite of organisms sets the stage and makes possible another and then another and then another. Literally, succession is about how bare rock can be a home for lichen which can set the stage for mosses which can be a nursery for seedlings which can then end up sheltering shrubs and then trees. Life can move from bare rock to forest (or savannah or wetland or some other ecosystem), and underneath it all at each step the soil is growing and becoming deeper and thus able to support more and more complex life-forms. But “succession” is also about sons coming after and inheriting from their fathers. And it’s also got the notion of “success” haunting it in the shadows. I tried to take my family history and play with those ideas while visually imagining an ever-growing landscape and the kind of underground currents girding the whole thing. LV: Can you tell us about your next project? What have you been working on? MW: In the past year I’ve learned a whole bunch of new information about my father. I always imagined the story of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, which ends more or less somewhere in my twenties, would continue, but I wasn’t sure how. Now, with the new information I have, I feel new energy for the task of writing not about the absence of my father but about the search and the discovery of his presence scattered across continents and families’ lives. So that’s one project I am working toward. The other is, in a way, the kind of book I thought I would write in my MFA, a book of essays about farming, foraging, environmental practice, Buddhism, queerness. I’ve spent the past twenty-plus years on this evolving plant-worker journey of wanting to find a way to live in/with/as the world, and I’d like to share some of the thoughts I’ve had and experiments I’ve engaged in along the way. One of those experiments, as you know because you saw the process unfolding when we were together at Oak Spring, was to hand –cut my overgrown postage stamp lawn in San Diego and bring it with me to Oak Spring where I taught myself some basic basket-weaving techniques in order to construct a basket, a pair of sandals, and a hat from that grass. I want to think deeply about how to live in/with/as the world around me. Marco Wilkinson is the author of the lyric memoir, Madder: A Memoir in Weeds (Coffee House Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Ecotone, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of Literary Arts in the Literature Department at University of California San Diego. Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI, among others.

Malinalli by Veronica Chapa | Atria/Primero Sueno Press | March 2025 | ISBN: 978-1668009017 [Note: This interview

9780810147881 | Published: October 2024 | Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books | Pages: 136 This interview Thank you for writing this book and sharing a little bit of your story with me through this interview

my fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, I worked at translating their respective plays, poems, interviews

My hope for this interview is that through my questions our readers and I can get to know you. 

Buy: Kinds of Grace Publisher: FlowerSong Press Release Date: May 2024 How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? When I was about five, I wrote a picture book called Pig Girl. I illustrated it too. It’s about a girl who turns into a pig because she’s so messy; it was a gift to my mother who often said I didn’t clean my room enough. Definitely probably passive aggressive. Still, it was the messy, loving work of a 5-year-old. My mother was actually delighted and said “Write more books, Jennifer!” I remember the feeling that maybe I could write another book after she expressed such excitement at my writing. I was always thinking of stories and poems ever since I can remember. Even in preschool I didn’t have the language for stories but I was dreaming them up with toys and my imagination. I’d go around as a kid cajoling my brother to act in plays I’d written. My mother would also read poems to me and I’d write my own response poems. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, a poet and a writer. What was the impetus for this body of work? Kinds of Grace started after I finished my first book, a cross-genre poetry & prose collection called SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, which was published back in 2017. Shortly afterward, I wrote a poem called “Apagón” about Hurricane Maria after just coming back from PR and finding out about the blackout, and a few other poems about loss. I put the poems aside, not ready for another collection and I wasn’t aware of a throughline yet. After I experienced a mental break in 2020, I had to dig my way out of recovery and I chronicled some of that journey in poetry. I also wrote about love, pain, Puerto Rico, being a Black woman in America, living in Fort Pierce, moving to Houston, finding personhood. I realized I had enough poems for a collection in the summer of 2022 and I sent the book out a year later after going through several revisions and deciding I wanted to publish it. I was so happy FlowerSong, and Edward Viduarre saw my heart. But it started with “Apagón” before I knew there would be a collection coming together. How did writing this book transform you? I learned how to forgive myself, give myself grace, come into community with those similar to and dissimilar to me. I wasn’t the same person as I was beginning the book, I was wholly changed. After it was done, I felt as if I inhabited myself more, understood myself a bit more, understood those I loved around me more. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. Live music definitely informed this book. I would go to coffee shops in Houston and work on Kinds of Grace while listening to Spanish music. I definitely wanted the piece to have a certain musicality so listening to live music helped. I love dancing so I spent a great deal of time in my office, dancing out the jitters. You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book? The first line of the book is “I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree” and the last line is “But I know no matter what,/The next moment comes.” I think these speak to each other. The first poem “The Past” is about letting go of that which binds you, of those who you loved and are no longer in your life, of the self you used to be. After the journey the speaker(s) undergo throughout this book with mental health, self and loss, the conclusion is that there is comfort in knowing that we won’t remain in any fixed state, the next moment will always come. There is always hope. William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why? An apple. I have an attachment to them. They’re something soothing about the shape and texture. I also love the color red so Red Delicious are my jam. I had an apple tree outside of my house when I was a child and I would pluck apples and think of the individual fruits as memories. If I took a bite, I’d indulge in a memory. Plus, I practically gorge on apples. So definitely an apple. What are you currently reading? I have my TBR ready to go for the spring. I bought Annell Lopez’s I’ll Give You a Reason, Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Bad Mexican, Bad American, Marcos Carlos Griffin’s American Daughter, Phillip B. Williams' Ours, Michael B. Wang’s Lost in the Long March, Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals, January O’Neill’s Glitter Road, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Piedra, Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud and Jen Fawkes’s Tales the Devil Told Me. Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home and Kinds of Grace. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

In an email interview, I asked Alcalá about the way mothers train daughters to survive the constant threat

Buy: What We Do with God by Daniella Toosie-Watson | Haymarket Books | Publication Date: September 09, 2025 | Pages: 80 | EAN/UPC: 9798888903704 What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?   Franz Kafka, for sure. His work’s impact on me is responsible for so much of What We Do with God.   Before anything literary/academic/bookish, reading Kafka at that young age gave me a methodology to contend with Christianity and everything that the faith mapped onto me and wanted to make of me. I was a teenager, a survivor; I was grieving and entrenched in the church—I used Kafka’s work to frame my understanding of my condition and to contend with the world around me, my experience with mental illness, and general day-to-day mundanities.   For What We Do with God , to honor the influence that class had on the book, I wrote “Questions after Reading Kafka in Eleventh Grade.” Beyond that poem, Kafka’s sensibilities offered different frameworks for approaching my book on the level of the poem and the broader questions of thematic scaffolding and tenor.     How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?   When I was in middle school (I think I was age 12) I had a friend who was a very talented freestyle rapper. I asked him to teach me how to freestyle. He told me to try writing, first—that he’d look at it, and we’d go from there.   As I got a little older, I learned, “oh—this isn’t my lane, let me not appropriate this.” Nevertheless, that was my beginning: studying rap battles, different rappers/hip-hop artists and their approaches.   Can you talk about your use of form and theory?   The thinkers and frameworks I’ve tended toward over the years taught me how to achieve my favorite poetic move, that is, how to make associative leaps between seemingly disparate things in order to engender surprise, something with particularities that would not be achieved without that specific pairing.   I think my interest in this way of writing had to have started with my interest in freestyle rap—my early studies and attempts towards developing the agility and intellectual dexterity needed for freestyle rap informed the varying kinds of associative leaps you can see in my poems. Then, there came Kafka in 11 th grade. Then: Russian Formalism, defamiliarization, artists like Arthur Jafa. Actually, the associative approach to poetry is often how I go about my short poems—it’s how I am able to cover so much ground with so few lines, like in the prologue poem of What We Do with God , “The Bug” (where I also nod towards both associative poetry and folks who might disparage my use of it, and also where I let the reader in on what’s to come in the collection): “…is this a leap? / What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug.” That I draft most of my poems via stream-of-conciousness is also informed by my history of loving freestyle rap as a form. Many of the poems in What We Do with God either are or started as stream-of-consciousness. For example, “God is Dog Spelled Backward” is very much a stream-of-consciousness poem. I wrote it in one sitting and the revisions were mostly cosmetic. Maybe a word-swap here, a line-break there, but the conceptual unfolding and ordering of information—what you see on the page in the book, now, is how it was initially drafted.   When some folks talk about “stream-of-conciousness,” they sometimes refer to it as “word vomit” (a phrase I detest, btw). But, no—I refuse that naming entirely. Contrary to these kinds of categorizations, stream-of-conciousness takes training and study—a river runs, but the shape of the river and how it flows is all dependent on where and how the rocks, plants, etc are situated in the water. Study and training situate and resituate our writing and its respective processes.   My friend from college, Twayne Towns, is brilliant in both written and freestyle rap. Nothing about what he does is frivolous or accidental—its pointed, precise. Please do not mistake my use of “accidental” as my saying there is no room for play and experimentation—both are necessary, and for sure, accidents can lead to art-making. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about rejecting pretentiousness within and across a literary scope, and beyond a literary purview, any artistic framework that claims itself the codifier of what is or isn’t literary, what is or isn’t art. Folks, who, should turn the gaze back on themselves to examine their notions around skill, talent, and what’s worthy of study and attention. Folks who need to turn on the music video, open the book, listen to the song, go to the slam, go to the reading, the workshop, the classroom, the studio, the church service, that they might fill-in the gaps of their study, stop harming people, and, with any luck at all: shut up.   Who are your mentors? How did they help you shape your book?   Greg Pardlo and Vievee Francis—both of whom I worked with at the 2015 & 2016 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop—changed the trajectory of my life. Without their tutelage and care, I really don’t know what my life would look like right now.   If we’re talking about mentorship on the level of craft, though: Greg helped me, in his words, “develop of sense of narrative architecture to complement and frame [my] associative leaps.” I met Greg very early in my writing journey when my poetry was quite abstract. He helped me to not necessarily reel-in my imagination, but rather, to conceptualize what my imagination could do and become when it has a scaffolding or structure.   With Vievee, in terms of craft and method: under her tutelage I studied and practiced writing in various forms. What’s more, she gave us practical, employable guidance on how to examine our grief and come out on the other side of the writing, intact.   I have mentors in other ways, too. I consider the writers/thinkers/figures who I study but haven’t met to be mentors; and their work, my mentors. I consider songs that have taught me something about pacing and building tension to be mentors. I consider the relationship between an epigraph and a poem that introduces me to something new, to be a mentor. Mentorship doesn’t have to be from someone you know. For so many people for so many reasons, person-to-person mentorship isn’t accessible. Plus, this alternative kind of mentorship often feels (and is) safer.     How did writing this book transform you?   Writing What We Do with God transformed me in so many ways: taught me about longsuffering, patience, and consistency. Showed me that I believed in myself. I mean, if I didn’t believe in myself, I wouldn’t have kept writing with no clear ending—I wasn’t writing on a press’s deadline or anything. I was writing to make something I loved and was proud of, that I believed would be picked up when I was finished writing it. I wrote for 8 years without an expected end. Indeed, I became a person who is willing to wait.   I learned to love my writing. I’m not the self-loathing artist. I’ve worked and am working too hard to be self-deprecating. Folks can dislike my work if they want to—that’s fine, and also not my business (granted that the reason for not liking my work is aesthetic/stylistic/rooted in an “ism,” etc.—if the reason is that I’ve written something harmful, then that’s another conversation and is very much my business).   To be clear, I can and do acknowledge when something I create isn’t up-to-par with what I want for my work, but I read something that said, “you can’t hate yourself into a version you can love.” If a poem isn’t fully-developed, I am going to nurture it until it is. Nurturing a poem might look like using gentle language like “not fully-developed,” studying, reading, giving myself a break, taking a walk, looking at art that inspires me, revision, revision, revision. But what I won’t do is tell myself that my art is shit 1. Because it’s not 2. Because no. I don’t accept being spoken to that way, and by extension, I won’t treat my writing that way. Yes—I’ve dedicated myself to this work, will continue to dedicate myself to this work, and I refuse expectations of humility or playing-small or being-small.     What are you currently reading?   Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End at the Sea . Daniella Toosie-Watson is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). Her work has been published in The Atlantic , The Paris Review , Oxford Poetry , Callaloo , Virginia Quarterly Review , and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York.

Colson | Washington Writers' Publishing House | May 16, 2024 | ISBN: 978194155139 Entrevista en español Interview

Buy: Brutal Companion by Ruben Quesada | OCTOBER 15, 2024 | BARROW STREET PRESS ISBN: 978-1-962131-03-2 | $18.00 Which living poet/writer had the most influence on your book? D.A. Powell has had the most influence on  Brutal Companion . His work, notably his trilogy, has had a significant impact on my approach to writing about queer experiences and the junction of personal and political issues. There’s a poetic beauty that cleaves reality that has encouraged me to achieve a similar balance in my work. I’m drawn to poets who demonstrate attention to similar social concerns as my own, but perhaps more importantly, poetry with rhythm and sound with particular attention to detail for the natural world and the perspective it offers.  Over the past decade, I’ve been voraciously reading contemporary poetry and there is so much to draw from these days. If I had to share poets whose use of rhythm and sound most resonated with me–Diane Mehta, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Philip Metres. The nature of expression in the work of Mai Der Vang, Anthony Cody, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is exciting. I could go on… Which non-living poet/writer had the most influence on your book? The late Paul Monette had a significant effect on this collection. His visceral, unembellished depictions of love and loss during the AIDS crisis in works such as Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog  influenced my approach to writing about grief, sexuality, and the complexity of identity. What is your favorite line(s) in your book? It is difficult to choose, but I particularly like these lines from the poemtry "Aubade:” "In the dark, I listen, now resigned, you mumble about the arms of pinyon pine, saying it points to a falling star against the serrated pool of sky." These lines encapsulate a sense of intimacy and cosmic wonder, which I strive for in most of my work. What are the primary themes in your book? Brutal Companion  probes multiple linked topics, including identity, loss and grief, the complexities of intimate connections, and the need for connection in an often hostile society. How has authoring this book changed you? Writing Brutal Companion  was a deeply transforming experience. It compelled me to address traumatic memories and feelings, particularly those involving loss and identity. The process of drafting these poems enabled me to have a better understanding of my experiences and how larger cultural and historical frameworks informed them. It also strengthened my trust in poetry's ability to express complicated feelings and experiences that would otherwise go unheard. Did this work have any influence from another art form? Visual art, especially painting, has had a considerable impact on this collection. Several poems, such as "Oath of the Horatii" and "Angels in the Sun," include direct references to specific artworks. The ekphrastic approach offered possibilities to explore emotional and thematic terrain. When I first conceived of this book, I received a grant for travel to museums around the country that allowed me first-hand experience for further ekphrastic writing.  Instead of imitation, the goal is to have an association with the original piece and make something that stands on it while also casting light on elements of the original material. We use public images and videos in creative ways when I teach ekphrasis. My process usually includes inspecting the original work and analyzing it, then using both literal and figurative language when speaking about that experience. Something that strikes a chord with me could be a subject, the imagery, the rhythm, or a single line. After that, I allow my thoughts and experiences to mix with the main idea of the original work.  The goal is to make a multilayered piece that pays tribute to the original and adds something new to the conversation about the arts. I figure out what is remarkable about the piece that interests me—is it the language, the images, or the feelings that are hidden beneath the surface? This is where I begin.  I spent two years visiting museums around the country and in Europe. It began by flying to Los Angeles, where I was able to visit my mom. Then it was a daily visit to museums in the area: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Villa in Malibu. Then, I went north to San Francisco, where its pub parks and artwork most inspired me. I visited the de Young Museum of Fine Art and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums; I shared an afternoon in Dolores Park with a friend.  In the second year, over one week, I traveled to Spain, where I visited the Reina Sofía, Prado, and Picasso art museums. On to Italy, where I visited palazzi and libraries in Bologna then in Venice, I arrived in time for Carnevale. Before returning home, I spent a day in Berlin at the Topography of Terror and Museum Island. I wish I could do all that again with more time.  What was the motivation for this collection of work? The impulse for Brutal Companion  stemmed from a desire to investigate and confront personal and collective traumas. My private and public life are intertwined and mutually influential to my work. In sharing this deeply personal narrative, I aim not for sympathy but for empathy—a bridge of understanding between my experience and the collective. The U.S. health crisis, intimate relationships, and the desire to belong are all central to this motivation.  One year after moving to Chicago, I was ready to begin a new chapter of my life. I was going to get involved with extraordinary poetry and teaching programs in the city. It was the start of August. I was turning forty, changing careers, recently single, and then diagnosed with HIV.  There I was, poised at the intersection of multiple transitions, my body in distress through what I initially dismissed as mere allergies. I’m allergic to everything outdoors (grass, trees, & flowers). After two weeks, the symptoms took a turn for the worse. For the rest of the month, I slept only a few hours at a time.  Those August days were rough. The fever hit me hard, messing with my body and my mind. It felt like I was stuck in some weird, hazy dream. Even though I felt awful, I kept thinking about my new teaching job and my upcoming birthday. It was like life was saying, "Hey, I'm still moving forward whether you're ready or not.  The fever kept getting worse until one day, I just knew something was seriously wrong with my body. I managed to call my neighbor for help. She came over, let herself in, and called 911. It was intense. I don’t know how I managed it, dealing with being so sick while also trying to hold onto the good stuff coming up in my life. It took me years to adapt, losing work and breaking commitments along the way. I wish I’d managed it differently, but context doesn’t always matter.  “Love moves me and makes me speak,” said Dante. It took another few years before I finally settled in Chicago, months before the COVID-19 lockdown. I moved in with my now fiancé.  The transitional nature of my life has made me resilient, for better or worse. The poems I wrote sat around for more than a decade. I never sent them out. Most were written when I first moved to Chicago. They celebrate life, recognize its loss, and find a way to reconcile what has passed. My love of language motivated me, and life kept me writing.  Are you working on a new project? Could you tell us a little about it? Yes, I am now working on a new poetry collection about the intersection of technology and human emotion. I am particularly interested in how artificial intelligence and digital environments are changing our perceptions of identity, relationships, and creativity. The project's goal is to combine parts of speculative poetry with more classic lyric genres to establish a conversation between the human and the technical. It is still taking shape, but I am excited to see where this journey takes me. Ruben Quesada ’s latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion , winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, published October 15, 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2023. Quesada’s work appears in prestigious publications including Seneca Review , American Poetry Review , the Best American Poetry series, Harvard Review , and The New York Times Magazine . Quesada has received fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’, and CantoMundo.

Buy: Luna Inmigrante by Virginia Bulacio | Alegría Publishing | June 27, 2023 Personalized signed copies with stickers, copies available on writer’s website What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? I came to the United States during my high school years, and I joined an E.S.L class (English as a Second Language). One of my teachers, Miss Ritvo, shared the book The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Some days, Miss Ritvo would read the book to us and other days, she would play the audiobook for us. It was illuminating to follow the book and Cisneros' words while reading the stories. I was transported to another time. In my imagination I would travel back to my small town in the north of Argentina. I felt connected to Cisneros' novel and the main character, Esperanza. I remember feeling like the writer would understand me. I carry those stories close to me, it’s a reminder of where I come from. Sandra Cisneros inspired me at a young age to create stories, bilingual stories para nuestra comunidad. Her work continues to inspire me today and I hope one day I can share Luna Inmigrante with her. How did your relationship with your family influence your writing? My relationship with my family has influenced my writing. I think they helped me understand in a way our immigrant journey. Some of the experiences we faced earlier in the journey later became a poem or reflection in my book. Those poems or reflections helped me to see our stories from different points of view, as the voice of an immigrant, what really matters in our heart. Luna Inmigrante is dedicated to mi familia and my friends who qualified for DACA, and those friends who did not, people I would see on the bus on a daily basis, workers and activists who joined rallies during Labor Day. They have influenced me each day and inspired this poetry collection, as we are one family, from the point of view of Luna Inmigrante. How did writing this book transform you? Luna Inmigrante has helped me understand that our stories are all connected, therefore my poems reflect that we are all part of everyone’s journey. Writing my book allowed me to heal, channel and transform that pain in energy in motion, within each line of poetry in Luna Inmigrante. With time, I am realizing Luna Inmigrante is here to transform us, heal us, grow together, and celebrate our stories and where we come from. I think transformation comes from healing, and each story represents a voice in our community, showing our diversity and honoring our stories. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. I would like to say motherhood is an artform. I think becoming a new mom in the pandemic inspired me to share my work with others. Motherhood gave me the strength to share my work, and hopefully inspire other writers to do the same. When my son was a newborn, I would take him on walks and I would pay close attention to the details he would see, the texture and colors of plants, our shadows, the petals of roses, as he would show excitement by moving his little hands so fast like an orchestra director. And to me that was a new artform, a new way of expression that I carry in my poetry. All these magical moments with him influenced me to create a new way of writing. Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies? Photography, photojournalism, taking Polaroids, the beauty of capturing a moment as it is, without any editing, this has been a passion project. Either I am on a walk or playing with my son outside, watching the clouds, waiting for the sunset, I enjoy taking photographs, seeing my son growing up, and documenting time. Photography is an artform that inspires my creativity, and it allows me to experiment with time and light. If you could have a dinner party with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why? What would you serve for dinner? The first person that came to my mind was mi abuelo. He was like my father to me. I would probably serve empanadas Argentinas, maybe he can teach me how to make an Argentine Parrillada (Argentinian bbq) like the ones he used to make when I was growing up. Years after I moved to the United States, he passed away. I did not have a chance to say goodbye or thank him for taking care of me when I was little. This dinner would be like a reunion to honor him and show him my gratitude. Virginia Bulacio is an Argentinean writer, educator, and storyteller. She immigrated to the United States during her high school years. Virginia holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a Minor in Spanish Language Journalism from California State University, Northridge. Her mission in teaching is to share her passion about culture, storytelling, and poetry. She is teaching subjects such as Spanish and Photography at a school in which the mission is to help the student emotionally, socially, and academically through positivity and mentoring. Virginia lives in Los Angeles with her family, and you would probably find her at a coffee shop looking for a story.

Buy: El Rey of Gold Teeth Watch: El Rey of Gold Teeth (ASMR?) Unboxing Hub City Press | ISBN: 9798885740197 | $16.00 | Oct. 3, 2023 What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? I was lucky to have worked with Eduardo C. Corral for El Rey of Gold Teeth after he graciously took on some mentees for their poetry collections. I’d learned so much from him from Slow Lightning, a book that opened me to new dimensions of craft and language ever since I read it in college. He really pushed me to place my poems into different containers, to let them become the best versions of themselves through individual forms that couldn’t exist otherwise. Can you talk about your use of form and theory? As a writer, the tools for my craft encompass language in all its forms, as many as I can play within as possible. As such, I write fiction, poetry, essays, and more to find my limitations and liberties. I firmly believe that form and content cannot be separated, so whenever I choose a form for which my language can be expressed best for that project, I have to be very certain that that was the best container for the project at the time. As in, my first book, a collection of short stories, exists because those thoughts and languages could only be expressed that way. One story in that collection takes the form of a court document filed on Mars that appropriates legal language for fiction, a regular practice in American politics; that was my way of playing with that form to say what I wanted to say. However, that’s not to say that this latest book, a collection of poetry, does not explore similar themes or subjects, but that the poetry allowed me to access new ways of looking at the same thing. In my experience, forms are merely conduits for language and thus should be thought of as facilitators and not funnels. For example, if a short story cannot cover everything you want to do within a given project, then try it as a poem since poetry is not bound by the sentence insomuch as the line. If a poem isn’t working, then try an essay as the essay can allow the writer the tools to show one’s math, so to speak, more smoothly, such as through citations or digressions or thought process (at least for me). In El Rey of Gold Teeth, there’s a poem in the form of a translation of a broken turtle’s shell as I was fascinated by the fact that species of turtles all have the same number of plates that comprise their shells, like the red eared slider’s 13 scutes. Thus, I wanted to explore the red eared slider’s shell as an ancestral inheritance, that it was telling them something about their past that they carried but could not see alone. Moreso, it is a ‘translation’ of a broken shell, further fragmenting the history in which they carry, making such a history even more illegible to human language, further complicating the notion of inheriting history and language across languages and contexts. In that way, the red eared slider’s shell becomes a historical document and a textual embodiment of the immigrant experience. I honestly don’t believe any other form that piece could have taken as fiction or essay or what have you often have linear progressions bound by the sentence. The poem, for me, allowed me to clunkily sing what I could not directly say as efficiently and playfully. What is your current obsession? Short lines, slant rhymes, couplets, trees, etc. My current obsession for my poetry is establishing a form for a poem and running it into the ground by continuously writing in it until I break all its rules. In that way, I find the form’s first limitation for me and know what to indulge in the new form that sprouts from the former. In this case, it’s the use of a single stanza to fill the expanse of a page, mainly through line spacing and generous line breaks to make the scarce seem abundant, to make the reader slow down as to not get dizzy or lost in the language. In a way, the poems are becoming more visual in how they occupy the white space of a page, how the form embodies the content in ways I couldn’t see at first, like carving words into the marble of the page. How did writing this book transform you? This book really let me see how badass poetry truly is. Like, how awesome it is to play with language in such a way as to explore its power and violence and joy. Writing this book gave me the power to share my love for my people, my city, my community in ways that either make people proud of themselves and what we share or to look at what we have in new ways. This book let me navigate my given and learned languages however I wanted. For example, I have a poem in the form of a pulga; I can’t wait for readers to engage with that piece and share in the beauty of something so normal yet so wondrously human. My first book let me see myself as a published author who is contributing to a larger conversation; this book that let me become the writer I’ve always wanted to be. That is, the kind of writer that will always take something and run it as far as it can go in that moment. This book transformed me into a full writer on my terms, into someone whose lot in this life is to write and share stories and ways to play with what we’ve been given. I couldn’t be more thankful. What role does the poet play in the 21st century? A giant influence on my writing is Tomás Rivera, especially his book …y no se lo tragó la tierra. There’s a short passage in the book that briefly tells of a poet who travels between migrant worker camps to sell them poetry, tailoring them to local communities by including their names. The poet provides instructions to his customers, telling them: “…to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness.” It was there that I learned that the writer gives their community the language to find each other in times of darkness, to share love even when the world makes it harder to see the light. In that way, the poet gives each member of their community the ability to become a beacon of love. For me, the poet in the 21st century carries on that tradition of taking language and sharing it amongst their communities to give them the power to speak, now more than ever when language is being obfuscated, used for violence, and facilitating oppression and division on a more massive scale than ever. My role is to tell you that love is real and that there is no singular use for language. We can use language to see a better reality than the one we currently have. When you read my work, I hope you see that language is something we can play with to process our histories towards a healing. That language is “the seed of love in the darkness.” Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies? Too many! But one passion that I’m enjoying lately is my curatorial practice, how I capture the thoughts and languages I can’t process through my writing (yet) but through organizing. I curated and launched a virtual exhibition in 2022 titled The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids where I noticed many Houston artists of color of various backgrounds and practices using grids in their artwork. I curated the exhibition to put said artworks in conversation with the political, historical, and pedestrian to try and see how the grid, a conduit of colonialism, can be appropriated by the creative imagination by and for marginalized communities. The exhibition is free and accessible in English and Spanish. In 2023, I curated and launched a series titled The Pylon Project in conjunction with The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids where I invited artists and writers to play with the icon of the pylon sign, those big signs you see alongside strip malls and/or shopping centers that list their contents. These pylon signs permeate throughout Houston’s grids of streets, particularly unique as Houston has no traditional zoning laws, often placing things together that can complement and/or clash with each other. That too is free to visit online but also has a limited print run featuring each essay as a zine. In 2024, I’ll be making another addition to the exhibition which I won’t say what it is yet. The point being, it’s really cool to work on something that grows with you yet has a foundation upon which to build, all of which is accessible and updated as you explore it more and more. The exhibition, then, is a conduit for aesthetic growth and organizing facilitated by visual language that I hope to one day turn into an exhibition catalog in book form. Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew? As a writer, you can do whatever you want. For real. Throughout my writing career, whether it be the workshop or the editorial process, I’ve been told what I could or couldn’t do. But when I was told to not do something, that’s when I knew I had to keep it. It’s your work. Your craft. Your life. Do whatever you want. Please. What are you currently reading? I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately to help me with my own process, including: Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s by Tiffany Midge; From Threatening Guerillas to Forever Illegals by Yajaira M. Padilla; How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon; Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino; I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux; Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib; and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? My next project is a collection of essays that focus on pop culture as a nation building exercise and practice, ranging from film to video games to natural disasters to beer to music to art to anime and much more. I think this collection will allow me to show my thought process in a different way, especially in making connections across various topics. For example, how does the depiction of football in American cinema connect to my navigation of Hurricane Harvey? How does drinking beer connect to the immigrant experience? You’ll have to read and find out! Other than that, I have a rotation of poems and stories and art criticisms and a novel that I work on at various intervals when the essays become too narrowing. I’ve also become a married man lately, so I’m always working on being a better husband. Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is a Houstonian, writer, educator, curator, and organizer of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He authored the short story collection The Book of Wanderers (2022), a 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist, from University of Arizona Press’ Camino del Sol series and the poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth (2023) from Hub City Press. Reyes has been honored as a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, 2022 Crosstown Arts Writer in Residence, 2023 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow, 2023 Dobie Paisano Fellow, and others.