Tilt

This summer Mummy, Daddy, Bunny and I are going to visit Grandmammy in her house by the sea. We don’t visit Grandmammy often. Mummy says it’s because she lives so far away.

When we visit Mummy lets me and Bunny play at the edge of the water near Grandmammy’s house. Bunny gets all fat and bloated and then Mummy has to put him out to dry. Mummy says best friends can’t be stuffed toys but I know she’s wrong because Bunny is mine. He always wants to play the games I think of and he never laughs at me like the boys in school.

The last time we visited Grandmammy I was only in kindergarten. Grandmammy told me she’d buy me a chocolate sprinkle cone if I tell Daddy that I want Grandmammy to live with us. Mummy was angry when she found out. I didn’t get ice cream and we came back three days early.

I like looking out of the window to see the big trees at the side of the road. There are only small trees where we live. Mummy points out pretty birds and a little monkey sitting on a rock. The monkey acts very funnily, jumping about and scratching itself. I yell out, “Mummy, it’s touching its bum!”

Mummy says the monkey is acting in this Shameful Way because it isn’t intelligent like me. I look away quickly from the monkey which doesn’t know not to show its Private Parts in front of others.

We finally reach Grandmammy’s house. When I enter Grandmammy smiles and says, “Who is this handsome young boy?” I laugh and run to the other room to sit on the bed and watch Scooby Doo while Daddy and Mummy talk to Grandmammy.

During dinner, Grandmammy puts rice on my plate and says, “Such a shame that he has to grow up an only child.”

Daddy says, “We’re a happy family of three.” I feed Bunny some of my rice.

“Those who cannot do better must be…” Then Daddy is yelling at Grandmammy and Grandmammy is yelling back. Mummy is

trying to get Daddy to sit back down. Bunny falls off his seat.

Daddy goes straight to bed without clearing his plate. I ask Mummy if Daddy wants to play I Spy but she says no, not right now. Grandmammy says she can play with me, but I say no, thank you and sit with Mummy and colour my notebook.

On the last day of our visit, I make sandcastles till Mummy says it’s time to pack. I run in, put my clothes in my blue sailor backpack, and try to run out but Mummy stops me. I have to wait there while she and Daddy carry our bags to the car.

I sit on Grandmammy’s blue sofa and swing my legs. Grandmammy keeps strange things on the side tables – little stones from a riverbank, a mood lamp, a prayer wheel from Tibet. Grandmammy doesn’t have any toys or comics.

Bunny and I are playing cross and noughts with my red jumbo crayon when Grandmammy comes into the room. She starts taking out jars and boxes and putting them noisily on the table. Mummy says it isn’t polite to make so much noise but I don’t say this to Grandmammy because I don’t want her to feel bad.

I know I have to listen to Grandmammy because she’s older than me. I stop and make more crosses.

“You’re acting like a cat in heat,” Grandmammy says in an odd voice. She’s looking at me strangely. I look down at my notebook paper. I wish Grandmammy would go back to moving the jars. I wish Mummy would come back into the room.

I try to focus on my notebook. But Bunny falls off the sofa and I’m trying to win the game and I’m used to shaking my leg when I sit.

Grandmammy is yelling at me now. “Stop it! Shaking your legs means you want sex. Is that what you want?”

I stop doing everything at once.

I feel like when Vicky from class hit me on the head and I couldn’t breathe or think, I just waited silently for Mummy to come get me. My eyes are burning. I nod like a puppet.

Grandmammy said the s-word.

The Dirty and Wrong Thing you shouldn’t say.

The Secret Thing grown-ups do in movies after they take off their clothes, even though you should never show anyone your Private Parts.

The Very Shameful Thing you cannot say.

The Chinese paintings on Grandmammy’s walls are tilting. It makes my head hurt. I want Mummy to come and take me away like she did after Vicky hit me. I want to go far away from Grandmammy who says these Terrible Things.

But my arms and legs aren’t working so I just sit there.

Mummy and Daddy come to take me to the car sometime. They say bye to Grandmammy. I say bye to the plant next to Grandmammy’s feet. Grandmammy says she hopes we visit again soon. I hope Daddy forgets the way to Grandmammy’s house.

The small pebbles in front of Grandmammy’s house are jumping. My Lightning McQueen sandals are tripping over them so Mummy takes my hand. My eyes are open too wide and I look at the dancing pebbles so Mummy doesn’t notice and make me repeat the Bad Thing Grandmammy said.

In the car I open the window and look out. Mummy asks me if I want to sing a song. She asks if I want to play I Spy. I pretend to sleep and she stops asking.

I feel like I’ve fallen in a very muddy and smelly puddle. I don’t touch Mummy’s hand when she gives me a sandwich so the dirt won’t get on her too. When we get out of the car to go home I see the sandwich fallen on the floor.

Only at night, when I’m pouring shower gel and water into my ears do I realise that I left Bunny behind.

Ashira Shirali is a high school student from Gurgaon, India. She loves books, music, good food and the colour blue. Her work has been published in Teen Ink and Moledro Magazine.

Visual Art by Paulina Otero

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Rewriting History With Jane Wong

Jane Wong holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former U.S. Fulbright Fellow and Kundiman Fellow. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley, and the Fine Arts Work Center. The recipient of The American Poetry Review’s 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, Wong’s poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, The Volta, Third Coast, and the anthologies Best American Poetry 2015 (Scribner), Best New Poets 2012 (The University of Virginia Press) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press). Her chapbooks include: Dendrochronology (dancing girl press), Kudzu Does Not Stop (Organic Weapon Arts), and Impossible Map (Fact-Simile). She is the author of OVERPOUR (Action Books). Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pacific Lutheran University.

Parallax Editors Emily Clarke and Kalista Puhnaty sat down with Jane Wong to discuss her upcoming projects and her writerly insight.

Q: How would you describe the impact your life has on your poetry and vice versa?

A: That’s a really good question. I think that you can’t really separate them— well, for me, I can’t separate my life and my poetry, I suppose. My own experiences definitely impact what I write about, but I also feel like writing poetry impacts my life, too. I think it’s easier to think one affects the other. I grew up in a restaurant in Jersey with immigrant parents and I tend to reference that a lot. So that’s impacted my poetry, but poetry also impacts my own well-being in a certain way. It’s not necessarily therapy but it calms me down to where I can actually write about the world around me. It helps me answer some big questions in the world, too. But mostly, poetry impacts my life in very surprising ways, sometimes when I least expect it.

Q: Your book, Overpour,  just came out, can you tell us a little about that and if you have any other upcoming projects?

A: Yeah, so, my book did just come out and it took about four years to write (and a couple years for it to be in the process of submission and printing) so to me it feels like a very old project, even though it just came out. I feel weirdly distanced from it. So I have been writing a lot, and I’m headed back to prose in a way. I just wrote this essay that is coming out in an anthology soon. It’s about growing up in a restaurant because that was a huge part of my life and I’ve never written any poems about it. There’s something about writing in prose that’s allowing me to have a more concrete description, so right now, the essay is written as a cheat sheet for other restaurant babies.

Q: In your TED Talk, “Going Toward the Ghost,” you mentioned the phrase, “rewriting history.” Can you tell us more about that and what it means for your writing?

A: Rewriting history is really important to me. There’s that desire to push back, to say, “you’re giving me this kind of version of the story and my responsibility as a poet is to raise up or reimagine the stories of my family that have never been told.” That has to do with major historical events that are totally glossed over in America in particular. I’m writing about the Great Leap Forward, which is this huge famine that happened in China and affected my family, but I didn’t learn about it until I was in college. I wouldn’t have ever known, so I guess that’s how I feel. There is a responsibility in terms of being a poet. I think a poet basically brings forth the stories that are often overlooked, and raises those big questions about who we are and how we’re related to each other in very blunt ways. I think that helps more than just scrolling through the news.

Q: Speaking of the Great Leap Forward, in which tens of millions of people died due to famine,  were you pressured to write about China’s history before you learned about that event?

A: I wasn’t, and it’s funny–those histories are forgotten, and I was looking for them. I was looking for something to tether myself to, because I felt so American; I felt so, in many ways, Chinese-American. Our families are such huge parts of our lives and I didn’t know a large part of their history, so I went looking for it in many ways. That said, I think that since I am an Asian-American writer, there was a pressure placed on me as a younger writer to write about themes that maybe were “expected.” Things like assimilation or mother-daughter relationships. At first I was just really annoyed by it, like, why do people want me to write about this one thing, and now I think of it as something that you have a choice in. And if you choose to do it, then you actually are rewriting history and building a community of people who are maybe addressing the same topic in different ways. I think my worry is that people don’t think it’s being addressed in different ways, but it is.

Q: As an accomplished poet, what advice would you give to young writers?

A: I think for young writers, the biggest thing that I would say is don’t underestimate yourself. You are on par with the writers you read and who are published. I think when you analyze a book in class, your work is at that level, too, and you should read and analyze it with the same exact intensity. Writing is not an easy career choice. You are going to get rejected a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I think for young writers, again, the most important thing is to never underestimate yourself. If someone says no to your work, it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re confident in your work, that’s all that can take you forward. I’m filled sometimes with indignance when someone thinks that I can’t do it or can’t make it happen— it even pushes me further. Even the phrasing of, “I’m an accomplished writer,” is silly to me, because of course I’m confident in my work, but I’m constantly emerging: you should always be a new writer every single day. You haven’t quite gotten to where you want to go. Enjoy the process of always trying to rethink yourself as a writer. I write a lot. I’ll just say that writer’s block doesn’t exist. To me, it doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.

Q: What do you want people to take away from your poetry?

A: What I want them to take away is that we should pay closer attention to the world around us. From the bee that’s dying in the grass, to your grandpa’s history that you never knew about, to Black Lives Matter. Just pay attention to everything; think about how it’s all interconnected. Somebody wrote about my book, it’s the quote on the back of the book, that the poems or the images or the narratives are seemingly disparate, but yet they are somehow interwoven together. I think that’s a takeaway. Nothing exists in a vacuum in this world. We’re all interconnected, and that’s the biggest takeaway. The title of my book is Overpour. It really means that you’re overwhelmed by a lot of things, and it’s okay to be overwhelmed by the fact that everything is interconnected, because it is, but it shouldn’t exist in a cave of sorts. Take a look at the world around us: see how we’re all connected in both beautiful and troubling ways.

Q: What is your writing process like?

A: I think all writers have a different process. For me it’s having a notebook full of images that I just run across during the day. I am not a writer who begins with a blank page because it gives me anxiety, I don’t like having a theme I want to write about. I don’t like having ideas of, “So, I’m going to write this poem about x, y, z.” I have a notebook full of lines I’ve collected across my week, my day, and I’ll grab ten at random. Then I’ll type them up on the page and I’ll play Bridge Builder or Jenga or something like that. I’ll move lines around, and I’ll add lines around them, and guess what? Whatever I was thinking about, my big life question, the theme, gets infused in those lines. It seems like poetry is exactly what I just mentioned; connecting pieces together. So, that’s my process. It sounds kind of silly, but, it’s very tangible. That’s why I don’t have writer’s block. I don’t want to just sit and watch that cursor blink at me on the word doc, I just want to have stuff that I can use. Revision is a big part of my life too, I write ten images down, and a majority of those lines are gonna be cut. I just recycle them into a word doc I call my “compost doc,” so if I’m not using them, they don’t disappear into the world, I recycle them back into the compost and I’ll use them for something else. I believe in the quality of all of my lines, but not in certain poems.

Q: Where do you draw the most inspiration from?

A: Definitely my mom and my family. Mostly because my mom is kind of wacky–she grew up very differently than I did, and she’s just a very strong, powerful woman. I draw a lot of inspiration from power; what happens when you’re powerless or when you have power.  I feel like that would define my mother because she was in an arranged marriage when she was nineteen, and came here, and had to figure out what to do next. I think a lot about her, and I sometimes write in her voice. Sometimes I’m not myself in my poems, and that to me is inspiration; stepping outside of yourself. You are no longer the speaker and that inspires me: risk, trying something new. The natural world inspires me, but I like to redefine it. We’re sitting in such a beautiful space, with the sun filtering through the trees, and I can draw so much inspiration from that. But, that raccoon eating my bag of Doritos in Seattle is also nature, and I want to draw inspiration from that, too. All of the nature in the world is inspirational, not just the kind we immediately think is beautiful.

Watch Jane’s TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjTjhU0gHZA

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The First Real Funeral

You grieved for the skin we found stuck to the sidewalk;

not knowing the garden snakes were only molting,

like boys running towards the water, their elbows popping out of T-shirt sleeves.

 

At nine and a half in dress up clothes on basement steps, we held mass like Priests.

Wearing Father’s ties, you wrote eulogies for everything that tasted like tragedy.

We learned to mourn on Saturday mornings, in bare feet with dirty hands,

planting tulip bulbs upside down in Mother’s garden.

 

I am buttoning my black coat to my chin, standing in the kitchen,

feeling your silence on my skin.

I am at the corner of your grief, and you are

somewhere in the middle of its country,

in the middle of his absence,

small again.

 

At night, I wake up and I am close enough for a minute

to hear the boys, sixteen, and calling to the shore

The night they raced to the water.

I dig my feet into the cold sand and watch them

spitting salt water from their cheeks.

Children with sunburns peeling down their backs.

Sea snakes, shedding their skin.

 

 

 

 

Emma Crockford is currently a sophomore at Rising Tide Charter Public School in Massachusetts. Her interests include goats that look like old men, and dogs that look like their owners. In the summer of 2014, Emma was the recipient of Stonehill College’s advanced studies program for teen’s Creative Writing Award. In 2015, She was chosen to attend the Grubstreet Young Adult Writer’s Fellowship. She is the founder and editor of her high school newspaper. Emma’s work has appeared in The Noisy Island, Teen Ink’s Print Magazine, and Grub Street’s Fellowship Anthology.

Art by Fiona McDonald

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An Interview With Carrie Murphy

Carrie Murphy is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is the author of Fat Daisies and Pretty Tilt.  Her work often discusses subjects like sex and feminism along with capturing the mindset and delirium of a teenage girl through pop culture references and real life experiences. In this interview, Evan Lytle and Danae Devine got to dig deeper into Carrie’s life as a part time doula and writer.

 

Carrie Murphy Q&A

 

Q: Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

 

A: Actually no, in high school I wanted to be an actress and was involved in theater and did a lot of plays. I studied drama in college but I realized it wasn’t my deal–too many big personalities and egos, so I decided to get my major in English. I had always liked writing as a kid and had entered in a lot of contests but didn’t see it as a career for myself until later in college. It always seemed like this cultural thing that writing has to be the only thing you’ve ever wanted, and I don’t discount people for always wanting to be a writer, and I’m still young, but writing isn’t the only thing I want and I don’t want to restrict myself to it.

 

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your occupation as a doula and how that contributes to your writing, if it does at all? But first, what is a Doula?

 

A: Ok, a doula is somebody who is there for pregnant women to give emotional support and physical training and assistance.

 

Q: Did you need to get some kind of certificate to be a certified legal doula?

 

A: Yes, it’s called a DONA, which means Doula Organization of North America, and so far I haven’t used any of my work as a doula for material because it’s such a personal occupation that I would need special permission from my patients to even base a story off an experience we had together. I don’t see myself wanting to use any of the experiences I’ve had as a doula in my poetry now but possibly down the line I’ll have a good handful of characters and situations I can apply from my doula work.

 

Q: Your poetry seems to have a youthful, coming of age sort of vibe.  Can you say what inspired that or where that came from?

A: Well about 5-6 years ago, I had started to notice that there wasn’t a lot of writing about being a girl teenager grappling with the world. I hadn’t seen a lot of poetry about girlhood–besides the gurlesque movement that combines cute and grotesque qualities like tropes about menstrual blood and ripping penises off–so I started to write about being a teen. Things were vibrant and colorful and little things meant so much more, like even if a guy’s leg touched mine. There is a big misconception that “teenagers are dumb,” which isn’t true for all of them. By my twenties I started to mourn the loss of a teenager’s sense of intensity and being overwhelmed.

Q: Do you find living in New Mexico to be beneficial to your writing career? What made you decide you wanted to go to school there? How was the transition from Baltimore to Albuquerque?

 

A: Well, I actually did my first year of college in New York, then a year in Massachusetts, then I finished up for two years at the University of Maryland where I got my BA. My parents were sick of this constant moving, so wherever I was going I had to stay there, and so I went to New Mexico State University where I got my MFA. I fell in love with the desert, the pace of life. It has its own culture. I graduated from there and decided I wanted to live in New Mexico after college. I don’t really write about it that much, maybe later, but New Mexico is my soul’s home. That is my place.

 

Q: What is “Dirt City Collective?”

 

A: Oh, that’s my writing group in Albuquerque, you know, my “crew.” I say writing group because we’re not just a poetry group. We’re full of all different types of writers that are in the group to support each other’s creative ideas and goals. We host readings all over Albuquerque and book releases and other literary events. Just a cool little group, my homies.

 

Q: So why do you like writing?

 

A: It’s just something I do–I would feel weird if i didn’t do it. It’s something that I’m good at and comes easily to me. If you don’t write everyday, then you’re not a writer. I don’t think that we have to live in a box, I think now we have more freedom to create. I think we’re more concerned about liking our job than just having a job to survive.

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Melon Groves

melon groves, boyo. rows of young boys, backs exposed like the inner sliver of a green bean, hacking and picking away in the steaming soil.

 

  1. for real
  2. magnetized by high eyes
  3. treat me my body; a full mountain expanse
  4. drawing arrows down
  5. i am an epitome of forlonging
  6. dullness in my muscles
  7. as a stinging shower
  8. heat on skin
  9. how can you demand control
  10. blossoming oranges
  11. thank you for the way your wet mouth rolls over them
  12. we are the grinning acquaintances on your ascent in hell’s mountains.

 

Segolene Pihut is a senior at Idyllwild Arts and she is majoring in creative writing. She is the poetry editor for Parallax and loves dogs. 

Art by Noah Jones

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melon groves

You jerk you didn’t call me up

You crashed your motorcycle Saturday

Because you were hasty

Your hand wrapped around the handles like crab spines

And this made it easier to weigh the bike into the ground

You didn’t think of me

When Steven and the swedes burned their house down

Was webbed between one handle and the wheel

And your turbine legs churned up the ground.

 

You want to see my body bent like a broken bird? Turn to page 8.

 

For the broken glass that scattered the asphalt and my skin, turn to page 19

 

You are cracked board game spaces

Perfectly symmetrical squares of auctioned land

But do you remember when I tripped and broke your guitar stand?

You got pissed and kicked my dog across the beer stained carpet

Well Sparky didn’t appreciate that and neither did I

And we would both appreciate it if you would come pick up all your shitty paintings

The apartment seemed emptier

When our muscles were trained towards the bedspread, we observed it like this:

 

I think of the layer of skin beneath

Tiny pieces of stone tumbling and spilling from my seams

Clever bug, carpet skinner

Its tassels drawing our wrists to our ankles like hog ties

But I am not yet disassembled; not yet stolen

We write, we bleed, we live, we bleed,

We bleed.

Emily Clarke and Danae Devine are both students at Idyllwild Arts Academy and major in creative writing. Emily is the nonfiction editor of Parallax and enjoys incorporating her native american culture into her writing. Danae is the fiction editor of Parallax, and hopes to make creative writing more noticeable to the public. 

Art by Dawn Jooste

 

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Oracle Thinking

A xenon taste left on my tongue,

An electric scent, a terrifying sound.

The veneers on my smile smell like my cheerios

That I pretend to eat every morning.

 

Oracle oriented thinking laid out on the table,

piě *left*, nà *right*, piě *left*, nà *right*,

I think to myself, an ancient tradition:

I could only hope to understand the mysteries of.

 

I wish my grandmother (man vecsmāta) would sing again

Aijā žūžū floods my auditory memories.

The blue light she’d shine,

just for the safety of our Troopers.

By Joseph Felker

Art by Diana Ryu

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Road Trip

Orchards, syncopated

Flash by in rows, repeatedly.

Coalinga:

Stifling, the scent of false industry

Sweats along the country roads.

A mirage of a farmhand straightens up.

Sprawling road kill. Shreds of tires, unassuming.

First shards of LA, and anticlimactic.

 

Cars congregate-stop and go-

Shadows lengthen, the highway’s hum turns to an unforgiving lull.

You are forced to imagine the fragile ecosystems

Within car-worlds.

A state line is crossed. Street signs change,

And people with them.

Denny’s drive-thru

Because everyone has forgotten napkins.

In the morning: Rolling hills turn to mesas.

Heat rises in waves of invisible striving toward the sky.

Faceless horizons turn to dust.

By Stella Pfahler

Stella Pfahler is a Bay Area native who attends RASOTA for Creative Writing. She is a circus freak, enjoys surfing, and she plays the saxophone. 

Art by Fiona McDonald

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Time for the Grind: Parallax Interviews Poet Katherine Factor

Here Parallax editor Jordan Sternberg interviews IAA’s Poet-in-Residence, Katherine Factor, on writing and editing.

Was there a defining moment in your life when you knew that you wanted to be a poet? If so, what was it?

No, there was no moment because the desire is steadfast, it is an endeavor one is always alive in — just that and what happens when you relentlessly press upon surface. So, the moment didn’t end, you know? But the mentors came in. I had this eccentric, polyester turtleneck wearing, abrasive as if-she-smoked-cigars sixth grade teacher, Jo Ann O’Hern. She not only turned me on to poetry, she demonstrated what championing work at a young age meant! Jo is forever lodged in my memory as she-who-showed-me language is moldable; My later retinue of mentors proved one could turn language into matter, and by proper craft we could churn it into something that truly matters.

Other early influences involve my hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, a town of yesteryear whose trains taught me that thought phrases could be dominated by sound; The poetic line is loud, is rollicking, is breaking landscapes. By grinding friction did those trochaic spondees chug, instilling rhythm in me. Also, being the birthplace of the Carl Sandburg — I inherited the sense that poetry could voice a people.

Early on I was also exposed to a lot of jazz and classical music, pinning in my ear a penchant for compositions that simultaneously sweep and experiment. However, whatever imprints abounded only make it more frustrating that “poet” comes from constant application of that noisy and annoying grindstone.

As a poet, what made you want to start working on the editing side of writing?

A poet is always editing, for poetry happens in a compression chamber. Consistently we edit as we run crazy errands for the economy of language. But the trick is, to turn the self-editor off while turning the composer on — making every note count! To grind is to bear down on letters until they become defined, bringing a lens into focus. The gears must be constantly churning, for the muse flashes so infrequently — better hope she’s greased and that you are poised with precision.

When I founded Wild Idylls Press in 2010, it was clear that student work at Idyllwild Arts was stupendous and deserved to be collected and published, which is an act of dispersal and an act of preservation. With the generous help of Arts Enterprise Laboratory (AEL) grants, we’ve paired with professional poets for mentoring. Students receive feedback on drafts, polishing and doing pre-production with me. Our first project was quite an event! Austin “Boston” (’11) kept crafting his tutorial novella with me — a surreal hero’s journey called The Breakfast. We put it into print and Austin’s reading paired with paintings by visual arts major Delaney Clark. Scenes from the stories formed a backdrop, breakfast was served, balloons were blown up, and Austin brought us on a journey indeed!

Our other chapbooks show the great diversity of style and experiment that poetry offers a young writer, as evident even by the book titles: Taylor Johnson’s (’11) breaking sunsets and Whitney Aviles-Low The Child’s Shadow were mentored long distance with poet Cathy Wagner. Jazz major Kat Dieter, (’12) took photographs to pair with her poems to produce Tidal Acceleration mentored by guest Kazim Ali, hand-binding her books with the help of faculty Erin Latimer (’02). 2012 saw incredible diversity with the publications of Kalinah White’s Guarded Memories about Africa and Peruvian Maria Alvarado’s book WRECKED. And I’m excited to have just published Erin Breen’s chapbook, Misconceptions! Erin collaborated with senior visual arts majors Kendall Ozmun and Delaney Clark, who took turns illustrating the fantastic, fun, and formally risky poems in the collection.

interr|upture,  the online journal I edit with Curtis Perdue, I wanted to be involved with because I believe in what we are publishing — poets like Emily Kendal Frey, Wendy Xu, and Justin Marks, with artists like Dana Olfdeather and Fernando Chamarelli. And I edit because I so enjoy what our peers are doing – journals like diode, jellyfish, sixth finch, H_NGM_N, iO, the Volta, and Drunken Boat — those making best use of the internet canvas. Editing is a prime way of contributing to the vibrant and viral  community that poetry fosters.

Tell us more about inter|rupture.

I met inter|rupture editor Curtis Perdue at Squaw Valley Poetry the summer before the magazine launched. He published two poems of mine in the first issue, poems I thought obstinate to most, but in publishing them, Curtis bestowed permission. Permission through publication is a type of mentoring. That is a hope and motion I desire to give other writers.

Turns out, Curtis could brave a gem of of journal, and we are different readers reaching for the same swell. Also, Anna Pollack is an incredible designer. She even found us this issue’s artist, Denton Crawford. So ill! His work is exactly what I’d expect a poem of mine to look like, gateway reflexing and all.

Additionally, I love the name inter|rupture! It feels like a place I inhabit, with the liminal easily seen and demarcated.

What kind of things do you publish?

Things? What is that? Do you mean, What do you look for in submissions? Well, I decidedly want the poem to pulverize me, grind on my notions with surprise! So please pop off immediately so I can furrow in and hence follow an image that drools and spools. One way to do this? Watch what articles are compression points, joints, hinges, what ones are unnecessary…what verbs are stagnant. Don’t try but taunt syntactical manipulation…sense why are you saying this…know how to fencepost…and so on.

Has your writing evolved over time or do you think you’ve always been consistent?

Yes, consistent in practice and purpose, following a Romantic urge, which is being in the mystery, the uncertainty. But the writing and collecting of language has evolved immensely. Idyllwild has given me the time to exist in a continuous grind, always tempting the augur and wishing an augury. For that I am grateful!

Outside of inter|rupture and Idyllwild Arts, how do you spend your free time?

I spend in practice, deeply immersed in process, the joys of which are heavily influenced by audio. 6,792 days might go by but I am just grinding away: typing keys and chafing the pulleys of my imagination. Currently, I am keeping  calendars, which is a regulatory act, and culling content that deserves to be freed. This can entail any variety of activities: delicately cutting & scanning images; compiling notebooks out of articles that provide a backside for printing fragments; researching, ripping pages & dogearing books t0 better translate their data into a new text; but often I am just absorbing.

On your twitter page, you post a lot about music. Is there any reason or are you just fascinated with music industry facts?

Oh, you want to know? Well, follow me @katfactor to find out!

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