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Isolated and Deeply Enmeshed: A Conversation with Sarah Heady

In 2013 poet Sarah Heady went out to southeastern Nebraska for a writing residency at Art Farm, a program started by a woodworker who’d grown up in that farmhouse. While introducing her to the place, he invited Heady to poke around the attic, which was filled with turn-of-the-20th century magazines and newspapers. It was July on the prairie, and it was sweltering. “So I went up there and spent a long afternoon sweating and looking through these old magazines from the teens and twenties,” Heady says.

Mostly, she told me, she was drawn to the stacks of a magazine called Comfort, “which was like a Ladies’ Home Journal for rural women.”

Touted as “the key to happiness and success in over a million and a quarter homes,”[1] Comfort was a mail-order magazine published from 1888 to 1942 by Gannet & Morris out of Augusta, Maine. Primarily a means to advertise Gannet’s Giant Oxien, a snake oil cure-all, Comfort increased its circulation ten-fold in the first six years of publication, making it the first magazine in America to surpass one million subscribers.

The pages of the magazine were filled with articles and ads about domestic life, in some ways much like those that fill magazines marketed to women today: advice columns, beauty tips, and recipes, with a tinge of early-internet-esque information sharing. “People would write in with questions about what was wrong with their chickens or share recipes for food or fertilizer for the kitchen garden,” Heady says. More surprising for today’s readers might be the ads for things like pessaries, mechanical devices used to keep one’s uterus in place to recover after a prolapse, most common after a woman has had multiple vaginal births.

Heady left Art Farm with photographs of many pages of Comfort magazine and other similar periodicals. When she got home, she started experimenting with constructing poems from this found language and, eventually, many other primary and secondary sources about the settlement of the Great Plains. These experiments, interspersed with other lyric pieces, eventually became her second book, Comfort.

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Those Objects of Desire: A Conversation with Rachelle Toarmino on Objectification, Persona & the Internet

Rachelle Toarmino Weird Sister

That Ex, writer and editor Rachelle Toarmino’s debut poetry collection, came out last summer with Big Lucks Books. God, does this book vibe. It vibes way down in the bones of every relationship you’ve ever had, of every love you’ve lost or are afraid to lose. Like the Libra the author is, That Ex is all cool sophistication and casual glamour on the surface while bubbling up with eager tenderness and brutal honesty underneath. Toarmino gives herself and her reader permission to revel in the love poem while never letting anyone forget that emotional apocalypse is around the corner, that there’s something exploitative in documenting your love, that there’s nothing we crave more than total devastation.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was reading think pieces about anticipatory grief, a term that continues to be thrown around during this period of universal loss. That Ex speaks to that kind of fearful breath-holding: we know something disastrous is going to happen but must push on with living anyway. The speaker’s relationship status is constantly in flux from poem to poem. In “I Wanted to Ask You,” the speaker is in a relationship. In “I Said Okay,” the speaker admits “what doesn’t kill you / makes you mad for the rest of your life” and as a reader, one is left on unsteady ground, looking apprehensively into the future, knowing what has been lost and wondering what else there is to lose. Toarmino references the poems’ speaker as “that ex,” but the speaker could also be the you (or multiple yous) comprising the addressees of these love poems, hate poems, and I-couldn’t-care-less-about-you poems. Either way, even the title of this collection casts every use of the future and past tenses into turmoil: we know this will end, but when? Who is that ex? Will I be next?

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Gion Davis: What makes a person “that ex”? Is there any way for a woman/femme to process her grief or anticipatory grief about a relationship without becoming “that ex,” or is it impossible to escape the patriarchal, misogynistic and contradictory expectations of being a perfect woman even after a relationship has ended?

Rachelle Toarmino: We all know that ex—the one who can’t let go. I wanted the title to nod to a gossipy recognition—we’re expected to know what someone means when they qualify a noun with that—as so much of the book is about having fun with the term’s reclamation. What’s less chill-girl than writing a whole book about your breakups?

I’m also interested in the grammar of that and how it communicates a subject making an object out of something. That is the direction of an outstretched finger—no word in the English language does more pointing than that. But then a magic happens when my speaker, after finding herself on the receiving end of that looking, turns to the reader and yells “Look!” She resists objectification by insisting on the significance of her pain—its power to be interesting, even. Continue reading

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Our Songs Are Our Trauma Prizes: An Interview with eCOCOBOYS

eCOCOBOYS feminist band

Photo by by Michelle LoBianco (@brooklynelitist)

I had the pleasure of seeing eCOCOBOYS perform at Alphaville this August. They were energetic and raw, with a lo-fi, Riot Grrrl-esque vibe, and told powerful stories throughout their set—all while wearing coordinating cowboy hats. The band and I caught up over email, and they answered a few questions about what drives them, and what’s coming next!

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Matt L Roar: Tell us how the band formed, who plays what, and how long it’s been around.

Maia: Tara plays bass and is our lead singer, I play guitar and sing some harmonies mostly, Griffin also plays guitar and is starting to sing now (!), and Tasha plays the drums. We all started playing together in September 2018.

Tara: I met Maia and Griffin my freshman year of college and I talked to them about always wanting to start a band, so two years later we finally started the band. We would just sit in Maia’s apartment writing our song to our talented drummer, the metronome app. Then finally we were like, we have to get a drummer, so our friend Gabi posted on a musicians Facebook page and Tasha responded. We played together once and it just all came together.  Continue reading

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Two Cities, Fairy Tales, & a Marathon Sprint: An Interview with Muriel Leung

Muriel Leung, poet.

Photo by Sarah Gzemski.

Muriel Leung is an Asian American poet who defies convention and form, who adds whimsy to everyday objects and exposes the darkness behind them, and who pushes the boundaries between the real and the normal and the hyperbolic and absurd in her work. Her first collection, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), toys with the magical yet apocalyptic and the romantic yet grotesque; it is both a strut through a flowery meadow and a devastating walk through the ruins of a ravaged city. I joined Leung in her adorable Echo Park, Los Angeles apartment for this conversation in racial politics, Asian American poetics, labor, and grief.

MV: What was the process behind writing Bone Confetti? As a fairly young poet, how did you balance writing and coming-of-age in your 20s?

ML: I wrote the bulk of Bone Confetti during my MFA, which I started in 2013. I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana from Queens, New York, which is where I grew up. I had the great fortune of having a wealth of different experiences, to work with different people and communities beforeLouisiana. It was such a big move and shift—from going to a chaotic city that constantly displaces people and is very difficult to live in—to then move to Louisiana where the pace of life is different. Baton Rouge has a different set of racial politics, where being an Asian woman there meant something entirely different than in NY.

I also began to understand the history of resilience in Louisiana, which has seen so much social, political, and environmental turmoil. I saw how much this was embedded in the fabric of its history that if there is a storm coming, people know they have to cook all the meat in their freezer because the power might go out, so they just throw a big barbecue. The attitude of survival in Baton Rouge is very different from NYC, which sometimes doesn’t know what to do with itself other than facilitate high productivity. I think both city’s spirits contributed to Bone Confetti, which was a very important transitional point in my life—a whole wealth of experience and language. Continue reading

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Beauty Doesn’t Seem to Go Anywhere: An Interview with Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon

There’s a sort of guilty pleasure that comes with reading a book illustrated on every page. Even more delicious is an illustrated book filled with exposed affairs, connected relationships, and literal-drawn-out lines of influence exposing our favorite artists from the decades gone by. When these elements come together in The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence, the result is the most electric read with which to start the new year.

I had the chance to ask writer Catherine Lacey and illustrator (and Weird Sister contributor!) Forsyth Harmon more about their new book, their favorite tidbits of gossip, and more:

Kati Heng: I know you had to cut down and leave out sooo much to include so many of these relationships in your book. If you were to write and illustrate a single book about the intermingling affairs of one couple or group (since it seems like every didn’t just settle for one partner!), who would you focus on and why?

Catherine Lacey: Anaïs Nin was a big inspiration for the early research and looking back, she was also one of the most prolific characters in the book as far as friendships, affairs and alliances go. Her diaries and letters reveal a sort of fervency she had about the people in her life and she left troves of writing about her relationships.

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Love Doesn’t Save Anyone from Themselves: An Interview with Angeli Cabal

Angeli Cabal

I first encountered Angeli Cabal’s work as the co-editor-in-chief of {m}aganda Magazine. My staff and I were blown away by the pieces she submitted–poems critiquing colonialism, Western beauty standards, and the figure of the Filipino woman. I was stunned to see that in addition to being a poet, Cabal is also a visual artist and multi-genre writer who creates sleek, intricate, highly clever illustrations and incredibly heart-wrenching creative essays. In addition, Cabal has been a devoted fanfiction author since age 12 and has garnered an impressive online readership on Tumblr. In 2013, Cabal self-published her first chapbook, True Love and Other Myths, which sold out after the first printing. She went on to publish a second chapbook, The Anatomy of Closed Doors, joining the ranks of  poets and writers who use social media as their vehicle. Cabal’s work is raw, evocative, hands-on, and accessible. She joined me for a conversation where we discussed fanfiction, our immigrant parents, and which three fictional characters she would invite for a session of afternoon tea.

MV: I’m not sure if you’ve read this recent Buzzfeed article about women and fanfiction, but they argue that fanfiction is a central genre for women writers because it allows us to create narratives that are not available in everyday life. Why fanfiction? Why should we keep writing and reading fanfiction? What power does this form of creation give us?

AC: It’s been 14 years since I started writing fanfiction and I’ve never grown out of it. Fanfiction is so much more accessible for me because of world building. In fanfiction, you already have this world created for you so there’s less pressure and you can focus on the narratives you want to tell, particularly characters you want to transform and flesh out. When you have these characters presented to you and you see all the paths and avenues the author could have taken to make them more human, these are awesome opportunities to take. It is also such a supportive community, I can’t even read some of the stuff I wrote back then because it was so horrible but I get reviews that say, “Hey, this is really good, keep it up.” That was so important for me as a young writer because no one else knew I was writing fanfiction. It really encouraged me and is one of the reasons why I still write fanfiction today. Continue reading

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Identity is a Fickle Thing: An Interview with Marisa Silver

A child is born in an unknown country and two things are immediately noticed: The girl, named Pavla by her parents, is both beautiful and her growth is absolutely stunted. So begins Marisa Silver’s magical new novel, Little Nothing, which traces Pavla’s transformations from a young girl with dwarfism to a beautiful non-dwarf teenager, and finally, into a wolf. The story bursts with magic, with the longing to discover identity, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a forbidden love between Pavla the wolf and the man who protects her. I spoke to author Silver about this new novel, so read on to reveal more of the magic:

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Kati Heng: Is there a metaphor hiding inside Pavla’s transformations from dwarf to beauty to wolf?

Marisa Silver: When I wrote the book, I avoided thinking about what it meant. I know that’s probably an odd thing to say, but if I decide in advance what a novel is supposed to be about, what its big themes are, then the resulting work will not find its way towards surprise. I just put my head down and write characters and try to make their actions and behaviors true for them during any given emotional moment or situation.

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A Mix of a Sassy Teenager and a Crotchety Old Lady: An Interview with Hadley Freeman

One of the most enjoyable, personal, and feminist books I’ve read this summer had to be Hadley Freeman’s 80s film exploration Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don’t Learn Them From Movies Any More). Not only is this a book that examines in detail some of the greatest films of (dare I say?) all-time such as The Princess Bride, Coming to America, Pretty in Pink, and Ghostbusters; the real draw of the collection is Freeman herself. Reading this book is like having a way cooler older sister watching the film right alongside you, pointing out the lessons you would have overlooked while simply laughing at the classic John Hughes wit. It’s hard to finish the book without feeling like Freeman is that cool upperclassmen in school that for some inexplicable reason, has taken you under her wing as friend, and a girl like me couldn’t waste the chance to extend that feeling into an interview. Read on to see some of the questions I couldn’t help but ask her about the book, feminists in film, and of course, Ghostbusters:

Kati Heng: As I read the book, I kept thinking that the subtitle very easily could have been “What 80s Movies Taught Us About Feminism and Why We Don’t Learn That Stuff from Movies Anymore,” or something catchier. Did you ever consider releasing this book in a more upfront feminist version?
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Talking with Cheena Marie Lo About A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters

A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (Commune Editions, 2016) by Cheena Marie Lo is a book of poetry that challenges what “poetry” can be. This text “[attends] to the sorts of mutual aid and possibility that appear in moments of state failure. As such it maps long and complicated equations, moving from Katrina to the prisoners at Riker’s Island as they await Sandy. It understands disaster as a collective system, the state as precarious, and community as necessary” (Commune Editions, 2016). While Lo’s original preoccupation concerned headlines of the past, in light of recent events in Orlando, I feel like this text, unfortunately, continues to be relevant today.

so what about the instinct to survive.

so what about birds and burying beetles.

so what about support and what about struggle.

so what about ants and bees and termites.

so what about the field upon which tender feelings develop
even amidst otherwise most cruel animals.

so what about migration. breeding. autumn.

so what about the numberless lakes of the russian and siberian steppes
and what about aquatic birds, all living in perfect peace—

Geraldine KimMany sections in A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters begin with some sort of carrier word or phrase that is repeated throughout that same section (e.g., “Because Another Tropical Storm is Looming,” with the word “because” or “Poor Marks for His Handling of Federal Response” with the word “poor”). Can you talk a bit about the function of this repetition in regards to the overall project/subject matter?

Cheena Marie Lo: Repetition is something that I use a lot in my writing because it reflects my thought process when I’m trying to figure something out. I have a tendency to relentlessly circle around things in my head. Some of these “carrier” words or phrases were part of the procedures I used when writing this– I lifted instances of “because” or “poor” or other “carriers” in the texts that I was working with. Reducing the materials to these words and phrases that surrounded them illuminated patterns and narratives in the source material. My intention with the repetition was to build and expand these narratives out.

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Defining a Clit Lit Tradition: A Conversation with Elizabeth Hall

Elizabeth Hall

Elizabeth Hall (Via)

We need to start saying “clitoris” more. As Peggy Orenstein’s research in her new book Girls and Sex illustrates, we don’t focus enough in American society on female pleasure. We talk about consent, but not what comes after consent: patience, creativity, communication, orgasms, reciprocity, etc. Cis male pleasure is still prioritized. (Ann Friedman points out, in The Cut, that this isn’t just a young girl problem—it affects women of all ages.) Elizabeth Hall’s nonfiction book, I Have Devoted My Life To The Clitoris, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press, is an unflinching contribution toward normalizing female pleasure and educating others on the full complexity of the clitoris. I wish I had read this book so much earlier in my life; it’s one of those ideas that seems so simple (a book about the clitoris!) that it’s unbelievable how long it has taken to be born into existence.

Elizabeth Hall uses bullet points to string together bits of information: historical facts, scientific research, female and male literary excerpts on the clit, and occasional first-person anecdotes. This is a slim book, easy to read in one day, though clearly the type of book you return to constantly or lend out to friends. Hall’s writing is smart, engaging, personal, political, and willing to take risks. Hall doesn’t hold back. I Have Devoted My Life To The Clitoris will give you courage and make you proud to have this complex, tiny nubbin of history, politics, and pleasure between your legs.  Continue reading

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