Tag: meet our new intern

Meet Our New Intern: Rachel Mekdeci

Author of this blog, Rachel, wearing a pink mask and a purple bandana with one raised fist and the other hand painted red while carrying a banner. Behind her, there is a sign that says 'Free Palestine.'

The first time I was ever a spiteful feminist was at the ripe age of 6, rushing to the water fountain after a taxing round of tag. Like all school girls are wont to do, we had been screaming with delight. A teacher rounded the corner and stuck up her nose at me. She pointed a finger at my eyes and said “Young ladies must be seen and not heard.” Reader, I have no explanation for what left my mouth next. I do not know how that little girl knew just what to say in that moment. All I know is that I said the next thing that came to my head: “Thank God I’m not a lady.”

It’s a funny story, one that I love to tell to unwilling houseguests. When a new friend finally asks “Rachel, what radicalized you?”, I tell them it was a game of tag. That isn’t true. What radicalized me was a history class. It was learning about dowries. It was watching movies. It was that black hole that opened in my stomach in 2015 when the newspaper headlines said there was oil miles off of the beach in front of my home. The tag story is a sweeter pill to swallow.

It was my very own radicalization that led to my hunger for knowledge. Once I could connect the dots, that star of capitalism and the constellation of its damage, I had to know more. I turned to the greats, hooks and Lorde and Butler and Spillers, and prayed over their words. After discovering my own queerness in my childhood, these essays soothed aching wounds yet ripped open some new. I knew I wanted to fix this ugly system, but I didn’t know how. It took many years of soul-searching and wrong choices to discover the best way for me to heal this world. I landed on a simple philosophy. I must learn in order to share.

Knowledge is power, yes, but because you then have the power to disseminate it. I must pour over these words, fiction and fact, so I can carry it forward. This is how I have ended up where I am now: determined senior in English Lit fighting tooth and nail to get accepted to a grad school where I can study queer literature (with an intersectional lens!) to my heart’s content. I dream of ‘Dr.’ attached to my last name, a comfortable office, and classrooms full of minds that need some learning. That is the legacy I want to leave.

I know this is not the usual thing one discusses when asked to introduce themselves, but I could not find a way around it. This, all of this, is who I am. I am a thinker before I am anything else, and I cannot help but to think of the state of the world. If I did nothing, I don’t think I could survive. This is how I do something, as little or huge of a change it might leave.

You’ve now met one of the new interns, but not really. I have written a great deal about one singular facet of my life. I am pleased to report that I am, in fact, a well-rounded individual with many hobbies, favorite foods, and a great deal of dislikes. That is not important. One thing about me is that I view every single moment as an opportunity to learn something new. I wanted this post to help somebody learn. I hope that you have learned one thing above all else:

Don’t do nothing. Please do something.

Rachel Mekdeci (she/her) is a foul-mouthed, mixed-race, Caribbean-immigrant Taurus with a bleeding heart passionate for the arts. As an undergraduate Literature student at the University of Tennessee, she takes every opportunity to write about queer literature and intersectional feminism. Her number one mission in life is to further the reach of the arts and maybe own a house?  

Meet Our New Intern: Claire Melanie Svec

A Latina woman sits on a rock, wearing a purple dress and holding a moon in her hands. In the background, there is the shadow of a tree and city lights.

Literature was not, in fact, my first love. It was music. I have been singing for as long as I can remember. In second grade, I proudly proclaimed to my class that my future career would be “the winner of American Idol!” Although I loved singing, I didn’t start writing until I was fifteen. I met a friend, another fifteen-year-old and a self-taught pianist. He produced melodies from his mind and asked me to write the words and sing. The first few songs were juvenile, but what would you expect from a couple of drama kids who loved Marina and the Diamonds and Melanie Martinez? I soon realized that my love for music was inextricably tied to my need to feel heard, to use my voice.

In high school, I began to seriously write and explore forms other than lyrics in my creative writing class. I remember how our teacher pounded this mantra into us: Be original. He disliked tired phrases more than illogical metaphors, which taught me to push the limits of my writing. I remember once describing the roof of a building, covered in fall leaves, as a crusted lasagna with parmesan cheese sprinkles. The class period was just before lunch, so I suppose that was the influence. Alongside creative writing, I fell in love with AP Psychology, and the scientific structures of the human mind.

After graduating, I moved from my small town in California’s Wine Country to Southern California for college. Alongside developmental childhood and abnormal psychology courses, I took poetry classes, expanding on what I had learned and observed through songwriting. For this reason, poetry has always felt safe to me. The phonetics, the rhyming—I had that down. But poetry, being ancient, experimental, and crossing so many boundaries, spoke to me, even if half the time I couldn’t fully understand why.

Eventually, I transitioned into fiction. This felt not only difficult, but humiliating, painful, and like downright psychological torture. We’ve all been there, sitting for hours pouring your guts out on a page, then realizing it’s too wordy, difficult to follow, and does not convey its themes well. I was lucky. I had fantastic professors who read my work, provided detailed notes, and gave me exercises to dissect the essence of my writing, pull it apart, and stitch it back up. My experience is far from that of a typical young writer—my first serious attempt at writing a short story won a local fiction competition, a feat which blossomed into a commitment to keep pursuing this passion.

Throughout these forms of writing, my central love for voice persisted. I want to be heard, as does everyone else, and art gives us that opportunity to speak to the heart. Music can captivate you with a catchy tune then make you cry during the bridge. Poetry can touch you in strange ways and lead you down its premeditated path. Literature masks reality within a story, often revealing ugly truths, stirring something from within.

Understanding the psychology of humans—our society, power structures, and culture—further fuels my writing. Capturing these nuances in diverse stories from diverse individuals gives us the power to produce empathy and, hopefully, justice for those our systems have failed.

It is an incredible opportunity to learn through Sundress Publications: to elevate bright, diverse voices, and to share their stories with the public. I hope the small role I play can help expose hidden truths, make us see what we try to ignore, and inspire human connection.

Claire Melanie Svec holds a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine. She is a writer, poet, and singer-songwriter whose work focuses on mental health, morality, and feminism. She has won the first-place prize in fiction for The Ear Literary Magazine‘s Linda Purdy Memorial Prize. In addition to her editorial internship with Sundress Publications, she is currently serving as a fiction reader for West Trade Review.

Meet Our New Intern: SINDUS Kim

A Korean person stands, head turned to the right, so that their face is mostly covered by shoulder-length black hair. They wear a shoulder bag, white pants, and a black shirt that reads MARRIAGE FOR ALL in red punk font. There are trees, grass, and other greenery in the background.

My first work of presentable quality was written in 10th grade, fresh after a devastating breakup with my Discord girlfriend of six months, and published on a well-known fanfiction website in a fever dream of heartache. 

I had explicitly tagged my piece as “Breakup Self-Insert,” because I recognized halfway through the draft that this was a thinly veiled projection of my own angst. A personalized hell of Hurt/No Comfort. Pieces taken from the still-burning house fire that was our mutually blocked DMs, then slapped onto an innocent Google Doc—fourteen thousand words written & proofread in the span of three days. This piece was the final nail in the coffin, my own special closure, and writing it was perhaps the most painful experience in my life: second-place only to admitting on my “Meet Our New Intern” post that I actively wrote fanfiction. 

Be it dissociation or healing, soon after I published the fic, I got over the girl. But I’ll never forget: I woke up the morning after that first chapter and saw that my notifications had exploded overnight. Comments sung praise after praise about a “fresh take on the character” and “a beautiful interpretation.” Every few hours, I’d receive some variation of “I don’t know how you wrote him so correctly!,” and think to myself: thanks, I just pretended he was my ex-girlfriend. I remember being confused, that nobody recognized the deception. Then, one day, the obvious hit me. 

If you squint hard enough, real characters look just like real people. 

Like characters, a real person exists within an ambiguous mishmash of ideals, morality, and history, to fluctuating yet paradoxically static degrees of importance, that influence their decision in any number of ways. These facets layer and collide to form the loose concept we call “self,” whether anthropocentric or otherwise. Similarly, like people, a real character is malleable—so we like to observe this self as it experiences a “thing.” Authors put an extraordinary amount of care into ensuring this happens. Consider everything the self is at this present moment, and why it is that way. Now, here’s a thing. Will the self change? Will it stay the same? Should it? Why, or why not? Or, my favorite—doggone with the character. Will you, the self reading this thing, change as a result of having read it? At the center of literature, there is a push-pull of human reaction; the process of evoking these reactions is what I call art. 

Between real things, the line dividing them is only a matter of semantics. The pravus opus of my career blended a teen lesbian situationship, an adult gay situationship, & every real thing’s real history together until I had something fresh. In the wake of a four-way projection, all of us imposed onto each other, I was left with a sadomasochistic mess of a story—in which every breathtaking reaction was brand spankin’ new. My readers were so compelled by my characters working out their abandonment issues over Spotify playlist descriptions that they could, graciously, overlook the fact that I clearly didn’t know what a semicolon was. 

All this to say: since then, I’ve loved real characters & people everywhere, and I’m elated to continue doing so as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications. I hope this was obvious from the piece, but I got back together with the girl. Please don’t go looking for my fic—I might have to quit my internship if you find it.

SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.

Meet Our New Intern: Ines Pinto

Brunette woman smiling, wearing a mid-length dress with stripes of orange and white with pink sneakers and round sunglasses. The background includes three highly ornate golden columns and the facade of a small palace with golden windows and pale green and pink walls.

Growing up, my mother would repeat time and time again the same mantra: “Books are our best friends.” I used to spend hours touching the books she kept on the lower shelves, so it made sense that she wanted me to believe that. It would be far more frustrating having to deal with a toddler who destroyed the books she collected than simply transforming me into a fellow bookworm. So, this introduction will very much be a representation of who I am through the books I read.

My mother would take me to bookstores and let me pick whatever books caught my attention. At ten, I developed a weird obsession with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a thirst for tragedy and love stories. I devoured the pages of Margaret George’s The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia, and Carolly Erickson’s The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette. I was a historical fiction devotee, who only cared about stories focused on tragic women. But to my peers, I was just a weird kid.

During a particularly unforgiving hot summer, I had nothing new to read, so I wandered through my mother’s bookshelves. The Lisbon Book Fair was not until two weeks from then, and I was extremely bored and unwilling to venture into the outside world before nightfall. That’s how I came to meet Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. While their stories mainly starred men, I couldn’t help but feel embraced by the melancholy and dark humor present in all of them. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky became a favorite by the time I acquired the more age-appropriate Hunger Games trilogy—which I adored!

Reading transported me to different realities, allowing me to live in the shoes of others. Writing, on the other end, was where I found the comfort of transforming all of my wildest ideas into something palpable. I found myself writing about worlds I made up in my head and characters who struggled with the same things as me. In a way, it helped me comprehend the issues I was facing, taking away a lot of the anxiety of starting high school, university and, later, moving abroad.

Whenever I reminisce over my past lives, I tend to attach books to them. The first time I kissed a boy, I was in the middle of the first Twilight book. When I inevitably got my heart broken, I found myself re-reading chapters of Anna Karenina until I became sick of the book. The day I had a meltdown over my degree choice, I wallowed my way up to a mall bookstore and found The Bird’s Nest—this would kickstart an addiction to Shirley Jackson’s writing and a shrine to her work that has since been taken down due to my continuously moving to different places. The day I started to plan my move to Berlin from Lisbon, I had just finished The Master & Margarita—my favorite book of all time and completely unrelated to the moving decision as far as I’m aware.

Books gave me the gift of empathy. I understood how my lived reality was shaped by many factors I could not control—my skin tone, my passport, my education. As a firm believer in the human right to dignity, and that we should all be equal under the law, I was fuelled to use my research skills to improve the world. Working for Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO, was extremely fulfilling due to my intrinsic need to help others. Contributing to Sundress Publication’s mission aligns this with my love for literature and the belief that books can make us better people.

Ines Pinto (she/her) is from a small beach town near Lisbon, Portugal. She decided to leave those shores behind as she moved around Europe, eventually completing her master’s degree in International Politics. She dreams of a fairer world, so she worked in the non-profit sector to call for the end of corruption and dirty money flows before moving to New York to start a brand new adventure. She is also the proud mother of a spoiled cat named Louis, a certified multilingual Eurovision fan, and a reader with an appreciation for all genres.

Meet Our New Intern: Nic Job

Nic, who is white with short-cropped purple hair, is wearing a navy jumpsuit with sparkly straps and hugging a dark brown horse. They are smiling.

As a child, everyone thought I would be the homebody of my siblings. I existed almost exclusively with my nose in a book or competing in some sort of local sporting event. The worst punishment for childhood mischief that I could imagine was losing reading privileges. (Often, what I was getting in trouble for was reading—when I ought to have been sleeping.) I preferred climbing trees and hanging out with the horses to social commitments and struggled to fit in with my peers. When I heard on the radio that my favorite author had passed away, I was so distraught that my father turned around and took me back home that day instead of taking me to school.

It came as a shock, then, when I spent eighth grade obsessing over scholarship applications for a boarding high school 3,000 miles away from home. California to New Hampshire at fourteen. I had never been further east than Billings, Montana. I became rather gifted at sleeping on airplanes.

That began a habit of travel, exploration, and collecting experiences. A summer program in Virginia. A summer working in Montana. Books were always my escape, but I learned to appreciate this incredible world we inhabit as well. My undergraduate years took me to Maryland, England, Czechia, back to California, and Montana again. Graduate school to Illinois. I realized just last week that my cat turns three this 4th of July, and has already moved with me four times, across multiple state lines. No different countries for him though (yet).

A dream that has stayed with me through all of this is to someday provide the little kid sitting behind the classroom at recess with a book half as big as they are in their lap the same solace I found—and still find—in the written word. The dream has morphed, reshaped, softened, and solidified over the years, but has never felt so real and attainable as in the last two years. Achieving my MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing was so much more than getting a degree. It was validation, was a step in the door, was a glorious capitulation and commitment to my craft. I feel like I am standing on a precipice of opportunity now. No longer chasing it, but arrived, teetering, on the edge.

These next few months, my internship here at Sundress Publications will be accompanied by applying to PhD programs and residencies, and editing the novel I wrote for my thesis.

Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.

Meet Our New Intern: Addie Dodge

A white woman with short blonde hair is standing in front of a brick wall looking at the camera.

I have always loved stories. As a child, weekends were spent at the library amassing impossibly large stacks of books. I had a tendency for sneaking off from the children’s section to the literature aisles, tucking works like Frankenstein and To Kill a Mockingbird into the middle of my pile to try to make my selections a little less suspicious. Usually, I got away with it. 

My love for reading translated into a love for writing as well. Poetry came first, as I attended readings and workshops throughout high school, and longer-form fiction followed, leading me to where I am now, finishing the final edits of my first novel manuscript while also getting ready to begin work on a second project.

I entered college fully intent on pursuing a major in creative writing. A voracious reader and writer, I began my coursework with a great deal of excitement and urgency to learn. However, I found myself questioning if this was the right path for me as I also began taking classes in psychology and falling in love with the field. At the same time, I was hired as an editor for my college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and was finding great purpose and passion in working with writers and other editors to bring pieces to full realization. I was excited about and impassioned by my work as an editor, while also wrestling with the question of whether I was going to continue pursuing writing or delve further into psychology. Now, in my senior year of college, I’ve decided to do both. 

For me, working as an editor is a direct extension of my writing practice. This work has given me the space to consider writing from a different angle, and to work with other writers in a holistic and generative process, something I am excited to continue in my work with Sundress Publications. 

While it may seem like a strange combination, working as a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter while also pursuing editorial work, I believe that my work in the field of psychology is a different translation of what I do as an editor and writer. As I move further along the path to becoming a therapist, it’s clear to me that much of this clinical work is listening to and assisting in realizing individuals’ stories in order to help them process what has happened to them. 

On the other side of that coin, I see my work in editing as another way of bringing stories to the surface through supporting writers in the development and propulsion of their stories. I deeply believe in the inherent healing that is available in telling stories, and in those stories being heard and understood. As such, I believe that the development and distribution of published works is crucial to our societal well-being. It is a great privilege for me to work with people and their stories in these two separate, but inextricable modalities. 

Addie Dodge is a student at Colorado College pursuing a BA in Psychology with a Minor in English. She is a writer currently working as an editor for her college’s literary magazine, Cipher, and is also a clinical intern at a domestic violence shelter in Colorado. She fills her free time with hiking in the mountains and lots of reading. 

Meet Our New Intern: Hedaya Hasan

A brown woman is posing to the side in a greenhouse with a tall green plant. She is wearing a black hijab, varsity jacket, blue jeans, and red handbag.

My first passion was reading. I did all the things keen readers do, though “keen” would not even begin to describe my addiction. Visits to the library became a weekly ritual. I grew hard muscles in my small arms from the heavy bags of books I carried home with me. I read when I wasn’t allowed to; late-night reading earned me more than one scolding and my teachers complained that I kept my nose to my books instead of paying attention. I read myself into deep headaches, completely blocking out the world around me before lifting myself to do something trivial like eat. I outgrew my supposed reading level and was moved to an advanced reading group at school before I outgrew that as well. None of my classmates could believe me when I announced that I had finished reading the Harry Potter series after starting it just two or three weeks earlier. The smartest girl in class was still on the fourth book after laboring through the series for two months which, according to grade-schooler logic, made me the new smartest girl.

I was officially a child prodigy. The kind of child prodigy that excels at one thing more that most people do at a young age but isn’t encouraged enough or given the opportunities or just lacks the verve necessary to carry that genius into adulthood. The older I got, the less impressed people were by my reading compulsion. The class prodigy label was slipping as I began to stray into teacher’s pet and know-it-all territory. I was no longer special. Not only that, but I was insignificantly average. In a desperate attempt to be praised and included, I slowly turned my eyes to illustration. It wasn’t easy to stray away from my books. In fact, I might have read more than ever during the transition period, though most of what I consumed became about painting or drawing. Being artistic or creative, in any form, is a universally likable trait and is apparently more impressive than being well-read. Any artist can tell you that hearing “I can’t even draw a stick figure” is an inevitable and endlessly repetitive phrase thrown around by the ungifted, unartistic peasants that crowd the human population. Not one single person thought I would pursue anything but illustration.

As it turns out, most things that are born with the intention of serving others stay headed down that route. When the time came for college applications, I very boldly applied to one art school. There was no back up plan for me, which I would come to sorely regret. The summer before I was due to start, I panicked. I had been accepted with a full scholarship and had really enjoyed the tours and orientations. One hot summer day, I opened my bedroom window to take a break from the stale air conditioning. Suddenly, sitting there with my chin on the sill, I felt the weight of my future float down and settle on my shoulders like a leaf drifts off a dry, red tree in autumn. I felt it blanket me and grow exponentially heavier. I was suffocating very quickly. To make a long story short, I do not have what it takes to be an artist and lack the wealthy background to be an artist regardless of the former fact. I had planned to study art at university for almost a decade, and that plan crashed before I could understand that it was crumbling. It was the only plan I made, which led me directly to a nervous breakdown. I begged my mother to let me take a gap year (she refused). I switched my major three times before school started and ended up suffering through a semester of film, which taught me many lessons and the importance of being around your own people. Whatever “my own people” may be, they are undoubtedly not film students.

The decision to switch to an English major was made purely by the fact that I had recently become reinterested in reading, this time with a focus on Palestinian literature. It was easy to begin reading again when the stories I read were sincerely important to me. I discovered that I enjoyed and had some talent in writing in a required course. In another course, I discovered that I enjoyed editing even more. It was almost like déjà vu, the way my Cinderella foot fell perfectly into the glass slipper of editing like it belonged to me. I’m more than grateful to have this opportunity as an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. Reading has created the parts of me that I love most, and I’m honored to be a part of uplifting more stories that shape people into their own slippers.

Hedaya Hasan is a Palestinian writer and designer based in Chicago.

Meet Our New Intern: Heather Domenicis

Writer/editor Heather Domenicis speaks into a microphone at Niagara Bar. She has brown hair, is wearing a blue denim dress with white sneakers, and is holding a sheet of paper.

A lot of writers start these intros by saying they’ve been passionate about writing forever, penning stories since they were little. And I did author one serialized ghost story in the sixth grade, passing new chapters scrawled in my black-and-white composition notebook off to fellow classmates and even my teacher (who had no idea I was writing most of it under my desk during science and math.) But writing was never really a part of my life again until college.

I had room for an elective to put towards my English major and jumped at the chance to take Intro to Creative Writing. I started writing mediocre short stories about girls with missing fathers they still loved, abandoning mothers they never knew, and rollercoaster romantic relationships. I gave my leading ladies cool names with “main-character energy,” like Lou, Leila, Lyra, and Jo. And many of them smoked cigarettes, though I had never touched nicotine. I wanted them to be edgier. 

But it was all a fraud. Every one of my characters could have easily been named Heather, letting myself bleed onto the page more honestly. My stories got decent feedback, but nothing remarkable. Then, I wrote an essay about my father—who, at that point, I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years—and it was selected for publication in my college’s literary magazine. Several of my professors read it and told me that while my fiction was “good,” my non-fiction was better; I needed to tell my story. 

I switched gears entirely, writing openly about a past I’d pushed deep, deep down to make room for the “normal” self I was trying to build at my elite undergraduate institution. I began writing about being born in a jail to a meth-addicted mother, spending years as the subject of an intense custody battle, visiting my dad in prison, and missing him all the time. 

The next summer, I interned in criminal court in Manhattan because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Court was riveting, but most days I sat impatiently in those pew-like benches, eager to later splay out on a blanket in Washington Square Park with my notebook and a pen. I longed to be like Eileen Myles in Chelsea Girls or Patti Smith in Just Kids: cool, edgy, and pursuing an artistic dream. That summer, I decided that I wanted to be a writer and live in New York.

After graduating in 2019, I landed a sales job at an early-stage tech startup, reckoning it would be a stable way to sustain myself in my dream city. I traded Washington Square Park for Washington Heights.  

A couple of years, a few small publications, and several Catapult (RIP) workshops later, I ended up at The New School, where I continued writing my own story and completed my MFA in Creative Non-Fiction in 2023. Still working at the tech startup, I’m finishing my memoir manuscript in my free time. Having recently served as a Non-Fiction Editor at LIT Magazine, I’ve fallen in love with the editorial side of the writing world too, and am so grateful for this opportunity to keep growing my editorial skillset at Sundress Publications.

Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor moonlighting at a tech startup. She holds an MFA from The New School in Creative Non-Fiction and her words appear in Hobart, JAKE, and [sub]liminal. Born in a jail, she is writing a memoir about all that comes with that. She sometimes tweets @heatherlynnd11.

Meet Our New Intern Jillian A. Fantin

Surrounded by blurred-out houses, fences, and grass, the author is shown from the waist up in a black compression tank with a gold septum ring and a gold nostril hoop. Their right arm contains a number of black and grey tattoos visible, including fuschia flowers, an American Traditional snake, and an envelope with a heart seal. They have a medium-brown, wavy mullet, dark thick eyebrows, and are looking straight at the camera with a blank stare.

According to my family, my toddler self regularly restated the same full sentence from Disney’s Dumbo (1941) when expressing excitement: “You said it, we rolled ‘em in the aisles!” This line is impossibly obscure, and it took my parents weeks to discover the source of my incessant parroting. Oddly enough, this two-year-old in their parents’ student flat in Sheffield predicted a life not unlike the shrouded circus clown stripping away their last performance of the night and reveling in the response of a crowd.

My tendency towards being a little court jester, eager mimic, and linguistic alchemist emerged at quite an early age. I adored reading, especially the part when I slipped into the different word-worlds of poetry. In second grade, I memorized and performed A.A. Milne’s “Market Square” for my class’s Mother’s Day celebration, complete with four stuffed rabbits that smelled of leftover Easter chocolate. When my mother laughed, something clicked. I had chosen that poem because it made me laugh to read, particularly because of its repeated “silly-sounding” words like “Tuppence,” “rabbit,” “mackerel,” and especially the sonically-charged “nuffin’.” Who wouldn’t love rolling all those sounds around in their mouth? When tired of memorization and recitation, I turned to books, any books that I could find, for a glimpse into the way different people and their different worlds played with language. From a very worn anthology of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and the “Looking Back” sections of every American Girl historical chapter book to the translation of Ancient Egyptian myths my father brought back from his workplace, I devoured worlds and joined them as their excitable spectator. My favourite words, though, remained the silly ones: ones with so many syllables you tripped over them before you reached the last letter, ones that made you think of something completely opposite of its assigned meaning. I adored words, and would copy them down in shaky cursive over and over until even the lines seemed to take on their own sound.

My early love of silly words, especially the way sounds felt in and escaped from the body, became a fascination with gibberish, which morphed with a love of performance—specifically the artistic presentation of my own body—and the creation and implementation of rituals for the purposes of artistic creation. Acting became one of the many outlets of my urgent need to express, as did regular reverent listening sessions of David Bowie, Meat Loaf, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. Ultimately, though, neither theatre nor music satiated my interests in the creative explication of language, and I left for university truly believing I would only ever have the chance to use language as a tool of clear communication and literary analysis. However, what hegemonic economic and educational values attempted to squash, writers and scholars like Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Elise Houcek, Mark Sanders, Roy Scranton, Zoe Darsee, and more than I can ever name, fostered. Through their generous advice, workshopping, research, and insight, I found a platform—namely, poetry—for taking gibberish seriously. As a poet in my MFA cohort, I explored sonic expression in written text, the dissolution and restructuring of words in shape and definition, and the way systems of power privilege certain words and grammatical structures over others, among other fascinating aspects of performativity, identity, and expression. Honestly, Milne’s “Market Square” and those chocolate bunnies feel closer to me now more than ever (and honestly, I might do some erasure-ekphrasis to try and find a similar moment sometime soon!).

Though I’m not exactly a John Lennon fan, I do admit he sang the truth in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I never imagined I would share CAConrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and Adrian Matejka’s Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain with the students attending Holy Cross College in Westville Correctional Facility. I still cannot believe that I led discussions on Kim Hyesoon, Eileen Myles, and Akwaeke Emezi in self-designed Intro to Creative Writing and Intro to Poetry classes at the University of Notre Dame, and I certainly never dreamed that I would be taken seriously in my love of the silly, the stupid, the gibberish. Now, I perform the personas found within my poetry manuscripts, including a sentient necktie, a transmasc seahorse collective, and a parody of Platonic dialogue based off the relationality between the friends of the Jackass franchise. There is no masking to be found in my poetic expression regardless of these various beings speaking and moving through my body. Rather, there is clownery: a profound act, a display of my whole body and its ability to generate an authentic form of energy through intentional performativity.

Regardless of when I’m actively performing poetry or not, I think I’m still like a court jester, tiptoeing the line of potentiality often forced between poetry and humor. Poetry and clownery, for me, work hand in hand, and my serious drive in both of these fields necessarily intersects to negate any powers that claim the authority to hierarchize words, sounds, and linguistic expression. The mothers, dogs, and clowns, as Bowie sings in “Life On Mars?”, have no need for such hegemony. Perhaps that’s the reason I cofounded RENESME LITERARY, a Twitter-based literary project based in the themes of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and, more broadly, in what our journal calls “abominations”—that is, any work of literary art that strays from and even defies mainstream publishing ideals, as well as the works pushed out of traditional venues in favor of maintaining the quiet of a status quo. I am excited to be part of Sundress Publications to uphold these exact values and support the great work of all writers, especially marginalized and oppressed writers.

Writing about myself is never going to get any easier, and this is no different. Nevertheless, my excitement to be part of Sundress Publications as an Editorial Intern this year eclipses those feelings of inadequacy. But then again, I think of with these words from Meat Loaf’s “Bad Attitude”: “Behind every man who has somethin’ to say / There’s a boy who had nothin’ to prove.” And I also remember the opening line of Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” that I’ve carried with me every day for years, especially for those moments when I think of negating my artistic worth due to my love of explicating gibberish and nonsense: “A poem is a gesture towards home.” A poem is a gesture towards home, and each writer looks towards that home through their writing, whether they know that home yet or not. However, I’m finding that home slowly but surely, and I look forward to continuing that journey through service to Sundress.

An ending manifesto: I am a clown, I am a poet, I am a poet clown. I’ll have them rolling in the aisles, and I’ll applaud in the aisles for them the same night.

Jillian A. Fantin (they/them) is a poet with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow, and the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of RENESME LITERARY. Jillian received BAs in English and Political Science with an emphasis in Political Theory from a small university in Birmingham, Alabama, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry and a graduate minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in American Journal of Poetry, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.

Meet Our New Intern: Lyra Thomas

I chose my name, Lyra, like I chose this career path. When I heard it, it just felt right. Besides, I’ve always loved the idea of being named after stars and constellations. I’m a black, nonbinary poet from St Louis, and believe me, I never shut up about it. I’ve been writing since I was eight, although my writing started with silly comedy sketches (I grew up watching All That and The Amanda Show in the early 2000s, so there’s no shocker there), it evolved into something more graceful as I grew older and experienced more than fleeting childhood bliss. Between my parents’ divorce and school bullies, I had writing material for years on end. Naturally, in school we read Shakespeare, Beowulf, and the rest of the dead white man works, but beyond those assignments in the depths of the 2010s, I found myself infatuated with the uprising contemporary poetry scene. After school, I submerged myself in spoken word YouTube with Button Poetry’s channel, as well as speakeasynyc’s channel with gems like Phil Kaye’s original reading of “Repetition.” Investing in poetry and hearing about the individual worlds of my favorite poets helped pass the time on the drives between mom and dad’s house, and helped me put my own feelings into better words, even if only for my own ears. 

Grade school through high school, I never really fit in, so my journals heard all the secrets I was too scared to tell anyone else. I often turned diary entries into poems, teaching myself how meter and syntax worked in a way that reads and looks good on the page. Part of the reason I didn’t fit in was because in the majority of STEM studies, I was subpar. However, when it came to English, I was the best in class. I grew to anticipate my peers’ faces when I would read my work in creative writing class—finally awe and not a smirk. I took the only creative writing class McCluer North High School offered my junior year, and I think that’s what sealed the deal for me when it came to choosing it as my college major. The class instructor, Miss Hobin, was often the only reason I managed to get out of bed back then. She was also the first instructor who told me I had genuine talent as a writer, which always stuck with me, even after she passed away in a motorcycle accident. I’ve always known whenever I release my first collection of poems, it will be dedicated to her. 

Naturally, I went on to major in creative writing, but that’s not where life took me after graduating. Instead, I landed in a comfy Human Resources role that ended up propelling me into a three-year career in various big name corporations in the St Louis area. By 24, I was making about as much as my mom did at the peak of her educational career. Despite the financial comfort, the independence, and the beautiful apartment, I knew I wasn’t happy. I knew my life was incomplete without writing, and the burnout from the 8-5 life overpowered every urge in my soul to write. After being laid off and let go and every other wording of that phrase enough times, I decided I was tired of settling for a career I never even felt appreciated in—a field that never truly made me happy. I decided, why not apply to an MFA program? COVID-19 seemed to be making the world fall apart anyway, so that’s exactly what I did. In the Fall of 2021, I came back to my alma mater, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, for an MFA in Poetry.

Now, ten years after that first creative writing class, and two years since leaving what I now call “corporate hell,” poetry is my lifeline. I’ve never once regretted going back to school. I’ve re-dedicated my life to my craft and what I love the most, and I’m incredibly proud of myself for doing so instead of settling for the comfortable path with its too-short weekends and too-long days. Some say they can’t believe I gave it all up for college town pizza parlors and late nights writing through tears. I say I certainly took the road less traveled by.

Lyra Thomas is a black nonbinary poet from the St Louis area, currently residing in Carbondale, IL for their MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University, which is also their alma mater. They received their BA in Creative Writing in 2018. Lyra enjoys reading/writing poetry, curating Spotify playlists, and cuddling with their cats Max and Silver.