Tag: Annie McIntosh

Vintage Sundress with Daniel Crocker

vintage sundress

The Vintage Sundress Series offers us an opportunity to catch up with writers who published with us in the past. In 2011, Daniel Crocker published Like a Fish with Sundress, followed by The One Where I Ruin Your Childhood in 2015. He took a moment to speak with our Editorial Intern, Annie McIntosh, about how mental illness affects his writing and the future of poetry.

Annie McIntosh:  I’ve often found phrases from pop culture or literature that just echo on a loop for me, sometimes for years—and you’ve talked about this before as well. Are there any poems that you’ve written, or maybe haven’t written yet, that have the same effect for you? What poems or lines still haunt you? 

like a fishDaniel Crocker: Most of my OCD manifests itself through intrusive thoughts, so I understand where you’re coming from! Mostly they are dark thoughts about self-harm, how stupid I am, that one time 20 years ago I said something embarrassing, etc. There was one piece of pop culture that often repeats nonstop in one of these episodes. It’s from The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s when Richie looks into the mirror and says, “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow.”  That’s a usual for me. Luckily, on the medication I’m on now I don’t have a lot of intrusive thoughts—usually only when I’m having high anxiety. Anyway, I did write a poem about a line getting stuck in your head from OCD. It’s “Jazz” from Shit House Rat.

AM: How has using black humor in your poetry and fiction informed your creative process, particularly when you’re drawing from deep places of childhood trauma? 

DC: I just always used humor to cope, and often that humor is dark. Also, people like funny poems. It makes them happy, even if the underlying theme is depressing. I love reading them at poetry readings. Nothing makes me feel happier than when the audience laughs when I want them to laugh. Then, I bring the hammer down on them.

AM: What was it about Sesame Street characters that inspired you to have this dialogue about mental illness in your poetry? 

DC: I thought many of them just lent themselves to bipolar symptoms. Snuffy is depression. Big Bird is mania. Cookie Monster is addiction. It just seemed like a natural connection for me. I think the first one I wrote was about Oscar the Grouch—that one is in Like a Fish. When I was working on Shit House Rat, I think I wrote the Snuffy poem first and after that everything else just fell into place.

AM: In your essay “Mania Makes Me A Better Poet,” you discuss the balancing act of mania/medication affecting your creativity as a poet. Do you have any advice for others in finding that balance? Does poetry ever trump being healthy? 

theonewhereDC: Sometimes poetry trumps being happy. Not as often as it used to, but sometimes. For the most part, however, I try to stay stable. I mean I have a family and a job. It’s good to stay as sane as possible. Though, I do want to clarify only a mildish mania (hypomania) is fun and creative. Full-blown mania is scary as hell.

AM: Where do you see poetry moving forward? Are there any poets we should really be paying attention to right now?   

DC: I think it’s already moved forward just in my lifetime. I started in the ’90s small press poetry boom. The old cut and paste magazines. They were great. That was our time, though. Now, it’s time for new poets. I mean, I could have never imagined when I was 20 that there would be Instagram poets, YouTube poets, etc. I think it’s great. It is bringing a lot of attention to poetry in general. I also like that poetry is much more inclusive than it used to be—though it still has a way to go. When I was starting out, I was one of the few non-straight (I’m bi) poets I knew of.

Poets I love: John Dorsey, Rebecca Schumejda, Laura Kasishke, Erin Elizabeth Smith, David Taylor, Mike James, Tim Siebles, Nate Graziano, Chase Dimock, my wife Margaret, and there’s so many that I just can’t name them all.

AM: What are some future projects you’re working on right now?

DC: I have a new book coming out called Sick. It’s a split book with me and John Dorsey. I should have my first fiction collection in many years coming soon. Probably my last fiction collection too. After that, I might work on a memoir. I don’t know. I might just be done.

13254447_1581128562184653_8497943936354604041_nDaniel Crocker’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Hobart, Big Muddy, New World Writing, Stirring, Juked, The Chiron Review, The Mas Tequila Review and over 100 others. His books include Like a Fish (full length) and The One Where I Ruin Your Childhood (e-chap with thousands of downloads) both from Sundress Publications. Green Bean Press published several of his books in the ’90s and early 2000s. These include People Everyday and Other Poems, Long Live the 2 of Spades, the novel The Cornstalk Man, and the short story collection Do Not Look Directly Into Me. He has also published several chapbooks through various presses. His newest full length collection of poetry, Shit House Rat, was published by Spartan Press in September of 2017. Stubborn Mule Press published Leadwood: New and Selected Poems—1998-2018 in October 2018. He was the first winner of the Gerald Locklin Prize in poetry. He is the editor of The Cape Rock (Southeast Missouri State University) and the co-editor of Trailer Park Quarterly. He’s also the host of the podcast, Sanesplaining, about poetry, mental illness, and nerd stuff.

Annie McIntosh is an English major at Franklin College, where she writes about gender-queer studies in science fiction. She is the Lead Poetry Editor of Brave Voices Magazine and a Fiction Editorial Intern for Juxtaprose Magazine. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Okay Donkey, Theta Wave, Digital Americana Magazine, carte blanche, and others. She recently received her first Pushcart Prize nomination and was named one of Indiana’s Best Emerging Poets for 2018. Currently searching for a publication home for her first chapbook, she lives in Indianapolis with her partner and their dog, Jackson.

 

Project Bookshelf: Annie McIntosh

First, start with your favorites on the top shelf—the necessities, the classics, the underwear drawer of your book collection, the books that had to exist for anything you read to come after, the first titles your eyes search for from across the room.

You feel a little guilty giving preferential treatment, but you reserve only the best bookshelf real estate for that beautiful, hardcover edition of Jane Eyre (not to be confused with the torn-cover, broken-binding paperback edition with yellowed pages and that lovely, dusty smell that hides in your bedside drawer to protect more of its old pages from falling out).

Next to Charlotte, you decide she wouldn’t get along with that high fantasy series and so you go back and forth, from left to right, taking care to match imagined author personalities and egos. Octavia Butler and Maya Angelou and Jane Austen would have had some tea to spill with each other, right?

There’s the copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men with the library sticker you’re still ashamed of, even after paying the past-due fine and replacement fee when you thought you’d lost it, but the feeling somehow fits in with all those footnotes.

You style Ulysses and Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars haphazardly, but intentionally, so any guests to your apartment know exactly what you’re reading right now. Through the years, books here and there will always move down to lower shelves, either fallen from grace or just outgrown: Junot Diaz, Voltaire, Extended Universe Star Wars novels from the 1990s. But the core authors of the top shelf — the ones that took little pieces of who you are and reshaped them—always keep their place.

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The second shelf gets messy. There are nonfiction and collections from classes that you just can’t part with because you might, one day, maybe, maybe need your annotations again.

Organization doesn’t matter here as much as just finding the room. But you’re out of room on the shelf. You’ve accidentally collected 9 copies of Wuthering Heights and three French-English dictionaries. So now you start looking for alternative spaces, anywhere you can stack. Like the back of your futon. Like your windowsill. Like the stacks next to the bed: books to-be-read, authors to-be-met, characters to become. Every shelf and stack like photo albums of who you were, who you are, who you might be.

 

 

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Annie McIntosh is an English major at Franklin College, where she writes about gender-queer studies in science fiction. She is the Lead Poetry Editor of Brave Voices Magazine and a Fiction Editorial Intern for Juxtaprose Magazine. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Okay Donkey, Theta Wave, Digital Americana Magazine, carte blanche, and others. She recently received her first Pushcart Prize nomination and was named one of Indiana’s Best Emerging Poets for 2018. Currently searching for a publication home for her first chapbook, she lives in Indianapolis with her partner and their dog, Jackson.