Tag: aylli cortez

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Luke Sutherland

We Call Upon the Author to Explain

Book cover of Distance Sequence by Luke Sutherland

Following the release of his debut nonfiction chapbook, Distance Sequence, Luke Sutherland spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about his creative process and influences. In this book, the narrator unearths his past to dwell on the persistence of trans love across physical and temporal barriers. Through hybrid forms and innovative craft decisions, Luke’s prose offers raw and earnest reflections on intimacy, ecology, the body, and the task of remembering.

Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2024.

Aylli Cortez: While distance becomes a barrier in the literal world, the narrator returns to their partner B through nonlinear vignettes. What made you decide to move back and forth in time rather than stick to a chronological sequence of events?

Luke Sutherland: Traditional chronology never comes to me easily. I find it generally not up to the task of translating memories in any real way. One of the push-and-pull struggles of memoir is contending with the fact that you’re narrativizing your life. Making a story of our personal experiences is a very human impulse; almost everyone does it, whether they write it down or not. There’s a fiction to this, and when we turn that self-narrative outward, letting others share in it, it can be very uncomfortable for both reader and writer. Non-linearity is a way of poking at the necessary artifice of memoir, while also an attempt to depict memory in the slippery way we actually experience it. 

AC: One of my favorite sections in the book takes us to Olympic National Park, where the narrator and B share intimate moments in nature. As the narrator detailed their lush environment and tender exchanges with B, my attention was drawn to their sense of awareness—what they observe around them, and how they ponder their visibility as a transgender man. Where does the book take place, and what about this setting spurs you to reflect on the body? How does nature shape your writing?

LS: The book spans the east and west coast, but the meat of it happens in the Olympic peninsula. All of my work plays with ecology. I’m always trying to get at the social construction of the ‘natural,’ both ecologically and morally. It’s a violent construction; we see this in everything from Zionist ecofascism (trying to make the “empty” desert bloom) to the criminalization of transition. Attempting to label certain expressions of human life as unnatural is deeply fascistic. On a practical level, the park is in Distance Sequence because that is where the events took place, but the decision to make it so central was strategic. 

AC: Themes of queer love and longing crystallize in the narrator’s relationship with B. I noticed their interactions didn’t end when B moved away, and the narrator’s feelings didn’t fade when other loves entered the picture. This portrayal of “dykelove” and “transsexual love” as a generous rather than finite resource was so refreshing to me, and I liked how it emphasized community. Would you be willing to share your influences? I’d be curious to learn about the people and/or art that informed your notions of love.

LS: I love your phrasing of love as a generous resource. The most important lessons I’ve learned have come from my friends and lovers, especially other transsexuals, and especially disabled kinksters, who know radical care better than most. To that end: the documentary BloodSisters and Davey Davis’ newsletter are both indispensable. Southern Comfort and By Hook or By Crook also come to mind. Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrillio is one of the best novels about love, period. And it’s impossible for me to talk about my influences without mentioning The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

AC: There are several parts where the narrator describes having a visceral reaction upon recalling painful events. When it came to narrating these moments, how did you manage your proximity to the text? The book also includes pictures of what appear to be journal entries. When did you start writing about these events?

LS: I started writing the book almost immediately after the events took place. I’ve never been one to keep a diary or document my life in a straightforward way. When I got home from seeing B, though, I couldn’t stop writing about it. The incessantness is what tipped me off to the fact that I was writing a book, not a private diary. I had recently seen Minari and read an interview with Lee Isaac Chung about how the arc of the film revealed itself when he made a list of eighty memories of his childhood—really granular, sensorial stuff. I thought: can I do that? Get down eighty moments in as much detail as possible? That’s how it started. 

The most painful memories in Distance are ones my body has held onto without the permission of my consciousness. The game then, so to speak, was to try to remember something on purpose, to bleed on purpose, rather than allowing whatever alchemic equation that usually dissolves some experiences and preserves others to take over. 

AC: The book is divided into twelve sections, each one focusing on a single or series of memories. Three sections share a recurring title: Memorywork. How did the “work” of writing these sections differ from the rest of the book?

LS: The ‘Memorywork’ triptych is me speaking directly to B. There is so much art about falling in love, and yet it is easy to forget what a difficult thing it can be. It is ecstatic, but pleasure and ecstasy aren’t always synonyms. Explaining your life to a new lover is in a way an act of dialogic memoir. The ‘work’ of memorywork isn’t labor in the capitalist sense, but it is effortful. I wrote the triptych the way I wished I could tell it to B but which distance prevented me from doing. Thinking of it that way, they are probably the most intimate chapters in the book, where the writer/reader veil is stretched thinnest.

AC: I’m drawn to the images that are scattered throughout the book: handwritten notes, travel photos, maps of hiking trails, illustrations of flora… I love how they surround and “hug” the prose, positioning the text among visual mementos. What urged you to include these in the book? What was the thought process behind their arrangement?

LS: It just made sense to me! Similar to non-linearity being true to the actual experience of remembering, including images made the text feel fuller. All relationships create ephemera, a mutual archive of sorts, but much of the relationship in the book played out through ephemera; it wasn’t incidental flotsam, but a driving force. Sharing it directly captured an intimacy that my text alone couldn’t. It’s also playful. What is an image, after all? When you’re looking at a scan of a handwritten note, is that image, or is that text? The two categories eventually start collapsing. 

AC: The fluidity of your prose, your playfulness with form, was really immersive for me as a reader. Did these formal choices come naturally to you or were they the outcome of revisions? Do they stretch or sit comfortably with your practice of writing creative nonfiction?

LS: I always like fucking with form, but for this project in particular, that was the case from the beginning. I’m agnostic of genre, and the idea that creative nonfiction should ‘sit’ on the page in a certain way strikes me as very boring. Prose writers do themselves a disservice when they don’t consider the options that verse and experimental text rendering offers them. Why are we so stiff with our lines? A paragraph can be such a dull container. 

So, this wasn’t a stretch for me, but the formal influence of Camelia Berry Grass’ Hall of Waters can’t be overstated. That book changed my writing, and Camelia is one of the most interesting essayists there is. 

AC: Is this sequence finished? Do you envision your next project/s as extensions of this book, or as conversant with it?

LS: I’ve made a concerted effort to not think about whether the sequence of the book is over. When I started to feel myself dissociate from the present moment with B—thinking things like, how can I write about this later, what’s the thematic thread here?—that was my sign to back off. We have to actually experience the present if we have any hope of writing about it authentically later. 

Most of my time lately has been focused on a novel about a trans punk band who start to experience bodily mutations. The novel and Distance Sequence are connected in that I am perennially interested in unconventional narrative structure, the mutability of bodies, trans intimacy, and the illusion of a distinct natural world. But it also feels like a bit of a relief to get back to full-throated fiction—finally I can stop thinking about myself for a while.

Distance Sequence is available from Neon Hemlock Press

Luke Sutherland

Luke Sutherland is a writer, librarian, and publisher on Piscataway lands, so-called Washington D.C. His debut chapbook Distance Sequence won the 2023 OutWrite Chapbook Contest and was published by Neon Hemlock Press. He was a finalist for the Larry Neal Writers’ Award, the Black Warrior Review Flash Contest, and the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. He is an interviews editor at smoke + mold and co-founder of the DC-area trans small press Lilac Peril. You can find him online as @lukejsuth. Photo credit to Farrah Skeiky.

Aylli Cortez

Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.

Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Author of Nerve

Following the release of her craft chapbook, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Sarah Fawn Montgomery spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about recognizing alternatives to traditional creative writing instruction. With incisive clarity, Sarah presents a multitude of possibilities for accessible spaces and work that empowers rather than depletes.

Nerve is part of Sundress Publications’s 2025 Craft Chaps Series.

Aylli Cortez: From discussing the need to unlearn ableist workshop advice, you then provide alternative ways for readers to develop their practice, design their space, and discover forms that truly work for them. What made you decide to organize the book into these sections?

Sarah Fawn Montgomery: I began with unlearning ableist advice because so many disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers are encouraged to believe they are somehow failing because they struggle with the writing instruction they have received. Because so many of us are quick to blame ourselves due to internalized ableism, it’s important to dismantle ableist education, pointing out the ways that this kind of instruction not only hinders our work, but hurts our brains and bodies. 

I wanted to point out ways traditional writing workshops are at odds with the disabled experience, as well as common microaggressions disabled writers encounter as advice, because this is the starting ground for many who have endured abuse in the workshop and are looking for ways to remake their practice entirely. This starting point then allowed me to discuss other important and often overlooked aspects of being a disabled writer. Offering ways to design disabled writing spaces, discover disabled forms and structures, and develop strategies for the practical business of being a writer was essential because many disabled writers operate entirely differently than our abled colleagues, yet this is never discussed in writing workshops or common craft advice.

AC: Not only is this book dedicated to crip kin, it also demonstrates what it means to be crip kin—to, as an author, write with your disabled readers and their varied experiences or symptoms in mind. What were your goals while writing for this audience?

SFM: So often disability is ignored or presented as a burden to accommodate. Most craft books and writing workshops assume a universality of experience, as if every writer utilizes creativity using the same methods, education a one-size-fits-all experience. I’m someone who spent many years in traditional writing workshops, pursuing an MFA then a PhD, and eventually achieving tenure as a creative writing professor. While I was able to write using the conventional methods I was taught, they never seemed authentic to my creativity, and, as I write about in Nerve, they came at great physical and mental costs.

This is a shared experience for many disabled writers, so I wanted to center our experiences in this book, framing them not as deficits, but as abundant sources of inspiration and innovation. This is a book that explores the disabled experience but does not suggest that this experience is universal. Instead, I try to provide many ways of writing the disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent experience, recognizing that what works for one writer may not work for another, and may not even work for the same writer as their bodies and minds shift with symptoms, abilities, and time. Instead, this is a book about modeling disabled perspectives, offering a variety of ways of being and writing in the world, and encouraging writers to listen to their bodies and minds rather than conventional wisdom. Disabled writers are incredibly innovative—we have to be to survive in an ableist world!—and so I wanted this book to center this innovation so that we might learn to trust our intuition and find the ways that foster our success rather than trying to force myself to follow ableist methods do not actually serve us. 

AC: The book’s generative prompts are direct and specific, inviting readers to write from their own lives and resist non-inclusive expectations. Why did you place these prompts at the end of the book?

SFM: Disabled writers experience radical shifts in our abilities on a day-to-day, sometimes moment-to-moment basis, so it was important to structure this book in a way that responded to this reality. Some writers may have the ability to engage with craft advice, while others may be looking for quick prompts to get them started. By sectioning them out this way, disabled writers can reflect on their abilities in the moment and quickly locate what will best serve them.

Similarly, not every writer engages with writing exercises the same way. For example, as an autistic writer, I have always struggled with direct prompts. I prefer a larger list of possibilities to choose from rather than a direct exercise, which can feel prescriptive, and often renders me unable to write. That’s why I model so many possibilities in the book, offering writers many different ways to do something so that they can choose what works for them and hopefully feel unencumbered by the performance of an exercise, as well as providing a list of generative prompts for writers who prefer direct exercises. Many of these prompts come directly from the advice in the book but are worded in a way that is more specific and offer readers and writers a clear task, while still providing the freedom and flexibility to make it their own.

AC: A recurring tip that resonated with me was the act of reframing rest and reflection as integral parts of the writing process, especially as one’s body and sense of time shift. Could you tell us more about the intention behind these themes of replenishment and regulation as opposed to healing?

SFM: Writing and publishing seem to constantly reinforce productivity, but this is exhausting for anyone for whom writing is not a full-time job, let alone disabled people, who are busy instead with the task of living. Capitalistic hustle culture maintains that products are more important than people, and craft books are no exception, focusing on the writing rather than the writer. But we can’t write well if we don’t live well, so I wanted to reframe rest and reflection as part of the writing process because these are essential for writers yet largely absent from conversations around craft.

In addition, it was important for me to write about replenishment and regulation rather than recovery, because for many of us, recovery simply isn’t an option. I can’t recover from my various disabilities, and while I would certainly like to be in less chronic pain, I would not choose to recover from my neurodivergence even if I could. My disabilities and my neurodivergence are essential parts of my being, essential ways that I process the world, essential components of my creative abilities. Rest and reflection are important strategies that allow us to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that can sustain us. We spend enough time and energy trying to live in an ableist world, so by considering replenishment and regulation as necessary to both disabled and writing life, we can start to consider writing as an act of agency rather than capitalistic production. Narrative is an act of empowerment, but we can’t be empowered if we are hurting. Rest and reflection are essential because we deserve to exist in our bodies and brains in ways that respond to pain and encourage pleasure. 

AC: In response to academic and publishing settings that enforce formal constraints on an already constrained group, what formal choices did you have the most fun with while putting this book together?

SFM: As someone who has spent many years in academic and publishing settings, I took a lot of pleasure in dismantling many of the constraints I was taught and have been required to follow throughout my career. First, the length of this book is a direct pushback against the argument that a longer work is inherently more valuable than a shorter one, that hybridity or chapbooks do not hold as much intellectual weight as full-length books. I wanted the length of this book to surprise readers and ask them to reconsider their beliefs about what constitutes a good craft book, what counts as good craft advice, and who gets to decide.

Similarly, this book puts the reader firmly in the role of expert. Most craft books situate the author and various writers included throughout the text as the experts readers must follow if they want to succeed, but disabled people are experts of our experiences, and so we should be taking advice from our own bodies and brains rather than forcing ourselves to follow the ableist advice of others, no matter their résumés. This book is full of reminders to unlearn various ableist advice you may have learned in school in favor of your own intuition and innovation.

Nerve is available to download for free from Sundress Publications

Sarah Fawn Montgomery in a forest.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice. She is also the author of Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.

Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.

Interview with Mahreen Sohail, Author of An Expansive Place

Following the release of her craft chapbook, An Expansive Place, Mahreen Sohail spoke with Sundress intern Aylli Cortez about how her daily preoccupations morph into creative ones. By questioning the dilemma to “stay or stray” from motifs in her work, Mahreen dwells on the process of expanding an idea organically—turning writing roadblocks into pools of generative reflection.

Through personal anecdotes, close readings, and provocative prompts, this book invites writers to embrace new chapters in their lives and approach long-budding interests from multiple angles. Here, Mahreen shows us that placing oneself on the page can bring relief rather than restriction.

An Expansive Place is part of Sundress Publications’s 2025 Craft Chaps Series.

Aylli Cortez: At the beginning of the book, you mentioned a rejection that drew your attention to “what feels like the one story [you’re] grappling with”—the subject of women as daughters first. Would you mind sharing the significance of this subject in your writing?

Mahreen Sohail: I’m drawn to this topic because it’s an entry point to many other relationships and modes of being – daughters as carers of parents, as siblings, as women who hold the family together, who learn from their mothers, or who want to be the opposite of their mothers. I’m also interested in the place daughters hold in the family they’re born into because how they function in that family and in that relationship continues to influence them in the future and how and who they form ties with. In general, I want to understand how women accomplish the act of moving away, growing up and away from the family they grew up in. Many women in Pakistan move from their parent’s house to their in-laws house. They go, almost overnight, from being daughters to daughters-in-law. Isn’t that crazy? It’s always interesting to me that women can do this apparently so seamlessly, but I think there is a level of sacrifice of the self involved. So, you can explore the topic of daughters from different angles, and these angles always reveal something new about women and their agency in society. 

AC: In citing Amy Hempel’s two types of narrative pressure, you opened the conversation to the need to hide vis-a-vis the need to tell. How did this mantra shape or echo across your process of assembling this book?

MS: I don’t really think about the types of narrative pressure when I’m generating a draft, that only comes later during the revision process. So much of the original draft depends on instinct and just feeling your way through a narrative. But once I could see the shape of the craft chapbook, I saw that its arc could include my pregnancy, the postpartum period, my concerns about my writing and how these orbited Ernaux’s work. I thought about that in the revision process, how what I was saying in the chapbook about myself could be underscored but what I had learned from Ernaux. And of course you can’t say all of the things, all at once. So much of my time postpartum was about parsing through what I was experiencing slowly and I wanted the essay to read that way too. And a lot of the credit also goes to Sohini Basak who edited the chapbook, and is just such an amazing, astute reader. She did a great job asking the right questions, telling me what needed to be expanded, or what could be cut. 

AC: Place is a recurring preoccupation. Some locations seem to come with weight (e.g., the country you resided in while writing Pakistani characters) while others relieve weight (e.g., the pool you swam in postpartum). As you navigated pregnancy and giving birth, how did your perception of moving to a more expansive place in your writing change? Was “getting there” a heavy concern that remained throughout?

MS: What a great question. I think the answer to this changes depending on the stage of my life. When I wrote this essay, I had just given birth a few months ago, and I think I felt like I was in a sort of a limbo. The pool, and swimming in general, helped me come back to my body and remember what my body used to be capable of pre-baby. I was concerned back then about ‘coming back to myself,’ returning to who I used to be (in body and in mind) and maybe subconsciously I thought of myself as a place. Now I have a toddler who I love more and more everyday, and I’m realising that there’s no returning to who I used to be. The version of me that existed pre-baby has changed, and as a result my writing has changed. Place doesn’t feel like a heavy concern anymore, which is maybe why it doesn’t feel so restrictive anymore. In caring less, I may have moved to a more expansive place? I don’t know. 

AC: The book includes excerpts from two of Annie Ernaux’s works, which you mentioned reading methodically. In articulating your craft concerns, what made it necessary to include your close reading/s of her books?

MS: I read her start to finish and in order while I was pregnant. It felt transformative for my mind, during a time when my body was going through a transformation too. I talk a little bit about this in the essay, but I think Ernaux helped me see that I could have a baby, and continue to be an artist. I’m always amazed to read an artist and a writer’s body of work because it shows me that the arc of a writer’s vision can be long and short at the same time. They can care about the same thing over the course of their life and yet write books that are so wonderfully different. The Years and A Woman’s Story are very different books but are also both about women, about motherhood, and daughterhood, and culture and the family you come from. I thought my experience of reading her would stand well next to that current moment of my life as a writer, a soon-to-mother, and then a mother. 

AC: Each anecdote is followed by a writing prompt that reflects on the experience of being rejected, of running into impediments that stall writing. What do these prompts encourage readers to discover?

MS: I hope the prompts will encourage writers to pause and think about their process. What makes them slow down? What is a hang-up that is actually an interest in disguise? What are the things they are interested in and do these appear regularly in their writing? How can they examine these in different ways? The last prompt is my favorite. I love swimming because it doesn’t allow you to do anything but be present for your body. You can’t listen to music, you can’t talk, you can’t podcast anything. I am never as fully present as I am when I’m in the water, and I think being fully present for at least some part of the day is a prerequisite to being an artist. Lynne Steger Strong has this wonderful newsletter where she talks about how “Attention, is not something you do, but something in which you participate.” Swimming helps me do that. It helps me be attentive to just myself and my surroundings (the pool). I hope these prompts help readers become more attuned to themselves, and the topics that make their writing theirs. 

An Expansive Place is available to download for free from Sundress Publications

Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Pushcart Prize Anthology (XLII), A Public Space, and elsewhere. She was previously a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK), and is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo and Hedgebrook. Her first collection of short stories is forthcoming from A Public Space.

Aylli Cortez is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His debut chapbook Unabandon was a winner of the Gacha Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in 2025. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him online @1159cowboy or visit his website.

Project Bookshelf: Aylli Cortez

I love ebooks as much as the next person. Last year, some of my most impactful reads— Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, and Sundress’s own Transmasculine Poetics edited by Remi Recchia (which you can download for free!)—took a digital form. Still, the physical sensation of turning a page and weighing it in my hands comforts me. So, even though I live in a tiny unit that can’t accommodate all the books I own (the rest remain in boxes), I continue to acquire more paperbacks.

Looking at the stack of books next to my desk fills me with pride because most of them are written by Filipino authors and published by local presses. It feels like an accomplishment, since I can’t help but consider that, until I was eighteen, I could probably count on my fingers the number of books I read that were set in the Philippines. I wish I had read more Philippine literature in my childhood, but it doesn’t escape me that foreign titles still dominate the shelves of major bookstores in Metro Manila, where I live and grew up. Now, I just do my best to stay updated on independent booksellers and the titles they carry.

A sidenote on books I read as a kid

Some Filipino stories that were formative to me: Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal, The Woman Who Had Two Navels… and Tropical Baroque by Nick Joaquin, my high school favorite Dear Distance by Luis Katigbak, and Smaller and Smaller Circles by F. H. Batacan (I also love her short story “Accidents Happen”). I also read the poems of José García Villa, Conchitina Cruz, Isabela Banzon, and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta repeatedly as a teenager.

This list could be longer, but I still feel like my childhood was full. I’m glad I inherited my mom’s love for books like Earthsea and Letters to a Young Poet (the Stephen Mitchell translation is very important). I poured over her Jeanette Winterson essays, her collections of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges stories. Even my interest in plays and graphic novels was sparked by her. As for my dad, well, he owned every volume of Gary Larson’s The Far Side comics and I laughed a lot reading those.

My mini collection has many fond memories attached to it, since I came by these books during my time in university and in the past six months post-grad. I can still recount where and how I got each one because tracing those circumstances matters to me. It helps me form a map of my local literary community, which was once just a nebulous concept to my freshman self. By going out to read, and by seeing what I read as a way to widen my world rather than shrink from it, I hope to run against the perception of readers as quiet, inward creatures who live in bubbles and armchairs. (Please, we can be cooler than that!)

To me, reading is most thrilling when I feel like I’m occupying two spaces at once. Like the time I finished Conchitina Cruz’s Dark Hours while stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Manila—the jarring effect of having her poems place me in traffic or on familiar streets, being re-immersed in the cities I was removed from. Or the time I observed Assembling Alice, a novel that takes place in Baguio during the Japanese occupation, come alive when author Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta shared her family history to a rapt audience at Mt. Cloud, a bookshop located in and named after the mountain city.

In those ways, I love entering a book with its context in mind, and it’s a gift to read in the context of my present, no matter (or perhaps because) that present is so harrowing. It puts me in closer touch with my surroundings. Seeing my life mirrored in a story, or noticing when a narrative tries to test its own reflection (say, by warping the facts of a historical event or imagining alternate versions of our lives), both excites and alerts me. There’s something both magical and grotesque about it that keeps me on my toes.

Some of the books that I can’t help but link to my own life, though they aren’t pictured because I lent them to a friend, include Narcissus by Mark Anthony Cayanan, a poet and mentor who has influenced me more than I can express in a sentence; Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi, a transmasculine Asian poet (like me!) among the first I’ve encountered; and will you tell me what I look like? by Raphael Atienza Coronel, a poet who combines text with collage art, and whose ekphrastic practice inspires me.

Other books in my collection include: a heavily tabbed copy of The Material Kinship Reader, edited by Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards, which I leaf through every now and then despite having read it cover to cover; a dog-eared copy of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which fully electrified me; poetry collections by Fine Arts and English professors from my alma mater; the senior folio of the student publication I was previously an editor at; and a stack of chapbooks by my lovely Creative Writing batchmates and alumni.

I’d like to highlight two titles which resonate strongly with me now. Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado is my current read. I bought the last copy from Everything’s Fine bookshop in Makati last November. I view this book of autotheory as part of my education—a follow-up in my mental list of self-assigned LGBTQ readings (which also lists Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, both vital to my trans coming-to-terms). Although I’m making slow progress, it feels invigorating to read about BP’s life on T, as well as the conditions that shaped and inform those moments, as I sit on the cusp of my own transition.

My Eyes on Palestine by Momoe Narazaki is an autobiographical comic I return to often. I discovered it while visiting Tokyo. After googling “queer spots” and “bookstores with English,” I landed in an infoshop called Irregular Rhythm Asylum, where I spent two hours reading comics, magazines, and other printed matter. In My Eyes, Momoe cares for her newborn while witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza through her phone. She wrestles with privilege, heartbreak, and injustice, which erupts in organized action. I cry upon every read, knowing it is necessary to feel this affected, and that I can’t afford to distance myself from this unprecedented atrocity.

Lastly, I want to share a picture of some prints, comics, zines, and chapbooks I got from recent art and small press expos, such as the Manila Illustration Fair and BLTX or Better Living Through Xerography (though, a few are from other publishing events and at least two are from Japan). It makes me so happy to have these on my “bookshelf.” These are such gorgeous forms of art and literature, and we’re seriously missing out if we keep overlooking them or viewing them as illegitimate. I celebrate how vibrant and diverse my local scene is, and I’m confident that I’ll always find joy in reading works that are rooted in, and created by, my community.

Aylli Cortez (he/they) is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, HAD, and like a field, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY. Find him on Bluesky and Instagram @1159cowboy or visit his website.

Meet Our New Intern: Aylli Cortez

Aylli, a fair skinned person with short brown hair, sits cross-legged on the grass. He is wearing wide frame glasses paired with a black crew neck top and blue jeans. Small purple flowers and various plants fill the upper half of the background.

Last February, I had the honor of reading some of my poems at a book launch in Makati, not far from the city where I grew up. As a then–university student who’d only been published in one journal, I was thrilled to play a supporting role in the milestone of a great poet. I didn’t expect to come away with a message of encouragement that evening, but when the author signed my copy of his collection, he also scribbled on the title page: “For Ayl—keep writing… You don’t have a choice now.”

The note struck me as funny, scary, and touching at the same time. Both a form of pressure and a show of recognition, it seemed to say: You need to continue doing this because it’s who you are. Now, one year later, I can do what I couldn’t in that small independent bookshop, call myself a writer. Not because I have a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing, or an award, or more published poems, but because I feel belonging in this community and want very badly to give back.

In my undergraduate years, I grew as a writer, editor, and facilitator through my participation (turned presidency and editorship) in two literary organizations. Combined with the experience I gained from my workshop and publishing classes, as well as my summer internship at the university press, I realized that honing my craft wasn’t a solitary endeavor. Writing didn’t have to be isolating; it could prompt me to converse and collaborate with my peers! I later learned that many of us shared the same zest for arts, culture, and niche Internet fandoms. Still, we needed the resources and opportunities to recognize that we weren’t alone.

While the pandemic drove classes online for half of my college life, I managed to organize and often moderate literary talks, writing workshops, social events, deliberations, and training seminars. It was a great way to invite professional authors to share their work and expertise with us, but also to invite students to read widely and critically, develop confidence in their works-in-progress, and offer their skills in service of each other.

Since graduating in June, I’ve learned to become a student on my own terms. Aside from reawakening my reading practice and seeing it translate to a calmer, more consistent writing process, I’ve made a habit of seeking and attending art events around Metro Manila—especially ones that platform small presses and self-published creatives. Talking to illustrators, writers, komikeros, and zinesters gives me perspective. Our insights (and friendship) show me what needs are and aren’t being met while getting me to see more possibilities for us as artists.

Now, I believe that self-expression can only take me so far, as my ideas flow furthest when I engage with material made by others, be it literary or “extraliterary.” Poetry welcomed me by encouraging that I test the distinction between the two.

As a genre, poetry willingly lends itself to overlaps. It can house hybrid forms, it delights in playful language, and it offers endless chances to experiment. When I came to grips with being transmasculine, I felt uncomfortable with the disclaimers of fiction and nonfiction, the line between real and not. Poetry didn’t have me choose. As I began reading more books by queer and trans poets of color, many of whom I have a dear professor to thank for introducing to me, the more my conviction in my future grew. Being a poet made me realize that my transitioning self was real, even though he wasn’t fully embodied yet.

Sometimes, I wish I’d arrived at this level of clarity sooner (read: before I drowned in my thesis), but I’m grateful nonetheless. Without my friends, mentors, and those writers I admire from afar, I wouldn’t have tried to put myself out there and soak up the opportunities that revealed themselves once I paid attention. No, in this timeline, I remain spurred when it comes to sending my poems out and starting new projects while my current manuscript sits in a contest inbox.

Having these connections almost makes me forget that I’m still the slippery, spunky, and super clunky kid that I was ten years ago. A younger Aylli dreamed of becoming a published writer, but he didn’t imagine that he’d be on the masthead of an international literary journal, or work for a U.S.-based publication, or be on a first-name basis with so many brilliant artists and writers, but here I am! A bit worn out, a bit bruised, but way less “I hate my body” and much more “This isn’t even my final form.”

Looking back, what alarmed me about the note saying I didn’t have a choice wasn’t the thought of my not liking that outcome, but the fact that I could no longer hide its importance to me. I enjoy withholding details, and being vulnerable doesn’t come easy. But when you’re a writer and everything else in the drop-down menu of the word, there comes a point where you admit that not having to confess anything (if you don’t want to) doesn’t absolve you of the need to be honest about what you want.

I’m excited to spend the next six months as an editorial intern at Sundress Publications. This is a dedicated press run by volunteers who deliver on the kind of care that writers deserve, and I feel privileged to play a short part in seeing it thrive. Editorial assistance is crucial to bridging the gap between necessary stories and the audiences that seek them. I want to support and offer this practice in my endeavors at home. I want to continue being led by wonder and respect. I want to inject myself into the world. I want to dream of the places my craft will take me, and of what I’ll become. Most of all, I want to choose to admit this.

Aylli Cortez (he/they) is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry in 2024. His work has appeared in VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Bullshit Lit, HAD, and like a field, among others. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY and a member of the Ateneo Press Review Crew. Find him on Bluesky and Instagram @1159cowboy or visit his website.