With the upcoming release of their debut poetry collection, Burns, SG Huerta spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Emma Goss about their poetic choices, pushing the limits of both English and Spanish in their poems, and the significance of memory, humor, and pain, in addition to what decolonialism means to them as a queer, nonbinary writer.
Emma Goss: How is repetition used as a rhetoric for pain in your collection?
SG Huerta: My use of repetition can represent rumination or perhaps wishful thinking, like in the poem “Hurtless.” In this poem, the ending devolves into messy repetitions of the phrase “some day this will hurt less.” Repetition is also familiar, and many of the poems talk about the repetition of toxic cycles. The cover of Burns also repeats the title, which I love. I think it represents these cycles as well.
EG: How does Spanish’s integration with English, such as in “latinxpoética” or “Mi tía texts me,” reflect your cultural narrative or experience with gender?
SGH: I have a complicated relationship with both languages, which the poem “latinxpoética” delves into. Early on in my writing life, I received a lot of pushback for including any Spanish in my poetry. I grew up bilingual so of course I was deeply impacted by that attempt at cultural erasure. Currently in my poetry, I try push the bounds of English and Spanish to make more room for queer multilingual and decolonial ways of being.
EG: Humor is employed very tenderly in many of the poems in Burns; can you speak to why humor was important to include in this collection?
SGH: Humor is a very important cultural value to me! I write about some difficult things I have been through, and I fully believe that sometimes you just have to laugh so you don’t cry. Sometimes tragedy can also lead to the comically absurd.
EG: Many of these poems utilize footnotes to contextualize and interrogate the beliefs society holds about gender and trans identities; how does including footnotes extend or inflate the pathos of these poems?
SGH: Footnotes are always fun to play around with. I think it adds another layer to the poem and complicates the reading experience. In “trans poetica” specifically, the footnotes show the hidden undercurrent of what’s happening to the speaker within the poem. The speaker can feel one way about their gender, but often other people have something to say. The footnotes are a way to contend with these different voices.
EG: Colonization is one of the most potent motifs in Burns. Can you speak to the myriad ways this motif strengthens many of your poems such as “My Phone Alerts Me About Queen Elizabeth IIʼs Platinum Jubilee” and “arte poética”?
SGH: Decolonialism is a lifelong ever-present commitment. These ideas appear in so many of my poems because I’m always considering its impact on our society broadly and my culture specifically. I can’t talk about Latinx heritage without talking about colonialism.
EG:Burns does not abide by a singular poetic form. How does playing with parentheses and experimenting with form allow certain poems, including “necropoetica,” “anthropoetica,” “ignorant american,” and “Some Issues,” to complicate issues of gender?
SGH: As a nonbinary person and poet, I definitely approach gender and poetic form the same way. I work with whatever fits the occasion, which usually involves queering language in some way. I’m a firm believer in trying different forms and presentations until you find what’s right, and what’s right can always change.
EG: Many of the most emotional and vulnerable poems in this collection delve into memories of your father and childhood. Can you speak to memories’ role in the collection?
SGH: Memory is my book’s best friend. A lot of these poems felt urgent to write and record; there are many memories that only I hold since my father has passed. However, these memories get complicated, because I don’t have anyone to corroborate them. I’m able to take poetic liberty and think of what works best in the world of the poem. The line between poetry and memory is there, but it is faint at times.
SG Huerta, a Xicanx writer, is the poetry editor of Abode Press, a Roots.Wounds.Words. fellow, and a Tin House alum. The author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press, 2025), their work has appeared in Honey Literary and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com.
Emma Goss (she/her/hers) is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.
Patrick Joseph Caoile spoke with Sundress intern Penny Wei about his latest short story collection Tales from Manila Ave., where they discussed the importance of food, play as a way to navigate migration and displacement, and living on Manila Ave. and places like it.
Penny Wei: What does it mean to belong to a place like Manila Ave, where generational history and familial warmth live alongside eviction and social class divides?
Patrick Joseph Caoile: There’s a line from one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that Freddy Krueger says, “Every town has an Elm Street!”, which seems to hold true. I even make a reference to this in one of my stories. In the case of Elm Street, the idea that a place is inescapable sounds like a prison. But that’s not all what a sense of place can be. For me, it’s comforting that you can find a Manila Ave. in places like Queens or Jersey City. When I lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, there was one there, too. Of course, not every Manila Ave. will have the equivalent of a strong Filipino community. Still, the name implicitly gestures towards the Philippines, and with it so many associations. With its global history as a gateway between the East and the West, the capital city of Manila is an avenue in and of itself. Manila is a metropolis of culture and commerce, but also of extreme class divide between squatters and shopping malls. In cities in the US, gentrification continues to displace those who can no longer afford to live in neighborhoods where their families have flourished for years prior. And yet, people continue to eat, dance, celebrate, mourn, and tell stories. This is how I envision Manila Ave.: a container of all these contradictions—a push and a pull, a home away from home.
PW: In several stories, food serves an important role. How do you see food operating as a bridge between cultures, identities, and memories?
PJC: I find importance not just in food, but in the making of it. When I think of Filipino food, I think of how laborious it is to make. In “Along Came a Stray” the siblings decide to roll lumpia for their Christmas dinner, just as they did when they were younger. They try to hold on to a tradition that they learned from their parents. Lumpia is a very tactile dish, a lot of chopping, mixing, wrapping. And after it’s fried and cooled, you pick one up with your fingers, dip it into some sweet chili sauce, and enjoy it. But it’s worth it. Not just the taste, but the experience. A recipe is a story, right? Beginning, middle, end. So, when I write food into a story, I find it intuitive to bring characters, backstory, and theme together. “Sinigang” definitely synthesizes those goals for me, too.
Even something as simple as coffee speaks to the wider implications of food. Coffee beans need to grow in a specific climate, be cultivated, be farmed, and be harvested. It takes a lot of labor to produce a cup of coffee. There’s also its history as a product of colonization. Alongside its dispersion is a story of displacement. On the other hand, as a beverage of leisure, you’ll find people connecting over coffee—business meetings, dates, catching up with friends, revolutions. Writers, like me, can’t write a single word without it. A lot of stories have been told over coffee. In “Kapé,” I sought to write towards these implications.
Also, I just like to eat and cook. Every writer needs sustenance. I’m a product of a childhood that was shaped by shows on PBS like Yan Can Cook and America’s Test Kitchen and Food Network, where people, food, and stories coexisted. Now, I love The Bear. I wanted to be a chef when I grew up. Maybe I still do.
PW: Catholicism, superstition, and faith run through these stories in different ways. What role does religion play in shaping the Filipino immigrant experience?
PJC: Just as food brings people together, so does religion. It’s all part of custom, like the house blessing in “A State of Grace,” the wedding in “Tong, Tong, Tong,” and the funeral in “A Balikbayan Affair.” These occasions bring together titos, titas, cousins, cousins of cousins, and anyone else who might have entered the celebrants’ lives in some way, big or small. Even the idea of being blessed by an elder, the mano po that is mentioned in “Tales from Manila Ave.,” is tied up in Catholicism. But as much as these customs celebrate grace, there are also aspects of Filipino faith that have a darker edge. Pagpag, for example, is the practice of making a tertiary stop between the site of a funeral and going back home; this way, any lingering or unsettled ghosts won’t follow. I don’t explicitly reference pagpag in “A Balikbayan Affair,” but that’s part of the reason why the family is at a truck stop saloon after the funeral. There are some stories in this collection in which I dip a toe into horror or the Gothic, and I’m definitely going to explore ways to lean into these in the future. In fact, the title Tales from Manila Ave. echoes the title of Nick Joaquin’s Tales of the Tropical Gothic, which is no accident.
PW: Some of your stories sit at the edge of childhood. How do you see childhood as a lens for reckoning with larger forces of war, dictatorship, and displacement?
PJC: I think a lot about a quote from James Baldwin, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” This has been on my mind for the past few years because of the war and genocide in Palestine, as well as the immigration raids here in the US. Whether it’s a family’s displacement from the land, or their displacement from each other, children are a witness through all of it, and so are we. Baldwin adds, “What we see in the children is what they have seen in us—or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”
When I wrote these stories, I tried to center children as witnesses in some way: as communal narrators memorializing a storyteller, as sisters adjusting to an American suburb, as children trying to prevent their parents’ divorce. But even when stories take a more adult perspective, the children are always in sight, such as the widowed mother looking at her sons in the final scene of “A Balikbayan Affair,” or the first-generation Filipino American protagonists of the last two stories who are now ushering in the next generation. I think it’s important, as a worldview, to consider what it means to be a child living in an empire, where the political is always personal. Of course, Star Wars comes to mind, Avatar: The Last Airbender, too. But Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird was certainly an influence in my writing, specifically as a child witnessing the changes around her, which are simultaneously political and personal.
I immigrated to the US when I was four years old. A lot of the logistics and paperwork happened behind closed doors where my parents carried the weight and anxiety of it all. I know that isn’t the same for every immigrant family. Some children need to translate for their parents, for example. But in these stories, I sought to fill in the gaps of the Filipino American immigrant story. I imagined the space between the world of children and the world of adults full of conflict, tension, and misunderstandings but also of love, hope, and connection. Children often don’t get a say in things. If they did, what would they tell us?
PW: Animals appear throughout the book. What does it mean for the nonhuman to accompany the immigrant story?
PJC: There are definitely a lot of cats in this book, prominently in “The House at the End of Maplewood Drive” and “Along Came a Stray.” In my family, we weren’t allowed to have pets growing up, except for the occasional fish or small turtle in a small tank. We had guinea pigs once, but didn’t bring them along when we moved from California to New Jersey. Only recently, just this past July, did I get my own cat, Clark Kafka “Cafecito” Kent. So, part of working cats into my stories is admittedly wish fulfillment. Usually, in that mythical notion of the American Dream, there’s a dog accompanying the mom, dad, son, and daughter. Dogs are “man’s best friend.” On the other hand, cats get a bad rep, tied up with witches and bad luck superstitions. But cats are so full of personality and also so full of care: the way a mama cat will pick up one kitten after the other to bring them to a safe place, the way she bathes them and gives them attention. The idea of bonded pairs and belonging to a litter—there’s a lot of familial connotations, like the struggle of staying together as a family. We can learn a lot from cats. Just ask T. S. Eliot and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
PW: In “Everything Must Stay” objects refuse to be discarded, even as they choke the living space. How do we measure the value of a life, or the significance/impact of a migration, with the things we keep?
PJC: The store in “Everything Must Stay” is a sari-sari, which means “miscellaneous” or “variety.” I think that meaning captures the immigrant experience in many ways. Immigrants carry a lot of baggage, literal and metaphorical. Sometimes space is limited, so what we choose to take with us must hold some kind of significance in comparison to other things. One example is the Santo Niño statue that Grace and her mother bring to their new apartment in “A State of Grace.” A toothbrush or laundry detergent—those simpler things can easily be found in a sari-sari store. At the same time, things can take on a new or second life. In the tradition of sending a balikbayan box to family in the Philippines, secondhand clothes or shelf-stable foods like canned Vienna sausages or chocolates become totems of our connection back to the motherland, back to the people we still hold dear despite the geographical distance. Objects are gifts, objects are resources. In “Everything Must Stay,” the sari-sari not only holds snacks and beauty products, but also holds the Filipino community together, and ultimately keeps the family at its center together.
PW: Childhood games—rice kites, Halloween nights, street songs—recur throughout the collection. What does it mean to return to play as a way of surviving displacement? How does childhood in general serve as a lens for exploring war?
PJC: I remember when I was just entering the first grade, when my family had just moved to New Jersey, I made friends with classmates by coming up with some really weird lore about our school. We gathered around someone’s desk, claiming that we had each seen a weird, glowing green light outside the school at night. As if we all went out of our homes, one by one, when everyone was asleep. We confirmed each other’s accounts, even drawing out a map of the school and labeling the tree where the green light was spotted. We probably could’ve passed a lie detector test; we were so convinced of ourselves. But of course, none of it was real (or was it?). I don’t know if anyone else from that class remembers, but that memory has stuck with me. As the new kid in the class, I felt welcomed by my classmates.
Play is unifying in that way—play as creative instead of competitive. Like I mentioned before, seeing the world through the eyes of children is ingrained in my approach to storytelling. Writing is play. We pretend as our characters and imagine what their lives must be like, and our task is to convince everyone else that they are true. The power of storytelling is that it centers on people, not statistics. It cuts through paperwork, bureaucracy, technicalities—that stuff of the adult world. Some might consider that escapism. At least for me, writing embraces the truth of our world. Or like how Kuya Jem does in “Tales from Manila Ave.,” it bends the truth towards magic.
PW: Several of the stories highlight women as laborers—nannies, nurses, domestic workers. Can you speak to the tension between Filipino women sustaining homes across two countries while rarely being recognized in either?
PJC: The Philippines has matriarchal roots. Despite the patriarchal structures introduced by colonization and imperialism, those roots still bloom. For example, there have been two women who’ve held office as president of the Philippines. Even through Catholicism, women seem to be the center of local religious life, leading community prayers and the rosary. They are also great storytellers in their own right; tsismis is indeed a craft. In this way, I think Filipino women might be most attuned to what it means to be Filipino. To sustain that across two countries is no easy task. It takes a lot of labor, in more ways than one. Many become Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in the healthcare and hospitality industries, and others as domestic workers. Many are teachers, too, like my own mother, who is a special education teacher. In all these fields and professions, there’s a necessary and intuitive sense of care. Mia Alvar captures a lot of these sentiments in her stories from In the Country, and I am so very grateful for her kind words of support for my book. Like in her stories, I similarly sought to capture the tension between Filipino women’s professional and personal lives.
PW: How does Tales from Manila Ave. as a whole explore survival across borders and generations?
PJC: I don’t think I ever considered the theme of survival in my book. But surely it’s there. I recently came across the story “Target Island” by Mariah Rigg, and in an interview with The Common, she considers how “the short story is just like a really long obituary.” When talking about Rigg’s story with my fiction students, which is about a man’s long and harrowing life intertwined with the island of Kahoʻolawe, we noted how obituaries usually end with a list of living family members, the “survived by.” In some ways, I think it’s helpful to think of short stories as obituaries.
The dedication of Tales from Manila Ave. certainly presents this book as one: to my family and relatives “in this world and the next.” In 2023 I had lost my paternal grandmother, and in the following year, 2024, I lost my maternal grandmother. We grew up mostly away from them, but whenever my siblings and I visited them in the Philippines, they were always so happy and proud of us. The last time we had seen them in person was in 2019. Their passing was a bit of a realization that my connection to the motherland was fading. Grief is always built into the immigrant story in that way. The characters in my stories get to that realization, too. I can list all the ways my characters mourn and grieve, but I would practically be listing every one of them in my stories. They grieve their parents, spouses, and siblings. They grieve a life of what-could-have-been if they had never left the Philippines at all. They are the “survived by” who have to figure out how to live with what’s left of their loved ones: customs, traditions, faith, memories, secrets, recipes, and ultimately themselves.
Patrick Joseph Caoile was born in the Philippines and grew up in northern New Jersey. His work is featured in storySouth, Porter House Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, the anthology Growing Up Filipino 3, and elsewhere. He has received support from Roots.Wounds.Words and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He holds a BA in English from Saint Peter’s University, MA in English from Seton Hall University, and PhD in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is a visiting assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Hamilton College.
Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She has been recognized by the Longfellow House, Cafe Muse, and Just Poetry, amongst others. Her works are up or forthcoming on Eunoia Review, Inflectionist Review, Dialogist, Aloka, and elsewhere.
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 bookalmost 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: Placeis 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.
Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, Pushcart PrizeAnthology (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.
Frances Boyle’s Light-carved Passages was released by Doubleback Books earlier this month. Frances spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Katy Nguyen about family, reflection, art, and home. Light-carved Passages is available for free download at the Doubleback Books website.
Katy Nguyen: What was your thought process in putting together Light-carved Passages? Was there anoverarchingnarrativeortheme that you hoped to achieve?
Frances Boyle: Like many debut collections, Light-carved Passages began with me assembling many disparate poems I had written over a number of years, ranging from my first-ever published poem (not counting the high school and university newspaper publications which are rightly confined to history) to more recent ones. The work in putting the collection together, what poet Sue Goyette once called “writing the big poem”, was to find the themes, preoccupations and tics that resonated with each other, and to shape them into sections. In the end, the poems coalesced around a number of themes: family of origin, interiority and reflection, often in nature, created family, and responses to artwork in various media. These themes turned into five sections (which became six in the current version), though they aren’t hermetically sealed off from one another. The themes overlap and show through in shadows and echoes, in conversation with each other. When I realized that the image of car headlights carving a passage through the dark appeared in several poems, I knew I had my title.
KN: By the end of your poems, there is a tension that rests just underneath the surface of them. How do you navigate tension and decide when to end a poem?
FB: I’m never entirely sure when a poem ends. There have been times when I’ve pushed on past when it really ought to have ended, writing lines that felt like an overly-neat wrap-up or an explanation of what the poem already said. In that case, the work was to trim back the poem as I revised. Other times, I felt a poem had come to an end, but in revision pushed myself to go deeper into the emotion or the language to what felt like a more satisfying and richer result. Finding the balance, maintaining that tension you asked about, is for me a question of feel, of nuance and some delicacy.
KN: Where did you draw inspiration from for this collection? Who or what did you look to as you put Light-carved Passages together?
FB: As is evident from the acknowledgements, I turned to many sources of inspiration for the individual poems, including international writers like Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath and iconic Canadian poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Don McKay and Judith Fitzgerald. But in addition to writing directly sparked by other published work, I always draw inspiration from fellow writers in my community, many of whom I thank (and continue to thank) in the book. One of my writing groups, the Ruby Tuesday group, has been together for 18 years, and I credit them with major influence on the poems, both in initiation and in revision. I’ve also been lucky to work with several great mentors; Barry Dempster in particular worked with me extensively as I put this collection together and was endlessly kind and supportive, while frequently asking me to “put some pressure” on a phrase or a line.
KN: In the poem “And the room breathed”, you wrote, “I refuse to mourn days past.” Can you speak about this great sense of lost connections, memory, and longing?
FB: Well, the poem may say it better than I’m able to in prose! What I think I was attempting to convey is the wish and hope that connections—with people, with places—are never really lost, that they can be accessed, either with the effort of refusal to believe in permanent loss, or perhaps with the effortlessness of letting go. Longing is an essential component in my visceral sense of how memory recreates connections and braids them into strands that sustain emotion in the present day. Another poem speaks of how “the moment never lasts”, but the crystallized feel of it lives on in the heart and, hopefully, in the poems.
KN: Even further, “Sort of an Elegy” is the shortest section in the collection. Was this an intentional decision?
FB: This section is actually one of the very few parts of the collection that changed materially for the Doubleback republication. In the original book, the first three poems in the section appeared as a multi-part poem, even though two of them had earlier been published separately (“Passchendaele” was my first publication, and “Wake” was first place winner in the “Great Canadian Literary Hunt” magazine contest). Because all three dealt with the same subject matter, the days surrounding the sudden death of my younger brother, I decided to present them as a single poem, which felt right at the time. When I had the opportunity to make edits for this new edition, I chose to separate them again, so as to give breathing room to each of the poems, with their individual moods and slightly different time frames. “Sepia” felt like an apt coda to those memories and my sense of how we preserve them, so I carved the four poems out as a separate short section that felt complete in itself.
KN: Several poems touch upon motherhood and daughterhood. How did the two inform this collection?
FB: Mother-daughter relationships, and their inherent challenges and sometimes joys, are key to both this collection and my two other poetry books. They are also thematically important in much of my fiction, particularly my novella, Tower, and my forthcoming novel, Skin Hunger. In Light-carved Passages, my role and emotions as a mother are central to the “Bouquet” section (and to a couple of poems in the final section), maybe because my own daughters were still in the more challenging than joyful stages during the time when many of these poems were written. Several poems in the “Blueprint” section situate the speaker as a daughter within a family, and that optic is relevant to the reflections in other poems. Much but not all of the mothering and daughtering material is based on real life; there are also imagined mothers and daughters here, including Persephone and Demeter in the poem “Winter”.
KN: In another poem, “The Land is Laid Out Forever”, there appears to be themes of home, affirmation, and reassurance. The line—“Don’t ever forget where you come from”—comes to mind. What was on your mind when writing this one?
FB: This poem was originally written in a long-ago workshop, so I can’t recall the assignment or prompt that spurred it. What I feel it was trying to do was evoke the various forces at work upon leaving home; specifically, the Saskatchewan prairie city where I grew up. The man in the poem, my boyfriend at the time, who I’ve long lost touch with, gave me the gift of that somewhat ceremonial farewell evening, and the imperative to “Don’t ever forget”. I attempted to do justice to that command (which I also positioned as a request on his part) by being highly attentive to the specific details of that moment, and that landscape, focusing on images as closely as I could recall or evoke them to create a sense both of place and of intense emotion.
KN: All of the imagery in Light-carved Passages is rich and specific. When writing these poems, do you have these scenes and moments crisp in your mind? Or are they something you build upon as you recall them?
FB: I think it’s a little of both. In drafting, I’ll often riff off an image that comes from another poem, or let sound and rhythm carry me through wordplay into something more specific. The poem “Silvered” is an example of that—playing with assonance and rhyme led me to the more concrete images later in the poem. Deepening the imagery and increasing the specificity most often comes out in revision, when I carve away extraneous words and ideas to focus on what feels strongest, most evocative, enhancing metaphor and figurative language, and working to crystallize the images so they carry more freight.
KN: In the “Blueprint” section of the collection, how did you go about writing these poems? It felt as though you were weaving this segment with a lot of sentiment in mind. Would you say it almost sets the tone for what the rest of the collection will be like?
FB: Exactly: the section can be viewed as the template, the blueprint, that sets the tone for the entire book, just as experiences within one’s family of origin are very often the blueprint for how a person will respond or behave later in life and in other relationships. In the section, I wanted to include both poems based on real experiences with my family of origin, as well as others that arose from imagination, all of which I hope establish a certain emotional tenor that reverberates through the whole collection.
KN: Did Light-carved Passages go through a lot of changes from other perspectives and voices? (For example, editing, sharing the poems, reading aloud, etc.) If yes, how so?
FB: Yes, there were many many changes, both to individual poems throughout the time I was working on the collection, and on the collection and its ordering. After working on a poem through a few drafts, my next stop was almost always to share with my writing groups for feedback. I didn’t always accept their suggestions, but I found that I learned as much from comments that I disagreed with as from those that felt right and true; recognizing why I disagreed helped me clarify my intent for a poem and work to realize it. Reading aloud, either at the group or at open mics, had a way of making me hear the poem anew, recognizing awkwardnesses and places that needed to be clearer. Later, I was fortunate to work with a fabulous mentor, Barry Dempster, through the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity who challenged me to do deeper dives into the imagery and the language, and guided me as I shaped the collection to clarify the thematic flow and conversations among poems and between sections of the book. And my editors, Rita Donovan at BuschekBooks, and Bethany Mulholland and Danielle Hanson at Doubleback, all had valuable input on the ultimate shape of the book.
KN: Are there any rituals and routines that you do before writing a poem? Or does the writing come to you naturally?
FB: I wish it came naturally! I tend to be very logical and linear in normal life, so my writing routine helps me sidestep that analytical part of myself. Letting go of logic and following intuition, sound or rhythm can lead into surprising places whether in memory or in imagination. Much of my poetry comes from freewriting in response to a prompt, be it an exercise or simply reading and reflecting on another poet’s work. This most often happens in the weekly sessions with my Ruby Tuesday writing group. Our routine is to first consider a prompt that one of the members has brought, reading the poems aloud. We then allow three minutes of silent centering, to reflect on what we’ve heard or to settle into whatever else emerges. Finally, we free-write for a set time—usually 12 or 15 minutes—then each of us has the option of reading the result aloud, to minimal comments. This all happens before we turn to workshopping the poems that members have brought for our input.
KN: And lastly, for budding poets and other creatives, what do you believe is the best way to go about starting or continuing a project?
FB: I am speaking just for myself here, since I know many writers who do begin writing with a specific project that they want to pursue (or that they feel compelled to pursue). I, however, have never consciously set out to write a collection or chapbook. I’ve always begun by writing individual poems, so that’s what I’m most comfortable suggesting. Write the poems that come to you, write lots of poems and share them with people whose opinions you value. Those opinions shouldn’t be considered the definitive word on a poem but, as you learn to trust your instincts, they will help you to find your own voice. You may get some further sense of what’s strong in as you submit to lit mags (rejections are inevitable, personalized comments are rare, so treat them like gold!). Once you have what feels like a critical mass of work, it will be time to take a close look at the stack of poems and see what themes or motifs recur, images that you revisit consciously or unconsciously. Your poetic obsessions are the best clue to how you can proceed to shape the larger work, finding and reinforcing threads through the larger work, either discarding poems that don’t fit or finding a way to bring them into the conversation, and sometimes writing new poems where you see a gap. It’s an iterative process, so requires patience and some stamina!
Frances Boyle is the author, most recently, of Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). In addition to two other poetry books and several chapbooks, her publications include Tower (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018), a novella, Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020), an award-winning short story collection and Skin Hunger, a forthcoming novel. Boyle got to know Pearl when they were both members of the Ruby Tuesday writing group and has admired her and her writing ever since.
Katy Nguyen is a budding creative studying Sociology and English at the University of California, Irvine. Katy enjoys reading and writing about the little things, music, and peoplehood. In her spare time, she likes to peruse around stationery shops and add more pens to her growing collection.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Erika Walsh joins us to discuss the work of Chelsey Minnis, and the importance of taking risks in poetry, whether it be through form or humor, and how bending expectations in writing can be freeing. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Chelsey Minnis? Why did her work stand out to you then?
Erika Walsh: It was initially a bit disturbing to me that I couldn’t remember the exact moment I encountered Chelsey Minnis for the first time, but then it felt kind of fun and cool, as though she were part of my life all along; like there was never a time before her. I know for sure that the first book I read by her was Bad Bad, and that the first singular poem I read online by her was “Clown,” but I can’t recall how I came to find her, or which came first.
I remember being tickled by the wild aesthetics of Bad Bad, with its pink and white striped cover, a seemingly random drawing of a two-headed fawn at the center of the book, and “bad” reviews highlighted on its back cover, such as “Her poems take some getting used to” and “Many won’t find her…acceptable at all…” These poems took real risks, such as covering multiple pages nearly entirely with ellipses. I was especially struck by Chelsey’s “Anti Vitae” which made me laugh out loud, as it listed her “failures” as a poet, such as “Mispronounce ‘Kant’,” “Told poems ‘lack agency.’ Have to ask what ‘agency’ means,” and “Told that poetry is ‘loose’ by future poet laureate.” It was so refreshing to read poems by someone who is clearly an artist and a poet, but not in a way that adheres to any arbitrary expectations of the literary world as an institution.
RW: How has her writing inspired your own?
EW: I love how genuinely funny Chelsey’s poems are. I began writing poetry thinking there was a “right” way to write a poem, and my poems came out feeling stifled and forced as I tried to bend them into shapes I thought may result in others taking me more “seriously” as a poet. Now that I’m in my MFA, I think I maybe for the first time feel like I truly have the space and support to write poems that are less “safe.” I feel more free to not only write poems that are “weird” or “experimental” (but still aesthetically pleasing), but also to write poems that are absurd and maybe even a little bit crude, maybe a little bit ugly. Chelsey’s writing also shows me that there are not only many ways to write a poem, but also many ways to be a poet, and that validation from other poets or from literary institutions can only take you so far. Writing the poems you want to write solely because you want to write them is the real pleasure.
RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?
EW: “A Speech About the Moon” (from Zirconia) puts me into a trance state every time I read it. It initially feels almost like a punch line, to have the poem start with one line about the moon before moving on to the birds and the fish and the sea, which quickly become the real adhering images of the poem. Then you begin to realize this poem is haunted. Whatever is haunting you rises to the surface as you read it, but in a surprisingly gentle way; gentler than you could have imagined. This poem gives you the space and permission to settle into the feeling; to not flinch away from your fear. I consider “Clown” (from Bad Bad) to be a classic. As I mentioned before, I believe it’s the first poem I ever read online by Minnis. This poem makes me laugh out loud, especially the last few lines: “You can’t imagine how jolly/ everything is. And the fright wigs… I don’t want to be a clown but I’m/ sure to be one. My mother was a clown.” Every time I read these lines, I know with absolute certainty that they must be true; that there is something clown-like in me, and in my ancestral lineage, and perhaps in every person who comes across this poem. Somehow, we’re all connected by both the fact that we are clowns, and the fact that we don’t want to be them. “Men Cry Because of the Heat” is another poem from Bad Bad that just makes me laugh. It really embodies the feeling of absurdity in Chelsey’s poems. The droll delivery of the speaker adds to this feeling. This poem also is in ways a parallel to “A Speech About the Moon,” with its attention to similar images, such as crying, ice, and birds. But unlike the speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” the men in this poem aren’t paying attention; “If a bird lands on their shoulder….they don’t even think about it…they can’t realize anything…about birds.” The speaker in “A Speech About the Moon,” is alone with her thoughts, whereas the men in this poem have help (“You have to cut their shirts into half shirts….”). The sadness in this poem does not, after all, arise from the same place, or from an “enchanted misery.” It is only the heat.
RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?
EW: I was recently named Poetry Editor of Black Warrior Review, the literary journal affiliated with my MFA at the University of Alabama, and will begin this position in January 2024. I’m very excited about this, especially since this is a journal I’ve been reading and following for many years! The 9th issue of A Velvet Giant, an online literary journal which I also edit and co-founded, also just came out last month. In terms of my own writing, my poem “My Baby” was recently published in Pigeon Pages. I have two poems coming out in VIBEin early 2024 (and the folio is available for preorder right now!) I’ve been writing lots of fairytale inspired poems lately, and have been writing ecopoetry as well and thinking about the connection between the violences humans commit against our planet and against each other. In terms of more life-related news, I recently moved into a new apartment with my partner. I’m planning a puppet show with one of my best friends, and starting to get back into studying tarot. I’m thinking about the future in a way that feels mostly exciting.
Chelsey Minnis studied creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of several collections of poetry including Zirconia (2001), which won the Alberta Prize; Bad Bad (2007); and Poemland (2009). She lives in Boulder.
Erika Walsh is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama, poetry editor of BlackWarrior Review, and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant. Erika’s creative writing has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Pigeon Pages, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com
Heading North by Holly M. Wendtcontains sharp, seductive prose and a rare perspective. Viktor Myrnikor, one of the novel’s two narrators, is a young and talented Russian hockey player who keeps his sexuality a secret. Readers become intimate with Viktor’s mind, a place hidden from so many, resulting in magnified tenderness and awareness.
In this interview, Wendt provides invaluable advice on research, novel structure, dialogue, revision, and debuting.
Marah Hoffman: Because I know the depth and breadth of your passion for sports writing, I know you could have written a gripping story about almost any sport. I am curious, why hockey?
Holly M. Wendt: From the start, this was always a hockey story. The novel’s inciting circumstances—the real-life Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash in 2011 and the foundation of the You Can Play Project, aimed at ending homophobia in sports, in 2012—are inextricable from the hockey world. And, as of both the beginning of the writing process in 2012 and this moment in 2024, there are no former or current gay players who are out in the NHL. (There is an out minor league hockey player in the Nashville Predators’ system, so I’m hopeful that fact will change, soon.) Both the writing process of Heading North and the plot of it are in conversation with these circumstances, which is to say in conversation with the world of professional ice hockey.
MH:Heading North traverses multiple years, lives, states, and countries. If you don’t mind divulging, how long did you work on this novel containing so many lifetimes? How did you stay connected to the world of the story?
HW: The functional timeline of the book and its events really only spans a few years—roughly 2009 to 2012—but my writing of it has taken eleven years, from the first words to the final pass of copy edits. And though I did put it away at various times in those years—to let the manuscript rest before each of its major revisions, to work on other things, to finally stop tinkering when I submitted it to Braddock Avenue Books—but each time I returned to it, returning felt right and good, just as urgent as before. That was especially true at the last opportunity I had to make substantive edits before publication, which was also the moment I worried most about. But the heart of my connection with this novel is my own inherent investment in both sports and queer representation in them, which is an ongoing conversation. It all remains relevant.
MH: In Heading North, the sounds of the Golden Gate Bridge at night and skates on fresh ice, the sensation of blood gushing from the nose–all come alive. Readers are expertly placed in the body of Viktor, a professional hockey player. They are also well-situated in place. I must ask: what was your research process like?
HW: I’m essentially incapable of liking something a little bit, so novel research is always carte blanche to give in to that obsessive quality, and it’s a process that I love. In this case, research meant sometimes setting an alarm so I could watch dodgy pirated streams of games broadcast only in Russian to get a feel for the international ice and the interiors of KHL arenas; sometimes that meant diving into the exciting sea of sports coverage that proliferated in the early 2010s: team staff Twitter accounts, player interviews, rookie camp scrimmages on streaming channels, and a wonderfully vibrant ecosystem of sports coverage from all angles that now, sadly, feels like a distant memory. I was very lucky to have been able to find exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it.
Other research involved simply paying attention when circumstances offer up gems: I heard a sound under the Golden Gate Bridge while I was road-tripping with a friend in the summer of 2011, about eight months before I started writing Heading North. I didn’t know when or how I would use it in writing, but I knew I would. And then I did. When my spouse needed stitches after taking a softball to the face, I asked permission and took notes while the doctor was sewing up his chin!
But invention matters, too. The cities of Svetlotarsk and Parov are entirely invented, but with the goal of making them feel real, even in their briefer presence. And sometimes it’s necessary to let go of verisimilitude in order to focus the work more tightly: there are so many more people involved in keeping an NHL franchise afloat than I managed to include in Heading North, but in terms of serving this particular narrative, less was very much more.
MH: As I indicated in my last question, you do a breathtaking job of immersing readers in professional hockey–a foreign terrain for many, including myself–without relinquishing tension. One of my writing mentors once said, “Stay out of the hallways.” How did you decide which moments were hallways?
HW: This was very much a process of editing for me. My worst writer trait is that I live in the hallways! When I’m giddy with that first draft process and falling in love with characters and places, I want to show everything, all the time. So my first drafts are always overlong and over-lingering, and the real work comes in removing everything that doesn’t need to be there. Reading the text out loud is a significant part of this process, too. When I have to say the sentences—and listen to them—I find it easier to know when I’ve gone on too long or when I’ve over-explained.
Having a few trusted readers who can help me navigate what is enough is also very helpful. I’m so grateful to the writer-friends who made their way through multiple iterations of this book over the course of a decade, especially because most of them are not hockey people, and they were able to help me see what details were going to be necessary so that anyone could pick up this novel and follow along, even without exhaustive hockey knowledge. That was very important to me: to make a book that’s both accessible and accurate from any of its entry-points. And together, all these things helped me find my way out of the infinite hallways.
MH: The point of view in Heading North feels special and well-suited for the story. It is third-person limited, including two perspectives: Viktor and Liliya, the general manager of Viktor’s team and the stepmother of Viktor’s secret boyfriend. What led you to choose this POV and what strategies did you use to pull it off?
HW: The close third-person point of view has long been my favorite, to be honest. It’s the one I always reach for first, and it was very easy to do that with Viktor. For a long time, though, there was another narrator for half of the novel, a character who no longer appears by name in the book. Removing and then replacing that character was the largest single revision point of the work. Though it was a difficult task to excise half the book, that narrator gave me a clearer view of Liliya and allowed me to get closer to her. Once I knew Liliya was my other voice, the rest came pretty easily.
It was important, though, to have that second voice, someone other than Viktor, present. His angle on the world (and his own life) is incredibly limited by his circumstances and his introversion, almost claustrophobic in its narrowness.
Once I decided on the person, it was really a matter of keeping myself quiet and paying attention.
MH: Your dialogue is true to each unique character. What makes this feat especially impressive is that English is a second language for some characters, including Viktor. What advice would you give to those struggling to create authentic dialogue?
HW: The best advice I can give is to listen carefully and listen with respect. Viktor’s experiences navigating English were a central part of the book because it evokes the real-life circumstances of other professional athletes. His is a privileged position, of course, in which he could be more well-supported than he chooses to be, and he doesn’t have the struggles of someone immigrating entirely in a brand new language. But his infelicities of language get recorded, reported, and scrutinized, and some of Viktor’s experiences in the novel are inspired by things I saw and heard happening as a hockey fan which were exceptionally rich in terms of beyond-the-boxscore coverage and took place before the current massive contraction of sports journalism as a field. I was able to listen to interviews with Russian players who were themselves at the same point in their work with English as Viktor and experience their speech patterns and grammatical constructions.
It was also important to me to try to show the places where Viktor experiences communication breakdown without presenting his speech as somehow “less than.” To that end, I don’t change any spellings on the page to mimic the sound of his voice; readers know he’s Russian and can bring that to the page. And, of course, everyone has an accent. Everyone’s voice, if represented faithfully, would not reflect standard English spelling, so there’s no reason to further other Viktor’s particular voice on the page.
MH: Since Heading North is your debut novel, would you mind describing how you navigated the process of debuting?
HW: The only way I could navigate any of this was with a great deal of help. As a debut novelist, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I tried to learn as much as I could. Reading Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal was very helpful, though that book focuses much more on the process of publishing with a large house rather than a small press. I also enrolled in a four-week seminar through the Dallas Writers Workshop on what book publicity was and how it worked, which was brilliantly useful and instrumental in my decision to hire an independent publicist. That publicist helped me navigate the world of organizing readings, connecting with podcasts, pitching companion pieces, and seeking out reviewers. I was also buoyed along the way by a host of writer-friends who were willing to be conversation partners at events, conduct interviews, offer advice, and simply—wonderfully—turn up at things.
The process of being a writer and being an author are very different things; the former is solitary, and the latter is social. Writing a book takes one set of skills and bringing the book into the world takes another, and for most folks, those skills don’t really overlap. So it’s important to reach out to friends and to be willing to let people help, which also means being willing to believe people when they say they want to help! I’m so grateful to the many people who were willing to assist along the way.
Holly M. Wendt is the author of Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023) and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lebanon Valley College. Holly is a former Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and their writing has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Jentel Foundation, Hambidge Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and others. Their prose has appeared in Passages North, Shenandoah, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Marah Hoffman is a poetry and creative nonfiction writer from Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an MFA candidate, graduate teaching assistant, and Ecotone reader at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In the fall of 2022, she was the long-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). Hoffman continues to support SAFTA as Creative Director.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Ashley Hajimirsadeghi (former Lyric Essentials editor and an all-around Sundress staff contributor!) joins us to discuss the work of Kim Hyesoon and the importance of female poetry, translation, and how everyone needs a break at submitting to marinate in ideas. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Kim Hyesoon’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: The first time I read Kim Hyesoon I was a freshman in college. I’d just moved back from South Korea after studying Korean at Ewha Womans University, and to curb the sadness of leaving behind a country I really loved, I was finding all of these ways to stay connected to the culture. I purchased a copy of Kim’s Autobiography of Death on a whim after reading about how she was one of the leading female poets in Korea–and one of the few who gets translated and brought into broader international discussions of literature made by Korean women.
What struck me then–and still strikes me–is how experimental Kim is with her work, and how unapologetically female it is. Autobiography of Death is specifically a reaction to the Sewol tragedy in 2014, but Kim generally uses the grotesque in a way that reminds me of abject theory, of artists like Meret Oppenheim and Cindy Sherman. It’s something I began to realize as an eighteen-year-old and now study today.
AH: I really do believe reading the work of women writers like Kim Hyesoon really helped hone in this instinct to focus on women’s stories. It was by consuming stories like these that I realized as a writer I was more comfortable anchoring pieces in narratives versus abstract concepts–and because of that, I began to lean more into documentary and ethnographic poetics. Reading Kim’s work also reminded me of translation and the power behind who and what gets translated–I wanted more from Korean women writers, and while we’re going through quite a bit of a Korean culture renaissance recently, it made me realize I wanted to read more broadly and translate myself. So I do Bengali poetry translations in my free time with books I sourced from a Bangladeshi bookstore owner in Jackson Heights, Queens. You learn a lot about language, power, and intentionality when you do this kind of work.
RW: Your chapbook, Cartography of Trauma, has a beautiful cover and title. What does this collection explore and what was your writing process like?
AH: Ironically, a lot of these poems are from high school and beginning of college. When it comes to exploration, I was in the beginning stages of thinking about how trauma is a ripple effect across periods, and I wanted to really hone in on women’s experiences. I have a tendency to blur fiction with reality, while delving into history, but I want to be really intentional and careful with the work I’m doing. Some of it is personal, some of it is research, but with fictional bends. I say I’m an accidental poet; I was a devoted fiction writer who kind of fell into this.
RW: What have you been up to lately (life, work, anything!)? Got any news to share?
AH: Right now I’m in my third semester of graduate school and preparing for my thesis. It’s going to be on colonial Korean women’s literature, so writers like Kim Myeong-sun, and this concept of hybridity as a form of self-expression for those suffering from the double colonization involved with the patriarchy. I’m trying to turn this into a digital humanities project, so maybe I’ll open it up to broader Asian feminist writers like Qiu Jin (if I have the energy).
Besides that, I’ve been taking a cute little break from submitting to marinate in my ideas and writing. I find it so liberating to step away from the submitting grind and just write. I’ve been doing this a lot more lately, and I think it’s helped my practice as a writer.
Kim Hyesoon is one of the most influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She is the first female poet to receive the prestigious Midang and Kim Su-yong awards, and her collections include I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), and Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018). Kim lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist currently pursuing an M.A. in Global Humanities at Towson University. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review, a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and a contributing writer and film critic at MovieWeb. She can be found at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com // Instagram: @nassarine
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com
Nnadi Samuel, the author of the newly released chapbook Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade, sat down with Sundress editorial intern Heather Domenicis to discuss themes such as violence, liberty, and individuality within the pages of Samuel’s book.
Heather Domenicis: Can you speak to the recurring use of militant language and imagery in this collection?
Nnadi Samuel: The collection itself speaks to a time of restraints, bondage, and gag order—achieved mostly through militancy. When the reader finds these reoccurring themes, it is more of a natural happening than a premeditated motif. The poem a “Glossary of Artilleryn Terms” is an example. As suggested by the title, we’ve survived such a barrage of hostile treatment that we coin new names for it. One line in particular attests to this: “To cherish where I’m from is to add guns to our part of speech.” It becomes part and parcel of our life’s syllabus; to attempt to purge it from our literature is to live in denial. A line from another poem from the manuscript states, “an editor tells me to tone down on grief, each time I begin a poem without birds. I would have him know, I lack the patience for soft feathered imagery, because we were raised to outpace bullets.” The conversation that birthed these lines did in fact happen and my response was the same. All this is to say we cannot shy away or turn a blind eye forever to the war which breathes fire daily in our faces—both at home and on sovereign soil.
HD: The titles of the poems heavily bleed into the poems themselves or assign context to the text, especially in “Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel” and “There is a Gnawing Need for Sugar.” How and when do you generate titles?
NS: Yes! I love the spillover blessing that comes with the scenery in poems like these. Sometimes, it is what gives rise to the poem. Other times, it is the nucleus/core around which the poem revolves. Either way, the titles of my poems have always been directly connected to the actual poems, so much so that you can substitute one for the other and still not lose out totally in its meaning and all that it has to say. In writing a poem, the titling starts almost immediately as the writing. Often, it happens right in the middle of it, and I am struck by one bright sentence which sums up the whole experience.
HD: Regarding “Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel,” can you elaborate on the significance of the “exit dress” and its role in the narrative?
NS: In most African countries, mode of dressing has been and still is one subtle way to profile and enslave individuals against their wish. This unfortunately has also slipped into the religious sectors, which are meant to be the soul of humanity. For example, in the line “I: asphalt glory. Color riot, in ways that put coffins out of fashion,” I am thinking of the numerous victims that tried to be different but ended up in a body bag (coffin)—perhaps, more beautiful and appreciated only in death. The one way to exercise freedom here is through rebellion, cut from same fabric as the dress: regaling oneself unabashedly in whatever manner one feels the most comfortable in. In between the inner lining of this dress is where they find closure, where they feel seen and heard. It is their long-sought door to liberty.
HD: Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade reflects on personal traumas as well as a broader, collective trauma. How do you navigate this intersection in your poetry?
NS: I started out wanting only to account for personal and remote trauma within my reach—things I could in a way control. However, I discovered that in speaking about my personal hurt, I couldn’t ignore the larger sense of it felt across borders. I cannot tell a story of an assaulted cousin back home without the same experience being applicable to yet another Black person outside the country—baton for baton, or even worse. Both experiences are intertwined, irrespective of clime, and I felt the need to address with the title. Here, I began with some close-to-home issues and lent that voice to account for an overall collective grief. It rains everywhere, you know.
HD: Alongside trauma, resilience is also a recurring theme. Do you believe poetry itself plays a part in your own resilience?
NS: I pride myself as having always been resilient in whatever field I find myself. However, encountering poetry unlocked a level of resilience which I never thought I could attain. I watch myself in recent times, stretching to my limit and springing back to shape even stronger. I have become more bendable. Being a poet does this to you. This doggedness has transformed my life and spills into my poems as a currency for changing the narrative and systemic bias.
HD: Many of these poems contain vivid and at times gory bodily imagery. How does the body inspire your work?
NS: The body is one of the most fragile, delicate parts of us. Whatever harm comes to us first encounters the body, before pain is felt across all organs. It bears the damage for all our battle scars, trauma—seen or hidden. Therefore, it is ours to own, love, and cherish. Sometimes, it is the only place we seek asylum. The body imagery in my work seeks to connect the individual to the hurt and make sense of the wound on a more physical level. Our traumas are mostly internal, hidden and unaccounted. The body is a signpost, a showroom that tells these tales in bold blood.
HD: Some of these poems, such as “Nebulous Strike in Minnesota” and “Poems Like This Refuse Sound, My Cramp Bears Music Enough” contain multi-generational family stories and broken families, too. How do you think about inheritance in your poetry?
NS: I come from a very dysfunctional society with so many familial battles, sibling-inflicted scars, and bad blood. While some of this is self-created, some is inherited. When we pose together for a family photo, it all seems a façade. There are so many cases of trauma fought within, which never sees the light of the day. Without institutional ways to address these wounds, the hurt spirals down to yet another family and forms a multi-generational history of broken homes. I think about inheritance as the curse (be it good or bad) we put a face to and live off until our death. That albatross on the neck that just wouldn’t let go.
HD: There are a few mentions of religion in this collection. Can you speak to religious influences in your work?
NS: I grew up in a very religious home and have witnessed both the beauty and beast in religion. Two case studies here give an insight. When I alluded to “christening” a colleague’s daughter in the poem “Schwa: in a Sound Where All Consonants Means Loss,” I was referencing the potency of my religion. And then in “Poems Like This Refuse Sound,” the line “Sorrow playing Jesus, playing Lazarus cheap for those buying it—” condemns the pontification of this same religion by men of God who know of this familial trauma and instead of preaching against it, turns sorrow to sweet sermon. There is so much to unpack here, which I am exploring in a body of work titled Biblical Invasion, that might end up being my third chapbook in 2024. Fingers crossed for that one.
HD: Which poem(s) in this collection is/are closest to your heart?
NS: I deeply connect to all the poems in this collection, especially “Schwa: in a Sound Where All Consonants Means Loss.” However, the poem “A Boy Ago” seems the closest to my heart, majorly for its nostalgic effect and childhood memories.
Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a BA in English & Literature from the University of Benin. His works have been previously published or are forthcoming in Suburban Review, The Seventh Wave, Native Skin, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, FIYAH, Fantasy Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, The Deadlands, Commonwealth Writers, Jaggery, Foglifter, The Capilano Review, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the 2020 Canadian Open Drawer Contest, the 2021 Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers, the 2021 Penrose Poetry Prize, the 2021 Lakefly Poetry Contest, the 2021 International Human Rights Art Festival Award New York, and the 2022 Angela C. Mankiewicz Poetry Contest. He was the second prize winner of the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands Contest and the bronze winner for the 2022 Creative Future Writer’s Award. He also received an honorable mention for the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest and the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize. He is the author of Reopening of Wounds. He tweets at @Samuelsamba10.
Heather Domenicis (she/her) is an Upper Manhattan based writer and editor moonlighting at a tech startup. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from The New School 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.
