Tag: Meet the Intern

Meet Our New Intern: Natalie Gardner

A white woman leaning against a wooden deck railing with the woods behind her. She is wearing a black dress, a green army jacket, and a black scarf, and is looking to the side.

The first piece of writing I was ever proud to share was a horror story I wrote for my tenth-grade English class. It was early October, and we were charged with writing spooky stories to share on Halloween, which unfortunately fell on a school day that year. Inspired by the works of Franz Kafka, the first author I became truly obsessed with, I wrote about a man who woke up paralyzed and was then embalmed while still alive. It was gory, visceral, and definitely not school-appropriate. When sharing it with my classmates, the predominant reaction was one of disgust. Although embarrassing in retrospect, I reveled in this reaction; I had made them feel something, no matter that it was disgust. Ever since then, I’ve been chasing that feeling.

I’ve always had a penchant for the weird, the off-putting, the over-the-top and campy. I attribute this to feeling like an outsider for most of my life, being both visibly queer and caught between my very Southern upbringing and the culture of my suburban hometown. Combine this with the inherent body horror of growing up as transgender, it seems self-evident that horror would eventually become my mainstay.

The urge to shock is not an inherently negative thing. Although it can easily give way to base cruelty, shocking art can also be a powerful tool for galvanizing others to action. For me, creating and enjoying art that seeks to shock is an act of self-empowerment. In a way, I am claiming the right to exist as something strange and margin-bending. To this day, I still love trashy, over-the-top art of all kinds, from Pink Flamingos to ’80s slashers, from Manhunt to Bladee. 

Around the time I started college, another of what I would call my “sustaining motivations” emerged—the urge to document. I was regularly attending hardcore and DIY shows hosted in basements, bars, and anywhere else that would take us. Additionally, I was (and still am) immersed in Knoxville’s “queer scene.” Inhabiting these spaces catalyzed my personal and artistic development. Anyone who has danced until 3 AM or moshed in a basement that is packed from wall-to-wall will tell you that it is an experience like no other. Its beauty is in its transience; for just a few hours, you are one with everyone around you. If the experience itself doesn’t convince you of this, stand outside after the show and watch complete strangers talk like old friends, share their last few cigarettes, and make plans to see each other again despite having just met. Watch the crowd dissipate, go back to your normal life, and then do it again a few weeks later. Do this again and again, watch scenes emerge and thrive and die, and you’ll understand the urge to hold on to it.

Queer lives, local scenes, basement shows where people who feel unwanted find community for the first time in their lives—all of these things are transient and immeasurably beautiful. Much of what I write is an attempt to document the beauty around me before it is gone. I owe this perspective on life and writing to another author that influenced me as a teenager, Torrey Peters. Peters’ debut novel, Detransition, Baby, was the first book I read by a trans author explicitly for a trans audience. It’s hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly enthralling, but more than that, it is a snapshot of the trans experience in a particular time and place. Peters moved me and showed me that I could accomplish more with my writing than I ever imagined. My writing became imbued with a new purpose, or rather, my ends evolved. No longer was I writing just to get a rise out of people. Instead, my goal became to create something that spoke to my particular moment, and for it to move the reader through its sheer, self-evident beauty.

When you really get under the hood of it, this desire is the same as my long-held desire to shock and disgust. Buried under all the teenage angst was a desire to make the reader feel something, and for them to really feel it. In truth, this is the goal of all art. There is beauty in every moment, in every voice, and I believe Sundress Publications is a place that values this beauty. I am excited to be a part of this team, and I look forward to making beautiful art with y’all!

Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.

Meet Our New Intern Jillian A. Fantin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the Intern: Bayleigh Kasper

I remember when a friend of a friend asked me if I was embarrassed because I wanted to go into the arts rather than study something “practical.” I looked down at the shirt I was wearing—which said, “I’m silently correcting your grammar”—and the pendant around my neck—which said, “The book was better.” While that moment says nothing for my fashion choices that day, it does capture my unapologetic fever for reading and writing. To me, passion is more important than practicality. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been gobbling up books and scribbling down stories. My mom likes to say that I practically knew how to read before she even taught me, like my heart was just waiting for someone to give me the letters to unlock the words and stories I had longed for before I even knew. I was the kid in elementary school English class who had to have the full-size pages rather than half pages they offered for the stories we would write for the end of the year—the ones with thick cardstock covers and fruit scented marker pictures on the opposite pages from the writing. I was the one who got scolded for staying up late reading or getting new ideas down and walking slowly behind everyone because I couldn’t lift my head from my book. I remember many late-night car rides, reading books one line at a time as we passed under streetlights. Some of my senior pictures were taken with towers of my books surrounding me. Most of my life has been feeding and being fed on stories. Being part of Sundress—something that feels like a big story buffet for everyone—is an absolutely magical experience to me.

Bayleigh Kasper is a senior creative writing major at the University of Evansville. She dreams of owning a tiny home in Colorado where she can adopt cats, make music, write, and eat very judge-worth amounts of chocolate without actually being judged.