Wild Willow Magazine

Minna Zallman Proctor Interview for Mythological Minison Volume 3

Melissa Ashley Hernandez
August 15th, 2023

Minna Zallman Proctor is an editor, award-winning translator, and writer. She is the author of the essay collection Landslide: True Stories (Catapult, 2017), Do You Hear What I Hear? (Viking, 2005), and co-author with Bethany Beardslee of I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in 20th Century Music (University of Rochester Press, 2017). Her recent translations from Italian include Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives (New Directions, 2017), and Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, As Such (New Directions, 2019), shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Cesare Pavese’s existentialist interpretation of Greek myths, Dialoghi con Leucó, is forthcoming from Archipelago. She has written for Bookforum, The American Scholar, Conjunctions, The Nation, Aperture, NPR.org, The New York Times Book Review, and others. She has been an editor at COLORS magazine, BOMB, and The Literary Review. She teaches in the creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is currently working on a collection of short stories responding to Pavese’s myths and a new translation of Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althénopis for New Directions.

Minna Zallman Proctor cannot be summed up into words. She is an ethereal and unending fountain of joy and wisdom and is monumentally skilled at her craft. She gave me the opportunity to pick her brain about mythology and folklore, and I left with more questions than before! Differences between mythology and folklore can sometimes be nebulous and in many cases subjective, but we still had a great time discussing ideas and hypotheticals.

(You can read Volume 3 of Mythological Minison here tomorrow!)

Interview with Minna Zallman Proctor

The Minison Project: There’s so much to cover, let’s just jump right in! What is your relationship to folklore and mythology?

Minna Zallman Proctor: The first thing I think of when you ask this question is that when I was a little kid I never went through the big Greek/Roman Gods and Goddesses stage that a lot of kids go through. I did a report on Herakles when I was in fourth grade and I was really intrigued by the concept that all the stories came from urns—which they didn’t but that was interesting—and I always believed the interesting version of truth over the real version. Other than that, I liked Irish folktales Arthurian legends, Norse mythology, and African folktales, because those were the books I found on my parents’ bookshelves. The Irish folktales were in a book that I loved especially called There Was a King in Ireland and all the stories (obviously) started, “There was a King in Ireland…”

But that’s my formative/little kid relationship to myth. My interest in the African folktales stuck the longest, because they were all short and profound and funny—like the one about how the sun went to live up in the sky because he was annoyed about the way people kept breaking bits off of him for an afternoon snack. Caveat: the book I read from was edited by Paul Radin, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who was an influential anthropologist in the 1950s who specialized in Native American and African religion and language. I suspect that a great deal of his work and probably all his cultural perspective has since been invalidated.

Then I didn’t think about myths at all for a long time. …until I started work on this translation project about Greek mythology, and suddenly that’s all I think about.

TMP: I suspect that a lot of the obsession for Greek and Roman myths stem from focusing on those literatures in schools, so I find it fascinating that you discovered Norse and African folktales to be more captivating for you. With that and everything you’ve been researching for your translation project, which I’ll ask about later, how would you classify the differences between folklore and mythology?

MZP: I am 170 percent sure that there is a formal distinction in the social sciences, which I don’t know and won’t look up, because it’s more fun to guess and make up an answer. So, with the caveat that I’m inventing this: Mythology explains things—why the grass is green, where you go after you die, why we exist. Mythology is exalted, larger than life, aspirational and eternal. Folklore are stories authored by a community—stories that are passed down whose purpose is story, nothing more or less. Folklore is local and specific and only lives as long as people repeat it. Both mythology and folklore are author-less. This is important. They belong to time and place, but not a single intelligence. Because folklore is specific, it reveals details about very specific cultural systems… of a family, of a village, of a town. Mythology is more general with an eye toward universal, and the figures of mythology are avatars; there is nothing really substantial in their character build that determines their actions; there are no real individuals; the gods have many faces and many names—suggesting they are many but none. Folklore is the language of a people. Mythology is more of a code than a language, and as such has a broader reach. This shared code crosses lands and histories and cultures and timelines. We continue today to repeat and interpret those ancient mythologies bringing them forward organically from a long long time ago to now. Roland Barthes said the mythologies a society creates express explanation and desire and that determines, and codifies, values.

And again, I just made this up. There are actual, formal definitions in some fields and volumes of theories and debates too. In other words there’s a 100 percent probability that there are many answers to this question that contradict, or at least discredit, mine.

TMP: You said “folklore is local and specific,” but when people document folklore on the internet where it can be widely spread, does it lose specificity and context? And what role do you think technology has played in allowing these stories to reach beyond their regional communities?

MZP: That’s such an interesting question and I wish I had a very smart answer. …In discussions of the internet, people reference this participation inequality ratio: 90 percent of users are “lurkers” (aka “audience”), 9 percent occasional participants, and 1 percent create all the content. (This ratio is over fifteen years old, so it has likely shifted as social media has grown.) In really crude terms, participation inequality is bad because it means that one percent of people have “undue” or “outsized” influence. But the same ratio applies to wealth (the “one percent”), and we know that wealth isn’t just having more, it’s about controlling more and so everything that’s about control—legislation or information—is basically controlled for all by the very few. Which is sinister and antidemocratic and totally from the dark ages and all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. But, there is something about that ratio that also calls to mind a group of people gathered around a storyteller. Yes, folklore is of a community and is not about authorship, and yet, it’s not as if the village gathered for storytime and then everyone started talking at once. That’s anarchy, not folklore. When everyone on the internet is talking at once and no one is listening, then everything zeroes out and is totally useless. (Like, if you’re looking for a restaurant on Yahoo and it has 800,000 reviews, you know you’re not going to learn anything about whether to go to that restaurant from the reviews: half the people hated it and half of them loved it and half of them hated it for dumb reasons, like it was raining the night they went, and the other half of them hated it for good reasons that are meaningless to the other half of the people—like, say, the ketchup was too vinegary, which is meaningless because half the people hate ketchup and wouldn’t order it anyway, and half the people prefer their ketchup more vinegary, and half the people wonder “How much is too much?”… so that’s just time wasted.) I guess what I’m saying is that folklore is by definition unauthorized, it’s passed along by people and may be altered in the process for any number of reasons. If it’s being passed along on the world wide web instead of in a town square, the people who receive it to pass it along might evolve it differently than the people who receive it and repeat it in the town square, but that just means that there are now different evolutionary tracks (probably many many different ones) for that story. Some are more local than others. Consider this, the African folktales I read in the 1970s were collected in the 1950s, translated by one person from a variety of languages and cultures into a monolithic text, and published in a book, which fixes a story in that moment and culture and medium. It un-folklores it. In other words, is the world wide web essentially more pernicious than 20th century ethnographers? Probably yes, and probably no. …Maybe it depends on whether you like ketchup.

TMP: “Un-folklores” is such a good term. You bring up a good point: when everybody is talking at once, can anybody really be heard? I often wonder about our future and our legacy as human beings. Do you think any modern stories will be classified as mythology or folklore in the future?

MZP: I don’t know. The question is really about whether we human people have hit some natural limit of archetypes, or explanatory apparatus (e.g., Why is the sky blue? Where does water stop? Why do we exist?) Are there things in the natural world that don’t already have a variety of explanations versatile enough so that the stories start repeating each other? Will we change the natural world so much that we’ll need new explanations? And, in terms of being worried about our future because we’re always challenging and disrupting the natural world, don’t you think it’s significant how many morality tales in mythology and folklore turn on the sin of hubris (aka pride)? …Maybe that’s because humanity keeps moving toward its own eradication with progress, and recklessness? And then it explodes and starts again, or the gods throw rocks and destroy and rebuild? It’s been and will be again, etc. Why does Prometheus’s liver keep growing back so that the birds can eat it again? Will AI ever be so mysterious that we’ll need to explain it in terms that go beyond “manmade”? Can AI turn into organic matter? And, if so, is that how the earth ends and restarts? Is bacteria AI? Will the new organic AI need explanations about how it came to be, or will it just access its vast information banks and discover that it was created out of 1s and 0s by people who were created out of cell division? Do you think, maybe, that aliens/life on other planets will be our future folklore? Or, do you think that the idea of other life forms on other planets is another variation on the idea that gods live in the sky? Was Zeus an extraterrestrial? And, I want to know about sharks.

TMP: I think we all want to know about sharks… Do you think folklore is a building block to creating mythology or does mythology spawn folklore?

MZP: I think they are two kinds of storytelling that both have strong cultural roots and identities. Whether you’re using my explanation above or Carl Jung’s, the distinction between myth and folklore is artificial; it’s either descriptive or theoretical—like the distinction between poetry and prose. It’s not as if you’re describing mitochondrial division, or the difference between sand and glass. Sure there’s overlap and fuzzy boundaries. (Is a story about how the leopard got its spots a local morality tale or a cosmology?) Different cultures express different needs and wants through the stories they tell. But ultimately storytelling has its origins in rational thought. The question Why? is the primordial ooze of language. Event and consequence are the primordial ooze of story. Those are the building blocks; mythology and folklore are some very big buildings those blocks made.

TMP: Let’s talk a bit about your translation project! What’s that about?

MZP: My translation project is hard to explain. Every time someone asks me about it, I talk for an hour too long. I have to find a compact way to describe it. Like everything complicated, it starts, of course, with my mother. My mother was fascinated with this book, which in Italian is called Dialoghi con Leucò, and its author, Cesare Pavese, who was mostly a poet and novelist—even though this book is not really either. I’m chronically fascinated by my mother, who was a composer, whose music was inspired by literature. When my editor at Archipelago and I were casting around for a perfect new project—and she was making some wonderful, very fun suggestions—then I had this image of my mother holding this particular book, and I asked if maybe it could be the perfect project. Ultimately, it wasn’t a perfect project; it was something else. More like a dare. The hardest thing I’ve ever translated. Baffling on every single level, from the subject matter to the language, to the emotional center, its socio-historical context, the conceptual landscape, the legacy. I love it unreasonably now, but I think that’s because I finished it.

Here’s my attempt at a compact description: Dialoghi con Leucò is a collection of 27 short lyrical dialogues between Greek gods and heroes, reimagined as existentialist debates, the paradoxes of which are extrapolated from their big mythological stories: Oedipus wondering whether the choices of his life have any moral meaning at all if they were all prophecy. Calypso trying to convince Ulysses that immortality is just as good as mortality—because she loves him and wants him to stay with her, but she doesn’t quite believe her own argument and he sees through her. Endymion complaining because his rapist, Artemis, won’t let him love her back. Leucothea (the white goddess) trying to convince Ariadne that she should stop crying about Theseus abandoning her, because Dionysius loves her and is going to turn her into a constellation—a cold comfort. Sappho hating the afterlife, because it exists, and she had killed herself to stop her thoughts, not to sit in them for eternity. And so on. They are funny and brutal and complex and suffuse with contemplations of life and death.

TMP: That sounds right up my alley, I can’t wait to read it! Is there anything you wish I asked that you would like to talk about?

MZP : ….Melissa, you’ve asked me everything there is to ask in the world and many things that I don’t have answers for. I’ve been thinking about myths in such a specific way for the last three years, and it’s been very fun to think about myths and folklore from a more holistic, cultural perspective for this interview. There’s a reason we all come to myth with different questions and wildly different answers, and the reason is routed in myth as a common point of reference. In his foreword to Dialoghi con Leucò, Pavese wrote: “Given the option, a person could certainly get by with less mythology. But we’ve come to accept mythology as a language, an expressive mode—which is to say, it’s not random, it’s a hothouse of symbols that belong, like all languages do, to a specific set of references that can’t be conveyed any other way.”

MYTHOLOGY LIGHTNING ROUND:

TMP: What is your favorite myth?

MZP: Orpheus

TMP: What is your favorite folktale?

MZP: The Devil

TMP: Which mythological figure do you relate to most? Who do you find most interesting?

MZP: Circe

TMP: Which mythical creature would make the best pet, and why?

MZP: Heracles. I think he’d be good at protecting me.

TMP: In mythology or folklore, if you could swap the roles of a hero and villain, who would you switch and why?

MZP: …I don’t know. I think one of the cool things about mythology/folklore is that all the archetypes are both good and bad or value-neutral or undeclared. Like the idea of a “trickster god” for example, or Dionysius, who’s fun, and fun-loving, and dreadful, and a savior, and a killer. …PASS

TMP: Is there any country’s mythology or folklore that you haven’t explored yet that interests you?

MZP: Of course—it’s not like you finish being interested in something you don’t know everything about. The list is inexhaustible. But. …if I had to pick two (because one is totally not possible), maybe I’d say Poland and Brazil.

A huge thank you to Minna for granting us the time to conduct this interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit her website here and read her work.

Lexi Everland Interview for Carnival Issue

Melissa Ashley Hernandez
June 14th, 2023

Lexi Everland is a professional fire spinner and wildland firefighter, among many other things. She has been performing for a little over 5 years but has been practicing for about 10. For Lexi, it is hard to find the time to balance a very demanding full-time job and performing, but not impossible! She aspires to inspire the creative who is balancing their love of their art and a full-time job.

Lexi is a long-time lover of fire. This love has brought her down many related paths in life, including learning how to perform fire spinning, dancing, and performing, and securing a job as a New Jersey Wildlands Firefighter.

Performing for a living is a dream not many are able to realize, so, like many creatives, performers have to balance booking performances with the realities of everyday life. In this interview, Lexi talks about her love for fire performance, the balancing act of having a more demanding job while trying to maintain your creative outlets, and advice on how to begin the foray into fire arts!

(Read the Carnival issue here!)

Interview with Lexi Everland

TMP: Fire Spinning. Wow! Of all the skills to pursue, how did you choose that one? How did it start?

LE: Well, I’ve tried out many many hobbies but this one really stuck! I went through phases where my artistic expression showed itself as jewelry making, painting, drawing, and even writing – but this one allowed me to move my body while expressing myself, and also showcase the hard work I put into my performances. Sometimes I even get to make money by doing it! And the work I put in to get good enough to not burn myself and feel confident performing didn’t feel difficult at all. Before I realized it, years had gone by and I had gotten pretty good, and I had kind of forgotten all the hours I put into it. I think that’s just because I love doing it so much, and it offers me an amazing outlet so it didn’t feel like work at all.

TMP: In our previous conversations, you’ve mentioned other skills, hula hooping, aerial performance, acroyoga — have you ever married any of those skills with your fire spinning?

LE: Yes! I have. A fire hula hoop is one of the many fire props I use and probably the one I am most proficient at. It is also where my love for the art really started. My performing partner and I will also throw in a couple basic acroyoga moves into an act, which is sort of like partner acrobatics.

TMP: What was the biggest struggle when learning how to fire spin?

LE: I would say the biggest struggle was lighting my fire prop on fire for the very first time. I practiced for quite a while without the wicks lit until one day I said, I think I’m ready. And my brother was there as my “safety,” a term we use to describe the person usually standing off stage with a towel or fire resistant duvaline cloth just in case we catch something (or ourselves) on fire. I guess it was mostly getting over the fear of getting burned. And I’m not going to say that you don’t get burned while performing: you take the proper precautions, wear the proper clothing (natural fibers because synthetics melt to your skin, fire resistant material, and/or fire resisting spray), but you still frequently get burned. But that’s the nature of the art. Hey, if you play with fire, you are going to get burned! But if you are well practiced, the burns are usually very minor and almost feel like a small patch of sunburn. Sometimes you may mess up, and then they’re a little more than a sun burn, but over time and with much practice and many mistakes, you fear getting burned less and less and less and you get better and better and better. I feel it’s a great analogy for life in that way.

TMP: Is there a fire skill you prefer? Do you have a favorite prop you like to use?

LE: I certainly have my go-to props, and the fire hoop is the one I have practiced the most, but I love them all for different reasons. There’s almost a completely different flow to each one. Some have similar moves that translate, but overall it’s almost like playing completely different instruments associated with completely different genres of music. Sometimes I am just in the mood for my dragon staff, which is a long staff with four wicks at either end that you manipulate by rolling down your arms and body and legs for the most part. And sometimes a different song will come on my playlist and it’s a song I just HAVE to pick up my fire fans and groove to. There’s also a common philosophy in the fire-spinning world that certain props are similar to dancing with a partner, like the fire hoop, dragon staff, contact staff, etc. The prop moves around you and you move around it. While other props are like extensions of yourself while you dance, like fire fans, double hoops, buugeng, etc. The props accentuate your movement. So it depends on whatever I’m in the mood for!

TMP: What was the hardest trick for you to learn, and what is the hardest trick for you to perform?

LE: Currently, the hardest tricks for me to learn are anything with my fire dart. Which is a large ball-shaped wick attached to a very long rope. It is so hard for me, and takes me the most time when learning tricks because it is a prop not like any other prop I have used before. The flow is different, the way you move your body in relation to the prop is different, the footwork is different, the parts of your body you use to manipulate the prop are different. And therefore, it is also the hardest for me to perform.

TMP: Pyro Noir Productions. Let’s talk about it: what is it? How did it start? Where do you want it to go?

LE: Pyro Noir Productions is a performance group based in South Jersey specializing in fire performing that my best friend and I started when we both had more time on our hands to book gigs. For a while there, we were booking gigs every other weekend around our normal jobs during the spring and summer and had a lot of fun! We performed at local festivals, car shows, bike shows, backyard BBQs, birthdays, weddings, and even at bars while bands were playing. Then Covid hit and we couldn’t perform for quite a while. Then we both got really busy with our jobs but we are looking forward to hopping back into the groove soon!

TMP: So, you work as a New Jersey Wildland Firefighter now — how did you make the leap from starting fires to putting them out?

LE: I guess my affinity for fire manifested itself in a couple ways! Fire spinning came first, and probably did influence my decision to take a career in fire. Since graduating high school, I knew I wanted to work outdoors in the environmental field. I went to school for environmental sciences and began taking the forestry route. It was then that I learned about the field of wildland firefighting. Initially I started out in the research realm, and then made the transition into the operational side where instead of studying wildland fire and its effects, I now get to fight fires and sometimes light them for prescribed burning purposes! From dancing with, to studying, to fighting and lighting, I can say I have come to intimately know the nature of fire. This reaffirms just how amazing a phenomenon it is, making it even more exciting to me.

TMP: A lot of our readers are creatives, not unlike you, attempting to make their creative life work with the reality of their everyday. Do you have any advice on how to manage that balancing act?

LE: It is HARD! Especially when you are passionate about both. At times, one will overtake the other. For the past two years, I haven’t gotten to perform much at all because of my new job. But things will slow down soon, and I will be able to get back into it eventually, and that is okay. I still practice at home when I get the chance and it serves as such a great stress reliever! It helps ground me and reminds me of why I do what I do. It gives me a moment to myself, to slow down, to move my body, to express my emotions, to feel my emotions, to process, to create! And that keeps me going at my other job. Especially when my other job gets hard, when it hasn’t rained for weeks, it’s dry as hell, and fires are happening left and right. It helps soothe the fires in my own life. And I feel like that’s why creatives create! So you have to make time for it. It’s how we self-care.

TMP: Any tips for beginners wanting to get into fire spinning?

LE: Yes! I would say buy a prop you are interested in and spend a lot of time with it UNLIT. You will most likely have to begin your search for a prop online. Watch a ton of YouTube videos to figure out which props you are interested in (you will probably have to order them online.) And then watch a ton more YouTube videos to learn how to move with the prop. There’s a bit of a learning curve, so don’t get discouraged! But also, don’t be afraid to try another prop. Certain ones might just click for you. There is also a huge fire-spinning community in the country, and the world! Connect with them! There are groups on Facebook and Instagram, find local ones, find out where they meet for spin jams, and just show up! You will learn a lot from watching people, and they are also always more than happy to teach.

TMP: Anything I haven’t asked that you want to talk about?

LE: As much as I love my full-time job, it does make it very hard for me to spend as much time practicing and performing as I would like. It’s so very hard to find a balance. Part of me thinks that If I could make performing my full-time job, I wouldn’t work a day in my life. The other part recognizes the reality of what it would take to do performing full-time. Probably gigs every weekend and a lot of scouting for gigs at first. A lot of marketing, maybe getting into teaching fire spinning. Maybe traveling the country hosting workshops. Probably a lot of time spent content-creating, which does sound amazing. But after some time, I know it would become mundane at times, and become a job like any other job. I like not having to sell my art. Not having to sell my creativity. I wish I could spend more time doing it, and hopefully I will be able to. The ideal balance is probably different for everybody, and maybe so worth it for other people to put the work in to make it a full-time job. And some would probably rather have a bad day doing what they love, than a good day doing anything else. But for those like me, with so many different passions and hobbies, I think it’s okay to not have to sell your art and to do it purely just for you.

FIRE SPINNING LIGHTNING ROUND:

Question: Favorite genre of music to perform to?

LE: it really depends on whatever I am in the mood for. Sometimes it’s really techy stuff if I want to move fast. Sometimes it’s soulful music if I want to move with intensity and passion. Sometimes it’s reggae or jam bands if I want to just flow like the wind!

Q: What was your favorite costume?

LE: So all of our costumes have to be fire-resistant and very unrestrictive, and that can make costume creation a little tough. But putting together a theme-specific costume is another aspect I truly enjoy about performing. Halloween events are always fun because you can get really creative. Circus clown costumes are super fitting and usually allow a great deal of movement. But I think my favorite costume so far was this skeleton catsuit with skull face paint. The material was so flexible and comfortable, and painting the skull face was fun!

Q: Biggest inspirations in the industry?

LE: My biggest inspirations in the industry were definitely my friends in the industry that introduced me, the local community I was lucky to have access to, as well as very influential content creators online.

Q: Most challenging/uncommon place you’ve performed?

LE: I’ve performed in very tight spaces and on very small stages. But the most challenging is when it’s hot out, and you’re on asphalt, and the sun is cooking you and so are the flames! Just have to remember to hydrate and take breaks.

Q: What has been your most memorable or unique performance experience so far?

LE: My most memorable experience performing so far was performing for the first time in front of a very large crowd, probably over 2000 people. I was surprised how much the crowd watching me didn’t matter and just melted away into the background. The flames sort of blind you from the crowd and you feel like it’s just you and your prop. And every now and then when you nail a tough or visually appealing trick you hear the crowd cheer and clap and whistle.

A big thank you to Lexi for allowing us such a wonderful interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit Pyro Noir Productions website, or follow them on Instagram.

Jenny Tufts Interview for Carnival Issue

Melissa Ashley Hernandez
June 10th, 2023

Deciding that a job in her academic field of study (politics) sounded exceptionally un-fun, Jenny proceeded post-college to live in 7 different countries across three continents taking jobs as an assistant editor, a live-in nanny, an English teacher, a university administrator, and a full-time dog walker. These occupations allowed her time to pursue a patchwork education in circus across various institutions including Circus Warehouse (NYC), Circus Oz (Melbourne), and Centro Acrobatico Fedriani (Madrid), alongside participation in innumerable private lessons, workshops, and festivals.

While she’s tried her hand at just about everything, aerial hoop is Jenny’s primary discipline followed closely by her invented apparatus ‘the infineight,’ made in collaboration with metalworker Tim Omspach. She has also performed aerial harness/vertical dance, spanish web, aerial chains, hula hoops, aerial spiral, and worked at great heights on crane gigs with Fidget Feet Aerial Dance Theatre. She might even do verticals if you pay her a lot of money, and she is a born 3-high middle.

Jenny is a US citizen and aspiring permanent resident of Ireland. When not on tour, you can find her snuggling her two giant dogs on the coast of county Sligo. She is proud to also be supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, and her beloved team over on Patreon. You can find her all over the internet under the name @circlecirque.

When we think of circus, we think of the experience of watching performers and acrobats “fly through the air with the greatest of ease.” Whether it be trapeze artists, aerialists, or fire performers, we always find ourselves asking the same question: how do they do that?

Well, Jenny Tufts is here to give us some insight on exactly that! She is well-versed in many kinds of aerial performance art and has graciously given us the opportunity to ask her about it. In this interview, Jenny talks about what it’s like to work as a full-time aerialist, her aspirations for her future, and what to do if you want to chase the “wheeee” like she does!

(Read the Carnival issue here!)

Interview with Jenny Tufts

TMP: We’ll start it off with a basic question, what got you into aerial performance? How did your journey start?

JT: I got hooked on aerial arts through the recreational scene in NYC just after graduating college – I was working a bunch of odd jobs (academic administrator, barista, nanny, dog walker…) and trying to decide what to do with my life, since a job in my field of study (politics) turned out to be way less appealing than The West Wing made it sound. I’ve never done intensive gymnastics or dance training, but I’ve always loved adrenaline and challenging my body, so when I discovered aerial hoop it was love at first sight!

TMP: Is there a type of aerial performance that you like the best? One that you specialize in?

JT: I specialize in spinning bar apparatuses. In contrast to ‘floppy apparatuses’ (like aerial straps, or verticals like fabric or rope), most steel-based aerial apparatuses no matter what their shape will have similar properties, and once you’ve mastered one it’s fairly simple to translate that knowledge to other landscapes. My foundation in aerial hoop gave me the tools to explore other bar apparatuses, like spiral, with confidence and comfort. And while I wouldn’t say I’m stage-ready in many other disciplines, I do train or have trained in dozens of other circus arts. I LOVE being a student and am a huge believer in having a diverse movement practice, both for practical injury prevention and to inspire new ways of approaching your home discipline!

TMP: What does your training process look like? What does your training look like when you’re contracted versus when you’re in your off-season?

JT: The unfortunate thing about circus is that, unlike every other professional sport, we don’t typically have an off-season. France has a brilliant artist unemployment scheme where performing artists are paid a livable wage during the months they’re not working so long as they’ve clocked enough hours in a performing job, which allows them to appropriately recover from the demands of a long contract, upskill, and/or create their own independent projects! Most artists around the world don’t have this luxury. …Like most freelancers, my calendar is a hectic patchwork of gigs. I prioritize performing, but also teach a few aerial intensives and festivals per year. I’m extremely fortunate to be supported by the Irish Arts Council, and through their grant programs have for the last several years been able to schedule paid time to work on my own creative and technical training, usually with the guidance of outside mentors. I can’t overstate how much this has transformed my work, especially coming from the US where circus arts funding not tied to a product is virtually unimaginable.

When I’m on contract, keeping my body healthy is the top priority: time in the studio is mostly spent conditioning and doing my physio exercises until I’m confident I can handle the show load without risking an overuse injury. When I’m at home and have the luxury of full training days, I’ll often go to the notes app on my phone where I write down quick choreo ideas and follow one or two of those rabbit holes for a while. These ideas come to me while watching my own work, watching others, when I’m randomly in the shower, and sometimes even in my dreams! At least half the time I try something and realize my understanding of physics or anatomy was flawed and the idea is impossible – but occasionally it works, and more often it leads to a totally different surprise.

TMP: What are some of the physical and emotional challenges you face while learning new aerial skills? How do you work through or around them?

JT: I went through quite a rough couple of years where I’d feel fear in the face of a new skill, and then get so overwhelmed with anger at myself for feeling that fear that I’d give up in shame. I thought all I needed to do was toughen up, commit, just do it, all those gym clichés – I thought that my peers who were doing the things that scared me were just braver than me, that my fear was an inherent personality flaw. But I see now that what those peers had wasn’t necessarily more bravery, they just had more familiarity with the apparatus. Nothing can substitute for time, and don’t discount what a dramatic difference time can make. I like to imagine fear is my little buddy just doing his job, keeping me alive – he deserves to be listened to, and then we can negotiate whether that particular warning is valid or not.

TMP: What kind of preparation goes into each performance?

JT: All aerialists should have as much rigging knowledge as they can acquire, and check their own rigging before every session. Whether you’re in a class or on stage, there are never too many eyes on the equipment and no question is a stupid question (if your rigger makes you feel stupid for asking a question, fire their ass and find someone who actually cares about your safety). I make sure I’ve run the act in the costume (nothing makes an act sloppy or dangerous like fabric that’s slipperier or grippier than you’d anticipated!), that I have my preferred liquid chalk on hand, and that my body is warm and ready. My favorite grounding exercise comes from my mentor Rachel Strickland, who recommends asking yourself: ‘Where are my feet?’ It gets me right out of my head and into my immediate physical surroundings.

TMP: What is it like being in the air? How does it make you feel?

JT: Once in a workshop the leader asked us each what our core motivation for our work was, and I said, ‘I’m just out here chasing the wheeee!’ And I think that’s pretty apt. Nowhere else can I be more present, in a playful conversation between my body and the apparatus. I like these heavy solid steel apparatuses because they feel more like a dance partner than a prop – sometimes they support you, sometimes they reject you, and when you work as a team with that incredible force of spin it’s pure magic. Aerial also gave me my first environment where I felt consistently powerful. Raised as a woman, and a chronically shy one at that, it’s not a feeling I experienced much prior to entering the aerial world and very much enjoy.

TMP: Chronically shy? That raises more questions! I know you’ve been doing this for a while, but do you still get performance anxiety? How do you combat that?

JT: Absolutely! I suspect the day I feel zero performance anxiety should be the day I quit, since the butterflies signal to me that I still care deeply about it. Good preparation is key to quieting nerves, but also the acceptance that in live performance, things go wrong all the time. Most of the time the audience doesn’t even notice. The more imperfect performances I give, the more I can relax into the knowledge that it’s not a big deal and happens to everyone.

TMP: Can you discuss the teamwork aerial performances? How do you work with other performers and technicians to create a smooth experience?

JT: One of the most intimate ways aerial artists (who are majority soloists) work together is through counterweight systems, where one artist lifts another via a pulley system. Getting the timing and height of the lifts perfect can make or break an act, and I love counterweighting aerialists I know because I can usually predict their needs better than any rigger. My girlfriend Aisling Ní Cheallaigh (also a world-class aerial hoop artist, go follow her!) and I always lift for each other when we can, and I feel much more relaxed knowing that the person on the other end of the rope knows my discipline and body language inside and out.

TMP: Any tips for beginners wanting to get into aerial performance?

JT: Learn broadly – take as many classes in as many disciplines with as many teachers as you can! Not every teacher/studio is the right fit for every student, so shop around until you find a culture that feels like home – and even then, travel to festivals or outside workshops whenever you’re able. Also, go see some circus. Attend a Fringe festival, see anything that comes to town big or small. As Stephen King says of writing: ‘you learn more reading a bad book than a good one,’ and in the same vein, I never feel like I’ve wasted time watching a show.

TMP: Thank you so much for this interview, it’s been incredibly fun to hear you talk about your passion so deeply! Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to mention?

JT: If you’d like more in-depth writings on professional aerial life, exclusive access to full shows/act videos, and first dibs on booking intensives, sign up to my Patreon! It’s a brilliant way for fans of my work to show monthly support, and for me to connect to a more intimate audience than the megaphone of instagram.

I suppose my last tip for anyone wanting to pursue aerial professionally is just this: show up, in person, over time, and be kind. That’s it. Call it nepotism, but people really only hire people they know – so get in the room. Show up to festivals, take lessons from people you admire, ask thoughtful questions on CircusTalk panel zooms… there are endless ways to engage. And know that these interactions will build up over time. People enjoy helping people they like. Good luck!

AERIAL LIGHTNING ROUND:

Question: Favorite genre of music to perform to?

JT: I don’t really understand genres anymore, but usually something instrumental with a driving beat.

Q: What was your favorite costume?

JT: In Disneyland Paris’ Le Roi Lion I got to be a hyena in a full velvet catsuit – I felt like a kid in footie pajamas and it was so cozy!

Q: Biggest inspirations in the industry?

JT: Aisling Ní Cheallaigh, Dreame Frohe, and Jennifer Cohen have always been some of my favorite technicians to watch – Emilia Dawiec is another up-and-coming hoop artist who I really enjoy watching these days. I also get a lot of inspiration from movement artists outside my field, like Yvonne Smink (pole) and Aime Patching (handbalance), and always look to Rachel Strickland for wisdom in all things related to creative life.

Q: Most challenging/uncommon place you’ve performed?

JT: Probably atop a crane in Gweedore, in the remote northwest of Ireland – the views were SO stunning I kept forgetting to wave at the kids below!

Q: What has been your most memorable or unique performance experience so far?

JT: In 2022 I got to premiere a show I made with my partner Aisling and two of our close friends. It’s the closest I’ve been to having creative control over a full-length piece of work, and while that responsibility was often harrowing, it was also incredibly rewarding! I screwed wheels onto our home couch so we could use it as a set piece, got to see the apparatus I invented make its stage debut under the capable hands of our friend Jen DeBrún, and shared the process with some of my favorite people. I’m looking forward to more of this in the future! (PS: the full show NASC is available to watch on my Patreon.)

A big thank you to Jenny for allowing us such a wonderful interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit her website, sign up for her Patreon, or follow her on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, or YouTube.

Alyse Knorr Interview for MiniGames Issue

Melissa Ashley Hernandez
April 2nd, 2023

Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University, co-editor of Switchback Books, and co-producer of the Sweetbitter podcast. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry collections Copper Mother (2016) and Annotated Glass (2013); the non-fiction books GoldenEye (2022) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (2016); and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.

Video games are incredible. Not only are they great tools to stimulate and improve creativity, focus, and critical thinking, but they are also great outlets for entertainment and art. The Minison Project is a collective focused on literary arts, but writing is so intrinsic to all kinds of art, not just books. There are video games that have some of the best storytelling I have ever experienced! With dynamic characters, dialogue, and world-building, video games can be (and often are) playable stories.

Alyse Knorr is no stranger to video games or the literary world. She has written two documentary-style books about video games published by Boss Fight Books, a perfect marriage of two of her passions. Her roles as poet, prose writer, and editor have allowed her to work with both big and small names in the literary industry, and she also has the added experience of teaching in academia.

Because of Alyse’s experience wearing different hats within the industry and her love of video games, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview her for the “MiniGames” issue of the minison zine. I asked her a variety of questions involving different aspects of her roles and got some seriously cool responses!

(Read the Video Games issue here!)

Interview with Alyse Knorr

TMP: How would you describe your relationship to writing?

AK: Writing is my life! I’m a writer (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) and I’m married to a writer. I teach writing of all kinds to undergraduate students at Regis University. I’m an editor of Switchback Books, a feminist poetry press, and a co-producer of a podcast called Sweetbitter, where I write every episode. For as long as I can remember, reading and writing have been a tremendous source of joy and comfort and inspiration in my life. It’s my passion, my profession, and my source of meaning in the world.

TMP: How did you get into writing? What does your writer journey look like?

AK: I’m one of those people who has always loved storytelling–when I was a little kid, I wrote these little books with my dad, and then throughout my childhood I always had my nose in a book, either reading or writing stories about other worlds. I spent high school math classes typing poems into my TI-83 graphing calculator, and after school I’d write little songs on my pawn-shop acoustic guitar. In college, I double-majored in English and journalism, and then I went on immediately into a poetry MFA at George Mason University. Ever since then, I’ve been living the wonderful life of writing and teaching writing!

TMP: How would you describe your relationship with video games?

AK: Playing video games with my father is one of my very earliest memories. I grew up playing Mario and Donkey Kong platformers, Doom, The Sims, Mathblasters, Oregon Trail–video games were a form of education, bonding with family and friends, entertainment on boring rainy (and sunny!) days, and a way for me to make meaning about my own gender, sexuality, and personal struggles. Games have always been a source of not only fun but also potential and possibility. In a game, you can go to another world and be a hero. You can feel more powerful than it’s possible to feel in real life. And that can be life-saving.

TMP: I know you’ve written two brilliant deep-dive, documentary-style books about two video games, but other than writing specifically about video games, how deeply does your history with video games affect your writing?

AK: This is a fascinating question! I learned to play video games before I learned to read, and my entire life, I have experienced stories through both books and video games, so I’m sure that a video game aesthetic or mentality or structure has certainly seeped into the way I write or tell stories. I think that in my poetry, maybe I’m influenced the video game’s inherent sense of potentiality. Games are full of rewards to win, levels to beat, secrets to find, and (effectively) an unlimited number of chances to do all this. I hope that my poems are imbued with a similar rich sense of potential and exciting possibility, where each turn of the line reveals a new world and a new exciting direction. Now that I’m writing fiction, I’m finding that I’m more interested in setting than anything else. I like drawing maps of where my characters are traveling and what they’re seeing along the way. And in platformers and open-world games like the ones I love playing, one of the most exciting features is exploring new worlds–Henry Jenkins calls this “topophilia.” Perhaps that’s one influence I’m taking from games to my fiction!

TMP: Walk me through your writing process.

AK: It really depends on the genre! The way I write poetry is very different from the way I write prose, and the way I write each book differs depending on the book’s content and limitations. For instance, for my book on Super Mario Bros. 3, I wasn’t able to get many interviews with the game’s developers, since Nintendo is very private. So the research for that project involved more time reading games criticism and doing a long playthrough of the game, whereas all of the GoldenEye team members were generous enough to speak with me for that book project, so most of the early research for that book involved talking with them, then crafting an outline based on what they’d shared with me.

In general, I like to research and plan as much as I can, then use that material to generate an enormous “shitty first draft” (in Anne Lamott’s words), then go through and cut, cut, cut and re-focus. I tend to write way more than what I’ll need in the final version–sometimes as much as three or four times more than the final draft. It’s the completionist in me!

TMP: How do you find being an editor impacts your writing? And on the other end, how does being a writer affect how you view video game narrative and dialogue writing?

AK: Believe it or not, all these areas feel pretty distinct to me! I think I’m able to compartmentalize and really put on my “editor” hat when I’m editing, my “writer” hat when I’m writing, and my “gamer” hat when I’m gaming! The one area where I see a lot of overlap is when I’m watching TV or movies. I don’t claim to be a screenwriter myself, but sometimes I get very frustrated by awful writing in cinema! If I had to say one thing I’ve really learned about writing poetry from my volunteer position as a poetry editor at Switchback books, it would be that it’s absolutely critical that the first ten pages of your poetry manuscript be very strong when you start submitting it to contests. These first ten pages are the most important part of the book.

TMP: Not only have you been published by bigger names, such as POETRY Magazine, but you have also been published in smaller journals and do editing for a handful of smaller/“indie” publications. In your experience, what are the benefits of involving yourself with smaller presses/journals/magazines? What are the pros/cons? What do you find the most rewarding and working with lesser-known companies in the capacity that you do?

AK: My bookshelves contain a huge variety of publisher titles–many from the big names like Norton or Penguin Random House, and many from smaller indie publishers run (like my press, Switchback Books) entirely by passionate volunteers. Just like we go to indie music for some of the most exciting new material, I think we can look to indie presses for really cutting-edge and beautiful work published by passionate people dedicated to editorial work not for money but simply because they believe in stewarding good literature into the world. The biggest risk of an indie publisher is that it will disappear, as many amazing small presses and journals routinely do. Without sustainable funding and staffing, indie outlets can disappear–along with the books they have published–which can put their authors in a really tough spot, especially considering how many authors are also academics whose only chance at promotion or success on the job market is the existence of published books. That risk aside, I think that the indie scene in literature, and poetry especially, is incredibly rewarding and inspiring. I have met some of my closest friends through indie publishing, and I love having a closer relationship with the editors at smaller outlets. I think it’s very important to support this work, most of which is keeping literature alive, keeping it new, keeping it fresh.

TMP: Do you prefer long-form or short-form writing?

AK: I love both! My home genre is poetry, which is about as short-form as you can get. But I really enjoyed working on the two video game books, and I’m working on a novel right now (more below!) and having a ton of fun with that.

TMP: What is a question you wish I had asked you, and what is your answer to that question?

AK: Hmmmm. Well, if you’re looking for other great video game book recommendations, I would say any Boss Fight title is awesome, though my favorites are NBA Jam and Baldur’s Gate II. I also can’t recommend enough David Kushner’s Masters of Doom. An incredible read no matter how much you already know about Doom. And of course, there’s the novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which is a gorgeous book about friendship, love, creativity, and video games.

TMP: What are you working on next?

AK: I’m writing a post-apocalyptic novel! Here’s the logline: After almost all of humanity disappears overnight, an emotionally scarred Coast Guard veteran must journey across what remains of the southern United States to find her twin sister, all without sabotaging her relationship with the woman she loves.

VIDEO GAME LIGHTNING ROUND:

Question: What video game character do you think is underrated?

AK: Probably Funky from the Donkey Kong Country series. Dude always seemed high as a kite but was running a thriving business (“Funky’s Flights”) and still seemed to always have time for his surfing hobby. Plus, he figured out how to make a barrel fly!

Q: A video game you think needs more love?

AK: I’ve really become addicted to this weird little Minecraft clone called 7 Days to Die. It’s Minecraft but with a less cartoonish look and 24/7 zombies. The zombies are slow-moving and super easy to kill, so the game’s biggest challenge is more around survival–you get hungry, thirsty, sick, and too cold or too hot (the game has several different biomes). It’s really a base-building and survival game about tedious tasks like collecting snow, boiling it into water, making soup, making bullets, collecting sand and crafting concrete to build walls. etc. I love that kind of slow, boring game. I can’t find anyone else who’s playing it, but I love it. I’ve built an epic base and farm on top of an abandoned gas station, and dug a huge moat full of spiky traps around it, and I feel pretty badass about that. Totally the opposite of how I’d fare in any real zombie apocalypse.

Q: In your opinion, which console is the best console?

AK: I’ll always have a soft spot for the Super NES. It was the best birthday present I ever got (at age 7) and my first console of my own. Right from the get-go, Super Mario World rocked my…well, my world! There are so many absolutely amazing games for the “Snezz,” as the British pronounce it. And for me it perfectly captures that feeling of childhood innocence.

Q: Thoughts on VR?

AK: I haven’t done a ton of VR, but every time I play it, A) I love it and B) I get really nauseous. So, mixed bag!

Q: What is your preferred game genre?

AK: I love a single-player open-world RPG (Skyrim, the Fallout series, 7 Days to Die, Breath of the Wild) and any platformer! I’m so excited for Bethesda’s Starfield…if it ever actually comes out.

Q: Favorite video game of all time?

AK: Super Mario Bros. 3! I wrote this book about it. : ) It’s not only a masterpiece, but also a cultural touchstone and a super fascinating artifact from Nintendo when it was at the peak of its powers.

Q: A video game you thought you’d like and then didn’t at all?

AK: I recently downloaded Ark: Survival Evolved because it’s my favorite genre of game AND it has dinosaurs. But it didn’t capture my fascination the way I thought it might. I think the level of challenge is kind of weird? Some things feel way too easy and other things feel way too hard.

Q: Best soundtrack goes to?

AK: Donkey Kong Country 2! I still regularly listen to “Bramble Blast” while I work. Shoutout to the geniuses at Rare!

Q: Who/what got you into video games?

AK: My dad! I talk about this a lot in my book about Super Mario Bros. 3. He taught me how to play that game (and Doom!) before I even knew how to read. We bonded a lot over gaming, and he really passed down his love for video games to me–a love that I’m now passing down to my own four-year-old daughter!

Q: Your weirdest video game flex?

AK: I don’t know if this is weird, but I’m pretty sure I know every secret area in Super Mario Bros. 3, and I can beat the game in about 15 minutes. Maybe my biggest flex is the weird amount that I know about SMB3 and GoldenEye–all from writing my books about them!

A big thank you to Alyse for allowing us such a wonderful interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit her website here, or purchase any of her books here.

Not enough people are trying to interview me rn so I interviewed myself

Lauren Matthews
October, 2020 – March, 2021

Oct 2020

What’s on your desk?

(Laughs)

Do you want the cool answer, or the gross answer? I like things that are revealing and a little shocking and a little too personal so I will tell you the true gross one. My fingernails.

I rip them off during calls or when I’m thinking, and don’t always throw them away immediately, and curse myself for being so dirty and having a body and hurting the body or manipulating the body and like, what if someone knew? Now you know. My boyfriend knows, and hates it, but he’s not the boss of me!

Do you work at your desk? Or is it too fingernail-strewn?

I do, sometimes! My boyfriend built us a joint desk that I love for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s pretty, and minimal, and handmade, and custom. Fits perfectly in our big greenhouse window, which is the reason we said yes to this apt. You feel like you are in the tree, and we have become intimate with the wildlife who live there and rain tree nuts down on us in the fall. Thunk thunk, you know? Good distraction during calls.

The second reason I love it is because when we first moved in I had a vision of my desk being there, and Josh was like “no, no we can’t, it simply must be the tv room,” and his sister and I were like “nah, you can release that dominant narrative,” but like, ultimately I let him have his traditional living room TV set up there, bc it’s not like he was totally wrong on that impulse, he just…doesn’t have my vision. He has his vision, you see.

The third reason I love it is because it’s like … an example of a triumphant part of our relationship. As per my dharma buddhism class, you’re supposed to wish destruction on yourself and success on others, but I will just grip to this little shred of triumph, because, like, I want to. Basically, when COVID hit he told me I needed a desk. I’d been WFH for 6 months already because my job is based internationally. also it’s important to tell you that between COVID and us first moving in, he had built me a desk. It sat in our dark little den and I only used it for, like, a static altar to the concept of desking or selfhood or desire or whatever, or perhaps creative work as a totem, but I never actually sat there. Because there was no natural light. But it was a lovely desk and I love when people make me things.

So anyways, he needs a desk and he’s like “I’m thinking of having my desk by the big greenhouse window,” and I fully lost it and tantrummed, because it brought up everything annoying about everything. It reminded me of all the times as a child my sister got something and I didn’t, or someone didn’t believe me or didn’t see where I was coming from or was like “that’s dumb” and then 6 months later we’re all about it but for themselves. And that is … so frustrating! So I threw a royal fit and Josh was like “ok ok” and a few days later was like, “I have a solution. what if I build us a biiiig desk so we both get a desk there?” And I basically died of joy because it was such a sweet solve and he just offered it to me like “no problem, I got you,” and it’s so much better than my lonely desk there.

We’ll have to come back to the dharma thing, but first, where do you work if not at your desk?

Wherever the wind takes me. I like to work from bed sometimes and stew in the forbiddenness of that. You know, everyone’s like “NO SCREENS IN BED” and whatever but they’re wrong, as are most firm edicts! I mean I get the principle, but sometimes you just need to trick yourself into working by staying in bed, or sometimes, it’s just the best place to bleed the thoughts out.

The other thing I’m really into lately is wfbath. it’s sort of the same indulgence of working from bed, like, haha I’m going to meld two parts of my life that capitalism realllllly wants me to keep separate. I like to bathe in the middle of the day so I’m in all of the hot elements (sun, water). Bath Office. It’s precarious, but really, what isn’t?

Where are you going first, or what are you doing first, when all this is over?

Morocco, India, and Turkey. Specifically: Tangier, Marrakech, Casa, Rabat, Fes, Nagaland, Assam, and the Aegean Coast. That’s where we’re based so I can justify it, but also because I’m really enmeshed in stories and craft from these places. I’m DYING to go. And I miss my coworkers! I want to hang out with them. I want to see Eri silk weaving in Assam. Oh, and North Carolina because there’s a textile mill there I gotta see. Plus this artist residency in France with one of my best friends who is a costume designer and an amazing artist and thinker.

What have you been eating lately?

Right now I’m basically drinking straight soy sauce. Kidding! Sort of! I make black beans and drink their broth and add lots of Tamari.

Do you have a mantra?

I get a new one about once a week. Something I’ve accepted or learned about myself this year is that I’m clairaudient – not, like, particularly expert at it but I hear things, people, and energies talking in my ears. This is just a very clear way I receive information. Sayings. What have you. I don’t always understand it and certainly it’s not always like…available to me. But when it comes it really comes. So often the words show up in this very emphatic way like my big self talking to my little self sort of? Like words on high.

So today during yoga almost immediately, as I was thinking about how I believe someone perceives me, I heard:

It is not my job to reveal myself to others; it is my job to reveal myself to me.

I think about the Frances the Badger book – Bedtime for Frances – often, because the dad badger is all, it is the wind’s job to blow against the window at night and make a creepy sound. And it is your job, Frances, to sleep. Which I find extremely poetic and sort of like – I think this is what my teacher, Kat, means by “obedience.” Like that quote, tulips don’t question anything – they just grow. Just do what you are to do. Don’t freak out about it.

The pandemic yoga format (o the privilege) really works for me. Because I am not fast at transitions or I’m very much on my own timeline with things, which means I’m usually late to yoga, but now I don’t even have to change out of my pjs or drive 4 minutes, I just have to roll out of bed and click a link and there you go, like, yogurt in hand, no less. Plus it means I can talk to myself, accidentally have my boobs fall out of my shirt, turn off my camera if I can’t bear it, take breaks to pee – reveal myself to myself. Because as a brilliant intuitive named Asher Hartmann put it “I have a people-pleasing gene,” which means like, try to dismantle it as I might, I will be affected by other ppl in the room, to the extent where like I won’t go pee out of fear of disruption. “It’s rude,” you know? Whatever. Denying our needs in favor of politesse. No bodies in capitalism! Etc!

Also, I have an incredible yoga teacher thanks to my friend Sophia Moreno-Bunge who invented her for me lol. Kyle Miller is actually just…the medicine. My medicine! She is a bright light in my scared, pandemic heart, beaming into my “library” where I do yoga. Funny and weird and sunny and singing to her dog and talking to her friends and just being who she is. “I love Britney Spears because she’s just like me – an insecure white girl who just wants to be a mom,” she said today. My boyfriend always laughs at least once during her class from his perch on the couch because she’ll say something so clowny. All from the shell of this popular girl! Like, I call it popular girl yoga because she is undeniably popular and cool, in the way where you want to come along, not in the way where you hate her. Like in the way where she is def a cool kid but is also, somehow, nice to everyone. I want to write an interview with her because I think she’s fascinating and also I feel like I have a firsthand understanding now of how someone becomes a cult yoga teacher. Like, they give it their all and also have “it.” She’s just a pleasure to be around…on Zoom! Which…how many people can you say that about???

I receive important information when I move my body. When I run or dance I usually have an inspiration, thought, or answer to a question. When I do yoga, because the point is to move, I save up these thoughts to record later, obsessively repeating them to myself. I’d like to try to use this tool to that end: moving not to move, but to receive.

Dec 5, 2020

Are you synesthetic? A synesthete?

Ummm no? like. no. But I do think it’s really extremely important to catalog the things that feel the same to you. Sarah Faith Gottesdiener calls these correspondences and I think of them as corresponDANCES because these are things dancing together in relations. So like, the Bernadette Mayer poem where she’s like 8 = yellow. or whatever, but then also, cocoa always makes me think of the word COAX so its like cocoa-x which makes me feel so cozy, or um, how a lowercase g in serif font looks like its giggling, like how the word giggle looks like the sound or concept giggle. My sister gets it with tastes so she’ll be like “sometimes peanuts taste like skunks to me,” or other wild links. And I think the more you can classify the things which feel the same to you the more you can … enjoy the energies of this world.

Mar 9, 2021

What is your favorite feeling?

Once I read an interview with a respectable lady who said her favorite thing was the monthly pluck of her one wiry gray hair on her chin. She had a name for it – him – like Spike, or something, and joked about it with her husband. Whoever you are, thank you, you changed my life.

I think about this a lot because I have a very wiry hair that grows out of a sweet little mole near my chin, and it’s just such a sturdy, toothsome, grippable hair, and it is probably gray too – looks translucent to me – and I also have to remove it about monthly or maybe every 6 weeks at most, and I have to say – this feeling is almost better than orgasm. Sometimes I replay it in my mind to soothe myself as I fall asleep. I mean, I also love orgasms, those are extremely important and another favorite feeling, but removing my personal Spike is a close second. After it’s gone I touch the spot where it was for like an hour, caressing this phantom limb, remembering what it was like when it was there. Psychological! Far out!

Mar 13, 2021 (new moon in Pisces)

How do you keep your house?

I like to leave my clothes in piles all over. Like a spatial arrangement of them lingering together, on a chair or railing or bench or my bed or in a basket. This is how I find new outfits because I see stuff together that I wouldn’t have thought to combine without first seeing their correspondence or alikeness. This definitely first started because my room would periodically as a teenager / young adult become a tornado of mess, just literally covered in stuff, and I’d always find inspiration there. I feel like this was something I also read in an interview maybe, like this is a tried-and-true tactic of letting things get cluttered together so you can eventually clean them up, parse them apart, and find new expressions in their midst. This is maybe also why I like leaving some things on the floor, like using the floor for storage. “A minefield” as my dad would call it, but I like witnessing the effects of use on a space, like, for a lot of feb and march I had on the floor of my room 3 tulle ribbons, 1-2 other various ribbons, all my potions next to my bed, you know like just smearing your desires and beings and STUFFS all over. This comes from an abundance and carefree mentality I’ve always wanted to cultivate and aspire to. It’s also the root of a term coined by my friend Annie and her sister Lucy which is “toyboxy”. It describes your friend who is so rich and her parents are so la-di-da that she never has to put her things away, no toybox constricting her, it’s always empty and the toys are always strewn all over the room. Also, I like sitting on a nice cozy rug and making stuff. Groundedness. I always have. Feels right.

Lauren is a writer and creative director in Los Angeles. You can read her work here.

You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Book Review: Shouting at Crows by Sadie Maskery

Poetry Collection

Halina Stone

December 7th, 2022

When the average person thinks of poetry, they start having war flashbacks to their high school English class. They imagine being forced to read the works of long-dead stuffy old men who wrote in a version of English so antiquated that it might as well have been written in another language. What they do not imagine is the variety of exciting, gripping poetry being written by poets today, like Sadie Maskery and her new poetry collection, Shouting at Crows. The collection is masterful in technique, rich in meaning, and an engaging read that explores how the loss of or search for something impacts, reveals, and changes us.

The first poem of the collection, aptly named “Beginnings”, sets up these themes. It is a poem about potential, beginnings, and the search for connection. Maskery explores this by presenting us with a speaker experiencing “attraction at first sight”. The speaker is drawn toward a stranger and time freezes, a potential partner and companion are identified:

a pause in the celestial clock;
a tick of time suspended,
potentiality acknowledged.

There is an element of destiny in the poem, integrated by the use of words like “celestial” and the lines “we are magnets, an exquisite tug / dilating pupils, veins, souls,”. The implication of “soulmates”, of the inevitability of this meeting and this potential connection, is further emphasized by the lines “the universe played this moment / to infinity before we were born” and again by the repetition at the end of the poem where the speaker says

[…] no I don’t think we’ve
actually been introduced, although
we’ve met. We’ve met. We’ve met.

Many of Maskery’s poems cover similar topics, but each poem presents a new facet or unravels a different experience of seeking or losing. For example, the poem “Eternal” is about the loss of memory. Though short, it is a sharp little poem that reminds us of one of the great failings of our species: we forget. Maskery sums up the sad reality of our unreliable and limited memories in a few lines: “I don’t really remember what to regret / or who I said I would never forget.” Another poem about loss is “Retirement” which, unlike “Eternal”, explores how the loss of intimacy can change how people in a relationship interact. The title implies that the speaker and their partner have “retired” from the relationship. They’re no longer “working” to improve or maintain it but remain in the relationship anyways. Maskery uses food imagery to characterize the speaker’s feelings about it. She describes the life of the couple as “[…] unappetizing, / […] a reheated / yellow sticker ready meal.” It is not bad, just disappointing. There is some subversion of expectations, however. When we think of the loss of intimacy, we imagine people either trying to rekindle it or accepting the loss and leaving. Neither the speaker nor their partner has left the relationship, and there is this plea towards the middle of the poem:

please, sit here on the sofa.
I promise to shift so the warmth
of our bodies cannot be shared.

The use of “promise” implies a concerted effort to not try and is quietly heartbreaking, but begs the question of why even bother to pantomime intimacy when there is no desire to engage in it? We are left to question ourselves and the speaker on this point. “Eternal” is an honest depiction of our unfortunate ability to forget, even the things we want or swore to remember. “Retirement” is a touching and honest depiction of what it might feel and look like when intimacy just isn’t there anymore. Both explore loss and its many facets and impacts in a sincere way.

Maskery’s poetry is honest even when steeped in metaphor, powerful without becoming melodramatic, and sensitive without pulling its punches. These qualities are clearest in her poems about loss and death. My favorite example is the poem “there is a beach”, which uses the imagery of shells to explore the grief of losing a child. It begins with an observation of crabs on a beach and the “infant faces etched into their backs”. There is a pause halfway through the poem, a “…” as if the speaker needs to catch their breath before continuing, the emotional weight requiring the speaker to steel themselves to continue talking. Then the connection between an infant to shells is repeated again at the end of the poem,

in our yearning as we recognize
the features of our dead child
in the swirls of a discarded shell,
hear waves through its emptiness.

Maskery takes an image we associate with life, joy, and childhood, listening to seashells to hear the ocean, and subverts it. She repurposes it to characterize grief: how it ebbs and flows but is always there, how it comes in waves. The grief and feeling of loss being a constant part of life is an idea explored in other poems about death within the collection, such as “Not Fade Away” and “Pass On”.

Throughout Shouting at Crows, Maskery shows off her ability to manipulate structure and language to maximize the impact of each poem. I particularly enjoyed her manipulation of line structure in “Zoom”. In it, the loss of connection on a Zoom call parallels the loss of connection between two people. Maskery’s clever use of structure allows her to give us a visual representation of that conversation while maintaining the specific effects of awkward, broken off and overlapping speech present in calls with unstable connection. The lines are made of incomplete phrases scattered across the page and the words are repeated, have inconsistent spacing, or are fused together. The lines “h a v eyoutried no it’s / B R E A K I N G (up)” and “what did you / you / it’s too / late / no it’stoo llllate” are great examples of this. Maskery utilizes similar manipulations of line structure in other poems, such as “holy”, “Fallen”, and “end scene”.

It would be remiss of me not to discuss the titular poem, “Shouting at Crows”. The title is interesting considering how soft much of the language in the poem is. Maskery uses words like “muffling”, “heartbeat soft”, and “velvet” which are at odds with strong language like “shouting”. They add a gentleness to the sound of the poem, and the use of alliteration and rhyme further heightens the softness and rhythm of the poem. This softness is juxtaposed with ideas of transitions and endings, of death. The poem begins with

Surrender your dead memories.
Brush away the film of flesh,
your hair, eyes, lips, to mist.
Peace. Be still now.
What you were will yet exist

Maskery goes on to integrate nature imagery into the presented idea that the dead never really leave; they are still present because death is part of the cycle of things. The poem is full of references to moments of transition in nature: “leaves falling” refers to the changing of the seasons and the coming of autumn and death, and “owls calling” and “the setting sun” refer to the change of day into night and the shift from light to dark. Death is just another transition. It is fitting for a collection of poetry broadly connected by transitions, by beginnings and endings, to have the poem it is named for be filled with transitional moments and cycles of change.

Shouting at Crows is a poetry collection that demands your attention and sticks with you days after reading it. Sadie Maskery’s writing will enchant and haunt you as she reveals the many ways in which we search for and lose people, relationships, and a multitude of other things. Her mastery of language and imagery, her subversion of expectations, and the calculated way in which she manipulates line structure truly sets her work apart, Shouting at Crows has definitely earned a spot on every reader’s bookshelf.

You can buy Sadie’s book, published by Alien Buddha Press, on Amazon:

US: a.co/d/cynNqTL

UK: amzn.eu/d/hSYyyXb

Halina Stone (they/them)
is a fiction writer, poet, and fantasy lover hailing from New Jersey. They studied Creative Writing in undergrad at Fairleigh Dickinson University and are pursuing a second Master’s Degree. When not writing, they can be found taking care of their army of succulents or sampling wares at various local cafes.

Let’s Talk: Publishing Master’s Degrees with Tommy Blake

Interviewer: Melissa Ashley Hernandez
April 26th, 2022

Tommy Blake (they/them) is the Editor-in-Chief & Founder of the winnow, poetry editor of Dollar Store Magazine, a poetry reader for Persephone’s Daughters, and a poetry reader for Variant Literature. They have a BA in English Literature from Waynesburg University and an MS in Publishing from New York University: School of Professional Studies. They superimposed music and motels onto their poetry chapbooks MIXTAPES and swerve, respectively. Also, they wrote about the Internet in Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen, and then their cat in Peanut [the cat] auditions as Courage […from Courage the Cowardly Dog]. Tommy is currently contemplating compulsory cishet and ambiguous trauma through horror titles.

Tommy offers their unique perspective on their Publishing Master’s journey and how it has helped them in the indie lit mag community!

Interview Questions:

The Minison Project: How has having a master’s degree in publishing impacted your relationship with the lit community?

Tommy Blake: In the first marketing course I took at NYUSPS, I made every effort in my final assignment to increase the number of the winnow Twitter followers and social media engagement. The lessons from that class coupled with the ~10x increased activity ended up paying off. At that time, which was the fall of 2019, the winnow had approximately 400 followers. By the end of the next term, the winnow had approximately 1000 followers. The major reason for the increase, besides activity/engagement, was potentially due to the first event the brand ever held: a writing workshop. We haven’t hosted once since 2020, but we plan to host another workshop in the future.

TMP: How has the MS degree helped you as a writer?

TB: I learned how to write ad copy as well as long-form and short-form content. Essentially, it helped me become a better business-oriented writer, which has, in turn, helped with social media posts. As for creative writing, I wouldn’t say this program necessarily helped me, as I did not take a single creative writing course at NYUSPS, but the focus on magazine media did inspire the last packet of poems I wrote.

TMP: How has the degree helped you as EIC of the winnow?

TB: Besides giving me the push to plan for social media, my coursework has inspired me to look into different business opportunities for the magazine. Unfortunately, however, since the teachings are on such a macroscale–meaning that they are designed to aid you if you work at a big company–not everything was translatable. All in all, this has taught me how to be craftier in my research, and that connections are incredibly important across the board.

TMP: What do you think can only be learned by serving as an EIC vs. through courses in publishing?

TB: Let me first say that if you plan to attend an institution to better a nonprofit literary magazine or a micro-magazine/press, that may not be worth it as the cost of the education will forever exceed the “monetary earnings” (re: there aren’t any). I did not attend NYUSPS for that reason — I attended because I want to work in publishing beyond literary magazines for a full-time job. However, since the courses are designed for the latter, a lot of concepts need to be re-learned through the lens of indie publishing. The biggest ticket item is funding. I’m still working this one out, to be honest, as my coursework did not really dive into this for big companies since the money is already there for them. There was a course for start-up companies, which would have been very helpful, but it always conflicted with required courses for me.

TMP: Do you think a master’s degree (fine arts or not) is necessary?

TB: The short answer: no, but it can be helpful.

The long answer is that it depends on what you are hoping to gain from the degree. I sought out an MS to further my experience/understanding of business models in the publishing industry and to make long-lasting connections. However, I have not sought out an MFA because, for creative concepts, I work and learn best from hands-on experience. On the other hand, an MFA would grant me more connections and more opportunities, potentially, for that hands-on experience. Career-wise, I do not see an MFA assisting me with that aspect of my life at this time; however, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t help someone else. All in all, I strongly suggest conducting research on any master’s program you plan to apply to and asking yourself why specifically that program and why you want it.

TMP: What makes this degree worthwhile and how has it helped you in the indie lit community?

TB: This degree taught me how to put together a multifaceted business plan that would have the potential to succeed in the scope of the publishing industry. I will always be grateful for the business experience and skills it has gifted me. I can’t wait to translate those skills and experience into a career in publishing, whether it be in Books or Digital Media.

Also, the degree has helped me with personal ventures, especially putting together a marketing plan for a self-published or micro-press book on a shoestring (or $0) budget. It’s helped me with understanding brand recognition, transparency, and ethos which would’ve taken me much longer to learn/understand without the degree. It’s also given me the confidence to properly conduct additional research, which may involve the knowledge of my peers or colleagues at times. And, of course, it’s helped me a great deal with business ad copy and graphics.

You can find Tommy on Twitter @tommyblakepoet, tweeting about their cat, Peanut.

You can keep up with the winnow here: https://www.thewinnowmagazine.com/

Issue 13

Minimal Sonnets
September 14, 2021

Note from the EIC: It is with great love that I publish this Issue, as it pays homage to Tom Snarsky and Jo Ianni’s first iteration of the zine, a site on Neutral Spaces (hosted so graciously by Giacomo Pope) that showcased hundreds of minimal sonnets from all over the world. Although this one is much smaller, I hope you can enjoy this recall to our humble beginnings.

the miniaturist	Tom Snarsky
half-worms, alive	Jack Hartley
brutes be better	Ankur Jyoti Saikia
i forgot my names	Charlie D’Aniello
Clawed storming.	Rhianna Levi
Of numbered days	Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
without my doubt	Aleah Dye
ducks duck or dip	Ankur Jyoti Saikia
a bee on my finger	Shine Ballard
my mind an apiary	Sanjana Ramanathan
tenderly mended	Amy Theobald Ross
ANGELS R ON BREAK	Alana Greene
Full in fourteen	Pramod Subbaraman
(No more dreaming)	Sadie Maskery
bench press tune	Alan Bern
Twist mortal law	Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
i can’t refuse you	Shine Ballard
Two hands to hell	Andrea Schrosk

Such little lies	Sadie Maskery
soak’d w/ bled neon	Jack Hartley
unhaply unmaskt	Alan Bern
my funeral today	Alana Greene
hypotheticals?	Charlie D’Aniello
my useless brain	Shine Ballard
Ἀχιλλεύς healed	Sanjana Ramanathan
and now I am yours	Alana Greene
Syrup sun kisses.	Rhianna Levi
cat chase Sunday	Aleah Dye
anomalous gloom	Charlie D’Aniello
shatter closets	Ankur Jyoti Saikia
Minimalism wins	Pramod Subbaraman
winging your way	Amy Theobald Ross
Lotus seed house	Andrea Schrosk
Apex, God complex	Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
Erotic? Oh. Why not?	Sadie Maskery

Cosmic currency	Andrea Schrosk
Life lures limbo.	Rhianna Levi
Jacuzzi fuzzbox	Clem Flowers
peachmango girl	Jack Hartley
deluge of desire	Ankur Jyoti Saikia
the boy resolute	Amy Theobald Ross
creativity in 14	Pramod Subbaraman
hands are sticky	Jack Hartley
moonbled nights	Sanjana Ramanathan
glass heart, mind	Aleah Dye
death doesn’t die	Ankur Jyoti Saikia
be contrariwise	Shine Ballard
add drunk kisses	Alan Bern
red-tinted lives	Charlie D’Aniello
as ginseng sings	Sanjana Ramanathan
Cold to the light	Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
sowbug painting	Jack Hartley

*Minison Parking Only*, Karin Hedetniemi

Callous calling.	Rhianna Levi
love’s retreats	Alan Bern
eyelashes a gift	Aleah Dye
snowglobe storm	Alana Greene
flyweight boxer	Amy Theobald Ross
good constraint	Pramod Subbaraman
Jaded by time, rot	Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
I hate you, my love.	Sadie Maskery
me, a sullen ghost	Charlie D’Aniello
Silly wild child…	Sadie Maskery
nosinim minison	Alan Bern
abacus chitchat	Sanjana Ramanathan
bang AND whimper	Alana Greene
thunder unrolls	Shine Ballard
#14 is fantastic	Pramod Subbaraman
step bold as blue	Amy Theobald Ross
a small thank you	Aleah Dye

Let’s Talk: MFA’s with Jared Beloff

Welcome to the first video podcast of the Let’s Talk Series! This Let’s Talk, we have a discussion with published poet (and repeat contributor) Jared Beloff about his thoughts on whether or not a writer needs an MFA to be successful.

You can follow Jared on Twitter: @Read_Instead

Let’s Talk: How Instapoetry Functions

Ada Wofford, Senior Editor
April 30th, 2021

Part Five

In our last installment we look at how exactly Instapoetry functions, what new trails are being blazed, and wrap up with a final conclusion. I hope you enjoyed this series and that you found some of the information presented here useful. A full bibliography can be acquired by request.

How Instapoetry Functions

As discussed above, hashtags are an integral aspect of Instapoetry. One can think of an Instapoem existing/functioning as such:

The poem functions via a complex interplay between the text, the image, and the hashtag(s). This situates Instapoetry as a truly unique genre of poetry and it is why a book by an Instapoet will not give the reader the true experience of Instapoetry, which exists solely on Instagram. It’s not about individual poets and their work, it’s about the poet’s entire online presence. Pâquet expands on this:

Indeed, ignoring the page as a whole and only considering the poetry replicates criticisms of researchers in ekphrastics, who “construct text–image relations variably, not without implications for the power relations between media …. Traditionally, critics envisage ekphrasis as writing on art, a top-down suggestion that implies that the battle for mastery is already won (by the writer)” (Harrow 259). While many of these poets are following in Rupi Kaur’s footsteps and publishing book collections, it is their curating of an online human brand that has allowed them to gain the momentum to bypass the traditional publishing industry and communicate directly to their readers. (311)

The thing not mentioned on my triangle chart is the reader or community. Through the use of hashtags, individuals interested in poetry or in specific poets can find one another to discuss and share ideas. Instapoetry is not just about poetry, it’s about community. This is highlighted in Kaur’s emphasis on selflove and feminist empowerment. Kaur’s poetry may say things in simple or practical language, but it also says things that many individuals cannot. Not only has her poetry help launch and cultivate an online space where women can share their stories, Kaur has also popularized (if not invented and provided) a style of poetry that enables such stories to be articulated and expressed. Pâquet writes of the audience of Instapoetry:

[. . .] the audience targeted seems to be almost exclusively young women. The poems are often about women, whether a third- person “her” or about women’s experiences from a personal standpoint. Rupi Kaur, for example, writes poems about rape, about her mother, and about global women’s issues. (305)

The importance of this is highlighted in the article, “Hair, Blood and the Nipple Instagram Censorship and the Female Body” by Gretchen Faust. Referencing Rebecca Ruiz, Faust writes: “Digital connectivity provides women with a very public way to assert their identities, build a supportive private or public community, and in some ways liberate their bodies from injustice or oppressive societal norms (168). This is why Instapoetry is valuable; not for the complexity of its language but for how it functions as both a space and a language where individuals (particularly women) can articulate and express that which they are unable to articulate and express elsewhere.

Conclusion

There is very little academic attention paid to Instapoetry and virtually none paid to the now defunct genre of alt-lit. Pâquet articulates why this is such an issue:

To argue that as academics such a popular form of poetry is too lowbrow to be considered serious sets up damaging binaries that ignore the importance of the poems as popular cultural products. The poets create valuable cultural products and are therefore important cultural artists. (302)

It was my goal with this essay to demonstrate just how true that statement is: Instapoetry, whether we like it or not, is a valuable cultural product. Regardless of its use of branding and marketing, regardless of its simplistic or practical language, and regardless of its lack of traditional form, Instapoetry contains its own complexities and functions in a manner traditional poetry cannot. It reaches people who might not otherwise read poetry, it creates spaces and means of expression that empowers individuals to express what they cannot express elsewhere, and it inspires people to pick up their pen (or phone) and write their own poems.

Critics like Watts and Adorno are repulsed by the idea that “anyone can do it,” when it comes to matters of art. But it’s this very idea that gave us bands like The Ramones. When it comes to art, anyone can do it, and everyone should do it. To insist on formalized rules or standards is to put yourself in a box. Studying what came before you is good. Understanding your craft, the theory behind it—all that stuff is fine and if you’re dedicated, it will heighten the relationship you have with your own art. But as any artist knows, when it comes time to create, all of that stuff disappears because creativity demands freedom.

Bakhtin asserted that all utterances are a response to prior utterances and a poem is no exception. When you write, whether you’re aware of it or not, you are in dialog with other poems—You’re responding to something. Instapoetry is now its own genre, its own utterance, and already we have poets responding. The article, “The Queer Migrant Poemics of #Latinx Instagram” by Urayoán Noel explores poets utilizing Instapoetry in new and different ways. As Noel puts it:

[. . .] I seek to expand the formal and political analysis of Instagram poetics by highlighting the Instagram work of queer migrant poets who self-identify as “Latinx.” I explore how this seemingly extraliterary work (memes, hashtags, etc.) encodes a poetics of performative polemic (what I call poemics) that self-reflexively challenges both the technocratic politics of social media and the assimilationist politics of normative. (531)

The poets explored in this article are not poets who made it big on Instagram, instead they are poets who use Instagram as an alternative means of expressing themselves. The work featured in this article is much more political than Kaur’s style of Instapoetry. Noel’s article showcases work that points to a new kind of Instapoetry, one that is more politically overt in its message; such as this example by Alán Pelaez Lopez:

The piece functions as a graphic as much as it does a poem, yet it also functions as a sign; almost like a warning. Noel writes of Pelaez Lopez’s style, “The memes’ nondescript white lettering over a blood-red background elegantly hints at Latindad’s historical and ongoing enmeshment with whiteness and settler-colonial violence, as well as its fetishization of slight cultural commonalities” (540). This is work that is engaging with particular ideas within particular communities in a powerful and meaningful way. Despite this, I’m sure there are people who would say that what’s shown above is not a poem, but they would be as unfounded in their claims as those who claim Kaur’s work is not poetry. If the avant-garde experiments of Gertrude Stein can make it into an anthology of modern poetry, why can’t the piece above? Or a piece by Kaur?

I’m aware at the myriad objections one can make against the claims I’ve put forward in this essay; I made many of them myself when I published my essay on Kaur and my essay on alt-lit in 2019 and early 2020. But we must question where our opposition to this new form of poetry comes from; what was is in our education that makes us insist that Instapoetry is not “proper poetry?” When someone with no artistic education says that a Jackson Pollok is not art, those in the academy are quick to say, “Well, it’s because you don’t understand what Pollok was doing. You don’t understand what came before. You don’t understand how the piece functions within the history of art.” But when a person with no literary education admires one of Kaur’s poems, the academy says, “You don’t understand what Kaur isn’t doing. You don’t understand what came before. You don’t understand how the piece functions within the history of poetry.” It’s time for us to reflect on our use of such analytic tools and determine whether they inform us or hold us back.

You can follow Ada Wofford on their Twitter: @AdaWofford.