Who are you?

I’m a person, writer, visual artist, and writing instructor. An east coaster who lives in the Pacific Northwest.

What is your book about?

Being one place in your feet and another place altogether in your head. Or being present and another part of you becomes a balloon attached to your wrist. Methods of examining moments–some as large as ongoing health crises, some as small as a bird seeming to slow down beside you on a walk–to make them new, weirder, maybe more connective to other crises of other scales, other birds, other words–to learn from them. How “the environment” is a concept to care about and also is everything–I’m curious about the language we use to describe things “accurately.” Noticing and processing change–bodily, climate, sociopolitical, natural–alongside it occurring at the same time, and running to keep up with it, and then throwing up my hands out of breath but also refreshed like a glass of water poured over my head.

Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing this book?

In its earliest form, this manuscript was my graduate school thesis, though I have continued to work on it and incorporate feedback from a few generous reader-writers. I started this manuscript before the pandemic, and finished it in the early stages of lockdown. I remember going on a walk with a friend and using parked cars as a buffer between us, sort of shouting over the cars to hear one another. That kind of discomfort comes through, I think, as does the discomfort of being tied to a body, and a brain. Maybe “discomfort-gently-adventuring-around” is a good description.

What are some books you’ve read and enjoyed lately and/or books that influenced the writing in your submitted work?

The book includes a serial poem that’s in direct response to the artist Chino Otsuka’s project Imagine Finding Me, a photography and poetry exploration in which Otsuka photoshops adult versions of herself beside her child-selves in childhood photos. I came across this project completely by accident, the best way to experience something. It has continued to move and excite me.

I looked a lot at Vija Celmins’ work while I was writing this book, though you’d never know it, because her drawings are precise in a way I could only dream of replicating in words, but the trompe l’oeil-ness of it felt adjacent, in a way…also Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles, at a friend’s suggestion.

Lately I’ve been really excited by Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences; Manny Farber’s still lifes; Shaker Gift Drawings; Ruth Asawa’s sculptures. Arthur Russell’s music, forever.

How would you describe your book using emojis only?

tree–arm–x-ray–dog–ocean wave–hand wave–rose softly and poignantly dropping a petal

EXCERPT

There’s a spot on the back of my head that I can’t see so I spend hours trying to clearly photograph it. Meanwhile my neck starts to rash and the rest of my body starts to disintegrate. My mind’s eye can only see the bull’s eye outside the possibility of my face-eyes, so when I begin dissolving it’s of little concern to me, just means I can reach a bit further to assess that impossible bump. If an oak falls…but what about the sense of touch outside the realm of seeing? It’s more real, now. It exists only in my hand and my mind. Everything within sight is also conjecture, a sparring with periphery that builds up to firm.

From now on I replace everything “the” with “my.” It’s disorienting when ownership becomes a casual directive, and all my angle’s left out. You can’t just take one of five dogs for a walk, you have to take all my dogs, every time. My body moves through space planularly, which is to say, like a plane. Like its own series of planes but at once as well dissolving into granules, like salt like ice which melts. Lying on your arm until it becomes no one’s arm just another arm hanging around in my room with you.

When I think of the possibility of dissolving I don’t have a problem with the action. The problem arises when I begin thinking about the residue that I might leave behind. The possibility that all of one’s most shameful moments collect in the wake of your existence and populate the sidewalk, the carpet, the grooves of the wood floor in an indelible stain is unbearable. If we could control what’s left over from our matter, what counted as leftovers, I’d feel relief and be able to relinquish my physical form almost immediately. It might be freeing to drift alongside the remainders. In the meantime I fret about the partition between wake and dream, a tangible self and the hover of a cerebral orb. The risk is tempting like an already-peeled orange, the smell on your hands, let’s just see. But I’ll be gone, so I won’t be able to clean up.