Honeysuckle Press

We loved the usage of second person in “Instructions for Suburban Boy Love” – what drew you to the under-utilized second person form? On a similar note, the surrealism in “The Husband Machine” is striking; what was your process for imagining and writing that piece?

I envision my use of the second person in “Instructions for Suburban Boy Love” as a lyric technology of doubling. Of course, the “you” operates as an obvious proxy for an “I,” but also proliferates a multitudinous shadow-cast of possible selves, a mutable host of queer boys in suburbia. I wanted to fathom and combat notions of queer suburban isolation, particularly in the South, and the paradoxical dislocation and multiplication offered by the “you” as characterological device helped me edify the experiential singularity of queer suburbia and posit the piece as a model of a phenomenon that occurs beyond upstate South Carolina, where I’m from. I also wanted to present a doubling of queer geographies. I wanted to present the physical landscape and a subaltern queer cartography of desire that includes places like the Macy’s bathroom or county park where men meet each other for sex. The piece is very invested in a consideration of what types of love certain landscapes permit.

In “The Husband Machine,” I wanted to write magical realism for the queer Carolinian. I wanted to explore the victimhood of desire, interrogate the acrobatics of queer intimate reciprocity in rural and suburban localities, and challenge notions of queer somatic infallibility, but I wanted a story brimming with magic and metamorphoses and Appalachian glitter, whale teeth and pink fur and strong Carolinian rivers, because I needed those stories as a fledging queer in a Southern Appalachian fringescape. I wanted to amplify the Gothic mysticism of upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina (my home and my mother’s home, respectively) and to assert the presence of complex queer narratives in landscapes that often don’t receive as much narrative attention. 

Your stories experiment with different styles of formatting, particularly “Autobiography of a Voice” and “Revisions on a Grindr Biography.” What was your process for building this collection?

I’ve almost always struggled with temporal and narrative linearity in my work, and I’ve almost always been captivated by lexical friction in poetry, so the fragmented format of those pieces allowed me to transpose a structural poetic interest onto prose. Both pieces are a glossary of sorts—“Autobiography of a Voice” actually does follow a relatively linear trajectory, but the fragmentation allowed me to navigate and manipulate chronology, while “Revisions on a Grindr Biography” is a meditation on my bodily relationship to the lens and the various physical and verbal revisions inherent in habitation of digital intimate platforms like Grindr. These pieces in particular (and the collection as a whole) embody a seemingly oppositional interest in ecological configurations and relationships within texts and the digitization of language. My organizational politic attempted to combine my interest in the page as a bucolic imaginary and an instrument for digital errancy and alternative entanglement of language and narrative. 

In your artist statement, you write about the effects of growing up queer in conservative South Carolina. How has your background affected your writing and your identity? What sources do you turn to in order to find representation?

In the South, landscape is such a force. South Carolina’s Spanish moss and derelict silos and buzzing lowland swamps are forever nascent in my language. I believe in a highly ecological relationship between place and language—the dramaturgy of South Carolina’s geography has imprinted itself of my very syntax and linguistic configuration—and for me, language is an instrument of pastoral fabulation. Much of my interest in ecoqueer poetics—the interpretation of the queer body as palimpsest of its landscape and vice versa—comes from my experience growing up in South Carolina. Language became both a topographical experience and an index of its own failure to simulate the pastoral, an ecology of desire and a failure to desire. Growing up, I internalized feelings of shame and isolation about queerness, and poetry presented itself as an antidote to that shame, a form of queer terraforming through which I could create the discursive pastoral imaginaries I desired, a way to fashion the landscapes I loved so they could love me back. To find representation, I turn to other queer Southern or rural poets—Rickey Laurentiis, Bruce Snider, D.A. Powell—as guides and effigies, as models of queer Southern ecopoeisis and the complex and beautiful entanglement of language and rich Southern landscapes.

Your prose is so lush and lyrical. How has writing poetry affected your prose and vice versa? How has your experience moving into other genres been?

When I first seriously started writing prose, it felt like such a distant nation from poetry. I didn’t think I could harness the lush and fabulous language I cultivated in my poetry and the systems of narrative (or dialogue!) that I felt prose necessitated simultaneously. However, the more time I placed poetry and prose in adjacency, the more I realized I could learn from their colloquy. Writing poetry has allowed me to disrupt my codified notions of what a story looks like and to invest in fabulosity and the fantastical in my prose—to queer and quiz and bedazzle the physiques of the stories I wanted to write. Writing prose has helped me develop an appreciation for the criticality of mechanics and interstitial space within narrative—the moments between significant actions and the (sometimes) slow emergence of a character’s psychology, moments that produce an essential and humming texture in poetry and prose alike, in which the reader ambers within language. I still struggle with the notion that I can only “seriously” write in one genre at a time, and I think a lot of that comes from my workshop experience. I studied creative writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public arts boarding school in SC, and the curricular model divided each genre into nine weeks of study, so I’m still trying to molt and let my content decide what genre bolsters it best.