Come and Sit

Poetics, downtime, and revolution with Aaron Shurin

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/June 17, 2026/| Aaron Shurin, The Deep End

This interview was conducted in May 2025 from Portland, OR, and edited a year later in May 2026 from Seville, Spain. Skip the editorial to go straight into our conversation.

Walking back to the hotel in Seville, Spain, along a wide path shaded by London planes following an afternoon at CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporánio), I noted the strangeness of seeing so many benches along the way. Even in a slower, quieter part of town largely insulated from foot traffic, benches were prolific. Even stranger was that none of them had backs, none of them had bars in the middle. Some were even in the shape of large squares, flat slabs projecting up a foot or so from the earth, large enough for a small family or group of friends to have a picnic, or for a couple stuck in the mid-afternoon heat to lie down for a brief siesta.

A man in construction neons lay on one of the slabs with a lunch pail at his side. A little further down, a man with a straw hat lay stretched out lengthwise on a bench. Neither seemed concerned with the world around or worried that they might be rushed along. I thought of the squares in Madrid and how families gathered there late into the night—visiting with neighbors, playing hacky sack, eating ice cream cones—and how I’d had to press against the urge to rush through, an urge that comes from living life in a America where architecture is hostile,¹ loitering is a crime, and public spaces are generally engineered to keep people in motion.² What happens to people who feel they can never rest, who believe that to demonstrate fatigue is to lose one’s place in the world? To fall out of step with the machine that makes possible, one day in the future, a life worth living?

I had forgotten that, a year ago, Aaron Shurin and I had talked about benches. We lamented the loitering laws so foundational to the character of the United States, and reminisced about our respective experiences in Central America, Mexico specifically—the memories of which loomed large with benches. It wasn’t until I returned to the room in Seville and started editing the interview I’d conducted all that time ago (what feels like lightyears now, with all that has happened since—both in the world and at home) that I was reminded. My husband and I are in Spain for our honeymoon, also a year late. Both events, I am seeing now, are right on time.

I’d planned to publish this interview in time for the release of Shurin’s latest collection, Elixir: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2025), but life events made bad bedfellows of rest and productivity, and many things just didn’t get done, making something of my chat with Shurin being one of them. Now that I am at it again (just in time for the one-year anniversary of Elixir’s publication!), I believe more than ever that I am just one small speck in the cosmos of it all, and that one should never be too precious about timelines and plans. Sometimes, the plans we make just aren’t very good. Sometimes, life expands and time contracts in ways that even the best choreography cannot compensate for.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: “One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew…shared a habit of mind… They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice.”³ I am trying to be less like this: less insistent on my desired outcomes and more accepting of those most impactful events which are entirely outside of my control.

The first poem of Shurin’s “Involuntary Lyrics”⁴ portrays an alternate approach:

If the judgement’s cruel

that’s a wake-up call: increase

energy, attention. These little pumpkins ornament

themselves with swells, die

pushing live volume packed spring-

form hard as a knock: Decease

and resist. Content

surges exactly as memory

closes its rear-guarding

eyes

—the world rushes in not by! just be

steady, receptors, measure is fuel:

whatever moves move with the

drift which moving never lies.

I have gone long stretches throughout my life where poetry is all I’ve read and all I’ve written, but not so lately. Lately, I’ve not written any at all and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to read, too: a change I might blame on the atrophying of certain muscles by social media, by busy-ness, by increasing pressure in our gig-economy to commodify every spare moment, to always be doing two things at once. But when Dante Silva at Nightboat reached out to see if Pool Party was interested in doing a review or interview, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to reacquaint myself with the practice of quiet, close reading that poetry requires. Plus, it was Aaron Shurin: a pioneer in LGBTQ+ studies who co-founded Boston’s Good Gay Poets Collective and “spearheaded the resurgence of the prose poem as a crucial form of modern art.” I won’t attempt too much biography here—David Grundy has said more already than I can here, and better, I am sure, than I might.

Life has accelerated so much in the past year, and I believe that A.I. is, in large part, to blame. War, economic precarity, increased violence, and widespread censorship play major parts as well, of course, in producing a cultural climate made more of painful fits-and-starts than the banal ongoingness that makes the magic of art and writing possible. Reliance on A.I. shrinks us: we recoil from ourselves and others, from the hard work of becoming and undoing and transforming. Everybody is saying that A.I. is the future, and yet it forecloses on futurity: one cannot build new worlds on crumbling foundations.

Perhaps poetry is the antidote; it is, after all, one of the few things now that A.I. still can’t do.⁵

It Hurts a Little:

A Conversation between Aaron Shurin and Ryan-Ashley Anderson

Ryan-Ashley A. / Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me, it’s really an honor. While I’ve read a bit of your work here and there over the years, it wasn’t until reading this new collection, Elixir, that I realized how influential theory has been in your writing.

Aaron Shurin / Yes, I call it poetics.

R.A. / I’ve discovered that being in graduate school really alters one’s relationship to language. You start using words like ‘poetics’ and ‘liminal’ and it sort of changes everything.

A.S. / You know, I went back [to graduate school] when I was 33 and it was a gigantic experience for me; it really changed my life.

R.A. / What was most transformational about graduate school for you?

A.S. / It taught me rigor, and it made me be more responsible to my work.

R.A. / That’s relatable. I thought I was serious about my work when I went back at 37, but to produce anything meaningful or truly novel, I found, required both paying such close attention to everything I did, and also to what others were doing. For the first time I really started to understand what it meant to be in dialogue with other writers and artists.

A.S. / It was the same for me. It was a period of really intense argumentation and counter-theorizing with the Language poets and really tearing things up.

R.A. / I think I was all the way through my first year in this three-year program before I really understood why I was there. Since then, it’s been off to the races, but it took some time. I knew I was passionate about and interested in a lot of different things but was unsure how to channel my curiosity into something meaningful, something that served as a contribution to this ecosystem.

“Maybe I had to relearn to
love my early work.”

R.A. / You must be such a different person and writer now than you were ten, twenty, thirty years ago. What was it like selecting work for this collection written in so many different phases of life? Was there anything that you discovered anew?

A.S. / It was an extraordinary moment, ‘moment’ meaning the two years that I took to gather the work, put it together, and make sense of it, and the challenge was deciding how much of my early work I was going to accept. What could I call it and have it achieve a purpose? I came to understand that I didn’t need to, that I didn’t need to make the early poems adhere to my current poetics. Maybe I had to relearn to love my early work. To do this meant understanding where it was in its context, how it played out in its context.

For example, “A Woman on Fire,” which begins the ‘selected’ portion of the collection, is my earliest, published in May of 1975—literally 50 years ago, a lifetime ago—and I wasn’t going to include it because I just thought, well, this doesn’t adhere to contemporary poetics in its formal ideology. But then I met with a friend of mine, Micah Ballard, who runs the U.S.F. Program, and he said to me, “Well, you’re including ‘Woman on Fire,’ aren’t you?” It was just a joke out of the blue, but then I went back and read it again and I thought it was incredible. It didn’t need it to be anything else other than what it was and I welcomed it in: that really opened the whole book up for me.

R.A. / Was there any early work that you returned to that you ended up editing for this?

A.S. / Well, I made the decision with Brian [Teare], who wrote the forward, that I wasn’t going to excerpt longer work, that whatever was going to be there would be complete. This decision changed the structure of the book a little bit because we ended up with longer sequences, but I think that it was the right thing. Often when you pull out a little section from a long piece, it loses a lot of its infrastructure. It was painful, but I had to honor it.

R.A. / Was there anything you wanted to include that you didn’t because either it was too long or just didn’t fit contextually?

A.S. / There’s this thing called Codex which is really complicated because it has three different type faces conjoining, and it’s, I think, maybe thirty sections—the idea of typing it was just horrifying to me, and when I read it, there was enough other work in relation to it that I could leave it out.

“It’s grim, like a sinkhole that develops in one of the poems
and the rest slide in. It’s really fierce.”

R.A. / I am obsessed with the interview you did with David Grundy .

A.S. / That was a really good interview.

R.A. / I was impressed with the way that he showed so much fidelity to you and your work and shared so smartly about everything he gleaned from your talk. I was thinking about your work with Good Gay Poets reading that, specifically what you said about freedom and the politics of poetics. Has your definition of freedom changed, or your feelings about it? I’m specifically thinking about the increase of censorship in this political moment we’re in.⁶

A.S. / I just found out that all these small presses were defunded, NEA grants taken away that were already delivered. Including Nightboat. That came out this morning.

You know, I’m not sure that anything has changed for me; the goals are still the goals. And the freedom, you know, it comes in parts. We’ve reached points one and two but there’s still three and four, five, six, and seven. So, I don’t think this moment is that different. The urgency feels different, but even if it were a non-urgent time, you would still be called upon to react in the same way.

I do feel an increasing urgency to stay alive, though, and I’m not sure how that plays out in poetry. I’m not sure that I can point to an urgent temper in my poems. I had written each poem in the Black Roses section singularly and then came to enclose them in this habit of black prose. I saw the temper was dark among them and, honestly, I didn’t really know why. It wasn’t me; I really didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to write some of those.

I remember that, in “Memorial,” the second poem in the book, it says, “you are written,” and when I was writing, I thought, I don’t feel that, I don’t want to write that. That’s not what I’m feeling. It wasn’t the aim and I wasn’t feeling that either—that kind of rage and, not despondency, but darkness. I really wasn’t feeling that. Well evidently, I was, but I didn’t know that I was.

So, it turns out that the darker mood, which sort of surprised me in Black Roses, I finally realized was kind of post-COVID. I wasn’t thinking of it that way, but I think it wore a post COVID armor.

R.A. / As I read, going back and forth between the newest works and then your selections from Black Roses, I noted here somewhere that it felt like there was a particular heaviness to the poems in this section: like when you’re walking but you feel weighted down, you know, it’s just like you said, armor, the weight of an extra coating or layer.

A.S. / It’s grim, like a sinkhole that develops in one of the poems and the rest slide in. It’s really fierce.

R.A. / So, you weren’t necessarily aiming for that at the time, it’s just what came? Channeling rather than feeling?

A.S. / Yes, I’m always channeling something because I don’t know where I’m going.

I just did an interview with Tiff Dressen and one of the things that I said, which I had never said before, was the articulated unknown, and that’s kind of become a new phrase for me, almost like the title of a new book. A phantom book. The articulated unknown: that really kind of describes my position.

“You start with a plug of yarn and
believe in the future.”

R.A. / Do you know of the researcher Lucy Cotter, by chance? I went to a talk of hers recently, and one thing she said that I keep returning to is that there’s so much expectation of artists and writers to be doing research all the time and that, really, when you’re a creative person, so much of what you’re doing is moving towards some place you’ll never reach. The experience of existing and moving in any direction is the work so much of the time.

A.S. / Yeah, sure, and one thing that’s become apparent to me more and more is that I was living in history. During great portions of my life, I was living in history, and I knew it at the time: I lived through Haight-Ashbury and the human “Be In,” and I lived through the turn of the gay experience with Stonewall. I lived through AIDS.⁷ So many of these historical moments were part of my life, moments that deeply made me, constructed me, so I’m very aware that I have this historical placement. I worked very hard when I was younger, and I’ve been trying to reclaim the part of my gay past when I was very active. I want people to know about that.

R.A. / Are you speaking specifically about doing more activist, liberatory work?

A.S. / Oh, yes. I was in the earliest conversations about gay rights being human rights. Just two months after Stonewall, I was participating in study groups—little offshoots from gay liberation in San Francisco—anarchist study groups, fairy circles… I was part of the original Fairy Circle in San Francisco.

Like Bob Glück, I’ve written a ton about gender, including “Woman on Fire” which is fifty years old. And my friend, Bob, says that we preceded Judith Butler. In a way, I think that’s true: I was studying a lot of gender material and the way I was writing about gender was clear and purposeful.

R.A. / Given how complicated the conversation of gender is right now, especially with all the legislation around transness, it’s obvious that there’s so much work to do and conversations to be had. I like that you brought up human rights because I think that, you know, at the end of the day, that’s what we all are. I suppose that, to me, so much of the work of art and writing is that it has this humanizing power, an equalizing power, it performs a kind of stripping down.

A.S. / When people ask me what poetry is, I say it’s a mode of attention. It gets people to pay attention to anything in their world instead of being overtly directed by capitalist impulses. Just look at the tree, really look at the tree. You can’t abuse the tree. If you really look at it, you have to respect it.

One of the great points in my life was during my first LSD trip. I went outside and there was a tree there, and I saw the tree. Oh, my God, I saw the tree—I saw its circulation, its pulsations, its livingness.

R.A. / That makes me think about the tension between grounded consciousness and the dreamlike quality of so many of your poems. One thing I felt consistently was the sense of being off-balance—not like being on eggshells or being anxious—just being sort of challenged, having my perception challenged, and I wondered if that’s just what happens when you write or if you are intentionally behind creating a somatic experience that manufactures this sort of vertigo effect.

A.S. / I think it is intentional. Definitely. But I’ve never used the word dream-like and I don’t really believe in that, actually. I do believe in kind of staking coordinates of the experience so that, at points, it’s fixed and naturalistic and at points, it’s loose. It’s uncomplicated if you surrender to it and that’s the goal, really. And that’s what I want to do, to grab onto something: I have its sensual presence, and then I let go and open my arms, and there’s the window right there, and whatever I can let in, I let in. The older I get, the more I am able to let in. But it’s not exactly imbalance, actually, it’s balance.

R.A. / Now I’m rethinking the question I sent over about push-and-pull, and the question where I quoted what Brian says in your forward about how “syntax carries the power of the erotic to change, with its galvanic charge…”

A.S. / Yeah. Oh my God. It’s such a good sentence.

R.A. / In “The Incarnate,” the line “running to keep up with the past—” And “Dome” at the very end: “nothing…It’s everything I needed to be…” Can you speak a little bit to the tension between motion and stagnation, to the tug felt in so much of your work?

A.S. / You know, one of the things one wrestles with is closure. Lyn Hejinian has a great essay called “The Rejection of Closure” and it’s something that’s always on my mind. The end of a poem is frequently, as I said, prosodic—it’s not necessarily semantic, not wrapping anything up. It may be as powerful as the lack of a period, like in “My Memorial,” we “are written and erased,” nothing else, there’s nothing there.

There’s no punctuation. Sometimes I’m asked during interviews whether that’s intentional and, yes, it’s very intentional.

R.A. / Ending on this line, “you are written and erased” and then nothing past that point gave me a feeling that there was a presence in the absence. It made me pause and read back through again and again, like I might see something on the repeat that I hadn’t before. Punctuation choices like that can be so affecting.

A.S. / Yeah, it hurts a little.

R.A. / We want to wrap things up, don’t we?

A.S. / Yeah, and I’m a punctuation queen. Really, I’m very fond of punctuation, especially the em-dashes and ellipses, you may have noticed.⁸

R.A. / Em dashes and ellipses feature prominently in “In the Sky of That Name,” whereas your newer poems don’t have quite as much punctuation play. Can you speak to that shift?

A.S. / I was compelled by eros during “In the Sky of That Name,” so that may recharge the landscape a little bit. It’s full of confusion, full of opposing erotic valances, and there was a sense then of being but partially known, or partially unknown. So there had to be a lot of space there. Also, that poem [“I. If You Were”] is all speculation— “If you were, as we were, if we were…” It can’t land anywhere, it won’t land anywhere, it’s all speculative and some of it is reverse speculation.

R.A. / Like the effect of that missing period at the end of “The Memorial, the effect on me by these punctuation moves was imposed meditation.

A.S. / They try to make whole something that’s filled with partiality: “…If you were, as we were, if we were…” like that one poem in that section that says, “two halves make two wholes.”

R.A. / And this circles back to the sort of push/pull tension we were talking about a few minutes ago.

A.S. / Yes, and I don’t know how you feel about “The Sky of That Name,” but I love that title.

R.A. / I had to turn it over: The sky of that name, the sky of that name, and I just kept wondering what name, and then also thinking that it could be any name. It felt like an invitation, some sort of opening, or like an invitation for imagination.

A.S. / And a lack of certainty.

R.A. / Something that can’t be totally pinned down or named. And something that can’t be named evades surveillance. There’s the possibility of slippery-ness, or slipping, in that.

A.S. / “In the Sky of That Name” is very slippery because I felt I wanted it to resolve in some way. I wanted to come back to the beginning again and it kind of does that very delicately. Beginning again, but tentatively. But then it ends on “…aurora air…” I’m as happy as anything I ever wrote with aurora air. That just has it, doesn’t it? It sounds it, and it looks it.

It’s a bomb of a possibility. I wrote like a demon on that one. It was very hard.

R.A. / What was the hardest part of the work on this piece, in particular?

A.S. / Well, I had to enter the romantic space without being overwhelmed by it and find a way to make it new. Some of the really complicated ones, like “The Mirror,” that one was hard because eye beams are going in multiple directions: you’re looking at eyes and the eyes are looking at the other eyes, and it is hard to negotiate the arithmetic of it.

R.A. / When do you know what form a poem is going to take? Whether it’s going to take more of a narrative, prose-like structure or something more like that of “Raving #9” which takes more of a traditional poetic form but is also experimental, including slashes and wide spaces between words in single lines.

A.S. / It was really the arrival of writing prose poems around 1980 or so, and then that was that—I was a prose poet, and it so suits my disposition, my maximalism, I call it. I had so much room to say what I needed to say, and then to counter it, and to move, and wiggle, and to shimmer, and do all those necessary things.

“Ravings” was very, very early. I was writing first lines. And the only counter to it is “Involuntary Lyrics,” and bouncing off Shakespeare’s sonnets, it had a very particular structure and structure of lineation.

R.A. / In at least two poems, I noticed images of coins in pockets. Was that coincidence or is there some significance for you?

A.S. / I think that’s just an accident. I don’t have any particular vibration about it.

R.A. / It’s curious, when you think of historical placement. Now, we hardly ever see or use coins anymore. Coins jingling in one’s pocket is a uniquely historical experience, a disappearing one. It was banal. I mean, you’re just walking down the street, thinking about whatever, hands in pockets, just rolling a few coins around like worry stones and it’s as quaint practically as landlines now. So now, it means something, whereas then, it was able to mean nothing?

A.S. / Yeah, I think I wanted to be present in this ambling moment where you just look at all the points of reference. When I was starting that poem, there were so many little points of attention and that was sort of an ‘ambling indicator.’ Hands in my pockets, jiggling my coins; I’m looking here, I’m looking there.

R.A. / And ambling is also a little bit of a lost art. I mean, who ambles anymore? People walk with their phones in their hands, not noticing.

A.S. / Yeah, I’m a big ambler.

R.A. / I think ambling is a necessary artistic practice.

A.S. / I think so, too. Rebecca Solnit has a wonderful book, Wanderlust: The History of Walking, and it is a history of walking for pleasure, which wasn’t always a permitted act.

R.A. / I’m thinking about how resting, loitering, is also a forbidden act in so many places, and how political the codification of these modes of existing is. How here, in America, standing around or ambling is often seen as suspicious, whereas in Europe, gathering is core to the culture—gathering, ambling, resting.

A.S. / Benches. In Mexico, I’m always wowed by the benches.

R.A. / There are so many benches in Mexico!

A.S. / Yes, come and sit, they say.

R.A. / We’re just so busy here. We’re just rushing all the time. To do anything other than to rush is like a defiance of capitalism or something. The desire for rest is something we’ve got to squash.

A.S. / Right, yes.

R.A. / Futurity and world-building are embedded throughout this collection. In “The Incarnate,” especially since we’re talking about chaos and rushing, I felt so strongly the feeling that the poem was a provocation, pointing to the fact that, to do anything, to begin anything at all that takes time, requires so much faith in the futurity of this chaotic world and, specifically, in one’s place in its future. It was the line about the knitter: “You start with a plug of yarn and believe in the future,” and I thought my heart might stop.⁹

A.S. / You can’t commit unless you’re going somewhere and you have an idea of where you’re headed. And so that is absolutely futurity.

R.A. / And also, the faith that I will have time to get to the place I’m going.

A.S. / Yeah, definitely. That was a very hard poem for me to write, I couldn’t quite get the dimensions I wanted with that line of…

R.A. / “In the middle, not the beginning or the end—a thunderclap that has him fleeing from the house (how else would the jungle prevail?)—running to keep up with the past…”

A.S. / That was the hardest. Its model was a boyfriend of mine who was terrified of thunder. He had known two people hit by lightning.

R.A. / That line, “then let him wrestle the lightning,” was potent.

A.S. / Well, he’s an ex-boyfriend. I had to give him something else to do.

R.A. / Do you have any craftspeople in your life? Any knitters?

A.S. / No, and I’m not one. I have no experience at all.

R.A. / A question that surfaces frequently in conversations with peers is about whether it is okay to write on things that you don’t have personal experience with, that you don’t have expert knowledge on. The reason I’m bringing this up is because I think there’s this pressure to be beyond reproach in one’s academic work, like being so well-read that your citations are beyond reproach, that you can say conclusively whether you are writing with or against other thinkers at any given time. Reading this line about knitting as somebody who taught knitting professionally, consistently, for over fifteen years, I was struck by this phrase, plug of yarn, because I’ve never heard it used before. It was so evocative and now it’s what I want to say all the time—not ball, or skein, but plug. I think that if you were a knitter or had close experience with knitting, you wouldn’t have come up with that phrase, and so it reminds me that, while anything can be learned, to be ignorant enough to be novel is a real gift.

A.S. / Well, the fact is, I have an imagination and that’s how I came up with it. I think the rest is B.S., really. You have an imagination, you use your imagination, and you understand human behavior, and you see what it accomplishes or doesn’t accomplish, and you go there. Half of my work features female protagonists, and why shouldn’t it? I have mothers and sisters and great friends. I see them and I know them. I am not them, but they’re part of my human experience. Same thing culturally. It happens to me when I’ve just spent a bunch of time in Mexico and, you know, one of these poems comes up. When writing about details of Mexican culture, I’ve thought, well, is this cultural appropriation?” And my feeling was, well, I’m spending every day going there, looking around, reading about it, thinking about it, and that’s part of my experience, too.

R.A. / Absolutely. These experiences are being subsumed into our subconscious all the time, regardless of whether we are seeking that out or not.

Since we’re nearing time, just a couple last thoughts. I wondered if, in everything that you’ve done, if there were times you might have experienced obstacles of some sort, whether creative, interpersonal, or whatever, and had to lean on something you were proud of to keep yourself moving in a time where you maybe felt more like standing still. I’m thinking about a forthcoming publication or a mentor, for example.

“Keep reading, pay attention to history, and pay attention to futurity. Locate what you want, what you want to see happen, and make it happen.”

A.S. / We’re talking about over fifty years of writing, and I was lucky enough to have it by me, in my hand, so I could move through all these wild historical experiences. And one thing I always gave myself was the gift of downtime. If I wasn’t writing—I could not write for a year or two years—people would say, oh yeah, writer’s block. But I’d say, no, I don’t have writer’s block, I just don’t want to write right now. I think it’s really important to let yourself have the time. Stay by it, but don’t push it, and, you know, give yourself the gift of tempo.

R.A. / That’s such great advice and it plays into my next question: what would you say to writers who are finding their voices right now or struggling to figure out what it means to be active without succumbing to the pressure to produce all the time? Specifically, queer writers and artists right now who want to be active as we were chatting about earlier but maybe are feeling a little unsure in this moment of how to do that in a meaningful way.

A.S. / If you want to find a moment, go back to 1969 or ‘70, and see how difficult that was. I mean, you’ve got the wheels greased at this point, you know. I’d say just keep reading, pay attention to history, and pay attention to futurity. Locate what you want, what you want to see happen, and make it happen.

I moved to San Francisco in 1974 and people ask me, what were you doing? I said, “Well, I moved to San Francisco to live my life as a poet and make the gay revolution, and I did.

R.A. / Hell, yeah.

R.A. / Before I let you go, just quick, are you reading anything that you’re really excited about right now? Any specific thinkers you’re really turned on to?

A.S. / Well, I’m going to be reading Ocean Vuong. There was just a piece in The Times about him and his new book, the new novel, The Emperor of Gladness , and I thought his first book was phenomenal. I’m looking forward to that.

Footnotes

[1] The subject of ‘hostile architecture’ arose in my recent interview with Kerri Schlottman as well.

[2] What is the antonym for ‘hostile architecture?’ ‘Inclusive’ and ‘human-centered’ design are antonyms I’ve found and I find the need for these designations to be deeply tragic. What is design if not human-centered? Or, at least, shouldn’t that be one of primary requirements?

[3] When I was visiting my grandmother a couple weeks ago—right before I left for Spain with my husband for our belated honeymoon—she gave me her copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a book both my husband and another close friend recently recommended. There is a small scrap of tissue in the book marking pages 48-49 and pages 135 and 137 are dog-eared. Unlike my husband who can’t seem to mark his place without a proper bookmark, I am my grandmother’s daughter (so to speak), relying on scraps and folds rather than what I see as an unnecessary prop. The quote I included can be found on p. 98.

[4] This sentiment is comforting as it applies to my own, what I view as ‘shortcomings,’ my own inability to press on at times I think I should, even when, for whatever reason, it feels like I can’t, but Didion’s approach is much more comfortable when it comes to things that are utterly beyond my control: perhaps if I take all the right vitamins, get lots of water, and reduce my stress, I might finally get pregnant after all; perhaps if I learn everything I can from my grandmother, record every conversation we have in this, the death rattle of her life, then I won’t really lose her after all when she goes at last. Maybe she won’t even go.

[5] While I concede there are some creative skills that A.I. imitates passably well when the stakes are low, nuance is not required, and plagiarism is of no consequence, I don’t think generative A.I. actually generates anything. Rather, it scrapes, hacks, and amalgamates. A.I. is particularly bad at imitating poetry. Poetry requires a sort of second sight, an ability to see something new, and to see it strangely, in a place where nothing was before. But A.I. can’t create something out of nothing, it needs everything—it gobbles it all up and then doesn’t even remember.

[6] Since conducting this interview, censorship has worsened. Books continue getting banned, media outlets have monopolized, news broadcasts have become unreliable (at best; criminally negligent at worst), and tourists are regularly turned away from the U.S. border because of the anti-Trump and anti-American sentiments promoted on their social media accounts.

[7] By happenstance, when we visited the Museo Sofia Reina in Madrid during the first leg of our trip, I saw that a Felix Gonzales-Torres exhibition would be opening the following week. We’ve missed it, I thought. In fact, it was opening the evening before our departure, the evening we would be back in Madrid in anticipation of our flight back to the U.S. the following day. I couldn’t have planned a better, more meaningful conclusion to our time in Spain which we had unintentionally bookended with visits to the Museo Sofia Reina. I have transcribed the statements and saved them as a PDF which you can access here. <Kevin, PDF in progress; will provide prior to publication>

[8] During this section of the interview, we briefly touched on Emily Dickinson, the original “punctuation queen,” whom Shurin has done some writing on. (include link to his work on ED)

[9] This is what I mean about being just a speck in the cosmos of it all. The night before I got back to work on this piece, I had a dream that I was gliding through the trees behind my grandmother’s house—think swing meets hoverboard. I was on some sort of tour, a guest in this place I knew so well, being led about. The seats sat close to the ground, close enough to touch the grass and slow enough to lift things from the ground. I didn’t want to be there but was obligated for some reason. I felt like a bratty child, but then I noticed that tangled in the grass was countless steel, circular knitting needles. I started scooping them up like flowers, so many that my arms were full of what might have been a bouquet. The line “—you start with a plug of yarn and believe in the future” can be found in “The Incarnate.” I am currently working on a family history project with my grandmother (who taught me to knit, by the way: and from hand-written instructions left by her mother) who is not well; I have to believe in a future that will allow us to complete this project together.

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Aaron Shrin

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. He has been a central member of the San Francisco Bay Area writing community for half a century, having taught a generation of poets at universities throughout the city. A graduate himself of the storied Poetics Program at the New College of California, he is a professor emeritus and former director of the MFA Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Shurin has been a pioneer in LGBTQ studies and in contemporary innovative poetry, challenging fixed notions of gender and sexual identity, lyricism and narrativity, the structure of verse, and for forty years, in language both lush and colloquial, he has pioneered the resurgence of the prose poem as a critical modern art form.

Daytime Moon: Living with Death

An Interview with Kerri Schlottman, installment #1

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/May 14, 2026/| Kerri Schlottman, The Deep End

warning: this contains spoilers!

A three-part conversation about Daytime Moon between author Kerri Schlottman and Pool Party managing editor, Ryan-Ashley Anderson.

[ Installment 1/3 ]

Lithium buried beneath the Salton Sea, the tragedy of hostile architecture, and the connections between colonialism and ecological collapse. The search for identity, fractured family systems, and the role spiritual and symbolic practices play in healing ourselves, our connection to each other, and our connection to the planet.

These are just a few of the interrelated topics that came up during my chat with Kerri Schlottman about her new novel, Daytime Moon, released this week by Unnamed Press.

While a casual read may leave one with a sense of the book as a story about chosen family, the special bond between sisters, and the tension that shows up in relationships between people with very different values from one another, close inspection produces a more layered experience. Mica comes to mind: when cohering, all the thin, delicate layers press into each other to produce what appears to be a solid yet slightly translucent flake of quartz. But it’s not one singular thing. It’s whole is made up of countless layers of tissue-thin slices of material that looks more like the vulnerable material of a dragon fly’s wing than the solid mass of a rock. Each layer maps onto the next—murky, opalescent.

While reading Daytime Moon, I found myself taking two steps forward then three steps back, each new discovery a portal into understanding the deeper meaning of something or someone that had come before. Often, it felt like I was reading backwards, but not because it was dense or disorganized, but because it was all just so rich.

Consequently, the conversation was bottomless, which is to say, long—10k+ words long. So we decided to organize it into sections and publish in installments. In this, installment #1, ecology and feminism features strongly, and we spend time talking about both the devastating ecological impacts of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, and the psycho-social impacts of living daily on a dying planet.

Read installment #1 of our conversation below, and then, if you’re interested in digging deeper into eco-criticism, ecofeminism, and environmentalism, check out the companion recommendations we have curated at BookShop.org

Ryan-Ashley Anderson / Given that water plays such a large role in Daytime Moon, the Salton Sea being its own character really—I wondered if the choice to make your Hudson a Marine scientist had something to do with creating an affective connection between him his daughter, Isa, and her mother, Janelle.

Kerri Schlottman / The practical reason is that I needed him to have an interest in bodies of water and a reason for him to be at the Salton Sea where he met Janelle. It made sense that, as a marine scientist, he would be there studying the ecology of the lake. I also liked the tenderness of his care for the small things: he’s studying the smallest pieces of the environment that are falling apart.

His role as a scientist also created a kind of bridge for this idea about water and watery bodies. In the viewpoint of this book the bodies of water are very female-centered and this makes him a bit of an interloper.

In some ways, his character represents beginnings. He wants to know what happened here, what’s causing this ecological collapse. He’s trying to identify the parts we need to worry about because of what else they can lead to.

It’s the oceans where we are seeing this most, the cumulative effects of countless small environmental violences, and I wanted him to have that experience with bodies of water, with origin points, with repair.

R.A. / What is your relationship with the Salton Sea like now?

K.S. / The Salton Sea is so fascinating. I first heard about it through an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No reservations. It was a long time ago, a really long time ago, and maybe I had heard or read about the Salton Sea somewhere already. But when he went there I became particularly attuned to it, attracted to the bizarre history of these unnatural natural places.

I had a weird relationship with the Salton Sea for a long time because I had only researched it and I hadn’t been there. The first time I went, it was exactly like what I had envisioned. There’s just nothing like it. I spent time there talking to locals, really touring the area and getting to know it. I told a cousin who was out at Joshua Tree that he should go, and he did. He’s enamored with it now.

If you experience it, it stays with you and I can see why people stay, even as there’s so much toxicity.

But it’s not an easy place to be. It’s in the middle of the desert and it’s a really challenging climate. And so many people get sick just from being around it, but there’s something about it that lures people there anyway. There were people camping with RVs right next to the toxic water when I went.

It’s a destination. It’s also dying. For many years, scientists tried to intervene. More recently they determined there’s lithium beneath the lake. Now, companies have clearance to extract the lithium.

People are calling it the white gold rush.

The problem is, as they mine, the toxicity will increase. There’s a big question mark about what’s going to happen to the people that are living nearby but also in places further out, like Palm Springs, where the wind can blow that toxic dust even further.

For one area to kind of hold all that weight is fascinating and, as a person who’s for my whole life been concerned about the environment and studying different areas of ecological collapse, it was like: everything is here.

Every conversation you could have is right here. It felt like very much the right place to set the book.

R.A. / The Salton Sea is really looming throughout. It seems to breathe, like a character. Tarot is treated similarly. I think it makes sense as we’re talking about indigeneity—the destruction of indigenous lands and cultural practices—to think about the ways that being identified as ‘other’ produces a sort of illegibility that makes, in this book, a character like Isa somewhat invisible. She is able to sort of float in and out of worlds undetected and her connection to tarot seems to be a part of that. It was particularly striking that while Isa is using this discipline to help other people find answers and create some sort of financial stability for herself, she is simultaneously really trying to answer for her own identity, to understand her own history. I wonder if you can speak to that and, in particular, the way that tarot made possible Isa’s friendship with Lizzy, a friendship that is so fundamental to the movement of the book.

K.S. / Yeah, I don’t know that I was so intentional about this. Sometimes it’s easier to look at your book after it’s finished and be like, oh, this is why I did it.

My process is very intuitive: I don’t plan it out, I kind of just let it come. Tarot felt like the right thing for Isa but also, tarot plays a role in my life too. I am a little bit obsessed with it.

Having gone through trauma myself, I think that anybody who’s been through something really traumatic feels the need to find ways to control their situation. Hypervigilance isn’t that different from predicting the future. It’s such a strong part of dealing with trauma. In many ways, tarot has functioned that way for Isa. She’s externalizing in a way that makes it hard for her to ask herself the difficult questions, so she pulls cards instead to try to understand what’s happening and what she should be doing.

And when you follow Isa through the book, you notice that tarot plays a much stronger role in the beginning than the end. I think this is an important kind of change. She’s finding her own healing and not necessarily feeling the need to rely on something external for answers.

R.A. / To me it seemed like by connecting with her history, Isa became intuitively connected to the future. Something slipped into place. This connected, for me as a reader, the gesturing toward an indigenous history and the erasure of colonialism, how it controls by erasing: erasing people, language, traditions, beliefs, family connections, and so much more. I felt Isa’s noncommittal nature early on directly related to her sense that something was missing, something that was found as she uncovered more information about her mother.

K.S. / That’s exactly right. You know, she doesn’t know much about herself. Her mother died in childbirth and the man who raised her—Dane, Janelle’s best friend—was in so much pain and grief of his own loss that he didn’t really share much with Isa and Cole. There are so many things about her mom’s life that Isa doesn’t know and so she’s on a quest to figure out who she was.

The people she meets begin to help put that together for her.

R.A. / I’m curious about your research approach, especially when writing about sensitive topics. Do you feel any trepidation around writing outside of your experience? As a white person whose research often involves cultural analyses of colonialism, the impacts of racism, economic disparity, etc., I imagine you took some steps to ensure you were really adequately researched and could write this book.

K.S. / The thing about identity in this book is that it’s really not set and that’s purposeful. Also, I’m not a writer that believes that you can’t write about other cultures, but I think this sensitivity has been really legit in the U.S. because many people write insensitively about race and gender

The thing with Isa is, we don’t even know exactly what her background is. The point is that she’s connected to a way bigger story than herself. And I think that that’s the important thing about identity—I don’t think identity is actually about the individual themselves, but about their connection to a longer history. I think that once you zoom out in that kind of way and you look at it more broadly, then it changes our orientation.

Isa and Marnie are both really stuck. Marnie is caught in the crosshairs of all personal trauma and grief and unfortunate circumstances, and she’s stuck in white patriarchal patterns. Her grandfather, who was white, had tried to hush her and her mother’s story, whatever that story was. She doesn’t even have the full story herself and she doesn’t understand her own connection to various traditions. Isa doesn’t interrogate it because there’s no way for her to know either.

That throughline was important because I wanted to be able to enter into a conversation about where these first moments of harm happen, and the genesis of so many of these harms, in this book, are caused by colonialism.

Relatedly, this book really doubles down on feminism.

R.A. / Laura represents a sort of internalized misogyny for me in the book. She’s standing close to power while keeping women at arm’s length. In many ways, she rejects femininity, or maybe womanhood would be more accurate, but this rejection often makes women suffer more. Unlike Laura, Isa, Lizzy, and especially Amber, serve as a really important foil to Laura. I love Amber. She is like this secret feminist. She’s powerful and kind and uplifts other women in really understated ways. The only woman who exhibits that misogyny-coded energy is Laura. I think Amber’s character does a great job of showing one way feminism can look. Like, it’s not a hashtag, it’s not #GirlBossing, not #FutureIsFemale, in my opinion.

K.S. / Yes, and it relates to one of the stories I learned that, in part, inspired the book. It’s a story Lizzy tells at the beginning of Daytime Moon about a female teacher, Hannah Upp, who went missing and days later was found floating in the Hudson River near Staten Island after going into a dissociative fugue state and just walking into the water near Chelsea Piers. She was sunburned and dehydrated but otherwise okay. That’s a real story. It fascinated me so much because, in that dissociative state, Hannah was drawn into the water. And it had happened to her before and happened again after that instance. It’s fascinating to me that when her brain turned off, she experienced this sort of biological call to the water.

So, that’s kind of where all the water elements came into the book. There’s also this hydrofeminism theory I’ve been exploring which looks at gender and queerness specifically from a woman’s perspective and talks about the function of water in our bodies as creators and ecosystems onto our own along with our connections to rivers and tributaries.

R.A. / Thinking about ecofeminism, I’m thinking about how bodies of water don’t impose themselves on the earth. They materialize because of other things that are happening in concert, small events that cohere to facilitate the production of, for example, river beds. It starts as a trickle which carves out a little slice which pebbles slip into and everything works together to help facilitate the transmission of water. And yeah, collaboration feels like a very feminist characteristic.

K.S. / Yes, I love that.

R.A. / In the book you write about the toxicity of the Salton Sea and you also mentioned the lithium mining that will soon be taking place there, specifically how mining will negatively impact surrounding communities. I’m curious about what led you to interrogate this. You’re obviously someone who is interested in the environment and the weight of our human impact on it, but, what about ecological collapse in particular.

K.S. / Well I was a kid of the 80s, and, from as young as I can remember, everybody was talking about the problem with the ozone layer. It was a really big deal.

R.A. / I remember that. Specifically feeling like I couldn’t use hairspray anymore.

K.S. / Yes! I remember very acutely realizing that our everyday actions directly impact the environment. And I swear it was like from that minute on, I was concerned about the environment. But even before then, when I was a little kid, I was just weird. I would walk around our yard pretending to give tours of the last tree on earth, pretending that this one tree was the last one ever.

The environment was always on my mind. My grandma was also a grade school science teacher, and she was really interested in the environment. She loved bird watching, collected rocks and insects, and she did all kinds of other cool stuff. I’m sure part of my concern about the environment was because of her; she helped raise me a lot.

When Bill Clinton was in office, I remember writing my dad a letter about how upset I was that he capitulated to the anti-environmentalists. I was really upset about it. So, this has been a lifelong preoccupation, for better or worse. I also just feel like, I don’t know if you’re like this, but I’m a very somatic person. I feel everything physically in my body.

As things get worse and worse with the climate, I’m feeling it. Physically in weird, upsetting ways, and it’s really troubling. There are all these small things. Like in our neighborhood, there are a lot of new high rises, and, this happened maybe six months ago, when I went out for a run one day, I found this little bird, like a little sparrow, that had hit one of the big buildings. This happens all the time and this one was still alive, but it was definitely broken. So I picked it up and carried it to the veterinarian in the neighborhood, and the whole time, the bird was holding onto my finger with its little feet.

It was the sweetest thing, but it was so injured, and it was so scared. I was cradling it at the vet and, of course, they couldn’t do anything besides euthanize it. I am telling you, I still hold that loss. Like, I feel physically horrified inside my body when I think about it. These problems exist on a spectrum: from massive environmental devastation to the everyday problems like high rises getting built without using bird-protective glass.

R.A. / And they are so fucking empty. So many of these buildings aren’t nearly at capacity, yet we have people living on the streets. These buildings damage ecologies without offering any real social benefit.

K.S. / Everything draws back to capitalism, to accumulation, to hoarding.

Stay tuned for future installments. Daytime Moon can be found all the places you buy books. Grab a copy or two today: there is something for everybody.

Author
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Kerri Schlottman

Kerri Schlottman is a writer of literary fiction novels, most recently Daytime Moon with Unnamed Press. Her novel Tell Me One Thing was named a 2025 Storytrade Literary Fiction Finalist, a two-time 2024 PenCraft Fiction Award Winner, a 2023 American Book Fest Best Literary Fiction Book Finalist, and a Shelf Awareness Best Book This Week. Kerri works to support artists, performers, and writers in creating new projects and is a graduate professor at NYU in the arts department.

Luke’s Tops

Luke Goebel Talks Film, Theory, and Art Influences

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/May 7, 2026/| The Deep End

You don’t have to read very far into Kill Dick to notice that this isn’t your average whodunnit thriller. The characters are complex in the way that real people are: genuinely kind but also sort…

The Greatest Interview of All Time

Aaron Burch in Conversation with Kevin Maloney and D.T. Robbins (w/ Special Guest Amber Frank)

by Kevin Maloney/March 3, 2026/| The Deep End

In the summer of 2024, I was going through a divorce and living with my mother… which feels like the first line of one of my short stories, but my life tends to repeat itself and sometimes my stories come true, and that’s exactly what happened in the summer of 2024. I was going through a divorce and living with my mother and I needed to get out of town for a few days to get some fresh air, so I drove up to Tacoma to visit my buddy Aaron Burch and his girlfriend Amber, who were renting an AirBNB for the summer. We went walking on the waterfront and drank beer and made pizza and got drunk at a tiki bar. It was exactly what I needed.

At the time, Aaron and I were in the middle of a literary experiment, co-writing a novella with D.T. Robbins about the unfortunate fictitious death of our buddy Kyle Seibel—an experiment which inadvertently produced the greatest novel of all time, Kettlebell Friends Forever (we printed exactly 50 copies… if you own one, you are in possession of one of literature’s great treasures). When Aaron wasn’t working on Kettlebell, he was dashing off short stories, sometimes as frequently as one per day, texting D.T. and I: “Oh crazy! I wrote another one. Oh shit, here’s one more! Wait… just while I was texting you about that last one, I wrote another one. Oops!” (I’m paraphrasing).

D.T. and I were annoyed, but we agreed to read all of Aaron’s stories, mostly because we featured prominently as characters in them. *Pro tip: if you want your friends to read your fiction, make them prominent characters in said fiction. The stories were playful and fun and occasionally ridiculous, but they also captured a magical quality I’d caught a glimpse of while visiting Aaron and Amber in Tacoma—an optimism I thought I was projecting onto the landscape since I was going through a kind of rebirth at the time, but which is, I think, distinct to Puget Sound, and maybe was particularly unique to that summer. On a sunny day, with its boats and ferries and Mt. Rainier hovering in the distance, Tacoma is one of the most stunning places on earth.

Fast forward a few months, and suddenly Aaron had mashed all the stories together, producing a short novel, Tacoma, that is a love story about Tacoma, the city, and two people—Aaron and Amber—sharing a sweet summer together without any of the conflict and strife we’re used to encountering in novels that focus on relationships. It’s one of the best books to come out of our corner of indie lit… if not the wider literary world in years. You can read it in a single sitting (I read the whole thing in a single bath while sipping a hot toddy), and all I can say is: go buy it. You won’t regret it. What you may regret, however, is reading this interview between myself, D.T., and Aaron, which is both the greatest interview of all time and also extremely, delightfully stupid. Enjoy!

* * *

Kevin / Aaron—you’ve done quite a few interviews promoting Tacoma, and in all of them, I noticed a common theme… you cite what a huge influence me and D.T. Robbins are on your work. You’ve gone as far as saying “those two are geniuses” and “my God, are they the best writers in America? Honestly, I think that’s an understatement.” Say more about that.

D.T. / Congrats on Tacoma, Aaron. To echo Kevin’s question, can you talk more about how you owe all of your recent creative and personal successes entirely to Kevin and me?

Burch / So, I haven’t really talked about this, and it feels a little awkward to do so in an interview with you two… but also fitting?

There’s kinda two impetuses for the book:

As you note that I’ve been saying, I think you two are both geniuses and two of the best writers writing right now. I wanted more Maloney and Robbins! You two can’t write books fast enough for me to enjoy them, it turns out, so I wrote Tacoma in large part inspired by you both, and wherein you both make guest appearances, as an attempt to kind of gift myself (and, by doing so, others) a new Kevin Maloney novel, and also a new D.T. novel. But also…
I’m also greedy, and as much as I wanted more writing by you both, and as great as you both are, I wanted that new, more writing from you both to be even better than anything you’d previously written. As very possibly the best writers in America right now, there was only really one way to level up from there: write it myself.

Kevin / Well, it’s all very annoying because the leveling up worked and now I have to write a book even better than Tacoma with guest appearances by you and D.T., which D.T. will have to level up on in his next book, with guest appearances by you and I. And god forbid Mike Nagel ever writes a book about us.

Speaking of writing a book about us—the Kevin in Tacoma sort of acts as this magical entity, like a genie, literally appearing out of nowhere, reminding everyone that nothing is real, and then vanishing. How much is that character based on me, the actual Kevin Maloney, and how much did he just sort of become his own thing (yes, this is another question about me)?

Burch / I’d actually be kinda curious to hear your answer to that! How much the Kevin in Tacoma feels recognizable, feels like you, feels true… vs. his own thing?

He’s obviously you. Like, maybe 100% “based on” you, the actual Kevin Maloney. But I feel like he’s also based on the Kevin Maloney in your writing, which is of course based on yourself but has also become his own thing? And then he gets fed through the lens of Tacoma and my own writing style and all that, so… he’s kinda like my fantastical cover version of your own artistic, absurdist rendering of yourself?

In that way, it almost felt more like I was borrowing a character from your fiction and using it in my own, as much if not even more than I was writing about “you”?

D.T. / I don’t want to throw the interview off or anything, but is this the part where we kiss? My pants feel so tight right now.

I agree—we are three of the best writers writing shit right now, and I feel like part of that is because of how we are always stoked to read/talk about/encourage each other’s writing. Moreover, it’s genuine. I don’t ever feel like when we send each other our shit, we’re just saying oh, cool, man just to say it or whatever. There’s sincere excitement/admiration for one another, and that’s been super influential for me, at least. Also, I already have ideas for how to incorporate both of you into my next novel!

Kevin’s and my novel characters are pretty close to our real-life characters because Kevin truly doesn’t think anything is real. He might actually be a hallucination or a memory of a mystic from another plane of existence that’s just never moved on, and I like drinking beer while doing/saying/writing weird shit, and I do get jealous when you guys have fun without me. Also, novel-me can be kind of a dick, and maybe real-life me is also kind of a dick? We all have blindspots! But I think the way you wrote us is really genuine and sweet, and it makes me grateful to have you guys as my friends, you know?

Burch / I was thinking a version of this even before you added that, D.T. (Which I note that you’ve been typing here in this google doc as “DT” but that you gave me shit for writing you as “DT” rather than “D.T.”), but there’s some nice echoes…

Not to speak for Kevin, but I feel like part of the fun for him writing autofiction is exaggerating himself—more of a fuck-up, more drugs, more of a hippie Portland wizard—and that exaggeration opens up fun fictional possibilities while also, through that same exaggeration, maybe getting even closer to the truth? I think a lot of the comments about my own writing in the last few years have been aimed at my earnestness and open-heartedness, and how I write about joy and having fun. I think all those are true to myself as well… but maybe become even more exaggerated on the page? In ways that I think have made my writing even better? And so, you know, not to get even more earnest and open-hearted here, but I also feel grateful to have you both as my friends, and my feelings about you both are pretty genuine and sweet… and I think writing into that has made my writing even stronger and also more unique. It is weird talking about your own strengths as a writer, but I think capturing you both on the page in the ways that you both feel flattered by and feel like are pretty close your real life selves is part of what makes Tacoma so uniquely a Burch book?

Kevin / Okay, I kind of want to barf about what a love fest this is, but also it’s totally true. Also… I happen to have attended an arts lecture last night about the concept of “cringe” by Portland artists Jaydra Johnson and Ashley Yang-Thompson, and the big takeaway was that cringe in art can actually be a really good thing, because, as artists, we’re often taught to avoid gross displays of sincerity, but this sincerity can also lead us to rawness and vulnerability, which are essential ingredients in great art. So… let the love fest continue.

On that note… in a different group chat I’m in with you Aaron (that D.T. isn’t a part of), we were talking about whether or not conflict is essential in a short story or novel. Our buddy Patrick Wensink is of the opinion that it’s absolutely essential, and you said he’ll probably hate Tacoma then because there’s almost no conflict. It does, however, have a quest. I know you’ve spoken quite a bit about the book’s positivity and optimism, but I’m curious if you can say more about writing a book without a lot of conflict. Did that concern you? Did any of your early readers suggest that it needed a bank robbery or a car chase?

D.T. / Wait. You guys have a group chat without me?!

Kevin / Ummmm.

Burch / I almost mentioned that groupchat earlier, and something Derrick said in it, but then didn’t because I knew D.T. would feel left out and get jealous.

No, the lack of conflict never really concerned me… until I sent it to some early readers, and then I did kind of wonder if they might make note of that, but none ever did. I think the book very much knows what it is, and lets the reader pretty early on know what it is, and so, with that groundwork set, it can maybe be more free to be itself?

I knew I wanted it to be a “hangout novel.” Movies like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some! and even Clerks and Mallrats are some of my favorite movies. That isn’t always what I want from a movie, but is def one of my fave genres. And so I was definitely trying to write into that genre. I think part of it, too, is its length. I knew pretty early on, if not straight up from the outset, that it felt like it would be a ~20k word short book. I think its brevity lets it get away with some things that might not work if tried to stretch over 3 or 4x that?

I talk about this a lot, but my favorite piece of writing about craft (maybe the only one I even really like? almost definitely the only one I ever actually find myself thinking about) is George Saunders’ “Rise, Baby, Rise.” There’s lots of smart stuff in it, but it has two subsection headers—“A Story is Made of Things That Fling Our Little Car Forward” and “Ending is Stopping Without Sucking”—and those basically capture everything there is to telling/writing a good story?

Maybe the main knock on “literary fiction” is that “nothing really happens” and that is an oversimplification, but I think can be true. It certainly can be for me, at times. We’ve talked about this, but I (and you!) kinda love a story where “nothing really happens.” That said, I think a lot of writers can excuse their own lack of plot/conflict/etc. by saying some version of “that isn’t how life works,” and they get caught up in the beauty of sentences, or whatever… but they don’t actually then think enough about what else is going to “fling the little car (the reader) forward”?

Maybe this is obnoxiously self-congratulatory (I’m not like those other writers!) but I did and do try to think a good amount about flinging the car forward. Sometimes that might be surprisingly cringey sincerity, or a ramping up of the fantastical, or “Kevin” or “D.T.” arriving in the story!

Kevin / There is a sort of plot device or motif (look at me using English teacher words) in Tacoma involving fictional “Aaron’s” relationship to his surrounding environment where things keep shifting around and changing on him every time he goes for a walk. It felt like a metaphor for returning to your home town as an adult where everything is sort of the same, but also sort of different in a way you can never quite pin down. It also reminded me a bit of Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” where Fuckhead and Georgie stumble upon a drive-in movie theater during a blizzard and later accidentally kill a bunch of baby bunnies (spoiler alert!), but then the narrator breaks in and says, “Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn’t matter.” Suddenly, the entire story’s truth gets thrown into question by an extremely unreliable narrator. I’m curious—why the shifting, unreliable landscape in Tacoma?

Burch / Most of these elements happened pretty early, and really as outgrowths of my favorite writing prompt: “what if?” I think the first fantastical element came from me and Amber actually going on a walk in Tacoma and noticing something we hadn’t noticed on a previous day’s walk. I don’t remember if it was something we commented on or if it just happened later, when I was writing, but there was some kind of “what if it actually hadn’t been there yesterday?” And that uncertainness became literalized in Tacoma’s shifting, unreliable landscape.

It’s funny, doing a few of these interviews, and reading some responses to and summaries of the book, it is being highlighted to me that the speculative elements in the book—the city of Aaron’s youth literally changing around him, there being a hidden tunnel in the mall he went to growing up that literally time travels back to his youth—are pretty on-the-nose metaphors. I think (hope!) what makes them work (?) is that they weren’t intended as such. I think, if they were, they’d probably come across as heavy-handed or cheesy. Maybe some readers would say they are! But I think they happened more organically and honestly. I was never looking for metaphors for growing up or revisiting the home of your youth or anything, but instead was always just trying to have fun on the page—What if…? What would be fun to write about? What might make my friends laugh? What could fling this little car forward? I’m trying to surprise my reader on the page, and that starts by trying to allow myself to be surprised while writing. There’s that writing maxim, “surprising yet inevitable.” I think a lot of the literalized shifting, unreliable landscape came out of just trying to entertain myself on the page and surprise both myself and the reader… but, of course, a lot of it feels inevitable because my obsessions—in general, but especially in writing—are nostalgia and growing up and male friendship and storytelling, and so those are the very ideas that end up becoming literalized through the more speculative or fantastical elements.

D.T. / Speaking of things changing, I’m sorry if I’m a little slow to respond. I’m part of this new group chat with sooooo many awesome people! Like, you guys wouldn’t believe how many really cool, awesome, beautiful, desirable people are in this group chat. They asked me if I wanted to join because they said I was also cool and awesome and beautiful and desirable. At first, I was like, IDK, I’m really busy with this interview right now, but they kept begging me. Like, “PlZ D.T., you’re the best and we totally need you so bad!” Finally, I was like, yeah, cool, I guess. Seriously, the best group chat ever.

Anyway, you guys probably wouldn’t know any of them. They go to a different school.

Burch / Does this mean we can (finally) just fully offload you onto them?

D.T. / As long as Amber and I can stay friends, totally fine with this!

Kevin / Speaking of Amber, I know how D.T. and I felt about being written about in Tacoma (wish we had bigger roles, but appreciate our centrality to the plot), but I’m curious about Amber’s response when she read Tacoma. What did she say when she read the manuscript for the first time?

Burch / Do you want to answer that, Amber, or want me to answer for you?

Amber / I just thought it was cute, especially how we found each other in every lifetime.

Burch / You also were excited that you were going to be “book famous.”

Amber / (laughs) Yeah, that, too. I also only really cared about the parts that I’m in.

Burch / I think D.T. has still only read the parts that he is in. He’s too busy with his new groupchat friends who we wouldn’t know, they go to a different school. I bet he’s read all their books!

Amber / Even before I read it, the first time you told me about it, and how it ends, I teared up. Also, I did actually like all the parts. I’m reading it again now! Also, add in that I did see a whale that day. Cause I did!

Kevin / I have tentatively, humbly, titled this interview The Greatest Interview of All Time, which it clearly is, but before it goes totally off the rails, and so D.T. can get back to his new, cooler group chat, I have one final question. Tacoma clearly has all the markings of a Hollywood movie and will almost certainly be optioned and made into an Oscar-winning cinematic masterpiece. With this in mind, if you have any say over casting, who do you think should play me in the adaptation? Who should play you? And—are there any actors you’d assign the unfortunate task of playing D.T., or would you just have to cast D.T. as D.T. because no actor could quite capture his grumpy, adorable Teddy Bear-ness?

D.T. / We made Kevin mad.

Burch / A fun question! I never think about this until prompted. Do you guys?

I was trying to think of actors who are tall and could bring some good “Maloney” energy. I thought of Harris Dickinson. I thought he was especially great as Fangs in Murder at the End of the World. Feel like that could be fun. But he’s 29 and Tacoma feels pretty middle age to me?

I just googled “tall actors” and Vince Vaughn popped up. His energy is different from yours, and would be different, but feel like he could whirlwind into the story for a couple of chapters, rant about how life isn’t real, and then disappear?

I’d never think of Owen Wilson as myself, or vice versa, but maybe a fun opportunity to pair them together again?

Or, wait. Maybe Luke Wilson, and then make Will Ferrell D.T., and run back Old School, as dumb, bro-y hijinks, but 20 years later, a little more nostalgic and beat down by life, and maybe a little sweeter, too?

Kevin / I actually don’t ever think about actors playing characters in my book. I don’t know why I asked that. Movies aren’t even real. Mostly, I was just hoping you’d say that I would be played by Ryan Gossling, but you screwed up. Anyhow, I’d just like to conclude this interview by saying thank you for being part of the greatest interview of all time, even though interviews aren’t real. Books aren’t real, but people should still buy Tacoma, out now from Autofocus, especially since money isn’t real. And buy Horse Girl Fever and Leasing while you’re at it. XOXO

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Aaron Burch

Aaron Burch lives in Michigan and is a teacher, and the editor of a couple lit journals, and the author of a handful of books, most recently, and most importantly, Tacoma. He grew up in Tacoma.

Everything’s Okay, Nothing’s Bad Here

Patrick Wensink in Conversation with Kevin Maloney and Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney

by Kevin & Ryan-Ashley Maloney/November 21, 2025/| The Deep End

Unlike the dinosaurs, whose extinction was the result of a single cataclysmic event, humans are courting our own extinction with significantly less flair. While the results of our warming planet are catastrophic—more deadly storms, famine, disease, etc.—the increase is incremental. Many writers and scientists have used the example of the frog in a pot of boiling water… you don’t recognize the problem until you’re already being cooked alive.

In his new environmental memoir The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of (Belt Publishing), Patrick Wensink addresses this issue head-on, focusing on a lesser-known but startlingly vivid example of human-generated climate change: bright-green toxic algae.

The book opens on Lake Erie. More specifically, the toxic algae which bloomed bright green across Lake Erie like, causing a poisonous phenomenon which nearly killed 400,000 Ohioans. From there, Wensink tells a fascinating story of the algae’s origins that unfolds like a detective novel as we get closer and closer to the bloom’s source. Along the way, we learn about green slime, a swamp full of wolves, the author’s preoccupation with Nirvana, and the unraveling of his own marriage.

The result is a near-impossible feat: Wensink has turned a complex, scientific issue with roots in Midwest history and industrial agriculture into a compelling, wildly readable page-turner. We (Kevin and Ryan-Ashley) spoke with Wensink via Google Meet from bed while still in our pajamas.

Kevin / When I was reading The Great Black Swamp, one line that really jumped out at me was: “This place is unique for its absolute lack of uniqueness.” You write about how you were rejected as a kid in Northwest Ohio—how people there prized normalcy while you were this weirdo. But over the course of the book, it seems like you come to love and almost defend this part of Ohio. Did your views of Northwest Ohio change over time? Did they change over the course of writing this book?

Patrick / While you were talking there, I thought of the dynamics in a sibling relationship. I can criticize you and I can give you shit if I’m your brother, but if anybody else does, I’m gonna step in and defend you. My relationship with Northwest Ohio feels a lot like that.

We didn’t have record stores and nobody else was into the things that I was into, and so I got picked on. Over the course of writing this book, though, and thinking more deeply about my home and its history and my history with it, I realize that it’s all those things that made me the person that I am now. And I like me now. And so there’s a part of me that plays this sort of sliding doors game of like, well, if all those things hadn’t happened who would I be? I have a real appreciation for the oddity and the hard times and the complexity that I had to deal with growing up there. And I don’t think I fully understood it and embraced it until I was writing this book.

This book took five years to write and over the course of that time, I had a lot of life changes, which I mention in the book—my marriage fell apart and I started a new career as a teacher. The process was very reflective of my being able to take a step back and think more about who I am and where I come from and why it’s all important. And, you know, I think a lot of us probably have a complicated relationship with our homes. I have a complicated relationship with my home, and that’s a good thing.

Ryan-Ashley / I love when a book about a niche topic seems to take an autoethnographic approach, and I’m drawn to that framework because it makes topics feel personally relatable which might otherwise feel inaccessible. While reading, I thought about my own relationship with changing landscapes, of agriculture-polluted farmland … and I think this is one of the reasons that it is more accessible than it might at first seem to somebody who thinks this is a book about a swamp. Because it’s a book about something else.

P / Yeah, I think that was part of realizing that my personal story had a place. These are the kinds of stories I like, the ones with human grounding. I’m not very good at reading academic texts. Even though I had to read stacks and stacks of them for this book, I didn’t want The Great Black Swamp to feel like an academic book, and I didn’t want it to feel like a piece of a straight-ahead, just-the-facts journalism, either. I wanted it to have humanity.

I knew it was going to be hard to make farming and algae and ditches sexy and interesting, and the writing process reminded me of when my kid was little. I would, you know, add spinach into his spaghetti sauce because I had to trick him into eating his vitamins. And while I’m not trying to not trick people, I decided to weave the more serious bits together with stories both about me being little weirdo as a kid, and, you know, really personal, vulnerable stuff. And hopefully that services to humanize my journey as well, because I respond to that kind of stuff. Whenever I see an author who’s brave, admitting their faults and showing you their hard times, I’m like, tell me more.

R-A / I really was drawn in by the way you consistently anthropomorphize the swamp and the natural environment. You bring into focus the period where people were trying to legislate the personhood of corporations, drawing a parallel between that and the fight for swamp personhood, and I’m curious about our specific relationship to nature. First, how you feel about the personhood and rights of nature, and, second, were the scientists you spoke with more sterile toward and removed from their subjects, or more personal?

P / The scientists I talked to were so enthusiastic and so smart and so willing to share. I noticed that they shared a really interesting commonality, many of them anthropomorphizing the environment when they talked about it. They would refer to trees as babies or old guys, and I thought that was really charming.

One scientist, when showing me different samples of algae, said, “This guy is not very toxic, but this guy is really toxic.” They had a way of making these feel like living breathing entities with individual personalities. And I think that added to their enthusiasm and their ability to make these things feel real. It worked on me that way, at least—the samples didn’t just feel like specimens in a box, they were like living, breathing characters.

I kind of took that spirit and applied it to the swamp itself. Probably because one thing I discovered while researching was that there’s a real lack of characters throughout the history of the swamp. And in creative nonfiction, just like in a novel, you need characters and scenes to really make something like historical writing come to life. But it was a swamp the size of Connecticut where nobody lived until the 1890s, and there were just a very few pioneer records. So I needed to write the swamp with the same craft that I would a living breathing human being.

For over a hundred years after the first people tried to settle the swamp, the swamp fought back. People would try to build a road, but then the road would wash out and the horses would get stuck in pits. They’d try to buy coffins, but the graves would flood, pushing the coffins back up to the surface. They built train tracks through the swamp, but it just swallowed them whole. So it did feel like a character, like it was in a good versus evil battle, relentlessly fighting back.

K / How did it feel as a non-scientist, telling a fairly complex scientific story, talking to a lot of scientists who are extremely nuanced experts in their field? How did it feel coming in as an outsider? Did your confidence grow over time?

P / I would not dare call myself an expert, but my confidence definitely grew over time. I was recently interviewed by some radio stations, and the DJs were talking to me as if I was a scientific expert and I was like, oh, I’m not very comfortable in this position. I’m a layman, and I’m pretty clear about that in the book. I think I mentioned that the last time I took a science class was like 1998, and I got a C plus in it. But I’m hopefully turning these deficits of mine into a positive. Instead of saying, I shouldn’t be the one to write the story, I’m like, Oh, I’m exactly the person to write this story, because the writing involves learning. And now I can maybe bring people along with me who also don’t know the science, making the information more accessible to them as well.

I’ve written a lot of fiction, but I’ve also published a lot of nonfiction. I’ve written for the New York Times and Esquire, Oxford American—a bunch of really nice outlets—and my favorite and best pieces of journalism are always written as an outsider, just trying to figure out something really, really unique. And so I kind of like being a dumb-dumb. I like being the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. I find that to be a really powerful position as a nonfiction writer, because you can then seek out people who know so much more than you.

It took me a long time to lose my inhibition around ignorance. For a long time, I thought ‘not knowing’ was something to downplay. But then, as I got older and more experienced, I realized that I love being a student; being a beginner gives me the perspective to make heads and tails of something as complicated as ecological disaster even when I don’t know anything. Hopefully that also enables me to put it into language that makes sense for other folks who, like me, aren’t scientists either.

R-A / The word “normal” shows up in the book 76 times, and this amplifies the way that the desire for homogeneity is in direct opposition to what is natural. I think it’s a very Western, very American, thing to want everything to fit ‘just right.’

On page 218, you write about carrying on like nothing abnormal is happening, and that made me think about how, even after the EPA reached out warning that the water system was at risk, nothing was done. I’m assuming that it was the desire for normalcy, stasis, that led to this inaction, but I’m sure there are lots of reasons.

I’m curious about the tension you might feel about the idea of normalcy given the destruction of the landscape and given your own history with feeling like you were sort of having to choose between nurturing the things in yourself that made you different, and cutting them out so you could be normal, fit in, suffer less. You were weird. The swamp was weird. People wanted to change you, and they also wanted to change the swamp.

P / Yeah, people really tried hard to de-weird the swamp, and this is exactly the sort of contrast I was trying to create. I didn’t come out of the gate knowing that it was going to do these kinds of things; it was more of an evolution, and I leaned in as I saw the parallels to my own life becoming apparent.

I started this book intending it to be a straight piece of journalism about the history of the swamp and about the toxic algae. It was only when my personal life started really getting complicated and sad that I took a step back, and it dawned on me that so many similarities were at play.

I was always really excited about the book, but it really took on a new life for me and became invigorating when I saw that the decisions I had made in my own life in order to try and be normal, to maybe have normal relationships, and to suppress the abnormal parts of my personality, were so strikingly similar to not just Northwest Ohio and Lake Erie in particular, but the environmental picture in general. For example, we all know global warming is happening and yet we have been suppressing the knowledge and implications of that for decades in hopes that everything will just end up okay.

I know lots of people are are pushing hard and fighting for change, but I think that the overwhelming perspective is, like, “Ehhhh, we’ll worry about it later. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” That mentality was so much of my own personality as well. Everything’s okay, everything’s okay, nothing’s bad here. I realized that this is such a human reaction and also a very Midwestern thing, because once I moved away from the Midwest, I saw a lot of people with healthier relationships to their feelings and to the world around them than me. Had I not moved away and had these opportunities, I don’t think I would have ever seen that in myself. So I’m lucky in that regard.

But it really wasn’t until a much later that I started identifying the parallels and recognized the need to put more of myself in the book. I had gotten bad advice early on to cut myself completely out of it. I was told that that the book was not about me. But I didn’t like that book. I wasn’t excited by that book. And the more I put myself into it, the more I thought, this, this is a book only I could write. And I like that.

K / Yeah, and it seems kind of like there’s this personal rewilding happening. A process of allowing for your own complexity, and nuance to surface.

P / Exactly. That’s 100% what I was seeing and feeling and hoping that people would take away when reading the book.

R-A / You’ve talked about how it was your curiosity and vulnerability which allowed you to write this book, a book which hinges on the accurate representation of scientific and ecological data and history which you didn’t already have the expertise to accurately illustrate. This feels like an important thing to think about in our current cultural moment.

In this moment, younger generations especially are being taught that as long as you sound like an expert, you don’t have to do the work of becoming one. There’s a pervasiveness narrative that you’re just supposed to naturally have ‘it’ all figured out and not need to ask questions. But this really creates a lot of divisiveness because when everybody is coming to the table with the posture of, I know, I know, I know …

P / … I’m an expert …

R-A / …yes! Then there’s like very little opportunity or reason to come together and just like discuss and wonder and posit.

Do you find that your students are able to be vulnerably curious? Were the experts you talked to surprised by your willingness to be vulnerable and curious and say things like, “I don’t know?”

P / It’s funny you ask about students, because I’m teaching creative nonfiction this semester, and a focus is on making them comfortable with not knowing things and using that comfort and self-knowledge as fuel to learn more. This practice is not natural, especially in the academic world, because these students are either used to writing term papers that have to be an exact length with a specific number of paragraphs that adhere to a particular structure. It’s not common for someone to come along and say, yeah, I don’t know.

I tell my students to just start flailing about, to start pulling information in to see how they feel about it and making heads or tails of it from there. It’s disorienting, I think, for a lot of students. And every once in a while I have somebody who really latches onto it, but for the most part, it’s confusing to be told it’s okay not to know, and to fail, and to totally blow it.

Recently, I had them all work on different pieces that allowed them to follow their own interests. One student is writing about the Louvre jewel heist, but also referencing a time when her family’s house was broken into.

R-A / Autoethnography!

P / Yeah, exactly. I’m really trying to have them infuse their own lives into journalistic pieces. We did a section that was all memoir, but now I’m like, what if you put some research into this and, you know, mix it all up?

Another student is talking about using a fiber arts and knitting practice to manage mental health.

After they’ve done a round of research and maybe interviewed some people, I have them do an exercise where I say, “Okay, write down everything you know about your topic,” and that’s all they do for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, I Say, “Okay, now write everything you don’t know about the topic.” Inevitably, this is either something they haven’t thought of or something they’ve avoided, and they see the unknowns as a negative thing. I tell them that this is exactly the kind of stuff you should be exploring right now. These are the questions you should be asking.

The results vary, but when when you see somebody employing that practice in their interviews and research, that story inevitably starts to sing—it starts to take on its own voice, and it’s really exciting and interesting to see. Hopefully they feel that, but at the very least, they walk away knowing that it’s okay not to always know what’s going on, and it’s also okay to fail.

The most surprising part of the entire book writing process was when I was interviewing scientists. I talked to a lot of environmental biologists and ecologists, and in every case, I was worried that it would be intimidating as somebody who knows almost nothing about science to talk to someone with such a scientific mind. But in every case, it was delightful.

In my experience, people who are in the sciences were so enthusiastic about what they do and about their area of expertise that they just could not be happier than to tell me everything they know and to answer all my questions. They shared passionately about their slivers of the greater world and were happy to walk me through the information slowly, as if I were, you know, an alien who’s just learning the language for the first time. That was one of the best parts, I would say.

K / You were talking about teaching your students how to put themselves into their journalistic work. As a Gen Xer, I feel like I need to ask the grunge question…

P / I know exactly where this is going!

K / In a book about toxic algae and Northwest Ohio, maybe the most unexpected character to me is Kurt Cobain. You talk about how finding a Kurt Cobain biography was an important part of your youth and I’m just wondering if you could talk about where you were in the writing process when you decided this story belonged in this book? How does it relate to toxic algae?

P / I think that probably came up when I started finally seeing the parallels between ecological disasters and my own personal disasters and shortcomings. So when I was going backward and trying to untangle everything and saying, Why did Lake Erie turn bright green and almost kill an entire city of people? Like what caused that? It made me look at myself and say, What caused me to be the way I am? And the answer to that was just like the ecology—it was a complicated combination of things, like we all are: it was growing up in the country, kind of isolated and playing by myself a lot as a kid with a big imagination, but then also eventually going into the public school system and having to deal with the hierarchies and getting bullied.

Right around the beginning of the grunge era, when my mind was ready for something different, I found Michael Lazaret’s Come as You Are, a really good Nirvana biography which most people probably wouldn’t think of as being anything special. To me, though, it was really exciting and eye-opening because it was about the band and how they grew up in a small town. But it was also the way in which Kurt Cobain talked about his view of punk rock, which was all about being weird and being creative. His view was that just the act of making something makes you an artist. It makes you punk. Before that, I’d always wanted to be creative, and I always wanted to make things, but I was too self-conscious. So to see someone saying, You don’t have to have special skills, and I don’t have a special background, in a weird way, was exactly the kind of pep talk I needed, and I wasn’t getting it from anywhere else. I didn’t have a cool older brother and there weren’t any other punk rock kids at my school. So I found it in a book. And you take it where you can get it when you’re at such a volatile age, you know?

K / Yeah, and you seem to describe the black swamp itself, or whatever small parts that remain, almost like the cover of a metal album or something, connecting these images of your punk rock ethos with the wildness of the black swamp.

P / I definitely compare it to a heavy metal album because, at one point, it was It was six feet of mud, like, deep, and the tree coverage was so dense that you supposedly couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face in the middle of the day. It was filled with tons of snakes and wolves and bears, all things I didn’t know existed in Ohio, and the malaria rate that was so high at one point that it was considered the unhealthiest place in America.

All those things were pretty badass, and it was something nobody really talked about when I was a kid. I think people knew about it, but it wasn’t really celebrated.

R-A / Speaking of music, when Kevin and I were talking about the swamp a few minutes before hopping onto this call, we were talking about the density of the swamp and the wolves and I couldn’t stop thinking of the talking wolves in Lil Dicky’s music video for “Pillow Talking (feat. Brain).” Have you seen this?

P / I don’t know that one.

R-A / I strongly encourage you to watch it. It’s like 10 minutes long—more of like a short film than a music video—but it’s… It’s hilarious. And I think that you would appreciate it. I’ll send you the link. It’s also disturbing, FYI, but in the best way.

P / Yeah, send it. I can handle it.

K / I’m curious about the end of the book. In the closing chapters, you explore the concept of rewilding, the intentional reintroduction of the swamp into Northwest Ohio, and it almost seems like the book is going to end on a hopeful note. Then there’s another chapter and it’s about Elon Musk’s chainsaw and the DOGE cuts. I’m curious about how Donald Trump’s election and the complete dismantling of so many important environmental agencies changed the book. Where where you in the writing process when these things were happening, and how did it change your view of the book’s conclusion and of the future of toxic algae?

P / That’s a really, really good catch, because the tone of that chapter is a lot different. The book was pretty much done by mid-spring of 2025 when my editor came to me and said something like, I think you should probably write one more chapter. I was exhausted at that point. I’d been writing the book for five years and had poured so much of my heart and soul into it. I was ready to leave it alone, but my editor, Phoebe Moghaeri, who is really excellent at what she does, said that there was an opportunity to be topical with all the change that was happening. She sent me an article about NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) losing funding and people getting laid off specifically in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had interviewed people. She said there was too much going on politically that was relevant to the story not to write it in.

I pushed back at first, saying we didn’t know what was going to happen and that we didn’t have enough distance from it yet. And she essentially said, Yeah, but I think you’re kind of missing an opportunity to be relevant to the moment if you don’t do this.

I knew Phoebe was right. She has had really great suggestions all along and I trust her judgement on these sorts of things. So I started researching again and re-interviewed a lot of the same people I’d spoken with before to see what their take was. I think it’s valuable to show these first dominoes, and I believe there are going to be some serious repercussions from the Trump administration’s funding cuts, from firing people at the EPA and NOAA and so many other really important organizations. So while I don’t know what the ultimate outcome’s going be, I think it’s not going to be good. And it did have an eerie echo to the Reagan era in the 1980s—a period I cover in the book—where he did a similar thing. We were making huge reparative environmental strides, but then he slashed everything by eighty or ninety percent.

It was really important and really valuable to show the chain of events then, and it’s just as important now. I hope it doesn’t get worse, but I’m not optimistic and the experts that I talked to were not optimistic either.

R-A / I also think it’s so important to document what’s happening right now. There’s so much censorship—language is being removed from government websites; the digital versions of critical articles that appeared in print and online are getting edited retroactively; and ethical journalism is practically extinct. I think it’s a necessary activist move to publish what’s happening as it’s happening.

This makes me think of Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, which you mention in the book, and how important that text has been as a historical document. It’s important in part because of the ways it exposed the troubling environmental ‘management’ decisions that were causing massive ecological shifts and extinctions and I suppose the hope was that the exposure would prompt people to be like, oh fuck, like… what are we going to do? People didn’t know how bad it was going to get but they chose to take their chances and now here we are. As you know, the Lake Erie algae bloom crisis is just one of many, many examples of catastrophic disasters which threatened (and continue to threaten) public health and safety. The Flint, Michigan crisis which you mention in the book, for example. And I think we really need these records now more than ever.

P / These crises are happening with more frequency everywhere, which is why this book felt really relevant to me as well. The big bloom was the first newsworthy version of this, but now it’s happening with so much frequency there. It’s become almost commonplace, which again, speaks to the collecting shrugging. Everyone’s just being normal and acting like things are okay. But it’s not normal. It’s not okay. And we need to address these things.

R-A / Talking about this makes me think of the compression of time you describe when sharing the National Commission on Water Quality report from the late ‘60s: “Lake Erie had aged fifteen thousand years in the two hundred years since pioneers first settled on its shores.” That information feels simultaneously horrifying and almost too abstract to fully land, but you really brought this idea home for me with the image of you and your friends chasing the train in the late ‘80s yelling, water! water! As you said in the book, you were yelling for water because bottled water was such a novelty at the time; it wasn’t really even a part of the collective consumer consciousness. Now, just thirty-five years later, I carry a bag made out of material generated from water bottle waste. And all because of a big Evian marketing campaign, the launching of which shifted public opinion and consumer behavior in a similar way to the cartoon corn tract you wrote about.

Out of nowhere, Evian bottles showed up on a New York catwalk—part of a fashion show–and the message was that water equals good hair, good skin, beauty. The message was that people, women in particular, should carry a bottle with them wherever they go.

P / It so weirdly all ties together, but it’s not publicly acknowledged.

K / You connect the stoicism of Northwest Ohio—this sort of like, eh, we’ll be fine, everything’s fine mentality—to the way people learn about climate change and decide it’s easier to go back to normal rather than making big changes. In all the research that you did, and as an expert in Northwest Ohio mentality, do you have any thoughts on ways to shake people out of this complacency mindset or do you think this is just how people are?

P / I don’t know that I have the answer to that one. I think it probably takes firsthand experience, like something bad happening to you. But even then, who knows?

R-A / Like the locals you interviewed who recounted the toxic algae crisis as not such a big deal… the thing that stood out the most in their memory was that everybody had to drink bottled water for a few days. They very much embodied the, eh, it wasn’t so bad, mentality you’ve described.

P / This was one of the biggest surprises after of all my interviews. I figured I’d go to Toledo and people would be like, oh, it was awful, it was horrible, but nobody said that and that was when it dawned on me that this is just a mentality, a very midwest mentality. And the more I talk to my friends from out there, the more I hear feedback that this is just how midwesterners operate.

I was that way for a long time, too. It took me a while to come out of my shell. But now, I look at all the things going wrong in the world and think that if our posture really hasn’t improved and we still aren’t paying attention to climate change, then I don’t know what it will take.

K / Yeah, unfortunately. Oh, well. I guess this depressing note is as good a place as any to stop.

We want to go ahead and get this live because, I don’t know if you know this, but the New York Times is very interested in what Pool Party’s doing and it could get you some really good press.

P / Yeah, I’ve heard rumors.

Patrick Wensink is an American author and his latest book, The Great Black Swamp, is available wherever books are sold. His novel, Broken Piano for President, received increased publicity when the whiskey company Jack Daniel’s Properties sent a politely worded cease-and-desist letter to the author asking that he change the design of his book cover, which closely resembled the label on Jack Daniel’s whiskey. You can learn more about the controversy and his past work at patrickwensink.com

Equitable Access and Meaningful Support for The Arts

The arts isn’t optional in a free democracy (here’s something you can do)

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/October 28, 2025/| The Deep End

(jump to action letter)

Since moving to Portland, I have seen art organizations close, arts funding diminish, and a focus on equitable access to creative opportunities, recede in favor of individual fundraising efforts. Beyond Portland, I have seen beloved literary journals and art organizations and small creative businesses, lose funding across the country.

What can a single person do to combat this, especially in an economy where income inequality is at a historic high, where many of the most creative and arts-enthusiastic among us live precariously, with little extra to give? Some of us are able to go see more films at independent theaters, shop at local bookstores, subscribe to journals, and pay for tickets to art exhibits. But so many who previously could, now can’t.

Small businesses and arts organizations are seeing both funding cuts and less money coming in the door for goods and services and experiences. People living in precarity, people losing creative gig work to AI, for example, have less room in their budgets and thus must trade enrichment for security.

Kevin and I are doing what we can with Pool Party and by attending as many arts-related and creative events as possible, but we too feel the pinch, and find ourselves adjusting our activities accordingly–matinees instead of evening showings, dinners in instead of eating out, cost-checking books across local bookstores in search of used or discounted copies when we can find them. Sometimes resorting to Ama*on when the cost is otherwise too great.

So when I was randomly added to a mailing list run by PACE (Portland Arts & Culture for Equity) —not long before I was invited to become a board member at Refuge America in NYC—I felt that exciting and particular spark which can only come from the feeling of having something to do.

I felt this way in my early 20’s when I worked as a field organizer for HRC (Human Rights Campaign), when I managed the political County Commission campaign for a woman supporting same-sex marriage, running in a Republican district, and then again when I launched an investigation against a racist employer, one which ultimately led to the person’s termination.

That feeling returned in my early 30’s when I opened a gallery in Tennessee and joined Knoxville’s Maker City Council–an arm of the city’s economic development initiative–and served for close to three years developing and supporting initiatives designed to bolster the creative economy and make Knoxville an economically friendly place to the people who made it interesting.

Now, I feel it every time I think of the small ways I am helping moving Refuge America’s initiatives forward—the primary goal being to support LGBTQIA+ refugees seeking asylum in America—and now, as I sit here writing an email to my mayor and councilpeople advocating for arts-related funding in Portland, OR.

PACE’s communications have given me a detailed view of what’s happening with city budgets and actions and, thankfully (because who has time for all this research), have provided me with stats and language to use when reaching out to my representatives.

Today, they sent an email to the listserve asking for members to join them tomorrow at 9:30am to support the organization as Blake Shell testifies that “the federal arts reductions are a part of the attacks on democracy, not separate from that.” She will have three minutes to testify and the more people who can show up physically or write to/call our representatives this week, the louder the chorus of their constituents’ voices will be.

In order to support this effort, I wrote an email which combined my own personal stake as well as the language provided by PACE and I’m including it below in case it’s helpful for anybody else wishing to act. Additionally, I have provided all the district representatives’ email addresses below so nobody has to spend time searching.

My Email

(read below or jump to representatives’ contact information)

Dear Mayor, District 3 council people, and Arts and Economy Committee Members,

I am writing to you today as a member of PACE, but more importantly, as a recent transplant to Portland from Raleigh, North Carolina. When I decided to move here in 2023, PNCA still had a community arts program; RACC’s funding hadn’t yet been gutted; and there were significantly more small, thriving galleries and arts organizations throughout the community than there are now.

It pains me as an artist and an arts lover to see my reasons for moving my home and life across the country for a more robust liberal and arts community, disappear. Even a year ago, things weren’t quite so dire, and it was at this time that my husband and I decided to start a literary arts journal and reading series. It has gone so well that we have expanded into a publishing house with plans to incorporate and publish our first manuscript in 2026.

When we began this project–designed to uplift artists and writers–we were counting on being able to apply for grants in the near future. Now, we are concerned that with diminishing financial options, our vision for providing the community with more of the kind of creative enrichment that helps local businesses and all of its citizens thrive, may be limited. We won’t stop our work, of course, but right now it’s just the two of us volunteering our time, and we had visions of contracting other local talent like graphic designers and editors to assist with our work. It’s small gig opportunities like this, coming from many sources, which make up a meaningful, stable, life for so many creative gig workers here in Portland.

In lieu of meaningful support from the city of Portland, many organizations will lay people off, replacing creative staff with artificial intelligence tools. Others will close. But AI isn’t a solution. Designed originally for increased efficiency to support humans, not to replace them, AI tools are no replacement for human ingenuity. For meaningful programming to exist in Portland, meaningful and strategic communications must be produced–press releases, advertisements, articles, digital marketing materials, exhibition statements–but these materials historically created and produced by people, designed with nuance and subjectivity and curiosity, will likely be replaced by ‘content’ drooled out by inexpensive AI programs in service of keeping doors open on shoestring budgets. This is just one of many concerns and costs (human and environmental) at hand.

I wonder how children living in a place with increasingly empty storefronts and decreasingly available access to the arts, respond. I imagine a child’s vision for themselves narrows without prolific examples of what ‘thriving’ creatively might look like. I believe access to the arts provides kids with the language they need to understand themselves, to build the confidence necessary to be curious, kind, productive members of their community.

Because creativity doesn’t thrive in precarity. It suffocates. And so do the people working in the arts here, many of whom are already seeing a decline in work alongside a rise in living costs. The balance sheet just doesn’t balance, and I believe the below stats makes this painfully clear.

*Portland’s arts funding challenges are rooted in scarcity. According to SMU DataArts, we rank 17th in the nation for artistic vibrancy but 172nd for government support. Our arts thrive despite—not because of—government funding.

In New York, SMU reports that 48% of artists make a living on gigs or freelance work, and only 8% are full-time workers. In our smaller arts economy, that gap is likely even wider. The“Big Five” are important employers, but they are not the primary source of income for artists here. Most artists earn through gigs, teaching, and creative side work that keeps this ecosystem alive.

Last year, the Office of Arts and Culture removed equity metrics from the Art Tax grants and distributed funds solely based on budget size. As a result, 45 of 80 groups lost funding, while only the “Big Five” saw increases.

Smaller orgs regularly employ Portland artists and offer affordable—often free—arts access across our neighborhoods. Prioritizing large institutions with endowments, greater funding, and fewer local artists is funneling money to money and power to power.

The Art Tax supports K through 12 arts education and making arts and culture available to underserved communities. In 2024, that mandate was changed without warning or oversight. We met with the Office and multiple committees, yet no corrective action was taken. We are now entering a second year of harm to our communities.

Portland voters expected the Art Tax to expand access, not diminish it. We ask the City to restore funding for the 45— and to realign arts funding with its original intent: prioritize groups that provide low- or no-cost access, employ local artists, and do deep community work with underserved Portlanders, all without other significant funding.

Our vision is clear: support smaller orgs offering greater access citywide and the artists who make Portland what it is. We need explicit equity and access measures protected from politics, and as costs rise while the Art Tax stays flat, we need change to provide more funding overall.

There are over 500 arts nonprofits here and most don’t receive city funding.

The arts give us agency, community, and the power to imagine change—that’s why they’re under federal attack, and why we must protect them locally.

We’re asking for a bold vision in support of the arts. Help us keep Portland as vibrant as the artists who live here.

Warmly,

Ryan-Ashley Anderson

*Everything written after asterisk was provided by PACE

Contact information for Portland representatives

Mayor Keith Wilson: [email protected]

Arts and Economy Committee:

Committee Chairs

Mitch Green: [email protected]
Dan Ryan: [email protected]

Committee Members

Jamie Dunphy: [email protected]
Loretta Smith: [email protected]
Olivia Clark: [email protected]

District 1 Leaders

District includes these neighborhoods: Argay Terrace, Centennial, Glenfair, Hazelwood, Lents, Mill Park, Parkrose, Parkrose Heights, Pleasant Valley, Powellhurst-Gilbert, Russell, Sumner, Sunderland, Wilkes, Woodland Park

Candace Avalos: [email protected]
Jamie Dunphy: [email protected]
Loretta Smith: [email protected]

District 2 Leaders

District includes these neighborhoods: Alameda, Arbor Lodge, Beaumont-Wilshire, Boise, Bridgeton, Cathedral Park, Concordia, Cully, East Columbia, Eliot, Grant Park, Hayden Island, Hollywood, Humboldt, Irvington, Kenton, King, Lloyd, Overlook, Piedmont, Portsmouth, Roseway, Sabin, St. Johns, Sullivan’s Gulch, Sunderland, University Park, Vernon, Woodlawn

Sameer Kanal: [email protected]
Dan Ryan: [email protected]
Elana Pirtle-Guiney: [email protected]

District 3 Leaders

District includes these neighborhoods: Ardenwald-Johnson Creek, Beaumont-Wilshire, Brentwood-Darlington, Brooklyn, Buckman, Creston-Kenilworth, Foster-Powell, Hosford-Abernethy, Kerns, Laurelhurst, Madison South, Montavilla, Mt. Scott-Arleta, Mt. Tabor, North Tabor, Richmond, Rose City Park, Roseway, South Tabor, Sunnyside, Woodstock

Tiffany Koyama Lane: [email protected]
Angelito Morillo: [email protected]
Steve Novick: [email protected]

District 4 Leaders

District includes these neighborhoods: Ardenwald-Johnson Creek, Arlington Heights, Arnold Creek, Ashcreek-Crestwood, Bridlemile, Brooklyn, Collins View, Eastmoreland, Far Southwest, Forest Park, Goose Hollow, Hayhurst, Healy Heights, Hillsdale, Hillside, Homestead, Linnton, Maplewood, Markham, Marshall Park, Multnomah, Northwest District, Northwest Heights, Old Town, Pearl District, Portland Downtown, Reed, Sellwood-Moreland, South Burlingame, South Portland, Southwest Hills, Sylvan-Highlands, West Portland Park, Woodstock

Olivia Clark: [email protected]
Mitch Green: [email protected]
Eric Zimmerman: [email protected]

In a moment where devastating headlines populate our newsfeeds twenty four hours a day, it can feel like there’s nothing anybody can do. But everything big was once small, and it matters what we do in our neighborhoods. It matters what we ask of our local governments. And I encourage anybody who can, to either write an email using the script above or choose another organization in your community to support in a similar way. A few ideas—prisoner letter-writing initiatives, refugee support organizations, LGBTQIA+ support organizations, and mutual aid groups among others can all benefit from people writing emails like the one above. Animal rescues and soup kitchens and youth support initiatives and art organizations all need volunteers, too.

There’s something for everybody who wants something to do in a moment that feels like nothing will help.

Learn more about PACE. Learn more about Refuge America.

SCRATCHING BOTH ITCHES: JAIME FOUNTAINE IN CONVERSATION WITH SOSO CAPALDI

by Jaime Fountaine/October 16, 2025/| The Deep End

As I helped with the load-out after the closing of their most recent show, “Entity Cramming” with Eric Anthony Berdis at Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia, it struck me that, even though Soso Capaldi and I…

Group dynamics, intimacy between strangers, and rehearsing for loss: A review and conversation between Autumn Joi Knight and Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/August 21, 2025/| The Deep End

It’s Outside the Paper: In conversation with Samiya Bashir on her poetry collection, I Hope This Helps

by Naya Clark/July 17, 2025/| The Deep End

Interview by Naya Clark

Samiya Bashir’s critically-lauded, multimodal poetry collection, I Hope This Helps (2025, NightBoat Books), begins with a quote from actress Niecy Nash-Bett’s 2024 Emmy award acceptance speech: “I want to thank me for believing in me …” This bold tribute, which echoes Snoop Dogg’s words six years prior during his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony speech, sets the tone for much of what’s to come in her latest poetry art collection.

Published just a few years after Field Theories, which uniquely interweaves quantum physics and Black embodiment, I Hope This Helps is the fourth poetry volume by the acclaimed poet, multimedia artist, essayist, and educator, and it promises to have at least as much impact as its predecessor.

In addition to her poetic accomplishments, Bashir is known for her opera Cook Shack (commissioned by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis as part of their inaugural New Works Collective), produced with composer Del-ShawnTaylor, and for leading Lambda Literary’s revitalization efforts as Executive Director from September 2022 through November 2023. She most recently served as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York, and holds the 2019–2020 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature—a distinction that resonated deeply as she became the first Black woman to receive the prestigious honor.

I Hope This Helps is an amalgamation of poetry and prose works laced with unique visuals that help expand the richness of the multimedia poetries. Experimental layouts, haunting illustrations, and suggestive sheet music punctuate the legible written words while unique typography choices—type that plays with shades of black and gray, that toggles between bold and italics, forces breaks with extreme spacing, and incorporates emoticons—make the reading of I Hope This Helps a physical experience. The addition of a QR code, which directs internet users to full bodies of work that continue off of the page, acts as a digital footnote, thus creating a truly multimodal and embodied one.

In the recurring series, M A P S :: a cartography in progress, for instance, installments are speckled throughout the collection using a black-out poetry method that transmutes existing language into new forms. The video iteration is accessible here and via the QR code at the back of the book as well.

Another piece that plays with form is HOW NOT TO STAY UNSHOT IN THE U.S.A, a two-page spread of all-caps actions listed one after the other which combine to tell the resounding and crushing story that there is no way for a person in America to feel totally protected from the possibility of being victimized by gun violence. The possibility is only amplified for folx who belong to marginalized communities and are deemed as ‘other’ by the American political and social system. ‘Offenses’ such as “BE PATIENT,” “HAVE A GUN,” “DON’T HAVE A GUN,” “BE GAY,” “GO TO CHURCH,” “BE AT HOME,” along with many haunting others, shout futility from the pages, highlighting how the looming fear of becoming a target makes for a dizzying existence for people in America—especially people of color, immigrants, women, and those within LGBTQIA+ communities.

Each of Samiya Bashir’s pieces combine to create a whole which, together, convey a richly quilted experience that helps the reader feel closer to being understood, closer to feeling part of something bigger than themselves.

In this interview, Bashir and I discuss multimodal art forms, her relationship between art and writing, and what it’s like to make art through an ‘American’ lens despite existing in its margins.

Naya Clark

I love that you start with a Niecy Nash quote. Can you go into how you decided to preface what we’ll be seeing, reading, and listening to with that? It kind of feels like permission to acknowledge yourself and could otherwise be taken as almost self-indulgent, perhaps.

Bashir

It’s the opposite. My fear is that it will be seen as self-indulgent, but the reality of why it’s there is because it’s so real, because the undercut is that I’m living in a world that not just refuses to believe in me, but insists on the opposite of me. I have a line in “LETTER FROM EXILE” [that says], “Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much / it would rather kill us all than let me live.” That’s America. That’s where I live, that’s where I’m from, that’s who I am, right? The thing is not just that this work would not exist if I didn’t somehow believe in me, but I have had to work hard and continue to—every day, all day—believe in me, because everything around me says I am not a thing to believe in. [I] trust myself to make work. It’s not a small thing, and I fight it every day. [Quoting] Niecy Nash as the opening to the book is really important to me because we can’t do this if we can’t somehow find a way to keep going. When I had the exhibition in Michigan at the beginning of this year for I Hope This Helps, one of the students in some Q&A [said], “You’re so fearless. How are you so fearless?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m terrified all the time… This is not fearlessness… I’m afraid, and I have to find a way to insist on doing it anyway.”

Clark

Do you feel a lot of this work is facing those [fears] head on?

Bashir

There’s no other way… I can face [fear] from the side, I can face from the back. I can come in through the old milk door in my grandmother’s house from the milkman days. But at some point one must stand one’s ground. June Jordan said, “We are the ones we are waiting for,” so we have to show up. We don’t actually get a choice in that.

Clark

You say you have no choice, but you make a lot of choices, especially with format. This is a whole multimedia project. And even one of the first poems, “OVERHEARD” plays with poetics. How do you decide when to toggle between various forms?

Bashir

The active agent there is me, but there’s listening, which is where I feel I really am getting to the work, in which the active agent is the poem. My decision is always to trust the poem to know what it needs. That trust helps me to identify and feel its form.

Clark

So it’s already existing. It’s a living thing beforehand?

Bashir

This is about the work, and how I can be of service to this work. What that also means is that the poem is not just a thing I made up. It’s a thing that needs to be made, and I have the privilege of being called upon to make it.

Clark

You write in “OVERHEARD,” “Once returned, I’m reminded how this whole business of writing, of sharing / is just not about me, and for good reason.” I think that’s such an omnipresent perspective of the work that you do.

Bashir

I come from a world that’s very clear that it’s not in any way about me, so to say that something is about me is kind of a revolutionary act. I want to be clear about when I engage [with] that, and when it’s right. I don’t believe that the art I make is about me. I think it’s about us. But I also don’t necessarily believe in a me that is supercilious to us.

Clark

You take a more conversational approach with “OVERHEARD.” I appreciate how accessible your work is—so much of it feels like how we [may] think and how we talk. You’re not trying to be overly flowery, and you’re not trying to put yourself in the confines of structure and language. One of my favorite parts in “OVERHEARD” is where you say “AND WHAT AM I TO BE—RAW OUT HERE? Entrails all exposed? / Skinless?! Nah, B! Nawwwww.” How did you make that decision?

Bashir

Everything is written, revised, rethought, made clear.

Clark

I mean, there’s emojis.

Bashir

It was what I meant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

One poem was published in an anthology before the book came out, but the anthology publishers [suggested] I replace those [text emoticons] with the actual emojis and I was like, “No, no.” I personally am a little obsessed with the language of captions…[when] you’re watching something—I’m fascinated by the way they reframe what’s happening… It’s important to be clear about how we think about things, how we represent things to each other, and then how we also experience it. If you’re writing, you have to filter your experience into these letterbox spaces… That is a wrestling with language.

I am in love with language. I am also the greatest critic of the English language. It’s not my jam. It’s my native tongue, yes. The most fluent language I speak, and probably will ever speak in my life. And I also think it’s probably one of the least poetic languages on the planet. American English is a miracle every day. But what I’m doing here is not flowery because I’m actually trying to communicate something. I’m not trying to talk over or around you.

One of my great pet peeves is the way poetry is taught as a puzzle you’ll never be smart enough to solve… [I Hope This Helps] is not trying to trick you, because why would I do that? That’s beside the point. How could it help if it’s all a trick, [or] it’s all a joke? I Hope This Helps—the earnesty of the title is real. If you were at a reading, I would be looking you in the eye. I’m not speaking to the middle distance. I’m really trying to talk to you.

Clark

It’s not all words. There’s line breaks, parentheses, brackets, [and] em dashes. You play with font size and boldness, color [and] white space. What is your process in deciding pause? Or a moment for the reader to take a pause with a space or a symbol.

Bashir

This work—it’s very embodied, right? I think of poetry as primarily an oral art…right through the ear, through the body. [It’s] something that we’ve carried in our bodies long before writing. Language is not just words. We talk about body language. That’s a real thing.

When we talk about spoken language, I think that the breath [and how it’s scored] is critical. I really do agree with the idea that what you see on the page…that’s not the poem. That’s just a delivery system to get the poem from my body to your body… It’s a musical score sheet. If you’ve ever read music, the idea is: I can take this beautiful piece of music, put it on paper, and you can pick it up with your instrument, follow that on the paper, and play it. That’s what I’m doing on the page with the poem.

There are times when a semicolon is going to do something and a colon is going to do something, and a stanza break is going to do something else, and a line break is going to do something else. Or a long deep breath, which I might have to put in brackets to tell you: No, I really mean take a long, deep breath.

I tell my students, [to] read poems out loud. Don’t just sit there and read them silently. There’s sound happening here, and sound does something to our bodies physically. If you go to the movies and you see how they’re scored…the music has been set up to do this to our bodies in advance. That’s what poetry has the opportunity to do as well if you’re scoring it right. [Sometimes] the language that I’m working with in video poetry is about light and the dust in the light and the color and the movement of the body. Sometimes, if it’s in performance, it’s again in the body.

I think of I Hope This Helps, the installation piece that’s focused on the Standards, as a performance. One where my body steps out so your body can step in, the performance as you move through these 20 Standards hanging in space. It’s listening [and asking], “What does this poem need?” This poem is not just about words. This poem is about something much bigger. Poetry does something to us. There’s a reason. It’s perhaps the oldest art form that exists…aside from and alongside cave paintings. We’ve done this since we’ve had language…

Clark

Have you always been experimenting with these forms or is it something that you evolved into?

Bashir

I guess the answer is yes. I mean, I think in terms of writing and making…I’ve always been experimenting. But what [I experiment] with grows as I grow. Being able to play with language, play with grammar, play on the page, versus dealing with performance—all of these things are different areas, and so many of them have opened up in my poetry.

Clark

I’m just always thinking about how you have to kind of learn the rules to be able to break them. You have to learn those rules of grammar to know how to play with the rules of grammar. Same with music, for instance.

Bashir

Yes. You can’t be a dancer if you don’t have any relationship to gravity, right? But this is dance, and you have to understand how space and force and measure and gravity work. It’s the same thing I used to teach [in] dual workshops with my dance colleagues when I was at Reed College. We would do composition workshops, because poetry composition and dance—they’re two different things. But also, are they? How do we think about what we mean when we’re using this language, and what we’re doing with it, and how they might be in concert [or] in conversation, and help each other think about [them] in different ways?

Clark

Speaking of movement and structure, this is a full collection, all the pieces living with each other. How do you work with something that’s meant to stand alone versus something that’s meant to be in a collection? Do you make every piece separately, [or] are you thinking about it as a family?

Bashir

Everything can stand alone, but that doesn’t mean it’s not part of a conversation. I think about my work really in terms of conversation… When I think about sending work out for publication, magazines or journals, it’s like I’ve got this kid [who] now gets to go out and play, gets to go to school, gets to meet other friends and be in conversation with what’s happening in the world. That conversation is everything. It’s what it’s there for… It’s not about me. I might have made this thing, but it actually exists outside of me and beyond me, and I have to let it go and live its own life… You get to kind of see what that is, which for me is always a surprise. Now I get to sit down and listen to the work say, “This is who you are. Let me help you be who you are.”

Clark

I’m also thinking of your lengthier poems like the MAPS series. I know that there’s no right or wrong way to perceive poetry or collections, but what was your process in making that a series? Was it one long thing and then you broke it up? Or was there a theme that you saw and decided they all belong together?

Bashir

Actually, it predates my last book, but I knew it didn’t belong in that book… It’s a found poem project pulled through a novel called Maps by Somali literary legend [Nuruddin] Farah. That novel is breathtaking. It’s part of his Blood in the Sun trilogy and the whole series is breathtaking. All of the language in [my Maps series] is pulled from that novel, and it creates a whole different story. There’s definitely a tension between a mother figure and a lover there, and tension between how one maps one’s own coming of age, one’s own becoming, one’s own existence in a world that is actually not here for our wellness [or] our existence. It’s always a cartography in progress… It’s a project that I don’t know will ever be finished. I still have not completed pulling language from that novel. But this is the piece as it is now, as it needs to be in an unfinished state. I may continue to add to it…over time, but I think what it needed to be was presented and clarified—as this is a process of becoming, not a process of having become.

Clark

Another thing that I noticed is that you are not afraid to say, “I don’t know.”

Bashir

It’s probably the truest answer I could give to most things.

Clark

There are also places where you have more blanket life statements. The things you feel you know, how do you know [when] to put it in a poem?

Bashir

I get by with a little help from my friends. We show each other the work and help each other find paths toward understanding and at some point I have to trust and believe, not just that I’ve learned a few things—but that there might be some value to that. I also have to trust [that] what I know through deep experience and observation and understanding and thought and work, is also what I have to offer… So if I keep it a secret then, well, that just feels kind of selfish and not really helpful.

Clark

I also want to know about incorporating photography, typography, [and] sheet music. What is the logistical process of speaking with your editor or publisher, and getting on the same page?

Bashir

I mean, one thing I want to say full stop is that I am grateful to Nightboat Books, Stephen Motika, the publisher; Kazim Ali, the founder; and the whole team there. Stephen and Kazim have really believed in me and my work… This project is important because it’s about a collaborative building… That is also one of the guiding principles of this book… I don’t actually want you to read all the texts. I want you to see how the text and the images work together. Then you can go and actually see the video and hear the music, hear it through the voices and the bodies of the singers, and see how all those things work together.

The video poem, negro being:: freakish beauty—same thing. It’s just a transliteration. You have to go see the whole piece yourself. “DARK MATTERS” is the same thing. It’s on Spotify. Go hear it. But you can see what we’re doing when the musical notes mash up with the language notes, which then come together to build a whole new language, which is a whole new piece.

That’s what I’m working to recreate for you in book form… This is beyond book form. This is just the ink-on-tree version of this. [If] you want to hear, see the whole thing, experience the whole thing, it’s outside of the paper. If I’m delivering it right, soon it might be in your body too.

Clark

I feel a lot of writers or artists may feel restricted by what they do and the form that they feel or have been taught that they need to take. From your perspective, how might a writer or an artist know that their work may work best as multimedia?

Bashir

One of the things that I think we’re culturally stuck in right now is this fear of failure, fear of being wrong. [That] if you say the wrong thing, [you’re] gonna be canceled and it’s over, and [you’re] gonna be mocked, and [your career/life is] done. But we have to be willing to try something. Many of the things that I do with this work, I didn’t know how to do before. But I had to do it, so I had to learn. (Fortunately, learning might be one of my favorite things!) So I figure out how to do something, because that’s what the poem needs. And I probably had to try many different things before I got it.

In my last book, I have another series called “Coronography”, which is a double sonnet crown. It’s really busting through the sonnet form to do the work that those poems needed. So I have to really move through the form and understand what it does, then I can know how I can use that form to do what the work needs it to do. That doesn’t mean that I need to blindly follow a rule. I need to understand the rules and know why they are there and what they exist to do. Then comes what I need to do with them.

Clark

You mentioned a large part [of I Hope this Helps] is collaboration and relies on having a good publisher, good people that you can ask, “How do I do this?” or, “How can we work together to do this?” What’s an example of something you didn’t know how to do that you needed to turn to and collaborate with someone else with?

Bashir

The piece called “Here’s the Thing:” which only exists because I had been commissioned to write a libretto with a composer for a choral piece structured for a chorus and orchestra. It was my first time working with a 250 person chorus and a bazillion person orchestra. [It was] my first time working with this composer too, and as [I was] working to get this libretto together, what became clear for me and this process…is that I had to write it as a poem [first], and that’s what set the libretto free. Then I could write the libretto.

Clark

With the constant doom and the feelings that everyone was experiencing [since Covid], how did you decide to write about this?

Bashir

One of my great heartbreaks—probably of my life—is how, in 2020, we had this terrible opportunity globally, as a people—as a humanity—to do something different. In two weeks, air pollution vanished. We watched the earth heal in a month. But then everybody was like, “Nah…”

Well…when do we start actually caring for each other? That’s [what] part of this book is. We have to figure out how to care for each other. For ourselves. Especially now, when it can so easily feel–at every turn–as if all just might be lost.

An early poem in the book, “Per Aspera,” ends with: ”I can’t say how we heal / I wish / I could / I would / I’ll try:” And I remember when that poem came through, I immediately knew that was how the book opened. It may have been the first day I actually saw the book itself finding its form.

Clark

I mean, you said the title is earnest, but objectively, what do you want people to get out of it?

Bashir

Well, I think, first, I hope people can feel seen and heard and known and not alone. The piece that spreads across two pages, “HOW NOT TO STAY UNSHOT IN THE U.S.A” is also one of the Standards in the installation. When the show was up at Michigan State University in January, I [was] really worried, because [they] had [their] own mass shooting in 2023, and that piece is a kind of a chronicle of recent mass shootings across the United States. I didn’t want to trigger kids. Not just kids, but the whole community there. But what happened was the opposite. These students came up to me in tears, but because they were so grateful for that piece. “It’s like nobody talks about it,” one young student said, who had been there. This sense of erasure, or back-to-normaling that we do well, that too is what we do with COVID, what we do with trauma and abuse and oppression and harm and this work sees that. Shows that. Loves us through it.

This is real, this poetry says, what we’re going through right now. And you’re not going through this by yourself. I see you, I hear you. I’m right the fuck here with you.

You can learn more about Samiya Bashir at her website, samiyabashir.com, and order I HOPE THIS HELPS at NightBoat Books. You can also order the book directly from your favorite local bookshop or attribute the sale to them via Bookshop.org.

Visit Samiya’s calendar for updates on happenings, including her August multimedia poetries workshop at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.

Learn more about the author of this interview, Naya Clark, at her website, nayaclark.com

Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney is the editor for our interviews and critical essays.

THE ORGANIZATION IS HERE TO SUPPORT YOU, a Review from The Deep End

by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney/March 20, 2025/| The Deep End

I was drinking coffee and reading The Organization is Here to Support You. It was the morning, which meant my patience for bullshit was still relatively high. I had been reading it since the night before—tearing through it, really—and had just gotten to page 87 where the book’s most loathsome character, Devin Brault, made a request of the book’s protagonist, Clarissa, which was so disgusting, I found myself involuntarily gagging. Not just gagging on the inside, either, but the open-mouth, I-might-actually-vomit kind of gagging.

As a longtime lover of horror films, I’m used to watching things that terrify me. That make me sick. But I’ve always avoided the really gory body horror stuff until recently. In fact, the last time I even remember reading horror proper was as a kid obsessed with Goosebumps, a glorious franchise my mother made me give up because it wasn’t good for my nightmare condition, and me waking up screaming in the middle of the night wasn’t good for her.

December of 2024, that changed. I was walking through Powell’s Books in Portland, OR with my partner, Kevin, one day and the cover of Violent Faculties jumped out at me from the shelf. I didn’t know who Charlene Elsby was at the time, but the cover illustration of a person’s tongue being cut in half by what looked like Gingher fabric scissors, gripped me. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started reading it and, at certain points, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish. Just ask Kevin. Multiple times, I put the book down and said, sometimes with tears in my eyes, “I don’t think I can finish it.” But I did finish it. And I’m so glad I did because that book literally haunts me. I find myself returning to it over and over again, pulling out little bits to use in this paper or that about the subjugation and destruction of the female body by the patriarchy under capitalism.

I was sitting in my corner chair and Kevin was lying on the sofa nearby when the gagging happened. Sensing the disgust on my face, he looked over. “Damn,” he said, “the only other time I’ve seen you do that was when you were reading Charlene’s other book.” Kevin was, of course, referring to Violent Faculties. Then, my gagging was a response to a scene where, during an experiment, the narrator drilled a hole into her female subject’s head (“…in the side of her head, so as not to ruin her pretty face” (50)) so it could be filled with the cum of an anonymous stranger in order to determine whether or not cum, when applied to an open wound, might lead to a longer survival rate. This male stranger—a willing experiment participant—did, indeed, fill the woman’s head-hole with cum after fucking it enthusiastically. She, of course, did not survive.

I’m now on my third Elsby book and what I love most about her work is that it’s always doing so much. Not only is she writing plot lines that are totally unique (yes, that is uncommon, especially in genre writing which can too easily fall into the trap of formula), creating imagery that is shocking in both its grotesqueness and its inventiveness, but she’s also doing this on the foundation of critical analysis. Elsby’s female characters are deep thinkers. They are animated by the intuition that all is not well, the belief that things could and should be better, and the desire to escape banality and subjugation. They do not want to be part of the system. They may want to be equipped to operate successfully within the system, to get by, but they are suspicious of it. Elsby’s theory-driven critiques are central to her plots and character development and they materialize in ways that are accessible even to readers unfamiliar with the central critiques.

You don’t have to be a philosophy expert or an anarchist or a socialist or a democrat to shudder at the thought of being subsumed into the machinery of a profit-based organization. The thought is terrifying because it’s not only possible, but likely. Probable. Required, even, to play the game. And, although rarely publicized, all over the world, people actually do live where they work. In many factories, employees live on-site, sleeping in tiny bunks with no privacy, for months at a time because their rural homes are too far away for daily commutes and these factories provide the best employment (or only) options for their families. They have no separation between work and home life and often, few protections.

Perhaps people who have been working from home since COVID can relate to some part of this. Cleverly, institutions have branded their flexible hybrid and remote employee options as evidence of being people-first organizations. In fact, allowing this benefits the organization far more than the employee. The greater the blur between an employee’s work and home life, the better for the organization. Think of all the overhead they’re saving from employees creating their own physical workspaces, at their own expense, with their own equipment, in order that the companies may save on real estate, utilities, office supplies. Think of the ways in which late-night and weekend texts have become normalized for WFH employees. All this without even a pay raise. Why? Freedom is the benefit.

The live-at-work life is explicit for our protagonist Clarissa who lives on-site at The Organization. She likes how convenient everything is—that she never has to go far for sustenance, that couriers bring any online purchases directly to her unit, and that she no longer has to contend with the long walk to and from work each day. She likes the security that The Organization has to offer, the feeling that she’s part of something (anybody who lacks a strong family or social community can likely relate to this desire—it’s certainly what drove me to succeed corporately for so long). She also seems to feel comforted by the fact that no matter how little she accomplishes (as long as she accomplishes the bare minimum) or how much, she will always be referred to as “satisfactory.”

Clarissa, an only child of two deceased parents, craves connectivity, Living at The Organization makes her part of its body, its systems. There’s safety in that. The Organization needs the work done each day that Clarissa does as a level 07, and she prides herself on ending each day in a way that would allow anybody to come in at any moment and just pick up where she left off. There is pride at The Organization in being dispensable. Because that’s what it means to do a good job. Nothing less. Nothing more.

“I take solace in how many officers there are and how,” Clarissa says, “in the event of an emergency, another one of me would take my place. There would be no interruption of my service” (7).

Clarissa goes on to explain that, “It is against every rule of decency to differentiate between us, and especially if that differentiation is an attempt to distinguish a better from a worse” (9), Clarissa explains, and this knowledge frees her from ever feeling compelled to do more than is required. Ego is an unacceptable attribute for a satisfactory employee. At least for, as we see, a female one.

But Clarissa isn’t necessarily satisfied within The Organization and doesn’t accept the conditions of her employment uncritically. Throughout the text, we are pulled into recollections of conversations with a past lover, Maurice, who talked to Clarissa about freedom and agency. Cleverly, Elsby has created Maurice to be two-dimensional, a character who is able to talk about freedom because he has the privilege to. Clarissa deftly criticizes Maurice’s naivety as early as page two.

“Maurice, when he was around, used to argue that employment is a constraint… But Maurice didn’t know what it’s like to be really constrained. He’d never needed something he didn’t have. Having everything you need, I told him. That’s freedom. And since not all of us are born rich, we have to work.”

From the very beginning, the reader understands that Clarissa is happy to be part of The Organization for the same reason that each of us reading this book is happy to go to work every day. We go because we have bills to pay, and paying those bills allows us to continue to have homes to live in as well as money to do things with friends and take care of medical needs, for example, when they arise. We are happy to do the things—we, the people who were not born and haven’t become rich—that it takes to avoid a disastrous and miserable life. We are willing to do what it takes. We must do what it takes.

Freedom at The Organization is an illusion in the same way that freedom is an illusion under capitalism. Anybody who, unlike Maurice, must work for subsistence, is only free in an abstract way—free to choose between this career or that, this company or that, this specialty or that—but never free to choose not to work. Further, like in life, merit is also an illusion. The lie that hard work and dedication is the antidote to precarity and the assurance of reward, is what keeps us cycling harder and faster over and over in perpetuity while inching toward retirement. Life under capitalism, like life at The Organization, is a maze. Follow the cheese and you’ll never have to look far to meet your basic needs, but don’t expect to ever get far enough ahead to escape. Even the feeling of escape that leaving one job for another provides is an illusion under capitalism, because when profit is the motive, exploitation is foundational. The only way it works is to get more out of an employee than you give. The Organization knows this.

In addition to serving as a commentary on freedom, financial privilege, belonging, and work-life balance— “We all get to log off eight hours exactly from when we log in…” Clarissa assures us by page five—it’s also a commentary on gender privilege. And this is what brings us back to the source of my disgust.

Devin Brault is The Organization’s quintessential frat-bro. We’ve all known or worked with somebody like him. He’s the type who feels entitled to the spoils that come with experience, but without actually gaining any experience on his own; who discounts the contributions of his female colleagues in order to make his own paltry contributions stand out as grander than they are; and who gets what he wants simply because he’s willing to grab it away from someone else. Reminds me of the two-party political system—the way the conservative party is able to get so much because they’re simply willing to, unabashedly, take it, while liberals expect that it’s actually possible for reason to prevail through the use of methods like patience, argument, and compromise (if you can call those methods).

I gagged when Devin, an employee five levels below Clarissa started inappropriately delegating tasks to her, claiming it would be easier for her to “just do it” than for him to learn how. Is there anything more enraging than somebody skipping line? The exact moment of gagging came when, after pushing back, Clarissa’s boss encourages her to help him because he’s not yet “up to speed,” even though Devin’s demands clearly result from unabashed laziness rather than a lack of know-how. Even though doing so would prevent Clarissa from fulfilling her own purpose within The Organization, which was to satisfactorily perform the tasks expected of an 07. This creates a glitch—an opportunity—for Clarissa to feel precarious in a role which had previously felt secure. To question things. To become unsettled. The unspoken message her boss is sending is that The Organization is happy to assign two people to one job, which means one of them must be redundant.

Why is this so abhorrent? Because an undeserving man is jumping rank and the wind beneath his wings is the germane knowledge that he will succeed simply because he deigned to punch above his weight. And the ways in which his behavior is being rewarded directly undermines the professionalism of his female superior, Clarissa. But under capitalism, women are meant to be grateful for the job. To not ask for too much. To not expect accolades or to make their male counterparts look less dedicated by trying harder than or doing more than or expecting higher pay than them for better work. Women are meant to be patient and wait their turn and prop up their male counterparts at their own expense—to die to themselves, if you’re Christian, or to kill their egos, if you’re Buddhist.

My gag was one of recognition.

Precarity, obedience, agency, and gender inequity are prevailing themes within this bureaucratic satire, and while I don’t want to give away any spoilers, suffice it to say that in The Organization is Here to Support You, the figurative ‘maze’ is made real and it’s far easier for men to get around.

As Charlene said in an interview with Mae Murray, “I have argued that existence itself is horrific and all it takes to become part of the horror genre is to write down, without a filter, the things that happen.”

Is Devin’s crime really so different than fucking a woman’s head to death? The result is the same in the long run. Just that the hole in the head is quicker.

You can purchase The Organization is Here to Support You here. To read an excerpt, previously published on Pool Party, click here.

It Hurts a Little:

A Conversation between Aaron Shurin and Ryan-Ashley Anderson

Footnotes

A three-part conversation about Daytime Moon between author Kerri Schlottman and Pool Party managing editor, Ryan-Ashley Anderson.

[ Installment 1/3 ]

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