How do your poems reflect your experiences? How do these experiences drive you to write?
I’m a really nostalgic person. Really obsessive, too. I’m typically thinking about the past instead of experiencing what’s happening around me. Because of that, my writing is often rooted in things I miss or resent or ache for. What I remember drives me to write. Like, I’ve been really, really thinking about this one time I stood a girl up for a date because I was hungover. I’ve written about three poems about it.
It’s a shame, honestly, because I miss a lot of the present when I’m so swept up in all that remembering and all that residue. But grief is really a great fire-starter. Most of my work is lit by everything I’ve weathered before instead of what load I’m bearing now.
Yes, I’m in therapy. It’s not a coincidence I’m usually writing about what we’re working on in there.
What is your writing process?
I kind of just get the compulsion to write sometimes. Most of the time, it’s when I’m listening to music that I get a spark. So, when I want to write, I spin a record, and in time something comes to me. Pen will go to paper for hours if I’ve picked the right soundtrack.
I spun Turn on the Bright Lights by Interpol to Hell and back while writing Diet Gutbread. It’s a perfect tone-setter.
When thinking about creative expression, what draws you to write poetry?
A lot of my thoughts hold contradictions. The ability to explore such a rawness that can’t be laid straight is the essence of poetry. It’s the only form that my true thoughts can mold comfortably.
For me, poetry is a way to wrestle with trauma much stronger than I am. Prose can’t handle all my identities and complexities, all the fallouts and such. Poetry bends with me.
I do write prose as well—I have a novella in the works—but even then, when I write stories, lyricism bleeds through.
Do you express yourself in other ways, such as art?
I paint! Watercolors, for the most part, but I don’t do it as much as I should. And I’m not the best at it, but it’s fun, and all I ever needed from it was something cathartic. You know, something cathartic that isn’t as macabre as my writing can be.
I like to paint my favorite musicians, actors, writers. Nothing too vile. Except for the painting I did for Diet Gutbread. I guess that was macabre.
How did you come up with the title Diet Gutbread and what does it mean?
The title came to me when I was writing a poem within the collection—one of my favorites, With this Breadknife, Think of My Body. I’d heard the word gutbread before, and didn’t know what it meant, but knew it sounded sick, so I used it in the poem. I kind of made up my own definition with my use of the word. Another reason poetry is cool? Meaning is arbitrary.
Gutbread signifies empty-calorie sorrow. We all consume it. The self-loathing just sits in your gut. And diet highlights the emptiness even more—we’re hollowing out our sadness and eating it all the same. It’s despicable.
What inspired you to write Diet Gutbread?
I’m a little ashamed of what inspired it. Last year, I experienced psychosis. I didn’t even know it at the time. A lot factored into it and, when I came to, I held a lot of grudges towards the people around me for not seeing it, for not helping. A lot of people split off from me and I lost a lot of myself. I don’t remember some parts of that time of my life, and that still scares me.
But I wrote a bunch when I came to. Diet Gutbread was a peg-leg to me. It helped me hobble through the world when I was still fucked up. This isn’t the only collection that came out of that post-psychosis spring back to life, but it’s certainly the realest.
To say I was inspired by my own mayhem is an understatement. I was trying to survive after a breakdown. Diet Gutbread is a pamphlet sporting my darkest brainchildren, written in a picking-up-the-pieces frenzy.
Why did you decide to use meat as the cover of the book?
I’ve always been fascinated with butchery. Blood, guts, body horror—I love it all despite myself and the taboo. Everything I write, I aim to make it bodily. Visceral. I feel, if I had to wrap my style into one word, it’d be that. Nothing felt more right for the cover of my first book than meat.
The main theme of Diet Gutbread is captivity. Captivity can mean different things to different people. How does this theme manifest itself in your collection of poetry?
The poems build many kinds of cages—mental illness, remorse, gender, surveillance, motherhood, longing. All these things can make somebody feel unmovable. Captivity, to me, is the tension between yearning and permission. What we desire, what we’re allowed to reach for. That tension threatens to kill in every poem.
You also explore queerness, neurodivergence, and guilt. What draws you to these topics?
They’re not topics to me. They’re much more akin to realities. A lot has changed in the past year for me. I’ve moved, started college, and was told I’m autistic. I’ve gotten into my first queer relationships, made and lost plenty of friends, and realized gender is stupid—I’ve lived lifetimes, it feels, in twelve months.
I can’t help but muse on what plagues me, and shame is one of those things that doesn’t leave. It follows me like a stupid puppy everywhere I go. I feel shame about my identity, the things I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt. Some of those things should be anguished.
But I’ve stopped hiding it, myself. By writing about these things, I’ve accepted what can’t be changed. I’ve given myself grace. It feels good.
What do you want readers to take away after reading Diet Gutbread?
My friend who read the book said she saw into my soul. I suppose I’d like readers to experience that too–hopefully see something beautiful. But I didn’t necessarily write the book to be seen.
I wrote the bulk of the collection in a bad mindset. I wanted to take something away from it myself, something good. And I did take something away from writing Diet Gutbread: the fact that malaise is holding me back completely.
What I really want people to see in the book is that everyone can be free. From hopelessness, stagnation, anything keeping you bound.
We don’t need to despair all the time. There’s no need to digest all that devastation when there’s so many blessings. Let yourself starve sometimes, you know? Give pleasure the chance to grow. So much, I want readers to know they can grow and change.
What’s next for you?
I’m not going to stop the grind. You can’t make me.
Like I said, I’m working on a novella. It’s heavily inspired by Arthurian tales, the Brothers Grimm, Carmilla, and Cronenberg. But I also have a dozen or so finished and half-finished manuscripts rotting in my drive. Who knows what’ll see the light of day?