It’s a good question.

Let’s clarify. When I say cartoons or kids’ shows, I don’t mean shows designed to help me learn my ABCs or about the power of friendship, but rather animated shows that might be classified with the kids’ label simply for being animated.

Bearing that in mind, how do you justify clicking on that button that says KIDS? The answer is simple: Cartoons are among the best-written television shows currently out there, regardless of your age.

There’s a simple reason that kids TV has become not only digestible for adults, but more enjoyable than a lot of network drama. The episodes are short. Because most cartoons aim to be about 10-to-20 minutes (accounting for the attention span of children) they have to tell stories in a concise way.

It’s an old adage in the writing world, but a true one: take out every unnecessary word and you’ll be left with the truest form of your story. This is the way it has to be in animated young people’s television, because when you’re trying to fit a coherent story line into a 10-page script you don’t have room to mess around. Because of the restraints, a punchier story is told.

In Cartoon Network’s “The Amazing World of Gumball,” we follow the life of a blue cat in elementary school. There are the usual standalone episodes of madcap adventures and zany characters, but it also transcends the usual boundaries by speaking directly to adults. Cartoons have done this for a while, hiding dirty jokes and giving knowing glances to the camera, and this is fun for adults who happen to be watching. But dirty jokes won’t keep people hooked. “Gumball” takes a different route, and it’s one a lot of cartoons are taking nowadays. The writers write complex, emotionally-driven storylines. Cartoons are no longer about being silly, but rather about taking a visually interesting way to be serious.

“Gumball” manages this by incorporating a number of different animation styles and character-types in one show. Some characters are puppets, some are 3-D figures and others are traditional 2-D cartoon drawings. This universe is then rich with a palette of eye-catching and rounded characters, which allows for big payoffs when an episode suddenly focuses on one recognizable but rarely focused-on character.

The nature of the shortened medium also allows the pressure to be lifted from each episode when viewed within the context of an entire series. While the main standalone story runs as wild as a short cartoon can, “Easter eggs” can be laid for the benefit of a much larger story across the season. Because each episode is short, the entire run of the show can tell a deep, rich tale. A relationship between two main characters can develop and grow more effectively in a cartoon series precisely because it cannot be explicitly shown as much or given as much direct onscreen time as in a regular show.

It is this marriage of succinct storytelling and the ability to run wild with the visual freedom of cartooning that both requires and breeds great writing. Children’s television seems to have finally realized its potential. By relying equally on the visuals and the writing, and bringing the two together in a condensed block, a limitless formula for satisfying television has been found.

This realization is helpful to apply to our own written work. Seeing a story being delivered in ten minutes is a great lesson in getting your point across. I can only imagine that in the writing room of any great, current animated show there are people desperately turning paragraphs into sentences and conversations into single lines. Happily, this can seem less of a drag when there’s a talking raccoon or a magic dog involved.

And if that last sentence doesn’t get you hooked on cartoons like me, then I don’t know what will.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

The post Cartoons Make Us Better Writers appeared first on Newfound.

One is to be so successful and/or talented, capturing your country’s truth with such style, that you make the city famous through the public’s interest in your life.

The second is to be from a city so small that they don’t have much choice but to invest in your name.

I think there is an element of both when it comes to James Joyce and Dublin.

As great as London is, it’s often easier to appreciate from a distance, like a good painting or relationships with extended family. I took myself to Dublin for a few days to get away from the smog and because there are few other places that can boast such a rich literary history, and almost none that show it off so casually.

It’s true that place is important for a writer, but it’s also true that changing places is important. It’s ironic that this is the idea which drew me to Dublin, when so many of its most famous writers left in the same spirit.

Let’s cut back to Joyce. As a disclaimer, I should say that I have never read “Ulysses“ and I have only dipped into “Dubliners.” In spite of this, as an English major it is impossible to escape Joyce, the perfect bohemian figure, traveler and experimenter with the form.

Walking around the city, I realized why. In death, Joyce has gained the power to advertise and decorate literally anything. Here is a list of places where I saw a likeness/poster/sculpture/bust or James Joyce: every pub, parks, cafés, restaurants, launderettes, a garage, a hairdressers, beermats, graffiti, and on and on and on.

A few years ago this might have unsettled me. Squeezing all the life out a dead artist to promote any random business because he’s recognizable and relatively strange-looking seems a bad thing at first glance. An artist should live on through their art, not through their ability to give credence to a back-alley barbershop.

You don’t have to be in Dublin for long to realize that this isn’t the case. It’s not commercialism, but pride.

Dublin is defined not by its architecture or history or attractions, but by its people. To be called a Dubliner does more than let people know where you’re from. It anchors you to a rich history of unrest and oppression, natural beauty and musical charm, and a character of resilience and strong reputation. This reputation, for the most part, comes from its heroes of fiction, poetry and playwriting.

There might seem something dissonant in the fact that some of the city’s most famous children wasted little time in leaving it. Oscar Wilde found himself more at home in the bustling London scene and Samuel Beckett left for Paris and even started writing in French. Joyce himself moved to Paris, too. So what is it about the place that breeds such talent and wit … and desperation to leave?

Let’s go back to the second reason on our short list of ways to become a city’s iconic literary figure. When somewhere is small enough to become famous because of you, it means that it’s probably become too small for you.

This is by no means a negative thing. These talents were certainly worth exporting. Not because Dublin is too small in reputation or opportunity, but because their talent was large. And if opportunity was indeed lacking for these talented individuals, it doesn’t make them traitors when they leave. (Wilde is infamous for retaining nothing of the accent.)

Despite their jet-setting, they never sacrificed anything of their unmistakably Irish verve and humor. No matter where they were in the world, their work contained the raw strangeness and levity that Irish writing, Dublin in particular, is known for.

My time in Dublin has convinced me that, for better or worse, a writer cannot escape their roots. Place is knitted into our skeletons. It informs our judgements, biases and is always waiting to sit there on the opening line of our museum biographies. So make peace with your city, for one day it might celebrate you.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

The post James Joyce and the City of Dublin appeared first on Newfound.

Demcak is a Renaissance man who works in unusual ways, cutting up blocks of text from a variety of sources and rearranging them, to create his poems. In “Cryptopedia” he mixes this method with the murky, monstrous and mysterious to create something unsettling yet genuinely moving and thought-provoking. Demcak’s success comes from his pitch-perfect subject choices and his ability to turn a seemingly random selection of lines and quotes into a twisting narrative, a short, emotive gut-punch. It takes talent to write poetry, but Demcak has proved he is not only a great talent, but a true craftsman.

Demcak’s poetry has appeared in a range of journals and we were lucky enough to have him share his craft, as well as some words of wisdom, with us at Newfound.

Josh King: Would you tell me a little about your writing life in general? Have you always considered yourself a poet? Did you study it, or just happen to fall into it?

Andrew Demcak: It’s funny now because I did consider myself to be primarily a poet until I wrote my first novel (“If There’s a Heaven Above,” JMS Books 2013) and I was already happy just writing poetry. Now I see myself as an author, a content creator in various forms. I have an MFA in English (Creative Writing/Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College of California. I studied with Brenda Hillman and her husband, Robert Hass. I’ve always been interested in language. I grew up in a house full of limericks, dreadful puns, and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. I love pushing words around on the page a making them do things they don’t want to do.

King: Does this collection signify a change of form or focus for you, or would you consider it part of the Demcak canon?

Demcak: It’s an extension of the canon. Many of my poetry books are collections of cut-up poems I created from various sources.

One of the things I love about history is: what we used to call magic, we now call science. – Andrew Demcak

King: It’s such a fun and unusual idea for a collection; people are undoubtedly going to focus on the idea behind it as much as the words themselves. Did this idea germinate while reading Wikipedia articles and discovering their innate potential for poetry? Or from a desire to find poetry in this unexpected place?

Demcak: I was thinking about classical myth and modern myth, the urban legend, when I stumbled upon all these entries in Wikipedia in my search for source material to cut up. I was more than thrilled to see so many of these subjects represented in Wikipedia. I’m glad that the Chupacabra has an article, for example. I’m intrigued by cryptozoology. No one in the West believed pandas were real when they heard stories about black and white bears in the 1920s.

King: Could you explain the process of creating this? What did a typical day’s work look like while researching and writing “Cryptopedia”?

Demcak: It’s a rudimentary process, I must say. I print out the Wikipedia article, cut it into pieces, place the pieces into a paper bag, shake them up, and then draw out a few scraps at a time and see if the random words inspire me to write a line.

I love using a finite set of language (the article itself) because the word choice is already limited by the subject matter. It helps when I edit the poem for meaning because the word choice keeps the poem within the subject (for example, I’m not going to find the word “subarctic” in an article about the Chupacabra. I’m going to find the words: blood, chickens, nightmare, goat, glowing red eyes, sucking, etc.)

King: During the writing process, were you tempted to release the poems without saying that they were cut ups from Wikipedia? Or is that too much of an innate, important part of this collection?

Demcak: I’ve published the poems both ways, but I think the process is interesting. I like to be honest about my work. Plus, it’s a fun way of creating content. Maybe I will inspire others to try cutting up their own work or the work of others.

King: At first I was tempted to think that you’d used Wikipedia’s “random article” button, but there are definite themes and connections running through “Cryptopedia.” There’s this triangular back and forth between scientific ideas, religious figures and mythological or folkloric creatures. Is this reflective of your own diverse beliefs, or simply a result of trawling though such a diverse website?

Demcak: My beliefs entirely. One of the things I love about history is: what we used to call magic, we now call science. I also love the line between myth and reality, especially in a spiritual sense. Belief makes the unreal real, because belief is real. It’s all a testament to the human mind, as with my poem, “Brain in a Vat.” What is reality to a brain in a vat?

King: There’s another unsettling theme that runs throughout, that of creatures which are famed for kidnapping or attacking children or instances of children going missing or being sold. To generalize more, “Cryptopedia” seems to run on themes of absence, both domestic and cosmological, hidden threats and unexplained conspiracies or myths. Reading your poems alongside the original articles themselves made my stomach turn more than once. What made you seek out these vicious characters and create a book dripping so heavily in the world’s mysteries?

Demcak: I think our mythologies are maps for the human psyche. These scary characters show up in stories whichever part of the world you are in and in every time-period. We’ve always known them. They are nearby, sly and illusive, waiting for us. I’ve always liked the darker side of things (I was a goth as a teen!), so I naturally gravitate to that. The dark side of the human psyche is fascinating to me.

King: You’ve included a sort of cheat-sheet at the end of the collection, with brief explanations of what each subject of the poem is. I think it offers a great palette cleanser and anchor point for the work. Was this always the plan? Why not just leave the reader to linger on the poetic summations, or explore at their own leisure?

Demcak: Part of the fun of this collection is discovery. But I worried that some of the lesser known subjects might confuse readers and put them off. The notes about the poems are like a guardrail so no one skids off the road and doesn’t come back.

King: What place do you think poetry has in today’s world? As an artist, do you feel any duty to confront the world’s problems, or do you feel, perhaps, that it’s your job to distract people from them?

Demcak: Poetry moved into popular music and then came back on its own to the stage in poetry slams. It’s in every culture and every language. It has always had a place, even if it’s just scrawled in a personal journal. As an artist, my response to the question “Do I confront or distract from the world’s problems?”—I do both. But I like poetry most for its language. For me, I write a novel to know what happened, what I felt, but I write a poem to hear the words rubbing up against one another.

King: What are you reading at the moment? As the year comes to an end, are there any books or works that have stood out in 2017?

Demcak: I thoroughly enjoyed “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” by Norman Ohler, and I’m reading “The Other” by Thomas Tyron right now (I can’t keep away from horror fiction!)

King: What is the best piece of advice you have ever received regarding the writing life? Do you have any words of wisdom for a writer embarking on their first collection?

Demcak: Best advice: Don’t compare your work to another’s work. You are on your own path, on your own journey, and it, like your work, is unique to you.

Words of wisdom: Be your favorite author.

If it’s criticism, it’s petty.

Believe in editing.

Always move forward with your writing, even if you are moving blindly forward.

Be brave with your work; do the thing you are the most afraid of doing.

Bonus mantra: Each time I touch my work, it gets better.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

The post “Cryptopedia” – An Interview with Andrew Demcak appeared first on Newfound.

Before we even reach the poetry, the collection offers what Perez calls a “poemap,” a picture outlining Guam’s cable network. The small island is crisscrossed with black lines which, according to Perez, “carry almost all transpacific Internet traffic.” Guam is a hub, interconnecting the USA with other continents. It’s a striking image to begin a book of poetry with, not least because of its utilitarianism. Guam is a tool for the United States, the reader sees, introducing the expectation of seeing the life and love breathing between those cables. Or struggling between them.

These images, and indeed this emotional thread, is fascinating and unsettling to follow throughout. More poemaps show the toxic chemicals in Guam, the intersections between the military firing ranges and parks and hiking trails and, strikingly, the spread of the USA’s ownership over Pacific islands.

The scope soon narrows onto Perez’s own Guam. In “from the legends of juan malo (a malologue) (the birth of Guam)” he fires off contextualizing proverbs which leaves readers (even those unfamiliar with the island, like me) with some idea of the pride and despair contained within.

“‘Guam is Where America’s Western Frontier Begins!”‘ ‘”Guam is Where America’s Logic of Territorial Incorporation Ends!'” ‘”Guam is Where America’s Voting Rights End!”‘ ‘”Guam is Where America’s Poetry Begins!”‘ Juan Malo’s malologues continue throughout the collection, railing against topics that seem innocuous and entertaining on the surface, like SPAM, connotations of the name “Guam” and the island’s “liberation.” Perez’s wit and concise, modern voice, shown these terms to be confused and enraged threads of Guam’s DNA.

[Lukao], at its heart, is about birth.

History is intertwined with the present and the actions of individuals; such is the way of island life and heritage. And it isn’t just history and the present that mix, but the different aspects of the island itself. Nature and man, myth and reality, peace and war. Perez can, in one sentence, describe the incomparable natural beauty of the place and then mention his route to the hospital for his child’s birth, or, indeed, the sound of military fighter jets overhead.

…It feel(s) as though you are looking at the bumpy surface of an island, not a book of poetry.

The current political significance of the island – a bargaining chip in an unstable game between world leaders or (more pessimistic) an island of potential collateral damage – is interrogated as Perez blends scenes of his wife bathing their baby then, in the next breath, recounts the stranded whales brought to shore by deafening military exercises. Perez’s poetry causes readers to experience this life of tension and the dialogue between an imposing world of danger and a life of such love. What a gift for a poet.

Throughout [Lukao], Perez is fearless, not only because of his ability to dig his fingernails into the belly of his home and show all the working parts, but because of how he bends the page, the form, to his will.

It’s a delight turning the pages of this book because the irregularities, the interviews, the maps, the monologues, crossings-out and see-through paragraphs make it feel as though you are looking at the bumpy surface of an island, not a book of poetry. The jumps between subjects mirror, one senses, the reality of life on the island.

Far from being a collection of tension and anxiety, however, it is the moments of personal clarity that allow the collection to breathe the heavy, pacifying breaths of childbirth. And what a relief it is.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

The post [Lukao] by Craig Santos Perez: The Birth and Life of an Island appeared first on Newfound.

I recently became a 25-year-old and it hit hard. Older people tell me to stop worrying and embrace my relative youth. Younger people tell me they can’t wait to be 25. But I hate it. Not only because it’s a year closer to death but because it feels like a decisive cut off point between me and my childhood. At 24 you can just about claim that you’re a kid, with no right to have a foothold in the world. But then midnight strikes, the birthday balloons deflate and you’re left with the world asking, sincerely, ‘What have you got to show for yourself?’

On top of that, I recently moved cities, jobs and uprooted myself entirely. As a result, I’ve spent the last few weeks mostly in my own company, attempting to build a life around myself, sandcastle-like, without much wet sand.

Whether aging worries you or not, there comes a time in life when self-care goes from being an ironic joke to a necessity, and so it was that I discovered meditation.

I know next to nothing about the culture around meditation, or any sort of mental self-help techniques. I did sense a stigma around it, a sort of suspicion that I was being tricked into looking silly. A feeling that it would be on the recommended list for customers who also bought yoga lessons and dreamcatchers. But on a day in which I either felt experimental or particularly stressed out, why not give it a go?

I’m about as skeptical as they come. Ghosts? Pah. Homeopathy? Babble. Gods? Don’t even try it. So I went into it cynically, unconvinced that I wouldn’t just be wasting ten minutes listening to a voice telling me to breathe. But I’m not unwilling to try new experiences, so I gave myself to it.

Having done it for a few months, I am surprised to say that it has helped me order my thoughts, but even more surprised that it has had a secondary benefit. It’s helped my writing and my productivity in the form of short-term bursts of energy. The app I use requires me to sit for ten minutes at a time each day, close my eyes, and take in the sounds and feelings around me and from my body. This helps take stock of how I am feeling, certainly. More usefully, while relaxing my mind it reminds me that even 10 minutes is a significant chunk of time in one’s day when it’s used correctly.

And this brings me back to the beginning. Twenty-five is not old, but it is, at anyone’s most hopeful guess, 25 percent of the way through. Only another cycle until you’re fifty, some have told me. I hate to complain and risk the wrath of older people (and, indeed, younger people going through any sort of genuine trauma) more justified to this anxiety, but the fear is hitting me nonetheless. Ten minutes taken away from my day to clear my thoughts is 10 minutes of work I could be doing to further my career and speed up the whole fame-making, millionaire future I have coming. The guilt of losing this time, even for something as important as mental self-care, is a delicious feeling, because as soon as my eyes are open again, I work twice as fast for twice as long to keep that guilt at bay.

This is no magic or sage wisdom, just a hack of my primate brain, force-flooding it with the desire to create something beneficial against a made-up deadline.

The benefits of a clear mind stretch far beyond selfish motivational tools. The brief calm that comes from deliberately taking a chunk of your day to disengage with the world and engage with the lump of meat you inexplicably are is important, especially in this stressful era we live in. It reminds you of what is important. It gives you the space to understand what it is you want to do next.

So I suggest you give it a go, if not to improve your work ethic, then to allow your brain to take a presumably well-earned break. That is, unless you’re under 25, in which case, quit complaining, you have nothing to worry about.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

The post Turning 25, Meditation and Productivity appeared first on Newfound.

It began a few years ago when comedy writer and performer David Walliams, known for his lewd sketch shows and bawdy characters, wrote a number of best-selling children’s books. As well as dominating the kids’ section of any bookshop worth its salt, they have been made into TV specials, movies, West-End plays and will probably soon be beamed directly into your sleeping child’s brain. Without wanting to sound cynical, it would take a momentous amount of denial to say that his literary success was not a result of his fame.

Perhaps that’s unfair. It’s probably down to his fame. It’s not completely impossible to think of him having gone through the route that all struggling writers go through and finding success that way. It’s just a lot less likely.

Because of Walliams’ success, children’s publishers started to poke around in the comedy circles for more willing authors, and they found them. A number of popular comedians and television personalities were more than willing to oblige (for the cash and for the joy of warming the hearts of children, I don’t doubt their sincerity in that), knowing that they were more or less guaranteed success. Now the fiction shelves, alongside the children’s section, are well-stocked with celebrities “having a go” at novel writing.

Let me make things clear here: it’s not their ability that I’m questioning or their success that I’m angry about. My annoyance comes from jealousy.

I wish it were that easy to just step into a career on impulse, or to be asked to do something that a huge amount of genuinely talented people spend their lives trying to achieve. At the very least, I wish that when the chat show host who fancies writing a fiction book gets a “Pick of the Week” sticker on the cover, they would admit that it is at best a marketing plan and at worst an embarrassing reminder of how little effort they needed to expend compared to the average writer to gain such plaudits.

Of course, this is anything but a singular phenomenon. All around us supermodels are becoming actors, actors are becoming political spokespeople and reality TV stars are becoming president. We know these things are sometimes, occasionally and never, (respectively) successful. Regardless of the statistics, we should all admit that things in general are best left to those qualified to do them. Or, in this case, those who have spent their lives and life-energies creating meaningful literature.

Children are, after all, the most discerning and demanding audience. What they read should not be a trite subject. And what’s more, it should not be a subject that is farmed out to popular figures by publishers, but rather one that is tackled by those who have a passion for delivering ideas and who know their craft.

Far be it from me to take from children their favorite books, or stop celebrities from fulfilling their dream of publishing that novel inside them. So it is that I’ve come up with a solution: Pen names. If you are a TV personality and want to write a novel, by all means, go ahead. But if it is done under your own famous name then it should be null and void, no matter how good it is. If you want the true writer’s experience, then simply change the name on the cover. This way all the toil, failure and rejection that precedes success can be yours and you can truly call yourself a writer.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and other places, and he divides his time between writing articles, drama and drawing comics.

The post Comedians and Kids Books: The Problem with Jumping on the Bandwagon appeared first on Newfound.

Daryl Yam is a Singaporean writer of prose and poetry, a co-editor of the SingPoWriMo anthology series by Math Paper Press and an arts organizer at the literary non-profit Sing Lit Station. His first novel, “Kappa Quartet” (Epigram Books, 2016), was longlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and has been released in both Singapore and in the UK.

Writing mostly about topics that inform his identity and personhood, Yam is drawn to stories of freedom and those that explore friendship, sexual and gender identity, the necessity of self-care, and the consumption of art, media, and culture. He takes particular delight in stories that are situated around the world, which feeds his grander impulse to write stories that are trans-nationally, globally situated. Yam is also employed at Sing Lit Station, a non-profit which promotes the reading and writing of Singapore literature.

Joshua King: Did you grow up surrounded by literature, or a creative atmosphere? Or was it something that you discovered by yourself?

Daryl Yam: Home, I would say, wasn’t a particularly “creative atmosphere.” My parents were never the sort, nor were they active consumers of the arts. As the first child however my mother made sure I read plenty of Enid Blyton and the Key Words Reading Scheme when I was little. It seeded within me an essential love for reading that clearly never went away. Eventually my parents would divert their attention to raising my two younger brothers, and so the process of discovering the world of literature lay very much in my own hands. Whenever the family went grocery shopping at Thomson Plaza, for instance, I’d excuse myself and go browsing for books at Popular instead. Once I spent so much time in there I didn’t even realize my parents had gone back home and left me behind.

King: Do you find your writing changes with the setting you are in? Is place important to your writing process, or in your writing itself?

Yam: It’s difficult, I suppose, to find both space and time in Singapore that’s somehow conducive to writing. Home itself is too comfortable, which in turn inspires laziness, and most of the best cafés here are either too crowded, too noisy, or too hard on people who stay for too long.

There’s also the persistent aura of work hanging over my head that’s personally hard to ignore. Some degree of removal is necessary, I think, to write fiction of a certain length. Whenever I’ve been abroad I have found that I can easily carve out the space and time I need to uphold a sustainable practice of writing. Now, in Singapore, I find myself writing best in the mornings, when there’s no one in the office except myself and my boss’s cat. A quiet afternoon with a cup of cold brew doesn’t hurt either.

King: Are there particular themes or a certain style that you think best give an impression of the contemporary Singapore literary scene? What themes do you find yourself returning to in your own writing?

Yam: I think the best of contemporary writing is currently attuned to the exploration of myths. On one hand it entails fantasy, the power of imagination, and the creation of possibilities. It demands an ability to rethink how we might possibly imagine a country like Singapore, whose identity, geography and very appearance still remain tenuous, malleable and mercurial to this very day, immediately putting to question ideas of nationhood and nationally-held beliefs.

On the other hand it takes to task the matter of storytelling itself, for the ability to determine who, what, and how a story gets told is a matter of real power in Singapore, with real consequences on the lives of people both direct and indirect. It thus becomes an attack on state narratives, organs of censorship, and revisionist claims on national history. Personally all of this is resonant to me, though I tend to find myself taking on these approaches in ways that are hopefully subtler and less didactic, so as to avoid being labelled pretentious or condescending.

King: Singaporean writers, if I’m correct, didn’t start writing novels until fairly recently. From a writer’s perspective, is there a greater appetite among the reading public for novels, poetry or other forms?

Yam: Well it’s easy to make that assumption, and I would owe it to greater visibility in the twenty-first century. Goh Poh Seng wrote our first post-independence novel “If We Dream Too Long” in the early ’70s, and it wasn’t till the ’90s when writers such as Catherine Lim, Ming Cher, Tan Hwee Hwee and Daren Shiau released novels of prominence.

Even now it’s hard to say whether the start of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015 led to some sort of rise in the appreciation of novels, particularly because it was established to promote what was seen as a dire lack in a literary scene dominated by poets, playwrights, and short story writers. Nevertheless, I would agree that the appetite for Singaporean literature is growing, especially amongst a savvier, younger generation of in-the-know cultural consumers. As to whether or not local writing has reached a level of public know-how still remains to be seen.

King: As director of Sing Lit Station, a non-profit which promotes the reading and writing of Singapore literature, how have you seen the literary scene change in Singapore in your lifetime? Have you been surprised by the people that have shown interest in your organization?

Yam: Seeing how our organization is merely a year old (while I am only 26), my direct experience with the growth of Singapore literature remains rather limited. But the numbers are there: we have record attendance ratings for literary festivals, the creation of new literary organizations and initiatives in recent years, a rising number of internationally distributed Singaporean novels, constant reprints of favorite titles, events galore happening every month.

It’s a scene that never fails to reveal fresher faces every year. Sing Lit Station’s annual writing challenge SingPoWriMo (Singapore Poetry Writing Month) has hit nearly 5,000 members on our ever-growing Facebook group, and we received a total 50 full-length manuscripts to consider for our 2017 edition of Manuscript Bootcamp, Sing Lit Station’s highly-selective developmental program for new and emerging talent.

King: Does having four official languages within your country help or hinder the writer? Do you find yourself reading many translated works, or, with the nature of your work, do you try to read as much literature in your own language(s) as possible?

Yam: I do think that having four “official” languages in Singapore certainly helps the writer, in the sense that anything written in English, Mandarin, Malay or Tamil all have claims to an equal share of the bounty at the Singapore Literature Prize and the Golden Point Award. Needless to say of course the English categories of these prizes are the most hotly contested, which also means that works written in English tend to receive a greater share of attention, appreciation and support. Personally I consider myself a rather failed product of the government’s bilingual policy: I am certainly more adept at English than I am in Mandarin, even though it is my prescribed mother tongue, and so I am rather disinclined to read anything written in Chinese unless it’s been translated. I don’t see myself making my ancestors proud anytime soon, I’m afraid.

King: “The Great American Novel” is a term often used to describe a quintessentially American book, typical of the North American experience at a certain point in history. Which book might be the best candidate for the Great Singaporean Novel? Which author might be best qualified to write it?

Yam: As it stands, the best candidate for this claim would have to be the graphic novel “The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye” (Epigram Books, 2015) by Sonny Liew. Not only does it meaningfully retell the story of Singaporean politics across the second half of the 20th century, it also changes its visual style in a way that pays homage to the way comics too were subject to many shifting trends across the decades. But we’re never one to settle for just a single Great Singaporean Novel; if there are more to come I am sure it will come from the like of Sharlene Teo, Stephanie Ye, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Amanda Lee Koe, and many others more. It’s only a matter of time.

King: Having just had your first novel, “Kappa Quartet,” published, to great praise, do you think your work is representative of the literary traditions of Singapore? Did you write it with a Singaporean audience in mind, or another audience altogether?

Yam: Well I would most certainly say–and I have said this many times–that “Kappa Quartet” is the culmination of many things that inspired me throughout my early to mid-twenties, one of which is a chapbook of four stories titled “The Billion Shop” (Math Paper Press, 2012) by Stephanie Ye. And that was the mere extent of the Singaporean connection, I think, though it had certainly proved enough. The very structure of it inspired me to want to do something similar, which thus resulted in the form “Kappa Quartet” finally assumed, for both halves of the novel.

And when I did write the book I didn’t particularly have a Singaporean audience in mind–if anything I was more conscious of how a Japanese reader might view the way I used the myth of the kappa to tell a Singaporean story, to elucidate what seemed to me a particularly Singaporean condition. I was very conscious and very determined though to ensure that it first and foremost find a home with no other publisher but a Singaporean one.

King: How do you view the role of a writer in society? Are strong, confident literary voices more necessary now as the modern world grows more unpredictable?

Yam: Personally I’m rather frustrated with what I find to be a very outdated notion of the writer as some sort of sage, or oracle, or seer. The very idea that we are to somehow responsible to provide any sort of decent answer or solution to the world is repugnant to me, because I really can’t pretend to be in any way a social worker, or a doctor, or a politician. To me it’s important that the writer instead find themselves grappling with questions instead, to be lost and familiar and even comfortable in the unknown, precisely because it’s hard to trust anything in the world these days besides ourselves.

King: If you had to recommend one book as required reading for the schoolchildren of the world, what would it be?

Yam: It’s not really a book but a trilogy. Nor is it really for schoolchildren either, but oh well. I’d recommend “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman.

Daryl Yam’s Required Reading List

1. “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood. The truly greatest novel I read as a teenager.
2. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Reading him is like being connected to a circuit of power: it turns a light on in my head every time.
3. “Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather: timeless. The only thing in my Modern American Literature module that left me longing for another, more distant age.
4. “Flesh & Blood” by Michael Cunningham. It’s the best thing he ever wrote; “The Hours” comes really close, but not quite.
5. “The Neapolitan Novels” by Elena Ferrante. Each book in the “Neapolitan” cycle I consumed in less than three days, three and a half days tops.
6. “Beauty is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan: yas, kween.
7. “after the quake” by Haruki Murakami. It’s a bold claim to make, but these short stories are testament to the fact that his best fiction really comes in smaller doses, and even more so when the one motif that occurs throughout the collection is in fact a sudden, seismic crack across the crust of the earth.
8. “Revenge” by Yoko Ogawa. Again: yas, kween.
9. “M Train” by Patti Smith. This accompanied me and gave me great nourishment and warmth when I traveled alone in the city of Prague. And like the best work of art it gave me a fresh pair of glasses through which to view the world once more.
10. “My Documents” by Alejandro Zambra. I’m particularly proud of the fact that this revealed to me the wonderful work that Fitzcarraldo Editions was doing in the spheres of experimental fiction and essential non-fiction; without Zambra in their catalogue I wouldn’t have discovered the joys of Dan Fox, Agustin Fernandez Malls and Claire-Louise Bennett either.

Recommended Singaporean Novel: “The Billion Shop” by Stephanie Ye. One thing I failed to mention earlier was how quickly I read this book. I remember getting in the train at one point and then taking the seat; before I knew it I was already done with the book, and I hadn’t even reached my destination. And so thus lingered this sense of awe and devastation in my chest that never went away till now. Like Willa Cather in particular there is a wonderfully still and stable assuredness in Ye’s voice that carries one through what is otherwise an ever-changing, ever-shifting, ever-turning world.

You can find out more about Daryl Yam’s writing and wider work at his website: www.darylqilinyam.com and follow him on Instagram and Twitter @yammonation.

And find out what’s going on at Sing lit Station here: www.singlitstation.com

 Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and other places, and he divides his time between writing articles, drama and drawing comics.

The post The Required Reading Interviews: Daryl Yam appeared first on Newfound.

Thomas Korsgaard came out with his debut “Hvis der skulle komme et menneske forbi (If someone should come by)” earlier this year and soon became a bestseller in his native Denmark. Written in 54 short scenes, “Hvis der skulle komme et menneske forbi” describes a family in disruption, a dominant father and a depressed mother. The story follows a young boy as he takes his first steps into the teenage years.

Based partly on his own childhood, Korsgaard is sparked debate among his family and friends, and across Denmark, about the value and aim of semi-autobiographical novels and the author’s balancing act between truth and fiction. He is currently working on his second book.

Josh King: Was there a “light-bulb moment” that inspired you to start writing?
Thomas Korsgaard: As long as I can remember I have been writing. I have tried to figure out why I have been doing this, but I actually think I just really enjoy it. I never thought I was going to be someone who was allowed to write real books. But as it occurs no one can give you the permission. When I realized this, I just started writing my first novel. After publishing a short essay in a small literary magazine, I was contacted by an editor who inspired me to continue and actually finish my first book. You could say that the meeting with her was my “light-bulb” moment.

King: What themes do you consider dominant in your work? Is there a reason for this?
Korsgaard: There are some themes that I think I keep going back to. Identity, sexuality, family and the question of whether you can live without one. I think I always felt left out and very different to others, and this has a huge impact on the themes in my book and in my writing in general. Abuse and the fragmented power relations in human relationships is also a theme that I find in a lot of my writing.

King: How much do you feel your writing is affected by setting and where you happened to be? Whether that’s being at home or in a café, or being in your own country or a foreign one?
Korsgaard: I think I can actually write everywhere, the most important part is that it is a chilled atmosphere around me. Sometimes I leave to go to a summerhouse or travel somewhere for a while by myself. Putting myself in that situation where I can focus on my writing fully, as a way of escaping any disruptions from everyday life things. When I am writing, nothing else matters. I also use an old abbey that has been transformed to a writing-refuge, where many writers come to disconnect from the world. The place is called Hald Hovedgård and is near Viborg, Denmark.

In a time where we look for “the real thing,” with reality TV and social media, the fictional book might be one of the real-est things you will find. – Thomas Korsgaard

King: When writing, do you have a Danish audience in mind? Is your audience determined by language spoken? Cultural sensibilities? Or something else entirely?
Korsgaard: I have no one in particular in my mind when I write. Of course I write with the idea that it should be published. It is important to me to be independent, reckless and honest – therefore I only write to myself at the start. Of course the book takes place in Denmark, but I think anyone from any country would understand the setting of a lower-class family farm. I use a lot of slang to portray misunderstandings as well of the lack of communication between the characters. This is all to give the audience a better understanding of the life of Tue (the protagonist).

King: Do you find yourself reading mostly translated works, mostly works in your home-language, or a mixture of both? Is there much opportunity to read foreign works translated into Danish?
Korsgaard: I recently noticed that I read an enormous amount of Norwegian books translated to Danish. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Merethe Lindstrøm, Vigdis Hjort and Per Petterson’s books are among these. I often find it hard to get through the “brick-books” that you often find in American literature. I have no doubt that many of them are very good, and I love the bulky language that you often find here. I would say that it generally is a good mix of Danish and foreign literature, contemporary as well as classic. In my experience there is quite a lot of translated work into Danish to find. All of the big publishers have international editorial staff.

King: “The Great American Novel” is a term used to describe a quintessentially American book, typical of the North American experience at a certain point in history. Which book might be the best candidate for the Great Danish Novel? Which author might be best qualified to write it?
Korsgaard: “Human Beauty” by Merete Pryds Helle was published last year. If I should name any Great Danish Novel, this would be a very good candidate. It is a family saga about the character Marie and her childhood, as she grows up in the mid-twenties. Merete Pryds Helle here captures the life of a typical Danish family in country-side during these years. Merete Pryds Helle just won the very prestigious Booksellers Choice Award for this novel. I think this book will be continuously read and loved for many years.

King: To an outsider, the Danish literary scene can seem homogeneous and contained. And yet Scandinavian literature is gaining popularity in the English-speaking world. As a young writer in the Danish scene, is there a desire to move into the international market among your contemporaries, or do you simply want to increase the body of Danish literature?
Korsgaard: I write and publish mainly in Danish, and with the idea to capture the Danish audience as well as the Danish language. Of course I would love the rest of the world to read my book as well, as the book is everything to me.

Personally, I do not think the Danish literary scene is homogeneous, we have many different writers and styles. The Danish author Dorthe Nors was not very popular in Denmark, but after having some short stories published in Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker she had a massive international break through. This of course created a greater interest for Danish literature in the eyes of the international audience. And the general idea of increasing the body of Danish literature I think is fantastic.

King: What, in your view, is the role of the writer in today’s turbulent, and often unstable, world?
Korsgaard: It is a fact that it is more difficult than it has been for a book to succeed in the world. In the fast-running world it is hard to capture someone for the time it takes to read a book, I think. However the as the world grows to be more open, it becomes easier to create a public discussion with a book.

In a time where we look for “the real thing,” with reality TV and social media, the fictional book might be one of the real-est things you will find. A book can open up worlds, and we get to hear voices and experiences we might not have otherwise. As a writer and especially as a reader, I think literature still manages to touch us in ways that nothing else can.

King: If you had to recommend one book as required reading for the schoolchildren of the world, what would it be?
Korsgaard: “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis is a book that I remember from my first years in school. The magical universe as well as the very serious world situation of World War II creates a fantastic world for a child. One of the themes, forgiveness, is a very important quality that I think every child should learn.

Thomas’ Required Reading List

1. “Out Stealing Horses” by Per Petterson, Norway
2. “Baboon” by Naja Marie Aidt, Denmark
3. “Days in the History of the Silence” by Merete Lindstrøm, Norway
4. “Ming” by Bjørn Rasmussen, Denmark
5. “Lettipark” by Judith Hermann, Germany
6. “Welcome to America (Velkommen til Amerika)” by Linda Boström Knausgård, Sweden.
7. “RUD” by Kamilla Hega Holst, Denmark

Recommended Danish Novel: “Crème Fraiche” by Suzanne Brøgger.

You can follow Thomas on Instagram at @thomaskorsgaard and find out more about his book here.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and other places, and he divides his time between writing articles, drama and drawing comics.

The post The Required Reading Interviews: Thomas Korsgaard appeared first on Newfound.

Clara Burghelea is Editor-at-Large for the Village of Crickets (VOC) blog Small Points of Light. Originally from Romania, Burghelea is earning a multi-genre MFA at Adelphi University. A poet, writer and translator, she has been published in print and online in In-Flight Literary Magazine, Straylight, Indiana Voice Journal, and Ambit Magazine under the pen name of Witty Fay. Her first volume of bilingual poetry, “Nefelibata,“ was published in 2014.

Josh King: Was there a “light-bulb moment” that inspired you to start writing?
Clara Burghelea: I have been writing all my life, I guess, keeping diaries when I was in high school, then commonplace books I did not know had a name until I took a poetry class with Judith Baumel last semester. In college, all I did was read and write, then I took my MA in Translation Studies (which should tell you I have had a foot in both camps for a long time.)

Writing became compulsory when my mother died. I was left with these unresolved feelings, self-doubt, and disconnection from social life. I developed a feral disposition, a search for something that was missing. It turned out I was looking for words but I wanted to pursue them in a sort of organized manner. I also craved the literary community, my own writing tribe.

King: What themes do you consider dominant in your work? Is there a reason for this?
Burghelea: I grew up in a communist country until I was 12 and this marked my childhood and impacted my adolescence. First, I did not know I had a voice and that it mattered. Then, I lacked women role models in poetry and fiction. Finally, I had my traditional upbringing shaping myself and the way I saw the world. Then I experienced motherhood, loss and a sort of restlessness. My current obsessions are pretty much related to all these things.

King: How much do you feel your writing is affected by the setting you are in? Whether that’s being at home or in a café, being in your own country or a foreign one?
Burghelea: Setting is essential in the creative process. I am a gregarious recluse which means that as much as I love the company of others, I become overwhelmed by the outer human noises and feel the need to isolate myself. It depends on the choices at hand. Back home, I could easily go to the countryside. Here, I find a quiet alley in Central Park or go the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, where I either write, read or simply allow my own thoughts to take a halt from the urban clamor.

But I am not a ‘nature’ kind of person, as much as I appreciate the salt-smacking seaside breeze of one of my favorite Greek islands, Thasos, or my grandparents’ cottage in Romania. It is more a matter of how the setting alters the state of mind.

Living in New York on my own feels like a self-imposed exile because it was my choice to leave my family for two years and depart from my comfort zone. It is quite a challenging experience. Edward Said was the one who beautifully expressed how geography defines us. He said none of us are outside or beyond geography and therefore we are not free from the struggle with it. I guess I am carrying mine around and at the same time, I am always departing and returning to it.

King: When writing, do you have an audience in mind? If so, is this audience determined by nationality? Language spoken? Cultural sensibilities? Is there any defining characteristic of this audience at all?
Burghelea: I only write in English but I cannot help wondering if my poems or stories are getting to the right audience. But then again, who is that audience? I know it is a niche one though there is a history of writers of different nationalities who chose to write in English. Ultimately, it all comes down to good writing but since English is not my native language, I feel I always have to go the extra mile in getting the natural flow of the language on the page. So, in terms of language, there is no audience since I expect to have my poetry or fiction read by people who appreciate good writing, but as far as the themes of my writing are concerned, I imagine it is a matter of taste. Some people will simply not be interested in reading stories about how it feels to a have a communist upbringing as a legacy.

King: “The Great American Novel” is a term often used to describe a quintessentially American book, typical of the North American experience at a certain point in history. Which book might be the best candidate for the Great Romanian Novel? Which author might be best qualified to write it?
Burghelea: To my mind, the Great Romanian Novel is “The Forbidden Forest” by Mircea Eliade. Eliade was a novelist, as well as a historian of religions who fled Romania when the communist regime came to power. He settled in the U.S. where he became a professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in 1958.

The novel is about Stefan, a man torn between his love for two women who lives under the pressure of his times—the novel is set in the late 30s and 40s—and searches for his own identity. It has elements of magical realism and discusses essential human themes like time, love, fate, history. It is a book that shaped my literary tastes when I was a teenager and still feels worth revisiting every year.

King: It seems to me fair to say that a large percentage of people in the US would find it difficult to name a Romanian writer or a famous work of Romanian literature, or perhaps I am just betraying my own ignorance. Do you feel a conscious desire to promote your country’s literary style when you are writing? Do you feel under any pressure to represent your country in your own work, because it is less represented generally?
Burghelea: It is true to a certain extent, although for those who considers themselves citizens of the world literary community names such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionesco, Norman Manea, Mircea Cartarescu, Matei Visniec, Ioana Nicolae, Ana Bladiana or Herta Müller—winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009—should be familiar. For instance, Norman Manea is a Romanian novelist and essayist who is a writer in residence at Bard College in New York. His memoir, “The Hooligan’s Return,” is exceptional in covering 80 years of life experience and struggles.

I don’t think there is a literary style specific to Romanian literature though there are obviously recurring themes. I like to speak of Romanian writers in all my encounters with writers of different nationalities and I often mention the need to have more female writers better represented in Romania and abroad. I do not feel pressured to promote Romanian literature, but I take every opportunity to speak of talented people of my generation, such as Marius Chivu, who is a poet, novelist and translator. His short story collection, “End of Season,” was translated into English by Alistair Ian Blyth.

For those interested in a detailed list of all the worth reading poets, novelists, essayists and playwrights, I recommend “The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since 1945” by Harold B. Segel.

King: Was there a particular reason that you chose to study in the United States, rather than somewhere else in the world?
Burghelea: I lived for four months in Boise, Idaho, two years ago and visited the most important cities on the west coast. I guess that was the moment when I fell in love with the potential of American literary life. There are no creative writing programs in Romania and only a few in Europe, so I knew here all programs used the workshop model and I was very much interested in this idea of being part of a writing community. I only had money to apply to three programs and I chose them from different parts of USA. Adelphi was the winner since they fought for me the most. It was a great choice.

King: In today’s unpredictable world, how do you view the role of the writer, or literature in general, if it has a role at all?
Burghelea: In the contemporary, uncertain, hate-fuelled, politically challenged, socially unstable world we live, literature is as necessary as breathing. It has the mission to use language and stories to reach out and connect, to generate empathy and help readers embrace otherness and diversity as means of personal growth. The study of literature is essential, especially for young people, since one of the roles and responsibilities of a writer is to act as a civic citizen and facilitate access to reading and writing. By teaching others about the force of the written word, we are teaching them to stand up for their rights and liberties and use their voice to fight for human values and against injustice.

At the same time, I believe literature is born out of discomfort and uprootedness. It is a state of being in constant transit where we, as readers, can find a temporary home. To my mind, all reading and writing is a sort of exile, a movement towards another language, another writer, another world. Ultimately, towards yourself.

JK: If you had to recommend one book as required reading for the schoolchildren of the world, what would it be?
Burghelea: The book that mesmerized my childhood was “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils” by Selma Lagerlöf. It taught me about empathy, otherness, geography. It captured the naughtiness of childhood and though it had its moralism, it was diverse and took one from the animal kingdom to flawed human interactions. I guess the book is a metaphor for breaking away from the family since Nils literally flies away on the back of the farm gander. Delicious. Though, I must say my own kids – I have a daughter and a son – did not appreciate it but rather devoured all Roald Dahl books and Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”

Clara’s Required Reading List

“Ways to Disappear” by Idra Novey
“Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff
“Karate Chop” by Dorthe Nors
“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery
“A Visit form the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan
“The Enchantress of Florence” by Salman Rushdie
“An Unnecessary Woman” by Rabih Alameddine
“Night Sky with Exit Wounds” by Ocean Vuong
“Twenty-One Poems” by Adrienne Rich
“The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda”

Recommended Romanian Novel: “The Forbidden Forest” by Mircea Eliade.

You can find Clara’s work and much more from the vibrant New York scene  at www.villageofcrickets.com

The post The Required Reading Interviews: Clara Burghelea appeared first on Newfound.

To read “Flower Wars” is to see all of these labels both interwoven and dismissed. Amador’s collection, though it so delicately touches the nerves of modern life and confronts the shadows that we see growing in society’s corners, is able to provide for multiple types of reader. It is light, beautiful and fully capable of staking its claim as part of the contemporary poetic renaissance.

Nico Amador’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod International Journal, MiPOesias, HOLD, Big Bell, Plenitude, Bedfellows, and APIARY Magazine, and he is an alumni of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writer’s Retreat. “Flower Wars” will be published by Newfound in 2017.

Writing in a way that risks exposure, that connects in an honest way, is a matter of integrity for me – Nico Amador

Josh King: I’d love to hear a little more about your writing history and your personal view of the writing life. Has your poetry, in your view, always been the shape that it is now, or do you see it reincarnating continuously as you mature?

Nico Amador: There’s a few different stories I could tell about my writing history but I think it’s fair to say that I probably wouldn’t have become a writer if I hadn’t first become an activist. I became politicized as student in the wake of 9/11, from seeing the ways the government was manipulating the fear of terrorism to wage a war on Iraq, to profile Muslims and immigrants, to fuel the systems that funnel young people of color into the military and into prison.

At the same time, the spoken word and underground hip hop scene was thriving and these art forms were real tools for drawing people into these issues. Open mics became a recruitment strategy for our campaigns on campus – but that meant all of us had to be ready with our own work in order to ensure enough readers for a successful event. Everyone was expected to put their name on the list. So really, I first started writing poems as a function of my political work.

But the effect of having that space within our organizing work was transformative beyond whatever initial motivations we had for it. It allowed us to build an organizing culture that wasn’t based on dogmatism – participation required a measure of personal courage, vulnerability and witness. I felt that it deepened our commitment to each other across issue and identity, as well as to our own voices. It kept me returning to the page despite how difficult and clumsy it felt at times.

Certainly, my poems have evolved since then. My curiosity has led me to other influences and I’ve moved away from a performative style to one that’s quieter, more authentic to who I am. But I still write with those earlier rooms in mind. Writing in a way that risks exposure, that connects in an honest way, is a matter of integrity for me. I hope to never embarrass myself by becoming so pretentious a writer that I couldn’t find an audience with the person I was when I was twenty.

King: So, with that in mind, do you consider yours a writing life? Do you have a schedule for your writing, or does it come out when you are politically motivated?

Amador: My work as a writer and my political work inform one another but each requires its own kind of attention. I don’t have the privilege or desire to abandon all other commitments in order to devote myself completely to the writing life, so making room for both is a constant negotiation but one that has a symbiosis to it. My political work gives me a location from which to write from – it takes me places, literally and figuratively, and those places become sites of tension and wonder and longing and relationship that is worth writing about.

At the same time, the vision and the imagination that is necessary to the success of social movements can be easily consumed by the daily work it requires. It’s a grind – conference calls and meetings and hammering out the same kinds of emails over and over again and facing down the feeling that nothing you’re doing is meeting the urgency of the crisis at hand. Writing is a way to root in a practice of creation. I try to write most mornings for at least a couple hours, and there’s a discipline to protecting that time that I think is important for anyone in the long haul of social change work. It’s more than self-care, it’s staying conditioned to an attitude of possibility, of thinking elastically.

King: For those who know a little about you and work, both in writing and in activism, your poetry seems to do great justice, and act as great contextual pieces, to the causes you have stood for. Do you find that you are under any obligation, or any innate compulsion, to write from the perspective of a queer person, or about race, especially in the political climate in which we currently live?

Amador: One impact of oppression is that our sense of choice is narrowed. It imposes circumstances in which we can only be one thing or another, it robs us of our complexity. The poem is a space in which we are permitted to be whole. I find relief in getting to approach the page, not from a sense of mandate but from whatever questions are alive inside me. In getting to ask, what is true for me today? What am I drawn to that is delightful or troubling or strange? And each day the answer is allowed to change if it wants to.

Ultimately, that kind of process does those causes or perspectives more justice, as you say, because they’re allowed to exist within a kind of internal democracy, one that has many interests and many points of intersection. That to me is queerness or racial justice at its most liberatory. It’s not just the assertion of a single issue or identity, but about lifting the restrictions that have been placed upon us so that we can live in the full range of who we are. In this current climate, which is so restrictive and so polarized, I want to keep insisting on the right to have places where we get to experience freedom, wherever we can find it.

King: Tell me a little about the creation of “Flower Wars.” How long did it take? Do you remember the moment that it first sparked into life?

Amador: The oldest poem in “Flower Wars” is at least eight years old and the newest is only a few months old. In that span of time I wrote about sixty or seventy poems in order to be able to curate the slim collection that appears in this chapbook, because I was still teaching myself how to write during that time. Many of the poems in “Flower Wars” started as writing exercises, I didn’t have a plan for them. But at a certain point, I could see which poems had lasted, and how they spoke to each other.

One day I printed everything out and sat with pages and pages of poems spread out on the floor of my office and shuffled them around until I understood the story they were trying to tell. After that, it only took about a year to fill in the gaps and finish shaping them into the final manuscript.

To be trans or gender non-conforming is, in many ways, to live at the perimeter of what is considered real. – Nico Amador

King: When reading through “Flower Wars,” I was drawn in by the rises and falls from reality into a kind of surreality that you achieved by changing the time frame, the form the poem comes in or the vantage point we have as a reader, for all of which there are numerous great examples. How much do you find the vivid and personal themes affect the way you present your work?

Amador: So much of this chapbook is shaped by how I came to an understanding of myself as trans and what that meant in relationship to the rest of my environment and the histories I’m connected to. To be trans or gender non-conforming is, in many ways, to live at the perimeter of what is considered real. So much of who we are is not given validity in culture or language or law or ways of thinking about the body.

The surreality of the poems are an expression of what it feels like to interact with the world when our place in it has to be either imagined or explained in approximation to what is more readily known and understood. Invention and metaphor become a necessity, a way of building a bridge between ourselves and what others define as reality. There is pain that comes from the isolation of that position, but also a tremendous access to magic and beauty. I wanted my words to reflect both.

King: As a mixed-race writer, and a Latino, how important is a sense of place in your work? Is it important for a poet to anchor themselves to a certain place?

Amador: Most of the poems in “Flower Wars” are sourced in some way from encounters with place, real or imagined. But the way place shows up is episodic, it’s in these acute moments that happen as part of a larger journey, there’s not a single anchor. There’s descriptions of places like Denver, Minneapolis, Nicaragua, which I’ve only passed through as a visitor, but there’s very little of Philadelphia, where I lived when I was writing those poems, or San Diego, where I’m from.

I do think that’s partly about being mixed race – I think that’s what Anzaldúa means when she describes what it is to live in the borderlands or when Rebecca Walker writes that she feels more comfortable in airports than anywhere else. That our sense of belonging isn’t attached to one place but in what’s liminal. When I’m in one place too long I get restless, I feel depressed. It’s when I’m in motion between places that feel most alive, when I’m able to see and think most clearly about what’s around me.

King: How do you think poetry fits into today’s society? Obviously, in recent months, even days, the poetry that has erupted has been loud and powerful and creative, but how, if at all, do you see the poet speaking out against society’s evils in a way that can make a difference?

Amador: In any highly repressive system, I don’t doubt that the role of the poet is necessary, though it is difficult to know exactly how or what that means. It’s something I think a lot of writers are struggling with right now, myself included.

I was just listening to a discussion about Adrianne Rich and how even in the role of the poet she saw herself as a worker. I took that to mean not only that she saw her poetry as a form of labor, but also that she didn’t view herself or her labor as superior to anyone else’s. There’s something in that attitude that I find helpful for this moment. That the role of the poet isn’t to deliver truth to the masses from on high, but to be a worker that is allied with other workers that will have to fight the battles ahead on multiple fronts.

The poem is only useful as much as it’s a tool used in relationship to other tools and strategies – the word alone will not save us. I can’t say what each of us should do or how we should act at this moment, but I think we all should be asking ourselves, Where can I push back on or withdraw my participation in institutions that are causing harm? Where do I have the ability to influence power? What am I willing to risk? What actions can I take to be in solidarity with those around me?

King: I saw elements of e.e.cummings, of Alberto Rios, and a mix of the surreal and the natural, colliding head on to express something banal and human. There are also mentions of poetry and poets, such as Pablo Neruda, peppered throughout, creating a sort of timeless world where poets share the modern world. Where do you see your fitting into the poetic tradition? Who would you list, if there is anyone, as your main inspirations?

Amador: June Jordan was the first poet that I really latched onto as an influence, first because of her politics but later because of her lyricism and her effortlessness with sound in a poem. She gave me my ear and my attention to the arrangement of words within a line. And yes, of course, Neruda, the lushness of his poems, the emotional force of his imagery. The first time I heard Eduardo Corral read it was as though he’d conjured a door and handed me the key. And I also spent several years learning from the poet Michael Loughran, who has been a wonderful teacher and whose personal influences span a very different territory – The New York School, Gerald Stern, Mary Rufle, Dean Young – to which I was somewhat resistant at first. But I’ve come to love those poets also, they’re helpful counter-weights, they keep me from becoming too lofty or too pretty.

King: Speaking of inspirations, what are the best pieces of advice you’ve received from other poets? And what advice would you pass on to someone wanting to write their first collection?

Amador: Don’t be boring. Not just in what you write but in how you observe your surroundings in between the times you sit down to write. To try to notice what others aren’t noticing or to notice them differently. That, and I also had a mentor tell me to treat the poem as a made object, a thing that can be taken apart and reconstructed and made better if it isn’t working. Taking on that attitude helped me become a more fearless editor of my own work. That’s the advice I’d pass along, to put in the time in on revision and insist on pushing the poems as far as they can go.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, non-fiction and drawing comics.>Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, non-fiction and drawing comics.

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