 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with distinguished professor and author, John Weir, who has just produced a new collection that we're here to celebrate and promote called Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me. And John has been kind enough to join us to talk about it. But before we begin, let me read a little introduction of John. This is his formal introduction. John Weir, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me. Congratulations. Oh, thanks. Is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the 1989 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Debut Fiction. And What I Did Wrong. He's an associate professor of English at Queens College CUNY, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation Program. That's an interesting field. In 1991, with members of ACT UP New York, John interrupted Dan Rather's CBS News to protest government and media neglect of AIDS. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, John. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Great to see you. Very happy to be here. One thing I want to note before we continue is that your first two novels are going to be released by Fordham University Presses in Fordham University Presses Relit Series in the Empire State Editions. So congratulations on that. That means Regress can get current copies. Are you going to write new introductions or are they just going to be re-released? I mean, the first two books, the first one came out in 1989, Eddie Socket, and the second one, What I Did Wrong, came out in 2006. And they've both fallen out of print. And this delightful guy named Richard Morrison, who works at Fordham University Press, kept asking me on Facebook. We became Facebook friends, and he kept saying, do you want us to re-release your books? And I don't know, I'm perverse. I ignored it for like three years. And then I finally thought, I'm not getting any younger. What the hell? So both those books are out with this series that he initiated, which is meant to focus on novels and fiction that takes place in New York City. So it's the texts of both, the original texts of both books. They just reprinted them and repackaged them. So and coincidentally, the three books came out like all at once. So it seems like I've been writing furiously for the past two years, but that's not really the case. Well, speaking of Facebook, let's start with the dedication of this collection of short stories for 5,000 Facebook friends and 2932 followers at last count. That's a fabulous dedication, and I feel personally affected because I know you through Facebook. We must have mutual friends in New York, but I became aware of your posts and they're so smart and contemporary and analytically astute that I sent you a friend to request and you were kind enough to accept it. And that is how I learned about the publication of this collection. So Facebook is working for me in other words. It is. It is. I also have to add that I'm not really on TikTok, but I saw your TikTok reading. Oh, yeah, I started doing some TikTok stuff. And then I think TikTok is mostly for like romance and sci-fi and young adult novels. And so I wasn't I'm not quite sure I'm reading. I'm reaching my target audience there, but but I've been posting things off and on to TikTok. Absolutely. Well, why not? Why not? How long did it take you to assemble this collection? I'm sorry, what did you ask? How long did it take for you to assemble this collection? Well, that's a really good question. I mean, it took both 30 years and 15 minutes by which I mean that I had written a lot of those stories over maybe since about 1997. I had been writing all of those stories along the way, publishing them here and there. And at some point, I was sitting in my office at school like on a cold night in February. And I saw that there was a contest that the Associated Writing Programs sponsored for the Grace Paley Prize. And I and the deadline was like 24 hours away. And I thought, huh, I probably have enough stories for a manuscript. So I've kind of flung them all together and sent them off and more or less forgot about it. And then very much to my surprise, the following August, they contacted me and told me that they'd selected my manuscript. So that was kind of thrilling. I mean, I had previously queried like 10 different agents. I don't currently have an agent and ask them if they would look at whatever I had and none of them got back to me. So I thought, I'll go the contest route and see how that works. And it worked out. So I'm suddenly a big fan of any of those writing contests that you can find in the back of poets and writers. They list that magazine. They list various contests. You can enter month by month. And, you know, yay. So that worked out. And Red Hand Press is a lovely small press in Pasadena. And they partnered with the Associated Writing Programs to publish whatever book they chose for that prize. And so and I've had a great experience with them. They're really nice people. And I kind of like small, working with a small press because they really get behind their books, whereas a giant mainstream press doesn't necessarily unless they know you're going to sell a lot of copies for them. They don't necessarily back you up. So I think in some ways, small presses are better. Well, Red Hand was lovely to me. You know, they sent me a copy of the book without a lot of Pooha or PDF file. I mean, they were really very generous about it. So, you know, I agree with you about small presses. They're sort of small presses. Why short stories? You're a novelist also. I probably I think just because I had all these stories and I wanted to have another book out in the world. The last book came out in 2006 and I was starting to feel like a big gay nobody. You know, like it's been so long. Yeah, so long since I published something. And and I just happened to have these stories available. But also I think that even with the two novels, I think in terms of writing kind of in self-contained blocks and then like sewing them all together with a novel, there's there's an arc you have to think in terms of, whereas with independent stories, you don't have to. But but I like short stories. I read tons of them and I teach a lot of them because I teach in a creative writing program. And it's it's it's really easier to work with a short story in one class than an entire novel. So so I've read tons of short stories. And and and I guess I didn't realize until I started assembling them until one manuscript that it it was the same narrative from one story to the next. You know, I'm I'm my main subject. I'm my main topic of fiction, apparently. And I and and I thought, OK, there's a kind of progression here. So so they so they work as independent stories, but they can also feel like, I think, a kind of cohesive narrative over a period of decades following this one guy from one part of his life to another. So that's why I'm calling them linked stories, I guess, because I think I don't know. Did it read novelishly to you or did they really seem various independent from each other, those stories? But as we since we're talking about it, why don't we pause and give the audience a sense of the writing and the story? And you've agreed to prepare a reading for us of about five minutes. Maybe. OK, great. Good time if you wouldn't mind. No, not at all. So I'll so I'll read from the story in which Charlotte Sheedy appears. It's called the scenes from a marriage. And it takes place in 1994. When the the speaker, John, is living through the last couple of years of his friend, David's life. David is also a writer based on a historical figure I read in an interview, but you don't. Yes, absolutely, based on my friend, David Feinberg, who was a novelist and a story writer. He wrote a book, a novel called Eighty Sixth, and he died in 1994. And very calamitously. I've I've I've I've I've never known anyone to die like that. And sadly, I've known lots of people who died, but David took it to a whole new level. And and so it really didn't have to invent anything with him. I could just write what happened. He was already so theatrical and the events surrounding his last couple of weeks were, I don't know, the stuff of fiction. So to your point about the nonfiction fiction thing. I know I often feel like I don't really need to make things up because the stuff that happens in my real life feels fictional already. And so why invent when you have this wacky movie taking place in front of you with this very vivid central character? So so so it is it's meant to feel like it's nonfiction. But but it's it's also not. There's stuff that I, you know, compressed in events that I merged together and the time sequence is different. And I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I that I changed so that I wouldn't be able to call it strictly and like a documentary nonfiction piece because I did manipulate things. But but but I but I kind of want you to have that. Is did this really happen? Is, you know, did he invent this? I kind of was the effect I was going for. That's very successful. Oh, OK. You've succeeded, Admiral Boy. Oh, well, OK. So do you want me to read it then? Yes, please. OK, Groovy, here it comes. It's called Scenes from My Mind. I'm reading off the screen. So once you have this goes. The second to the last time he gets out of the hospital, the last time being his death. My friend, Dave, goes on a farewell tour like share. He's just published his new book, his third, his last. It's an it's an account of the final year of his life. And it's impossible to read, partly because I'm in it, doing nothing to keep him alive and and partly because he won't stop kidding about the worst thing that happens. My T sale count is lower than my IQ. He says, if I were Dan Quayle, I'd be dead now. Two weeks before he dies, the publishing company sends him 30 copies of the book and I load Dave and his book into a cab and we drive around town handing them out to every agent or editor or cute boy who ever rejected him. He's also trying to get someone to publish the diary he kept while he was in the hospital. It's a black mead composition notebook and it's an aborted novel, a toilet joke, an archive of AIDS obituaries from the New York Times for September and half of October in 1994, a list of results of blood tests, CAT scans, MRIs, bone marrow tests, colonoscopies and bronchoscopies, a document of rage and a draft of top 10 lists, top 10 most embarrassing public bowel movements, top 10 cutest male nurses. And it's an autobiography in the form of a questionnaire. There are 500 questions which Dave has written in block letters and his careful third graders print number one name with a blank line next to it. Number two, age, number three, religious persuasion, number four, number of lifetime sexual partners in thousands circle one and the options are zero to 10, 10 to 20 and a lady doesn't tell number five, life expectancy and so on for pages. Of course, he supplied the answers. There's scribbled in his barely readable cursive script. His name is Legion, his age is you should die like this. You know what aging is for religious persuasion. He has written Liza. He doesn't answer the question about sexual partners next to life expectancy. He writes, I've got 10 minutes to live. But who's counting? Now I've got nine. We take this diary to several literary agents. David already has an agent, but he fired him because he brought ice cream to the hospital room. Ice cream for God's sake. Ice cream is dairy. Dairy goes right through me. If I have lung cancer, would you bring me a pack of Virginia slums? We visit Charlotte Sheedy, Audrey Lord's agent, also Ali Sheedy's mom. In the future, I won't work with anyone who hasn't ripped a lesbian and raised a movie star, Dave says, when our cab pulls up to her building on lower Broadway. Then fuck you, he says for no reason. He's always meanest in cabs. I'm getting money out of my pocket. I've been broke for my whole adult life, but I took a steady job just as Dave started getting sick. And for the first time in a friendship, I can pay for things. Lately, I'm paying all the time, which fine. He's always paid for me, bought lunch, taken me to Broadway shows, orchestra seats, shelled out a cash loan for a month's rent. Several times, I'm happy to pay. I can't keep him alive, but I can pay. He, though, hates the shift in power. Paying his paying is his job. His privilege is his way of his way. He jokes of making people love him. Don't overtip. He screams to me. Jesus, get a receipt. Do you think you're a Rockefeller? You're not. Guess why? Guess why you're not a Rockefeller? Rockefellers have money because they don't tip and they save their receipts. We climb out of the cab. He weighs 97 pounds. So he walks slowly, his death walk, all bones. The skin at the back of his neck is creased and dry sinewy. His hair is pin straight, slipped against his skull. One arm goes out to the side for balance. The other ends in a fist that clutches the waistband of his jeans. His pants are a sight gag. Let go when they fall. He knows this and he'll drop them to shock you. And he leaves his zipper open to show his diapers. The pants and diapers are white and so is his t-shirt, which is scrunched up over the Hickman catheter that spliced to his chest above his right nipple. He's a little diapered man in a blue shroud, holding his pants up and moving stiffly and delicately across the sidewalk. He's 38 years old. Now we're pushing through the door to Charlotte Sheedy's office. And there is the surprised assistant at her guard post. She stands up, then darts back, freaked out by what flew in. It is as good for something, a way to get access to anybody. Push past office lackeys waving his hand. It says we have an appointment and we keep walking through the door to the intersanctuary, straight to Charlotte Sheedy's desk. Dave sits in a wooden chair, sits, slides. The chair is slippery or he is or both, or the problem is his coat. It's a sled and he rides it down off the chair seat until he's sitting on his neck. Then he pulls himself up again and again. Such a little figure slipped quiet from its chair. That's Emily Dickinson. It's on my mind. Did I say it out loud? More poetry, my response to loss. Dave hates me because I can't help or I can only a little bit. And right now. Dying is a series of instant victories over nothing immediately fatal in preparation for complete loss. Will he not die if I find there are a poem? If I can separate him from his coat, let's pretend I can save him from his coat, at least, I'll I agreed upon I get him out of the thing, which he drapes over the arm of his chair and sits still. Now he's a pair of shoulder blades in a T shirt and above them a face. Huge head, shrunken body. His glasses are Dr. Echelberg's a billboard that stares at you. There's a narcissistic boon in watching David die because he lights on you with an urgency and directness that no one else has ever spent his gaze. Sure, it indicts you, but you're hot and lit. A movie star in your key light floodlights on Charlotte Sheedy, who's been sitting behind your desk and watching calmly waiting for the best moment to speak. Oh, Charlotte Sheedy, David says, I brought you my new book and also my newest book. I'm standing behind him. He's a film director and I'm his people. He raises his right hand signalling me and I step forward and hands Sheedy his two manuscripts, the new book and the hospital diary. I want you, he says, pausing to haul himself higher in his chair and to catch his breath and to grab his pants, which have not moved up the chair with the rest of him to represent me from now on. Charlotte Sheedy is spectacularly cool. She opens Dave's new book, the published one, congratulates him, thumbs through a few pages and then sets it aside with a palm flat on its cover, both stamping it with her approval and absorbing its contents through her fingertips in an apparent flash of superhuman appraisal. Then she takes up Dave's diary, which in her hands is which in her hands is not a not a receptacle of rage and rubber or hospital gloves and blue pills, but an ordinary book proposal. She's so smooth. I want her to be my agent, too, possibly my mom. One page of the diary is entirely black and she stops there. Dave inked it solid with a magic marker one hospital afternoon frowning while he told me that he hoped he didn't go to hell because he was tired of running into me, even in hell, I'd have to buy you lunch. She says of the page and says, I see. Then she closes the book, looks up, our eyes meet over Dave's head. I'm trying to make my face say, sorry, sorry, sorry. Charlotte Sheedy is nicer than I am, though. She doesn't collude with me in silent commentary about a man who is clearly at the end of his life. Instead, she looks at Dave. I'm not sure this is ready to be shown around, she says. Maybe she gets sick writers in her office all the time. Maybe all writers are ten minutes from death. Please keep me in mind, though, when you have something that's finished. Dave Grins showing all his teeth, darling, I completely agree. He stands slowly and heads around her desk for a hug. They meet by her chair and do a quick theatrical cheek to cheek air kiss. And then we're listening to Dave breathe his fierce breaths. It's an effort for him to stand up. I haven't dared to help him because there's nothing wrong. That's the story he's telling. He's not a man with just days to live. He's a potential client with a literary property he's shopping around. And what am I then? His people, his development girl, his chauffeur, his longtime companion, non-sexual, his stock boy, carding books, his pocket change, hailer of calves, his walker, as if I were a woman in fur on the upper east side. His George Hamilton accompanying Linda Bird Johnson, the president's daughter to the Academy Awards, which Hamilton did in 1966 in white tie and a spray tan. Dave would get that reference. He loves anything tacky and obscure. He loves failed and minor stars. Three months ago, it would have made him laugh. Now, though, he's going to die. And all I have is George Hamilton in a fake tan. Dave is breathing in Charlie. She's office. We're all breathing. She breathes. I breathe. We listen to Dave breathe. We count the breaths, which come slowly with labor. Breath, pause, breath, pause. We stand there waiting for what's next. That's it. I hope that wasn't too long. Thank you. It was lovely. It was wonderful. I love the story, too. It was quite a thing to happen in real life. Let me tell you. Oh, I bet. I left out lots of stuff. But it's so like I would not have known how to respond in that moment. But she was just completely professional, but also kind and compassionate at the same time. She she was pretty amazing. It's really an incredible story and part of an incredible collection. So let me ask you about the audience. You mentioned in the last story called It Gets Worse, which is a wonderful, excruciating story about high school. You mentioned that your audience there. Is the parents of the bullies? Is that an accurate? I mean, it's a funny thing. I read that I had said that and I thought, huh, is that true? But. Certainly, I mean, I know the kids had get bullied in high school for all kinds of reasons. And I hope it doesn't. I hope it's not as misogynist and homophobic as it was when I was in high school, although I'm guessing that depends on where you grew up and who your parents are and so forth. But but I felt like. People who've been bullied like that have a have a sense of what that feels like. And and and I mean, I'm gratified if they feel some catharsis and reading about it, although I don't know, maybe it would traumatize them. But but the the the people that I've pretty much my whole adult life wanted to communicate with were the the people who bullied me and harassed me and flung homophobic slurs at me all day long. And and and, you know, I often wonder, like, who are they as adults and what are they doing now? And do they ever reflect on that moment? Were they really aware they were doing it? You know, did they have a sense of their hostility, their violence, you know, their harassment and and, you know, in a weird way, those are the people I've been trying to confront, I think, through my fiction for basically my whole adult life. It's kind of the same psychology, I think, by which when I teach a college class, I immediately focus on the person in the back row who seems the least likely to care about a single thing I have to say. I don't know, I always go for the the person in the room who's the the least likely to be interested in anything about me. I mean, that's not quite the same as being harassed by 16 year olds. But but I but I don't I'm not sure that enough in particular straight people, I think, have a sense of their complicity in in making gender non binary or or or gay or queer teens. Feel like outcasts, I feel like they're not safe walking into a classroom and and and, you know, there's been a lot of talk about bullying and so forth, but but I don't know if there's enough focus on my complicity in that, you know, if people would ask themselves, what am I? Well, what did I do? And what am I doing now that that allows this to happen? You know, even if you're not actively harassing someone, you might just buy your Sarah Schulman has written about this, about being a bystander to someone else being abused and how the bystander has a complicity in that. And maybe in a way, I'm trying to to reach the bystanders and say, take a stand. You so want to be you to fit in and be liked by people. And and I I mean, I know I was you know, mean to various people at various points because they weren't cool or for whatever reason. So so I also want to acknowledge my complicity in that in, you know, any of those stories. So let's go back to the audience, though, like with the story that you just read. Who's the audience for that, do you think? Well, certainly anyone who knew David Feinberg. I remember the publication of 86. Yeah. And and his nonfiction book was called Queer and Loathing, which I don't think I've ever read, although I mean, I read it while he was writing it, but I don't think I've read it since he died because he refers to me repeatedly. I mean, he writes similarly to what I'm doing with him. I guess he writes about scenes where he's sick or something and I'm in the room trying to help and failing to help me accountable in his own book. So and he had tons of fans and lots of lots of readers who really liked his writing. And so I'm happy to, in a way, give a shout out to David, even though he doesn't always come across as the nicest guy. He was a very, very sweet guy, but also a very acerbic guy, sort of a fun kind of one or two. But all the sweetness went away when he got really sick, which, you know, I can't imagine what would happen to me if I got that sick. I mean, you know, it was it was horrific. How would he had to live through and die from? But anyway, I do want to document that period of time. I'm sure that you were talking about reading Sarah Schumann's book there's there's a lot of literature and movies and TV news reports now about the first 15 years of the global AIDS crisis, like 1981 to 1996 ish and. And some of it, some of it gets to the truth of it. But I think a lot of it treats it as kind of a theme park that we can visit and think, oh, it's so sad what happened to those people, but everything's fine now. And I wanted to I wanted to give the most painful possible depiction of what it was like to live through that and how it's still affecting people, you know, if you go through that kind of loss. In your I mean, at any point in your life, but especially like in your 20s and 30s, it's it gives you a weird perspective to look at the rest of your life to have watched all that death and and all of the people who couldn't have cared less that it was happening and all the government neglect and the pharmaceutical companies. And it was very isolating and left people very much on their own to manage catastrophe. It's as if it's as if with covid. I mean, as bad as Trump was, at least he was saying the word covid. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word AIDS until in the early in his second administration. So at least everyone knew covid was happening to people and people were talking about it online and how do we manage this? And so there so there was a sense of community happening around what is covid and how is it affecting us? And with AIDS in that moment in New York City, it was just the people who were dying and and everyone else was kind of oblivious. So I didn't want to represent I didn't want to say look what happened. So so it's both for people who lived through that and for people who want to know about it and have maybe gotten slightly sugar coated versions of it from from TV news reports. Not that you can really sugar coat it, but so I think it's a really important project and you do it beautifully and it's very pretty and real. I mean, you lived in New Orleans during that period. Yes. What was it? Oh, and I was living in Boston in 81 where as it was just being, you know, the community was just forming. Right. And I remember vividly Gay Pride March in 81, where the newly formed a act up. Well, act up came up came later. But all these men were coalescing and showing strength. And a lot of them appeared on the quilt afterwards. Right. Right. Right. So then I moved to Madison, Wisconsin and New Orleans. And I mean, that whole period certainly marked everybody's lives really deeply. So you're bringing it back because it's so important. I want to see there was a broad revival of Larry Kramer's of a normal heart. I don't know, maybe I saw it in London. Oh, wow. Recently. Well, no, it was so interesting. I saw it in 1986 and then I went to a talk back afterwards. And it was like in England, they were just learning about age or something. It was the strangest. It was like a culture shock kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it means to interrupt you. Go ahead. No, no, no, I just I saw the original normal heart, I guess in 86 at the same time you did. And I hadn't seen it or read it in. I didn't see the TV version that I went to the broad revival in 2011, maybe I'm thinking I can't I can't remember exactly when it was. But but I was sitting in the audience with a bunch of people my age. I'm assuming there were lots of out of towners. And and I was watching it felt like a home movie because I had known a lot of the guys who were first involved in gay men's health crisis, whom Larry sort of made into composite characters and wrote about. So I'd known some of those guys and, you know, and watched people die in that 1983-1984 period. And and the audience around me, I could sense them being like, how could this have happened? You know, who knew this happened? And I was like, where were you? It was all that was happening for me. But it's funny how something that huge and catastrophic can can still stay kind of a secret to a lot of people. So so I'm really wanting to explode that secrecy and then and make it more present for people. And another strength of the book is that the second part is called, I think, survivors, lone survivors. And you're able to suggest long term survivors were able to suggest the impact that the irrevocable impact that it had on people who were there doesn't go away. No. I mean, Act Up had a Act Up New York had a kind of reunion in 2012, 2013. It's some NYU building and everybody who had been involved in Act Up New York, I mean, a lot of people in Act Up New York came together and and talked about their feelings, basically, like what they were feeling while all that was happening, because Act Up was so focused on getting the government's attention, you know, intervention, street activism. And there kind of wasn't time for feelings in a weird way, or maybe it was a way also to distract yourself from from the trauma you were experiencing, because you could go lie down on the street and chant and get arrested and show up in the evening news and feel like you'd accomplish something. And but all these people were still left with a kind of PTSD, I think, from watching so many people die. And that was that was part of the motivation behind that story, was thinking about what it's like for people now in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s to have gone through this experience and still hold all these feelings about it. And, you know, what that has done to them, how that's shaped the rest of their lives and so forth. It's a really important book, John. I really thank you for writing it. Oh, well, thank you for reading it. Let's switch gears a little bit. What are your current projects? My next projects. Well, I have like three different books that I've been writing since the last century that. Every so often I open a file and look at it and think, oh, this isn't so bad. And then I write a page and then I put it away for another six months. But but my immediate project is to write about my mother who shows up in two of the stories in the book. She died in 2018 and she was. I mean, I say in the book, I think she was a movie star without a movie to star in. I mean, she was the most theatrical, funny, smart, mean, capable. Like she was a cowboy on the one hand, but she's also like a Rita Hayworth beauty queen, on the other hand. So she was this weird combo of like Henry Fonda and Rita Hayworth. She rode bareback in the woods and her tennis shoes. And she swore like a truck driver and and a Taurus. So very forceful and very sure of herself. The most person I've ever met, way more certain than I am. And I spent she and my father for some crazy reason, moved to a retirement community outside of Philadelphia, where no one had ever been. They grew up, they lived in New Jersey for 50 years, I think. And suddenly they were in this retirement union and my father promptly died. So my mother had eight years of living along with just her dog. And so I spent and then she had broke her hip and had a stroke. So really for the past five years of her life, the last five years, I spent pretty much every weekend with her. And and she regaled me with all the stories about her childhood in Denver. And and she she was like David Feinberg. She was such a character that I could just sit there in her living room, give her a glass of white wine and some cheese. And she would start talking and I would just be pretending to like looking things up on the internet. But I was actually transcribing every word she said. And so I have, you know, 80 pages of of my mother's monologues. So I'm so I'm so I'm writing about her is my next project. I'm spending the summer in Denver, where she grew up, where I've really never been. And I'm trying to sort of find out stuff about her past her childhood and see what was myth and what was actual and figure out a way to record that all on the page. She's so easy to write about because I have her voice in my head. So even talking about stuff that she would like she died before COVID happened. But I have her voice in my head telling me all about COVID. So I don't really have to I can just take dictation, basically. Oh, my mother's talking to me about COVID and I can start writing it down. So but I really want to introduce her to reality. And I feel a kind of obligation to record her story, which I think she wanted me to do because she she fed me all her love letters before before she got to give me this giant packet of all the love letters she'd written to all the guys she'd been in love with before she married my father. So there was a sort of a tacit admission that she was expecting me to use them you know, after she died, of course, so she couldn't sue me. Is it going to be a memoir? I haven't quite figured that out. I mean, I think it's going to be similar to some of the stuff in You and His Knowledge is killing me in that I kind of wanted to feel like documentary, but at the same time, I don't want to feel obligated to write down things exactly as they happened. I mean, I want to be free to make stuff up or change names or compress time or move stuff around in time and space. So if it were a memoir, I would feel way more like I had to say actually what happened instead of instead of fictionalizing it in a way that that worked fictionally. So so so it'll, you know, I mean, I generally like to write stuff that feels like it's happening in front of you as you're reading it in a sort of documentary way, but but that doesn't mean that it's actually what happened. So so so I do deliberately want to write that line. And I think there's more room in publishing world lately for hybrid work or stuff that blurs those lines. I mean, I don't know, have you found that that? Yes, I have. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of time, we're getting to the end of our time. Oh, OK. Are there any last words you want to share with our audience? You know, by my book. I'll read it. Hi, it makes sense to me. Hi, everybody. Welcome to All Things LGBTQ Interview Show today. We're speaking with Rage Hezekia and Hezekia. And she is a well known and quite published poet living amongst us in Vermont. And so we're going to talk a little bit about her work and who she is so people can get to know her. You're living in Bennington, right? I live just I'm like, what direction from Bennington? I live one town over from from that. Oh, that's OK. Yeah. And you're originally from Massachusetts, I know, from Salem. Uh huh. And how long have you been in Vermont? My wife and I moved out to Western Mass from the Boston area about four years ago, and we've been in Vermont for three. We were in we're in North Adams before we just moved over the Vermont border. We really like it here. And you're working in that area, Bennington, right? Could you tell us a little bit about what you do there? Yeah. So I work at Bennington College and I am the Associate Director of International and Academic Services, and I work to support first year and international students in their transition to Bennington and just kind of offer holistic support and visa and immigration support and all of that kind of stuff. And what kind of students go there? Is it is it a working class school? A commuter school? Is it a, you know, any kind of students do you encounter there? That's a great question. So it's a it's a it's a private liberal arts arts college. It's really small. We definitely have a we have an organization on on campus called Flow, and that's her first income working class, first generation students. And so there's a large population of students that are that are in that bracket. It's about 20 percent international students, about 20 percent students of color, students from from all over the world and throughout the U.S. for predominantly, you know, the the coasts, a lot of a lot of New England folks and a lot of California and Northwest folks. Sounds great. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about your poetry and I'm going to read a little introduction and about your work and all the great awards you've gotten, and it's very exciting. So Rage is a New England based poet and educator who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She has received fellowships from Kava Kahnem, McDowell and the Ragdale Foundation. And it's the recipient of the Saint Bataugh Foundation's Emerging Artists Award Awards. Her poems have been anthologized, co-translated and published internationally. And you have two books and one chapbook. So this is your second volume and it's called Your and and it will be coming out July 2022. Yeah, it's it's in pre-orders now and then it'll be be out in just a few months in July. OK, and we'll we'll put up something telling people where they could pre-order your book. And so Rage and Rage is a Hezekiah's impressive collection pulses with the deep emotional intelligence. This book is filled with space and beautiful verse that manages to explore the erotic, the familiar and the mundane with stunning wisdom. From the masterful use of the centro to pause in the transition in the tradition of Lucille Clifton and Dinez Smith. This is a book that sings a necessary song. We are all richer in the world where urine can exist to help us consider these questions in consent and contemplation. So that is a beautiful introduction to your work. Thank you. So your first chapbook. It must have been really exciting. Did you get it right when you graduated or and could you tell us a little bit about your first chapbook? Yeah. So, you know, I think publishing poetry is such a it's like it's such a strange journey. So I finished my MFA at Emerson College in 2015 and Stray Harbor, my first full length collection and the Unslakeable, which is a chapbook that's essentially an excerpt of Stray Harbor, were kind of published simultaneously. I think that made I think Unslakeable came out like, you know, maybe like three months before Stray Harbor or something like that. But both of those collections were essentially my MFA thesis. So I finished I started writing those poems in 2012 and probably the last of them was written in in 2016. And then the book came out in 2019. So there was a lot of a lot of space, a lot of, you know, iterations of that book. It took a it took a while for me to publish and I think it's I don't know, I think it's harder to publish your first collection. I've heard that it like, you know, publishing your first collection kind of creates space for for future books. So this new collection year and got picked up really quickly, like within a few months of me submitting it. So it's it's really lovely because I feel very connected to the work. It still feels like what I'm writing right now, whereas when I was when I published Stray Harbor, I felt like I was reading from a book I had written, you know, five years ago. It felt very different from what I was working on when the book came out. And so the transition to what you're writing now reflects, of course, who you are now and, you know, what you've gone through and how you've established yourself in the world. Do you how do you write? Do you get up in the morning and say, OK, I got an idea? Or do you just kind of spontaneously write and, you know, how do you do that? Yeah, it's it's all over the map. I'm really grateful, you know, I work on the academic calendar, which means that there's there's a lot of space in, you know, what we call non term time at Bennington, but between semesters, essentially, you know, for me to just have more space to invest in my work on a daily basis. I get up in the morning, I meditate, I pray, I make a cup of coffee and I sit down at my desk and a lot of times that space is taken up by like scheduling readings and submissions and kind of the more like administrative parts of being a poet. But that's when the majority of my writing takes place, too. I actually had. I'm very fortunate in that Bennington College has one of Robert Frost's old house and old houses and I was able to spend most of the day there working on edits for my book. And that's very generous. Yeah, it's very it's so cool to be able to just, you know, sit in his life. Yes, sit in his living room and work on my book. It's a tremendous privilege. So I feel really, really grateful. So I gather from this introduction that you have been influenced by Lucille Clifton and Danez Smith, you feel like you. And Cento, do you use some of their work in conjunction with yours, like using their words or maybe idea? Could you tell us a little bit about that? I don't think many people would be familiar with what that actually means. Yeah. So so it's one of my favorite forms to write. It feels like it's kind of cheating as far as writing forms and poetry, because they're my understanding, my interpretation of a Chento is a poem that's comprised entirely of lines from other people's poems. And so there are three Chentos in the book. And I really love writing Chentos because it it kind of feels like I'm a knitter, but it kind of feels like quilting to me. It feels like I get to kind of take take pieces and and find the commonalities and the things that I'm drawn to in poems, you know, tend to be pretty consistent. And so when I'm reading, I often write down lines of poems I really adore on index cards. And then I just have a bunch of index cards with lines on them and the author on the back and I can kind of like move them around and create a poem and then know where all the lines are taken from. So that's that's where that's how I've how I've been able to write Chentos so far. And I'm I'm grateful that it's a form that I've come to love, in part, because it feels like, you know, I get to use other people's work in an in an ethical way. But it must be something that really moves you, right? I mean, it's got to be like, you know, some identification or something that really moves you to want to do that. Yeah, there's water, I think, too, for the person you're writing, you know. Yeah, yeah, I am a lot of the book deals with my my challenges with fertility and trying to get pregnant. And it a lemon wrote a book recently called The Carrying, where she kind of talked a lot about her own fertility journey. And one of the lines that that I borrowed for one of the Chentos that I wrote was I am a hearth of spiders these days, a nest of trying. And I just was like so shaken by that. And it felt so true to my own experience, like that my whole life was trying and how, like, you know, just how bleak, like being a hearth of spiders. Like that's so bleak. And it also gets like, oh, so true. And so there's something really beautiful for me about being able to appropriate that language and and fold it into the language of other poets that I really admire and and create new work from that. I know it's it's it's really, you know, it's something that not everybody can pull off. So congratulations. Thank you. Thanks. And then I want I was reading some of your poetry and I came across. My wife is always right. And I laughed, of course, because my wife is always right. Also, even when she isn't, but, you know, so and this poem, the language is so sparse and so poignant and so like, you know, like, I read the last part and I thought, you know, you could have said. Eat their own, but you use kin and I just found that like, wow. Just the use of language and the sparseness of the language. It's just beautiful. So would you mind reading it for us? Sure. Thank you so much. I pulled one poem out and not both of them. Let me just find it really quick. And then I'll ask you to read another poem, too. Beautiful. My wife was right. My wife was right when she said the mice would burrow back into the deep bin, reaching my hand into the barrel's hovel, their nest skittered, cottoned in selvedge. We tipped the tiny family into damp oak leaves on the lawn and rid the bin of seed. I'd filled our feeders, beckoning goldfinches, black capped chickadees, suic for the sap suckers. My wife worried they'd return. I dismissed her fears. Days later, black dust littering the cover. Evidence of reentry. Three starved bodies, huddled in the bottom. One faceless, consumed by her own kin. That's incredible to, you know, to express that kind of feeling. Would you read us another poem of your choice and and the first before you do that, how did you come upon this idea? Is this something that sort of happened? My wife, of that poem, my wife was right. Yeah. Did it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's like it's it's wild because I think living in Vermont, I've talked a lot with other poets about how how where you live and where you spend your time just kind of like funnels itself into your poetry, like it feels like, you know, by osmosis. There's chickadees and gold finches and sap suckers. And, you know, I have a poem right now with a Phoebe in it. I know like, you know, I had a workshop with Vivee Francis, who's another Vermont poet. And she said, oh, poets love birds. And I thought, yeah, we're cool with birds. But this book, Yeren has multiple poems in it about mice because there are just, you know, living in living in Vermont. I have a cat, like the interactions between the cat and mice, like the inside, the outside, it's all in there. So that, yeah, that did that did happen. And there's lots of lots of other disturbing mice poems taken from taken from real life. You know, but it has so much, you know, besides, I mean, just as a venue for, you know, the mice, but it has so much more in it. Yeah, that is, yeah, really touching. Thank you. So do you want to read another poem for us? Sure. Yeah. So you mentioned Lucille Clifton and that blurb, which I'm so grateful for. And Lucille Clifton has a poem called Poem to My Uterus. So this is this is after Lucille Clifton. And this is the last poem in the book. Poem to My Uterus after Lucille Clifton. Bright wanderer, homing station set for the gathering. One tiny studded heartbeat. You shed bright blood each monthly turn. I thought I've trained you how feeble my attempts to control my body, my worry and still you bear in home. Empty of anything resembling family. Each try, frozen and fresh, familiar and foreign. Anonymous men I chose from glossy catalogs. This one plays basketball. This one plays piano. I bring them all to you. Laven bear, divide my thighs, hoping. But you stubborn and polyped, pocked with fibroids, ever unwilling. I strive to line you with rich blood. One book says fresh pineapple. One says avocado. I eat whatever magic promises to make you take. Maybe I've ruined you with acutane or decades of ortho tricyclin, pummeled the entry to your home with bleached water from public tubs. You worried caraff, sweet doomed hubble. Show me what you need to make a life. That was beautiful. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. And on that note, is there anything else that you would like the audience to know? Your book is coming out in July. People can pre-order and where would they pre-order? You can pre-order from my website, richhazakaya.com, and I'll put the link to the pre-order in the show notes as well. And my website and my Facebook page also have a full list of events for the next few months. I'll be teaching workshops and touring around the Tri-State area. So, yeah, come see me. I will. Definitely next. And I hope you come to the Malkylia area, or even Burlington. We can get to Burlington. So thank you so much for coming and joining us. And we'll see you soon. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.