“I Was Searching for Something in Nature to Affirm my Identity”: An Interview with Jennifer Conlon https://ift.tt/CWsI5tN
When reading a poetry collection, it’s a mistake to feel that we know the writer. But Jennifer Conlon’s debut so completely evokes the journey of a distinct speaker that the mistake is easy to make.
Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi C.T. Salazar called Taking to Water “the most transformative collection of poems I’ve read.”
Conlon, a North Carolina poet who lives in Tempe, Arizona, hones their story of transformation from the landscapes and imagery of the rural South. Embodied by the experience of gendered violence, the speaker moving through these poems embraces the many “ifs” necessary for true self-expression.
As for the author, their responses to my questions were as thought-provoking and generous as the poems themselves. If you like poetry resonant with deep, abiding feeling and shaped by unmistakable craft, then they have your number.
This interview took place via email in December 2023.
Having now Googled catfish noodling and looked up flatheads, I thought I would ask, what existing kinds of knowledge do you hope your readers will bring to Taking to Water?
In so many ways, I wrote this book with the advice to “write the book you needed as a kid.” So I’m imagining readers who recognize the experiences of growing up queer in a religious South and also readers who might have gone fishing as a kid and felt something weird in their tummy about it all. I also felt uncomfortable in academia as a Southerner with an accent, so in part, it’s in resistance that I chose to let that language live on the page and not over-explain or translate for non-Southerners. I hope readers with cultural knowledge of the South will find my book, because that’s who I trust will know and understand the images best. Those are the readers who might have witnessed firsthand their drunk uncle and his buddy try to noodle a catfish and lose. Readers who have gone to church camp a time or two, maybe gone to a homecoming just for the food. Especially if these readers, like me, obtained this knowledge by being unwilling participants in parts of their culture that they don’t necessarily love or identify with like fishing or worshiping a patriarchal god who has damned queers to hell. I’m hoping to show them another world in the images they recognize at the lake or in the church — one in which we thrive.
Most people will pick up quickly that you’re using fish imagery symbolically. How did you settle on catfish-as-metaphor?
The catfish arrived in a class I took with Natalie Diaz in graduate school called “Emotional Imageries and Their Lexicons.” There were several exercises in which I kept coming back to fish in general, as fishing was part of my upbringing. I became quite obsessed with the research, particularly in how flatheads survive. I had also read Lauren Berry’s The Lifting Dress, which used the idea of a garden in the throat for things that could not be said. I found that to be so powerful—this recognition of what an image could hold. So Natalie’s class helped me to craft that more intentionally, with consideration for the catfish’s etymology, history, and mythology. Those poems sat for several years, and when I came back to them, I recognized my journey of finding the language for my nonbinary identity in those catfish images. I was searching for something in nature to affirm my identity, and the catfish’s ferocity, loudness, and resistance called to me.
Where do you, as the author, see fish in relation to some of the other image families you explore (trees, birds, clay, fire)? Do you see Taking to Water as underlining or pointing to the power of “natural” imagery given its subject matter of gender . . . or is that a misconception/simplification?
Absolutely. Learning queer history and the queerness of the natural world have made me understand that I do belong in this world. As a kid, I wanted to live in the woods. I was only really interested in the world of books or the world of the woods behind my house. Those have always felt like havens where, even if the wider world didn’t understand who I was, I was still safe. Writing this book, all the natural imagery of my childhood surfaced, and I decided to carry it with me like a power. Wasps and ants and storm petrels and kudzu defend me against an abusive stepdad; water and fire become transformative and comfortable homes; a bear helps me to investigate a secret I’m holding. For so long, I didn’t have the language to describe myself, so I considered the languages I do know, and the woods is one of them.
You explore tropes of adolescence and girlhood (in poems like “Girl, If You Don’t Cross Your Legs,” “Eighth Birthday,” and “Men Can’t See Me”) in language familiar to feminism, but complicated by the speaker’s awareness of identity. Later, in “I Dream a Garden Where,” the speaker kills the Girl figure in dream-space: “I have killed off that Girl / I till / her body in.” What does Girl represent to the speaker in that moment? How does Taking to Water interact with feminism as a critical mode?
“I Dream a Garden Where” imagines a fire and earth baptism, one a bit more violent and hurried and less celebratory than the poem “Church” in which the speaker reclaims their body. In this moment, Girl is the identity that was forced on the speaker, and they recognize they don’t align with that. The speaker isn’t a girl, but had experienced being socialized as a girl, and was abused for being a girl. So when the speaker kills off this Girl figure, they are killing off the imposed persona; they are rejecting and transforming the lessons and trauma of girlhood. While water is something that slowly shapes what is around it, fire and earth feel more urgent, as if the speaker is attempting to cleanse themself of being raised as a Girl so that they can imagine a different childhood, a different future. Taking to Water seeks to consider transfeminisms — to acknowledge that gender is not fixed and that all folks assigned female at birth don’t have the same experiences. And yet, when assigned female at birth, it determines so much about one’s experience in this white supremacist patriarchy.
Thanks for calling attention to “Church,” a beautiful poem that I hope readers will seek out. I’m curious about that poem’s appearance relatively soon (p. 16) in Taking to Water, as well as the “if/(then) let” logic in that poem used so frequently in the gospel. Given the book’s interest in process and in questioning, what was organizing (or ordering) the book like for you, according to what certain poems might represent in the narrative?
Ordering Taking to Water didn’t come easily to me, and I got caught up in the chronology at first. There were two things that helped me order my book — a workshop called “How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript” by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and my phenomenal editor at Autumn House Press, Mike Good. They both helped me to consider ways of ordering a book beyond the narrative — toward image, form, titles, and the tension created between last lines and first lines. My editor, Mike, color-coded my entire manuscript which helped me to see that while there is an ultimate chronological reckoning in the collection, there are specific motifs that create movement. He identified the turn in “I Dream a Garden Where,” which led to the poem living in the center of the book. Once this happened, it was easier for me to identify how to parse out the church poems. I wanted “Church”” early in the book for a couple of reasons, especially because it is in direct conversation with the first poem in the book, “Tongues.” “Church” is like a call-and-response to that poem, taking up the line from “Tongues” that wonders, “if I make a new word for worship” and imagining an answer to the question it ends with — “do you think the god I make / could be a power with no tongue?” I feel like these two poems establish the imagination of the speaker, because the “if” continues through much of the collection (I use the word 71 times!).
“Church” also seems to be designed, specifically, to talk back to the “patriarchal god who has damned queers to hell” part of Christianity that you cited before, and yet, Christian fundamentalist beliefs surrounding gender are still toxic in far-reaching ways. Can you explain your process of reckoning with that in this book? What books/conversations/realizations supported that reckoning?
I don’t think I’ve reckoned with that at all. I haven’t been a Christian since I was 11 or 12. In the poem “Self Glossary of a Genderfluid Kid,” I define the oak tree as “the first god I met” because it was nature that held all the power in my mind. This is something I’ve felt to be true since I was very little, and it was always in conflict with this patriarchal god-in-the-sky depicted in Bible school. But I see myself trying to reckon with that in this book — to heal from the religious trauma and catalyze the power left in me. “Church” is quite focused on the body, on reckoning a great source of shame for a queer person. The speaker is able to reclaim and redefine each part of their body. One image that’s important here is the snake, a common symbol for Satan. Multiple snakes show up in “Church,” as desire, movement, breath, power. I wanted to reshape the image of the snake and return it to nature. Ultimately it’s my model for how to pull myself up by my own body. The last poem of the book, “trans us the new gods,” returns to this in the lines “snake knows the possibility / in reach.” This poem ends with rage but also in praise of trans communities that have survived the church.
In Taking to Water’s later poems, “thriving” is often positioned as resistance to something else. A few examples: “I am lucky for my body still / I turn away / from graphing the light” (“Spectrum Study”); “The stormbirds / flit from curse to curse” (“I Desire a Dream I Desire”); “I have to quiet / the prey in me” (“If I Want to Cum”). The poem “It is impossible to attempt,” a poem of transformation, also begins with a negation. I read this as a rhetorical move necessary in Taking to Water, but I have wondered: to what extent does a writer have to evoke toxic gender roles — which requires inhabiting them for a time, as the author, and as the reader — in order to negate them?
When I was an undergraduate studying with Stuart Dischell at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I remember a conversation with him in which our thinking about this differed quite a lot. I remember telling him I wanted to write poems that made people feel like they’d been punched in the gut. He seemed a bit confused by this, and all these years later, as a teacher myself now, I understand his concern. At that moment, I was writing anti-war poetry, and I was thinking about the huge impact poems like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” had on me. That poem had shocked me into an understanding of combat that I had not previously experienced. So it became a kind of mode for my writing — to never shy away from the most difficult images. Now there’s a lot to be said about who should write those experiences or images, about witness work, and for me, I felt comfortable evoking these toxic gender roles as a way of saying, This is my experience, not as a woman, but as someone who lives at an intersection of that experience as a nonbinary person raised as a girl. I didn’t know the word nonbinary until 2019, so there was a long life of rage and confusion. So it felt necessary to represent this, especially since I had no examples for myself as a reader. Sure I had read books by nonbinary and trans folks, but I only found books about what it was like after rather than during. That is, books that represent life after knowing who you are or after coming out or post-medical or social transition. I couldn’t find books that showed the questioning process itself. So I wanted to write a book that showed that process, one that has a lot of movement and is quite comfortable.
In your acknowledgments, you thank fellow writers for “creating space where queer writing can live” and for your “first queer writing home.” Can you talk a little bit about what it was like not to have these spaces, then to find them? What about queer writing spaces could or should be enacted in their counterpoints, or is that even possible?
Whew, this is so important to me. I grew up in a small Southern town where being queer could get you killed. Matthew Shepard was murdered when I was 13, and that news made me seal my lips for a long time. I lived well into my 30’s without a queer community because of shame. So when I slowly started coming out more, during and after my MFA program, this magical thing happened where other queer writers would invite me to queer spaces. And I say magical because it transformed my entire experience of life. Queer communities are not without their issues, but damn if we don’t create some of the most transformative and open spaces on this planet. As someone who has gone through an MFA and many toxic academic workshops, I’m not sure I believe non-queer writing spaces can enact this. I haven’t experienced that yet. If it weren’t for teachers and mentors like Natalie Diaz and TC Tolbert, this book wouldn’t have existed, because I wasn’t able to see myself in the writing or pedagogy of other teachers before them. I encountered TC Tolbert’s “Trans/ Space is Expanding” workshop after the MFA, and it was the first time I’d been in a (virtual) room of only trans and genderqueer writers. I felt like every poem I’d written before had some kind of sheet over it, like those white sheets over the furniture in horror movies. In TC’s workshop, it was like I wrote without the sheet over the poems. I just wrote. It felt like the truest writing I’d ever done. That must be what it’s like for cis and straight people to encounter their MFA. I remember some of those people from my own MFA urging me to write about myself. But all I could think was, How? How do you even do that? Of course, I learned that queer writing spaces exist so queer folks can write from their true selves.
Taking to Water
By Jennifer Conlon
Autumn House Press
Published October 16, 2023
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