THE NEW NOISE: IMMACULATE DISCIPLES PRESS // 8th Grade Hippie Chic by Marisa Crawford
THE NEW NOISE is a new series here at H_NGM_N, where we invite other presses to shine the spotlight on one of their titles and feature them here. This week we're happy to have Immaculate Disciples, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations founded by Dan Magers in 2007. The press has released chapbooks by Sampson Starkweather, Farrah Field, Marisa Crawford, and collaborations by Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina and Matt Bollinger & Dan Magers. The press has collaborated with artist such as Matt Bollinger, Joseph Lappie, Caitlin Wheeler, Mark Price and Forsyth Harmon.
Immaculate Disciples Press has just released Marisa Crawford’s 8th Grade Hippie Chic , so the editor (Dan Magers) and guest-editor, Steven Karl, decided it was a perfect opportunity to ask Marisa some questions about her new chapbook.
IDP: Hi Marisa, thanks for taking the time to answer some questions from Immaculate Disciples Press! Dan and I first saw poems from this collection when we published you in Sink Review and have been carrying around their voice ever since! The chapbook is a collection of untitled prose poems that fall under the title of 8th Grade Hippie Chic. I’ve always been curious as to why you settled on 8th grade as opposed to 7th grade or 9th grade or even 10th grade. Could you elaborate on this choice? What is it about this age that made you want to explore it?
MC: Thank you guys for taking the time to ask me questions! In some ways, I’m not sure I have a great reason for choosing 8th grade – when I first wrote the poem, I used 8th grade in the title, but later I considered changing it to “9th grade” since 9th grade is perhaps the more accurate time period during which I most identified with the kind of “hippie” subculture that the poem describes. I think the world and events loosely related in the chapbook span in my life from about 7th grade through 11th or 12th grade, and some of the lines even reference early college. So in a way 8th grade felt kind of like a median grade. But I also think there’s something particularly powerful and pulling about 8th grade, definitely for me; maybe for everyone. For me, 8th grade was the first time in my life when I felt like I could choose my own identity, when I chose to break away from the people who were supposed to be my friends, the music I was supposed to listen to, the clothes I was supposed to wear, the things I was supposed to care about — and to do, and be, something else instead; and surround myself with people/friends who understood and supported that. Now making those choices just feels like living my life, but in 8th grade it felt truly revolutionary, and kind of magical. It felt like a time of huge possibility, experimentation and exploration. For me, 8th grade was also the first and only time in my life when I was sort of part of an ongoing rivalry — in this case, between the popular kids and my group of friends— which made exploring this kind of “alternative” identity and subculture feel exciting and sort of self-righteous—which is kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it felt really powerful.
IDP: The chapbook features 16 poems. Is that the entire collection, or are there more? And by way of follow-up, do you see them existing on their own as this chapbook, or do you have grander plans for them?
MC: There are some ideas or lines in the chapbook that I’ve wanted to expand on or explore more for years now, but at this point the chapbook—which I think of sort of as one long poem in 16 sections—feels like something I wrote a long time ago, and I think it will be hard to change anything or add in new sections. I would like to try though. I do think of the chapbook as a piece that can exist on its own, but I also have written, and continue to write, a lot of other poems that are thematically related to the chapbook – poems that are also, at least in part, about teen girls in the 90s being obsessed with/appropriating culture from the 60s and 70s, etc., – and I think of those poems and the poems in my chapbook as part of the same larger project. I see them all as part of a manuscript I’m working on, which is very tentatively called “Reversible.”
IDP: In addition to the cover, the chapbook also contains a series of illustrations done by the artist and writer, Forsyth Harmon. Can you talk a little about how you got Forsyth involved in the chapbook, as well as how you see the illustrations collaborating or expanding the world you’ve created with your text?
MC: Forsyth and I used to work together, but at the time I had no idea what an incredibly talented artist she is. When I saw her artwork online, I fell in love with it. She’s working on an illustrated novel called The Woo, and in reading it I felt like her work and mine were really in sync in terms of both being about 90s suburbia, being a girl, pop culture, etc., and in that we both use a kind of playful aesthetic. When Immaculate Disciples accepted my chapbook, I immediately thought of asking Forsyth to draw the cover, and hopefully some interior illustrations too. The way the process worked was basically that I sent her the poems along with some ideas I had for images, and then she added ideas to my list based on images that stood out to her in the poems; then we settled on six final image ideas. It was a really fun process, and Forsyth was so great to work with — she did stuff like email me photos of three different daisy-print dresses from Urban Outfitters or wherever to help match her illustration to the real dress from my poem/memory. I love how the illustrations work with my poems in the chapbook—they feel like little artifacts that fell out of the book’s interior world onto the page, and I do think they expand that world by giving it a more tactile quality, and adding dimension, like the reader can kind of walk around in it and actually see stuff as well as just feeling it. I love comics and other work that combines words and images, and have always sort of secretly wanted to make more work like that, so I was really excited to collaborate with Forsyth, and have her artwork collaborate with my poems, in that way.
IDP: Your debut collection of poems The Haunted House was published by Switchback Books in 2010. Many of the poems in that volume are similarly interested in the dynamic between female friends. Do you see these works as being in a conversation with each other?
MC: When I started writing the female friendship-centered poems in The Haunted House, I was pretty much writing them in reaction to a culture that makes women feel stupid for being and doing the things they’re taught to be by that very same culture; I was writing them in reaction to feeling that way about myself for being those things — “girly,” silly, emotional, sentimental, and in particular in reaction to a bad relationship that made me feel that way. Not that I’m saying all women or girls are girly or emotional, but I think that our culture teaches girls that’s what they’re supposed to be like. I think girls spend a lot of their lives feeling like shit for being who they are, and when I was writing those Haunted House poems, I was locating a center in the girl relationships and the girly stuff that was/is an actual foundation of strength for me. And the poems are saying that girls can be all of those things, and they can also simultaneously be crazy smart and fierce and powerful and amazing — and that female friendships are so awesome because they support and embody that. I think that 8th Grade Hippie Chic sort of builds on those ideas, but it’s also, I think, more interested in talking directly about conflict within friendships than the Haunted House poems are, though some of them do touch on that; 8th Grade Hippie Chic is more about the kind of weird jealousy and resentment that can exist between female friends who love each other so much; maybe in part because they love each other so much. I feel like, if the two are in conversation, maybe The Haunted House is saying “Oh my god female friendships are so magical and important and life-saving!” And 8th Grade Hippie Chic is like, “Yeah, but they fuck you up too. Everything fucks you up. Let’s go smoke weed and listen to The Wall.”
IDP: What are you currently working on? Is your newer work in the same vein as Hippie Chic? Any thoughts on how you perceive your work is evolving?
MC: I’ve been working on the manuscript I mentioned, “Reversible,” which I see 8th Grade Hippie Chic as part of, but the poems I’ve been working on most recently feel like they might be separate from that manuscript. For a while, I found myself sort of trying to write into the “project” of the manuscript, but I don’t think thinking about poems in that way is very helpful to me. So instead I tried to just let myself write whatever I’m writing, and I’ve ended up with some poems that feel very thematically connected to 8th Grade Hippie Chic (you can read some of these here if you’re so inclined!), and many others that feel a little bit different. I write a lot in my phone while I’m on the subway or on my lunch break, or in emails to myself when I’m at my desk at work. In part because of this, my most recent poems have been more about dailiness and about navigating being an adult and part of the “real world,” also working in corporate settings, writing copy for fancy retail brands, being a New Yorker and thinking about what that means in the context of the city and having recently lived in California and being the fourth generation of New Yorkers in my family. I’m also working on some more articles and non-fiction-y writing, and I was trying to write a YA novel, which I’d like to continue working on sometime soon.
check out Immaculate Disciples Press and click here to order your copy of 8th Grade Hippie Chic!
