What Happened After the War? The Mini Interview with Bunkong Tuon
By Alden Jones
In 1975, spurred on by bombings in Cambodia by the US military near the border with Vietnam, the communist Khmer Rouge party took control of Cambodia. During the four years Pol Pot was in power, the Khmer Rouge forced the population of Cambodia into labor camps in a plan to return to “Year Zero” via an agrarian revolution, callously murdering anyone considered to be interfering with the new agenda. By 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians were killed, often for such infractions as wearing glasses or practicing art or having an education.
Koan Khmer (Curbstone Press, 2024), the autobiographical novel by Khmer Rouge survivor Bunkong Tuon, takes up the story of one family who flees Cambodia at the end of Pol Pot’s rule of terror, first for a refugee camp in Thailand and ultimately to the United States. What happens to refugees after the war is over? Binding their remaining family members into a new unit—like Tuon himself, his main character, Samnang, lost both of his parents as a young child in Cambodia—Tuon’s characters find alienation and isolation in their new lives, but also hope, love, and spiritual connection with the ones they lost and with their homeland.
Because the Khmer Rouge targeted artists who might have passed on their craft, and due to the severity of the trauma faced by an entire nation that many wanted to forget, personal stories of the Pol Pot years have emerged slowly, and the most notable works of contemporary Cambodia in English have focused on the Pol Pot years themselves. Fifty years later, Tuon considers what it is like to be a refugee once the war is in the past, what it means to survive in the body when the mind cannot let go of what the body has been through, and how recognition can be located in something as small as a yellow bird.
I spoke to Tuon about what happens when ordinary people become refugees, the parameters of an autobiographical novel, and the role of spirituality in Koan Khmer.
***
The Rumpus: As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge capture of Cambodia which led to the systematic enslavement, starvation, and mass murder of Cambodia’s population, your story is a crucial reminder of the effects of a nation-wide disaster to which the world paid insufficient attention at the time. Cambodians in the diaspora face a unique issue: While those who remained in Cambodia slowly emerged from the devastation of the Pol Pot years in a community of people who understood what they had been through, those who fled the Khmer Rouge and made homes in other countries most often found themselves among people with very little understanding of Cambodia’s history. What role does this play in Koan Khmer and why Koan Khmer was written?
Bunkong Tuon: I wrote Koan Khmer for many reasons, but I’ll focus on three for my response. I wanted those in the United States who didn’t know anything about refugees to know what it was like to be a refugee. Nobody in their right mind wants to be a refugee. Being a refugee means you do not have a choice about leaving home, being separated from loved ones, being so poor and desperate that you have to seek refuge in someone’s country. It’s embarrassing, humiliating, for some of us. To make matters worse, Southeast Asian refugees are reminders of the Vietnam/US War, which was a blemish in America’s nearly flawless war record. And many American families had loved ones who lost their lives to the war. Furthermore, the refugees themselves carried terrible memories of atrocity and loss and therefore suffered from PTSD. As a literature professor, I believe in the power of stories and one of those powers is its ability to evoke sympathy in readers. I want Koan Khmer to move the hearts and minds of readers as they experience vicariously the impacts of war and displacement on ordinary people.
More importantly I was also thinking about Cambodian Americans. I wrote Koan Khmer as a kind of literary documentation of what first generation Cambodian refugees went through in the first decade of living in the United States. It’s my way of honoring our elders. Related to this, I wanted the young generation to understand what it was like for our elders and the sacrifices they had to make for their children and grandchildren. This has always been my project since I began my writing life.
Rumpus: In an early chapter of Koan Khmer, Samnang asks his cousin for help remembering their years as refugees, explaining to her how writing about their shared past “helped explain why I felt so different and alienated, why I had so much anger and hate bottled up inside…That after I started writing, it felt like a boulder had been lifted from my chest and I could breathe again.” In response, Samnang’s cousin replies, “There are things I wish I could un-remember.” Can you talk about this friction between wanting to “un-remember” trauma from our past and the urge to revisit difficult times through writing? How exactly does creative writing remove the boulders of our internal lives?
Tuon: In the novel, I have three characters who represent three possible approaches to trauma. There is Bopha, the cousin who wishes to “un-remember.” There is Pu Ly, the uncle who uses violence as a reaction to traumatic memories. As a male elder, he uses Cambodia’s patriarchal culture to hurt others because he himself is hurt. Samnang Sok, the protagonist, uses writing to tell his stories and thereby unburden painful memories and find some sort of healing. I don’t think complete healing is possible, but I think writing helps. There are studies in which survivors of war, genocide, and violence (physical, sexual, and emotional) are asked by therapists to write scripts where they tell and retell the event that caused PTSD. The more they write, the more they are able to name “the event” and control the narrative. If folks are interested, check out Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman as well as the work of other trauma scholars like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub.
Rumpus: You call Koan Khmer an “autobiographical novel.” What’s the difference between approaching the material as a straight-up novel versus an autobiographical novel, and why did you choose this container? How did the autobiographical elements drive the plot of Koan Khmer? What fictional elements gave you the opportunity to have fun with narrative discoveries?
Tuon: The novel is loosely based on my life. Like Samnang, I lived in the refugee camps in Thailand, grew up in Revere and Malden, and went to college in Long Beach. But the specific details are made up because I wasn’t there when events happened or I was too young to remember. Take the chapter “Yellow Bird” as an example. I only heard about the soccer match brawl between Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. I wasn’t there when the uncle came home beaten by the Thai police. And there was no yellow bird. I created the yellow bird as a symbol of violence against the innocent. I also wanted to show Samnang’s tenderness and compassion. Then there’s the Lok-Ta chapter, which was completely made up. The story needed that chapter to show the contrast between Lok-Ta’s way of being and the American way of being. When I wrote that chapter and then later read it to a live audience, I wept. There was so much in that chapter of what Tim O’Brien calls “story truth.” In other words, the narrative takes fictive turns when the story demands it. Then we have the mermaid chapter, which was totally true. But in our modern world, that passage could be described as magical realism in a novel full of realistic sensibilities. Of course, Samnang isn’t me. There are things he says and does that I find ridiculous and pathetic. I wanted to show how lost, confused, and troubled Samnang is. For these reasons, I categorized Koan Khmer an autobiographical novel.
Rumpus: What role does spirituality or the characters’ and your Buddhist beginnings play in the plot of Koan Khmer?
Tuon: I think Koan Khmer is a spiritual novel. As a former head monk at a monastery in Battambang, Lok-Ta does embody Buddhist values of kindness, compassion, and patience. But he also presents to Samnang (and by extension to readers) a Cambodian belief that everything in this world is alive—the trees, the forest, the lake, the birds, the animals—all contain spirits. This Cambodian animism reappears throughout the novel in the forms of dreams and visions. Samnang’s parents aren’t dead; they are spirits who protect and guide him on this journey of self-understanding and self-invention. At the novel’s end, even the trees in Pennsylvania are alive with spirits. Ultimately, I wanted to capture this old way of being in the world and place it within an American context. This, for me, is what makes Koan Khmer a Cambodian-American novel.
Alden Jones is the editor of the forthcoming Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing (Blair, May 2025) and the author of Lambda Literary Award nominated The Wanting Was a Wilderness. She teaches at Emerson College and in the low-res Newport MFA.
The book cover of Didi Jackson’s My Infinity (Red Hen Press, 2024) is gorgeous. It is a cropped image of Dove No. 2 by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish abstract artist and mystic. The collection contained within the cover—like the cover art—is exactly like the blade the moon makes when it wobbles like a scythe in the night sky. Its speaker, Didi Jackson, a professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University with a talent for ekphrasis, bemoans platitudes and generalizations, and calls our attention to the name of things in the difference between the ovenbird and the wooden thrush. I admire how My Infinity undergirds a yearning for the intangible phosphorescence of life amidst and in the aftermath of grief. In this way, it balances the foils of the possessive “my” and the ever-expansive “infinity,” as the mood modulates between the exquisite pleasure and blindness of intimacy and the keen observation of how all the light will be smaller tomorrow.
Didi and I conducted this interview via Google Docs over the course of a month as the academic semester ramps up for Didi, and I am struck that the insights that became her answers appeared in the quietude between book tour readings and classes. Below we discuss dualities in the first poem, “Witness,” learn about Didi’s creative process, and end with her hope of what poetry can achieve.
***
The Rumpus: You begin with the poem, “Witness.” How does it set up the poems that are to follow? What I noticed was an obsession with twoness: “the birch leaves shimmy,” “clap[ping] at the sun with their gilded hands,” which is then compared with the ancient catacomb frescoes; the pair of ruffed grouse; the goldenrod and milkweed; the secret of the Green Mountains and the speaker, the secret-keeper.
Didi Jackson: I love your observation of dualities. I chose the poem “Witness” to open the collection for many reasons. I feel as if it sets the tone for the book. It incorporates the beauty of the natural world while signifying its ability to occupy a space of pain and sadness. That might be the “twoness” you are picking up on. It amazes me that daily we live amidst immense splendor and deep sorrow. I circle back to that over and over again in my collection. Hilma af Klint was also fascinated with dualities. She explored various dual binaries throughout her career including those of gender, life and death, and lightness and darkness. So, it seems fitting to open with a poem that also is steeped in such oppositions.
I also believe, as a poet, it is my ultimate calling to operate as the eyes (and ears and a mouth) for many different women. I act as the witness for my younger self, for a woman artist who was overlooked in the canon of art history, for my student who was murdered by her partner, for a friend who died too early. In the way I know best, I am making a record of these and other events so to somehow keep these stories alive and to better understand the struggles of women.
Rumpus: What was your writing process like? Let’s start with the Hilma af Klimt poems, a sequence of which was featured in BOMB Magazine.
Jackson: When I visited the Guggenheim in 2018, I attended the exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s various series of paintings titled Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. It was one of the highest (if not the highest) attended exhibition in the museum’s history. People lined up around the building and the museum hours were extended. But I didn’t start writing my “Hilma poems” (as I call them) until much later. I think “The Swan No 1” is one of my earliest poems of the series which I wrote in 2020 during the pandemic.
I taught art history for almost ten years and so I am particularly drawn to ekphrasis. My process for writing this collection involved purchasing the exhibition catalogue and a few volumes of the catalogue raisonné of af Klint’s work and staring at the images for hours. I searched for what was familiar in her abstract art; something for me to hold onto and incorporate into images in my own work. I additionally visited locations in Sweden that would have been important to her. I was able to see the Stockholm Cathedral, a site she visited often on holidays with her family when she was young. I also drove to the island of Munsö where, as an adult she built a studio (that is sadly no longer there.) Both the architecture and landscape of Sweden informed my choices of words and images for my poems. In order to bridge the distance between us in both time and place, I braided my own childhood geography of Central Florida with that of her Swedish environment. Despite her notoriety as an abstract artist, af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, painting, among other subjects, landscapes and botanical studies. These early images certainly found their way into her abstract painting and eventually into my own poems.
Rumpus: Turning next to other poems in My Infinity, did they come to you immediately or gradually?
Jackson: The subjects of my poems emerge slowly, though the images I use might be immediate. In my poem “The Burning Bush” the small, invasive tree that I use as a symbol grew at the corner of our house in Vermont. And I added it to the poem immediately after staring out our window as I received the news of Brianne’s murder. Its bright red leaves stuck with me and became an imprinted association with her unspeakable and untimely death.
I like starting my poems with a strong image and allowing that image to shift into a metaphor or simile of some kind that then supports the design of the rest of the poem. I love that you call the images that come back to me “apparitions.” What a wonderful way to think about how images appear (or reappear) into my consciousness from seemingly out of nowhere. How fitting considering the spirits and seances that inhabit this collection.
Rumpus: There are couplets, one-stanza poems, and poems where the caesura is freely deployed. Could you speak to your use of poetic forms?
Jackson: When reading a collection of poetry, I am happy to encounter a variety of forms. As a matter of fact, I just finished reading Paisley Redkal’s West. In it, she moves through such an exciting selection of poetic forms: a contrapuntal, sonnets, ekphrasis, couplets, snaking or meandering lines, long columns, lists, and persona poems to name a few. Each turn of the page is like opening a new present. I want that same feeling for my own readers. But, I should say that I don’t believe in the arbitrary use of form. Or variety just for the sake of variety. Denise Levertov said, “Form is never more than a revelation of content.” For me, this is also true when writing poems that engage with visual art. I take the elements of the art (line, shape, texture, color, space, value, and form) into consideration when building a poem. I want the poem to, in some way, aesthetically model the painting, even if it is only on an intuitive level.
Rumpus: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
Jackson: Wow! Let me see. I encourage readers to take some time to get to know the paintings of Hilma af Klint. I’m not sure when they’ll be in the United States again. I hope it might be sooner than later. Also, beyond the poems about visual art, this collection is filled with an affinity for and a close observation of the natural world. Recently, I decided to take a year-long class to become a Tennessee naturalist. I recently moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t want to write about my new environment without taking the time to learn about it. Google is good, but it is also kind of cheating. I encourage everyone to come to know all that is immediately around them. Urban wildlife is a topic many authors are thinking about now. Certain species have adapted to a landscape we have manipulated for our use. But there are so many species that are suffering for the same reason. The voiceless doesn’t just include the human world. As poets, as witnesses, we can be that voice.
***
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.
Exploring Latina Archetypes: A Mini Interview with Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez
By Christine Kandic Torres
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez is challenging our perceptions of what it means to be Latina. Inspired by the trichotomy within the public consciousness that Latinas can only ever be sexy, subservient, or streetwise, in her new book Tías and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us (Seal Press, 2024), Mojica Rodríguez explores twenty different kinds of female archetypes that exist within our families and communities.
I first became aware of her several years ago via Latina Rebels, the online activist platform she founded in 2013, which today has over 350,000 followers. Since then, I’ve appreciated how she takes institutional ideas about assimilation, class, sexism, feminism, and racism, and weaves them into personal stories to make them easily accessible, digestible, and above all, relevant to those of us outside the academy. In Tías and Primas, Mojica Rodríguez combines memoir and social theory to examine the ways in which these female archetypes, from La Matriarch to the Tía La Loca, shape the people we become. The collection is, in a way, less about the bonds of family, and more about the ways in which we learn to perform our own unique brand of womanhood—for better or for worse. The book serves as an invitation to dismantle internalized biases and heal generational trauma so many in the Latine community have inherited as a result of colonization, imperialism, anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity.
I chatted with her over e-mail about the value of a good therapist in the writing process, the importance of employing a decolonial lens when trying to explain the “unexplainable,” and how writing can afford us the space to speak our truths when we are raised to believe that silence is safest.
***
The Rumpus: How did you come to the idea for Tías and Primas?
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez: It was a few things that led to it, but mainly I remember that SNL skit with Selena Gomez and Melissa Villaseñor “A Peek at Pico” where we saw two Latinas on our screen in a mainstream American nighttime show and they were both playing cholas. I remember the uproar, from progressive Latinas tired of seeing these tropes again and again. And I also remember some Latinas getting defensive about the critiques, saying they felt represented. I remember that moment because it was so complicated, the critiques and the critiques on the critiques told me how complex Latinas truly are. I ran with that thought in mind, and started to just tune into the Latinas I knew growing up and the Latinas I know today in my life. And I wrote this book for them, to honor them and name them into existence—like that skit did. But also, I wanted to go deeper, I wanted to delve into what that all means for us, about us, and what it could mean.
Rumpus: How did you decide which tías to include? Were there any that didn’t make the final version?
Mojica Rodríguez: Several archetypes were cut, and in hindsight I wish I had included others! I ultimately knew that I was going to miss some archetypes, because I do believe all books have biases from the authors writing them—I knew I was going to have my limitations. And I name that in the introduction of the book. I wrote out the Femme Primo archetype, and cut it because I felt like that was not my story to tell. I think folks like Edgar Gomez (author of High-Risk Homosexual) are doing a better job writing that person out, fleshing that primo out in his own writings, better than I ever could because I am not that person.
Rumpus: So much of the book reads as a call for compassion and an invitation to heal from complicated family dynamics. Have people in your family read it yet? If so, what has their response been?
Mojica Rodríguez: My family treats me like Tu Tía La Loca, so I am silenced often in my immediate family spaces. They do not read my work, for the exception of my sister, and they do not acknowledge my career as a writer. I was raised with very specific beliefs on womanhood, respecting your elders, and silence as protection—which in turn means that my defiance of all that is threatening and scary.
I write my books to say the things I wish they’d allow me to say to them, if they were not so quick to dismiss me. I write down the full sentences that do not get to come out of my mouth without their defenses coming out.
Rumpus: I appreciated how you de-centered the “Pretty Prima” in her chapter, and instead focused the blame on her family for raising her as a pawn for their own social capital and proximity to whiteness. Why was it important to you to include the “Pretty Prima” in the book, and why was she saved for last?
Mojica Rodríguez: I did not arrange the book chapters, my editor did. I get too attached to the book, to be able to see it as a reader might, so I relinquish that power to my editor.
But writing her out, because I have witnessed her, was complicated. As the not-pretty prima, because I do look more Indigenous, and non-Black Latines are still very anti-Indigenous and over-prioritize proximity to whiteness, I found resentment.
When I wrote the first draft, I saw that I had placed blame on someone who is just a product of years of colonialism and brainwashing. So, after talking to my therapist (j/k lol! but not really j/k), I was able to see her fully. Because it was never her fault, it was never any one of our faults, and so once we can see that we can move beyond demonizing ourselves and instead hopefully we can turn our attention toward the systems. It was a trauma-informed approach, really, that helped me write this book and that chapter.
Rumpus: You write that “a decolonial lens” was important to bring to your chapter on “The Tía Who Sees Fantasmas.” You also note that conversations about ghosts and the thin veil between us and the spiritual world are seldom met with discomfort or skepticism from people raised in BIPOC low-income households. Can you share a bit about why it is important for us to honor and make space for the unexplainable in our lives? How did “Afro-circular” logic help in your construction of this chapter?
Mojica Rodríguez: In academia I learned how often low-income people are pathologized by outsiders, with oftentimes no real sense of what they are even saying. With that in mind, when I was thinking of the archetypes, the “Tía Who Sees Fantasmas” was an early entry in my list. It was so obviously going to be an archetype because so many Latines I know have personal ghost encounter stories.
We can sometimes assume logic is just linear, from point a to point b, and the world tells us men are more logical and women are more emotional. With that framework in mind, we need to a) realize how deeply patriarchal that thinking is and b) expand beyond that limiting thinking about logic. Molefi Kete Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea was the first time I saw that challenged, where communication theory is explored through the categorization of Euro-linearity values and Afro-circular ones. And for me, thinking beyond Western logic allows me to open up my mind to other possibilities that make sense to people in the global south, even when it does not make sense to a Western perspective.
So that chapter has no clear conclusion with answers, to the Euro-linear lens, but it explains so much to those of us who understand that ghosts are real and it can be complicated at the same time. That chapter is written with a different logic centered, which I would not have been able to do without a decolonial lens.
Rumpus: You reference “childism” a few times throughout the book, citing that we have “normalized adult supremacy,” which routinely subjects children to “unchecked anger misdirected at them due to unprocessed trauma.” How has this particular prejudice against children informed and guided your body of work?
Mojica Rodríguez: While I am not a parent, I was a daughter and a child who is now an adult healing from the wounds of my childhood. Concepts like generational trauma help me understand that it goes deeper than just blaming my parents. My book is meant to give explanations, not justifications. And with that in mind, I write about wounds inflicted on children because they are so vulnerable. Children are truly so vulnerable and we have all been socialized to want them without often thinking about the consequences of becoming parents—and that is oftentimes how we inflict the most harm.
I have been in therapy for a decade, and seen many terrible therapists before I found a great therapist who taught me that not all therapists are made equally. And I am actually learning how to regulate and learning how to identify and name my feelings. I am learning how to express hurt better.
I write with a picture of me at age six next to my computer, because it motivates me to write for her, to advocate for her.
Rumpus: What are you currently working on?
Mojica Rodríguez: A young adult novel. Wish me luck...
The Strangeness of Fiction: A Conversation with Scott Guild
By Elizabeth McCracken
When I first spoke to Scott Guild on the phone, it was in the wake of a terrorist attack: I was calling to offer him a spot at the New Writers Project, and it happened to be the day that the whole of Greater Boston—where he then lived—was shut down while police looked for the Tsarnaev Brothers after the Boston Marathon Bombing. I was delivering good news at this strange time; we joked a little but also talked about the utter strangeness of the moment. That conversation now seems from the world of Scott’s fiction: surreal, terrifying, full of suspense, thousands of people in their homes holding their breath.
As a person, Guild is modest and self-deprecating—knowingly, comically self-deprecating—but as an artist he’s astonishingly ambitious, a virtuoso. Plastic (Pantheon Books, 2024) is a book, an album, a project like no other. How can a book be about plastic figures, sentient waffles, and a miniature Jesus who comes off His crucifix to be a song-and-dance man be so deeply human and humane?
Scott Guild is a musician, writer, and teacher whose first novel and first album—both called Plastic—were released this year. He’s a professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, and for many years has been an advocate for prison reform. Though Scott and I have had many conversations over the years in person and on the phone, including in front of audiences and over guacamole salad, we conducted this interview over email.
***
The Rumpus: Plastic is both a high-concept novel, and profound, so intricate and strange that I find it hard to describe. I just want to insist that people read it. It's full of strange concepts and yet it's not about them. I guess I mean that largely the characters are plastic, but the novel doesn't stay with that initial question, “What if plastic figurines were sentient?” (Let's call it The Toy Story level.) It's interested in much more complicated questions. How do you describe the book to people? And what do you think it's about?
Scott Guild: You make an excellent point here, which is that the characters never discuss the fact that they’re plastic figurines—this is just their normal reality, walking around with their hinges and hollow bodies. Unlike Toy Story, there’s not a world of flesh-and-blood humans in contrast to them. I think this gets at a part of the book’s meaning: We all live such strange lives now, immersed in our technologies while the natural world crumbles around us, but more and more this just feels normal, the state of existence we’ve all accepted.
I wouldn’t want to define what it “means” that the characters are plastic figurines: I’d love for readers to interpret that for themselves, and it’s meant different things even to me in the years of writing the book. But when I look at the way we live now, and then think about how we would appear to people from a century or two ago, we probably would seem as alien to them as plastic figurines, at least in some ways—living so far from nature, completely surrounded by our inventions and the narratives they give us.
In writing the book, a main goal was to capture something of what it feels like to be alive right now, and—at least for this novel—I couldn’t seem to do that with more traditional narrative forms, which seemed rooted in a different era and type of cognition. The form of my book had to take on the story’s themes; it had to inflect how the story itself was told. I tried writing Erin’s story with a limited third person voice, then with a first-person voice, but this always fell short of what I hoped to evoke. The novel only started to work when it was written as a TV show, when we saw Erin’s life through the filter of the media to which she’s addicted. Similarly, it was only when I gave the characters plastic bodies that their world felt right to me.
All that being said, this isn’t how I describe the novel when someone first asks! I mention that it’s set in a world of plastic figurines, but then also that it’s a love story, and a story of a person trying to reclaim her humanity in a violent, chaotic world. Erin exists inside many layers of alienation, but her personhood and spiritual growth always feel like the heart of the book to me (even if her chest is technically hollow).
Rumpus: I feel like you and I have talked over the years a lot about the uses of strangeness in fiction. You talk about it a little here from the point of view of a writer—by making the world stranger, you can also write about our own world, a kind of pinhole camera—and I wonder if you can talk about what strangeness means to you.
Guild: This is such a fascinating question, and it gets me thinking about what strangeness is in art. When something is "strange," this means it has swerved from our expectations, that it has somehow defied a normal or typical pattern in its genre. It's funny, because there are whole genres—like surrealist fiction, which I write—where strangeness itself is the expected pattern, and therefore not "strange" at all!
To be truly strange in surrealist fiction, with all its genre expectations, I think you need to zag at times in the opposite direction, to go for realism when the reader expects the bizarre. This was part of my hope with Plastic: to write a surrealist novel that also has the intimate, personal stakes of traditional literary fiction, so that the two different genre patterns would keep subverting each other, creating a tension that matches the tensions in Erin's world. Just when you think you're in this zany, wacky metafiction novel where the characters get "Brad Pitt's Disease," here comes the section where Erin cares for her father as he dies of BPD—far more Alice Munro than Thomas Pynchon.
This connects to what I was saying in the last question: my desire to capture something of what life feels like right now. Seeing Trump high in the polls, seeing our eco-crisis ignored, seeing a global rise of fascism, many of us feel like we're trapped inside a satirical metafiction novel (and not a particularly well-written one!). But this doesn't change the depth of our connections to each other, or the inner depth of our emotional and spiritual lives.
And this leads to another thought: what is the point of strangeness in fiction? Why seek it at all, as a writer or reader? To my mind, when something is truly strange—and strange in a way that's satisfying—it's because it finds a new way to render experience, a shift in form that gives a new window onto our personal or collective existence. In the 1740s, when Samuel Richardson pioneered detailed character interiority in Pamela, this gave readers a very strange and new literary experience, but one deeply rooted in their own personhood. Three centuries later, nothing could be more expected in a literary fiction novel—detailed inner lives are the definition of normal. Though a little less common, the same point can be made about Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness or Kafka's dream logic narratives: innovations become widely-used craft techniques, and these techniques no longer startle us. But these formal innovations were effective at the time, and continue to be effective now, because they train their gaze on something crucial about the human experience and can still speak to us centuries after their strangeness has worn off.
Rumpus: I love this answer so much, from Pamela to notes of Alice Munro in Plastic. I wanted to ask you about the visual in the book. One of the things that struck me is how clearly I saw some of the things in the book (things that don't exist in our world, like sentient anthropomorphic waffles), while at other times I didn't need to see things in great detail because I was so busy listening: to monologues, song and dance numbers, et cetera. Even though I read the book on the page, it's somehow a real multimedia experience. Maybe my question is just, “How'd you do that? And what do you see when you write?”
Guild: This is all so wonderful to hear. In many ways, the true setting of the novel is Erin's mind, and it's a mind immersed in visual media—particularly television, which she uses to escape her traumas. When Erin looks out on the world, she sees it as close-ups and wide shots, as scenes in front of an imaginary audience; her own thoughts feel to her like a confessional to a camera in Reality TV. Like so many of us today, she's deeply disassociated from reality—all of life feels like a screen—and I wanted this type of cognition to come through in the form of the book, to immerse the reader in this space as well.
In the early drafts of Plastic, when I was writing in limited third person, I always felt like I was telling the reader about Erin's mental state, from the safe remove of a more traditional narrative form. When I began to write the book as a TV show, suddenly I could see the plastic world through her eyes and the distance between us vanished. It's incredible how evocative language is: When I'd write, "the camera zooms in on Jacob's face," or, "the camera pans across the room," it felt like this whole other visual part of my brain switched on, and I could write (and see!) the setting in much more detail. And I had to admit how steeped I am in this media myself, that a few phrases about a camera could do this!
I didn't realize it until later, but I think I cribbed some of my formal approach from Joyce's Ulysses—I should give credit where it's due! So much of Ulysses is told through the lens of his era's dominant media—as a play, as a series of newspaper stories, as an academic text, depending on the section—and Joyce wants us to remember that we receive our whole sense of the world through these rhetorical structures, that there's really no such thing as "objective" perception. But the experience of Ulysses is one of continuous fragmentation—a major Modernist theme—and I wanted the form of Plastic to feel fluid and seamless, in the fluid way that visual media tries to present the world.
Rumpus: You are also a musician, and have released Plastic, the album. Is it a companion piece? An essential part of the experience?
Guild: Thanks for asking about the music! I do think of it as essential to the experience because it takes you directly to one of Erin's most important mental spaces: a space of song. Erin slips into surreal musical numbers throughout the novel—usually at her times of peak emotion—and the album is a way to experience these moments in full, with melody and arrangements for her lyrics in the book. The songs on the album are also chronological, so you can experience the whole story in about 40 minutes of music.
The album didn't feel like an "adaptation" of Plastic—the way a movie or a musical would—but an expansion of a space already in the book. It lets Erin step from the pages and continue her story in a different narrative structure, with the amazing singer, Stranger Cat, giving her voice. I love the music videos we made as well, and what these add to the storytelling experience.
Rumpus: I know that you worked on this book over years—I saw some early iterations and was always surprised by how much changed from draft to draft. You ended up with a book that was both different in nearly all its particulars and yet at its heart, the same book, undeniably. The same in its soul, and its ambitions, and life force. How did you keep the book from seizing up as you worked on it? I suppose this is another way of saying, “How did you keep it alive, and yourself interested? How does it feels to have it out in the world and done?”
Guild: I suppose the easy answer to this is Erin herself—staying close to her as a person through the years. (It’s been a long time since I thought of her as “fictional,” though I suppose she’s technically not alive!). With each new draft, I felt like I was coming to know Erin better, slipping more fully into her world.
Everyone writes and develops their fiction differently—there’s no one correct way—but I usually need a feeling of discovery as I work, a sense that I’m arriving at the truth of the characters and the world, rather than “making things up.” Learning that Erin is plastic, that she breaks into musical numbers, that she gave her father hospice care, that her sister is a terrorist—all these were discoveries while I was deep in the drafting process, and then I’d get excited and start reshaping the book around them. It would take months, or in some cases, years, and I was lucky enough to have brilliant readers like you giving me feedback and guidance along the way. But it was always grounded in Erin, and in becoming more in touch with her mind and heart and world. That often changed the book formally as well, which was a fun surprise of its own—as I mentioned before, her story only made sense to me when it was written as a TV show.
I made the album for many reasons, and I can see now that a major one was spending more time with her! We’d been together for so many years, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet: I started to work full-time on the songs once the book was completed. Now that the book and album are out in the world, and people are reading her story and hearing her songs—it’s a feeling beyond words, letting go of the person who meant so much to me all those years, seeing her leave and have a life with others. In some ways it’s very fulfilling, but I also miss her! Luckily, we still get to bring her alive at all the book-and-music events around the country.
Jami Attenberg’s A Reason to See You Again (Ecco Press, 2024) is funny and quick-moving with a strong emotional core that explores what it really means to be family, through thick and thin. The novel revolves around the complicated family dynamics of a mother and her two daughters as they grow up and live through the cultural and technological changes throughout the 20th century, moving deftly between the thoughts of the characters in surprising ways. It’s wide-ranging, delving into various women’s relationships with work—or the absence of it.
When she’s not writing books, she manages the highly popular Substack newsletter Craft Talk and its yearly challenge, “one thousand words of summer,” where she motivates thousands of subscribers to write a thousand words a day for ten days straight.
We spoke over Zoom about her writing process and how this latest book fits in with her life’s work.
***
The Rumpus: A Reason to See You Again is your tenth published book. That’s a lot of books! Is there something you're trying to accomplish that you haven't in your earlier works?
Jami Attenberg: I wanted the book to cover more time. My last few novels were much more compact. Then when I wrote my memoir, I enjoyed how it spanned so many years and so many cities. It gave the story the chance to breathe. So, I wanted to apply that to the novel. I was also interested in having family members be separate from each other as opposed to being intimate and involved in each other’s lives. They were more spread out and spaced out. It’s also possible this desire to span more time and space came as a response to that particular claustrophobic feeling I had in the pandemic.
Rumpus: What seeded the idea behind this novel?
Attenberg: I actually wrote about this in my newsletter [Craft Talk]. During the pandemic, I was looking at a lot of vintage clothes on Etsy and kept seeing these white puffy shirts. I started thinking about a woman wearing it and being somebody's cool aunt. Generally, characters show me the way into a book. And so, the cool aunt, Shelly Cohen, was the first character for me. I pictured her at a kitchen counter in the suburbs talking to her family, with all of them leading different lives, interested in each other but also always a little annoyed with each other.
Rumpus: Does that dynamic have any resemblance to reality? How much of yourself is in this book and these characters and their relationships?
Attenberg: None of these characters are like anybody that I know, really. But they’re adjacent to people I know. They feel like they live in a neighborhood I’ve lived in before. Or maybe they’re a third cousin. Someone you met once and feels familiar, even if you can’t say exactly who they are.
Rumpus: How do you find the central core of a story with multiple main characters? What are they all hovering around?
Attenberg: The way time moves forward in this book is the core, and how the characters are impacted by time. Time is both the structure and the thrust. For example, the way they communicate at the beginning of the book has changed by the end of it, often expressed in terms of technological advancements. And those kinds of changes are ones that can only emerge specifically over the passage of years or decades of time.
Rumpus: So, technology changes relationships in this book. But you could say it just provides your main characters with new ways of ignoring each other.
Attenberg: There’s one scene near the end of the book where two characters are driving in a car and a third one calls them on a cellphone. And they really don’t want to talk to this person, but there’s no way of ultimately avoiding it: we live in an era where you can track people’s locations all the time. It’s vastly different than earlier in the book, when it’s Nancy’s twenty-first birthday and she desperately wants to talk to her family, and she has to leave her house, walk down to the corner payphone, put money in it to make a long-distance call, and hope that somebody's there and picks up at this specific moment in time. In a way that phone call is so much more meaningful. But their communication still has meaning at the end of the book, when they finally do break through to each other.
Rumpus: A lot of important life events in this story aren’t actually in the book but are referenced offscreen or obliquely. How did you decide what to put in the story versus what to reference offscreen?
Attenberg: These people are not confrontational until it’s too late. They’re trying to figure out how to exist with a problem without actually dealing with it. So, these things feel far away to the reader because they feel far away to the characters. They don’t like dealing with things head on. But there are still feelings that are very much present.
These things trigger other issues down the line, though. If you don’t deal with something in the moment, eventually it’s still going to show up. One of my characters doesn’t tell another character something very important, and when the other finds out, she is furious with her. It impacts their relationship forever. By choosing to avoid conflict, she created another conflict in the process. And a lie by omission is still a lie, and that’s certainly a plot point.
Rumpus: I also wanted to highlight one particular line: “He thought it would be easier to explain themselves to the world if they lived in the same place, when actually they only had to explain themselves to themselves and no one else.” It feels like the heart of this story.
Attenberg: I wouldn’t say that line is the heart of the book, but it’s a touchstone line, one I hope people highlight on their Kindles, ha. The characters in this novel grew up during a certain time and place where they felt like there was a path for them with specific milestones they had to achieve to please the world in a certain kind of way. I think most people understand now that we don’t have to stay on that conventional path, that we don’t have to abide by anyone else’s rules. I think the characters in the book are happiest when they figure that out. Even if it takes a long time.
Rumpus: On top of writing novels, you also run Craft Talk and the yearly “one thousand words of summer” challenge, with daily letters of encouragement from various authors. Does this community enliven your own novel writing?
Attenberg: It keeps me on track. And every year there’s a letter from one of the contributing writers that hits the right chord and comes at the right time. That’s the beauty of these letters of writing advice. You never know when you’re going to need it. This year, that letter came from Jennine Capó Crucet. It was about writing from a place where you know you can throw it all away. So that’s what I did. I gave myself permission to just write something I could throw away. Then I loved everything I wrote, and now I’ve written thirty thousand words this summer, the new beginning of the book, and it's great. I definitely feel the accountability. Every year. We're doing it together. It's equalizing.
Rumpus: Even somebody who's written ten books needs that accountability sometimes.
Attenberg: People need it, and it works. It really works. But also, you don't need it. We can write all the time on our own. But during one thousand words of summer, it feels like a friend is there with me.
Rumpus: So, you’re working on another novel now. How many more novels do you have inside you?
Attenberg: I’m not planning to stop writing. Will my next novels get published? Who knows. Does it matter? Probably not. How many books do I have in me? A million. I’m in my fifties now. I’ve slowed down a bit but know more of what I want and can look back at what I’ve done. And I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
I first encountered the works of Porochista Khakpour in 2014. As an MFA candidate at Columbia, I was eager for Iranian-American voices in fiction. To read Khakpour is to carefully parse through works of fiction and nonfiction that unfurl family, identity, and Persian myth—I can remember devouring Khakpour’s second novel, The Last Illusion, feeling unburdened. She is a rare writer, and to see life and the Iranian-American experience through her astute and caring pages feels something akin to landing.
In Tehrangeles (Pantheon Books, 2024), Khakpour’s latest novel, the world she satirizes makes for a delightful romp. We meet the Milani’s, a filthy rich family living the (Iranian)-American dream. Al, the immigrant father, is a bombastic junk food tycoon. His wife, Homa, is reeling. As they raise their four daughters (Violet, Roxanna, Mina, and Haylee) in the terrain known as “Tehrangeles,” the splashy landscape of Los Angeles where Iranian-Americans reside (and thrive), the opportunity for their very own reality show slowly snaps the scaffolding of a home, unraveling everything inside.
It was a joy to speak with Khakpour over a Zoom call in May. We discussed the whirlwind of Tik Tok, identity erasure, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
***
The Rumpus: I want to unpack the absurdity of celebrity culture, and in particular, the terrain that has become influencer culture. Did you always want to write a novel about this world? What was appealing to you about exploring celebrity and social media?
Porochista Khakpour: I’ve always been very obsessed with pop culture. Anyone who follows my social media knows. Even if it's not about my writing, or my literary interests, I’m always commenting, or tuned into pop culture. I’m forty-six, and I think I’m pretty up on things that Gen Z knows about. That’s just always been my interest. Most of my books do have some pop cultural angle in them, but Tehrangeles is the most absorbing. I think I had to get to a place, and maybe it took my fifth book, where I wasn’t so concerned about sounding smart. I’ve already written the smart books; the deep and heartbreaking books. I don’t feel like I have to prove myself as much anymore. If I had done Tehrangeles as my fist book, I think I would have been too worried about it being called a beach read or being labeled as women’s fiction. I would have had all of these other insecurities. Tehrangeles allowed me to not only investigate the Iranian-Americans of that demographic, but it also let me get deep into this world of bubbly, frothy trash. I guess some people might call it guilty pleasures, but it sounds absurd to say that—it's such a big part of American culture.
The book is kind of a period piece, too. It takes place in the first half of 2020, and I had to dive deeply into the world of TikTok. I was already on TikTok for a while before that, and I’ve only started posting publicly there recently, but I've been lurking for ages. It’s an amazing place to go when you’re interested in pop culture and celebrity and all that, and it introduced me to the world of content creators and influencers. This aspect of contemporary pop culture allowed me to paint the characters in a deeper way. These girls are just children, really; they’re Gen Z, but they all have jobs that they take really seriously. They’re making money, even though they have money.
Rumpus: I appreciated the versatility on the page. The humor is electric and sharp, and the dialogue is so astute. At the same time, the novel is deeply poignant. You also include a section written entirely in Farsi, allowing us to further access the characters despite the boundaries of language. In terms of craft, what does it mean to use different threads to tell a story?
Khakpour: Iran is really important when I’ve been grappling with Iranian-American life. I haven’t been able to return to Iran since I was a young child. I was born there, and I lived there for several years, but I don’t ever really feel comfortable writing a work set in Iran. I only have limited knowledge of that. Obviously, I can imagine it, but it’s not enough for me. There are many writers who do that a lot better than me; who write very directly from that experience. Iran, in almost all my books, becomes a symbol of an impossibility. It’s always tied to yearning, and longing, and characters wanting to go back to a homeland that they’re separated from. I wanted there to be a real distance between Iran and Iranian-America. In the novel, there are moments where I have relatives and friends in Iran calling the family, and telling them that they’ve heard about certain events in the US, and their show, and I wanted the Iranians to be different from the family. I wanted there to be this really big cultural divide. That was important to me.
I didn’t think that I would get away with the section written in Farsi, either, but my publishers didn’t touch that at all. In fact, we just had this funny situation where we have a wonderful, well-known actress who’s Iranian-American doing the audiobook. She only speaks some Persian, and she felt that her Persian wasn’t good enough to read that whole section out loud. So, as we speak, my mother is in a recording studio in LA, reading the mother’s (Homa) part that was all written in Farsi. My dad, too, helped me write that part, because I didn’t want it to sound like my Persian. I could have written it in my Persian, but I wanted it to sound like someone of a different generation writing a little section on Iran, and nature, and things like that. I had my dad do a lot of it, and now my mom is reading it. It’s kind of a weird and unique thing for an author of books.
Rumpus: The last two books you published, Sick and Brown Album, were incredible works of nonfiction. How did it feel to revisit fiction? Was it muscle memory?
Khakpour: I love fiction. Fiction has always been my true love, and I would have never been a writer if it weren’t for fiction. It was writing nonfiction that felt a little bit like tourism. I was working on Tehrangeles the whole time through all of these books, and I thought that Tehrangeles was going to be my second novel. It's funny, though—my nonfiction is more popular than my fiction. It’s always been like this. The amount of readers my memoir Sick had is more than all of my books combined. The success of that book was slightly frustrating for me, because it kind of proved what I was worried about—ultimately, my greatest function for people was as a nonfiction writer. It’s nice to go back to fiction, though, to remind people that this is what came first and foremost, and what I will always think of most as writing. As art, really. Nonfiction as art feels a little bit secondary for me, even though the greatest nonfiction, of course, incorporates all of those craft elements that create great art. I compartmentalize pretty heavily, and it’s just a totally different mode to be writing in nonfiction. I just try to handle that in a much more straightforward way.
Rumpus: This is also one of the first novels I’ve read that incorporated the pandemic. It plays a large role in the story, forcing the characters to confront various aspects of themselves, and each other. I’m curious about what it meant to revisit those early months of lockdown, and how it functioned in this setting.
Khakpour: I’m someone who is interested in things right after they happen, and I want to read about life as it happens. There was a challenge, though, in writing a funny book about the pandemic. I wanted the book to obviously be satire, and to be fun, but my real life experience of the pandemic was purely horrific. I lost seven friends. I lived in Queens, New York, which was very hard hit. As I was working on this book, the soundtrack was just nonstop ambulances 24/7. I felt like I did with 9/11; I was in the center of the hard hit area, and it was very disturbing.
Ultimately, I was a character that doesn’t really exist in the book. Maybe Mina, to some degree. Mina is longing for a communal experience, and she’s trying to educate her family. And then you have someone like Roxanna, who does my worst nightmare, which is throwing a super-spreader party. That was also a fun climax for me. A book that has a super-spreader party as its climax seemed thrilling, because the odds of me ever being in that situation were zero. Then there’s someone like Haylee, of course, who is so young, and so impressionable. She basically loses her mind during the pandemic. She goes down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, and ultimately becomes MAGA. In looking at Iran and some of the responses with Gaza, people are seeing the conservative Iranians very visibly right now. Right in UCLA—the heart of Tehrangeles—the aggressors tearing apart encampments are conservative Iranians. There’s an assumption that the proper position as an Iranian is to be anti-Palestinian, which is insane. Their own internalized Islamophobia is such that it has to take any position that’s very anti-Iran. There’s a feeling that the family is kind of Republican, or Republican-adjacent, but Haylee is very blatantly conservative. It’s to the point where she keeps arguing with her sisters that she’s white, and Haylee wants to identify as white. Ultimately, she was one of my favorite characters to write, because she was just so different. I could write horrible things. That experience of writing things that you’re just so opposed to; that are so insulting to your total soul—in a sense, it was kind of thrilling. Writing her, and then trying to find a way to save her—it was a difficult tightrope act.
Rumpus: I want to explore identity erasure. With Roxanna in particular, we see what it means to reject her Iranian-ness completely.
Khakpour: I think the whole thing about Roxanna pretending to be an ethnicity that she’s not, which is the dramatic tension in her arc, is pretty real. People may think I made that up. It’s very surreal, and how could that really happen? But there are a lot of Iranian youth, I think, who pretend to be an ethnicity that they’re not, because Iranians often do have the luxury of passing for lots of things.
In all of our lifetimes, whether you're Gen Z, Gen X, or even a boomer—you know that there’s been a lot of anti-Iranian sentiment. This is especially true in the West, but it occurs everywhere. Even throughout the Middle East there is so much anti-Iranian sentiment. It’s very tempting for young people that are already very concerned about issues of identity to then just take that leap over there. I wanted Roxanna to be in this pickle where she’s built this other identity for herself, and it works perfectly that her last name works with it; her dad’s occupation, the fact that the sisters are spaced out in school… everything works out until the idea of reality hits. And that’s kind of a funny thing. We’re talking about reality TV, but we’re also just talking about reality. Suddenly, you have to be really real. Reality TV, of course, wants to exaggerate and embellish the real elements. How can they not talk about ethnicity? Now she’s just in a state of absolute terror about what she can do to make that work, and in the end, it kind of becomes a non-issue. Nobody cares that much, but to her, it’s the end of the world. There’s this whole reckoning with her boyfriend, who is Italian, and then it’s his forgiveness of her in the end, and what that all means… I think that it was a good conceit for a piece of fiction. And I think it’s also a very real thing. I think almost every Iranian I’ve ever known—whether for issues of protection, or whatever it could be—has pretended to be someone they’re not. I’ve done it before; certainly around the 9/11 era. There were times where I felt unsafe. I would say that I was Italian. I think it’s pretty understandable, even though it's extremely comical.
***
Yasmin Roshanian is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, BOMB, Catapult, and elsewhere. She is at work revising a novel surrounding Iranian-Americans as they navigate college during the onset of the Obama Administration.
The Myriad Worlds We Each Contain: Mini-Interview with Maya Jewell Zeller
By Janet Rodriguez
Maya Jewell Zeller writes poems that glitter, like crystal snowflakes, and land with such beautiful grace you might not expect them to be the swift agents of change they are. Zeller’s most recent collection of poetry, Out Takes / Glove Box (New American Press, 2023), selected by Eduardo Corral for the New American Poetry Prize, is a gift to her readers. Structured in five distinct sections, each containing thematically focused poems, Zeller paints image after image of beauty and starkness, life and death, science and history, motherhood and loneliness. Diane Seuss describes the book as enchanting, where “the vehicles that carry us into and out of imaginative spaces abound.” Zeller’s newest project, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), is the equally impressive flip side of a proverbial coin. Complementing the creative surface, Advanced Poetry is a college textbook with a diverse canon. Upon closer examination, the anthology is an ice-cutter of college texts, where readers and educators alike are challenged “to push their writing and reading into new understandings and innovations, across varied and inclusive global aesthetics.”
In May of 2024, Zeller was featured at the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series at Central Washington University, which was broadcast for those of us who couldn’t be there in person. She had recently returned from a month-long residency at the University of Oxford, where she worked on current and future creative projects, a place where she “was also able to rest and gather up energy for the next stretch of work.”
Through a series of emails, Zeller and I discussed what structure means for a writer, how creativity is sparked through inspiration, and why landscapes inspire her poetry and conversation.
***
The Rumpus: I love how Out Takes / Glove Box takes the reader on a multifaceted journey through the imagination. When someone asks you what your book is, what do you say?
Maya Jewell Zeller: I think of it as maybe an avant-garde, indie, documentary film, or a museum with several curated and related exhibits. I really want readers to feel invited and welcome in it, even as the protagonist is very specifically a version or many versions of myself—my girl-self, my woman-self, my mother-self, middle-aged, in the academy, in late capitalism, feeling the extreme othering and splitting effects of the economic over selfhood, as she wills magic back into her life, and defends her rights to her reproductive system and her mind’s way of mapping image and narrative. I’m so grateful to Diane Seuss for her insightful and generous blurb, as well as to Eduardo Corral, Laura Read, and Carol Guess for how they all saw parts of the book that others didn’t—that kind of close reading and validation of what the book is doing as an art space. It felt like they understood its very viscera.
Rumpus: The five sections of the book contain complementary poems that are also very different from one another. Why did you structure the book this way?
Zeller: I think of the book’s shape as a Wunderkammer or Commonplace book on a self, fractured by contemporary pressures and mended by everyday joys. I often quote Kazim Ali on his own writing of Bright Felon, a hybrid text which he says, “wrote itself out of requirement.” I feel this way about my own organic forms, both in terms of poetic structure and in terms of a collection’s arc. In a lineage with Denise Levertov and Hopkins, I do believe art rises up and out of us and we need to listen to its need for unconventional orders, disjunctive music, and surreal images. EJ Ianelli asked me about this—which he called “difficult poetry”— in a Spokane Public Radio interview back in fall, and I told him that rendering a difficult world into art often requires us to take shapes that fragment narrative.
In the case of Out Takes, the book’s five sections feel to me like a cabinet of curiosities or a curated set of museum rooms. It begins with a frontis poem, “Field Girl Come Home,” which is both an invocation/invitation from the mud fields, and a documentation of setting in which we might imagine the book takes place. Section 1 follows that [with] a set of poems that are “documentary” and then a series of “out takes” from that documentary—developing the conceit of film, through deep image poetics. Section 2 are all autobiographical poems of the speaker’s self, past and present. Section 3 practices embodied poetics by taking the voice of a persona: a woman who has been institutionalized because she believes she used to be a mermaid. This mythic, lyric imagining, I hope, creates a space in which we ultimately believe women—who are rarely believed, in our imaginary and real worlds—and also follow these women’s emotional truths to deeper understandings. Section 4 is a set of spells, which reiterate the need for magic as a healing space. It also suggests that revision and re-seeing allow us to fully inhabit. This section repeats two versions of one poem—the way the book keeps insisting that more than one way of existing deserves equal space. Finally, Section 5 returns us to a series of outtakes: surreal dreamscapes that pull from the book’s imagery and narrative suggestions and deepen those threads. We are invited to imagine, again, the whole book as a film with a cutting room floor ready for more collage-making.
I hope the book also serves as an invitation to create form, imagine one’s own art and art life as complicated and worth sharing in whatever shape it needs to take, to invent models, to move outside normative expectations for both poetic and book structures and allow the material itself–and our deep imaginative spaces and diverse reading canons—to guide us.
Rumpus: The language in your poetry is thoughtful, but dangerous. Precise, but deadly. I feel like my skin is being detached from me as I'm reading. What is it about language that can do this?
Zeller: Detached skin! I love this, and I’m overjoyed that you had that visceral experience. It recalls the well-known moment in Emily Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” I love that—a feeling so many poets have written about since, and I do not pretend to really understand it—poets, who make art with words, sometimes translate an experience or feeling so successfully that someone else is able to also feel it, across time and space and in another body. That is what I always aspire to, and I’m honored you felt it.
Rumpus: You began your reading with, “I am most comfortable when I am dissecting a dead cow..." I know I might be misquoting you, but you ended this part by saying, "I want to see the worlds inside of this..." How many worlds does a person possess deep inside?
Zeller: I was reading from my essay, “Scavenger Panorama,” originally published in Willow Springs Magazine and then listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. I like to think that Vivian Gornick and anyone else who read it understood the Joan Didion feeling of being on nodding terms with our past (and present?) selves, the myriad worlds we each contain. I hope that it gives other writers—particularly those who don’t always feel themselves represented in literature—permission to share those worlds, to create space to expand them.
Janet: How do your inherited landscapes influence your art?
Maya: My landscapes are both coastal and inland, in the Pacific Northwest, as well as probably some percent Iowan (my mother is from Des Moines). I hope that my connection to and love for these various watersheds and home-spaces comes through in the poetry—that it may be riparian and delta and converge and sheetwash and rivulet and soaking wet and barn-roof-beat, as well as ferned and mossed and also logged and fished and mud-rutted and salvaged and repurposed and gritty and glittery and full of tall grasses and flung seeds, hay and scrape and grass-cut legs and rusted gears. I hope it is as beautiful and complicated as the people and plants and animals in these places and the people who pass through, too. I think of other contemporary poets who write of rural spaces with both gentleness and unflinching questioning—poets like M.L. Smoker and Joe Wilkins and Vievee Francis and Kathryn Smith and Canese Jarboe, and feel an unwavering depth of gratitude that I get to be alive and working with language during this time, when the pastoral and antipastoral and necropastoral coexist in our conversations about life and love, on and off the page.
Rumpus: You collaborated with Kathryn Nuernberger to compile Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. It’s an ideal textbook: the most inclusive, representative sampling of modern and classical poetry. Is this the reason you traveled to England? What is your dream for this book?
Zeller: It’s always an honor to collaborate with Kate, and we were really thrilled to be able to bring more light to the poets in its pages and moreover, to encourage every person writing to curate their own canons. That, really, is our dream for this book—that it gives permission to poets at all stages of their careers to dream their own ways forward in a web of rhizomatic literary and other ancestries.
Traveling to England was interesting at this stage in my own academic, creative, and personal lives because while I have genealogical roots in Scotland, and I feel at home in the green and gardens (and mud), my own upbringing was in rust and ravine and logging communities—people of physical labor, and not much “of the academy.” I always feel like an imposter in higher-ed, so I felt this even more at a prestigious school like Oxford, where you wear a formal academic gown to a swearing-in—and then to a dinner. These are beautiful events held in ancient halls and heralded sometimes by a horn and chalices of wine and gavels and by people who represent their fields with joy and depth and sometimes a public bravado and others a real nerdy shyness I find very charming. I want the poetry textbook to feel like all of that for its readers—but the swearing-in to poetry can be a ceremony the poet invents themselves, and the attire anything that feels holy to their own culture and creature, and honoring of their deep personal poetics, from any background or way of being.
🎈Update!🎈The Rumpus received additional support for our summer fundraiser yesterday. With these new contributions, we reached our 15K goal! THANK YOU! These funds will pay the 300 contributors we'll publish in the next 12 months.
ICYMI donate any time: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/the-rumpus/general_support
“In a world where it is far too easy to feel disconnected, I'm grateful to The Rumpus for providing a way to expand my literary community.” –Gabriella Souza
Help us continue expanding literary communities by contributing to our summer fundraiser!
“The Rumpus is an amazing, respectable magazine that aims to publish the finest art on all levels. It's a place where great writers pass through as a rite of passage. The magazine also gave me great feedback on my short story and a sense of creative capacity for other venues to take my career seriously.”
-Demetrius Buckley, Rumpus Fiction contributor, award-winning poet, part of Empowerment Avenue Collective @demetriusbuckley
Donate to The Rumpus at http://bit.ly/raisetherumpus and help us increase Contributor pay!
“The Rumpus means the world to me, both as an author and as a reader. Writing about addiction can be vulnerable, so having an editor who was attuned to that experience was such a gift to both me as a writer and to the essay itself. At its heart, The Rumpus loves not just writing, but writers, which is one of the many things that makes it such a critical part of our literary community.” -Christy Tending
We love writers more than we can truly express. They're the lifeblood of The Rumpus, and they make us who we are as a publication. Help us show writers just how much they mean to us by making a tax-deductible donation to our $15K summer fundraiser for better contributor pay at http://bit.ly/raisetherumpus
“The Rumpus amplifies voices by and for the people, versus the cannon. Their existence is crucial in publishing work that pushes boundaries in ways many literary journals don’t. Being published in The Rumpus was a dream. They made my work and voice feel valued.” -Emily Joy Oomen
There's nothing we want more than to make our writers feel heard and valued. Help us show our writers just how much we value their voices, their stories, and their creative labor by giving a tax-deductible donation to our summer fundraiser now at http://bit.ly/raisetherumpus
“Because of the courage The Rumpus offers writers and readers, my story, or at least one chapter, is out of my body and in the world. My narrative in The Rumpus has gifted me credibility in the industry with agents and other publications, which means doors opening, which means a broader audience. Which means, I’m making a difference. And this, for me, means the world.” -Rebecca Evans
How can you help us usher vital stories like Rebecca's into the world? Donate to our summer $15K fundraiser to better compensate our 24-25 contributors at http://bit.ly/raisetherumpus
What will your tax-deductible donation to Raise the Rumpus do exactly?
✒️Triple our monthly budget for contributor pay
📔Pay 300 24-25 contributors
⌨️Set minimum payments for authors & comic artists
Just $50 fully funds one contributor. $100 funds two contributors. And $300 funds six contributors. You can donate any amount (every little bit helps!) but you can also donate within our Rewards packages and receive prizes for your dedication to the magazine.
🎁You can receive a Rumpus sticker for donating as a Supporter.
🎈For donating as a Friend, you will receive a Letters in the Mail letter from Jami Nakamura Lin, Morgan Parker, or Claudia Acevedo Quinones.
🎀And when you donate as an Ally, you will receive a Letters in the Mail letter AND a WRITE LIKE A MOFO mug.
“Truth & beauty. Humor, grief, experiment—The Rumpus knows that language is always political. I'm indebted to folks like Rumpus Poetry Editors Carolina Ebeid and Cortney Lamar Charleston, who so generously opened up a space for some of my earliest published work, widening the doorways to and through literature. Long live The Rumpus!” -Janan Alexandra
Our summer $15K fundraiser to better compensate our 24-25 contributors is going strong! The Rumpus has been championing experimental, risk-taking work for 15 years. Help us continue that work and help us PAY WRITERS who take such risks by making a tax-deductible donation at http://bit.ly/raisetherumpus
“During a collaborative conversation with my editor, she encouraged me to burrow into the heart of the story so I found a closing that finally, finally gave voice to why I'd written the piece in the first place. The Rumpus encourages invaluable conversation and connection, which are some of the very reasons we engage with art.” -Eshani Surya
Yesterday we launched a $15K summer fundraiser to better compensate The Rumpus's 300 contributors between Aug 2024–July 2025. Help us continue our legacy of facilitating invaluable conversations and connections by making a tax-deductible donation by JULY 12!
Today we’re launching a $15,000 summer fundraiser to better compensate the magazine’s 300 contributors between August 2024–July 2025. Recently, The Rumpus has started working toward being financially sustainable, so that we can continue operating independently and in a way that better supports our community of readers and writers. For this fundraiser we’re setting our sights on increasing contributor pay.
Reaching our $15K goal by July 12 will allow us to triple our current monthly contributor budget from $400 to $1,250. This will allow us to set a payment minimum for original work. For example: $50 fully funds one contributor, $100 funds two contributors, and $300 covers six contributors.
A tax-deductible donation is meaningful at any level you’re able to give—every dollar counts.
While The Rumpus’s revenue improved in 2023 from previous years, fundraising and donor support are a new important part of our model. There’s still a large gap between the funds we bring in and the amount needed to run a magazine we’re proud of.
We’re asking our readers and the literary community to show that we collectively value creative labor by DIRECTLY supporting the writers we’ll publish in 2024-25.
