This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair on the 20th of November, 2022 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

I have so many thoughts about revisiting a work written by my teenaged self. What was it like to sit again with these poems? How did you feel reading back over them? About the nat that you were?

while i did a lot of revisiting old work for some of my most recent work, i don't know that any of my actual poetry made it directly onto these pages. it was more of a guiding principle when creating the erasures of various novels that you see in this book—this whole deep dive into my archive for my upcoming full-length visual poetry collection (random access memory) was pivotal to creating the fine line, really. i wanted to put myself into the mindset of my young self. the fine line arose as sort of an offshoot of random access memory, when the erasures i was writing for RAM started to get a little darker. subconsciously, i associate a lot of darkness with the time in my life i was examining, and back then, i read a lot of YA fiction and tried to emulate it. we're talking Gossip Girl, The A-List, The It Girl—if a teen girl would have wanted to read it in 2011, i probably read it. these kinds of books inspired a lot of my early writing, and working on these erasures definitely reawakened that part of my brain. i had recently been tasked with writing a poem without pronouns (like, any pronouns) for my MFA poetry workshop, and i decided to give myself the additional challenge of working with words that weren't my own, specifically erasure fragments. that led to wanting to go back into the books i used to read and write more erasures. it's become an interesting way to frame the simultaneous desire and terror i felt towards sexual activity. basically, tl;dr, i've been circling around girlhood for a while as i come into my identity as a queer adult, 

I remember writing the alt text for one of your Polaroid images and describing a head thrown back as if in ecstacy or pain. I doubted the ambiguity for a minute then left it. Tell me more about how you think this collection is walking that line.

the polaroids were made when i was in undergrad for a final project in my freshman seminar. at the time, i was examining the intersections of pleasure and artifice, mostly through pornographic magazines. my friend had this magazine that i tore a page out of, where this woman was grinning from ear to ear, about to be penetrated. something about it was so absurd to me—probably my own conflicted feelings towards sex, especially heterosexual sex. so i took these photos with my ex with the idea that they'd be unedited and authentic. they ended up a bit more staged than that, and i've always felt drawn back to them, like that project was never really finished. in some ways, i think of myself as a prop in those photos, particularly given the way things transpired with that particular partner. but i also remember my excitement to make those images and the electricity of the relationship, and i still feel like those images toe the line of pain and pleasure myself. 

and the text really underscores that, because for a while, while there was this excitement to explore sex, i also had a genuine apprehension towards it. the push and pull you see in these erasures between pain and pleasure is extremely reflective of the way i came into my own as a sexually active person. i had a frighteningly early start to that, so my understanding of the ways in which i was expected to be objectified by men was shaped early and lasted a long time. i still feel that after that much time spent on compulsory heterosexuality, i've freed myself by choosing to exist in my body the way i do now. that's a long way of saying that my relationship with sex is complicated, and it was important for me to dip into both the pain and the pleasure of it.

There are so many perfect summations of adolescence in these poems. For me, I'm thinking "why not?               sounds like fun" and "it makes me / bad nervous". And then two or three turns to the decidedly adult. I'm thinking of "anything / comfortable       is           boring to me.". Not to say ennui isn't a theme of adolescence but only that the follow up "after a while i / don't want to.                      under– / fill / anymore." feels decidedly like the reflections of someone outgrowing a space.  Is this reflective of how you entered your twenties? Would you say that transition came naturally or were you, like the "center of a peach", "slammed, / fuck– / ing everywhere." like so many of us were?

i spent a looooooooooong time in a space i'd decidedly outgrown. i was absolutely "slammed, / fuck- / ing everywhere." but i'm also historically pretty afraid of change, so while i made some progress towards feeling comfortable enough in my own skin to stop sleeping with people who treated me terribly, it was really easy to undo that progress when someone who felt familiar came along. you can see me slowly work my way towards transitioning before i dated my last ex, and then i look at the photos of me from when we were together and they just feel off. so i consider my twenties to begin in earnest at 24, when that was over and i started transitioning for real. to properly address the question, i came into my twenties like a "little hot mess," to quote Fall Out Boy.

As someone who has published a significant body of work, and as a publisher yourself, I'm wondering if you could reflect on choosing a path for your projects. Does a collection tell you how it wants to be published? Does someone so prolific ever trouble themselves about whether or not they are writing to fit any specific call? I suppose I'm asking, when you put pen to paper, what is the goal?

collections absolutely tell me how they want to be published. i wrote my first chapbook knowing i wanted to self-publish it, while my next two books were written with the intention of being submitted and published by a press (but it was very nebulous beyond that as to where). the fine line started out as a text-only microchapbook called restricted reading, but it didn't feel super complete. i was honestly grateful to link up with kith on this one, because i felt like y'all really embrace hybrid work and this one needed the photos. i probably would have self-pubbed it if you weren't into it because i wanted to maintain that element, and let's be honest, not everyone is willing to take on a poetry manuscript with a photographic component. i also feel like regardless, a level of creative control feels important to me; i'm cool with feedback, but i'm not interested in working with a publisher that wants to turn my manuscript into something that it's not. because my work is so centered around processing and healing, i know that a super traditional publishing experience may never be for me. and i'm kind of okay with that, because ultimately my goal with sharing my work is to connect to viewers/readers who may share experiences with me.

Alright, here's the one you all get to answer at my expense: honest answers only, what was your experience of being published by kith?

not to sound like a kiss-ass or paid partner, but i really enjoyed it. i mentioned that aspect of creative control earlier and i think that was what did it for me. i never felt like i was compromising things i wanted in order to fit a bigger mission statement or whatnot. i also have to say: i'm a weird thinker. my brain is weird. (cole_sprouse_i'm_a_weirdo.gif) my brain activity ebbs and flows greatly, and i like to respond to things right away so i don't forget, but it's difficult to form thoughts in email-speak sometimes. i so valued the informality of working with kith for this reason. it wasn't overwhelming.

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