hika.

What writers/artists find yourself looking to for inspiration? How do you feel they inspire your work?

I think my foundation, when I was a teenager, was primarily white men like Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess. Now, I still love them, but the discovery of Susan Sontag and Simone Weil at 16 opened my world, as I had to learn that women could be intellectual. That was the articulate realization I had: Women can be intellectual. Weil makes you cry. It’s very soulful. I’d like to think I have that strain in my own writing and I try to nurture that. My absolute favorite artist is Leonora Carrington who is first a painter but also a short story writer. She is a surrealist and she has all these unusual relations between animals and women which I really enjoy, and I think reflects that embodied experience of being a woman. I also love Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. I think a lot of philosophers inspire the images and stories I am drawn to. Anyone who is strange. I forgot to say Sun Ra is actually my absolute favorite artist. His early singles, his poetry. It breaks me. Filmmakers inspire my writing too, like William Klein or Jonas Mekas, who was a refugee from Lithuania during Nazi occupation. He is like the first youtuber, but in the 70s with Super8 film. He would be chopping up and making his own documentaries, and they were poetry. He thought of film as poetry. 

When did you start writing, and how has this evolved into your writing today?

I have this one memory of being in fifth grade and having creative free-write time. I wrote the story of this girl who was anxious to get in the water and learn how to swim, and I was asked to read it aloud. After I read it, there was a moment of silence where my teacher was looking at me with this strange look. And then she immediately applaused. I enjoy external gratification. You have to tell yourself certain things that will let you keep writing without that external gratification, but at the end of the day it’s nice. I didn’t read seriously until I was about 16 and I read Narnia again. The Magician’s Nephew, the prequel, has a stunning scene of Aslan creating the world through song, and I was like, oh, holy shit words can do that, can convey to me this godly choir without any sound. So I started writing, I would say, when I started taking academics more seriously, which was junior year of high school. I wrote poems like Jonas Mekas wrote for his own films. They were like flurries. It was freeing to see in words an affirmation of how I felt life was.

The motif of the porpoise that comes up throughout this poem is so interesting, what about porpoises caused you to make them central to this piece? Was it a specific experience?

That has to do with a Norm Macdonald joke where the punchline is, “well, I think I’m serving a youthful porpoise!” So that really just came up for the word play. But then, as I said, I’m really interested in animals and their subjectivity and such, and they’re definitely a defining facet of my soul. And it’s interesting to me to think of writing and the purpose of writing as a living thing that you nurture, and take care of just like all relationships. I also think about the texture of a porpoise, they have this shiny, flat skin that’s meant to be in water. And when we touch that, it’s almost uncanny. 

What was your writing process like for this piece? 

Sometimes I’ll enter without control, this loose state of consciousness. It’s when you’re not self conscious. And you just start. This is mainly how I write—it’s like painting to me. Tactile. I often write little jottings in my notebooks or in my notes, during class or during other things, which feels like I’m accessing something deeper than my rational mind, and a bunch of words start coming out. And then they have nice textures, they’re texturally compelling. So I think that [this poem] started out with maybe one or two stanzas of nonsense, but there was something there. Then the meaning revealed itself to me. It took me a while to realize this poem is about basically the portrait of the artist as a young woman, the doubts and anxieties which come up in terms of understanding that this is your life. There are periods of extreme doubt, as with any writer, but especially with anyone whose experiences, such as desire, exist outside of the symbolic order. But I don’t like the “I,” I don’t like identifying with what I am. Because I think that’s shite and that the beautiful thing about the human imagination is that you can enter the body of a porpoise. 

I love how simultaneously whimsical and visceral and strange this poem is. Your distinctive use of diction, punctuation, and mis/re-spellings contributes to this. Like spelling “say” like “sey,” and “alarm” like “alarum.” How did this mode of poetry come about? Is it unique to this piece, or is it typical of your work?

I’d say as of right now it’s pretty typical to my work. Prose and poetry. I had something published in Persimmons when I was 19, or 18, which I regret exists on the internet now. Two of my favorite poets are John Berryman and Cathy Park Hong, who critiques Berryman in many ways, but also takes from him. John Berryman does this stark thing with voices and he’s a difficult person to read because he uses minstrelsy, but then these other poets today are stealing stuff from him and filling in the gaps. Sublime artists. There’s something with voices and theatrics that he was drawn to in a racist way that then other poets take and transform. I think there’s a cacophony of voices that comes out from most writers. With wordplay it’s fun to see how malleable and plastic words are. And the “sey,” there’s a logical reason behind it. The first instance of it is “for the right thing to sey,” but “say” is written wrong. It’s always this optimism or hope that is immediately tainted. I do that a lot in everything I write. It’s supposed to be shifty. 

Are you primarily a poet? If so, what makes you gravitate towards poetry? If not, what genre do you typically write in and why?

It’s difficult because poetry is the hardest form. And it’s only in college that I’ve written short stories that I poured a lot of effort into. They all start as poems, every single one. I think poetry is how I think, I’m addicted to reading other poets and other poets will inspire any prose I write. But I think time will tell ultimately. When I write prose, the consistent critique is that it doesn’t make sense. In a poem, you have a bit more trust in the abstraction. My professor Michael Leong told me that you have to near the breaking point of cognition but still have something that gathers at the end, even if it’s inarticulate. It can’t just be nonsense. 

I am so curious about the title of this piece. Can you speak more about why you chose to title the piece what you did?

I think it sets the tone immediately that this is a poem about debris collected into one place. The comic tone of the title treats the whole poem as if it could be just jest, but in fact there is something beneath it all that’s a bit more grave, a bit more uncomfortable. It starts out, and then the death bird comes and then “Isabel,” the speaker—also my name—says yes to men, mouth spuming, there’s desperation. But there’s also a detachment that comedy offers that allowed me to go that depth. So much of writing is finding the right accidents. Like the porpoise thing happened to work or that happened to thread into this other thing. That’s where you encounter the spiritual elevation of art as being something that commands its own life and is its own living thing that you only accommodate. 

How has your writing grown at Kenyon? Has Kenyon changed who you are as a writer?

Kenyon definitely pushed me as a writer. I came here because it’s considered “the writers’ school.” I think they should definitely fund the English department more if they’re gonna call themselves that. But in the classes here, I had professors that believed in my work. I never had the kind of typical caustic professor who would be like, “this isn’t good enough.” I just had really supportive professors. I think they trusted me to be able to take criticism and saw how serious I was and took me seriously. Professor Parssinen, in Intro to Fiction, because of the consideration she had for my work, it didn’t feel like she was just doing her job. That helped me take myself more seriously as a writer. And then taking Advanced Creative Nonfiction with Ira, I wrote a 75 page draft of a chapbook, and his excitement for it, and for me for having written it, was a necessary sign. 

A beautiful thing about Kenyon is that when you read and you share your stuff, your friends and your professors and people who know you are listening. Because of the fragmentation of communities, your audience is often anonymous, or people don’t know you as a person, or have any care for you. When we had our reading, I was doing voices for my different characters, and I felt like I was with a group of people who I knew loved me, and it was warm rather than anything about impressing people. So that’s a really lucky thing, to experience that in the beginning.

What’s your dream writing project to work on? 

At this point, it’s probably a movie because I think that’s the route for our age. People aren’t reading novels as much, people don’t take seriously short stories or novellas. I think writing a movie with a trusted director and an established relationship with a cinematographer. We would work together, but I’d be the writer and have agency without becoming annoying. That would be my ideal. I want to work in film. That’s where I’m gonna work. 

Would you want to be a director as well?

Yeah, totally. I’m directing Titus Andronicus coming up this Friday. I’ve directed a short film this semester. I constantly write scripts for short films. And in them, the people are like the people in my poems where often their name is their essence in some capacity. And they’re highly representational, rather than realist figures. There’s a lack of realism in almost everything I do. Realism’s a nightmare because it can’t even recognize itself as a nightmare. I think that the theatrical performance of life goes far deeper than a performance of “what’s real and truthful.” I’m very interested in theater and acting and so forth. And the way an actor can just make a really banal line come to light. It’s crazy to me. Like Christopher Walken, he gets these scripts where he has to say the most banal thing, like, “How’s your kids?” And he’ll say that and I’m like, holy fuck.

It seems like all of your artistic pursuits are connected. Could see yourself making something where the actual mediums are interacting with each other, like some sort of hybrid work?

My first art that I ever did was painting, so I think that’s why some of my favorite artists are painters. My ideal would be to be an auteur, which is someone who writes and directs a movie. But this country is not meant for artists in so many ways. There used to be subsidies and stuff, but that’s all been gutted. You need low rent for artistry to thrive, and that simply doesn’t exist, or when it does, it’s just a bunch of gentrifiers and young college students who need to find a place to live pushing people out. As we know, from this country, there’s not a real concern for people. Italy is paying people to go there, so that might be in the cards. There’s a necessary laziness to the artist that is infringed upon by the fast paced demise of the world. We need to get creative in terms of where we find our artistic communities. 

In a perfect world, what would your writing aspirations be? Or where would writing take you? Or is it inseparable from the reality of what it is to be a writer? 

In a perfect world I probably wouldn’t write. In some capacity, a perfect world is before we stood up and started walking on two feet. When we were still ape-like. At that point, things were okay. There was some Fall from Eden which then made writing exist, made people have the need to write. For writers, writing is as necessary as water. Rilke and Letters to a Young Poet was very inspiring. He asks if you would be able to continue life without writing and for many people who want to be writers the answer is yes. But it’s not for me, and I know that much. I can’t ever know if it’s good, what I’m doing, but I know that I need water. 

In some capacity I know we’re in a semi post-literate society. Emily Dickinson is inspiring to me because she wrote and didn’t think anyone would see it, yet she had all these beautiful satchels in her drawers. That, to me, is enough. There’s no end goal to writing, I think that’s important. So when you get into the gratification thing, it gets difficult because then you’re searching for that attention. But ultimately I like the definition of art as—to tie back into the porpoise poem—purposive purposelessness. I think that’s Kant’s definition of art. I think you’ve lived a good life if you’ve been utterly useless. The worst thing you can do is end up functioning.

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Isabel’s poem “sum noyve” will be published this May in HIKA’s 99th issue.