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Carlin Steere, a senior English major with an emphasis on creative writing, submitted “The Way Things Are,” which was included in our fall preview.

What inspirations did you have for this poem that you submitted to us? 

Yeah, so, my sophomore year, I took feminist philosophy with Professor Rebecca Lloyd Waller, and we were talking about the difference in how women are treated and men are treated when expressing emotion. And so we were talking a lot especially in court situations. So, I kept thinking about the, you know, Kavanaugh trials and how a lot of women in politics are treated very differently. Like how women, how we’re seen as irrational when expressing emotion versus when a man is to express emotion, it shows that he’s passionate. And just how emotion is not inherently a bad thing, but how anger is also an emotion, and how women are seen as emotional and how emotional is seen as a negative trait. So, it intrigued me. But yeah, I highly recommend I’ve taken a bunch of classes with Professor Waller, but feminist philosophy is definitely one that, you know, I learned a lot about.

Was the formatting of your poem intentional in any way or can you explain a little bit about that? 

Yeah. So, I primarily write nonfiction and so I read a lot of creative nonfiction. And I’ve been playing with form for the past couple of years, and when I was writing the poem, it was a way for me to write something in a quick manner um of something I wanted to talk about in a longer piece in the future, but I haven’t had the chance to. And so I love playing with form. um and I feel like I have five different thoughts going on in my head at the same time. And so when I shift or indent, it’s either a reflection of several thoughts in my head and I’m trying to figure out how to format them on the page. Or it is the equivalent of me I guess, for some writers they bold or italicize, and I feel like my way of doing that is just indenting or shifting. 

This is also just a general question, considering that you are an English major with an emphasis and creative writing, how often do you write? Like, is it like, I’m assuming it’s frequent? 

So I’ve been working on my thesis for the past year, so I’ve been writing a lot. I think my writing practice is definitely more feeling based than it probably should be. I write when I have a strong passion for things and usually that ends up being right before I go to bed. But lately I have been writing more consistently, every week or not every week, but multiple times a week. But if I’m writing over the summer, if I’m writing on a break, it tends to be more sporadic, when I’ve had some time to really think things through, I know that there are some writers who, and I’ve been trying to do this more where they will write to figure things out. And that’s something that I’ve been doing this past year. I’ve been trying to figure things out through my writing, but I prefer to have thought things out ahead of time. 

 Is there a meaning behind the title of your poem? Does that relate back to the feminist philosophy class that you mentioned earlier? 

After living 21 years, almost 22 years as a feminine-presenting person identifying as a woman, constantly facing people specifically men picking apart every argument that you have, depending on just how you present. As opposed to the actual content of what you say. It is so frustrating to feel as though that is the world that we live in. So, the way things are is it’s not me wanting to give in and say that this is the way things are so we should roll with it. It is disheartening and angering to know that it is the way that our society operates at the moment. I wrote this way before this recent election. I did not write it my sophomore year; that would have been 2022ish. I definitely believe I wrote this just over a year ago. But I feel like it reminds me that I have to continue with my feminist theory and feminist writing because of, you know, the administration and also just the way that I think that women are being attacked more frequently online, which is really scary. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this as well, but I don’t like social media, not that I try to be on TikTok because I think it’s a hellscape. But I worry a lot. I think that I’ve seen a lot more transphobia out in the open. I’ve seen a lot more misogyny out in the open, homophobia and,I don’t know; I value my educational experience and philosophy classes and GSS (Gender and Sexuality Studies) classes because I feel like everything I learned ends up in my writing and then plays on my mind for hopefully as long as I live.

Do you have writer’s block? Are you like a procrastinator or is it easy for you to get words onto a page? 

It depends. I do deal with writer’s block. It’s it I know that some people say that writer’s block doesn’t exist or that you should honor it, but I think that my writer’s block extends more so when I’m when I have a lot of my plate, so it’s not necessarily that I don’t want to write or I can’t write. It just comes from feeling like I have a lot going on. So there definitely have been periods of my time. At Kenyon and, you know, outside of Kenyon, I feel like my work has stalled. I think I’m trying to get better. A fiction professor that I had, visiting professor, Melissa Fallabino, who was here when I was a freshman, who’s wonderful and is now at UNC Chapel Hill, I believe. (She) had told us to bring around a small journal everywhere that we go, so that we could write things down. And for a period of time, I was loving having something tactile, but as I add more books to my bag back is heavy, and it hurts. So I’ve been really utilizing my notes app, which I love. Sometimes I have to make sense of it later and it doesn’t make any sense. And sometimes I’m able to jog my memory, but it’s definitely helped especially coming up with ideas of things that I want to write about if I do find myself kind of questioning or are coming into a period of writer’s block, I can whip it out just think, oh, I have this idea at this point. Let me try to flush it out now. 

Would you write, in the future potentially, like a collection of these poems?

So I actually self-published a collection when I was a freshman. This (“The Way Things Are”)  is not included in that. This is something that I honestly think about my work now because five times is better than it was done and it still won’t be five times as good as something I’ll produce when I’m 50, but I’m getting there. But yeah, I’ve been thinking about doing another collection and trying to submit it. Whether or not I give it to publishers or just keep it to myself. I currently have something that constitutes a second collection, but I don’t think that I want to put that out into the world because I think that my writing has changed. I think that my thoughts have changed as well. But I would definitely be open to it. But yeah, I I feel like I do write a lot of creative nonfiction now and that seems to be what I’m doing for my thesis and grad school in the future. But everything I write in poetry is not even fiction too. Everything is related, nothing is separate. So, it’s all stewing in my mind.