Interview with Writer Chaya Bhuvaneswar

By Anita Felicelli

Editor’s Note: Anita Felicelli interviewed writer and physician, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, about her award-winning story collection, White Dancing Elephants, which was the winner of the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and a PEN American finalist for debut shorty story collection in 2019. Jimin Han called the book a “daring mix of ancient, contemporary, and dystopic stories carries us to the heart of rarely exposed longing, loss, and the politics of violence and endurance in remarkable, elegant, heart-stopping prose,” while Kirkus Reviews called it a “evocative, electric...an exuberant collection.”

Felicelli asked Bhuvaneswar poignant questions regarding the collection, writing about anger, motherhood, pregnancy loss, gender, and sexuality. You can read the interview below.

Anita Felicelli: We rarely see depictions of Tamil women's anger in books or films. In this book, there are many stories that explore this culturally forbidden emotion in an exceptionally full way. Can you talk a little about your process and what you tap into when exploring anger, how you translate this anger into language on the page and any challenges around that?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: I love this question as a starting point, because it reflects an artistic choice to engage and acknowledge anger, to let it flower and see where it leads. That act is so critical, to refuse to swallow down our anger, especially within a Tamil culture so fundamentally dependent on women’s willingness and ability to gracefully stay ‘in place.’ It’s hard to imagine now: the things my father would say to me, the things other men in our community felt they had the right to say and do.

One year during undergrad, I actually wrote down a long list. Not only of what they’d said, but also what people outside the community had said to me in high school and college, the mocking slurs. So many stories come from that flint – those two experiences – violence ‘inside’ and violence ‘outside.’ I think the anger that flames out from those two striking against each other is at least partly what powers my work.

Once I start writing a given story, I would say there are no barriers I feel to fully exploring any emotion of the characters. The most challenging aspect of any piece of writing for me may be to understand how to structure the story around that emotional core, to find that balance between spontaneity and coherence.

AF: I found the miscarriage story that opens the collection really beautiful. We almost never see desi women characters who complicate certain cultural expectations related to motherhood. Can you talk a little about your choice to write the title story in second person as an address to the unborn fetus?

CB: For me, writing is the most productive when it’s unplanned. I hadn’t even planned to write that afternoon—I was jet lagged— but I was sitting in a small hotel lobby nothing like the one in the story in Amsterdam, and I missed my son. Missing him made me realize how much I also missed the child I miscarried. How I thought of that child as a distant child, not gone. Some of the most interesting stories to write emerge from writing about a person, place, even a thing, where the act of writing teaches you what you think and feel, what you didn’t know when you started putting words on the page. Meanings emerge as you write.

I am also interested in emotions that surprise me. Until my miscarriage, I was still so caught up in the unresolved work of forgiving and accepting my parents as people. I was still preoccupied with my parents, often angry at them, certainly disappointed at not getting the help from them I’d hoped to have in order to balance working full time with having a young baby. They, too, were quite angry at me for many reasons, not too many of which actually made sense, kind of a constant, bitter, broad anger that in a large way, I had “failed” as a traditional daughter.

Until that miscarriage, I didn’t even understand how much I loved and would love my own children and how that intensity would so completely displace the old intensity with my parents. I didn’t understand until the early morning that I saw the bleeding and couldn’t stop it, how much I could grieve a loss. I’m grateful to that story, “white dancing elephants,” if it makes sense to be grateful to a story, because it gave me the insight to shape my work life around that love of my family. Where “family” so clearly means my children and partner, not my parents in the same way. I’m very proud of my parents now. I’m proud of how they economized and saved up enough to have the retirement they’d hoped to; how they cared for my brother; how my mother, even now, is sewing us masks.

AF: And I'm always intrigued by whether or not sad or dark dimensions of life are aestheticized in various authors' stories. I feel we talk about this too little, about the role of aesthetics when rendering violence or tragic topics. In the title story about miscarriage, the voice is very lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about aesthetics or the "voice" of the story as you write?

CB: Unless the narrator of a story wants to objectify violence, I never want to, and if the narrator wants to dwell on those details, he’d better have a damn good reason. I don’t think I would have been able to or wanted to write from any viewpoint but Jayanti’s, the survivor’s, in “Orange Popsicles.”  I wouldn’t want to write from the viewpoint of one of the rapists, who savored the quasi-pornographic aesthetics of what they were trying to do to her. I think so much of the violence I’m interested in is emotional, verbal. Lyricism can be a way the survivor, the listener, copes with that violence.

AF: And equally, there's a strong thematic thread of female-on-female betrayal, simultaneous friendship and betrayal, in many of these stories. As a writer, do you think consciously about complicating the narrative of perfect victims and perfect villains?  I'm interested in how Sula might have influenced you in your writing of Talinda, for example. Or do these complications arrive for you at a more subconscious level?

CB: Everyone has themes and obsessions they continue returning to. For me it’s both betrayal and the fear of being betrayed, as well as the equally interesting process by which someone determines that they have “no choice” but to betray another. What I work on, in life as well as fiction, is to conceptualize “betrayal” from the point of view of the person who is doing the betraying.

Sula is such an important work and one I’ve repeatedly returned to. The rose birthmark. This quote:

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

I remember reading that during a period of my life when I did not feel like I could make the time or space to write, and gradually reckoning with how true it was, how dangerous we can become to ourselves, when we don’t do all of what we’re supposed to do, when we don’t realize our purpose.

AF: How does your work as a psychiatrist inform your sense of gender and wild conduct in the book? When you're writing, do you think of characters on a clinical level, or do you see fiction as a completely distinct path into human disarray and foible? I think of a character like Maya in “The Shaker Chair” who acts against social norms evidently due to mental illness - does she have more of a backstory in your mind? How did you decide to place the story within the point of view of the Black psychiatrist Sylvia who treats her and is simultaneously repulsed and drawn to her?

CB: It’s taken me awhile to understand the answer to this question. I would say all gifted writers are acute psychologists. I’m often stunned by the psychological acuity of writers describing characters’ motivations. The level of understanding and insight is extremely humbling. But at the same time, writers don’t have, or want to have, the “therapeutic” mission, or at least, don’t want to have to include that aspect. I remember wincing, but acknowledging the truth of Zadie Smith’s statements, for example, emphatically differentiating “writing” from “therapy.”

Writing is driven by the writer’s desire, the urge to know and tell a story. If a story is brutal to the characters, but works as a story, that’s enough. So even though writers also share that psychological insight, there is no real connection between writing and psychiatry. In psychiatry, the sole purpose is healing. There’s nothing more important than the patient’s well-being.

AF: I'm fascinated by the erotic or sexual in these stories, the way sex so often shades into deep betrayal in these hugely energetic and dynamic stories in the collection. It feels, often, cathartic and visceral. I'm thinking in particular of the characters in “Orange Popsicles” and “Talinda” and “Chronicle of a Marriage Foretold” and “In Allegheny.” Can you talk a little bit about the intra-gender social dynamics you were tapping into with these stories?

Women’s desire is often mocked and judged. It was important to me to write stories in which there was no judgment, period, and the characters were allowed to want whatever they wanted. Perhaps that sense of freedom and absolute permission, permission on the basis of the women’s humanity alone, is what creates a sense of catharsis.

AF: In your story “Neela: Bhopal, 1984,” you use a fantasy or magic realist mode. To what extent do you think the political demands a more fantastic mode? Was this always a magic realist story or did it undergo different genre iterations?

Works by Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami have been so important to me in thinking about this. It’s hard to tolerate the bleakness of political realities without creating some lens to view both small details and larger outlines. The fantastic mode is a way to approach the pain of looking at these realities – like what we’re seeing now, a calculus by which Senators’ response to a January briefing about the coming COVID-19 pandemic was to buy stock rather than warn the public or insist that the federal government prepare. Their profits were worth more to them than the millions of people who would die.

I’m not sure, though, that any theme or subject “demands” any particular mode. There are devastating, very realistic and understated political stories that don’t employ fantastical elements at all, like by the Pakistani-American writer, Daniyal Muennedin. And Chekhov, of course. So political. His story “Sleepy” is one of my favorites – realistic and completely chilling, the consequence of literally working someone to death. Above all, it’s important not to let ourselves look away from a given political reality. Fiction can be a way to face what has to change.

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Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, jellyfish review, aaduna and elsewhere, with poetry forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Quiddity, apt magazine, Hobart and more. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She received the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Henfield award for her writing. Her work received four Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in 2017. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events. She is the author of White Dancing Elephants.

Anita Felicelli is the author of CHIMERICA: A NOVEL and the story story collection LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT. CHIMERICA appeared on The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great Second Half of 2019 Book Preview, Fiction Advocate’s What to Read in September, and Ms. Magazine’s Hidden Gems of 2019. It was an Alta Fiction Pick for Winter 2020. LOVE SONGS won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. Anita’s stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alta Journal, Midnight Breakfast, Terrain, The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Catapult, and other places. Anita’s work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, won Greater Bay Area Journalism awards, placed as a finalist in several Glimmer Train contests, and received a Puffin Foundation grant. She graduated from UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley School of Law. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her spouse and three children.

'Time is emotional for me': An Interview with Poet Sara Borjas

BY MONIQUE QUINTANA, IN INTERVIEW WITH SARA BORJAS

The last time I saw Sara Borjas was a few weeks ago when we spoke over the produce section at Costco. There were quick laughs and unspoken intentions, the thought that we'd know a little more about ourselves and the places we exist in the next time we meet again. Sara's debut poetry collection speaks to moments like these. A recipient of the American Book Award, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff ( Noemi Press, 2019 ) shows growing up in another kind of California. Simultaneously urban and rural, hot and cold, high tech and nostalgic, Fresno, CA, is celebrated and lamented in the book and its loves. In the essay near the center of the book, ' We Are Too Big for This House, ' Borjas creates new mappings of time, space, and the familial archive. She talks about writing the piece here. 

Monique Quintana: It's often said that we begin essays with questions that we want to ask about ourselves. When would you say you started writing "We Are Too Big For This House" in your mind? What were you most surprised about when you eventually wrote it down to page?

Sara Borjas: I started writing it because Carmen Giménez Smith said the speaker in my collection isn't fully understood with what poems I was offering her in my manuscript. She told me to ask myself: What is it I am not saying? Why is the speaker so tender and so resentful? I was not surprised about what I eventually wrote, but I am surprised about how its form offered what feels like the singular way I could express what feels like a given and obvious experience for me at intersections of my identities.

Cover image via Noemi Press

MQ: When I read your essay and the notes on the margins, I think about how time works for Xicanas and our memories. As someone who's invested in the intersections of feminism, pop culture, and archive, how do you experience time differently with the women in your life? What is a song, TV show, film, or any other art piece that resets time for you?

SB: There's not a thought that I have that isn't conversing with my doubt and my own oppressive tendencies. I feel like we, Xicanas, are always living at times of intense colonization, liberation, and the present moment, which makes every moment tense and potentially reckless. Time is heavy, no matter where I am. And I think women in my life have been taught either euphemisms or slogans of oppression like "everything happens for a reason" or "I'm just grateful" or "some people have it worse." I've heard it called "toxic positivity," but I don't know it's that for women of color or all Xicanas. So I feel like my investments and my privilege, built on their labor, helps me see those as survival tactics, and also, things I refuse to participate in anymore because suffering shouldn't beget more suffering. I also understand that they're necessary for many Xicanas, and much peace and choices are built on them. I'm incapable of crossing of into that "positive" thinking because I feel like I remember everything, even the things that didn't happen to me specifically in my lifetime, and so sometimes I feel guilty for knowing or thinking I know. It can be a special type of lonely. Time is emotional for me. And the only thing that resets that, without a doubt, is the song "Ascension" by Maxwell, and a moment when I feel truly, truly loved.

MQ: What do you want most for new Latinx essays to interrogate about ourselves?

SB: I want something very specific—I want Xicanx writers to interrogate our machiste. I want most for Xicanos to interrogate their machiste. It's played out, "laughable and lethal" (as Jess Row says of whiteness) and oppressing us all.

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SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha, is from the americas before it was stolen and its people were colonized, and is a Fresno poet. Say their names.

Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019 as part of the Akrilica series and received a 2020 American Book Award. Tony McDade. Sara was named one of of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets, is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow, represents California as a CantoMundo Regional Chair, and is the recipient of the 2014 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize. Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, and The Offing, amongst others. Sandra Bland. She is a lecturer in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, where she works with innovative undergraduate writers.

Ahmaud Arbery. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. Justice for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the countless others. She digs oldiez, outer space, aromatics, and tiny prints is about decentering whiteness in literature, creative writing, and daily life.

Abolish the police. Find her @saraborhaz or at www.saraborjas.com. Say their names.

Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and the author of the novella Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her short works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has also been awarded artist residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She has also received fellowships to the Community of Writers, the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, and she was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Megaphone Fellowship for a Writer of Color. You can find her @quintanagothic and moniquequintana.com.

Dolls and Meadows: An Interview with Poet Kristin Garth

BY MONIQUE QUINTANA, IN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTIN GARTH

Poet and editor Kristin Garth has created a career that plays with technology, new school pastels, and old Hollywood glamour. All of her literary endeavors are empathetically experimental, provocative, and nurture sex-positivity. I reviewed Garth's chapbook, Shut Your Eyes, Succubi last winter, and wanted to inquire more about her lyrical inclinations and what's coming for her next.

Kristin Garth

Monique Quintana: I love how you advocate for sex-positivity in literature. What was your journey towards sex positivity, and how is that reflected in the Pink Plastic House's architecture?

Kristin Garth: Thank you so much for this compliment. Sex positivity and sexual honesty are two qualities I find essential in a healthy psychology. I came from an abusive, extremely religious home, a home where people feared the body and sexuality — but also were obsessed with these things. As a young girl, I developed physically early, and I was also sexually abused early in my life.  

In this way, sexuality has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. It wasn't a choice to learn about it, but you can't unknow it.

I have spoken to many other survivors of childhood sexual assault over the years in group therapy settings and just through friendships. I know for many survivors, sexuality becomes, post the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, a dark and intolerable, of barely tolerable, event. 

Others, including me, comfort themselves with sexuality or attempt to — I certainly did. I would lock myself in the bathroom in elementary school, and touch myself, feel a sense of triumph and autonomy in these moments that my body was still mine. Fantasized about a future where I wouldn't have to hide or lie — where I wouldn't rage with my sex like my abuser. I would just be who I was and speak what I needed. 

Pink Plastic House a tiny journal, represents this kind of complex, whole person I wanted to be. A house, when I was young, felt simply unsafe. It was people by adults who took what they wanted and deprived you of privacy/dignity and expected you to present a lie of purity to the world — a "purity" of which they deprived you.

The Pink Plastic House is safe and also complex in the way that honest worlds are — they have basements where people's darker urges manifest in consensual, communicative ways with adults. They have tea parties and slumber parties, too, because the Pink Plastic House's architecture is designed by a womanchild who is kinky and innocent, adult and emotionally still a little stunted and forever a child in the way that some survivors of sexual abuse are.  

I place poems in Pink Plastic House a tiny journal into the rooms I feel they belong. It grows all the time with new elements emerging just like the honest and open human soul does. It's also developed a neighborhood of associated journals that deal with erotica and kink (Poke) and horror (The Haunted Dollhouse). These two journals both emerged out of a lack, I felt, of space for horror and sex writing in the post-pandemic world. Many journals began restricting their submissions to prohibit these categories. 

I felt an urgent need to keep the lit world complex and give people like me a chance to voice their kink and horror because I know that doing that brings me peace. To feel restricted in my voice, I feel like I'm back with the Puritans again. I never want anyone to feel like that. 

It t's ironic that Pink Plastic House a tiny journal came from the title of my first chapbook Pink Plastic House. The title poem of that chapbook is about me as a stripper playing with and populating a Barbie dreamhouse after work. 

I stripped in pigtails and braids and schoolgirl uniforms for five years to establish my financial autonomy from my abusers. At that time, I think the house represented my loneliness and the normalcy that I craved so much. Writing about that lonely Barbie house and creating a journal in its name has connected me to countless people decades after that lonely schoolgirl stripper took off her clothes to be free. The Pink Plastic House represents community and wholeness to me now, and that's the power of writing — how it can transform your life. 

MQ: Not only are you prolific in your writing ventures, but you have edited numerous projects. Anthologies are especially challenging to put together. What are a few pieces of advice you could give writers who want to pursue publishing an anthology?

KG: I have edited four anthologies, three with a partner and one alone. Justin Karcher was my first editorial partner. We worked together on Mansion, a Slenderman anthology, and These Poems Are Not What They Seem, a Twin Peaks anthology (in which you had a fantastic poem!). I had the idea for Mansion and shared it with Justin long before I had the Pink Plastic House journal or any editorial experience. He said we should do this and I felt empowered because he had the editorial experience I lacked.  

I definitely think that is a great way to gain editorial experience is to work with a more experienced editor. If you have an idea for an anthology and feel lacking in the skills to execute, find yourself a more experienced partner. I'm a very hard-working human, and I love learning. I just needed someone who knew more than me about tech and editing. 

Even on my newest anthology that it is my first solo project and the first publication of Pink Plastic Press, Pinkprint (the first of many. I hope, anthologies of work from Pink Plastic House journals), I hired Jeremy Gaulke of APEP, who has published me (and published the Twin Peaks anthology) before to print and design a cover. It was another way to ask for and receive a second pair of experienced eyes on this manuscript. Collaboration with people who know more than you is always good, I feel.  

MQ: You often use video to share and promote your work on Instagram and Twitter. What do you specifically appreciate about each platform? If a writer could only use one of those platforms, which would you recommend and why?

KG: Wow. This is such a hard question, which is ironic because, for years, I said I'd never join Instagram. It was a statement completely informed by my ignorance of the platform. 

People were always telling me I was a natural to be on Instagram because I make so many videos and post my selfies and socks.  

I have been in the Twitter literary scene since 2017, and I am beyond grateful to Twitter to give me the space to finally be myself. I write a lot and publish a lot, and it was marvelous to have a place to share that. 

I'm an introvert, stay-at-home girl in a small southern town. I don't have a local poetry scene I'm affiliated with — Twitter became that. By doing the videos, I felt like I was reading for my friends and people got to experience that as if we are in the same hometown.

It's sort of amazing that I'm known for my poetry readings being a poet who has never read in public "in real life." I had an engagement to teach a Delta State workshop at the Southern Literary Festival that was cancelled by the pandemic. After the pandemic, I began to feel that maybe I'd only be an online poetry reader, and maybe that's okay. 

Poetry Twitter gave me a voice, and I spent so much time there that I did not believe I had time for another platform. To be honest, the only reason I joined Instagram is that in the middle of doing editing on The Meadow, a very vulnerable book I wrote about my experiences in BDSM as a young woman, my publisher at APEP left Twitter to focus on one social media platform. Since we communicated a lot during the writing of this book, a lot in messages, he told me I could talk to him there. So I got myself together and did what people had encouraged me to do — have an Instagram to archive my socks and sonnets and videos.  

Twitter is very fulfilling to me for the friendships I've made and the opportunities present in the literary community. All my books came to pass through Twitter conversations and my would-be speaking engagement. I have a weekly sonnet podcast with Gadget G Radio called Kristin Whispers Sonnets that I was invited to do because of Twitter. Though I have come to love Instagram better in its actual layout and the archiving of video, for example, I could never betray Twitter, which has given me so much.  

Though Pink Plastic House has a vacation Instagram house that has become a much a part of the journal as my website, so if you asked the house, she might have a different answer.

MQ: I love the film aesthetics of Anna Biller, Dario Argento, and Alejandro Jodorowsky and literary aesthetics as different as Edgar Allan Poe and Marguerite Duras and Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Your aesthetic is literary and cinematic. What are some artistic aesthetics that resonate with you that people would be surprised to hear? Whose aesthetic dollhouse would you like to spend a day?

KG: Thank you so much for calling my poetry cinematic. That means a lot as I primarily write Shakespearean sonnets, and it's always been important to me to try to create a world in 14 lines. I love films and how they engage all your senses and transport you places.  

Obviously, I am a huge David Lynch fan, with my favorites by him being Mulholland Drive and the Twin Peaks film and series. That really wouldn't surprise many, though, as I've written many poems about Twin Peaks, and I've published the anthology about it.  

I am so influenced by many other filmmakers, though from Whit Stillman, whose movies like Metropolitan taught me about dialogue and it's importance to the bravery of a filmmaker like Catherine Hardwicke in making the film Thirteen with its honest portrayals of troubled adolescence — to which I very much relate.

It's hard to speak about the raw truths of an abused child in a public way. I feel such a debt to films I watched, and books like We Were The Mulvaneys and Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, as an example, that deal with sexual trauma, societal dynamics, and power imbalances. Reading books like these made it feel doable in an engaging, artistic way and my voice worthy of being heard. 

I would love to be invited into anyone's dollhouse. I have three myself — an old wooden one that has been through a lot and became the logo of the literary journal. I also have a Barbie dreamhouse and a Disney Cinderella castle replica. I have an ongoing feature of poets who have dollhouses that has featured Kolleen Carney and Kailey Tedesco so far. I feel like it's my chance to virtually commune with other poet dollhouse lovers. That's a subset of people I just adore, so if you are one of them, feel free to reach out because I'd love to know you and for you to be in The Real Dollhouse Poets of The Pink Plastic Plasticity. 

MQ: In your APEP Publications chapbook, The Meadow, the speaker takes a journey through hurt while at the same time recognizing intricate beauty and the body politics of BDSM. The speaker has autonomy through a memoir. What is a future "meadow" you envision walking down?

KG: That's such a lovely description of The Meadow, thank you.  The Meadow is a book I've been wanting to write for twenty years. In fact, there is a poem inside of it called "Homecoming," which was my first and only publication until I was 43 and became who I was supposed to be.  

The story of the publication of the sonnet "Homecoming" in No Other Tribute: Erotic Tales of Women in Submission, edited by Laura Antoniou, tells a lot about me at this time of my life. I wrote this sonnet and gave it to my first dom when I was just discovering the BDSM scene in my early 20's. I received a partial scholarship to graduate school in creative writing because of my sonnets, many of which were sexual and kinky as characterize many of my sonnets, but I would end up dropping out of graduate school to strip to have the financial autonomy to live my life away from abuse. 

Even though I was in school studying writing, I didn't submit my poetry anywhere. Didn't have the strength yet to even contemplate that kind of rejection after the tortures of my childhood. I submitted, though sexually, and I gave this poem to my much older dom, who was also a writer. He didn't tell me, but he submitted it to Laura Antoniou's anthology, where it was accepted. At that point, of course, he told me to gain my consent to move forward with the publication, and I was shocked but delighted. 

It was published under my scene name as pseudonym (Scarlet), and it was the only poem accepted in a collection of prose. The editor wrote the kindest introduction about me, how she couldn't help but publish this poem. It was that magical kind of publication experience that can change your life.

Of course, for me, it would take almost twenty years before I worked up the courage to submit myself in writing. But I always knew I eventually would because of the way this experience had made me feel seen in a world in which I was still invisible.  

I had published it under a pseudonym, which made me very sad at the time because I feared my parents would find out. I still lived at home. I hated not being able to own my experiences due to abuse and the threat of more. I swore one day I would write whatever I felt with my name and be known for that name. Almost 700 publications later, I know my younger self would be so proud of the Kristin Garth I have become. 

I am my meadow now. I feel I had to undergo the catharsis of hurt to discover myself — and sometimes I find myself in its thorns again. But I also ache for the petals and the dew of the meadow. I am learning to nourish and cultivate myself better and make roots, and value rest and replenishment. I don't leave myself open to predators and the elements the way I did in the desperation of my wandering youth. There is an architect in the meadow now. I am building a cottage. I am learning to shelter.

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Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2: One, Luna Luna, and more. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry including Pink Plastic House  (Maverick Duck Press), Crow Carriage (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press), The Meadow (APEP Publications), and Golden Ticket from Roaring Junior Press.  She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter and her website.

Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and the author of the novella Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her short works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has also been awarded artist residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She has also received fellowships to the Community of Writers, the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, and she was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Megaphone Fellowship for a Writer of Color. You can find her @quintanagothic and moniquequintana.com.