Tag: interview

Evolutionary Contradiction: An Interview With Ophelia Wong

Posted on by Rebecca Paredes

Ophelia’s winning piece, “Hermaphroditism and Culling Adaptations of the Blue-Banded Hawk,” begins as a fictionalized academic article, and then shifts to discuss gender dynamics, performance, and familial roles—all within the footnotes. We’re happy to share this interview with the author, who takes us behind the scenes of this layered work.

Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our Gender Trouble challenge, which asked writers to pull apart gender categories: heteronormativity, roles, and bodies. How did that prompt inform this story?

Ophelia Wong: The prompt naturally channeled me into the works of Judith Butler. In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, she poses a question, paraphrased here: whether to be a woman is, by social definition, to be in an oppressed situation. I crafted my story while being unable to get her words out of my mind. I wished to sever the definition of woman from oppressive gender roles, revealing how patriarchal imbalances of power have no biological basis and are socially conditioned. I also aimed to expose and dismantle heteronormative ideology that perpetuates patriarchal hierarchies on a familial level.

RP: The framing device for this piece is an academic article about the blue-banded hawk, but the footnotes tell a coming-of-age story. How did you land on that structure? As far as I can tell, the blue-banded hawk is fictional—was this based on the dynamics of a real species? 

OW: The blue-banded hawk is based on two species — Harris’s hawk and the blue-banded goby. The former is the only matriarchal and social raptor species, while the latter is a hermaphrodite fish species. In a social group, the largest female goby may change sex to replace the single dominant male and will assume sex-linked roles, such as caring for offspring. By drawing on the social dynamics of these two species, I could reshape relationships between behavior and sex and gender. I settled on creating the blue-banded hawk, rather than the Harris’s goby, as birds are better known for sexual dimorphism and imbalanced courtship behaviors.

The academic structure of my piece reflects my realization that non-heteronormativity is accepted as a natural fact in every species but ours. Presented with a scientific article on sexual ambiguity and transitions within blue-banded hawks, we might show impartiality, or even interest. Yet by replacing the hawk with a human, this very evolutionary phenomenon becomes unnatural and disputable. By integrating a coming-of-age narrative, I underscore the irony of rejecting a natural phenomenon but accepting the destructive consequences of our rigid gender roles—the real evolutionary contradiction.

RP: In the footnotes, cooking and eating function as a clear way that gender roles exist and are ultimately subverted. Can you talk about your thought process with food in the footnotes compared to how the blue-banded hawk approaches feeding? I’m thinking about these lines, which change so much once we read the accompanying footnote: “Though biologically greater in size, females often display fasting behaviors.3 This stereotypic behavior is hypothesized to be a stress response.”

OW: Through these lines, I convey how social enforcement of gender expectations can often be harmful and counterintuitive to maintaining biological and psychological health. In the footnotes, I explore how women are socially conditioned to reject biological changes, such as weight gain or physical manifestations of age, while the biological growth and nutritional requirements of men are adequately supported from youth.

Within both my protagonist’s family and the kettle of the blue-banded hawk, offspring feast on the labor and sacrifice of the mother, inherited by her daughters. When male hawks seize food from the dominant female, the female, other males, and offspring, lose out. I wished to reflect how this polarizing imbalance of gender roles is also detrimental for father and son, who become unable to provide for themselves and deprived of strong familial bonds. By disrupting the motif of cooking, when the protagonist instead buys food for her sister, I wished to convey how adequate nurture can occur without extensive domestic labor. Ultimately, I endeavored to reassert my belief that the redistribution of domestic duties and dissolution of gender expectations would be greatly beneficial for social and evolutionary longevity.

RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?

OW: I’m currently polishing up a few past works so they are ready for publication online! I have a few vignettes arising from recurring dreams, a sonnet inspired by a rat dissection, and stories stemming from disjointed phrases that have tumbled into my head. And as always, I’m chipping away at the same fantasy manuscript I’ve been working on since forever. It’s a very different genre, but similarly a social commentary—an exploration of prejudice and systemic injustice, gender identity and family, all alongside a heavy dose of sorcery. You can keep up with my writing @the.poets.narcissus on Instagram! 

I am beyond grateful for the support from you and your team, and the space—fortified against AI—that you have crafted for writers to express their works. If nothing else, I implore readers to interrogate entrenched social beliefs—whether they manifest as misinformed prejudices or oppressive conventions. As Butler asserts, we must disentangle our perceptions of minority groups from narratives of marginalization.

Refusal as a Form of Tenderness: An Interview With Kailum Graves

Posted on by Rebecca Paredes

Kailum’s hybrid work, “Patch Notes for the End of the World,” starts at the beginning of human civilization and zooms into a singular, essential interaction between an adult and child. The scale of this piece, and how it manages to straddle both humor and heart so deftly, captured our attention during our reading, and we’re thrilled to share this interview with the author. Read Kailum’s winning work, and then take a peek behind the patch notes.

Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our History Repeating challenge, which asked writers to explore cycles of destruction and what happens when that cycle breaks. How did that prompt inform your work?

Kailum Graves: The prompt immediately made me think about repetition at different scales—historical, political, domestic, emotional. I was interested in the way the same patterns of harm can keep reappearing in new language, new institutions, new rooms. A war becomes a family system. A family system becomes a sentence someone says to a child.

What drew me to the challenge was the final question: what happens when the cycle breaks? I didn’t want the answer to be grand or triumphant. I wanted the break to be almost unbearably small—a pause, a refusal, a hand opening instead of closing. The piece is really about that tiny, difficult moment when someone inherits an old script and chooses not to perform it.

RP: We loved that this piece uses patch notes, which developers use to detail changes with each software update. How did you land on this as your structure?

KG: I liked the coldness of patch notes as a form. They’re so functional and tidy—added this, removed that, known issue, minor fix. There’s something both funny and horrifying about applying that language to human history and inherited harm. The structure let me move quickly through huge ideas without having to explain them in a traditional narrative way. It also gave the piece a kind of bureaucratic absurdity, which felt right for the subject. So much violence is made possible by systems that describe terrible things in very clean language. Patch notes became a way to expose the gap between the neatness of the record and the mess of what actually happened.

RP: You described this work as “hybrid microfiction/prose poem,” which is spot-on—there are so many knockout lines in here, like “Added drawers that slam like verdicts” and “Children now able to recite the year a war began while failing to identify the sound of one starting in their own home.” This is a long way of saying, do you tend to write pieces that blend genres, and if so, what draws you to it?

KG: I’m very drawn to hybrid forms. I think some subjects resist behaving as only fiction or only poetry or only essays. Sorrow, heartache, trauma, love, memory—they rarely arrive in clean categories, so I like forms that can blur or fracture a little. I often find myself starting with a strange premise or structure and then using it to get at something emotionally direct. In this case, the patch notes gave me permission to be compressed, funny, bleak, and lyrical at once. Genre-blending lets me follow the emotional logic of a piece rather than the rules of a single form. It can make room for jokes and devastation to sit uncomfortably close together, which feels very human to me.

RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?

KG: I think the piece is ultimately about refusal as a form of tenderness. Not a perfect cure, not a clean redemption, but a small interruption in an old pattern. I’m interested in the idea that history does not only repeat through governments and wars, but through gestures, rooms, tones of voice, and the things people do not know they have inherited.

At the moment, I’m working across fiction, poetry, and television. I’m especially interested in speculative and uncanny premises that open into very human questions: how people survive themselves, how humor works as an emergency device, and how tenderness can appear in places where it was never properly installed.

All This Is My Cradle: An Interview With Danielle Janess

Posted on by Rebecca Paredes

“Caddis,” our Silent Spring finalist, focuses on the caddisfly and then zooms out to examine a legacy of pollution and its impact on the natural world. It is a breathtaking poem, and we thoroughly enjoyed chatting with poet Danielle Janess about the background of this piece. Enjoy our conversation.

Rebecca Paredes: You submitted “Caddis” for our Silent Spring challenge, which asked writers to dig into themes of climate change and the world changing under our feet. How did that prompt inform this piece?

Danielle Janess: The impulse to write “Caddis” comes from my life and family. I grew up on lower Lake Huron, where I have vivid memories of caddisflies and mayflies, at a certain time of year, seeming to cover every exterior surface: screen doors, walls, windshields. They remind me of the feeling of peak spring and the turn into summer. For my father, who taught me to pay attention to the natural world, their hatch meant the start of trout fishing season. Caddisflies belong to the scientific order Trichoptera. They undergo four distinct metamorphoses, transforming at first in water (from egg to larva to pupa) before emerging into air as a winged, moth-like adult. A keystone species of the Great Lakes, they support cultural, recreational, and commercial fisheries. Because they spend most of their lives underwater, they are also highly sensitive to water pollution. I think almost constantly about Lake Huron and the St. Clair River—they are my lifeblood. The poem reckons with our human impact on the Great Lakes by looking at this one small but important insect. 

RP: This poem uses anadiplosis, a literary device where the last word of one line appears at the beginning of the next. To be honest, we geeked out about this in the Glossy Planet Slack channel—we loved how this device ties together the “weaving” mentioned in the epigraph and by the caddisfly, and how much that repetition transforms the poem when read aloud. All of that to say: can you talk about your decision to use this device?

DJ: If you watch a video of a caddisfly larva building its protective case, prepare to be amazed. While the grub itself is not the most attractive creature, they are wondrous little architects. The French artist Hubert Duprat famously “collaborated” with caddis larvae in the 1980s. He put them in aquariums alongside precious gemstones like pearls, rubies, lapis lazuli, and genuine gold flakes. The larvae then spun bejeweled sheaths from the gemstones, each one completely original. While not all Trichoptera build cases, those that do use materials that vary depending on their species and what’s available in the local water column. That could be minerals like sand or fine gravel, debris such as leaf bits and twigs, animal matter like snail shells and fish scales, or, as we now know, micro and nanoplastics.

In my youth I saw loads of caddisflies, but until recently I didn’t know about their intricate lives as aquatic artists. The more I learn about them, the more my appreciation deepens. I wanted to honor their way of being and making, so I played with different ways for the poem to approach the insect’s mode of assemblage. No one quite knows how they got their common name, “caddis.” But Merriam-Webster cites it as an old English noun, c.1500, for worsted yarn, ribbon, or binding, whereas Trichoptera comes from the Greek, meaning “hair-winged.” I got to thinking about hair, braids, weaves, and binding (the verb), which they do with the sticky silk from their mouths. One day, in a craft class led by Yvonne Blomer, it clicked. She mentioned a form in which the end of one line begins the next, which made me picture a weaving shuttle, and my mind flashed on the caddisfly. I also hope that the sense of motion afforded by the pattern conveys something of the forward-moving current in the St. Clair River. 

RP: “Caddis” both points out how we are interconnected and how our actions impact the broader ecosystem. In particular, I loved the shift into microplastics and how the poem highlights not only how omnipresent they are, but also how they become woven into the very bodies of humans and animals alike. Do these themes reappear in your other work, and if so, what draws you to them?

DJ: Your question hits on something I wrestle with both personally and in my current poetry project. 

What does it mean that I have inherited from the life-sustaining enormity of the Great Lakes and also from the violent appropriations of mega-polluters like Shell, Nova Chemicals, and Enbridge? 

In Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, the poet Jan Zwicky says that “love, awareness, and the desire to respond are distinguishable but inseparable.” Like it or not, because of my life and family, I am connected to the crimes of polluting corporations. For seventeen years, my father worked as a process operator at the Sarnia Shell refinery, among the world’s largest manufacturers of gasoline, distillates, liquid petroleum gas, heavy oils, pure chemicals, and solvents. I am keenly aware that his labor, along with my mother’s, provided for my upbringing and for our family’s home on the lake. He died in 2020 of multiple aggressive cancers. Studies show that men in our region experience cancer rates at thirty percent higher than the Canadian average.

In 2024, just outside my hometown of Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, Nova Chemicals opened a plastics production site that produces one billion pounds of brand-new plastic annually, in the form of polyethylene pellets, aka “nurdles.” Billions of these lentil-sized nurdles now litter creeks and stormwater routes that drain directly into the St. Clair River and Lake Huron, leaching yet more toxins into our environment, drinking water, and food chain. As for Enbridge, their badly aging Line 5 pipeline moves as much as 540,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Superior, Wisconsin, to the Sarnia refinery, snaking under the Straits of Mackinac and crossing under the St. Clair River through the heart of vital Great Lakes ecosystems. Over a fifty-year period, from 1967-2017, Enbridge’s Line 5 spilled over one-million gallons of oil. The Aamjiwnaang First Nation of Sarnia has opposed this pipeline since 1953 because it trespasses through their legal treaty territory.

While Line 5 predates my birth, I am old enough to remember our local beaches before they were strewn with polyethylene nurdles. I remember swimming in the lake before the invasive zebra and quagga mussels, brought into the Great Lakes by freighters from the Caspian Sea, filtered the water to its current clear blue by sucking up the phytoplankton and subsequently driving our native whitefish and trout populations to the brink of collapse. All this is my cradle, and it will be my grave.

RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?

DJ: I’d like to share a few of the many living writers whose work contributes to this conversation. These include Rita Wong, whose poetry overlaps with water activism; Philip Kevin Paul, W̱SÁNEĆ Nation poet, whose work astonishes for its relationship to his home on Vancouver Island; Laurie D. Graham, whose poetry often investigates familial history and whose latest collection, Calling It Back To Me, I can’t wait to read; and Tim Lilburn, whose radically contemplative, linguistically-charged work, in essay collections like Living In The World As If It Were Home and poetry collections like The Names, invites the reader into wholly new heights of thinking.

Lastly, please let me say thank you again, Rebecca, and to all of you at Glossy Planet, for this meaningful recognition.

Iterations of Erasure: An Interview With Zoe Korte

Posted on by Rebecca Paredes

In “Slumber party,” our Redacted challenge finalist, Zoe Korte uses the burning haibun poetic form to navigate sexual trauma and the loss of autonomy. It was an honor to speak with Zoe about their poem’s structure, language, and craft. Read the piece, and then check out our conversation.

Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our Redacted challenge, which invited writers to explore the after-effects of what gets hidden. How did that prompt inform this poem?

Zoe Korte: As a kid experiencing child-on-child sexual abuse (COCSA), I had no vocabulary to name my trauma. If that wasn’t taboo enough, I was entrenched in purity culture, the adults around me sheltered and deprived me of self-knowledge. Victims of abuse are encouraged to keep silent and avoid conflict, and receive backlash for using their voices. My words, my autonomy, my understanding of myself was actively being erased. I have been working with erasure poetry for about a decade and recently started experimenting with the burning haibun form created by torrin a. greathouse, who has also used this method to explicate themes of sexual trauma.

RP: We universally applauded this poem’s layers—the way the opening poem is so impactful, yet disorienting, not unlike the speaker at the slumber party, followed by the self-erasure to reveal the deeper truths underneath. Can you talk about your approach to the three levels of self-erasure?

ZK: Each iteration of erasure represents repeated trauma, as the voice of the poem becomes increasingly disjointed and associative. The speaker is reduced to simple begging, insisting in new ways while being ignored, and gradually gives up on being heard at all. Similarly, the form mimics how memory degrades over time, but as it decomposes, it can fertilize new insights. I tend to think of erasure poetry not as burying meaning, but unearthing or excavating it, almost in a surgical sense as the writing process requires an almost meditative state of focus and discernment.

RP: The phrase “small but dense” appears multiple times in the beginning, and it’s such an evocative phrase—of childhood, of bodies, of an innocence that must now carry weight. What does this phrase mean for you in the poem?

ZK: With most of my work, I often don’t realize a poem or volume has accumulated its own lexicon except in retrospect, when my obsessions and thought patterns emerge across pieces. However, in the run-on word-vomit section of my burning haibuns, I do consciously double back and recycle phrases to unfold multiple dimensions and reach a semi-satisfying conclusion. Revelation and realization alter the past as we remember in new ways and experience multiple truths. I have often found that growth feels like spiraling back to the same ideas but with added insight. This particular phrase is an echo of a recurring motif of mine. Thinking of myself as discrete, compact, or finite has always helped ground me, like an antidote to dissociation. Acknowledging the limits of my body, memory, and perception, especially in regards to my child self, has led me to feel less overwhelmed and consumed by trauma and shame.

RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?

ZK: I am polishing up a full-length collection of erasures largely composed during the early days of the pandemic that I hope to publish in the near future! I also encourage everyone to look into signs of COCSA, whether you suspect you have experienced this type of abuse or would like to be more aware of how to prevent it. RAINN has some great resources.

The Weight of What Isn’t Said: An Interview With Nafisa A. Iqbal

Posted on by Rebecca Paredes

Nafisa A. Iqbal’s winning poem, “Louis Kahn’s Ghost: National Assembly Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh,” is a dimensional piece that examines the unresolved questions of democracy and power. There is so much meaning between the spaces in this work, and we invite you to sit with it, and then read our conversation with Nafisa.

Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our Checks and Balances challenge, which invited writers to explore the tilting dynamics of power and systems. How did that prompt inform this poem?

Nafisa A. Iqbal: This prompt felt complementary to my work as someone whose writing frequently addresses (im)balances of power and personal and political apparatuses of oppression. As a Bangladeshi writer, the July Revolution of 2024 that my country lived through is still fresh in my mind since February the month this challenge was held—marked Bangladesh’s first national election since the toppling of the fascist regime. I wanted to approach these themes obliquely through the lens of architecture, an art form I’ve grown intimate with through my life partner who is an architect.

RP: This poem is grounded in a distinct historical moment, but so clearly interacts with notions of accountability and absolution that remain relevant today. Why Louis Kahn, and why this building?

NAI: The National Assembly Building, or the Jatiyo Shongshod Bhobon, as it is known in Bengali, is a monumental piece of architecture known to every Bangladeshi, operating for us as an emblem of democracy. The story of its construction is profound. Louis Kahn was initially commissioned to design this project in 1962 by the Pakistani government, who, at the time, ruled Bangladesh following the Partition of the Indian subcontinent by the British. While the project was being built, Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan and became its own sovereign state. This shifted the significance of this project from a legislative complex in a region that was politically marginalized in Pakistan to becoming the symbolic heart of the infant nation-state of Bangladesh.

There is also the fact that Kahn died in 1974, eight years before the project was completed. To me, there is something haunting about this. This is a building designed before its country existed and completed after its architect was no more. In my poem, I wanted to draw the connection between the unfinished business of a major project and the unresolved questions of democracy that still haunt Bangladesh today.

RP: One of the reasons this poem stood out to me is that it turns the gaze on the artist—how what we support, and what we participate in, can also perpetuate larger systems of power. The em dashes, and the white space they create, contributed to that gaze. How do you view the em dashes functioning in this piece?

NAI: Kahn often spoke of light as a fundamental design element of this project. The building uses the strategic placement of voided shapes to bring in natural light. Monumental geometrical openings become apertures that choreograph the experience of this space. I wanted the em dashes to function in a similar way: as apertures in the body of the text, with the white space as light. Meaning is meant to accumulate in these pauses. I wanted the reader to feel the weight of what isn’t said. The fragmentation caused by the em dashes also mirrors the jagged history of the space I am dealing with, one that cannot be told in smooth or straightforward syntax.

RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working
on now?

NAI: Currently, I am working on a deeply personal project: translating the poems of my late grandmother, Rahila Islam, a poet who lived through British colonial rule, the 1952 Language Movement, and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Although she published two poetry collections in her lifetime and published prolifically in well-known publications in Bangladesh, her work remains largely unknown to a wider audience despite engaging adeptly with these major historic moments. I am drawing on my grandmother’s poems, our family archives, as well as oral histories held by the women in my family to challenge the erasure of her work, and in a broader sense, that of women’s voices in Bangladeshi literary history.

Lastly, I would encourage anyone reading this poem to look up a photo of Kahn’s project. It truly is a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture! Readers can find me and follow my work on Instagram: @the_monafisa.

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