Note: Verve {in} Verse is my new poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. I kicked off the series with poet Edward Vidaurre. In this next installment, I talk with Monica Lewis about her upcoming book Sexting the Dead, her experience with VONA, and “mothering the brain.” -Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni: First of all, Hola! Sending you 7 Train Love from Queens! Let’s start this off by asking: What brought you to New York City? What has made you stay? Do you ever think about venturing elsewhere?
Monica Lewis: I fell in love with New York City during my first visit here which wasn’t until I was 25 actually. I had been meaning to come for years; one of my best friends from high school in South Florida (where we grew up) studied as an undergrad at NYU and had been begging me to visit since 2001, but I could never really afford the trip. So it wasn’t until after I completed my undergrad studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and wasn’t quite sure where my next move would be (though I knew I was finished with the Midwest), that I finally decided to visit NYC. I planned a trip for two weeks, but then I never left.
I will never forget the moment my love for this city was cemented: I was sitting on the #2 train, looking around at all of the other passengers, and realizing, as a person who comes from a mixed racial and ethnic background, that for the life of me, I could not for certain pick out almost anyone’s backgrounds. I found that to be beautiful. I also loved that NYC was the only place I’d ever felt I could be invisible. Here you see and witness every sort of person, and so after a bit, nothing becomes very shocking, and that for me, as a person with a physical disability, also felt extremely freeing. I knew it was home. I’ve just celebrated my 11th anniversary here this fall and feel I can officially call myself a true NY-er. While I love nature and the country, and I do need to venture out at times for my sanity, I don’t see myself ever leaving NYC permanently.
RB: Likewise. Sometimes I do think of leaving NYC and settling in Iceland just so I can be with the horses, but that dream is for now a ways off. So. Can we please talk about the last lines of your poem “moon-cleansed,” recently published by Flapperhouse:
“still, i will do my best to protect you as a wolf does; come for its kin and it will kill. and the bones of the hunter, the mother will lick as clean and as pure as the moon.”
Wow. This whole poem blew me away, how the speaker tries to commune with a consciousness that is both a part of her while seeming separate from her at the same time, a separate fragile entity, a “she” that has her own “bloody body” which contain “waves of sea with all the love the ocean deserves.” What was it like for you writing this poem? Would you say this a poem of rebirth?
ML: This is definitely a poem of rebirth. I wrote it rather quickly, as I do most of my poems. I struggle with major depressive disorder and my relationship to my brain is one that I often see as both an intimate part of me (hence the birth of it in this poem, the mother holding it at her breast after a bloody, gory birth), but also separate from me; there’s a book I saw years ago that I think of often with a title like When Your Brain is Trying to Kill You. In this poem I was trying to explore that duality. Obviously I would not exist without my brain, but there are so many times when it feels like a completely different entity – something familiar and a part of me, like a child I’ve given birth to and am responsible for, but not truly me. The end of this poem was about me trying to learn how I can learn to mother my brain in a different way.
RB: “Mother my brain” – I love that. I’ve been fascinated as well by the mind-body connection, especially since my own body has been attacking my nervous system. Autoimmune illnesses are largely unknown in origin, what causes them, and it’s definitely affected my writing. So I might just try that, my friend: mothering my own brain. . . .
You’re currently finishing up your book, Sexting the Dead. Can you give us a taste of what it’s about?
ML: I’m still deep in trying to figure just that question out! It is my first collection of poetry, so right now I am looking at my body of work as a whole and trying to see how it all fits together, or speaks together in different, yet compliment ways. I would say, at its heart, it is about the body and my two obsessions with it: sex (and what comes from and with that like lust, love and pain) and death (fear of it, a longing for it, escaping from it, the physical realities of it).
RB: You an alumna of VONA/Voices; can you tell us about your experiences with this organization? How does it serve as an alternative to the academic workshop setting?
ML: I say without hyperbole that attending VONA in 2015 saved my life. I had severe writer’s block following the completion of my MFA and deep trauma from years of workshop experiences where I was often the only person of color in the classroom. To be in a safe place as an artist was new and revolutionary. The idea of this is what initially drew me to VONA and it is also why I hope to return one day. What I really absorbed from VONA is that I don’t write for certain (meaning lots of) people. I also don’t write for other writers. I write for my readers. I found this in my journal recently from that summer:
“I’m done trying to distort my stories into something that makes a certain ‘you all’ comfortable. I don’t care if my words are ‘universal’ to your so very small universes, those which I’ve been exhausted by and trying to escape from since day one anyhow, anyway. I don’t care if you feel excluded from my narrative spaces. I’m long past writing for the big, boring ya’ll. You know why a lot of magical realism has never resonated with me? Because the actual realist state I live in and write from has too often been labeled unrealistic because it is borne from a marginalized place. It is too depressing; too dark; too much. While I love stories of girls who turn into silkworms or worlds where I’m a muggle or a Sith Lord, or even, really, part of a couple on a trip to northern New York in winter when our whole climax might be your mother’s set of wedding china breaking or at best, a snowstorm and bears, our truck broken-down, us cabin-stuck for at least four days, outta skinless, boneless sardines, honestly, I’ve seen and lived with much wilder happenings in my day-to-days. So that’s where I go. I laugh a lot. I am nerdy; I’m creative. But I’m no longer interested in trying to educate the willfully ignorant through art. Libraries, schools, the whole internet exists. Learn for yourselves. This token is no longer a functioning token. Game out-of-order. Instead, go find refuge, self, and sanctity in art because you want to grow that muscle in your chest a little more, a little more, a little more. Get strong enough to the point of craving that window to confront and finally dismantle that ugly ass mirror yourself.”
This is what VONA means to me as a writer of color.
As stated above, my main goal as a writer is to engage deeply with my readers; to be honest and brave in the stories I tell, be it through fiction or poetry. I hope to bring stories to light that are often shamed into the shadows. I’m less interested in being a “success” as I am entering that honored space with a reader who identifies and is moved by the stories I share.
RB: Speaking of identifying with readers, you wrote an essay called “On Art and Engagement” for The James Franco Review in which you discussed resistance, art and the body as working together to break down oppressive, established hierarchies:
“For me, as a writer, whose cis female, brown-skinned, ‘dis’-abled body must live in a patriarchal, racist, glorified able-body world, this means my art must resist the urge to distort its exclusive stories. Each one I write must refuse to reconfigure its narrative space into one that is collective, cooperative, benign.”
I love the unapologetic energy of the essay, but especially of these lines in particular. How did you get to this place? Where do you go from these lines?
ML: I think my response to your question about what VONA means to me gets at this question. I truly believe my art must tell its own stories that truly do resist the urge to distort themselves into what is common or easy or normative. I recently joked with a friend that my work is often too dark and depressing, but he responded in a remarkable way. He said he was speaking with a friend on the artist Adrian Piper and his friend said, “She deals with dark and heavy themes around race and gender and she definitely doesn’t pull punches, but she also approaches them with a sense of humor that never becomes clowning, but also shows a lively and open responsiveness to what she’s dealing with.” My friend said that all of these things can be said about my work. That is truly what I aim for.
RB: Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the various poetry and artistic communities in my life, and ways to bring them together, ways for us to collaborate? What does community mean to you? How do you balance it with the solitary nature of writing?
ML: Community is vital to me, as being an artist, especially a writer, is certainly to live in a very lonely mind space. It’s another one of the main reasons I find living in NYC is essential for me. I’ve found a beautiful, loving, vibrant, and diverse community of writers these past several years in Brooklyn. It is why I participate in so many literary readings. I’ve also found Facebook to be essential to my connectedness with the writing community. It has its faults, certainly, but for the most part, my experiences have been positive. For years I have been moderating a private Facebook group called “teasparrows” whose mission I wrote quite openly: “My beautiful friends, this is a safe, private space and i’m missing your words. I want to encourage you to please continue to share what scares you and/or makes you beam, and/or causes any heart sputterings. You can always hit delete later, but you might, for one flash of a second, make someone so lit they go on to breathe some fire breath of their own that then inflames another, etc., etc., etc…let’s be the kindle, the tinder, the flint, the flame, the little wind-kissed spark for each other.” It’s grown to over 400 members in just a few years and it’s a lovely place to encourage new writers, writers who’ve never thought themselves writers, and writers who do consider themselves writers, a place to connect and experiment and support one another.
RB: Who are you reading now? What poets excite you?
ML: Right now I’ve been reading Danez Smith, Kaveh Akbar, Devin Kelly, Melissa Broder, Jeannn Verlee, Ariel Francisco, William Lessard, and Kwayme Opoku-Duku III. They are all electric and inspiring me. A poet I continually turn to, as well is Lucie Brock-Broido, who we as a community, tragically recently lost. She has been a tremendous light to me as a poet. (And old school standbys always at my desk are my favorite confessionals: Plath and Sexton!
RB: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
ML: Still trying to finish “Sexting the Dead” so that’s top-priority, but when I need a break from poetry, I turn to flash fiction, so I’m every so often, churning up a little new ones of those!