Interview conducted by Annika Warrick
Transcribed by Annika Warrick and Matthew White
In April of 2024, Arkana editors had the opportunity to interview acclaimed poet Brody Parrish Craig, author of poetry collections such as Boyish, and The Patient is an Unreliable Historian, about trans representation, their literary inspirations, and the impact of their poetry.
AW: Who would you consider to be your mentor and influences?
Brody: Geffrey Davis because I worked with him in grad school at the University of Arkansas and he made a really big impact on not just my work, but how I teach creative writing. Matthew Henriksen in Arkansas as well made a big impact on me in terms of who I was closest to as a writer. Past influences, I feel as if I’m most drawn to people who, ethically and praxis wise, are doing something interesting in their work regardless of what that looks like. I really love June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima for sure, Tongo Eisen-Martin, love Wendy Trevino. A lot of that has to do with the way that their poems, their artistic passions just pass the page, talk about politics and are informed by community organizing in a way that’s not just poems.
AW: It does something more than just words.
Brody: Yeah! I love poetry, but I’m not interested in a poem that sounds pretty but doesn’t have anything to say. I like when there’s commentary or critical discussion happening in the poem.
AW: If you had to pick a favorite of your poems, it could even be top three to five, which ones would you pick?
Brody: I don’t feel like I have a favorite poem. I feel like every time I write a poem, I love it for a while and then I don’t love it as much. My favorite poem changes every three seconds. One poem I really love is the first poem in this new book that’s coming out, The Patient is an Unreliable Historian. It’s called “Mad in America,” and that title is after a book by Robert Whitaker that has the same title, Mad in America. I love that poem because it makes sense as the opening of the book. It’s a mantra or a channeling of lived experience in madness and psychiatry over the history of the United States, which is what the book by Robert Whitaker is about. It’s the history of psychiatry in the US. It’s a really intense book and took me a really long time to get through it. But, I really liked writing that poem because of how I blended research, other lived experiences, and history into my own experience. It was really informative, and it was also really fun.
AW: So maybe that one, “Mad in America”?
Brody: It’s my favorite for today!
AW: There is a lot of religious imagery in Boyish. How do you feel your religious upbringing influenced your sense of poetics and your sense of self?
Brody: It’s kind of complicated. On one hand, there is my religious upbringing and the reclamation or the subversion that comes up in my work. But also the religious trauma. That’s half of my work. I am a very spiritual person, and what that means to me is very different from what my upbringing was. I didn’t know this until recently, but I was looking up certain words to see how many times they appeared in my next book, and the word “God” is in that book like 44 times. It is only an 80-to-100 page book, too, so that’s almost every other page! I had genuinely no idea. In Boyish there was a lot of unpacking that I needed to do about being raised southern baptist and being queer. A lot of times hymns and prayers will come up in my work in one line or another, and I’ll subvert them. So there is that half, but I also have the half that is my own spirituality.
AW: A major theme in your work is transness and queerness. How do you feel your identity as a queer person and a southerner informs the way you write?
Brody: When I started going to school for writing, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to do this in a more formal way.” At first I didn’t know who my audience was, because there is the audience that you are taught to reach, and the audience I am trying to reach. One of the most important factors to being a queer person and southern person is that all those things coalasque. My audience can be anyone who picks up my books, but my number one audience is queer and trans people, and most frequently queer, trans southerners. What does it look like to put that audience first, versus second? It dramatically changes everything that happens. There are not enough trans people in poetry and art spaces, unfortunately, there are not enough queer, trans people who get elevated to a platform. I want to write for people like myself. If anyone else comes along, you are totally welcome and invited, but you are secondary to who my audience is. Giving myself permission to do that was huge for what came next in my writing. My poetics and my art are very community driven. I see my role as an artist in society past just publishing.
AW: So one thing I noticed in Boyish is you use asterisk ellipses to create space in your poems. What do they represent that words can’t?
Brody: I’m kind of obsessed with asterisks. They’re pretty! They look like stars! So that’s part of the reason. It is just a beautiful piece of punctuation. I have this need to write things in sections. I don’t know why that is. I have a lot of poems that I feel need to be longer, but also feel episodic. It’s a way to indicate a section that still looks pretty to me, aesthetically,
AW: You have a way of accessing the subconscious with your work. How do you feel like the subconscious comes into your writing process?
Brody: I feel like the subconscious is really huge in my writing process. Usually when I write, I tend to go with a freewrite, and tap into my subconscious first. Find the poem from there. For me, being neurodivergent, being mad, being queer, I can express myself better through a subconscious freewrite info dump, than I can having a conversation like this. A lot of times when I am trying to start a poem, I am trying to access that place in the subconscious to get whatever is going on out. Then, in the revision process, I try to blend that subconscious dump with the reality of what is happening, and turn that into an actual poem. There have been times when I’ve dumped into a document and put it away for three years. Then you actually go back and go, wow this is actually a poem, what the hell?
AW: You help run TWANG, a writing anthology that elevates trans and gender nonconforming writers that live in Mid-America. Tell us about that!
Brody: In 2018 I found out there was an opportunity for artists to apply for funding for projects, and I was interested but terrified. It immediately occurred to me that I would want to elevate other trans artists, if I had the money. I almost didn’t apply. It was through Artist 360. Twenty four hours before the application was due, I was like, I gotta do it. I sent it in, forgot about it because I knew it was never going to happen, and then I got the grant! The project I pitched was to make trans or TGNC (Trans and Gender Non-Conforming) writing anthologies, which did happen and is available free online. You can technically order it in print, too, if you want. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting it out there, but in the process, I ended up falling into doing trans-specific poetry workshops. With that project, I hired two other folks to read submissions with me and select what would go into the anthology. I also did four creative writing workshops, and they all centered trans poetry. For each of those workshops, we partnered with a queer or trans nonprofit in the region. It was amazing but also super challenging, because I had to learn how to do things like design a book. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and I learned a lot. One of the biggest things I learned is to ask for help. Shoutout to Sibling Rivalry Press, because one of the people who taught me a lot was Seth Pennington. I just said, “I don’t know what I’m doing, can you please help”, and he gave me so much information.
Now I’m co-leading this new event series with my husband, visual artist Max Calabotta. We are doing another creative workshop series, but this time we are specifically focusing on Arkansas. The theme is trans joy, and there will be another anthology eventually. One of the things that has been on my mind is equity. With the first publication, it was a submission model, accept / reject, etc., and I really didn’t like that about it. This time anyone who comes to the workshop, as long as your TGNC and Arkansan, you’re invited to put your work in the anthology. For us, that has been cool because it eliminates barriers for people, and it has been amazing working with Max because he knows everything about visual art and I know nothing about it!
AW: What has it been like navigating life as a trans poet in a red state? If you could give a piece of advice, what would it be?
Brody: My advice, just across the board, would be to find your people. Whether that be other artists, or other trans people, other queer people, whatever that means. For me, I really have found my people in Arkansas, and it really has made a difference. There is a lot of shit, so having a community that I can rely on, having people that can see me, makes all the difference. I remember with SB43 (a recent piece of anti-trans legislation in Arkansas), when the last legislative session was happening, I interpreted the legislation as, if I am performing a poem in public in a dress, I am going to violate the law. That is the reality of being a trans artist in this state. At the same time, I have people who can hold space with me, and we are stronger if we get through it, stronger if we are together. I grew up in Louisiana, so I’ve always lived in the South. Personally, I don’t know if I would be happy outside of the region. This is my home, and it is very complicated to deeply, deeply, identify as a southerner and deeply, deeply identify as trans at the same time, to allow myself, regardless of other people, to hold space for all parts of my experience and identity at once. I very much claim both of those things and the beauty and the horror of that has been really important to me in terms of the levels of honesty that I can have in the work that I write. The more I can be honest with myself, accept myself, and interrogate myself, the stronger the work is, and the more honest I can be on the page.
AW: Boyish is a chapbook, and your upcoming publication is full length. What was your process of creation like with Boyish, and how did your process differ in The Patient is an Unreliable Historian?
Brody: In grad school I had written a thesis and it was probably 60 pages. A couple things from that turned into Boyish, but a lot of it just disappeared. Some of it actually comes back in this book that’s almost published. For Boyish, I thought a lot about structure. I thought a lot about the order of the poems. I thought a lot about movement between the tones of the poems and trying not to put too many similar tones back-to-back in the book. It was in a lot of different orders before it landed on the order that got picked up. I submitted it out to a handful of other contests before it won the Omnidawn Contest. One thing, too, is that in the end, all the poems had to do with Lousisiana. There were certain poems that just got pulled out that didn’t feel thematically relevant. Even if I loved them, I just didn’t put them in. It was very much like… a slice of a thing. In my MFA program I was taught that you get a chapbook published, or maybe you get two chapbooks published, and then collectively all those chapbooks become your first book. That was the model I was taught. I thought maybe that’s what was going to happen for me, and that’s absolutely not what happened. In the first draft of my full-length book, there was a lot of Boyish, but then I put it away. I tend to have a first draft of a book, not look at it for a year, and then come back to it and turn it into what it needs to be. I’m actually doing that with a different book right now. I’m in the pause phase with it before I go back and look at it again. So with The Patient, I had done that. I didn’t look at it for a year, and then I came back to it, and I just wasn’t happy with it. I wasn’t sure where it was going, and then all of a sudden, it needed to be something else. A large portion of that book changed between the first draft and the second draft. Now it’s very much separate from Boyish. There are maybe 4-5 poems from Boyish that made it into the The Patient. It’s a very different piece.
AW: So how did you find your publisher for The Patient?
Brody: I’m using the same publisher. I was scared, but I just straight up asked them if they wanted to publish my full length, so here we are! In terms of figuring out why I submitted to Omnidawn to begin with? Love Rusty Morrison, love her poetry, had heard good things about her as a publisher. I had also met poets who had published with her before through Omnidawn, and so I knew things about the press. One of the reasons I decided to stay, too, is that I felt really happy working with them on Boyish, and I really admire them politically. When Rusty read my manuscript, very limited comments were made on it, but in those comments I could tell that she knew what I was going for. I always feel like she saw my work, you know what I mean? The limited feedback and suggestions were like… things that were in line with what I was going for.
AW: Has publication affected how you write at all?
Brody: I try not to let it, if that makes sense. I think there is this danger of being like, “Oh I want to write what’s going to get published,” and that’s super unhealthy in a lot of different ways. I won the chapbook contest, which is super cool, but also super lucky. Since winning that chapbook contest, I have judged that chapbook contest. To be in that position where I have all these manuscripts and I’m drawn to specific things, and drawn to so many of them, but I can only pick one? I now know that just because it gets picked up, does not mean that it’s…I don’t want to say “the best,” but…there are so many works that don’t win a contest, and there are so many good poems that don’t get published. I intentionally try to not allow publishing to dictate how I feel about my work. I think that has to be a practice, too. Matt (Henriksen), back in the day, was running Typo magazine, and had published two of my poems that ended up in Boyish. He read through Boyish after it had gotten accepted for the contest and was talking about it, and he said, “This is going to be funny to you but I think the two weakest poems in this are…” and it was the two poems he had published in Typo. Grain of salt, it can be cool to get published, and of course I want to get published. I’m a writer, I want an audience, but I don’t want publication to determine the value of any of my poems.
AW: If your poems could do one thing for the world, what would you want it to be?
Brody: I don’t think I want them to do just one thing. I think there’s probably a couple things, and it very much depends on who is reading. I’m really big on creating dialogue, on space making. Having narratives that have been erased be seen. Also, questioning. Sometimes I want to make someone uncomfortable, to interrogate something. I think interrogation is part of it. But space making is big. I want to connect with people. That’s part of why I was drawn to art to begin with, and that’s why I enjoy collaborating with other artists on TWANG. There will always be projects like that for me because as an artist, I’m not interested in doing it alone. I’m interested in connecting with people.