#m. mack

Issue #18 – Historical (Re)Tell Tell the truth but tell it slant, writes Emily Dickinson. For this issue, we’re looking for telling retelling of the historic, tales that offer what wasn’t said but should’ve been, what wasn’t written down but likely happened, whose voices speak that didn’t speak because there wasn’t a platform for them. We want poetry, prose, and nonfiction, music, art,…

Nicole Tong’s Curated Series of Interviews Closes with

Poet, Editor and Fiber Artist M. Mack

  M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of the chapbooks Traveling (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015) and Imaginary Kansas (dancing girl press, 2015). Hir work has appeared in Gargoyle, Wicked Alice, Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, in The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), and elsewhere. Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press. mxmack.com 

Mack shares hir experiences as an editor, teacher, and poet. Ze discusses gender, current projects, collage, Super Mario Brothers, ecopoetics, and Gazing Grain Press.

Where are you from (or currently living)? How did you come to be a writer?

I live and work in Virginia, in several suburbs of Washington, D.C.

I think I came into being AS a writer. My mom bought me my first journals and before those, a tape recorder. My mom never treated writing as something I shouldn’t be doing; I learned in graduate school that this is not common. I went to Woodbridge Senior High School, home to the Center for Fine and Performing Arts where I majored in creative writing. I’ve never stopped studying creative writing.

Describe your typical writing process for writing poetry.

I’m always collecting. I keep a notebook with me, but mostly, I use the Evernote app on my phone to collect images, bits of language, and concepts. I compose in Evernote, too, and I use the note revision history to keep myself from saving 75 versions of a draft to my computer. Sometimes I get bogged down in the how of things, so when I find a tool that works for me, I really embrace it.

I generally go through periods. I won’t write anything in a project for a while, and then I will write several poems in one evening, or one poem a day for a while. Then, when I feel I’ve exhausted my raw material, I will go back to collecting. I use a similar process for submitting and revising. I’ll spend most of the month gathering potential markets, and then I’ll send out. I’ll think for a long while about a project, and then I’ll make a lot of changes to it at once. I’m always switching between active and passive processes. The key is to remember that the passive phases are equally important to the more clearly productive ones.

What are your current projects? What are the inspirations for those projects?

I’m currently working on several main projects. For a long time, I was working on only one project, a full-length manuscript called Theater of Parts. This is a collection of impossible theater, a term coined by Caridad Svich in her collection of Federico García Lorca’s drama. Then I started working on a little chapbook of ghostly loved poems called Imaginary Kansas, and I found that I really liked moving between the two things. Both of these projects are obsessed with their own queerness, Imaginary Kansas more quietly, maybe. I enjoyed having two major projects to write into; their modes were different enough that I could move back and forth between then. But, as I started to feel done with those projects, I began to panic that I didn’t know what I would write next. After a few uncomfortable months, I have found myself in the midst of several projects.

One of the projects I’m actively working on has the working title “Mine.” I spent 2014 hospice caring for my grandmother, and I worked from home this past summer due to this. For some reason, I was drawn to a cable shopping channel for long spans of time. The hosts are very happy, and they are adamant that their products will change your life. Once, the host suggested that if you were homebound and could not care for a pet, you might like the doggie-shaped cookie jar she had on clearance as the next best thing. I built a lexicon of their strange language in chunks—the phrases and chant-like repetition of televised salesmanship. I collage these gems into open field poems. I put things next to other things and see what happens. What results is gendered, and of surveillance, and of a particularly desperate kind of live marketing.

I’m also working on a set of poems with Alyse Knorr called “s/m BROS.” These feature the characters and landscape of the Super Mario Brothers universe and explore gendered and sexualized discourse. We’ve spent a lot of time on Mario wikis and other fan-constructed resources. We put Mario and his pals in our landscapes, or we put ourselves in theirs, or we use their language.

There is also a project that I want to be working on. I’m in the early research stages of a future project on the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that established the major infrastructure of our state and national parks. My mother and I have been visiting Virginia State Parks for a few years now. We’re currently taking part in the TrailQuest program that challenges you to hike each of the 37 Virginia State Parks. We’ve stayed in cabins built by the CCC, and this summer I found a CCC museum at Pocahontas State Park near Richmond. As of now, I’m gathering primary and secondary sources, and I’m reading ecopoetics texts. I’m newly interested in the construction of landscape. I’m sure the gender lens through which I view everything will come in as well. There is an ethics to conservation and its storytelling, and I hope to immerse myself in this more fully and see how the project develops.

CCC research

Tell me about Gazing Grain Press and the ways in which being an editor has shaped your own writing?

Siwar Masannat, Alyse Knorr, and I founded in Gazing Grain in June 2012. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about the professional business of being a writer and editor. Beyond that, I’m impacted as a human poet when I get to read feminist contemporary poetry in the summer. I get to read a lot of really great chapbooks. Alyse and I are now working with an expanded staff of ten editors, and collaborating with other feminist writers is an incredibly enriching experience.

I also get to collaborate with talented writers when designing chaps and miniatures (little handmade books featuring a poem or two). Working with the space and layout of other poets’ work has renewed my interest in space. I’m thinking again about my own work and the page as a formal element to work with. I would like to return to making artist’s books of my own. In the meantime, I’m laying out a largely visual text of one of my manuscripts and I’m playing with space in the cable shopping poems.

One of the most important ways that working as an editor has helped me as a writer is that I understand aesthetics a bit more. I understand better that editors are poets with their own sets of values and priorities, and when I’m sending work out, I’m looking for priorities that compliment mine.

I know you to be a writing professor. Does teaching shape how you follow or break rules?

I have always been simultaneously infatuated with following and breaking the rules. Much of what I do as a composition instructor is to interrogate rules. I start every semester with a discussion of writing rules and advice. We build a list and then we have a critique. Who made this rule? Who benefits from it? Is this rule always true? Does this rule apply in every situation? Does this rule conflict with some other rule? I think these are important questions. Rules (systems) are often in the subjects I teach, be it composition, literature, or creative writing.

I will say that this semester, I see the most connections between my writing and teaching than I have before. I’ve been writing and researching along with my students, which has led me to examining my own rules all over again. Often when I am writing along with them (since I have excused myself from the actual essays), I stretch the rules and apply the prompts to a different purpose. My students are wrapping up an essay based on an existing text (chosen from texts by rule-breakers bell hooks, Cornel West, Kevin Kumashiro, and Howard Zinn). At one point, I worked on a chapbook review in response to the in-class workshop I had given them. The prompts were geared toward developing a response argument to their chosen text. I like when I can draw these clear connections between what I do and what I am asking them to do.

What is the role of gender in the production of your work?

The role of gender in my work is…total. Much of the time, I view my poetics as a mode of research. In my life, I’m trying to make sense of gender, and poetry is the way I’ve chosen to try. (Though I do admit that often my poems are trying to un-make or un-sense gender.) When I was working on my MFA, I was trying to find ways to accurately and responsibly represent trans* and genderqueer experience in my poetry. I came to do that by representing my own experiences, and by focusing on genre as an organizing system analogous to gender. But even speaking from one’s own experience is charged. How does my experience relate to someone else’s? Am I trying to speak for others? There aren’t answers to this type of questioning, necessarily, but the asking is important.

What do you value as an artist?

The space around a boundary--where it breaks.

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Here is a poem that originally appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection.

http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v16/e10/mackm.htm

  i think it is a paradigm shift not only for the home but for the office

          but it is a paradigm shift because

it's an even greater thing, i think, when you have access to the experience of others

          anniversary

          happy birthday 

          with sympathy

because the absorption is so challenged

this is a great drink to have in the 

                              morning afternoon evening 

                              but not too late but just about 

                              any time of day really 

                              just a great drink to have

play mix match

you will love 

              love 

              love

the resurrection plant

                         are stained 

                         are warped 

                         are dented 

                         are oxidized 

                         are broken

and you're getting every rose in the garden as well

 ~