This interview was conducted by katharine blair between the 10th & 17th of December, 2022 via email.
Aside from a few vagaries of location, the questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

“I learn each song by hearing a note & then playing it.”

We Are the Brightside

I spent a lot of 1993/94 in the basement of a house I still miss in the east end of Toronto which pinch hit as rehearsal grounds for a band called MKUltra, then Slogun, more than a little in love with a bass player named Ned. I’m fear-wound and starved where he’s languid and alive and so barely mine. My world is mind the invisible hard lines, shift and adapt or get who the fuck knows what’s coming, and his is parents who read the library into submission and sing and dance in the kitchen while we smoke hash in his room. I am still grappling with present tense realness, still hearing notes and fumbling their execution. I call it execution. I still need the rules. Tell me more about RJ and your invisibility. Middle school’s such a real thing. How do you wear yours?

Omg , that’s so cool! Thank you for sharing this with me! I would look forward to 4th of July every year because it meant getting to go over and play music with Joe and his friends, RJ included. Like, if you asked me growing up what my favorite holiday was, I would tell you it was the 4th and it had nothing to do with the actual holiday itself. The 4th of July for me meant that Joe would be home from Berklee College of Music (he played multiple instruments, but clarinet was one of the first he picked up which is why I think he let me join in), and if Joe was there then that meant RJ would show up at one point, and Matt and Marty and a bunch of the other older “kids” that played music with Joe in high school. Joe and his friends would put on a concert in the garage after we finished lighting sparklers and throwing Pop Its on the sidewalk. And then they’d go back to the basement and play more later. Later in the night, after most of the guests had gone home, they’d go up to the living room where the piano was and all jam over there. One of Joe’s friends even knew how to play spoons. I have Joe to thank for any ear training I have as a musician. 

RJ is still one of my dearest friends to this day, and I was at their apartment in Chicago earlier this fall to celebrate my birthday. Looking back on it too, RJ was one of the first visibly queer people I ever met and they’re not much older than I am. I’m just realizing as I’m typing this how grateful I was to have that, well before I realized my own queerness and came into my own with it. 

And oh geez, first through eighth grade are the sources of all of my bullying trauma. I was the kid who would read on the bench on the playground in elementary school because my friends didn’t want to be my friends anymore. I became a people pleaser in high school because I thought that if I could get everyone to like me, my friendships would be consistent and I wouldn’t be made fun of ever again. Joe’s younger sister was one of the two kids I would play with as a kid most frequently, aside from my best friend. When my sister and I first moved into the neighborhood, the main group of neighborhood kids who would all play Knock Out late into the evening wouldn’t make space for two more kids. But Joe and his two siblings really weren’t a part of that and let my sister and me come over and play. I would literally sit in the front lawn waiting for Joe’s sister to come home from dance to play. There really wasn’t any romantic or crush-y feelings behind it when it came to me waiting for Joe’s sister to come play. It was just that if my best friend wasn’t home, then Joe’s sister was my only other option for kids my age and Joe’s sister was a year younger than me. I was a really, really lonely kid! I didn’t want to be invisible at that age, even though invisibility could have kept me safe. If I wear invisibility now, it’s through things like going to concerts and bookstores by myself and being immersed in worlds beyond my own. I wanted friends and to be with the other kids so badly when I was younger to the point of desperation and, so if I had friendships that did stick, I flung myself at them. I would cry to my dad at night when he tucked me into bed because I wanted friends. I wish I could hug my younger self looking back at this. I wouldn’t be able to tell myself “it gets better” because adults did that and I didn’t believe them. I remember thinking, “That’s nice that ‘it gets better’, but nothing is getting better now and I don’t know how much longer this is going to keep being this way because I hold out each year and nothing changes.”

One day during the summer, I think I was in sixth grade, Joe’s sister wasn’t home but Joe and RJ were and they were going to have band practice in the garage. I didn’t really “play” with Joe as a kid: He was five years older than me, and I usually didn’t see him aside from in passing when he was leaving his house. He was the cool older brother that wore a lot of black and I was intimidated by. But that day, I didn’t have any other kids to be around and said, “Oh, can I hang out with you guys then? At least until your sister gets home?” And I’m really thankful they didn’t turn me away. I think they could sense I didn’t have any other friends to be with that day of the summer and didn’t want to be alone. Sitting in on Joe’s band practice with RJ was magic to me. I think that’s one of the reasons why music, band, and marching band became so important to me as an adolescent: playing music meant playing with others. Community in music became my favorite thing. Jesus Coyote, the band whose song Windows that’s on the CSWG 5-year anniversary playlist, is the band that Joe plays with now. RJ’s been working hard on their debut album too, under the moniker Kicked By a Hand. We Are the Brightside unfortunately doesn’t have any music on streaming platforms, but I wanted to honor both RJ and Joe by having a track that one of them co-wrote to honor them and the impact they had on me. 

“We’ve still got our friends & we still have the radio.
I promise you’re gonna be fine.”

Billie Joe Armstrong & I Come Out to Each Other

On a recent trip my person let me detour our drive through the Midwestern suburb where they grew up and I’ll admit that I had forgotten just how lonely it can be to grow up isolated and queer. I live now in one of these cottage towns masquerading as cities on the SF peninsula. It’s suburban in so far as the houses are short and the yards sinfully vast, but we win on scale. You can’t build a five mile long block of single family houses with no access to groceries or transit when you’ve barely that much acreage from hillside to bay; demand inevitably leads to supply. And yet I still miss the anonymous possibility of a real city of size. Growing up I lived downtown and we shuttled ourselves across Toronto lengthwise, twice daily, from the ages of 9 and 12. If you could be it, we saw it. If you could do it, we tried it. And we still needed music. How has music found you? Has it saved you? What doors did it wedge and hold open for you as a child?

I found myself in awe of your description of suburban yards and the way they are sinfully vast. What a delectable way to describe them! I definitely feel that, being back home in the suburb I grew up in. I feel boxed in by golf courses and miss living in the Twin Cities very, very much. I don’t have my driver’s license and there’s not really a public transportation system here, so I have to rely on my parents and sister to get around. I can’t just hop on a bus and go to my favorite bookstore or local independent coffee shop because independent bookstore in my hometown is still a three mile walk from where I live. I miss that sense of independence and being able to go to poetry shows and concerts too! 

Like RJ and Joe, music opened a door for me regarding friendship when I got to high school. I do not think I would have had the same positive high school experience had it been for marching band. I got into the top band as a freshman, and not a lot of freshman do, and the top two bands make up the high school’s marching band. Marching band was really my saving grace in high school. So was speech team, which I learned about and joined as a result of one of my friends in marching band. 

RJ and Joe were also band and orchestra nerds, too. That’s how they met actually, through being in orchestra together. Joe also played clarinet in the top band and introduced me to the other kids in the clarinet section when I found out I made it. The clarinet section also had a love for penguins for some reason, and once held a penguin-themed party where we all went to get sandwiches and see a matinee of Happy Feet. I don’t even know how to explain how a penguin party with a bunch of teenagers who all play clarinet happened, but it did. I think Joe invited me to that. I also remember him telling me he’d burn me a copy of My Chemical Romance’s B-sides for me. He was really the cool older brother I never had. 

“It has taken centuries for Gerard Way & me to open
the curtains & let the light in. To accept that we need it.”

If Gerard Way Was a Vampire, I Would Want to Be Their Familiar

This quote, yes, but really just the whole thing, start to finish. You’re writing here with perspective, and now you’re five years past with perspective on that perspective and I wonder how you’d write it now. My youngest asked my second ‘what comes after adult’ when they turned 18, and the answer, ‘nothing. You’re an adult forever,’ refuses me peace. What comes after adult? How do we pull ourselves forward? What marks that change now? Please spare me your thoughts on the last line. I know that one like breathing; we’ve still two months of darkness and I’m just not that strong.

Oh my god, I had SO MUCH FUN writing this poem! It’s actually inspired by the show, What We Do In the Shadows, and I was giggling to myself while writing it because I kept thinking about Guillermo giving a frustrated look at the camera because he’s just done with the vampires’ nonsense and not getting a thank you. 

I don’t know what happens after “adult”. I don’t even want to be an adult! I just turned 28 so, like, I’m in it for the long haul for adulthood too, I guess. Aside from important responsibilities like going to work and bills and taxes and making sure my cat is well cared for, I try to be an adult as little as possible. I read a lot of YA. I check out graphic novels from the library and take visits to the comic book store.  I’m rewatching Doctor Who right now, and I’m counting down the days until the new Percy Jackson series. The world is so heavy as an right now, and I can’t even fathom how hard it must be as a teen. I know my inner child is trying her best to hold it together. The only way I’m able to pull myself forward is to find small joys and to engage with my tv shows and comics. I work in retail to make an income, and if I didn’t have things to escape into, I’d emotionally fall apart. My friend, Max, describes the silly tv shows we watch to get us through as “potato chips for our brains”. 

The only thing I like about being an adult now is that I have the skills to deal with intense emotions that I didn’t as a teen.  I didn’t really go to therapy until I went off to college. I think that’s the difference between being a kid and being an adult: your toolbox for emotional regulation becomes a bit bigger. 

My dad also mentioned once how he’s older, and yet he still feels like he’s fifteen. I feel like that most days, too. I still get mistaken for a high schooler, but then the high schoolers I coach use slang that I’ve never heard before in my life and then that really dates me! 

“I don’t know       who let it slip to
my parents       that I wanted to kill myself      but my dad
took the lock off      my bedroom door       that was it, really
no one said      a word”

I Would’ve Grieved Differently Had I Discovered the Wonder Years in High School

I think about this one constantly. There are kids now who are born into tumblr, who never lived without trans people of all permutations, who don’t know the agony of waiting 17, 20, 25, 40 years to meet another person who echoes their aberration and makes them feel real and human and, ideally, good. I wonder what is the next step, who’s out there now, drowning, and how do we find them? I try not to think about how long even this leap will take to reach the whole world. Before all of it, I turned to books and to music. So many of us did. Cheapish and relatively available, other people’s words gave us windows in and out of the world. How do you feel about the role this book has played in that effort? When Hanif tells us he’s still coming to you for salvation, how does that feel?

Wow! This is an amazing question! To be honest, I don’t know. “I Would’ve Grieved Differently Had I Discovered The Wonder Years in High School” is also a poem that is new for the 5-year anniversary edition. I was the kid who turned to books and music too, and I always think I will be. The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series was my salvation in middle school. When I didn’t have friends, I pretended that Percy, Grover, and Annabeth were my friends and let me go on quests with them. 

I don’t know if my work has played that big of a role, but then I get a message from someone who said my poems helped them get through a difficult time and I know what I’ve done what I’ve needed to do as a writer. 

I still can’t believe that Hanif something like that about my work! He’s like Gerard Way-level cool to me as a writer. I’m just a nerd who lives with her parents, works as a barista, and coaches competitive public speaking to a high school team. I don’t feel that special or that important to receive praise like that. It really means a lot. 

On a darker, more morbid note, I did feel like my poems have failed in a way. A friend of mine, a poet named Bennett Nieberg, died by suicide a few years ago. Bennett got me and my friends booked for a poetry show when we toured through Denver. It was one of the best nights of my life. I performed a lot of poems from Crowd Surfing With God at that show. This sounds very unreasonable, but as I revisited the poems in this book, a voice in the back of my head asked me, “Your poems couldn’t even save your friend, so what does that make of you?” But that’s not how mental illness works. And even poems, which are things I love reading and writing, couldn’t stop me from getting close to attempting to take my own life, either. 

“what is giving & taking but a
known act of god? / of the body’s relentless hunt? / my
mother & i have different ways of surviving”

Portrait of the Artist & Her Mother as “White Winter Hymnal” by the Fleet Foxes

Put these three lines in a summoning circle and I’ll come just to fight you. Kicking and screaming and broken, with the will of a bound beast, my heart will arrive. Mothers sure are something, and I say that as one. For a mother and child to be sick of the same thing, to swap nurse and nursemaid, to bind a shared hunger in opposite veins. I’m always eating my half of the offal our shared trauma taught me not to share. How do we shake off this difference? How do you convince a mother that a brain intent on destruction couldn’t care less about two working legs?

If you ever find out how to shake off the difference, please tell me! I would also love to know! I love my family, but they don’t quite get how mental illness works. And using the “illness you can’t see” or metaphor doesn’t quite work with my mom because she lives with an autoimmune disorder and multiple health issues that you can’t see, either. For some reason, mental illness is different with my parents. They’ve definitely gotten a lot better at understanding it since I was a teenager, that’s for sure, but there’s still that Boomer/Millennial disconnect surrounding mental health. Like they’ve both been to family sessions for my own therapy, but therapy for them is off-limits. Which makes me really sad, to be honest, since I know how they can personally benefit from it and become better, healthier versions of themselves from it. But I’ve had to radically accept that they’re not the people I can go to for specific emotional support, as much as my inner child wants me to. 

“tomorrow will be fresh &
blank staff paper // healing will open on a new chord // it
will sound terrible the first time // that means it’s working”

Gerard Way Talks Me Down From a Panic Attack

It never fails to amaze me how art has the power to illuminate one’s life in infuriating ways. I don’t know how I’m going to wedge the text of ‘Gerard Way Talks Me Down From a Panic Attack’ into the checkbox format of the PCL-5 next time I’m asked to drag myself, again, back through everything for some specialist or another, but you can sure bet I’ll try. Stylistically this one really works for me. The invocation of two voices diametrically opposed with the same goal of safety rings true every time. Talk to me about music and grounding. If you still use it that way, give me your top five.

Oh wow this is so kind! Thank you! I would cry myself to sleep listening to Famous Last Words by My Chemical Romance in high school when my brain wanted me to die and I didn’t know why and it scared me. I’ve always rocked my head back and forth while listening to music, ever since I was three, and it’s partly because it’s comforting, but mostly because I cannot sit still listening to music. 

I don’t know if it’s still in the same grounding way, but I do listen to music when my brain is being mean to me and make me feel safe or help me cry until I feel better. Here are those songs: 

1. Famous Last Words by My Chemical Romance

2. Graceland Too by Phoebe Bridgers

3. Favor by Julien Baker 

4. Cardboard Castles by Watsky

5. Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell  

I know this line isn’t yours, but I’m dying to ask you about it anyway. In the forward to this 5th Anniversary Edition, Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “[t]his book was a salve and salvation for me five years ago, and it still is now.” No doubt you’ve been asked this before but what is the experience of revisiting? We published a book last year (tommy blake’s ‘lacuna’) that took a text written between the ages of 15 and 17 and looked back on it fondly from their twenties. With the barest of edits, blake nudged their younger self a little closer to telling the truth. Was there any temptation to alter the text here? How would you want to nudge your younger self?

I think it’s a privilege to revisit work in this capacity and to give the poems a chance to live a second life. Not many books, poetry collections specifically I think, get to be revived like this with a small press. I feel very lucky and also very pressured because like part of my brain is like, “Okay, you can’t screw this up!” 

I start welling up when I think about the fact that Hanif wrote that my book was a salve to him then and still is now. Like, Hanif is the whole reason I write about music and approach it the way I do. He’s one of the kindest writers in the game, and I never thought that a writer I viewed in such high regard and considered to be a hero of mine could even think of my work in this capacity. I hope I get the opportunity to meet him in person again soon. He’s believed in me and reached out to me during a really dark time in my life, and his work leaves me in awe and wants me to keep reaching towards warmth and kindness. Hanif’s books were my favorite to recommend to customers when I was a bookseller. When A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance first released and then nominated for a National Book Award, I felt like a proud #1 fan whose favorite band had their big break and made it to the big time. One day it was slower than usual, and Hanif’s book was still new, and I grabbed a copy of it to finally have a moment with it and read behind the counter before things at work picked up again. A favorite regular of mine, a priest who loves poetry and reads The Paris Review stopped in. Since I knew he read modern writers on occasion, I asked him if he had heard of Hanif’s book(s). He said no, and I told him, “Oh, he’s fantastic! You’ve gotta check out his work,” and walked him over to where A Little Devil In America was displayed in this new hardcover releases section. After he finished his browsing, he came back to the register with Hanif’s book in hand. “I didn’t quite know how to feel about it at first,” he told me, “but then I got to this specific sentence and I was absolutely sold,” remarking something along the lines of how he could tell why I loved Hanif’s writing so much.