This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair on the 13th of December, 2022 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

To talk about lacuna is to talk about adolescence. As a culture we build so much importance into these few, precarious years between the relative paralysis of childhood and the supposed free agency adulthood entails. I'm curious, as a pop culture engaging child of the internet age how you went into your teen years and how you came out. You were the first generation to do it in public, in perpetuity, to have a record of all your true and false starts live on. lacuna is as much a relic of those years as any. Was it jarring to go back there or does that public record hold a space open between then and now?

I have known I’m queer since childhood. I didn’t have the language or understanding, but I always questioned gender norms and expectations. I found myself crushing really hard on Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron from High School Musical. I didn’t know what to do with that information, but in middle school and high school, I went through a series of panic because I felt this intense desire to label myself. And by labeling myself, I also felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to be on a spectrum of any sorts. So, that meant I felt like I needed to choose something.

A portion of my queer history is unfortunately archived on DeviantART. I had a penchant for writing journal entries. I was also frequent on Yahoo! Answers (RIP), and I would often try to gauge what is okay and what isn’t by no standards I should have ever pitted myself against. 

When I was writing lacuna originally, I was just writing and writing and writing. I claimed it was for a character. It was always about me. I didn’t know what I was doing, and a lot of the language I was using was new to me. I did upload some poems on DeviantART, and I felt pretty exposed. I also felt like I really needed to get something out there. I had a creative writing teacher in high school who encouraged this project, and I’m forever grateful for him. With all this said, I don’t think I should have exposed myself online so much, so publicly.

I have many times drawn a parallel between a our teen years and a monday that just refuses to play nice; one of those work days when the alarm fails and the train stalls and every single one of your clients decides that emailing back to your emails is fine and okay, the kind of day when you schedule the root canal you've been needing because, actually, by contrast, calling your insurance provider feels like a break. "I know you're a weird shape now and waking up spotted and horny and deeply ashamed, just like we taught you, but after dinner your mother and I are going to need you to tell us your fifty year plan." Where do you think the you that started lacuna was at in this process and how does the you that revisits the text see it now?

lacuna’s original form is a hot mess. At the time, I was a huge Sylvia Plath fan, and there were too many poems that were too closely inspired by her work. There were also poems that made absolutely zero sense and only existed because I liked the vibes the words gave off, and I was quickly taught not to do that. 

Diving into lacuna now, I realize there were so many things about me that are neurodivergent that I didn’t have the language or understanding for as I do today. Any time I sat down to write as a teenager, it was always because I was desperate to say something or process things. It felt like my poems predicted the future because I would write something, and then it would come true. I think that had a lot to do with how I processed emotions and events, and when I was writing, I was tapping into something subconscious, so, therefore, the poems only appeared to be soothsayer-tinged. The me-then writing lacuna was really lost and confused in that space. 

Revisiting it roughly 8-10 years later has given me the opportunity to reconcile those thoughts and feelings and package it in a more digestible way.

There is an inherent queerness in lacuna that at times surfaces directly as a trans masc cry of arrival and at others as a plea to be nothing, unseen. Where do you think lacuna sits in your oeuvre of creation? As a poet and writer, but also in your project of realising yourself as a multi-dimensional being.

lacuna was really daring for me to write at the time because right after, I attended a Christian University and tried really, really hard to become cishet. In that time frame, I was really ashamed of my past and thought that being genderfluid wouldn’t be understood or accepted, and I felt that meant I couldn’t be who I am. 

In a similar vein, I felt pressured to be binary trans in high school. To make a “definitive” choice. I’m saying that in quotes because that is how it was presented to me. However, I constantly felt this opposing force of “I am so trans masc, listen to me” and “Okay, I really don’t want to take up space where I’m not supposed to”. By the end of writing the book, I was getting ready for college, and I cis-ified myself. I altered a lot of the text then to get rid of anything transmasc leaning, and when I returned to the book recently, I restored it as it should be.

lacuna is a title I spent a lot of years feeling embarrassed about. I know a lot of writers struggle with this and where to place their older works when they have newer things that are “better”. I like to think now that our projects exist at a point in time for a reason. 

You brought lacuna to me fully realised and ready for print. How much of that design process felt inherent to the project for you and how much of it was an effort to produce a submission an editor could envision in print? Were you thinking of marketability as you mocked it up in canva or were you focused on serving the poems themselves?

I wanted lacuna to be stripped back and have a pocket book design. Something to carry around with you, much like I carried it around (metaphorically) for years. lacuna is one of those things I wouldn’t stop returning to. Part of it was an effort to understand myself better. But regarding the book itself, I wanted to make sure it also had a font aesthetic (to some degree) based on the years I was writing it. It has that soft grunge feel to it which is what I based my personality on at the time. Other than that, I wanted to make sure the design could be easily transferable for an editor to work with.

We're a little lax here at kith by comparison to many other presses. It's an approach built to suit my particular skills and limitations but there are at least two people in each publication process and success comes down to fit. What have your press experiences taught you about your own press priorities? Where would you rank assets like past publications, personability, and wide social reach?

I loved working with every press I’ve had the privilege to be published by. It’s worked out, so far, that each press was best suited for the book’s needs. It’s really difficult for me to explain it because it’s a vibe check concept for me. With kith books, I knew I wanted a higher level of creative control than I could not have had if I sent the manuscript to publishers with a specific style guide. I also love the mission of kith books, and I couldn’t imagine a better home for lacuna.

For any publisher I look into, I want to see some kind of previous publications. I may research and ask about that experience to draw my own conclusions. Another thing I like to see is the way promotions are handled. Wide social media reach can mean nothing. Promoting authors with genuine care and interest is of a greater value to me than numbers.

Do you feel a tension between creation and the need to 'do well'? What is 'well' to you anyway? Do you think there's any value in a metric of 'success' in the art world at all?

No metrics in art, please. I think a lot of times, and this is from past experience and observations of others, we put too much pressure on ourselves. We compare too much to others. This can be analogous to a lot of things, but when it comes to writing, we all need to give ourselves more breathing room. It’s okay if you write something you didn’t like. It’s okay to write a stale draft. Nothing is final. It can become something else later. 

As for success, it should be individualized. Success should not look the same for everyone. Success can be gathering words to write something, it can be reading, it can be talking with friends. It does not always need to be “publication”, “money”, “numbers”. Success should be what you set out to achieve. That is it.

What's next on your radar? What are you writing? Submitting? Reading? Who should we know about? What should we read?

I’m currently working on a bunch of collaborative projects. Another project I’m working on involves re-synthesizing other poems from the original lacuna manuscript I did not include in the book you may be reading today. All of this is poetry. However, I have a short memoir chapbook set to release in March! 

My favorite writers, who I will recommend to anyone, are: nat raum, arden will, charlie perseus, Theo Sebastian, Taylor Byas, Clementine Williams, ari lohr, john compton, Robin Kinzer, Clem Flowers, calia jane, sofía aguilar, ami j. sanghvi, Keana Aguila Labra, and luna rey hall.