I know some people had a lot of trouble creating in quarantine; did the downtime feel unusual? I’m used to bartending five or six nights a week! So I know this book wouldn’t have been possible without, you know, being kind of stuck at home and away from everyone for like an extended period of time. In terms of the way I navigate my work in general, I write a lot about trauma and longing and pain. I talk about it in the book, where I’m like, “I kind of want to be writing a book about joy, but I don’t quite know how right now.” Overall, I think I’m reasonably well-balanced, so I’m able to sit with a lot of bad emotion without letting it drive me insane. I would get up, go on a long walk with my dog, do yoga or ride my bike, read for a little bit, and then I would work on this book.
What was the process of writing this book like? I more or less wrote it during the first lockdown, and it just came out in a flood. I think part of it was dealing with a lot of ideas I had been navigating and wrestling with for the past year, like the Betty Draper essay [for The New Inquiry]. It was giant amoeba of a project that was kind of split up into three parts; it was like that essay, and then this project, and a second book of poems. I signed with Grieveland in June and decided to do this book for them.
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