Interview: Kassia

Today we’re joined by Kassia. Kassia is an accomplished poet who specializes in free form and free verse poetry. They live in Florida with their husband and work as a freelance writer and editor. Kassia is a genderflux feminist and has a background in theology. They did their bachelor’s work on how Eastern Orthodox theology supports and advances ecology and environmentalism. It’s clear they’re an incredibly dedicated writer, as you’ll soon see. My thanks to them for taking the time to participate in this interview.

WORK

Please, tell us about your art.

I write poetry, mostly free form and free verse, though in the past year I’ve gotten much more into prose poetry and ghazals, and am trying to train myself in some of the most common Western forms of poetry (sonnets, villanelles, etc.). In the last few weeks I’ve been funneling my poetic skills into composing Akathists, which are long hymns used in the Eastern Orthodox Church, comprised of thirteen odes. I’ve also been glossing some of my favorites from a collection of Akathists I have, because whoever translated them got a little carried away with the pseudo-Shakespearean language for my taste and it’s very distracting.

My big pet project, though, is a novel centered around two people in an asexual/aromantic relationship. I want to show that a relationship built purely on platonic attraction can be just as compelling and erotic (in the classical sense) as every tired and predictable YA franchise out there (not that I don’t love me some Hunger Games).

What inspires you?

That’s a hard question to answer, because my inspiration doesn’t usually come from anything external. Most of it comes from my experience of the numinous in the physical world and my interior response to it–though a small portion of my work is inspired by people close to me, and trying to articulate the experience of being asexually and aromantically, yet powerfully, in love with someone. My entire impetus for writing—from poetry to fiction to blog posts—is to translate my intense interior life into language. That’s my main inspiration: not really the outside world, but how the things I experience get internalized and translated into symbols, archetypes, and mythopoeia.

What got you interested in your field?  Have you always wanted to be an artist?

I’ve been writing since I was six or seven. It’s just always been a part of my life. When I was in middle and high school I got fixated on Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and the Decadence and had all these crazy plans involving blowing off college for being a bohemian poet in Paris. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and I went to college, and got some wonderful exposure to academia and the publishing world while pursuing a degree in religion. For a semester or two I toyed with going into theology and trying to get published in journals, but when my advisor pushed me towards academia, something didn’t feel right and I knew I had to stick with the more artistic side of my work. So I pushed back, and here I am a few years later working on a solid poetry portfolio.

Do you have any kind of special or unique signature, symbol, or feature you include in your work that you’d be willing to reveal?

There’s a lot of cosmic, space imagery in my work. Moons, stars, black holes, galaxies, energy strings, gravity waves. Some particular constellations make repeated cameos, especially Cygnus and Orion for some reason. I didn’t really consciously make it that way, but I’ve always been fascinated by the weirder, more surreal aspects of physics, space, and how space-time behaves. It makes sense; huge structures like nebulas and black holes are excellent ways to communicate the vastness of inner, spiritual/mental space that I try to capture in my work.

What advice would you give young aspiring artists?

Stay weird. Never stop learning. Teach yourself about subjects you’d never think you’d be interested in, no matter how arcane or mundane or strange they may seem. Don’t be afraid to be experimental, or make mistakes, or produce things that no one else understands but you. Making art is like clearing a spring choked with mud. Sometimes you have to produce utter shit before you get to the good stuff underneath.

ASEXUALITY

Where on the spectrum do you identify?

I identify as asexual and aromantic.

Have you encountered any kind of ace prejudice or ignorance in your field?  If so, how do you handle it?

Not really. I haven’t published anything yet, so we’ll see. One of my goals is to publish a collection of platonic love poems; it’d be interesting to see what reactions such a work would get.

What’s the most common misconception about asexuality that you’ve encountered?

That as an asexual person, I do not like, understand, or engage in sex, and that “asexual” is synonymous with “sex-negative”. It’s an understandable enough misconception, and I’ve never personally encountered it in a malevolent way. Even my best friend, who is bisexual, heavily involved in the LGBT community, and very understanding, thought that was the case until I cleared it up. I like sex well enough (though, I think, it’s far less important to me than the average population; the thought of a life without sex doesn’t fill me with horror), I understand why it’s important to other people, and I am sexually active (married, even!). I simply don’t experience sexual attraction, which is much different than having a negative or ignorant attitude toward sex.

What advice would you give to any asexual individuals out there who might be struggling with their orientation?

You are not broken. Your experiences are completely valid and absolutely no one gets a say in how you experience your orientation except you. Not your parents, not your boss, not your school, not the Internet, no one. Being asexual is not a curse or a reason to pitied. Always celebrate who you are, even if you have to do so fiercely, in the midst of people trying to tear you down.

Finally, where can people find out more about your work?

Nowhere at the moment! I wish I did have somewhere to point people, but I’m very careful about publishing online—that is to say, I don’t. I am in the process of building an asexual blog, though, and will post regular links to it at my Tumblr, acequeen.

Thank you, Kassia, for participating in this interview and this project. It’s very much appreciated.

Interview: Dominique Cyprès

Today we’re joined by Dominique Cyprès. Dominique is a phenomenal writer who has dabbled with various forms including fiction and nonfiction. Their first love is poetry and they have written plenty of different kinds of poetry. They have a story in Unburied Fables, an anthology from Creative Aces. It’s obvious they’re a passionate and dedicated writer, as you’ll soon read. My thanks to them for taking the time to participate in this interview.

WORK

Please, tell us about your art.

I’ve dabbled in a lot of different sorts of writing – from fiction to creative non-fiction, poetry in both verse and prose. As someone with an overlapping interest in tech, I’ve also experimented a little with interactive fiction. I’m really interested in what new ground can still be broken with Infocom-style text adventures.

I’ve also forayed a little into video editing and stereographic photography. I’m pretty much the prototypical “jack of all trades” in that I keep trying new media and I don’t often stick with one and try to master it. In the end, though, everything seems to come back to poetry. I often find that when I’m working on fiction, or text adventures, or visual media, I’m compelled to find a way to inject poetry into that medium.

What inspires you?

My primary motivation in making art is a sort of practical mysticism; my goal is to give voice to the enormous wonder and bewilderment I feel trying to make sense of both the natural world and interpersonal interaction. As an autistic person, I often find myself in the sort of situation that Temple Grandin refers to as being “an anthropologist on Mars.” The world often seems an altogether foreign place to me, and my art (when I have the time to make it) acts essentially as fields notes on this inscrutable country.

What got you interested in your field?  Have you always wanted to be an artist?

The artistic role models who have most informed the direction I take in poetry are probably Emily Dickinson, Miyazawa Kenji (whose work I have read only in English translation), and Charles Simic. Dickinson and Miyazawa together really pulled me toward poetry as a medium in the first place, and their biographies and work share certain themes in common. Both were disabled and regarded as odd by their communities. Both expressed in their work an immense love of humanity and of nature, but wrote from a perspective of looking upon these subjects from the outside, and both wrote largely for themselves and did not manage to sell much of their work to professional publications during their lifetimes.

Simic’s influence on me comes through his seminal Pulitzer-prize winning volume The World Doesn’t End, and largely has to do with his pioneering work on the form of prose poetry, and his use of ambiguous and discordant sensory images to cultivate what poets refer to as “negative capability,” the ability to draw art out of questions that have no answers, out of confusion and non-rational thought.

I tend to think of art as something I am inclined to do, and not as a feature of who I am, perhaps because I’ve long had it drilled into my head that writing poetry alone is not a viable professional path for someone who needs to support themself and their family financially. I’ve heard this even from former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand, who derives much of his personal income from his work as a college professor.

As a young person I wanted to devote my life to art in some way professionally. As I neared the end of high school I told my parents I wanted to study acting full-time in college and choose that as my field. They asked where I would find the money to feed myself and I didn’t really have an answer, so I studied psychology instead, and wound up dropping out of college after three years when I reached a point where my undiagnosed learning disabilities had started to make it impossible to complete my coursework.

At that point, in 2012, my self-esteem just bottomed out entirely, and one thing to I did in an effort to pull it back up was to take a bunch of poetry I had been working on while I was at school (where I was pursuing a creative writing minor) and build on that work, flesh out its themes a little bit, and compile it into a book I could have printed through a major self-publishing-platform. That was Dogs from your childhood & other unrealities. I had neither the money nor the energy to engage in any serious promotion for it at the time, but being able to share my work with some appreciative friends in that manner was the kind of encouragement I needed.

Now I’m working on a new volume of poems. It’s necessarily very different from my last book, because I’ve changed a lot since 2012. It’s in verse, whereas my last book was entirely in prose. It’s much more concerned with overtly political questions, with the relationships between the wage worker and their work, with the struggles of a young and growing family. I hardly find time to work on it, as a full-time retail worker, part-time student, and parent, but I’m excited to share the personal growth I’ve experienced in this form.

Do you have any kind of special or unique signature, symbol, or feature you include in your work that you’d be willing to reveal?

I often feel that I’m walking a metaphorical tightrope in my work, attempting to balance impulses toward self-deprecation, disillusionment, and cynicism on one hand and an irrepressible sense of naïve wonder on the other. That’s a feature of my everyday life, too, but I expect it comes out a lot in what I make.

What advice would you give young aspiring artists?

My advice would be to try to hold on to your art, to what you do that moves you on a deep level, even when it doesn’t pay the bills. And if you have to step aside from making art because you’re depressed or just too busy struggling to survive for a while, you need not be ashamed. Go back to your art when you’re ready and let it accept you with open arms.

ASEXUALITY

Where on the spectrum do you identify?

I’m asexual, and I’ve identified myself as such since age 20 when I first heard about other asexual people. I’m quoiromantic. I’m married now; I have two spouses and a child, and the fact that I’m asexual doesn’t come up very often in my day-to-day life. But if I had never identified myself as asexual in the first place, I probably wouldn’t be married now, because it was identifying as asexual that allowed me first to accept myself for who I am, and then to find people who understood and accepted me enough to start a family with me.

Have you encountered any kind of ace prejudice or ignorance in your field?  If so, how do you handle it?

There’s a strong push for writers of creative non-fiction and poetry today to candidly confess intimate details of their personal lives, and that very often includes one’s sex life and sexuality. That can be an uncomfortable demand for an asexual writer and I encourage other writers to share only what they can share confidently. As it happens, though, I have made very few connections “in my field”, so I don’t yet have any direct experience with ignorance around ace issues directed at me as a writer.

What’s the most common misconception about asexuality that you’ve encountered?

As much as you can insist to people that asexuality is your sexual orientation, some people will be determined to see it as a medical symptom that you should somehow be treating, or as an ideological position. There’s only so much myth-dispelling educational material you can provide to someone before it becomes a waste of time.

What advice would you give to any asexual individuals out there who might be struggling with their orientation?

The decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet, and not as a proper planet, was an arbitrary taxonomic exercise, motivated by mounting discoveries of Pluto-sized objects in our solar system. Essentially, if we continued to count Pluto as a planet, there would be so many newly-found planets of similar size that we could never hope to make elementary school children memorize all their names. But Pluto is still out there in the Kuiper belt, and it’s still an important target for scientific research.

Similarly, your experiences as an asexual person are real and an important part of your life even when other people find it inconvenient to acknowledge them.

Finally, where can people find out more about your work?

Dogs from your childhood & other unrealities is still available in print and as a free e-book via my blog. My next book, tentatively titled dead monochrome doggerel, is still in the works and I’ll be sure to announce it on my blog when it’s ready.

Thank you, Dominique, for participating in this interview and this project. It’s very much appreciated.