Interview with Evelyn Berry, poet and author of Grief Slut By Kristy Snedden Grief Slut is Evelyn Berry’s debut poetry collection and what a debut! In these luscious pages she offers a poetic experience of the grief, pleasure, violence, and surprising tenderness of growing up queer in the American South. As a 1973 transplant to the South myself, I snapped up the chance to interview Evelyn. I invite you into her world and her written words. How long have you been writing and when did you become serious about your writing? I was serious about my writing from a young age. At age eleven, I decided to write a novel and vowed to publish it before age fifteen. It took an additional few years, but that reckless ambition served me well as a developing writer. Rather than worry too much about whether what I wrote was good or not, I cranked out six or seven full manuscripts before graduating high school. They were terrible, as all first novels were, but they gave me a kind of grip on narrative that I think serves me well now. I wish I could be so confident now as I was as a teenaged writer. In person, Evelyn tells me that her poetry is informed by South Carolina childhood scenes, including possums, dandelions, and boiled peanuts. Anyone southern who has paid attention will delight in her imagery when she writes in “Queer Ecology,” “young queers been fucking in the fields/ since the first sin first garden delight/ first adam’s apple taken in the mouth first seed spilled/ if they burry enough wild queers in the dirt// one’s sure to sprout in their backyard.” Wow! Evelyn, how often and how do you write? Under ideal conditions, I write every day, usually very early in the morning. I work best when I wake between five and six to write something before my anxiety rises out of bed to meddle the progress. For poetry, I like to write first drafts by hand. I prefer notebooks small enough to fit in my pocket. When I write fiction, I use one of two tools. The first is a word processor, the 2002 AlphaSmart Neo 2. When I’ve written more than two thousand words, I transfer the mess onto a computer for edits. Otherwise, I use a program on my computer called StimuWrite, which is a software developed by the horror writer Eve Harms, to help one write by mimicking the dopamine-processing of social media attention. I also often write in Wingdings font, so I don’t have to think too hard about what a mess I’m making. I do almost all of my revision in Google Docs. Writing, rewriting, erasing, rearranging, and playing with the text until it’s up to snuff. Evelyn talked with me about how she likes to find the “spaces where people can thrive” and when I ask her about writing her “swamp creature” poem and especially the stanza, “not every incandescence is beacon, some only a house burning/ or body/ lit from within,” she tells me that she was working “deep in the middle of nowhere.” Even in conversation, Evelyn spouts lines that sound like poetry. What are common traps for aspiring writers? In my opinion, too many writers struggle to share their work because they’re embarrassed it’s not up to the standards for which they hold themselves. They say, if only I get an English degree. If only I get an MFA. If only I take one more workshop, read one more craft book, wait one more year, then I’ll be ready to share my work with my peers. But sharing your work, either through publication or open mics, is a kind of magic. You’ll find that your words will connect, even if you don’t think they’re very good. Once the thing’s written and revised, the piece isn’t about you. The poem or short story lives in service of the reader who may find there a familiar hurt. Evelyn acknowledges that although poems “shift over time,” she still believes writers should take the risk and put their work out into the world. She is bubbly and engaging and it’s no stretch to imagine her on open mic night, engaging the crowd with her unique voice. What is your writing Kryptonite? I’m the self-flagellating type. I don’t believe anyone who tells me they like my work. I have to near-trick myself into writing anything. Have you ever gotten reader’s block? While I might spend periods of my life failing to write, I’m always reading. If I’m weary of literary novels, I spend my time reading manga series and comic books until I’m ready to tackle something heftier. What creatives have helped shape your mind and your work? Much of my thinking around art and the role of the artist comes from creatives like Keith Haring, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Annie Dillard, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, David Wojnarowicz, Dieter Roth, Audre Lorde, and John Waters. If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be? was flailing and writing bad novels as a young writer, but I don’t think I would have it any other way. I am happy to have failed so spectacularly so young so many times or else I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn. If I could go back in time to talk to a young version of myself, I’d probably not spend any time talking about writing at all. I’d be trying to convince me to try estrogen. Many of Evelyn’s poems reference the Southern LGBTQ landscape. I love how she peppers our conversation with references to her own identity journey and her poetry doesn’t shy away from difficult, even harrowing historical events, as in “controlled burn,” a poem that refers to a series of fires, including an accidental fire at Ghost Ship in Oakland, California in 2016, an arson attack at The Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1973, and an arson attack that killed two gay men in their apartment in Dallas, Texas in 2011. I’m always interested in a writer’s “writing process.” What can you tell us about yours? I usually start by writing a long list of words that share some kind of sonic relation– rhymes, near rhymes, assonance, alliteration. Then I try to make sense of that sound, see what sounds good with one another and wait for my subconscious to make meaning from the song. I take revision very seriously, so those first drafts don’t survive. They’re usually disassembled, stripped for parts, and cannibalized. Evelyn shows us her careful attention to sonic relationships in “lotus eater,” with the lines “…I once mistook/ meth for molly,/ but swallowed/ still, then stripped/ out of my skin.// bite into the apple,/ spit out a razor,/ spit out a razed orchard.” I will be playing with this method myself! What period of your life do you find you write about most often? I’ve spent most of my writing life focused on childhood and young adulthood. I haven’t written much about my life now, as a thirty-year-old trans woman living what is to me a boring, domestic life and to others the most radical life path they can imagine. As I begin to write poems for my next collection, I’m turning away from memories of youth and looking toward ideas of trans motherhood. Most all, I feel like I’m writing into the future these days. What did you edit out of this book? The first version of the manuscript, completed in 2017, contained many more poems about addiction, as I was in the process of sobering up after years being addicted to opiates. Many of them were nonsensical, silly, and too romantic about being fucked up. I cut many of those from the manuscript during the years of revision. Once the book was accepted, we whittled the poems down a bit by removing some of those that didn’t serve the book as a whole. Many of those poems were love poems or poems that didn’t have anything to do with the themes in which I was most interested. One of these themes is grief. Many of Evelyn’s poems refer to the death of a close friend who killed himself in 2020. As a fellow human left alive when someone I loved killed himself, I especially resonated with, “ritual is a just another name for the habits grief carves from a mourner’s tongue,” and “the only thing I know of god is shard-scattered in the river,// discarded jug we used to carry water home./ if I could, I swear, I would collect every piece of you.” Do you have any secrets in this book? …This book is nothing but secrets. It’s actually quite freeing to have written and published this book chock full of my worst shames. I put them in a book and don’t feel ashamed about those feelings or memories anymore. That shame has been alchemized into poems, that pain shared. What is the most difficult part of your artistic process? I’m impatient about my work, but I think it’s important to let drafts sit. Waiting is essential to the process, but it’s dreadful to wait. Meanwhile, of course, I’m caught up in the drama of wanting to publish, market, and share the final product. During that time, when I’m letting a book or poem sit by itself, I’m processing how to revise it in my mind. The secret’s not to lift the lid too early. You’ve got to let it sit for a while, simmering and stewing in flavor. Evelyn talked to me about how the “Grief Slut” changed from when she wrote the earliest poem in 2017 and the final poems about two months after submitting the manuscript to the publisher. Over five years, I wrote, rewrote, revised, reimagined, rearranged, and compiled the poems in Grief Slut. I wanted, most of all, to write a book with the best possible poems I could write at the time. I wanted to write specifically about grief, the personal and public archive, queer history, the transformative self, gender transition, and my experience as a queer person growing up in rural South Carolina. It wasn’t until 2021 when the book started to look similar to what was published in the final version. I think of “Grief Slut” as a book about becoming, a book that necessarily had to undergo radical changes as I went through one of the most painful, transformative periods of my life. When we talked about the poem, “on the question, “wait, can trans women reclaim the word faggot?” Evelyn said that the meaning changed as she began transitioning in 2021 and that the poem is based on a true story. I won’t say more than that – people will have to read this poem for themselves! What inspired you to start writing poetry? I mistakenly believed poetry was easy to write. Once, when I was seventeen, a local competition paid seventy-five dollars for placing third. I thought to myself, if only I can crank out a poem once a day for the rest of my life, I could make seventy-five dollars a day. When I realized, years later, how impossible the entire endeavor was, it was too late. I’d read and written too much poetry. I’d been changed. Who are some of your favorite poets? Why do you like their work? Contemporary poets who have shaped my sensibilities include Paige Lewis, Sam Sax, Chen Chen, Danez Smith, Rachel Zucker, Ocean Vuong, torrin a. greathouse, Sam Herschel Wein, Franny Choi, Kaveh Akbar, and Shira Erlichman. I’m attracted to writers who risk something in their work, especially confessional poets who let us into the painful parts of their lives. There’s something thrilling and revelatory about someone allowing themselves to be known so plainly. Evelyn clearly accomplishes this with her poetry. I found so much emotionally resonant material in “Grief Slut.” She has written many lines that will stay with me, including these from “tres(passing),” “i decide to stay another year,/ to carve a home, to hum the trans body/ into a song that belongs here.” Is there a poem in this collection that is your favorite? The poem “Praise Song in Lieu of Obituary,” which is the first poem in GRIEF SLUT, is incredibly important to me. It is a love letter to a past version of myself. Do you have any funny stories or anecdotes about your experiences as a poet? I came of age in the poetry world as a performer before I learned much about craft. But that means I learned other important lessons, like keeping a crowd’s attention, dealing with drunk hecklers at a bar, and performing my heart out to a mostly empty room. I’ll never forget one show where I featured at an open mic at a pizza shop. The cook that night didn’t like poetry, I guess, because he cranked up the music in the kitchen loud and started banging pots together throughout my set. It sparked a fight between the poets and the pizza-makers, and I think my feature there ended the series forever. So, these days if anyone is apologetic about a small crowd or a long drive to a show, I wave it away. I’ve performed under much worse conditions and survived to tell the tale. Such energy and courage! What would be your number one piece of advice for someone who wants to start writing poetry but doesn’t know where to begin? Read poetry. Read widely and deeply. Read work outside your comfort zone. Take that reading seriously. Do so with a pen and paper on hand. Try to notice what the poet does and how. What theme comes up frequently in your poems? Queer history, the fat/trans body, southern-ness, rurality, grief. Evelyn infuses the rural south into her work in a way that creeps up and covers the reader. Even if you’ve never lived in the south, you will have the southern experience when you read her collection. How do you know when a poem is finished? I’m notoriously bad about revising poems for years on end, even after they’ve been published. I suppose I’ll stop now that the poems have found their way into a full-length book. Otherwise, I believe poems can continue to be revised ad infinitum. As we finish this interview, I will quote from one more poem I loved that speaks to Evelyn’s authenticity and vulnerability as a writer – from “yes i’ve seen the future & i promise i’m still alive.” Evelyn writes, “i am translated most simply/ as constellation cluster of star/ with a name/ i’ve chosen myself/ i ache/ i break open/ & like water abandon form/ i carve/ my feminine name the same way/ a river fissures/ rock into ravine slow and deliberate:// oh! Evelyn, where have we been?” Evelyn Berry’s book, “Greif Slut” was published by Sundress Publications in December 2023. To learn more about Evelyn, find her at: EvelynBerryWriter, Instagram: EvelynBerryWriter, TikTok: EvelynBerryWriter, Youtube: EvelynBerryWriter, and Twitter: Evie_Writer. Comments are closed.
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