Cameron Awkward-Rich

Interview by Mag Gabbert

Mag: In your interview with Essay Daily in 2017, you talked about the lyric and essay genre-modes in terms of the lyric’s ability to render simultaneous yet separate selves within a first-person “I” speaker, and of the essay’s connectedness to argument and citational exchange. Two different aspects of those genres/modes also came to mind for me as I read your work; the first is the lyric’s relationship to leaps or gaps (for example, in “A Braided Heart,” Brenda Miller describes the lyric essay in terms of its “tendency toward fragmentation that invites the reader into those gaps […] a form that is interactive, alive, full of new spaces in which meaning can germinate”). And the second is the essay’s connection to an “attempt” (Merriam-Webster provides these definitions: “a. effort, attempt—especially: an initial tentative effort; b. the result or product of an attempt”). Perhaps these attributes have been overemphasized or oversimplified in conversations about these genre-modes already, but I wonder whether they also speak to your work or writing process in meaningful ways?

Cameron: Despite appearances to the contrary, I haven’t read/thought enough about the different affordances of “lyric” and “essay” to approach this question in anything but an utterly idiosyncratic way. So please take this as a provisional answer. 

I do appreciate those senses of lyric as containing gaps that invite readers in and essay as “an attempt” toward knowledge, but, for some reason, I always chafe against them. It’s easy to explain this chafing with respect to the essay as “attempt” by virtue of my life as an academic. While I would like to keep open the space for tentativeness, reaching, and falling short, it’s more or less true that the essay is presently our authoritative genre. It’s the mode we go to not primarily to play, to attempt, to practice, but to demonstrate and defend what we know. Of course, there are many many scholars and writers whose work foregrounds this more open definition of essay, that itself chafes against the essay’s duty to speak with authority, and I’d count myself among them. I suppose it’s just always seemed to me to be slightly disingenuous, to simultaneously insist on the essay as “attempt” while we live in a time and place in which whole sections of standardized tests also go by the name “essay.” 

Regarding that definition of the lyric: again, I think it’s a good one, but one whose premise sometimes sits with me the wrong way. Sometimes, I think, I am aiming for (and maybe accomplish) the inverse, using ‘gaps’ as a way of keeping readers at a distance. It’s never a good idea to read Goodread’s reviews, but one such review of my first book, Sympathetic Little Monster, goes like this: “These are lyrical poems of story-like images of transition girl to boy. Interesting, yet found them cold. We are looking from afar.” I sort of love this review, and in many ways think that the distance/‘coldness’ this reader felt is precisely the feeling I hoped to produce for a certain kind of (non-trans) reader. It’s hard enough to move around in the world as a body that invites scrutiny, the presumption of intimacy, and motivated ‘interest,’ you know? So I do think there is something about the gap in the lyric as enabling, also, the impossibility of closeness between writer and reader that I appreciate, that allows me to write poems at all. 

Mag: Lately I’ve had some interesting exchanges with young poets (often my students) with regard to the idea of “service”—to the profession, to the community, etc.—and I know this is a topic you’ve spent time thinking about and discussing, too. I like to emphasize engagement with literary communities in my classes, via local events, reading articles and interviews, drafting reviews, and of course just plain reading. But, sometimes my students will suggest that encourages cronyism or other forms of exclusion—in other words, 'Who says we have to form these connections or do extra stuff just to make and share our art?’ 

I have to admit, that angle surprised me at first, because I think community engagement sets a very different standard than one that’s based on, say, advanced degrees or fellowships. At the same time, though, I do see how taxing the emerging phase (perhaps especially) of this vocation can be. We ask a lot of new writers; not just financially, but also in terms of time and energy commitments. So, I’m hoping you might expand on your perspective with regard the obligations we have as writers to our community.

Cameron: I’m of at least two minds about this question, so I might contradict myself a little. First, those things that you’ve listed – reading, drafting reviews, going to events – are not, to me, primarily “service work.” All of them are ways of engaging with the wider world of writing, sure, but only drafting reviews seems to me to be potentially ‘service’ work. Reading and going to readings are vital to making art, at least for me: they are vital for feeding one’s creativity, for testing and sharpening one’s voice, for learning new ways of approaching the page, etc. Book reviews are a different kind of thing, especially if they are being written for publication, although I do think that writing them is also a way of learning how to be a reader, right? It’s a way of learning and learning to articulate what a reader might get out of one’s own work, of figuring out what the pleasures of poetry are for yourself so that you might learn to transmit those same pleasures to your audience…it’s a way of learning to think about why you might share your work in the first place. Of course, if your students’ aims are just to write for themselves, then I see their point. But as soon as the goal is to share work, then one has to learn to think about audience, and there’s no better way to do that then to be the audience of and for others. 

But, second, I’m actually not sure that new writers, especially, have any obligations to the ‘writing community’ writ large. I think that it’s important for them to understand that, like everything, the writing world (journals, audiences, conferences, prizes, readings…) isn’t self-assembling, that it requires work to maintain and, therefore, people to do the work. I also think that young writers often find themselves putting enormous time and effort into various kinds of community-building work because they are trying to create new spaces within the writing world for themselves, their peers, the work that they want to see in the world – I certainly don’t think anyone is obligated to do this, but this is a kind of work that has always been vital to expanding the bounds of what the ‘writing community’ might be. So, do I think it is profoundly unjust that emerging writers do all kinds of unpaid labor to reproduce the writing world? Yes. But I also think that doing so is one way of actively reshaping that world. 

Also, not to sound too much like an old man, but I suppose I wonder how much of your students’ sentiment has to do with their (presumably) having grown up online, where the ‘sharing’ infrastructure is less on them to build and maintain? 

Mag: Your poems often seem to speak from an out-of-body experience, from an omniscient consciousness that’s able to see the entire multi-faceted prism of the self as the self is refracted throughout space and time, and this effect is achieved via the combination of shifting verb tenses, shifting pronouns, and perhaps shifting points of view, all of which render a “not quite locatable” speaker, to use your phrasing. For me, this aspect of your work really resonates with the epigraph by Avery F. Gordon in your collection Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016): “The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened.” 

The collection as a whole also engages with ghosts quite a bit—“Is there a word for a child talking to himself / or no one?      I’ve said ghost”; “I’ve tried not to write about these ghosts […] have you ever known a body not to be haunted?”; “Strange to be a girl growing up to be a ghost […] sever the image from the body & it becomes a monster.” So, what I want to ask is, might this be one way of unifying the speaker throughout the collection, by imagining that voice as an exterior ghost of the self? Or, does even this ghost need to morph, in the way that things we are haunted by often morph?

Cameron: Wow, what a careful reading! I’m not certain I have much to say back to this other than I really love this way of tying together the formal and thematic elements of SLM. “The ghost” is certainly one speaker of the book, though many of the poems are firmly located in an ‘I’ that is more or less ‘me.’ I’m being evasive, I suppose, but I don’t think things need to be stable or singular in order to be unified, you know? I am large, I contain multitudes and so on and so forth. 

Mag: I’m very excited about your new book, Dispatch (Persea Press, December, 2019). It seems as though—based on your earlier conversation with Essay Daily—this is a collection that will continue to ask the reader to consider narratives in terms of possibilities, choices, and/or latent potential. I’m thinking, in particular, about some of the (what I like to call) ‘choose your own adventure’ poems from Sympathetic Little Monster, such as “The Girl Is Brought to Her Knees in a Field of Grass,” “Essay on the Theory of Motion,” and “(Vagina Monologue).” I’m also thinking about some of the questions you’ve described engaging with in Dispatch: “What kind of revisions need to happen to make this a poem/world in which my friends are alive, that isn’t structured so as to kill them? How ought I pay attention, how to register the perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude?”

With these questions in mind, and in addition to being more outwardly focused, I wonder whether you might say that this new collection is more interested in the present—or perhaps even the future—rather than the past? Is it fair to characterize Sympathetic Little Monster as a collection that primarily circles the past?  

Cameron: Thanks for your excitement, though I’m very nervous about this new book! But yes, it is fair to characterize SLM as a book that is primarily about the past. It was written mostly in the years immediately after I started taking testosterone and, therefore, was increasingly legible to the world around me as some kind of ‘m.’ In other words, I felt myself moving into a future that was less and less like my past, and I felt like I needed to put that past somewhere, to inter the girl I was in another timeline, so that I could get on with living. 

Mag: I really like the way you describe SLM as pointing readers to ‘latent potentials,’ what I might call alternate futures latent in the past. This description actually rhymes with the temporality I try to think with in Dispatch, which is more like “pasts latent in the present tense.” That is, Dispatch is also a kind of attempt to get on with living, but the thing that needs reckoning with is the present, the ongoing news of state sanctioned violence; the ongoing dehumanization of black and brown, queer and trans people; the afterlives of slavery; on and on. I’m not so sure about the future, I’m bad at believing it will arrive as anything but doom. But! I’m currently teaching a feminist science fiction/utopia class, in part as an effort to train myself to think and write forward, with something like hope. 

I know that you are interested in considering poetry collections holistically, as their own “unit[s] of analysis,” rather than just limiting our conversations to individual poems. As someone who’s spent the last few years revising and adjusting my own poetry manuscript, I certainly identify with this idea, and I realize that—within writing communities—the process of compiling and arranging whole collections often gets overlooked. What were some of your considerations as you went through that process with Dispatch, and did you have to make any particularly tough decisions? Also, if you were asked to distill the entire collection down to just one line, stanza, or image from within it, which would you choose, and why?

Cameron: You know, it’s funny. While I was making SLM, I thought much more in terms of the book, likely because there was clearly a narrative arc – it was about leaving somewhere, arriving somewhere, even ambivalently. Dispatch is not like that. It circles and circles around. Certainly, when I was ordering DispatchI thought a bit about narrative, because there are a few things that ‘happen’ to the speaker that are referred to throughout the book (a car crash, primarily) and I wanted to make sure the poem about the event preceded all of the poems that refer back to it. I also think that it’s a harder book to read, in some ways, so I wanted to make sure to have a few poems near the beginning that might teach a reader how to enter the book. Finally, there’s two titles that are repeated throughout, “[Black Feeling]” and “Love Poem,” and I wanted to make sure that they were evenly dispersed, as these two emotional registers (love and black feeling) are ones that the book as a whole oscillates between. 

As for a distillation, the opening lines of the poem “All My Friends are Sad & Bright” is as close as I can get:

I think door & there is. Open& here’s a room 
where everything you’ve lost is washed ashore. 
We’ve seen the news. We know the story. 
How even our bodies hurt us sometimes 
so much.

The why is somewhat hard to articulate, so here is a list: love poem for my friends with an undercurrent of black feeling; the instrusion of ‘the news’; the reaching for something like joy, not despite but because of hurt; revising Richard Siken’s “Snow and Dirty Rain” into a poem that hopes for the flourishing of my people, the ones I know and the ones I will never; faith in poetry to make small rooms of respite, despite all of the evidence of what it fails to do. 

Mag: Finally, in a 2016 interview with Cosmonauts Avenue, you were asked to include a favorite lyric, and I believe the line you provided (“I don’t want to meet you nowhere (no) / I don’t want none of your time”) derives from TLC’s excellent 1999 hit single, “No Scrubs.” We here at Underblong are also averse to scrubs, so I’m hoping you might provide us with your own definition regarding who or what should be considered a “scrub.”

Cameron: Ha! Well, in the song, a scrub is clearly a guy who is a parasite on his friends and threatens become a parasite on a lover – someone who benefits from others’ care and other forms of labor without offering anything in return. Someone who likely doesn’t even recognize the extent to which his life is buoyed/enabled by others. Just this morning, there was a screenshot from reddit circulating on Twitter, which was an account of a man who tried to pay his female neighbor (whose name he does not know!) to cook dinner for him each night. That man, a scrub. But we all sometimes inhabit the position of ‘the scrub.’ For example, I’m quite bad at being a person in public, so it often falls to my partner to talk to waiters, to conduct small talk with really anyone. I’m definitely a scrub then! Fortunately, it’s situation-dependent, and I like to think I make up for it in other ways.