TtD supplement #297 : seven questions for Laressa Dickey

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She’s the author of the poetry books Syncopations and Twang, among others. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. For Bergen Assembly 2019, she and her partner Ali Gharavi created How to Pass Time With No Reference, a multi-media installation about their experiences inside/outside the Turkish prison system. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation; she researches the dancer's use of language and the writer’s use to/for dance. She’s a member of the performative collaborations MISLEADING SUBJECTS and WITHING and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Her poem “Heart bulge” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Heart bulge.”

A: “Heart bulge” is a piece that originated in residency while I was working on an ongoing project called Mammillary bodies. I hope someday it will become a book of lyric essays. I have been working on it, on and off, for about 8 years and it's still going. The Heart Bulge piece was written during an artist residency at Saari Residence in Finland in 2022. I was working in the dance studio with an text called The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy by Eric Blechschmidt, the phenomenological embryologist. And I was reading and devising movement scores from this speculative embryological text which describes the morphological forces at work in the embryo’s development, forces which lay down the spatial map of us as humans and mammals. I was really interested in those forces as a creative problem and as a way of thinking about the creative process. That something dynamic and increasingly differentiated is forming our particular shape. It’s happening before DNA activation. Something else is at work in us, when we are taking shape. That seemed thrilling!

So “Heart Bulge” was a piece of text taken from that book. It is a moment in the embryological development of the heart before fits itself into place between the lungs—well, this is a creative way of saying it—because as Fanny Howe taught us, language literally fails to deal with actions that occur simultaneously—but before it becomes the advanced vascular system of compartments, it is a bulge in a main vertical vessel. But I took it as a score for a dance process, which led me into writing, eventually.

Heart Bulge as a phrase became a lens through which to think about how our bodies and selves are also shaped by family, by landscapes we grow up and evolve in, by the social body that we grow up inside of. And the simultaneity and complexity of all that happening at once, but also in different temporalities.

Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Heart Bulge is different from other things I’m doing now, some of which are boring, like grant applications. What creative writing I'm doing is more collaborative. Together with a collective called WITHING, we’ve made 6 online episodes for Radio Worm in Rotterdam. The episodes are experimental language sessions, let’s say, derived from common scores we work on together, apart. It’s a collective, more programmatic approach to writing—poetic at times, but not necessarily calling attention to itself as such. Nobody in the group has a hold on what we are making—what it is or will be; it’s slippery and yet, we are making it together. I find myself writing things I don’t recognize as me and I love that.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2835793/3980073

Q: Is this shifting the ways in which you approach your own work, when you return to it?

A: It’s making me see my own idiosyncrasies through reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of others. I suppose this is really just a reading process, a reading as a writer process. I think moving between the collective and my own work also brings up the question for me about the use of the writer, the use of the singular voice, what it is, how it exists, what it does, thinking of it as material and materiality. And maybe it clarifies the basic conundrum: how do I want to say this? How can I say this?

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: I have things I reach for, or reach back to, in terms of syntactic logic, classics like My Life by Hejinian, or the feel of a dance, Dogs of Devotion, made by Jeanine Durning. Maybe the tone of voice, that odd tallness, in Samuel Beckett in The End.

Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Oh man. I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on the sentence and the paragraph, the units of meaning they organize and what they can do. I have developed more tolerance to use “I” in work, in a way I hadn’t, and I am more willing to move into prose, that is, the prose poem, or the hybrid, etc., when the work demands that. I hope to write a novel someday, but I suppose it will be a weird thing.

Q: What do you feel the prose poem allows in your work that might not be possible, otherwise?

A: For me, the prose poem allows a different kind of control of the movement of a text. In it, I can feel access to rhythms, stops and starts, reversals, the impulse toward and subversion of story. It allows my improvisatory thinking to form and holds it in form. Play play play! Probably someone has written this before, but the economy of the prose poem interests me. It’s often sparing, reticent, and yet it can roam across the page. It pretends and promises but ultimately does what it wants. I relate to this as a kind of freedom, a space to grow into and form, rather than being formed by. Though I suppose both are happening simultaneously. Thought is growing and forming lines and sentences, and thought is also being formed by the page and by the limits of the technology and by the limits of me as a person, thinker, writer.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: I often return to Etel Adnan’s Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) or her work, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, and I do that because of the presence of/in the voice. I read Tove Jansson’s Summer Book every summer and never fail to feel amazed by those stories. About every 5 years, I go back to Gary Young’s No Other Life. I recently read Helen Garner’s diaries and already know that I’ll be back.

TtD supplement #296 : seven questions for Jessie Jones

Jessie Jones is the author of one poetry collection, The Fool, which was published in 2020 with icehouse poetry, and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She grew up in the prairies and now lives in Montreal.

Her sequence “Four Methods” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Four Methods.”

A: I heard many years ago that Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio by Lee Strasberg, transcriptions of the private acting classes that he taught at the Actor’s Studio in New York starting in the late 40s, was essential reading for writers (I don’t remember why now). So, I dutifully purchased it and put it on my shelf. Years later, I finally read it. In addition to disabusing me of many preconceived notions about “method” acting, it made me appreciate the difficulty of assuming the role of another person, and the effort—expense, even—involved in doing it convincingly. We attempt this all the time in writing—adopting a persona or the voice of “the speaker,” creating characters. I especially appreciated Strasberg emphasizing the strangeness of this impulse, and how drawing a line between the character’s experience and our own deepens what we’re trying to convey and, under ideal conditions, better connects us to ourselves. So the poem is four attempts at inhabiting that strange psychic space, not yet that character and no longer just oneself, preparing to pass from one to the other by way of some sense or emotional memory. This poem and the reading around it also connected me to a broader project, now a manuscript, which is about the consuming nature of being an artist, seeing everything through the lens of creation, the ways it requires a relentless investigation of your past, your interests, even banal daily life for “material.” That makes it sound cynical, but I mean more the unconsciousness aspects. Like great acting, it’s reacting to what presents itself to you and getting involved in it.

Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Thematically related, but tonally different and formally denser. Newer works are a little looser and “voicier,” I think. 

Q: What prompts the difference in approach, in your thinking?

A: A higher density of diction can create some welcome distance, which I usually prefer when I’m experimenting with something new or trying to write in a voice other than my own. Sometimes, I switch into that mode almost defensively. In some of the newer pieces, I’m trying to stay closer to whatever is driving the poem and to be a little more comfortable owning an idea or feeling. 

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: Honestly, the biggest one has been Philip Guston, the painter. I’ve been reading and rereading many books about him, his lectures, writings, interviews, correspondence with friends, including I Paint What I Want to See and Guston in Time by Ross Feld. This became a bit of an obsession, resulting in a trip to the UK to see his retrospective at the Tate Modern, one of the highlights of my life. I love his way of speaking and writing about art. It’s gutsy, funny, and most concerned with openness and curiosity. He’s very casual, though intelligent, and a great talker. He wants to bring people in. Finding him felt like the thrill of meeting someone you know you’ll be great friends with. He went through a serious artistic crisis as he was considered to be at the peak of his career, and built a new style from rock bottom that renewed his love of artmaking and redefined him as an artist, even while turning a lot of his fans (including some of his dearest friends) against him. There's something in that experience, I think—the reckoning, the doubt, and, ultimately, transcendence—that made him more comfortable with the mystery of artmaking, the surprise, and to find kinship in trusting what may seem like a mistake. So, I’ve been literally influenced by the way he speaks and writes, which I find so charming, but also by his great capacity to seek and let others into that process of seeking, which is powerful and intimate. While I adore and admire so many writers who seem to drop wisdom fully formed and jewel-encrusted into their works, I discovered how much I like the mess of discovery through Guston.

As for poets, I’ve also been lately influenced by and found a similar kinship with the works of Sara Nicholson, whose first two books (The Living Method and What the Lyric Is, both from The Song Cave) marry the linguistic and philosophical rigour that I love with a humour and casual ease that I aspire to.

Q: With a published full-length collection, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I feel my work has deepened since my first collection. It’s still very much me, still my style, but perhaps holds less back, which feels great. There was a lot of nervous energy around my writing in the past; I was afraid my practice would slip away from me, that I wasn't worthy of doing it, not educated enough to write intelligently. That’s gone. Now it’s just a part of my life that grows with me. My next project, which I’ll dig into as soon as this manuscript is wrapped up, is larger in scope, more narrative, more researched, more outside of me, and will, I hope, stretch me creatively and formally. I’m a little bit afraid of it! But I think that’s a good sign. 

Q: Do you see your work in terms of projects, then? How did you move from someone who works on individual poems to someone who works on projects?

A: No, I don’t usually see my work in terms of projects, at least not at first. My first book and the manuscript that “Four methods” is a part of came together over time, poem by poem, and became a project as thematic unity between the pieces emerged. I like that approach and the way it allows one’s particular, timely interests to guide the writing. Only when I start to notice a pattern do I narrow my focus and read in a more directed way that will nurture the rest of the work to be written. With my first book, this didn’t really happen until I was at the very end. With the new manuscript, it happened more quickly and was more obvious from looking at the books I was reading—they all seemed to lead me to the same point. 

The next book, “the project,” however, requires me to think of it as a unified whole from the beginning because it’s more narrative, adopts a particular form and vernacular, and will require more planning. All very new, exciting territory. I’m not sure why the move to a project is happening now, but I suspect it’s a way to stay interested and not get too comfortable. I’ve also been working on a collaborative novel for the last two years with another writer, and thinking large-scale narratives for so long might have tunneled into my poet brain.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: There are so many! It’s hard to narrow it down. But the more consistent mainstays are Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, Elizabeth Willis’ Meteoric Flowers, Lucy Ives’ Orange Roses & The Hermit, Fred Moten’s The Service Porch, and Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics. I have noticed, though, that I may have greedily overdrawn those accounts and need to start developing a new set of resources for this phase of life and writing I’m in. Reading “forward” as opposed to “backward” has proven useful for me over the last few years, as has trying to broaden my conception of what can generate a poem. In the past, I had to read a poem to write one, and now I can read an essay or academic paper or work of philosophy or a novel and feel equally energized. I also regularly return to Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, my favourite novel. I recorded me reading the first chapter of it for a podcast called Women Reading this spring and it was a totally new way of engaging with a very familiar text. There were so many things that I had missed or breezed by in prior readings! I feel like as I age, I also see new things in my favourite works, so reading them again now is a little like reading them for the first time. They’re speaking to a very different person.

TtD supplement #295 : seven questions for Tanis MacDonald

Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books. She has won The Malahat Review’s Open Seasons Award for Nonfiction twice: in 2021 for her essay on female friendship and in 2025 for her essay on adoption and ancestry. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Book*hug Press. Tanis is the former host of the Watershed Writers podcast and was a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University for many years before retiring early to gad about and do cool shit.

Her poems “Decimal Dance Party,” “On hearing that it is time for me to decide,” “For Real” and “Prognosis” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Decimal Dance Party,” “On hearing that it is time for me to decide,” “For Real” and “Prognosis.”

A: I crave the strange when life gets a little repetitive. I like low-culture-high-culture mash-ups and mishearings and false profundities and flash absurdities. I write narrative poems, too, though with a poem, narrative is always relative, but I like the process of shaping happenstance and an accrual of images (and “misimages”) to create not a portrayal, but an unarticulated space where a portrayal could be. That sounds fancy, but I don’t mean it to be. I think it’s how many people – including me -- perceive the world on an everyday basis: not always seeing the thing itself but instead the swirl around it. For a poem like “Decimal Dance Party,” the collaging of those moments as best and second-best is both absurd and familiar, just as the small events themselves are. “For Real” takes up an old question of the nature of reality. “Prognosis” is so named for the couplets’ interrogation of mental processes. And did I decide? All the time!

“For Real” will appear in my forthcoming book, Tall, Grass, Girl, and the rest are from a manuscript in process.

Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: In my forthcoming book with Book*hug, Tall, Grass, Girl, I have styled a poetic narrative: low on declaration, strong on using language to convey the difficult.  I’ve been refining that kind of narrative about escaping violence and becoming tall (my metaphor for thriving) for a while, and it has been a tonic more recently to switch up my perspective to an “I” that is less lyrical – that is, less personal and contextual – and more gleefully declarative and happily grouchy. I can see, looking at these poems now, how they have emerged from a mind crammed with detail and external influences and are focused on not only how meaning is made, but how to make it bounce. The moment with the library patron was something I overheard  and knew that it was a piece of the mosaic I was assembling about how different generations speak to, dance with, remember each other. Sometimes I think the most important skill writers can practice is the ability to recognize patterns.

Q: What brought about this particular structure, and how different is that compared to some of your prior work? Is approaching a collection as a self-contained project, whether through structure or content or both, how you usually approach building collections?

A: One manuscript begets another, if we are lucky, and I have questions outstanding from Tall, Grass, Girl that will make appearances in the new manuscript. That said, building a collection is different every time.  Content is so dependent on structure. Writing the new poems keeps my head above water as I undergo a big life change and I am guessing that they will find their places in a lyric dialogue about being an aging badass.  

I’ll never be done with the lyric mode, but I am forever questing to discover places where prose and poetry meet and where I can cartwheel with language as much as I want. Poems (and do) turn into essays, and vice versa, and sideways, and like a cement mixer: literary chimaeras are my jam.

Q: Is that how manuscripts emerge, from a series of outstanding questions? And it suggests you see your work in a kind of trajectory, yes? How does that sense of trajectory show itself within the context of book-length, theoretically self-contained, works?

A: I can’t speak for anyone else, but inquiry is important for me as a fuel for writing, especially poetry. Which doesn’t mean that this is an intellectual exercise: not at all. The writing mind is a curious mind, all the better to approach a single subject, or a single question, from a variety of angles. In terms of a trajectory – well, yes, but not a consciously planned one, and not a trajectory that needs to have special importance to readers, necessarily. When I am putting a manuscript together – or testing out poems to see if they could speak to each other in a manuscript – that’s when I start thinking consciously about what I’m asking (myself, the reader, the poem). If we are talking about how manuscripts look and feel after they are published as books, the trajectory is likely to be mysterious to everyone but me; and if we are talking about me as the person generating the work, then the trajectory – as I see, hear, or feel it – is everything. Everyone gets from one book to another somehow and this kind of inquiring bridge is one of the ways I do it.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: To the moon and back!

On the best days, the work of poetry makes me think better, breathe more deeply, feel in the world instead of feeling like I’m drifting through space. If progress has been made – such as it is, in poetry – it’s because I’ve discovered something and surprised myself. I think I am becoming both more energetic and more relaxed as a writer –energetic about possibility and relaxed about what the outcomes may be. Changing my life to invest in art over a daily grind is a big shift, and I hope that my work is heading towards a harvest of everything that can grow from my decades of (literary) planting.

Q: What is it about the form of poetry that attracts you so deeply? What do you feel possible through your work with the poem that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Leonard Cohen wrote “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” And I wonder: what’s a burning life, and do I have one? And Emily Dickinson: “When I feel like the top of my head has been taken off, I know that that is poetry.” And Kafka: “words should be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” I think of all these elemental ways of describing poetry as explosive, and ash, and metal striking salt and ice. 

Poetry is the best form to convey not that which is unsayable, but that which defies, and is sometimes betrayed by, the limitations of the declarative statement. To state something baldly can be, ironically, a form of misdirection; it suggests limited meaning, limited affect, limited narrative. But the implications and language work of poetry allow room for the extraordinarily human: lived contradictions, everyday oddnesses, and simultaneously felt emotions (think of times you have been grateful and guilty, or angry and relieved, or joyful and exhausted). Its music, and the way it reaches for our inner organs, is another attraction of poetry; prose can do that too, but it’s poetry’s raison d’être. If I can spend time each day in a space where this is possible, in what I’m reading or what I’m writing, then it’s a good day.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: The Poets:
Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, Phil Hall, Adrienne Rich: all poets who light my mind on fire. I have been reading and thinking about their work with line, language, repetition, and lyric for decades.   
Marge Piercy, Lucille Clifton, and Kim Addonizio for their audacity and sheer breath-changing effect of their poetics.
Emily Dickinson (whose Tell It Slant Festival held each September is an online must-attend) and Jay Macpherson for reminding me to touch base with formal work.
Shakespeare and Yeats for the music.
Rumi for surprise and to reset my brain.

The Prose Writers:  
Melissa Febos for her spirit of risk.
bell hooks for her combination of compassion and sternness.
Louise Erdrich to remind me where I’m from and who I owe.
Toni Morrison to remind me to stay conscious.