AC: I actually wrote this piece when I was 17 and I've been using they/them pronouns for around seven or eight years now. I’ve seen non-binary pronouns come out of fashion, back into fashion and again back out of fashion. But even though my relationship to my body has really changed over time, my identity is something that I'll always stick with. At that point in my life though, I think I was dealing with feeling like identity was something outside of who I really was. I guess you would call that dysphoria, but it wasn't because I wanted to change anything necessarily. It just felt like something that was super external. Like, identity was a vessel and not actually part of me. So, one night, I just sat down and wrote the first stanza and then I had the idea to make a series of erasures of it, all modifying that first stanza. In some ways, it feels like in the beginning of the poem, the body is not mine, but by the end it feels much more like mine. And I think it's really beautiful how people, of all gender expressions, of all ages, can tell stories through their bodies. A bruise is a story, a scar is a story— same thing with tattoos. When you see those marks on someone's body, you know that something happened even though you don't necessarily know what it was, right? It's like a sort of opacity and honesty at the same time. So, when I was writing this piece, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to do that with a body of language. I wanted to see what stories that body would take on as it evolved from the pre-existing images. What would it tell if I took pieces away, if I modified it? What would it reveal to me?


14H: I think that's one of the things that makes it so compelling! That transformation from the beginning to the end. It feels like it ends in a place of claiming oneself. Speaking of identity, how does identity shape your writing or any artistic expression or you do now?

AC: I actually had to write something about this for a thesis project that I'm doing which articulates what I want to say better than I can right now: my experiences are informed by my identity, and that is the extent to which I think identity informs my poetry. A lot of the things that I have felt or seen wouldn't have happened to me if I didn’t look how I look or come from where I do— it’s part of who I am. But in terms of my poems, what happens is that there’s a really potent feeling that I have about a memory or an experience or a dream, but the fact that that experience is not tangible, the fact that it's happening in my head or that I'm recalling it is also important. As in, I experienced this, I lived through it, but now what I'm remembering; it's different from the actual event itself. So, in order to combine the details of that memory with a sort of abstraction away from it— the way dreams are abstracted, the way feelings and traumas are abstracted from you when you remember them— I think that's why I like using images so much. Images know how to communicate something better than I would if I just said I'm feeling sad or I'm feeling angry. I would say identity informs poetry because I am who I am, but not really beyond that. I actually very rarely write poems explicitly about aspects of my identity. "A Series of Modifications on My Not Transgender Body" is the only one that has a descriptor in it which I use to identify myself. I never felt like writing about, or positioning my ethnicity or my cultural background or anything as a lens through which to view the writing. I think it would have just been a distraction from what I really wanted to write. 


14H: Yes, I think we all are so deeply informed by our experiences, that it inevitably shows up in our writing, even if not explicitly. Lastly, I’m curious how you feel about the importance of writing and publishing work that deals with ideas of queerness and transness— especially in our current political climate?

AC: From a writer’s perspective, I think if you want to write because you're hoping to get famous or because you're trying to get published, in my opinion, you're probably never going to write anything that's worth reading. For queer people, sometimes you have to write to survive. Poetry saved my life. It saved the lives of like many other people I know. The act of writing and of being courageous enough to believe that you have something worth saying and then putting it into language is a brave act because you're contending with something that is so dear to yourself and that places you in a position of vulnerability. So the most important thing is to write for yourself, which is so cliche, but you've got to do it because you got to do it. You can't do it just because you want to get seen. Writing is important because it helps you survive and it helps you survive because it helps you contend with yourself and accept the parts of yourself that you're contending with. When you do that and other people read it, that sort of struggle pays forward. I'm resorting to cliches, but it makes you feel like you’re not alone. It's like, if someone has looked at themselves, hard enough to put these words on this sheet of paper, that's an amazing affirmation of existence as exactly who you are and nothing else.

14H: Thank you again Alison, for sharing your thoughts, your time and your wonderfully rich poem. You have incredibly insightful thoughts and I’m sure you will go on to do awesome things. Good luck with the rest of your degree!