14H: A beautiful answer. I think when we read something we love, there is a purpose and grounding that is unique and relational because of the people that are doing that work, in the same practice as you. Tell me more about your manuscripts, fellowships, travel, and—being a Storytime Lady!  

 

MKF: Yes! I'm a bookseller at Little Professor, one of the oldest independent bookshops in Birmingham. It's been around for about 50 years. When I think about public-facing literary community, I didn't realize that Little Professor was everything I was looking for. I'm not the only Storytime lady, in the sense of children being like, that's the Storytime Lady, but yeah! It is I, the Storytime Lady. It’s a really beautiful opportunity early on to be physically present with kids and to show them reading and stories are community acts, that storytelling is what we do as humans, and it brings us together. And afterwards, I make them balloon animals. 

 

14H: Hidden talents! Is there anything else you'd like to share about being a bookseller, as an interrelated way to exist as a writer in the world, and a whole other community to be a part of—sustaining independent bookstores? 

 

MKF: When I was in graduate school I felt like I wasn't encouraged to go into bookshops, necessarily. Not in a sense of, whatever you do, child, don't go to the bookshop. In the sense of—always live somewhere with an independent bookstore, and then go to the independent bookstore and spend time with them. You know, the bestseller shelf at an independent bookstore tells me more about where a people, a widespread culture, is at emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We read because we're trying to feed and nourish some part of ourselves. The titles in Little Professor change weekly, you can see patterns of what people are scared of, what people are excited about. You can see what people are running away from, what people are grieving. If someone came in with a terrible illness or a collapsed lung, and a doctor was like, I know how to treat that. I know how to fix this. I know how to help you. In the same way, I can look at the bestseller shelf and as a writer, be like, oh my god, you just want to know you are okay, or you just want to go somewhere else, and you want to be okay while you're there. There's also this chasm, I feel, right now between romantasy, and then absolute tearjerker-got-you novels. There's little islands where people gather, here we have genre fiction, or literary fiction, and everybody gathers there, trying to be safe…for example, I was wondering how long it would take me to talk about Emily Henry today—I’m willing to give a TED Talk presentation as to why she is a 21st century Bronte sister. 

 

14H: Love that! I'm thinking of when you mentioned being critiqued for pretty prose, because I think that’s very often a critique against women and women's writing. I’m also thinking of the themes in “Regular Cowgirl” as well, how it balances fear, grief, and incisive social commentary with momentum and musicality, in a way we still find possibilities of humor and hope. 

 

MKF: So “Regular Cowgirl” is from my quarantine manuscript called The Great Dying, which actually got selected for an Editor's Prize this year, by poet Danielle Hansen for the Codhill Press prize, and it's coming out next year. It’s called The Great Dying because it's styled like an action movie franchise. The Great Dying! The Great Dying 2: Hard to kill! The Great Dying 3: Dying Greater, The Great Dying 7: Coup de Gras! The Great Dying 8: The Fate of the Great. And “Regular Cowgirl” is the last poem, actually, in the manuscript. It was a gnarly, wild thing that I wrote while in quarantine. It felt like my family was burning, my body was burning, my life was burning, the world was burning. The only place that felt safe was poetry. How would you write poetry, MK, if you thought there were no rules? If you thought there were things that you weren't supposed to write about, that we're supposed to write about, like having a female identity in a nuanced way. What if it was gross? Like, oh, yes, female grotesque is very… no, no, no. Like…gross, cartoonish gross. I felt like you're not supposed to be funny in poems, but I started writing all these, like, dark humor poems, it was like…knock, knock, who's there? Everyone's dead! Kind of unhinged. There's humor to it, and there's haunting to it. “Regular Cowgirl” is also a poem of exegesis, where it tells a little bit about the Great Dying, the Permian Triassic Extinction event that came millions of years before the K-T impact dinosaur event, and was way deadlier. Like, it was so bad, they just called it the Great Dying. When you feel that small and the world feels that big, that sense of scale, especially during quarantine, there is a friction from that. I feel really lucky to have been an art maker inside of that moment. The manuscript is dedicated to people who were lost, people who were changed, and also Emily Dickinson, my first true poetry love, who has never let me go it alone. There was a lot of laughter and crying and crying until you reached laughter. And that's how 2020 was and 2021. 

 

14H: And 2025…I’m thinking about all the female authors you're bringing into the conversation, and how they're with you when you write, and then also ghosts, and perhaps how they work together. 

 

MKF: Well, part of being an artist, and specifically part of being a writer, is communicating with the dead. You are participating directly in one of the oldest forms of making in the world. Song and storytelling predates cooking. That's old. Bodies singing patterns to one another, ways to describe what they've seen, what has happened. Being a maker, being a storyteller, being a song-teller. That's an ancient tradition. Of course, you write the dead. Of course, you write with ghosts. We are never truly alone when we're writing. I like to imagine all the female writers that I look up to are with me. I think books are kind of magical talismans that are with us and protect us. You'd asked me about some of the other projects that I was working on. ARKBIRD, or the Raven's wife is my verse novel titled like an epic apocalypse, because it is a retelling of the flood story from the perspective of a woman, set inside 21st century climate change. Pleurotomaria is my new poetry collection about the continuum of deep, geologic time. It starts at the creation of the moon, and goes to the ripping of atoms at the end of all time. If you stare into the vortex of deep time long enough, it will stare back, and it is not singular, and it is unquestionably female. So there's kind of a polyphonic symphony of female voices echoing out of rocks and across waves and ancient water, and it's all spiraled together in the Pleurotomaria, poetry being this kind of dark, dark matter that can transcend time and bring all visions together. And the pleurotomaria, since I know everybody lies awake at night thinking about this. Just me? The pleurotomaria is a sea snail, a sweet little sea snail, one of the only species of living creature to survive all five mass extinction events. The old version of it died off, not because anything else told it to, it ended because it became something else on its own terms, and I find that so frickin' inspiring. And then there’s Velvet, my Southern Gothic novel. Velvet is… not for children. Velvet is an imaginary small town in Alabama, a very real place, that has experienced a regional apocalypse, resulting in a haunted lake that holds the town hostage. The Deep South is naturally a dark, beautiful, weird, spooky and quirky place. To me, there's something extra charged about Alabama in particular, connecting to deep time, because Alabama used to be underwater. It was a sea. The trees, the land is all haunted here, because it remembers water it can't see. I'm also writing it because, one of the old questions for a lot of people and a lot of readers is a conflicted relationship with home, and this idea of what role do monsters play in the background of all these things? Now, have a substack. I decided last year there's also not enough new fairy tales for children. Children right now, ages 4 to 104, need new accessible fairy tales that remind us to look out for each other, and to be brave in the face of danger. So, why are pumpkins orange? It could never be how their skin ripens because of photosynthesis and how light reacts. No, pumpkins are orange because they blush. When pumpkins are especially magnificent, they blush. They don't apologize for it, they just blush, and know that they're magnificent. The purpose of the original fairy tales were meant to keep people alive, to keep children alive. You would tell a child a fairy tale about something that lived in the woods, not because you want them to be afraid of the woods, but to have respect for the woods. Stories keeping people alive. 

 

14H: Storytime Lady, coming out! A natural. I'm curious about the connective arcs between all of these different genres and subjects and projects, and horror and hope. What connects all of these works for you in terms of resiliency, and what you think the future looks like, for us as a species? And for art, creativity, and knowledge? 

 

MKF: When I'm writing, I'm thinking about my connection to the ancientness of the craft. What I would always tell my students, and as I tell myself here now, is reading and writing are radical acts of communion with the dead and the absent. And when we engage these crafts, we're part of that. In the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s “This Is My Letter to the World, that never wrote to me” I feel like I've written countless love letters to the world, but I also feel like the world has written back to me in many ways. There's correspondence with the dead and the absent and the cosmos. We're not alone. Time is always with us. It's something that poetry is strong enough to reach through and connect. I love what you said about hope and resiliency, because that's something I have to hold onto. I get my optimism from my mother. She is such a fighter, and that's what she's raised me to be. Again, Emily Dickinson, “hope is a thing with feathers that preaches in the soul.” There is delicacy to it, but it's iron lace, basically. It's intricately formed but unbreakable. It's left to the work of poets to bear witness to eons and ages, and to bear witness to all of the shades of human emotion and human experience, to collapse memory and time and to layer visions. I believe art has the power to save the world. And my logic there being, poetry must save the world, because it's the least likely thing to do so. It's so old. Of course it will. So I feel, in terms of hope and resilience, I feel lucky to be someone who's writing inside of this moment that we're facing down, climate change, and war, and a lot of grief. I have a lot of faith in creative work and writing specifically and in storytelling, to be something that turns the tide.  

 

14H: Thank you again MK, Dr. Foster and Miss Storytime Lady, for your time and generosity, and your poems. Your words are nourishing, and I appreciate you.