Interview with queer author

This is an author’s photo of Robin Gow. He is white and has a shaved head. They are wearing a star-covered black dress and black-rimmed glasses. They have butterfly wing earrings and a studded collar.

Pride Community Project Episode Three: Claire van Doren Interviews Robin Gow

Claire van Doren
This is an author’s photo of Robin Gow. He is white and has a shaved head. They are wearing a star-covered black dress and black-rimmed glasses. They have butterfly wing earrings and a studded collar.
Robin Gow

Superstition Review is excited to share a podcast project planned and produced by SR intern Claire van Doren. In this four-episode audio series, Claire will be talking with SR’s queer contributors. In today’s episode, Claire interviews Robin Gow (they/ze/he). They are the author of a number of chapbooks and novels for young readers, many of them forthcoming in 2023. Their works include Honeysuckle  at Finishing Line Press, Backyard Paleontology at Glass Poetry (Forthcoming 2023), and A Museum for That Which No Longer Exists at Alternating Current Press (Forthcoming 2023), A Million Quiet Revolutions, Ode to My First Car (forthcoming 2023), and others. They are the managing editor of The Nasiona. To learn more, visit his website.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity. Credit goes to FreeSound.org for the sound effects.

Claire van Doren: Hi! My name’s Claire van Doren, and you’re listening to the Superstition Review Pride Community Project. Today, we’ll be hearing from Robin Gow. They’ll be discussing their experiences with the queer community and how it impacts their work. This is one of four Pride Community specials. Stick around to hear from more of Superstition Review’s queer contributors.

[Phone ringing]

Robin Gow: My name is Robin Gow, and I use any pronouns but she. I’ve worked in a lot of different genres: I do poetry, young adult and middle-grade books, and kind of hybrid essay work, too. I think of myself as a very hybrid writer, and I think that’s because the way my brain works and the experience I’ve had as a trans person don’t fit neatly into things. My narratives are very messy. I turn often to poetry because poetry is very forgiving of strangeness and welcoming toward narratives that break apart and fracture and that kind of thing.

But I’m trying to find that space in fiction and essay, too. I definitely think that it influences me in that way. Like every non-binary person, that kind of translates into having non-binary impulses in genre. Like, I don’t totally believe in genre. I think having that knowledge about myself as “between” a lot of things has definitely affected me and my writing.

I like to think of my poems as mini-conservations that I can start with someone else. There’s this essay by Frank O’Hara, where he talks about a poem as squarely between himself and another person. And I guess I think of my poetry like that. I always want it to be in conversation. Or, if not in conversation, then maybe a letter to someone. I think that I’m often writing towards a community because I feel like the word community is really complex, and the spectrum of people so diverse as LGBTQ+ people. And I see that in my work at the LGBTQ+ Center—working in social services in general. It makes me very interested in the small, beautiful intricacies of peoples’ lives—because a lot of the work that I do is creating programs and space for queer people. And I think I’ve just learned a lot about community and its expansiveness.

I think it often motivates me a lot in terms of my more narrative work—like the young adult fiction I write. But I think that it impacts my poetry, too. I guess that it motivates me, it makes me more interested in creating, because I know that there is contact with the community that I write for. Because I feel that I write primarily for other queer people.

It makes me go back to high school and some of the books I read that really sparked my interest in literature as a whole. And I think that I had a long period of reading a lot of stories in the magical realism genre. Specifically I read 100 Years of Solitude alone in high school, and I think there’s so much I didn’t get because I was a high schooler. I didn’t get the global context that Gabriel García Márquez is writing in.

The ways in which writers of that movement are writing into complete strangeness in day-to-day life has always affected me. Because I think reading that work in high school had a lot of impact on me. And it’s interesting, then—at the same time I was reading that, I was also watching a lot of anime. Which I think sounds funny as a huge influence, but I think it had a huge influence on me because anime is very fantastical. There’s a lot of questions of what it means to be a person in the world that are addressed in some of the animes I really like.

And then more lately, I just other queer writers—like Jos Charles’ book Feeld is very influential. I wish it could influence me more because it’s just so brilliant. And then I think also, currently, I’m really into horror—because I feel like, in current cinema, that’s a place where people are committed to being really weird. And I think I’m just really fascinated by that. That’s also something that I think influences my work.

As a trans person, and also as someone who’s neurodivergent, who experiences the world in some strange ways, I think that that has always drawn me into thinking about where an image or something can spin off into something bigger than the mundane. Especially religious imagery. Because I was raised very Catholic, I had a lot of negative experiences with religion, especially as a queer and trans person. But I’m so fascinated by it. I’ve taken a lot of personal interest in saints and the ritual around Catholicism. Something I was always intrigued by is that the bread that they have actually transforms into Jesus’s body. They don’t believe it’s a symbol; they believe it’s an actual transformation. I think that that’s kind of sparked an interest in me, where the mundane goes into the magical in the day-to-day world. I find an interest in where day-to-day life can slip into something surreal or something absurd. But it’s still out of respect for mundane life or interest in it, too.

I want to write toward younger people. I think that, a lot of times, writers are against writing for youth. And I actually think that—when I think about the books that impacted me the most–it’s the things that I read when I was younger. So I’m trying to write towards—or in solidarity with—queer youth. And I hope that my writing can create some of those conversations.

And then I’m also interested in exploring a hybrid fiction novel. It’s hard because I write in very strange genre formations, but I guess what I’m trying to achieve in the future is not letting that baggage I have about genre influence me creating something.

Because if I don’t finish it, then it will never be a thing, you know?

[Phone hangs up]

CVD: Thanks for joining us! Be sure to check out our YouTube page for more audio and video content, as well as our official Superstition Review blog.

A headshot of Cavar.

Pride Community Project Episode Two: Claire van Doren Interviews Cavar

Claire van Doren
A headshot of Cavar.
Cavar

Superstition Review is excited to share a podcast project planned and produced by SR intern Claire van Doren. In this four-episode audio series, Claire will be talking with SR’s queer contributors. In today’s episode, Claire interviews Cavar. [sarah] Cavar (they/them) is a PhD student and writer of transMad things. They are editor-in-chief of Stone of Madness and swallow::tale presses, and their writing can be found in CRAFT Literary, Split Lip Magazine, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. Their debut novel, Failure to Comply, is forthcoming with featherproof books (2024). To learn more, visit their website, follow them @cavarsarah on twitter, and at librarycard.substack.com. 

The following transcript has been edited for clarity. Credit goes to FreeSound.org for the sound effects.

Claire van Doren: Hi! My name’s Claire van Doren, and you’re listening to the Superstition Review Pride Community Project. Today, we’ll be hearing from Cavar. They’ll be discussing their experiences with the queer community and how it impacts their work. This is one of four Pride Community specials. Stick around to hear from more of Superstition Review’s queer contributors.

[Phone ringing]

Cavar: I’m Cavar. I use they/them pronouns. I’m a PhD student in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, and also run around, put my little raccoon hands in a bunch of different writing and editing kinds of projects. I usually describe my work as—not really bridging the creative and the scholarly—but rather, sort of, undoing the binary between them. I hope to write things where dividing them into creative work and academic work doesn’t really make sense anymore. I’m also interested in doing work that really confounds sense-making, as a goal—mad works, quite frankly, which is a theme that comes up again and again.

I think that surrealism, in a lot of ways, is a way that writers approach—and tap on the shoulder—of madness, even if they don’t quite feel comfortable with the terminology of madness specifically. I think that the idea of the surreal—this idea that you’re able to cross from this reality to into a slightly bent or modified reality… It’s something that’s so in line with this “mad politic,” where multiple realities are accepted and celebrated. Instincts that one person might see , might not be the things that you see. And using surrealism to really get into those spaces—I think it’s a really incredibly valuable, mad tool.

It also frees me up to write things that feel a lot truer to me. I feel like I often experience these feelings, thoughts, experiences that go beyond what realism has to offer. And, to be freed up to use the language of the surreal, paradoxically, even though it’s supposedly “fake,” actually allows me to be a lot more honest. So growing up, I actually didn’t write fantasy or science-fiction very much. I think it’s because I associated all of it with—either like the hard sci-fi, where it’s hard to understand it. Or, like, A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy, with the maps and the names and the seven hundred pages. And so I thought that that was completely not for me. And I was right, but there’s a lot more to fantasy and science-fiction than that.

And so I gradually dipped my toes in later and got more enthusiastic about fantasy and science fiction. And I was really compelled by the way the authors used the languages of the future to address those realities and contemporary problems. And I was really impressed by the way that systems of magic and sorcery can be used to articulate everyday forms of violence and strife that we were dealing with now. And from there, I passed from a more grounded sense of fantasy and science fiction, to people beginning to recognize it—folks like Samuel R. Delany, who is taking fantasy and science fiction—being like, “Okay, but what if we challenge the structure of realism itself? What if we didn’t simply imbue future politics or wizards or witches into a kind of present-day logic? What if we up-ended logic?” And I think that both discovering the surreal that way—and also beginning to read my first collections of poetry when I was in college—it really made me realize that I was allowed to write things that didn’t only not exist, but didn’t really make sense in any universe.

One of my favorite authors is actually a literary young-adult author named Neal Shusterman. He writes mostly speculative fiction-slash-dystopian kind of books, for the broad category of reluctant readers. And I was skeptical because I feel like reluctant readers books are often stereotyped as “boy books” and books that don’t really have a lot of interest for people who are already drawn to a bunch of different genres and to writing. But I began reading Shusterman’s books when I was in middle-school. And I physically cannot put those books down—and I still can’t. And I think that that’s a testament to the fact that good work is good work, and it’s going to draw people from all different backgrounds and all different spaces.

I would really like to focus more on forms of writing that right now I simply don’t have the tools or knowledge to do. I talked to a couple of colleagues who are into boardgames, and they’re like, “Oh my God, what if I made a novel that was a game?” Or thinking about multi-modal approaches to writing. Things that involve QR codes and music and videos and all kinds of weird shit.

One of the great things about using mixed media is that it draws in people who are into music and into graphic novels and into computer games and into board games. I would love to work on something where visual art was the central component to it. I would love to work more on “found” documents and work more on archives. Really, just using as many forms and technologies and methods as possible—because so far, my expansion beyond just writing prose on a page has just gotten more fun the more weird stuff I do.

[Phone hangs up]

CVD: Thanks for joining us! Be sure to check out our YouTube page for more audio and video content, as well as our official Superstition Review blog.