Creative nonfiction allows for the flexibility to create these surreal and unsettling spaces. What made Art the right figure for you to choose to inhabit this space?

I was thinking quite a lot about Art and Terrifier 2 when I went to see Jane Hirschfield’s talk, so it felt really natural to manifest him there in a literal way. Art himself is compelling to me, I think, because he doesn’t seem to follow any consistent set of “rules.”

Most horror monsters operate using a logic internal to either a particular movie/franchise, or to the genre itself. Think of the malevolent spirit released to haunt a house via a seance gone awry, for example, or the demon summoned by reading a passage aloud from an ancient book. Often, these logics even play a part in the way a film is structured. The protagonist says, “We have to figure out what this is so we can stop it!” Then, they make a trek to see the sole survivor or the socially ostracized knowledge-keeper, and the exact mechanics of how the monster works are revealed along with how to beat it.

Art, on the other hand, seems to be part-supernatural and part-human. It’s not spelled out. Part of that is definitely my fault, as I wrote in my essay, because the first time I saw the film I got up to go to the bathroom during an explanatory scene. But Sienna, the protagonist, doesn’t know a lot about him either, even as she has to face him. Together, that created this effect where, especially during my first viewing, Art was just there, and not rule-bound at all.

Along with Terrifier 2, I was also thinking a lot about my relationship to artmaking when I saw Jane Hirschfield’s talk. I had just started begrudgingly embracing the titles of “writer” and “artist” after finishing my MFA. It was (and still is) really challenging and scary to take that part of myself seriously, and the transition felt sudden. So, it made sense to me that Art would be the shape that artmaking took—a character that doesn’t follow the logic of everyday life, follows me everywhere, and relentlessly demands a kind of ultimate vulnerability.

I love how you weave between part-memoir-like narrative to part-horror-filled experience. What about this format made it the right choice for you to tell this story?

Art’s intrusive and unsettling vibe presented an interesting vehicle to explore my changing relationship to art. In turn, the part-horror, part-memoir format helped shape the essay’s emotional friction into a more lifelike representation of my internal landscape. I love speculative nonfiction, and one of my goals in writing is to capture what feels real—in many ways, what feels real is real. Or, at least, it’s one of many coexisting realities.

Sometimes, a life-changing experience seems pretty ordinary on the surface, especially when the revelation comes mostly as a result of introspection. For me, the internal experience of feeling things click when playing with new ideas and concepts is absolutely explosive, which is hard to describe directly in writing. Speculative nonfiction can help make some of that process a bit more visible and interesting to a reader.

I like your interpretation of permeability via body and horror, and its juxtaposition to the poet’s reading of it as moonlight and ruin. What drew you to connect these different views?

As you might’ve guessed by this point, I read and watch a lot of horror. I’m really interested in the genre and how it provides a vehicle for grappling with experiences that can be difficult to name and contend with otherwise, including experiences of physical porousness, boundarylessness, and vulnerability. On top of that, another piece I had been working on at the time centered on envisioning the body as a haunted house. That’s definitely not a new concept, but I’d been thinking a lot about the relationship between the house/the home and the body, the public and the private, and the more immediate reciprocal leakage between outsides and insides. When I heard Jane Hirschfield read that poem she had translated, the clarity of that image really resonated with many of the concepts I’d been thinking through, so I had to write it down.

I adore your note of forgetting “to need to write, even though it feels like coming home.” I must ask: What about writing feels like coming home, and how do you then find that motivation to write?

Thank you! In this context, I feel like “coming home” refers to debriefing, processing, or maybe even coming back to myself. The way my brain works, I’ll have an intense experience without realizing that the deep processing of that experience happens on a significant delay. And much of the time, that processing happens through writing. As I get older, I’m realizing I need to intentionally carve out quiet alone time to write through the impacts of the things that go on in my life. I actively avoided processing that way for a long time, actually, because it was too hard.

So, I forget about writing because I associate it with an outcome or a finished “piece,” when in reality it’s a process I really need to engage with in order to make sense of myself and my world. Motivation, though . . . I still haven’t cracked the code. I write in short, intense bursts right now, when I emotionally “have to” or feel overcome by an idea. But I’m trying to develop a more consistent routine because creativity is clearly so important to my well-being. Hopefully I’ll get there soon!

What is next for you? Do you have any other stories or projects your readers can look forward to?

Thanks for asking! Right now, I’m experimenting with different mediums—I’ve been trying out some audio/visual and sculptural work, too. I’ve done programs these past few summers with artists of all kinds, which have been so enriching and generative that I’d like to expand my practice accordingly.

More concretely, I’ll have an essay out this summer in the Bellingham Review that’s a kind of ars nonfiction about driving around in the dark and looking into empty houses. I’m working on finding homes for a handful of other pieces, too. And I’d love to start putting together a collection of work soon!