Last month, The Offing published Trans Issue 2015, which ran from November 16-26, and featured work by trans / non-binary writers and artists in each of our departments. The issue was curated by five guest editors; in response to questions by The Offing Poetry reader, C. Russell Price, they offered insights into their editorial process — and their visions for the present and the future of literature.
Cam Awkward-Rich
“We live at a time where people are constantly awash in all kind of terrible information / images, like someone thinks we need more and more (and more and more visceral) bad news in order to be moved by it. But when a poem makes me laugh manically or throw my hands up because of how exquisite or true or whatever it is … well, how great, that language can do that.”
Read the full interview here.
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H. Melt
“My advice would be that queer spaces can be anywhere. They can be in your backyard. They can be on your bookshelf. They can be wherever you are. Even somewhere as simple as in a letter to a penpal. Queer spaces don’t have to be in a club or bar.”
Read the full interview here.
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Devon Llywelyn Jones
“Because what’s not original or compelling is simply what the establishment is allowing into its echelons: capitulation to whiteness, enshrinement of patriarchy, perpetual colonization, nihilistic alienation, dehumanization of the foreign, and worship of profits. Thank you, everyone whose work I read, for renewing my hope that true art does exist when you look in the right places.”
Read the full interview here.
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TC Tolbert
“And finally, despite mainstream media’s best attempts to reify a single dominant transition narrative, trans poets are upending the binary imperative all the way down to its syllabic roots. The trend is to be alive – fiercely, wondrously, complexly – in a political and social system that would rather we be dead or ashamed or mute.”
Read the full interview here.
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Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
“I want the privileged white academic voice to stop existing as the standard for what poetry ‘should’ be. I want trans people to be able to write poetry that doesn’t have to pander to cis people’s feelings about what constitutes transness. I want trans people to be able to say fuck you to those who whine about ‘identity politics’, and embrace their writing as coming from a different place than their cis counterparts.”
Read the full interview here.
