KB Brookins is a writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. They are the author of HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (2022, Kallisto Gaia Press), FREEDOM HOUSE (2023, Deep Vellum), and PRETTY (2024, Alfred A. Knopf). The Offing published their poems March 20, 2024. Editorial Assistant Shlagha Borah conducted the Q&A.
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Shlagha Borah: You wrote a very important book that I love with all my heart, so I’m very honored to be talking to you today. Because I read Freedom House not very long ago, I noticed a lot of resemblances. But the two books are tonally quite distinct. Would you talk a little bit more about your process and how you changed as a writer between these projects?
KB Brookins: I also have a chapbook that came out in 2022 called, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, and I feel like each of the three books are modulations of a person coming into knowing themselves better, because in How to Identify… I was thinking a lot about home and feeling a kind of homesickness, wishing that people could see me for who I am. Then I get to Freedom House and I’m more flippant, a little more fearless on the page.
When I got to Pretty, I got really introspective and found myself writing poems that actually felt like non-fiction. So I asked myself, “What am I scared of?” I had already been thinking about it for a while, so I started writing non-fiction pieces, started pitching to some places, getting some pitches accepted, etc. I realized I keep circling the same themes, and these are probably going to be things that I continue to think about throughout my whole literary career.
I’m going to think about them differently over time but queerness, masculinity, race — I kept thinking about those three things and I copy-pasted all these essays into one document, sent that to an agent, that the agent sent to a publisher, and then it snowballed in a really quick way. Because I felt bewildered by poetry at the time, and I had this half-poetry project that ended up becoming Pretty. All the books that I’ve written so far are iterations of the same person learning more about what it means to be a Black trans person. Pretty was an effort at writing myself into history because in the earlier days of my transition, I felt like, what I’m experiencing, is it a thing only I’m experiencing or is it a thing that has happened to other people like me? Sure there are memoirs about Black masculinity, Black queerness, and how one’s masculinity changes over time as a trans person but my masculinity and queerness and transness comes with Blackness and for some reason, I couldn’t see it in a book. So, I thought, what if I just wrote that book?
SB: It’s so interesting that you said you felt bewildered by poetry because I first came to know your work as a poet, as I’m sure many people did. I want to know more about your choice of braiding poems throughout the book – would you call Pretty a hybrid book, or a memoir with chunks of poetry in between?
KB: I thought about calling it a hybrid memoir but then thought, What if I just called it a memoir and then people were confronted with poetry unexpectedly? What would happen then? Maybe it’s a Black trans memoir but it’s not the one; I’m not gonna pose it as if my experience is universal because it isn’t.
Early versions of this book didn’t have poems because I thought I failed at writing a poetry book so here I was, writing a memoir. I didn’t have the skill then to be able to read it with the generosity that I can read it with now. My editor suggested that I include them because they were punctuating the essays and it felt like they were good companion pieces to the essays, and also because they are a storytelling mechanism on their own. I want people to view poems as stories, as much as they view essays and memoir chapters and short stories and novels as stories, because a poem is a story, it’s just a story that doesn’t move linearly, it moves based on emotion or sound, but it’s a story nonetheless.
SB: I want to talk about how collaborative your work is. One, the language you use is so accessible. And two, there are so many openings in your endings that feel very welcoming and inviting for the reader. Can you talk about the intentionality of this craft choice?
KB: Endings are probably the hardest part of writing for me. I’m continuing to live life after this sentence so what happens now? When I get stuck on endings, I go back to earlier parts of the piece and think of what’s changed, and how to signify that. How have I changed as a writer? How has the reader changed by the end of this? I have an affinity for open endings because the best creative writing and media to me have a kind of open-endedness that mirrors life.
To your point about accessibility, I try to write the way I talk, and maybe that’s a thing that I learned early in my literary journey because I came from a spoken word poetry after-school workshop that happened in high school where we read our stuff out loud. That was our way of showcasing our work and also our way of editing stuff. And that’s still how I edit — I read it out loud and I’m like, okay that’s whack, or it’s making me slip up, if it’s gonna sound boring with me reading it out loud then I probably should pay attention to it.
I want the reader to feel like they’re sitting next to me at a coffee table or across from me in a mock therapy session or we’re in a classroom learning something new about each other. I like to post questions too, like in Pretty, I definitely bring poetic impulses because it gives me a liberty of approaching language generously, and moving towards the undone.
SB: What have your workshop experiences been like? Have you ever workshopped parts of Pretty? Did you receive any kind of pushback or people were generally encouraging?
KB: I didn’t workshop any books that I’ve put out so far in MFA workshops. I feel like it did me a great justice to not have a lot of eyes on this book, it was really just me and my editor, because I would have second guessed it far too much if I would have taken it to workshop spaces. I think workshops are useful in the sense that you get the feedback if that’s something you’re craving, but I don’t know if I was craving feedback in the writing of this book; I was instead craving clarity. I could only really attain clarity by wrestling one-on-one with the page. I was trying to play singles tennis with a machine on the other side, I was not trying to play pickleball with the homies.
SB: It makes sense for such an intimate project to be just yours until you decide to let it out in the world. It’s a hard decision to make because it poses the question of how much you trust yourself. Was this easy to achieve for you because of the narrative of the manuscript, your previous publishing experiences, because you had an editor you trusted a lot, or a combination of all of these?
KB: Shoutout to my therapist that I had when I left my hometown for good in 2017 and moved to Austin. I was a hot mess — I was fresh out of a relationship where I had just lost the love of my life (when you’re in your early 20s you think everybody’s the love of your life), I was newly locking my hair, and I had just changed my pronouns. It was a big transitional period, and I went to the therapist’s office really undone.
But looking back on that, she asked me a lot of questions that got me thinking about things that maybe happened when I was 2, when I was 20, when I was 13. I was feeling a lot of complex feelings about home, about my gender and sexual orientation and masculinity. That relationship had also imploded because I was exhibiting some toxic masculinity and I asked myself, Why did I do that? Do I forgive myself for this or do I continuously punish myself? Do I have the capacity to change all this stuff?
It was helpful to talk one-on-one with somebody every week, who asked those hard questions. This is all to say, by the time I started writing the book in 2021-2022, I was already thinking about my past and how it shaped who I am now. By the time I was wrestling with the page, I could focus on getting to the next sentence because I already knew what I wanted to say. I just wrote and let it be messy. It’s an intentionally messy memoir; it doesn’t move linearly, you don’t get to the end of a piece and you go, “I’m so glad KB’s okay.” The writing process was really just moving all the potential energy into kinetic energy without overthinking too much.
SB: I want to know more about the title and how it came to you. Even for poems, single word titles are hard, so I can only assume how it would be for a full manuscript.
KB: The first piece in the book that made me feel like I was cooking with grease was the titular piece called “Pretty” which also took the longest to finish. I was writing through shame which was hard and also brought up a lot of moral questions for me — Is this my story to tell because I’m not the victim in this story, and what is the responsibility I have to living people?
When I was writing that piece, I was a fellow with this literary organization and it was a free creative process and I went to a Q&A with Kiese Laymon, who’s one of my favorite writers and who has a really amazing book called Heavy. I asked Kiese how to write about something shameful without re-traumatizing the other person. He gave me an answer along the lines of “don’t crucify yourself on the page and don’t keep punishing yourself”, and advised me to have open dialogue with people if it was possible. That really helped me reach out to the people I was writing about. I offered them an olive branch. I said: If you want to talk to me, I’d like to write about this thing. I don’t want to publicize it or make money from it. It’s fine if you don’t, too.
I wanted this book to be called Pretty because I wanted to push against expectations of beauty — I’m talking about fatness; I’m talking about queerness; I’m talking about transness; I’m talking about Blackness — I’m talking about a lot of identities that have been historically told that they cannot be desirable, cannot be pretty, cannot be soft.
SB: There are a lot of ethical decisions needed to be made while writing (and subsequently, publishing) a memoir. How much of the story is ours to tell? How did you navigate these waters while writing about other characters, especially in the first person narrative?
KB: When you write a memoir, you have to talk to a lawyer, usually at the press, and they ask if someone you mention in the book is going to sue, if so, maybe you should change the same. It’s one of those unwritten things so little details are often changed in memoirs.
I’m not trying to cause more pain and I also want to make sure that when I depict someone on the page, it’s not so venomous that they seem like a caricature or a villain. I don’t think people wake up in the morning and think, “how many people can I hurt today?” People have reasons for why they do the things they do and I try my best to figure out those reasons. I can’t take back what they said and how it affected me but what I can do is learn more about their point of view, if I feel safe enough. I’ve had some conversations where I felt that the person has changed over time and are not necessarily the person they were, but honestly, I also wanted to depict that sometimes it’s not sunshine and rainbows by the end, sometimes you still have a homophobic parent even if you explain things over and over, even if you give them all the grace you can, there will be people who’ll never see it. I wanted to express that grief on the page.
SB: When we first met, you asked me what my current obsessions were, and that stuck with me because that translates directly or indirectly into one’s work. I wouldn’t call it an obsession exactly but something that ties your books is rage. While your books are really humorous, there’s always an undercurrent of rage and care for community. Are those your obsessions? What are your other obsessions at the moment?
KB: It’s funny that you name rage as one of my obsessions. The page is the place where I can say things that I can’t necessarily say in real life. I’m quite chill in real life and I don’t like confrontation. But if you scroll my Twitter or if you read my books, you would think I’m a person who instigates fights all the time. But no, I’m silently thinking about these things. On the page is the place where I feel like I can say something and not be completely under fire, lose my job, etc. It’s where I can let out those emotions because I don’t have access to them as a Black person in my everyday life since there are a lot of stereotypes associated with Black people when they’re upset. There have been a lot of times within my family and school systems where I’ve said how I felt and have been invalidated. But the page can’t invalidate me, so I’m going to tell you how mad it makes me, in hopes that we can be mad together.
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