Khadijah Queen is a multi-hyphenate artist and the author of Anodyne (Tin House, 2020), Fearful Beloved (Argos Books, 2015), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press, 2010), and Conduit (Black Goat imprint, 2008), among other works. The Offing published two of her poems in 2015. Ashaki M. Jackson conducted the interview.
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Ashaki Jackson: Memoir feels as intimate as poetry in terms of genres. And you’ve authored five poetry collections. You double down on the personal with your new book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Legacy Lit, August 2025). Why a memoir?
Khadijah Queen: A lot of people would ask me about my time in the service and I didn’t really want to talk about it. And when I was in my MFA program I wasn’t even planning to write a memoir. I wanted to write about my family history, how my mother’s mother’s family migrated north from the South, specifically because her grandfather was lynched. He owned a store and some land in this little town called Autaugaville, Alabama, which is between Selma and Montgomery. And I wanted to research and write about that story, because they had to leave on pain of death. That’s how they got to Michigan in the 1920s on that particular family line. I wanted to write about that.
My mentor was Valerie Boyd (may she rest). When I was telling her this [she asked], “Weren’t you just in the Navy?” Because I just got out a couple years before, maybe three years. “What are you gonna write about it?” And I [thought to myself], nobody needs to hear that! I was very surprised that she asked about it. Not a lot of people wanted to talk about it. If I tried to talk about it with any kind of depth, I [could] feel them glazing over. It’s a very specific experience, and it doesn’t fulfill the stereotype of what people think military service is. I don’t think it’s easy to open up that narrative. Certainly not casually, but also not really in my circle. So, I just didn’t talk about it. And Valerie said, “No, I want to hear that. I want to read that.”
AJ: I learned about the military through you. Your insight was certainly a revelation, especially from the voice of a Black woman. Are there other Black women or women of color who have offered their voices?
KQ: I found a couple. One, she had been… in Iraq. She was a prisoner briefly; and I can’t remember the name of the book. I wouldn’t call it a literary memoir, but it was an account by a Black woman. I had to search further afield. That is what led me to other research that became some of the stories in this book. If I can’t find a lot of Black women’s stories, then there’s got to be somebody else. There’s got to be other stories of women at sea, women in the Navy, women pirates, merchants.
I wish I had time and resources to travel to find more primary sources, but I was only able to get to the UK. So that’s mostly what I found and the books that I could get from my university library. It was important to me to have a diverse array of experiences and voices and time periods [to] unlock the notion that women have been sailors since the beginning. And also, what is the origin of the idea that women are bad luck on ships?
AJ: Your research found figures like widow-cum-captain Mary Ann Brown Patten, pirate Zheng Yi Sao, and privateer Jeanne de Belleville — each notable women of the seas despite the dominance of men. How did weaving their stories into your memoir clarify your experience in the Navy?
KQ: It made me feel less alone in my experience to read about what women have gone through and overcome historically. That famous Baldwin quote, right? Their stories helped explain, too, why I couldn’t simply bury the experience and move forward. It is significant, unique, and it changes you.
AJ: In one of your chapters you write, “Civilians are trained to think of sailors and soldiers as tough, indestructible, disciplined, superhuman, perhaps honorable and able, bodied and resilient, and we are that, but we are not robots, nor are we machines.” It piqued my curiosity as to the diversity amongst the people with whom you were serving at that time. Tell us a little bit more about your cohorts from boot camp to the ship.
KQ: You would see the same kind of people at the store. Every kind of person… like a microcosm of America. When we think about sailors in the larger culture, the picture we have of a sailor is usually a young white man. But when I was serving that was not the case. There were a lot of us too… What’s in the way of equal treatment [in the Navy] are erroneous beliefs that only certain people deserve certain privileges, and therefore they want to enforce these beliefs even though it’s not written down [in the laws anymore].
AJ: So it truly is a microcosm that mimics or tries to reimplement social hierarchies in the system.
KQ: Hierarchy is the military. It is built in. We were taught that everything is equalized, but that is not what I experienced.
AJ: Your entrance into the Navy was pretty quick. Familial responsibility, scarcity, and personal goals that you [describe] early in the memoir, specifically education, helped you decide to join the Navy in just a few days. What did you expect from your enlistment – what were you running to?
KQ: I did not have an idea of what I was running to at all. I was just trying to get my education money and get away from Michigan, running away from an experience I felt trapped in. The research and looking into the Navy and understanding these hierarchies and these intrinsic ways of moving through the system — I didn’t know anything. And this is before the internet, mind you. I’m a researcher now for a living, and when I think about how fast I made that decision, it just felt like I could get on out of [Michigan]. I sure did see my way out of what felt like an impossible situation. I felt like I was drowning.
AJ: Your story resolves in several ways in this memoir, and one of them is in your becoming a mother. Does motherhood change your perspective on enlistment? Does it change your perspective on having the experience?
KQ: I’ve never thought about that. I think I talk about in the book how much I wanted to raise [my son] myself, and I didn’t want to outsource that to my mother, my ex’s mother, anybody else. I looked at this little, tiny person and thought: I am his mother, and I am going to raise him. That was a big reason why I didn’t stay in; they were on this war kick, and I asked myself what is my son going to do if I don’t exist? I felt more of a responsibility to him than I did to the Navy. I couldn’t trust them with my wellbeing. They’d already proven that I couldn’t. I was looking at it not just from the silo of my own experience but through what happened to my shipmates. Even if you’ve done everything right, or you’ve been in an international incident, they still are not going to treat you that great. I didn’t trust my shipmates to protect me, didn’t trust the Navy to have my back. And the values that we were taught to have, I didn’t see reciprocated. I couldn’t abide that.
AJ: There are over 100 chapters — the shortest being seven sentences. Certainly the veteran memoirs on the market right now are not written in these bites. What was behind the shape of your memoir?
KQ: In the beginning, there were normal chapters. I [revealed] this one little snippet that I hadn’t shared with [my agent]. And she wanted more of those. It was a pretty collaborative process, I would say, over the five or six years that I was working with my agent and then my editor at Legacy Lit, Amina Iro. It was not an easy process, because there was a lot I didn’t want to say, and there were things that I couldn’t say because there are certain things you’re not supposed to disclose. I was a reluctant memoir writer and I had to decide what felt more important: keeping the stories to myself or perhaps making a dent in the stereotypes that people have about women’s experiences on active duty.
AJ: And when engaging your publication team, there was the matter of a generational gap.
KQ: What was most difficult about having generations younger than me read this memoir — certainly cultural references and understanding the lack of access to information [25, 30 years ago]. It’s very different now. You have a computer in your pocket that can tell you anything. It was not like that. You had to go to the library. You had to look at and read through a physical book to find information, right?! You had to call somebody on the phone. There was no texting.
AJ: There were encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sold door to door. Every family would have an encyclopedia set. M would be the thickest. I remember you explaining that the emergency line 911 didn’t exist nationwide until we were children.
KQ: You remember this! I had to stand my ground on certain things and explain a little more than I wanted to, in order to bridge the gap. It’s about balancing authenticity and connection, right? How can I make sure that this comes across clearly, while still maintaining the authenticity of my experience and voice.
AJ: There are three chapters in this memoir titled “Triggers,” like you’re always coming back, you’re rebooting, you’re paying more attention to what bothers you. In this memoir, they’re in three neat chapters even though they are reckless and elbow through the memoir.
KQ: The triggers came about because [my agent and] editor thought it might be good to have some kind of respite from the intensity of [the memoir]. Memory is recursive. So, things come back. And that’s true, whether or not you had an experience like mine.
AJ: While you were still recovering from your training injury, people would ask you why you were still in boot camp. You said, “Sometimes I just wanted to hide, but there is nowhere for introverts to hide in boot camp.” Boot camp and what followed was not only a lot of physical energy but also psychological energy, and I wonder how you managed that.
KQ: I would get the heck off the ship, go to a motel by myself – $40 a night, which I could not afford. I would go to the library and get a bunch of books, go to the store and get a bunch of snacks, and sit in my underwear by myself, watching TV, reading books, and eating snacks. And that was my reset when I had liberty. If I couldn’t go on liberty, if we were at sea, I would try to have some time to myself in the evenings, if I didn’t have duty, and sit on the aft missile deck. I read out there at first, until dudes started bothering me — playing monkey in the middle with my book or making fun of books that I was reading. I couldn’t read in public anymore on the ship unless I wanted to be bothered. I would sit out there, meditate and watch the sunset, put my headphones on, zone out.
I have a lot of alone time now. It’s kind of great. It’s also concerning to some people that I don’t really seek out company. I’m 50 years old, I have my son, and you know, right now it’s just us, and if we want to we usually will have social time when we’re traveling, either to see family or to do fun things. He has a lot of online friends. I have colleagues at work. I have my friends that are scattered all over the world and we talk on the phone or on Zoom or Signal or whatever, but I just don’t need a lot of social time. If I find I need it, I will go seek it out. But I really enjoy my solitude in my menopausal era, my crone era.
AJ: To what extent was remembering and writing this memoir part of that self-care?
KQ: I needed to write it out and sometimes cry it out. I used to write a lot in cafes before the pandemic. Those were the days. During the more traumatic parts, I learned to take care of myself, and that meant I needed extra sleep. Ordering takeout. I might not answer the phone. That meant I needed a fluffy blanket and all my favorite teas and snacks and music. And I didn’t have a lot of privacy growing up, either. So being able to afford that little motel room—you know, the whole Virginia Woolf “room of her own” [program] — made a difference in my mental health and processing for sure.
AJ: Shout out to funders of space for writers, recuperative spaces, spaces for rest, spaces for silence and for returning to oneself.
KQ: I want to give a shout out to Civitella Ranieri — they gave me a fellowship in September and October 2023. It was six weeks in the countryside in Umbria, Italy, near Tuscany, where I could just write and be around other writers and artists and musicians. I was able to get the final draft that my agent sent to publishers when I was at that retreat, and they just took such good care of me. They did my laundry! Nobody has ever done my laundry since my mama. So I really appreciated them, and we can’t underestimate the value of care. That’s another myth that writers are isolated and have to be alone in their room. You also need care. You also need to be taken care of. And the more you have that, the more you can produce, and the better work you can produce. I think you need people.
AJ: Space, a supportive team, an interest in facing the memories and processing the memories. How about a therapist?
KQ: Shout out to my therapists!
And Chelsea Hodson, a writer who does coaching here and there. In 2019, I felt this deep urgency to finish [the memoir]. I needed to get a complete draft to my agent. I worked with Chelsea for six weeks, mostly emailing pages for accountability, plus a long letter each week with prompts and questions.
AJ: A system is so helpful. Reminds me of The Grind, where we’re put in small groups of strangers to generate but not to review anything. No feedback is necessary. Just generate. Shout out to Ross White of The Grind.
KQ: I think we’ve been pretty lucky to find groups that are supportive and generative and positive.
We had a memoir group after our MFA called Red Thread, and that was Susan Southard, Anne Liu Kellor, and Anne Canwright. We would share work through Yahoo Groups, that’s how long ago that was. But it was good accountability. [I finished] Black Peculiar with that group — the play part — and some of the memoir. My PhD cohort saw some of it too. They’ve read pages, especially McCormick Templeman, who is a fiction writer. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of good readers who I trust.
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