Aricka Foreman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drunken Boat,Minnesota Review, Union Station Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation by Viking Penguin, Learn Then Burn 2: This Time its Personal. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Callaloo Writers Workshop. Her chapbook Dream With A Glass Chamber is forthcoming from YesYes Books.
What doors do you open at The Offing?
I’m the Enumerate editor, which means I get to play with visual art and text. To enumerate is to list, and there are a number ways to play, flip and upturn hierarchies, linear ways of thinking, etc. Much of the work by the artists and writers we feature is work that pushes boundaries and resists. I hope our space gives them some breathing room or a nudge to keep pulling at the thread of what erases, is too neat, and reductive (and frankly, boring).
What doors does The Offing open for you?
It’s amazing work, but it is challenging. The roles of editors, educators, “gatekeepers” should be about advocacy. The Offing‘s mission is clear, and often I have to consider the number of ways a piece impacts communities: POC, LGBTQ, Disabled, etc. The Offing squad checks one another to make sure we’re featuring quality work from a diverse set of voices. It’s strengthened my eye for blind spots, and has connected me to some fantastically talented people.
Is there a piece you’ve worked on or found at The Offing that’s been especially meaningful to you?
This is a rude question. There’s so much. I loved working on “Tapered Throne” by Brandon Tauszik and Nate Marshall. It was a risk: to pay homage to the barbershop as an integral safe space in the Black community, without putting the barber on a deifying pedestal. It turned out dope, and I hope readers appreciated the nuance between the number of voices at play. I love when we have the opportunity to keep things transparent, to complicate how we see things … there’s got to be some harmony to what makes the human condition human, its beauty and its flaws.
Anything else? Tell us something about your experience with The Offing and why this work is meaningful to you.
I can genuinely say that we have a staff of generous people. They give their time, resources, and brilliant ideas, eyes, ears. We’re fortunate to have writers and artists trust us with their work, and none of us take that lightly. It shows in not only what we feature, but how we feature it.
We also have very full lives. We go through crisis, losing loved ones, the trauma of transition (relocating, unemployment, finding new gigs); we have to feed our gifts as well, spend time with partners, children, loved ones. I’ve never seen a space that makes room for that, who will step up with extra hands when one of us needs reprieve or life calls us away. It’s a rare, rare gift.
