Former Flame Fridays - Vale Prosper
12/20/24
You were featured in volume 4, what has happened since?
I’ve got a poem coming out with Punk Monk in early December, and that’s really it on the poetry-publishing front this year. But I've spent my focus on compiling my first chapbook and full length, and have started in on a new play, so I just haven’t dedicated myself to the submission grind. Writing and creative work is a cycle like that though, one crop rotates with another, sometimes it’s a sowing year, sometimes it’s a harvest. I’m just following the call of the Source (as Rick Ruben names it).
What/who inspired gemini sun / sagittarius moon?
This reminds me of the Chris Fleming quote about how you don’t get to choose what in your oeuvre will actually enjoy success.
It’s about a conversation I had with a stranger I hooked up with twice. Which is sort of a canon event for poets, I fear?
You gotta write something echoing and larger than the moment deserves, at least once. What’s laughable too is that I wrote it in 15 minutes at 3am, after spending hours on another poem about a much larger moment, which hasn’t been accepted anywhere. My first Pushcart Prize nomination was for a first draft. Why, how, I ask you.
How does it fit into your style/body of work?
If there’s one prevalent tone throughout my work, it's The Yearn. The forlornness that comes when you observe whatever chasms distance you from another human. Not always grieving, not always hopeful. Quietly desperate, and somewhat miffed that there is any distance to begin with.
Stylistically? My work tends to be about as referential as a bibliography. Of course it would be of a memory. Every poem is just another citation of one point or another in my life.
Why Troublemaker Firestarter?
Genuinely, because it’s an excellent publishing home. Y’all do a great job of curating delicious anthologies of quality. Secondly, because as an discernibly Sad and Horny poet, I could not resist the call for Sad Poems, specifically for Horny People. I remember looking at my partner after submitting and telling them “if I don’t get into this publication, I will have failed my own gig and will bear its dishonour.” She nodded.
But also because the list of who I’ve been published with is a fantastic collection of chaos vibes, and I intend to maintain that. Like, Rat World Magazine, body fluids: TEETH, warning lines, Wayward Literature— at the end of the day, I am a carnivorous rat bastard foole who takes that professional image seriously. So why wouldn’t I want to be called a Troublemaker and a Firestarter.
What compels you to submit your work? Why be a writer at the end of the world?
Because every time I share something, at least one person tells me they feel seen. I will do anything to shrink a distance.
Who are your current favorite writers?
I foam at the mouth for Anne Carson and Mark Leidner. I’ve been reading Carson’s translations of Sappho’s poems and I thoroughly enjoy being systematically dismantled at every page. And Leidner just gets the parallel of whimsy and strangeness running alongside melancholic, slightly passive burning rage. Which makes me feel seen.
Are you a troublemaker, a firestarter, a heartbreaker, a lucky duck, a devil, a terror, or sad and horny?
Must I be one thing? Am I not allowed my multitudes?
Lord, that's such a sickeningly pretentious thing to say. Except it's true. I fear I have been— if not perpetually am— all of these things. This line up is one Whimsical Idiot away from being all the wolves inside of me.
Where can people find you?
In your walls!
(@evillittlevale, on all socials)
What would you want the lovely readers of Substack to do?
Be encouraged and empowered by Life’s inherent meaninglessness— the vacuum of apparent answers is an invitation to use your god-like creativity to call things into Being. If nothing matters, that is only the allowance to designate significance to what you will, as you so choose.
This above all: fuck around and find out!
Do you have any questions for me?
What’re you scared of most?