Tag:

memoir

Interview with Accomplice Soham Patel
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Soham Patel

by CCM
written by CCM

1. What’s your favorite song to dance to?
Lalji Pandey’s “Jimmy Jimmy Ajaa Ajaa” from Bollywood’s Disco Dancer movie circa the early 1980s.

2. Describe your personal hell.
I am sorry I don’t understand.

3. What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Some of my dog’s innovatively coy begging ways and almost anything Gene from Bob’s Burgers says.

4. You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
I guess I’d just choose this moment and live out the rest of my years from here.

5. What’s a gif that you can relate to?
I don’t know but I like the ones where there’s animals and/or dancing.

6. You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
The Lichtenberg Figures (but I only know that from poetry) or I might die?

7. It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Calm.

8. What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
I mean—in-house bias but—the Accomplices’ three cat, ramen hat picture is pretty great.

 

 

 

 

 


9. Where did you write most of your book? Why?
The compositions were mostly written on a Sony Vaio laptop circa 2002 because my parents so very generously purchased it for me as a happy birthday/congratulations and good luck to you in MA school gift. As a revision strategy, I rewrote each poem by hand in a large notebook as well.

10. What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
One strength is that I always believe in writing but a struggle is that I don’t always believe in my own writing.

11. Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
My writing process changes but it is most always driven by ritual and revision. Like for example I’ve been blocked, or very very slow, in coming up with new stuff for about fifteen months now; so for the time being what doesn’t work is putting pressure on myself to make something new and hurried, reading and rereading (my stuff and other writing) works.

 

SOHAM PATEL is a Kundiman fellow and an assistant editor at Fence and The Georgia Review. Her chapbooks include and nevermind the storm (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2013) New Weather Drafts (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and in airplane and other poems (oxeye, 2018).

Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil

by CCM
written by CCM

What’s your favorite song to dance to?
In the studio: “Let’s Work”-Prince and “Vamos a la Playa”-Cibo Matto / this morning in my house “The Highway”-Tunde Olaniran because its groove makes me wiggle.

Describe your personal hell.
A chatty Lyft driver masking deep angst with descriptions of hot chicks.

What’s something that always makes you laugh?
The Muppets. Always.

You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
 Right here. Right now. Let’s keep going. I want to be here when we win.

What’s a gif that you can relate to?
My body.

You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
My hair looks the way it did after that one hard perm in Detroit in my tween years. (The lye! the burn!)

It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Smug and pleased that I have moved to southern California where this is clearly not happening and I don’t have to dig out my car as I had to for many, many years.

What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Hello Kitty. On a notebook with a matching pencil and eraser.

Where did you write most of your book? Why?
A whole bunch of places—Minneapolis, Detroit, Columbus, Dayton, Yellow Springs, Ohio, St. Louis, on an old farm in South Carolina with Lewis, visiting Rosa in Trinidad, Andrea’s sublet in LA in the summer where I could see palm trees and sunsets. I travel a lot and have moved a lot over the last five years. So this book is a mixtape of people & places.

What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
Too brainy/ mushy/ academic/ nerdy/ earnest/ abstract/ dense/ poetic/ too black/ not black enough/ too much information/ too private/ too controlled/ self-aware/ refusing to be just one way or one thing/ questioning & yearning. Those are my struggles and my strengths.

Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I strive to write to and from the body. I strive to connect writing and performance and life through a chronicle of performance body that would contribute to and honor an archive of black women’s creative expression. I am aiming for the long game—the idea that somewhere at some point, some one who really needs it will find my books (like a leaflet in that poem by Adrienne Rich) and that the words there, the images, will make a difference. I scribble in notebooks. I type on a screen. I put sheets of paper down in a room and move them around with my hands. I hustle and floss and cajole people to read my stuff now with my third eye open to the future.

 

Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle CivilGABRIELLE CIVIL is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Signature themes included race, body, art, politics, grief, and desire. Since 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. She is the author of Swallow the Fish and Tourist Art (with Vladimir Cybil Charlier). She currently teaches Creative Writing and Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco

by CCM
written by CCM

What’s your favorite song to dance to?
“Untitled” from In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’m ’90s trash.

Describe your personal hell.
I have a recurrent fear of losing my ability to speak and form words, or anything messing with my brain’s language centers. I’m aphantasic, so most of my inner life and memories reside in words.

What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Iggy Pop singing “Surfin’ Bird” to his cockatoo, Biggy Pop

You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
I’d go back to any time when New York was dirty and affordable. Now it’s just dirty. It was my home, and the first place that I felt embraced as a human, and where I felt that potential was everywhere. I can’t live there anymore, and I miss it all the time.

You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I fall down?

What’s a gif that you can relate to?

It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Cold.

What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
My favorite picture of my evil cat, Sylvia.

 

 

 

 


Where did you write most of your book? Why?
A coffee shop in Little Italy, Cleveland. I lived in a really shitty apartment and I had a crush on the barista.

What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I wish I could quit poking myself in the eye with this ink pen.

Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I wake up at 5 or 6 every day and write for about 2 – 3 hours. It’s before the internet and my phone and life bother me. There’s an incredible peace in being the only one awake, and looking up from your screen only to realize the sun came up while you were deep in your work.

 

 

ALEX DIFRANCESCO, author of Psychopomps, is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Tin House, Brevity, and more. They are a 2017 winner of SAFTA’s OUTSpoken Competition, and were long listed in Cosmonauts Avenue’s Inaugural Nonfiction Prize. They have recently moved to Ohio, where they are still trying to wrap their head around “Sweetest Day.”