AUTHOR INTERVIEW with D. Allen 

On November 11th, Runestone students and friends gathered on Zoom to interview multidisciplinary artist D. Allen. The interviewers were Blake Butenhoff, Robyn Earhart, Joe Joyce, Ariel Stemple, Noah Topliff, and Sam Wicks.

D. Allen is a queer and gender queer poet, teacher and muliti-disciplinary artist living in Minneapolis. They completed an MFA in poetry at University of MN in 2017 and are currently making new work with the support of a Jerome Hill fellowship. D.’s first book, A Bony Framework for a Tangible Universe, was published with the Operating System in 2019. Using poetic and essayist forms and a range of other artistic media, D.’s work explores the body, illness, disability, intimacy, the natural world, sexuality and gender. This work takes many forms, work architecture, painted surfaces, textured sounds, soft spaces, slow dinners, sustain listening, tender assemblages, quiet gardening, deep breaths. They value each of these endeavors equally. You can learn more about D. and their work at their website.

NOAH TOPLIFF: You’re a multidisciplinary artist. Can you tell us about the first form you fell in love with? How did your artistic practice now grow out of it?

D.:  I grew up in rural North Carolina and spent a lot of time hanging out in the woods, and I think that was because of the way nature puts everything together at once. I wrote my first poem when I was 9, and remember walking with my dad by the creek. We were 20 minutes from the house and this flash of thought happened. I had to run home and write it down. And looking back at that little notebook, there’s also a little blue marker drawing of the creek next to the poem on the page. It was 1996 and I can’t remember if I drew it or if my mom drew it for me, but I don’t know how to separate them. Lineated poems and 2D media on paper were twins for me. If you look at anybody’s nature journals you’ll often find writing and drawing together. Later in high school and in college it got taught out of me; I was told these things needed to be seperate. 

ROBYN EARHART: You have a background in literature and printmaking. You collaborated with poet Roy Guzmán and Marco Antonio Puerta on the art and design for Restored Mural For Orlando, and your own book bursts with visual stimulation. Could you talk more with us on how you come up with ideas on how to make the visual and the textual meet?

D.: Roy is a dear friend of mine — I’ll be forever in awe of and indebted to them for sharing this poetry life friendship with me. I’ll talk about the process for Restored Mural For Orlando.

There was the shooting at Pulse Nightclub and we invited folks over for dinner to have a queer fam night, to be there for each other. The next day, Roy sent me a draft of a poem responding to the tragedy, and later we went to a performance by the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus and I thought we need to get this poem out into the physical hands of people because it’s an important moment of community grief in a space meant for celebration and safety. The poem had been published within five days of the shooting. We then reached out to Marco who translated the poem to Spanish. As a multidisciplinary artist, it’s true I want to do all the things myself. I want to make the art and write the thing and put it all together, but it’s also helpful to work with other people who know each other well, where everyone has a distinct role. My role was to make the final object and figure out how to distribute it. I made an 8×10 gouache drawing as a wordless response to what happened, then took photographs of the drawing up-close that composed the damaged mural metaphor of the poem. 

With any project, it all depends on the identity of the project itself, and often that will change over time as I work and get to know it better. 

RE: When you’re drafting, do you actually see the visual images to use later on?

D.: It depends on the piece! In the “Needles” portion of my book, dictionary erasures came first. It was a way of thinking about what I wanted to write about without language but with spines and thorns. Those photos are from when I was a baby human. This piece changed the most over the course of time and the version in the book is much different both in content and form. The images came first, and the text came much later. Life is full of “well, maybe I’ll do this, too!”.

SAM WICKS: This leads us to the next question. You have a diverse toolbox of medium, form, and discipline. We’re wondering, how do you choose which form to use and when to apply it?

D.: That’s very generous to think that I choose — I often feel chosen by them. I think it often comes from a place of necessity, what’s available and practical. If I’m traveling and I don’t have the space to bring my paints and all my knitting needles and a quilt I’m working on, then maybe it’s easiest to work in my notebook or do some audio recordings. But necessity also means physical, mental, and emotional necessity. 

Personally, there’s been a big change in what’s possible in terms of medium and discipline for me. This big textile that’s hanging from the ceiling is a piece I worked on the winter of 2018 into spring 2019 for six months, and my book was about to come out and I was exhausted from revising and spending seven years with all of these pieces which I love but which were also painful. I’m a relatively private person, so it was intense to make that work and step out of it so others could see it. I spent six months recovering from that process, during which time all I wanted to do was knit. I had been inconsistent with knitting because I was focused on writing, and then my hands remembered what my Nana taught me.

I was selected to perform for Q-Stage with the 20% Theatre Company and conceived of the scrim, my solution to not having the words to express what I was going through. I didn’t write down a single word for that performance, and it was an hour long! I recorded myself talking through it on Garage Band so I didn’t have to memorize any of the words. Your voice is a record of your emotional and mental state at a particular time, and it was really helpful to document changes. That show was everything I had to do at that time, including just being in a bed with this textile hanging on the stage, because I want to live in a space with people seeing it. 

RE: We were actually just talking about the textile piece before you came into the interview. We talked about how your work embodies physical objects, materials, and textiles. And it sounds like in some way, cathartic release produced new work. Could you tell us more about the most cathartic thing you’ve written, and what has been the most challenging thing?

D.: They are the same thing to me, because catharsis doesn’t come without its share of difficulty in my experience. I don’t know how to quite answer that—well, maybe it’s actually simple. I struggle to read my own work in front of other people. After college, I was detoxing from the heavily academic quotes and opinions on the work we make, and joined a queer activist writing group in Madison, WI. That was the first time I got a sense that I could be a body on the stage; I don’t have to hide behind my little notebook, speak in poet-voice and scurry away afterwards. I performed in open mics and then in a group with others doing different monologues. Then, I performed in a show we created from the work folks in our group had written, and I think that experience of writing something privately, sharing it with people I trusted and loved standing in a small, sweaty, black-box theatre was absolutely terrifying and also an important feeling. Not necessarily good, but it felt like a moment of healing, to have folks both within and outside of your community on three sides of you, to see their faces and absorb that collective aliveness. 

JOE JOYCE: Our group is wondering about your writing process, how you use textiles and objects to signify the movement in space and boundaries for disabled bodies. How do you give power in language to these objects? I’m really curious about how you give meaning to them. 

D.: Joe, that’s a great question. It’s funny because before you asked I picked up one of these rocks on my writing desk, and I think sometimes by just touching or holding something, we learn about these objects through sensory experience and not just through brain-thinking. I’ve always been a bit of a magpie, like here’s a dish of agates and here’s a dish of sea-salt I harvested from my last residency, and oh there’s some dried blood oranges over there! 

I feel aligned with poetry because you don’t have to have that same singular way of expressing thought on the page as you write with prose. To give expression to objects on the page, I build relationships as I would with a person, and that happens through study. I don’t mean formal or academic study, but just attending to and listening to them in the most expansive sense of the word. 

I live very near to the I-35 overpass, and there’s just all sorts of weird, fun stuff everywhere, all the time. Minneapolis is the largest city I’ve ever lived in. I know how to walk in the woods and pick up feathers and stones, so here I had to set all this stuff on my windowsill and ask them what they were about. I notice that things are heavy, or hollow, or if left in the sun awhile develop these iron flakes. I realized I was doing this because my own body was going through these intense changes at an age where I didn’t see my peers enduring joint dislocations and this very corrosive physical experience. I felt closeness to these objects and felt I didn’t need to explain myself to them. They represent bookmarks in time — when you pick up a feather, you usually remember where you picked it up. 

These objects are part of a mapping project, mapping both emotional and physical landscapes. Take lots of notes and let go of your assumptions about what those should or can be, because you can’t put the feather back on the bird and you can’t turn the rusted object back into a machine. But they get to have another life, and so do I.  

JJ: Thank you, D. Some of your work that stood out to me in your work was the “The Rust Collection”, originally published by District Lit in 2017. You’ve also published in journals such as Lockjaw Magazine and Black Warrior Review. How do you go about the process of taking previously published work and revising them for a book?

D.: It’s important to me to see how other poets not publishing the exact same version of a poem in their book as in a literary journal. Not in the sense of trying to get the poem erased online or not giving credit to it, but thinking more in the sense of geological time, which also extends to relationship-building, activism, and community mutual aid. It’s not just a one-time thing, this is not a singular object we put out into the world and then forget about. Publishing means you get connected with people you might not have otherwise have met, relationships that will hold and sustain you mutually. 

In my first year here at the UMN MFA program, I was lucky to be in a class with poet Jamaal May. He read one of his poems to us, and the version in his book was very different from the version I found published online, which was also very different from a Youtube reading of the same poem I had watched earlier, which was also different from an anthology it was published in. So you could trace the fossil record of the different ways May had thought about this poem, and you could see they were all connected. Sometimes in creative writing, there can be this value judgment inherent in the process of revision, the idea that you’re going towards something better and anything left behind isn’t good. It’s been liberating for me to think of revision as allowing pieces different life cycles. “The Rust Collection” is definitely like that. It started with the objects, then I wrote some prose poems for a class, then I drew portraits of each object, and then I rewrote those prose poems which turned into something else. 

ARIEL STEMPLE: I find reading poetry about disability and nature fascinating, and I’m also a bit of a process nerd. Did your EDS diagnosis change your writing process, or change your perspective on being an independent artist?

D.: Yeah. So, so much. I started experiencing symptoms right out of college and at the same time coming out as queer. Most of my poems were really personal, and I had hesitation to become my full self on the page. I had internalized this belief that if you want to be a good writer, you have to focus on what other people think writing means, and there can’t be weird images of thorns on your body. And at that time, I’d sort of given up on getting a diagnosis, because everyone told me I just needed to be on antidepressants or birth control or was making it up or had a personality disorder because I was sad about being in pain all the time. There were people around me dealing with similar things, and we started that queer writing group. I kept going and got closer to a diagnosis. I tried to look at it as a metaphor, not only as a painful and frustrating thing that was happening to me but as something to look at and attend to the other subjects I wrote about. So, you know– connective tissue disorder and how we hold ourselves together—there’s a lot there and it was a way to survive. My art and my writing helped me stay together when my body wasn’t going to do it. 

I was talking with a friend who also had EDS about how chronic illness brain-fog affects your capacity to write certain kinds of things, and she talked about writing haiku in response to that. And I think for me, that’s when form starts breaking down, I look at my writing and say to it you’re going to be whatever you want to be so if you want to arrange yourself as a pile of objects, cool. If you want to be a bunch of drawings with captions, cool. It’s a process of giving myself permission and making sure I have people around me who aren’t going to say turn this into a sonnet. I don’t have the capacity anymore to create what doesn’t serve me and my community anymore. If I’m working on something and it seems like a struggle, something has to give. I have to let go of that initial sense of shape or form. 

AS: Thank you for being open about that. You talked about breaking form in terms of disability, can you talk about breaking form in terms of being a non-binary artist?

D.: I think there was this sense of being unhappy with the options available to me. Form and gender seem like a part of something larger to me. To me, it’s not about making a third thing that’s “never been seen before”. Human expression, gender, identity, and disability takes many shapes. Something that ties gender and disability for me is that for a while, I wasn’t using mobility aids or joint braces all the time, I could pass as an able-bodied person and there was a dissonance but also a safety in that. We can’t look at someone and assume anything. I know we really want to do it, because that’s how a lot of our brains work, but it’s not helpful. And I think in terms of writing, I resist the idea that we’re breaking down binaries or breaking down boundaries or breaking genres — in my mind they shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place! 

HALEE KIRKWOOD: Your book is available as a free PDF online. Could you talk about this decision made by you and the publisher, The Operating System, to make this an accessible and free resource?

D.: You know, I didn’t send my book out to a whole ton of places because I had an idea of what I wanted, and I wanted relationships with people who were coming from a sense of common ground with me. I didn’t want some council of straight, cis, white guys deciding whether or not my writing deserved to be in the world! And I love The Operating System, I love their vision and some of the books they’ve put out so far are among my favorite books that are hard to define. When they brought up making it available as a PDF, I said yes, of course. I live off my work, and I don’t make a ton of money sometimes, but it’s nice to have the work available to those who want it and are open to a PDF. I don’t want to make it harder for people to get the book. Of course there’s a technology barrier there, too. And you have to make sure you’re not being too self-sacrificing, but within reason, I think we can take care of each other in this way. 

BLAKE BUTENHOFF: I’m going to read some questions from the rest of our class posted in the chatbox. Jessica Zick asks, “How do you balance the academic voice with your personal voice when it comes to revising your work and seeing it come to life?”

D.: Oh man, give it a lot of time, don’t poke at it too much. I’ve found that often, my academic voice is a total jerk. And I think that’s usually because that’s someone else’s voice. Like a teacher I had who told us “real writers” sit at a desk from 9-5 like it was showing up for work. And even before I had a disability, I thought that my writing was not any less good because I wrote it with a pillow behind my back. With revision, I like to give things a lot of time, and am meticulous about saving all the versions of writing whether it’s in my notebook or in my computer. For the book I’m working on now, I’ve had to do a lot of traumatic research regarding medical research and how medical science has harmed a lot of people in the pursuit of healing others. Spending time in the medical archives at the University is not for the faint of heart, and not something you can force yourself to do. So I set it aside and made it something I can work on even in 10 – 15 years. 

BB: Jessica has another question. “What advice would you give emerging writers as they’re looking for homes for their pieces? How do you deal with submission rejections?”

D.: This is one of my favorite things to talk about, so thank you! I don’t necessarily go out looking for editors that I think will also be my friends afterwards. But I do think when you read journals and follow the work of writers you love and see where they’re being published, you can get a sense of where you might not only be allowed but welcomed, even celebrated. I grew up in a household where there were New Yorkers laying around and for a long time I submitted my work there because I didn’t know anything else. And now, you know they do publish amazing people but I don’t feel like it’s for me anymore. Think about your identity as a writer and what you have the capacity for. Are you the kind of person who’s comfortable sending the same piece out to fifty different journals, who has the mental energy and time to do that labor? Or do you want to be more selective and say, these are the ten places where I could see my work being in good community? Another one of my boundaries is I need a little compensation in order for it to be published because I want this to stay my main gig and it’s ok to set goals like that. 

Dealing with rejections — we all have things that soothe us. One of mine is spreadsheets. I find it comforting to keep track of where I send stuff. You can do it in Google sheets, or in a notebook, or on a piece of paper taped to your wall. Part of the accomplishment of submitting is actually having done it. That is a lot of labor, and even if that round of ten does not result in being published, you’ve still made a commitment to yourself. And just keep remembering that this is all personal, and the myth of objectivity is one of the most psychically damaging things to us as artists. There’s enough of us on this planet that someone — and most likely many someones —  that are going to love what you do, especially when you do it in a way that makes someone vibrate with the energy you were meant to put out.

BB: I think I may have the most complex question here tonight, so here it is…what next?

D.: Oh, well all the things, as you can imagine! I’m very lucky to have support from the Jerome Foundation, so I’m working on another book, a book of essays, and I think it will be very different from A Bony Framework; there’ll be more words overall. It may end up being one fluid beast. It will be more research-based looking. But right now, I’m just appreciating the time to sit with it for a while and not force it. The gift of the kind of time a fellowship or grant gives you is more space to practice the parts of writing that aren’t often supported. I’m thinking, I’m reading, and looking out the window. 

Thank you all so much for being here. As someone who works and lives alone and usually likes that, this year has been a whole different beast, and it’s nice to have some human contact around the things that matter to us. I’m thinking of you all and hope you’re taking care of your bodies and your hearts.