Mark Blane: To start, let’s play a little word association game. You answer with as many words and ideas as you like. First word: Film.
Queen: I recently saw something that was very good, “Philomena.”
Blane: Next is: Food.
Queen: I made a really bomb salad the other day.
Blane: What was in it?
Queen: Sesame seeds, raisins, carrots, cucumber, and I always put spices in my salad like oregano and salt, pepper and basil. And I make a homemade balsamic vinaigrette with olive oil and all the spices.
Blaine: Yes. Another word: Shopping.
Queen: Shop online. So I got my groceries at Target the other day.
Blaine: The song.
Queen: “Magnolia” by Leon Bridges.
Blane: I’m adding it to my playlist now. So let’s jump in. I’ve seen in your work that you like to move between poetry forms, especially experimental ones. In “Anodyne” I see deleted poems, I see a sestina, even a monologue, moving between them all seamlessly. Movement, in general, is important to so many writers and artists. You’ve moved and lived all over. Last year you lived and taught in Denver, but grew up in Los Angeles. You also served in the army for several years. You are no stranger to movement, and now you are in Blacksburg.
Queen: It’s been an experience. It’s been an adjustment. I haven’t adjusted yet. We stay home a lot because, you know, we [my family] everyone has a disability. But we take our safety gear for vacation time and I’ve been to New York twice. And I love that New York has a lot of safety practices and protocols. I have been in France since I moved here. I was in France in December. I’ve written a lot there and will be back this summer for a James Baldwin conference. I’m on a panel with Carmen Gimenez [director of Virginia Tech’s Creative Writing MFA Program] and three of my friends, and we’re just going to talk about James Baldwin in the South of France. But, yes, in Blacksburg the mountains are beautiful. I love the sky, the sunset and the sunrise. I love Eats, the organic grocery store.
Blane: How does motherhood affect your teaching practice, creatively and spiritually?
Queen: My son is 22, but because he’s autistic, I’m still his main person. He is very functional but needs help with daily tasks. So I secure him now and let him do the things he likes. I feel like it’s just about care, injecting care into the way I teach and the way I build my classrooms to be resilient because I think there’s a lot of shame around disability and especially mental health disability. So many people don’t make room for it in their classrooms. But because it is an area of my research and a part of my life as a parent of a child with disabilities, I find it easier to make room for different ways of handling tasks. I try to build tasks in flexible ways. So if someone needs rigid expectations, they can have that, and if someone else needs a little more freedom to change their mind or move things around, they can do that. I try to create rigor around the investigation. Instead of what I like to call “fake rigor”, which is checking boxes and following 8 million instructions that you can’t keep track of, which can be boring and frustrating. I try to meet students where they are and ask them what they care about.
Blane: It seems like a very thoughtful and safe space.
Queen: With my son, it’s been a journey. He was diagnosed with a specific learning disability in third grade, and then in sixth grade we discovered he had hyperlexia. When you have ADHD, it can appear as if you see letters backwards or can’t pay attention, but you can also be super good at reading and your language skills are very high. My son is in the 90th percentile and many people think of autistic people as people who have difficulty speaking. My son never had it. It has been a struggle to get institutions to recognize the needs he has, and he is not alone in this experience. I try to build that awareness into the way I structure my classes, and it doesn’t hurt anyone else. In fact, I think it creates a more community-led experience in the classroom. I teach graduate students poetry and creative writing. It’s a place where students can be a little anarchic. You’re encouraged to practice articulating your intuition and your freedom of thought, which is not what we’re always invited to do in this human experience, in this American experience, right?
Blane: I think a lot of creators and storytellers would resonate with that. I heard an interview you did with Harper’s Magazine and you talked about your inspirations while writing at the beginning of the pandemic. You were watching YouTube videos of the pandemic and disaster movies of 1918. Then I read your contribution to Harper’s. A zuihitsu, a Japanese form of poetry. You wrote about your mother, about the tragedy, about so much injustice, even the fabric of your daily life being torn apart. What is your advice for young writers who are exploring trauma in their work?
Queen: This is something we discussed in my fiction class this past semester. And one thing that is next to that is your approach to discovery. Sometimes if you feel compelled to talk about a traumatic experience because not everyone wants to share it, but if you feel compelled to do so, you can’t let it go unless you’re able to let it all go. But then you can go back and review it. You think about how you want to shape it according to your purpose in terms of what you want to leave with your readers. I told my students this example: When I was talking to Roxane Gay about her book The Hunger, I asked her how she decided what to leave in and what to take out, and she said if she didn’t want a traumatic thing to happen again. it was sent back to her by a Twitter troll, then it didn’t make it into the book.
Blane: That’s great advice.
Queen: So you can take those things that you don’t want to resonate with you and put them into another form. You can use metaphor to express it. You can use things you know, such as beauty, whether observed or in language, or use sound or music to help you understand that your experience is made up of more than that trauma, that it does not define you and you are able to imagine something different.
Blane: Thanks for that. It’s like a mini master class right there. Free to all our readers. I noticed on Instagram that you were recently in New York presenting an award.
Queen: I was a panel judge for the Open Book Award at the PEN American Literary Awards. Seth Meyers was the host. He called it the “Oscars of books”. My co-editor K. Ibura came with me. We just finished this new speculative, multi-genre anthology coming out next year.
Blane: I have to mention your book that just turned 5, I’m So Good. It’s all about your celebrity encounters (some are with family and close friends), along with one more important detail – a description of what you were wearing. It’s so wonderful. I am so grateful to have been able to bear witness to your unguarded testimony. I gasped, I laughed, I cried. I felt immersed in every experience and memory.
Queen: I’m so happy every time people tell me they liked that book. It was the most fun to write and the hardest to publish. The whole #MeToo thing happened about seven months after it was published, so it didn’t gain traction at first. And it was rejected for years. But every time I read it out loud at events, it was such a hit. I knew I had to persevere, and what a gift to know that the immersive experience of writing is echoed in the experience of reading. Thanks for spending time with him.
Blane: My last question: Do you believe in magic?
Queen: That’s a tricky question. … I believe in imagination. I believe that we can use our imaginations powerfully, endlessly, in that even in our attempts to fulfill our imaginations, even if they seem like failures, we are still learning something and pushing our imaginations further.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
