RLU: One of the things that's been coming up in the conversations is about how writers may discover their queerness through writing. The poem or poetics can provide a mirror or archive thoughts, desires, experiences, while concealing certain things until you're ready to reckon with queerness more explicitly. I wanted to ask you about this because you started out in poetry. There is/was a self being made through poetics, but now your work focuses on fiction and prose—novels, short stories, novellas and essays. It seems that the form has changed for you. Maybe you're still writing poetry for yourself, but it doesn't seem to be as much of your public writing persona. This is a big lead up to the question: what’s your relation to form and queerness?


KMC: That's a really beautiful question. In a lot of ways, I never really transitioned away from poetry. Oftentimes people explain it as kind of passing through the gate of poetry, but I really don't think of my poetry as a transitional phase. If it is, it's like a phase I'm constantly in—the gate is just an eternal gate. I feel like I bring my poet self into every form that I write. Actually, I get closer to whatever my idea of poetics is, or whatever poetry means for me, in fiction and non-fiction—in things that feel far from poetry. 


I always think of genre more as a marketing tool than as something that I begin with, or something that I'm really rooted in. So I don't typically think about what the boundaries or borders are between poetry and fiction. It's more applied in retrospect, maybe. Something that unifies my process is the idea of the writing being ahead of you; you kind of just go to meet it. That’s very much my process, where any kind of logical or rational self gets left behind and it's the language that leads me first. There's that quote—I don’t remember who said it—“language first, then ideas.” For me, the writing exists first and then I follow. I exist in the wake of my writing. Rather than feeling like I'm creating myself, sometimes it feels like the writing is creating me.


Or maybe they’re both ‘me’ and we’re actually creating each other in a way. It’s led by pleasure in a way that feels very clear. It’s not the self that was formed or born to survive in this world, but a different kind of self, a self that is always possible or on the brink of becoming. Whereas the self that has to exist in the world is a lot more bounded. Writing is such a liberating feeling and process. 


RLU: You’re reminding me of a previous interview you gave where you spoke about queer futurities. 


KMC: Oh yeah, yeah, the horizon of being.


RLU: The goal is to approach ‘being’ over and over again—not to get there, necessarily. When I think about what it means to live a queer life, the question is coupled with a diametrically oppositional statement: that straightness (to me) is a kind of calcified existence where you feel as if you've figured something out. I’ve encountered with straight friends, and even queer friends who live more of their time in the straight world, a mentality that the future is something that you enter or arrive into. Whereas a queer approach to time forecloses arrival but demands an unrelenting and paradigm destabilizing howling tumble into the next moment, which is our lives. We live just outside the future. 


KMC: In my queer friendships, I get the glimpse of [José Esteban Muñoz’s] utopia in the present. What you're saying is really resonating with me because I'm working on a nonfiction project right now about queerness and my obsession with the figure of ‘the girl,’ which is a theme that's consistent through all my writing. I started writing about heteropatriarchy as this temporal regime and violent way of imposing certain forms of domesticity onto Confucian relationships—onto women and daughters. In these relationships, violence can be replicated internally, cycle after cycle, generation after generation, but queerness is an opportunity to escape from that. I had this in mind when I wrote the book and I didn’t know if I was gonna keep it, but I was like, “Oh! Lesbianism is the secret to eternal life.”


Constance Debré said, and this is me paraphrasing, “homosexuality is just a permanent vacation from life.” And I was like, oh, that's what it is. Queerness is a vacation. It's like you don't have to live life. It's so wonderful. It's like everyone else is at work and they're there. Everyone else is employed, everyone else is grinding, and you're just on a permanent vacation until you die. That is so wonderful. Growing up in these very confining, very violent patriarchal roles that were imposed on me, including the idea of life as a woman and as a wife, all those things represented a certain kind of constraining employment to these grand cosmic forces that are really just patriarchy. Now, I get to be on vacation forever. It's like an out of office inbox message, You cannot contact me for any of that nonsense. It means choice. It means, thinking about your life in a different way and deciding for yourself, what are you going to do with all this free time? What are you going to do with your permanent vacation from life? There's nothing on the horizon. 


RLU: You brought up the girlhood adolescence that runs through your work. In your early poems there is an archetype of the girl who's being imposed upon who also has deep powers of imagination to will herself out of that imposition. I want to ask about violence and killing the family that deals out obligatory patriarchy, either excising the family that exists in memory, the family that is brought out through fable, the family that exists but is immaterial, and more. To that end, family is also used as metaphor, as foil or as an actual example of a vacancy. You engage the animality of family and the unbridled, maybe even autonomic violences dealt out in a family system. Your use of family and underlying investigation of queerness together meditate on what is considered natural. Can you talk about the natural and unnatural?


And maybe, if you want to take this question there, can you talk about the natural and unnatural as it relates to your later literary work that engages climate change?


KMC: It kind of brings me back to genre. Often, I feel like people define me as someone who writes speculative fiction or who is in the genre space of fantasy and sci fi, but it also really is rooted in poetry and in metaphor and in language. The process of making literal a metaphor often looks like magic or science fiction or fantasy. What's so powerful about that space of the surreal or the uncanny or the unreal—whatever people want to call it—is defamiliarizing the things that we have considered natural and then making natural things that are strange or grotesque, or making beautiful things that are profane. The sacred and the profane co-existing and oftentimes becoming unified, or becoming one in the same.


Part of it is making visible the certain systemic sources that we consider natural or invisible—so natural that they should be invisible. I think this is also related to the figure of ‘the girl,’ because childhood is the space of first experiences and it's where that initial encounter with those systems happens. I feel like that's a space that allows me to really show that first impact before you become desensitized to it. For me, if childhood was this space of why?, I've always wanted to carry that energy into adulthood. Maybe it's part of that queer temporality of like never really having to grow up. I’ve always wondered, How do we become desensitized to pain? How do we become so acclimated to being hurt or hurting others in this way? When does it become okay? 


It’s almost like refusing to let the system stay a system, or even become a system, because each wound is so fresh and individual and special and sacred that it has to be dressed as such. And I feel like writing in the space of ‘the girl,’ through the eyes or through the lens of this narrator is a way of honoring certain rules or forms of pain that otherwise get buried or are allowed to repeat. Then you're just a casualty in that system.


I've been so inspired by what genre can do in terms of making what we consider natural and natural. I actually have clear cut ideas of what's unnatural, like capitalism. But for me, it’s wanting to disorient. That’s interesting because sexual orientation is how we describe queer people.


RLU: I wanted to ask about queerness and bodies. Your writing imagines human bodies in new forms, mascerates and truncates bodies, connects bodies across unseen yet felt distances of time and space, and explores violence (interpersonal, state) from one to another body. You’ve also described writing poetry as a kind of puberty. I wonder about language’s ability to diagnose bodies, traffic in violence, or remake the body by renaming the body. Does this bring anything up for you? 


KMC: I always think about the transphobic language around being born insert-gender. And my response is, no one is born. Everyone is made. And that making process, it never ends. I think about how deeply unnatural it is to gender and sex the body. This isn’t something I think about all the time when writing, though I feel like my characters are constantly running straight into that all the time.


I feel like these heteropatriarchal impositions of gender and sex desecrate the possibilities of the body as being malleable, as being reborn all the time. The thing that has affirmed my ideas in the body more than anything is actually a work of nonfiction about birds called the Evolution of Beauty. The author was talking about how evolutionary biology is just a bunch of bullshit. Again paraphrasing, because he's like, “Why do we use science to reify our cultural ideas?”


We’ve created these colonial systems to affirm things that aren't even true. The author was saying that we as a species have evolved toward choice and we continue to evolve towards agency and freedom. 

RLU: To speak back to what you were saying about how the body is made and not born, I’m reminded that heteropatriarchal structures want the body to be fixed. White supremacy and whiteness also demand fixity in order to dictate where one enters into racial capitalism. Whiteness bestows certain benefits as to wealth and land ownership, that if you are not able to be born into whiteness, then land or wealth acquisition is out of reach, and therefore mobility within class structures is out of reach. Then, too, whiteness argues who is considered property. It also makes me think about the colonial imposition of gender and how deeply this racialized and sexed othering is intertwined with political schemes to dispossess a people of their land. 


KMC: I was really recently reading this book by Omotara James and there’s a line that goes, and again I’m paraphrasing, “The birthright of every being is freedom, is to be free.” I loved that so much. Not only the sonic quality of the line but that it was “every being” as well. I thought, I think that is why I write. But going back to the bird book, I feel like if I had read this book when I was younger, I would have been a scientist because it felt so aligned with the world of poetry and writing. 


One of the things I enjoyed was the insight of how much science is used to reinforce certain white supremacist beauty standards. The author is like, if you really look at the evidence, beauty is really arbitrary. He looks at beauty in birds specifically. He brought up this study that some evolutionary biologists did about the ideal hip to waist ratio and how that supposedly indicates fertility and who is attractive. He was basically like, yeah, it's bullshit.


He said it was an insidious attempt to naturalize beauty standards and make them indicative of some objective form of beauty. The truth is that the world is chaos and disorder, and actually we have so many beautiful things on this planet Earth because of the utter chaos and subjectivity and total lack of objectivity and objective value.


I love that idea of excess and disorder and chaos. To go back to what we were talking about earlier, that we as people have this end goal that is oftentimes, reproductive and forcibly replicating the nuclear family at the expense of many people—it’s just not how it is. It’s unnatural. It’s counter to our collective dreams of freedom. 


KMC: So much about queerness, for me, has been about liberating beauty from these oppressive or repressive systems. As a kid I was always told my value is in beauty. That you have to be beautiful. Beauty was always tied to some form being consumed or consuming; still, all forms of beauty were just a way of preserving a status quo. Now I feel like I’m almost getting to rediscover what is beautiful, to let beauty be this wild thing that's also grotesque and also disgusting and excessive and a little too much.


Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote, “To love you more, I imagine that you are very ugly.” It's almost like the abject comes with the sacred. I was like, what a queer subversion of everything straightness is about. Now, when I encounter something beautiful, I often find that it's beautiful in this very queer way. When I think queer art and queer poetics, it's almost undoing beauty in a certain way. Maybe, it’s that there’s an element of surprise.


RLU: In an interview that you did for Bomb Magazine about Beastiary, you said that the daughter character experiences queer desire as something “completely engulfing.” You said, “Instead of rooting that hunger in shame, I wanted to portray her desire as a kind of lineage, as something that is deeply tied to the desires of all women and her family.” In your work I’ve noticed a tension in the journeys you take your characters on, where walking toward themselves can sometimes mean turning away from who you come from. Does that spark anything for you? 


KMC: Yeah, that’s a beautiful question. I think in some ways my entire writing practice is born from that question. In Dorothy Allison’s short story collection, Trash, there’s a story called River of Names, which is about familial history and then this queer relationship that she has and the juxtaposition of those two elements. 


I didn’t know why it moved me so much, but years after reading the book I was talking to someone who said, “Queerness actually brings me closer to my family.” She didn’t mean in the way that brought her closer to their lives but that it brought her closer to trouble. I realized that was really true for me, because I come from this lineage of women whose desires were bludgeoned or deferred or destroyed or forced to be buried; women who are so full of rage and desire and grief and loss and anger. In grieving them, it's as much about grieving their lives as it is about grieving their unlived lives. It's this doubled grief. I grieve your life and then I grieve the life that you wish you had, which is so deeply, deeply painful. And to realize also that I'm a product of lives that they didn't want to have is something that I hold really, really close.


I feel like queerness does bring me closer to that struggle in a lot of ways because I resist that intentionally. I feel like disobedience and rebellion is a form of love, and it doesn't often get talked about that way. Especially in a Confucian family, it's seen as the utter desecration of your lineage, of your role, of these certain forms of respect that you should have. From the western perspective, there's this idea of, you break away from your oppressive family, and then you leave them behind. Both of those narratives are not particularly true or helpful or right to me. Even if no one understands, my forms of disobedience are forms of love. It's the greatest form of love I could possibly have for you, is to defy you. But in some ways, defiance and refusal is a form of staying true to the desires that are unrealized and to our collective desire for freedom. 


Horizontal lineage is something that Safia Elhillo says, which I love. I feel like I come from my friends as much as I come from anyone else, that I'm born from my friends as much as I'm born from anyone else, and mothered by them, and also mothering them as well. I feel that way about a lot of writers as well. It was that Dorothy Allison story that made me want to write prose in the first place. I don't think I would have without reading that story, River of Names. It's like, There is a river of names that runs through me at all times. To honor that river sometimes I have to be disrespectful and I have to be rebellious and I have to be disobedient, but that also is a form of honoring, and that's also a form of loving.