Q&A with Micro-Anthology Contributors

Miracle Monocle has released the fifth installment in our micro-anthology series, A Little Sugar in the Tank. The book represents the first collaboration between the journal and PubLab, a new initiative pairing students interested in working in the fields of writing, editing, and publishing with projects that will give them a one-of-kind hands-on experience with bringing a book into being. One of our three PubLab fellows this year, Lizzy Roth, has stepped forward to conduct interviews with some of our wonderful contributors. We’re hoping that their words of wisdom and inspiration convince you to click through and order your copy of the book, which is now available in print and digital format.

Lizzy Roth: When you think about your piece what are the first things that come to mind?

Cassandra Whitaker: Like many of my recent queer epithalamiums, this poem is a contrapuntal, allowing me to play with more than one voice within one container.  Through this form joy is doubled, tripled; this body allows me to play with resonances and discovery. I explored this form in my book Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring a Wolf, from Jackleg press, where the poems explored masculine and feminine energies, or the energy of emptiness and addiction to drugs, drink and sex, largely using the form to pull apart and to rip, as a wolf might render flesh. In the wedding poems I’m currently crafting, I’m using contrapuntal forms to explore unity and joy, though the wolf appears from time to time.

LR: What is your favorite aspect of your piece?

CW: My favorite part of writing these lavender wedding poems is the pre-writing portion where I’m imagining food, fashion and presentation! Just thinking of the fruits of a wedding, the laughter, meeting new people, the nostalgia that accompanies a wedding, and of course, the dresses and food.  When I’m writing, the form does not always speak to me at first, though sometimes you get lucky and you know exactly how you are going to craft a poem before you craft it: that’s muscle memory working for you. This poem did not begin this way, rather it was written in long stretches of prose. I really do love a long breathy line, which is often where I start to write and where I start to cut. I try to write every day, and what does not make it into a draft becomes fodder for other work. This poem was Frankensteined together from two abandoned drafts, then broken up and re-shaped into columns.

LR: How does this piece fit into your larger body of work?

CW: This poem is part of a manuscript of wedding poems, centering queer couples, though many of them are not explicitly queer. Some of the poems I imagined to be occurring within my body, and that I had some kind of access to them, some knowledge of their joy as it radiated through me, some are written for couples I have known throughout my life, some poems written for historical couples, and many are written for couples I will never meet. 

LR: If you were to choose a song to play while people were scrolling through this interview, what would it be and why?

CW: “Sugar in The Tank,” by Julian Baker & Torres, ofc.