For our latest installment of Conversations With Poets We Love, we speak with poet and editor Tyler Friend. Tyler’s work has been featured in Tin House, Hobart, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Tyler edits the online poetry magazine Francis House and designs for Eulalia Books
Uzomah: Can you explain how it was expressing yourself as someone who is LGBTQIA through the arts in the South?
Tyler: This is a very good question, and I don’t have a good answer for it yet. I grapple a lot with capital S Southerness and capital Q Queerness, how they interact, and how I respond to them. I think a lot of what I try to do through poetry is answer this question, albeit obliquely.
U: How has poetry and the arts helped you understand more about yourself, and aid in your development as a person?
T: Poetry and art were the things that first led me to explore my gender identity and presentation. When I was an undergrad and working on my thesis manuscript, my amazing professor Michelle Gil-Montero assigned me the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetics. Around that same time, I was also working on my senior art show and a series of self-portraits exploring gender.
U: What were some of your favorite books as a child?
T: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Plenty of Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter.
U: What are some books and authors that made you want to be a writer?
T: I have a very distinct memory of finding Said the Shotgun to the Head by Saul Williams in a discount bookstore. I read it in one sitting, sitting in my car in the parking lot and straight-up giggling. I got so much joy out of the language and how it was presented. I think that’s the moment I was like, I wanna do this.
U: What books or authors would you suggest a new writer or poet read to improve their craft?
T: Read broadly, no matter what genre it is you think you want to write in. Be sure to read YA novels and poetry and creative nonfiction. Listen to slam poetry. Some of the writers who’ve been most formative to me, in addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, are David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Rainbow Rowell, Jo Ann Beard, Mary Ruefle, Matthew Dickman, Andrea Gibson (which I saw you interviewed !!!), Lauren Zuniga, and so many more.
Figure out which presses and literary magazines are publishing the kind of work you like. Lit mags are a great resource for finding new voices, especially in poetry. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is: prioritize reading. Take it seriously, keep a list, set a goal. At first, this may feel like you’re taking the joy or spontaneity out of reading, but I promise you’ll get over it. Or, at least, I did.
Self-diagnose. If you realize all your favorite sci-fi is by old white dudes, go find sci-fi written by women of color. Start with Octavia Butler.
Also, audiobooks are wonderful and proabably available for free, right on your phone, from your local library. So are podcasts, and there are a lot of great literary ones. I’d especially recommend Danez Smith and Franny Choi’s VS. Start thinking about all media as art. What’re your favorite TV shows? Why? Who writes them? I could go on and on about this, but I’ll stop here.
U: What are some things that you look for as an editor in the poetry submissions you get?
T: When reading submissions, I’m most often looking to be surprised. Even though Francis House is a very small journal, we receive between 400 and 800 poems to consider for each issue. It becomes easy to get distracted when reading another poem about coffee or birds. That’s not to say that a poem about birds can’t be surprising, just that it had better be surprising.
U: Can you give some advice for poets submitting to magazines or journals?
T: Read the guidelines closely. I cannot emphasize that enough. Francis often receives fiction or full-length manuscripts, neither of which we publish, and we have to reject it immediately, which makes us feel bad. Apart from that, it sounds basic, but really do familiarize yourself with the journal before submitting. Feel out their vibe. If you have a super weird, expletive-filled poem about baseball, Hobart is your place. If you’re writing nature haiku, maybe not so much.
U: How does being a visual artist help you with your writing?
T: I came to visual art first, and so I see language as more visual than auditory, which is apparent in some of my work. I like to pick words apart into their disparate shapes (rather than their syllables, as some poets may), and I’m always (perhaps overly) concerned with how the poem looks on the page.
U: What are some things that you would like to see change about how LGBTQIA and QTPOC authors and artists are represented in major publications and in the media with and about their work?
T: One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is whether queer people and people of color are getting to write about things other than their non-cis-het-whiteness. Not to say that identity should be disregarded, or that these don’t influence every part of our lives, but to say that I want my love poetry and nature poetry to get just as much attention as my poetry that’s explicitly about transness and queerness.
U: If you could come back as an animal, which one would you be and why? What artist and what author would you be and why?
T: I would very much like to be a sloth and live a life that calmly, and I would love to spend some time in Mary Ruefle’s brain.
U: Can you describe the ideal space you need artistically to create?
T: I can create pretty much anywhere, but my ideal would be the basement stacks of a library that I have to myself, with plenty of old books, with a big table, a MacBook, a printer, a scanner, a lightbox, a Mayku FormBox, and plenty of metal rulers and purple pens.
U: What are you currently working on as a writer and as a visual artist?
T: I’m very distractible, and I’m always working on multiple projects. I have a children’s book that’s been accepted for publication at a small press, so I’m copyediting that. I have a full-length poetry manuscript done that I’m sending around, three chapbooks at various levels of completion. I’m working on a speculative novel-ish thing about magical apricots. I’m working on a bunch of re-writes of H.D.’s poetry, some mistranslations of Sappho. I’m doing some digital drawings imagining a queer, brown utopian future. I’m making what I’m calling “Concrete [Poems],” which are just little abstract sculptures. And putting together the two chapbooks that Francis House is going to release in March, which I’m really excited about, as well as working on a coloring book for Eulalia Books to give out at AWP.
