DREAM IN FORM AND FUNCTION
A Conversation with Sasha Amari Hawkins
OS Collaborator Sasha Amari Hawkins talks about her new digital chapbook, These Deals Won’t Last Forever, out now from The Operating System.
Greetings! Thank you for talking to us about your process today! Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?
For sure! I’m 22-year-old girl from Laveen, Arizona with a life-long love of police procedurals, Roddy Piper, and describing myself with lists.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
I love writing, and I’m also deeply untalented at anything else. My whole life has been me running from writing even though people kept telling me to write, because school tells you it’s some antiquated profession for, like, syphilitic, British noblemen and 50s well-to-do-alcoholic types. In college, once I decided the final frontier, astronomy, was absolutely not for me, I really began to focus on my writing. A calling is a calling. Me + writing, truly a match made in a Calvinist, pre-destined, ran-from heaven.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
I still haven’t settled on calling myself a writer, definitely not a poet. It may just be insecurity on my part, but I feel like those titles formalize the act of creating too much. When I first started writing with, like, the intention of it being something I put out into the world the thought of calling myself either of those titles, being introduced as those titles, was paralyzing. ‘Girl who writes’ is my title right now.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway? What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?
I think my cultural role in the community beyond is to get people thinking. I think that’s what most writers want to do, it’s just a matter of about what. For me, it’s media. In your literary and artistic and creative communities, people are going to start dissecting your work before you can even think to ask. I think my role being fulfilled successfully as someone writing poetry is to get people who wouldn’t normally dig into a text that way to do so.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
I kind of always write in groups, it’s how I work through whatever I’m obsessed with at the moment. Like, I was obsessed with how Paul Kersey’s daughter/wife/female compadre always bites it and the violence of their death is always something done to him, instead of that character being able to ruminate and reflect on her own loss in “Death Wish.” So I wrote the section of this book called “Womanmaker, CA,” and I did my best to work out an answer, or at least give that experience back to that specific character. And then I got stuck on those movies everyone did in the 90s where some crazy guy terrorized a man through every avenue but the man himself. Like, he’ll seduce his wife, his daughter, kill the dog, kill the maid, trash the car but their actual confrontation is treated as sort of sacred and one-off. So I wrote “Lonnie’s Chinese Menthols” and tried to give those characters a voice within this world where they lack agency, to hear what they thought of this entire, you know, subsection of film which thrives on their anguish. And beyond that, further linking the two, is the question: what’s up with me for being so drawn to these specific films which treat other women not so great? I wrote the pieces separately, but pushed them together after noticing that thematic through line of watching and doing nothing, inside and out of the poems. In total, it’s two “films” and a framing story. It was a struggle to meld the framing story into the work because I’d written it without a larger project in mind and it had nothing to do with film, just using others and autonomy.
Did you envision this collection as a collection or understand your process as writing or making specifically around a theme while the poems themselves were being written / the work was being made? How or how not?
Yes and no, because I always saw the two “film” sequences being in the same collection, but not necessarily the framing story. That’s from a batch of poems I wrote about professional wrestling, mainly their lives on the road away from their families and, like, the basic concept of accountability. As far as the promoters were concerned, the talent could poison themselves on whatever they wanted so long as they made it to their match that night. The complicity of those promoters in the early deaths of their main draws like Roddy Piper and Macho Man Randy Savage, and of myself for watching the products of that relationship really get to me. I guess guilt is the connecting theme, you know, between the “films” and the frame of this book. Around the time I started this project, news broke that Maria Schneider was sexually assaulted by Marlon Brando on the set of “Last Tango in Paris” in a scene that made it into the final cut. I am a big Brando fan, so I’d watched the film before, and I was horrified. I felt guilty. I got to thinking how much of acting is pretend and how much is discomfort, and why is this indistinguishability so rewarded, and why, if I’m so thoughtful, am I still telling people to watch “Cape Fear” every other breath when I know Polly Bergen got knocked around so much shooting her back bruised? I dunno, maybe these poems are, thematically, about how we’re not as good of people as we’d like to think. How we fail others, or something.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?
At any given moment, I’m probably doing a trash Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson impression. Ariana Reines’ Mercury was a big factor in this work’s creation, structurally and in terms of focus. There’s a set of poems in there about Watchmen and feminist film theory that really crystallized what I wanted to do with my own work. My instructors at the University of Arizona were really helpful as far as honing in on what works about my writing. I had one professor, Joshua Wilson, who was just the most encouraging about the most out-there things I would write. Just bonkers to the point where I as the author could not give an accurate summary of what I meant. And then my other two workshop instructor Farid Matuk and Susan Briante kind of challenged me to write with more control over what I wanted to, you know, actually say with my work. All three were super important to this chapbook being written, because without them I never would have felt sure enough of myself as a writer to even attempt three storylines in a twenty-something page chapbook, nor would I be able to really get out what I wanted to say.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
The nice people at the Operating System actually suggested the final title (which thanks, I love it!). I feel it represents the finicky nature of using and being used, because eventually anything runs out of what makes it needed. The title of the actual poem sequences are things I overheard or saw, a lot of the time. I feel there’s a certain level of danger and something very desirable about stuff you’re not supposed to hear, even if you have nothing you can do with it. So in titling, I tried to think of phrases I heard that gave me a quick taste of a situation, but not the whole thing. My favorite title is written after a Roddy Piper promo, but it’s not anything he said, it’s the phrase “Womanmaker” on the back of the coolest panther shirt. He was a head to toe performer, down to the threads. He didn’t have to identify what a “Womanmaker” was, because it has such a visceral, ugly ring to it. It’s visceral, then you attach context in the form of a promo, or words or whatever. That’s pretty much where I stole my process of naming: wrestling promos. They’ve got 2 minutes to get you to remember them over the fifty other dudes you just watched, so some pretty captivating stuff gets said. Anyway, somewhere in all of that is your answer.
What does this particular work represent to you…as indicative of your method/creative practice?…as indicative of your history?…as indicative of your mission/intentions/hopes/plans?
My work functions a lot like a dream, and how there’s patterns to the symbols and plots as we experience them, and then I try to get them to a place where a reader can take something from it too. Like, for this work specifically, I thought a lot about why I kept coming back to these films where the majority of the violence and physicality and sexualization is a burden carried by women, when I myself am one. Why am I not identifying with these characters? My hope for this work would be that someone reads this and gets to thinking about the logic behind their own taste, good or bad.
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
I feel that it works as a navigation of audience complicity in sexism, in violence against and in the sexualization of women, so long as we get something “great.” And I try to give a voice to those being used in these situations of sacrifice for something delivering that greatness. Does it do that? I dunno, you have to tell me.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
Best outcome for my book is that it’s read, and people don’t feel like they’ve wasted life-force having read it. Maybe everyone else goes on their own journeys of self-challenge and discovery through their DVD collections. You know when they did the last episode of “The Hills,” and Kristin Kavallari leaves Brody to go find herself in Europe or whatever? But then it pans out and she’s on a set with crew, hugging Brody, there’s a wrap party, you can see payroll cutting the checks and you as an audience member go “oh, I have to consider this show as construct of choices? And what those choices say about the creator and what they say about us as an audience for watching?” Pretend that’s at the end of all you watch, and ask those same questions. That’s what I hope this book makes people do. For me, though, it poses a challenge to do more, and improve upon it with my next work, if the Lord is so kind as to land me a next time.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. How does your process, practice, or work otherwise interface with these conditions? I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?
It’s hard, because mainstream publishers aren’t going to take the chance on minority voices, often for fear of their pocketbooks getting lightened, but at the same time progress is confrontation. If only people like myself read my book, I’ve affirmed their beliefs and their sense of community but I’ve made no real progress. And as someone who’s grown up in Arizona, which has a population of, like, 4 other Black people, I know how that sense of community and belonging is important to the writing process, or even just existing sanely. Progress isn’t only forward motion.
You need like-minded voices to sort of give you the push to put your work and yourself out there, into the hands of people that would otherwise not be into your work. But community is not everything. Way back when, my family was a part of Black Wall Street, which was a small community in Tulsa, OK where Black people started businesses and commerce amongst themselves. They bothered no one, they needed no one, but in 1921 a race riot decimates the community. Those that lived, fled. Even in isolation, it’s too much for those that wish you ill based on constructs out of your control to let you live. To live and thrive is a direct counterargument to supremacy, and those who believe in that can’t handle a challenge. Community is comforting, but as long as hate’s hanging around outside, you’re never safe. The push against sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, everything else needs to be constant, because the second we let up, we’ll be burned to the ground.
About the Author
Sasha Hawkins is a Phoenix, AZ based writer with a deep, abiding love for schlock films and professional wrestling. She is Managing Editor for The Volta, and has written for the University of Arizona Poetry Center blog.
ABOUT THE COVER ART:
The Operating System 2019 chapbooks, in both digital and print, feature art from Heidi Reszies. The work is from a series entitled “Collected Objects & the Dead Birds I Did Not Carry Home,” which are mixed media collages with encaustic on 8 x 8 wood panel, made in 2018. Heidi writes: “This series explores objects/fragments of material culture- -how objects occupy space, and my relationship to them or to their absence.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heidi Reszies is a poet/transdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, Virginia. Her visual art is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and is the creator/curator of Artifact Press. Her poetry collection titled Illusory Bordersis forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019, and now available for pre-order. Her collection titled Of Water & Other Soft Constructions was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry (forthcoming in 2019).
Find her at heidireszies.com
