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Episode 329: Alexandra Lytton Regalado
247 Plays2 years ago
Alexandra Lytton Regalado (@alexlregalado) is the author of Relinquenda, a collection of poems published by Beacon Press.
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Social: @CNFPod
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Transcript
Introduction and Teamwork in Writing
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and efforts, editing news, you know, from yours truly. My wife is so good at editing that we've teamed up.
00:00:09
Speaker
Captain America and Winter Soldier style. If you want to do that, two for the price of one thing and you're ready to level up, be it a book, a book proposal, we'll stop shy of saying we'll edit emails for you. But if you're ready to level up, email me and we'll start a dialogue. Sound good? Great.
Critique of 'Self-Care' Terminology
00:00:29
Speaker
I really have a big problem. I hate the word self-care. It seems to me.
00:00:34
Speaker
You know, it's like, it sounds like masturbation to me. It's like, just keep it to yourself, dude. Like, come on, like, don't announce I'm going to have some moments of self care, you know?
Meet Alexandra: A Salvadorian-American Writer
00:00:50
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, that's Alexandra Litten Regalado. She's at Alex L Regalado on Instagram and her website is alexandralittenregalado.com. Litten is L-Y-T-T-O-N. She's a Salvadorian-American writer who splits her time between San Salvador and Miami. Her new collection is Relinkenda.
00:01:18
Speaker
Relinkinda. Relinkinda. Relinkinda. I believe I'm saying that right. It's Spanish for relinquish, essentially. It's going to be coming out in early October. So, you know, if you dig what you hear on this episode, you might want to head over to beacon.org because it's published by Beacon Press.
00:01:40
Speaker
or your favorite retailer, you know who I'm talking about, and pre-order this fine collection that has a very distinct through line. I quite enjoyed how Alexandra played with form and came to grips with the relationship she's had with various men in her life, had and has.
Support and Community Engagement
00:01:59
Speaker
It's great stuff.
00:02:01
Speaker
Great stuff. Keep the conversation going at cnfpod on Twitter or creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram or whatever Consider heading over to our patreon page. Yeah to help support this enterprise. It's a big ask I realized that I'm already asking you for your time with this show I test your patience, right? I mean come on and on top of that I have the audacity to ask for two or four bucks a month. I mean
00:02:27
Speaker
Who are you? But those dollars, man. Oh man. Do they mean a lot? I am we lost the patron this month, but we also gained a new one even Steven So I want to give a shout out to Sean for joining and though Kevin leaves us I can't thank him enough for contributing to the CNF pod coffers It's just it's a really incredible means the world and you're always welcome back man And if the idea of leaving a few clams at patreon is a bridge too far
00:02:56
Speaker
What also means a lot are kind reviews on Apple Podcasts, pond casts, a pond cast. Jeez. I mean, how many of these have I done? Seriously. If you leave one, I'll read it right here. We've got a nice collection, but in this day and age, you really can't have too many. I'm not Marc Maron, seeing efforts, no matter how kindred we might be at heart.
00:03:19
Speaker
Show notes to this episode and more than 300 others. There you may also sign up for the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. This is where it's at CNFers. I'm not one to hang out on social media. I sure as hell am not scrolling. I'm sure as hell am not trying to get good at social media, whatever that means.
00:03:39
Speaker
But I am one to put a lot of effort into a kick-ass newsletter that entertains, gives you some value, and sticks it to the algorithm. Right up the algorithm. If that's your thing, sign up. Been doing it for many, many years. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, can't beat it.
00:03:59
Speaker
There are some people out there who are probably like, yeah, someone can be it
Alexandra's Writing Journey
00:04:03
Speaker
anyway. Alexandra is here, and we talk about how she became a writer, her relationship to her father, death and dying, finding flow, and a recommendation that gets the biggest endorsement from your CNF or in chief.
00:04:16
Speaker
Stay tuned at the end of this rodeo for my parting shot about how podcasts are like restaurants. Hmm What the hell do you mean BO stick around and I'll tell but for now? Accepting the personality at the helm of USS CNF the part of the show that might be the most Acquired tastiest part of the entire enterprise for you is right here. Okay. Here we go rift
00:04:50
Speaker
How you came to be a writer and how, you know, how you chose it or maybe it chose you. I've kept notebooks since I was about eight years old. And you know, you can imagine what the contents of that is like, you know.
00:05:03
Speaker
oh, such and such boys slipped me a note or didn't, you know, I ate a taco, which I shouldn't have eaten, you know, like those kind of teenage concerns. But I think that the idea was there, it started with like, you know, recording my sort of daily observations. And I've kept the journal throughout. It's not something that I sit down and write in every day. It's just sort of I do like in bursts.
00:05:28
Speaker
So I think that in general, maybe my sense of wanting to be a writer also came from the fact that I was a big reader and that was something that was instilled in us by my mother. And I think I was just very much lulled into this beauty of being lost in a book. And of course, that idea of
00:05:51
Speaker
being curious, you know, and really wanting to know the names of things of plants, specifically and animals and different things and not just saying, you know, a flower or a plant, you know, actually saying, you know, the names of these things. So I'm kind of like a collector. And so it generally just sort of worked out in that sense that I was collecting ideas or observations.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think the journal always becomes like the puke bucket. It's like you're writing in it either when you're like the happiest or the saddest or the most scared. On a regular ho-hum day, it's kind of hard to bring yourself to a journal unless you're reading.
00:06:33
Speaker
And so a lot of times when I'm reading poetry or nonfiction or fiction, and I'll want to record something in my journal and or that'll spark, you know, a thought about, oh, like, this is an interesting solution to a problem that I've been having on the page, you know. So it's either it either goes to those extremes of like, you know, emotional outbursts or sort of like rational research based
00:07:02
Speaker
entries. I was I came across this question about this idea of like flow and flow states and a lot of a lot of people especially in creative things that they feel like they need to find a state of flow and that's how they get going. But in reality it's more like if you're gonna be going out for a run or something it's just like you don't wait in your house and wait for a flow state and go running.
00:07:25
Speaker
You start running and then hopefully within a mile or two you're like, okay, now I'm in the flow.
Finding Creative Flow in Writing
00:07:31
Speaker
And I wonder how, and I think that's very true with any creative endeavor, though I think the trap is to try to wait for that flow before you get going. So maybe in the face of that, you know, how do you establish, you know, a practice so you can hopefully get to that coveted flow state in your writing, be it poetry, essay, or whatever?
00:07:50
Speaker
Well, I'm a big fan of the free writing idea, like don't lift up your pencil. Even if you're writing, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know a hundred times. Eventually your brain is going to flip the switch into something else.
00:08:03
Speaker
So yeah, I do do that a lot and I enjoy that because it takes you to interesting places that you didn't think that you had it in you, you know? You think all the well is dry but then all of a sudden, you know, this door kicks open and you're like, whoa, where did that come from? So that's kind of fun. Another thing that I think is sort of interesting too when you're in a rut or you're stuck
00:08:25
Speaker
you listen to music that you don't know the lyrics of or like maybe in another language or you hear poetry in another language and then you sort of, I'm a translator also so I love to think of this idea of what those words sound like either in Spanish or English and how that could tip off sort of a line or a thought. So those kind of creative processes for me are different ways that I can open up when I'm feeling kind of stuck.
00:08:52
Speaker
I find too that sometimes and you were alluding to this just a moment ago is that the act of the act of just writing something and you're like oh where did that come from it's it truly does stem from just sitting down and being comfortable with you know bad writing and
00:09:09
Speaker
And it's just like you don't know where it came from, but it wouldn't have come out of you had you not just been able to sit there with some discipline. And I mean, how important is that for you to just, you know, just to sit there like this free riding exercise you were talking about? Like how important is that for you? Because that's kind of how you how you tap new wells.
00:09:27
Speaker
This is really interesting because just last night we had a dinner with artists and writers and we were talking about that. Do you sit down with an intention or does it just rise up and meet you at some point? I think that there's a lot of different ways of approaching a page whether it's an image or a word or a sound or something.
00:09:48
Speaker
But I think that the point of what our conversation was like, at what point does good writing veer from pamphletismo, which is basically like writing something specifically to direct a message, or are you involved in the process as a revelation?
00:10:11
Speaker
um and and what is better or what you know what makes that divide between good writing and bad writing um and not bad writing but like a different kind of writing you know it's more like prescriptive or like an instruction manual or you know a different text rather than a poetry because you don't necessarily go to poetry to look for a lesson or
00:10:33
Speaker
you know, the cold hard facts, you know? You know, given that, you know, a lot of us as creative people, we're always stricken with some measure of self-doubt, probably more often than not, and yet we still have to persist in the face of that self-doubt and the voices that are telling us maybe we're not good enough and certainly our early drafts are certainly not good enough.
Writing Advice: Overcoming Perfectionism
00:10:56
Speaker
So I wonder if for you, like in the face of that self-doubt, you know, how do you keep yourself moving forward?
00:11:04
Speaker
Well, definitely for me, when I'm writing, I don't write with the intention of who's my who's my greater audience, right? So you have to, you know, my daughter who's 16, she's starting to write poetry now too.
00:11:19
Speaker
And she's very much in that fixed idea of like, you know, you're, you're, you're carving that, that first line into stone. And I'm like, no, babe, you just got to let it go right. Ugly, like really just, you know, embarrass yourself and, and, and write really cheesy, horrible things. Because once you get over through that whole, like mind rational rational, trying to your mind, trying to rationalize that it has to be perfect from the get go. That's when you allow yourself to make those mistakes that actually
00:11:47
Speaker
can do really interesting things along the way. So yeah, I write for myself. I don't think that I'm even writing already towards like another collection, you know, I'm just sort of, each poem works for me as kind of like a puzzle, you know, you start off with one piece and then
00:12:07
Speaker
they start building together and by the end you might get something really good or something that you just throw away for the bone pile and another poem might grow on the back of that poem.
00:12:20
Speaker
And so it's not an utter waste of time because if you spent an hour writing a crappy poem, maybe the next time you sit down and you can whack something out in 15 minutes, it's because you wrote that crappy poem. And when does a collection start to crystallize in your head as you're writing just a pile of poems?
00:12:43
Speaker
That's a really good question. And again, this is a conversation that we were having last night. Like at what point do you start to think about what the back cover text of your book is or the title or where is that going? How are these things speaking to each other? In my case, I have two collections. And if I'm able to sort of put like an archive sort of
00:13:10
Speaker
tab on each of them, I would say my first book was a book of women and my second book is a book of men. And so I just started kind of a very broad idea of what it means to be a woman in El Salvador was the sort of the idea of my first book, Madria.
00:13:30
Speaker
And my second book was I was very intensely involved in a relationship with my father who had been dealing with cancer, two different types of cancer over the span of six years. And so I became sort of obsessed with anything that had to do with the body and aging and illness.
00:13:52
Speaker
but also kind of understanding that in my father's illness is when I started to understand a lot about him and how we were alike, even though our relationship before his illness was not always great, was not always crystal, he was sort of a distant father. I always like to think, I'm totally going on a tangent here, but a friend of mine after she read my collection, she said,
00:14:21
Speaker
Oh, it seems like, you know, your dad, you know, was, was kind of like really tough with you. And, and, and like, you know, maybe, you know, you, you had some sort of like, you know, domestic violence situation. And I said, that's really interesting that you say that because sincerely, you know, like I was hurt by certain things my father did, but never did he ever lay a hand on me. And so if I think about
00:14:47
Speaker
a character like, I forget her name, but the basket case in the breakfast club, you know how everybody thinks she has this terrible home life. And then when I asked her, like what did they do to you? And she said, well, they ignore me.
00:15:03
Speaker
And so there is a sense of, you know, how does a child see themselves reflected in the relationship with their parent? And so that spooled off a whole bunch of other kind of thoughts, like what kind of parent am I, you know, to my children? And what kind of parents are my husband and I to our children?
00:15:22
Speaker
And what is my relationship specifically with my husband? We've been married for 20 years. And so you know that that goes like a roller coaster. And my son, my eldest son, who is sort of strangely, he's funneled all of my motherhood experiences into him because he was my first child. But back to your question of how does it become a collection is you just start writing the poems. And there was a moment where
00:15:52
Speaker
where they just sort of start sifting together into sections. And I began to understand that the book was very much about self-doubt, self-love, what is good enough, relationships, all those weird silences and the things that are unsaid.
00:16:12
Speaker
Especially when there's a giant clock ticking of someone is going to die and there's going to be a closure or not to your relationship. And what have you done in your life to try to bridge that or not?
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment in a poem early in the book where you and your father are fishing and, you know, there's, you know, towards the end, it was like you were seeking help, but it was evident that you would be on your own to reel the fish in. And I think that just in hearing what you're saying about your father, it's just like that was very, that was a very illustrative moment of what, you know, your relationship was, if I'm reading into that correctly.
00:16:57
Speaker
Exactly, very much so. And the title of that poem says a lot about the content and relationship of our lives because my dad was a good man. He was honest. He was very hardworking. At some point, I even wonder if he was on the autistic spectrum. He was a big time hermit, loved being alone, loved silences and just sort of his own time.
00:17:21
Speaker
But he was an alcoholic. He was actually functioning alcoholic for the most part of our lives until he got older and sick and he couldn't give that up and it was very difficult for his body to handle, you know, cancer and alcoholism at the same time.
00:17:38
Speaker
So the title of that poem is a history of alcoholism. And so very much that fish is not only the metaphor of how we are connected, but how we are also alike. I saw there was a potential, as any of us who are children of alcoholics, that those kind of patterns can repeat in our lives. And I realized that
00:18:03
Speaker
Drinking is very much like going swimming in a raging ocean. You have to have a giant respect for that ocean, especially when you know it's taken a few of your loved ones under.
Complex Family Dynamics
00:18:17
Speaker
Well, for sure. In a later poem, too, you wrote that the thirst for drink is in our genes, and how I duck that bullet is an oil painting. Mother and child with hands posed in praise, eyes rolling in ecstasy, of the moment seized and rendered purely. And you say, too, which is another great dichotomy between you and your father, like the poet says it all, and my father, who says nothing is stone, is statue.
00:18:42
Speaker
And I really love that passage and I think it really speaks volumes to like, you know, your dynamic.
00:18:48
Speaker
Exactly. You're really reading into it in all the ways that I hoped a good reader would read into it. So it's such a pleasure when someone gets those things. It's tough. I have to imagine it was tough, too, because there are moments in the collection where you make note of your mother saying, like, please don't publish any of this until your father passes away. And what was that tension like of wanting to tell these stories but do it in a way that is respectful of the people closest to you?
00:19:19
Speaker
Well, the birth of this book was pretty intense, Brendan, to be sincere. My father died in December of 2019.
00:19:30
Speaker
and, you know, 2020 COVID, right? And we were selling my family's childhood home at the end of February. I got stuck in the United States because the borders to El Salvador closed. And so I moved in with my mother, sorry, to my grandmother's house.
00:19:52
Speaker
And I was stuck for a little over three months in the United States. And so it was kind of like an imposed residency, writing residency for me. I said, all right, all those poems that I've kept in journals and that my mom was like, you're not publishing this until he's gone. I was like, I need to do it now.
00:20:11
Speaker
So I was pretty diligent about my practice of writing and I would write about one to two poems per day, but they were already pretty much built in my journal. So it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
00:20:27
Speaker
But I think that that's why, especially the chapter that deals with my father, it has kind of like, it tells a story. And so I was very curious. I was like, what is Brandon even going to ask me about in the nonfiction, you know, podcasts related to poetry? And for a minute, I went into a panic thinking like, you know, what is true about poetry? Is everything that I write true, you know, and going through this idea of
00:20:53
Speaker
of memory and the way that we remember things and how those things are tricky and the way that things are represented too. And also, especially when you're talking about family members and you're bringing sort of sensitive topics to light. I'm like, I have to be respectful of my father and especially because I know he's not going to read my poetry ever because he never did. He never attended a poetry reading, but it wasn't because he didn't love me. It's just that maybe in the same way, if he said to me, do you want to go and listen to this
00:21:24
Speaker
astrophysicists talk about math and space for like two hours, do you want to come with me? I would have been like, ah, I don't know, dad, you know? But if he had written that book, I think I would have gone anyway, but whatever, back to the differences.
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, I had to be respectful. And so I wrote the book pretty intensely in about, I think I wrote the first draft of the book in about three months, three and a half months that I was in lockdown. All of us were in lockdown. The poems are very raw because I never in my wildest dreams thought that it would get picked up so quickly, much less win a prize like this, like the national poetry series.
00:22:07
Speaker
And so I kind of went in a panic when I heard that the book was going to be published because I felt like I wanted to maybe spend a little more time contemplating what I was going to come out and say and how I was representing myself because this second book of poetry is a lot more personal.
00:22:28
Speaker
than my first book. My first book is like a chorus of women's voices, me included in those voices and in those stories, but this is pretty personal. I'm pretty naked in this book.
00:22:45
Speaker
It strikes me throughout that it really is an interrogation of your relationship with your father, among other things, but especially your father is kind of one of the main characters, if you will, throughout the whole collection. And do you feel like over the course of writing these poems and putting together the collection that you have most of the answers you would want about your father and about your relationship to him? God, that's a really hard question.
00:23:15
Speaker
But I think it is interesting what you've said because I think that my relationship with my father kind of set my tone with all of my future relationships with men, you know, as Freudian as that sounds. It really is true. And so, you know, you go around everywhere sort of looking for your father, you know, in your partners and then
00:23:36
Speaker
you know, sort of understanding what your relationship is with your children. I don't know that if I have the answers to it, but I feel like definitely because my father's illness was so extended in six years, first he had throat cancer and then he had stomach cancer. You forgive a lot of things because you let go of a lot of expectations and I stopped
00:24:03
Speaker
wanting him to change or to be something else and I think in writing these poems is also when I began to understand a lot about myself and my relationship to solitude and silence and my need to sort of detach from people for a little bit also to kind of like you know re-energize and
00:24:24
Speaker
get charged up to deal with people again. And what my relationship is with just sort of like anxiety and expectations. So I feel like my relationship with my father ended well and ended peacefully.
00:24:41
Speaker
I don't have any regrets or resentments. It's sort of like, it is what it is, and he did what he could do, and I did what I could do, and that was our relationship, and that was it. Yeah, and the passages and the poems that you write about your father dying and succumbing to cancer in those moments in the hospital or in hospice are really just tender and really, really beautifully rendered.
00:25:11
Speaker
And I wonder for you, just given that experience that you had of just being by your father's side and then writing about it, just at this point in your life, what your relationship is with death and dying.
Confronting Death and Grief
00:25:27
Speaker
Well, I'm going to be 50 this year, so it's definitely blooming. It's there. It is there. Probably also another topic that comes before dying is pain. I think that this book is also an exploration of how to handle pain, emotional, physical, all different kinds of pain.
00:25:55
Speaker
I think that also something that I've considered a lot too is maybe in a first collection somebody will be more interested in questions of identity, cultural, tradition, family, origins, all of those kind of things.
00:26:14
Speaker
And I'm kind of, I've kind of stepped away from that. And, you know, in fact, I think, you know, I'm a Salvadoran American writer and I've spent half of my life living in El Salvador and half of my life living in Miami. And I kind of gone beyond really needing to define myself as
00:26:32
Speaker
What am I first? What am I more? What is my language of choice? Pretty much now, those boundaries are just completely permeable for me. And so I think that holding hands with that idea is also sort of like I've seen my father passed his last breath in front of me.
00:26:58
Speaker
my my experience with death has been sort of like a crash course because after after my father died my my grandmother who was you know the matriarch of the family she passed away in 2021 november october sorry and my
00:27:22
Speaker
My mother died on December 31st, New Year's Eve. Well, I guess it was January 1st already of this past year. And so the two people that I had spent, you know, writing, you know, sharing a home and writing these poems about death and sort of, you know,
00:27:41
Speaker
what is the point of it all? That was my last intense moments with them. Because my grandmother died, you know, a few months later, and then my mom, you know, after that, and, and, and my grandmother died of old age, you know, she's 102. And my mom had a heart attack, she she had a heart condition. So that was that was unexpected. And so I couldn't tell you what's worse, you know, a long, lingering, painful death where
00:28:08
Speaker
you know finally when my father died we were all like oh thank god he's you know he's not suffering anymore or you know a phone call at four in the morning and like hey alex you know mom had a heart attack and she didn't make it and you're like what
00:28:26
Speaker
So that brings me to the title of the book, which is relincenda, and that's a Latin word. And the root of that word is the English word, relinquish. So, you know, look at me, all cocky, thinking that, you know, I'd written the book about learning how to let go because my dad had died. And, you know, we've lost a lot of family members in and around the same time.
00:28:50
Speaker
And so then my grandmother dies, and then for me, the biggest tragedy was the loss of my mom, because our lives were completely intertwined. And she was my greatest fan. And leading back to your first question of, at what point did you become a writer so much? Because my mom was like, you've got to do this. This is you. And you're so good at it. And read and write. And here's these books. And let me read your poems.
00:29:15
Speaker
So that was a huge bomb. And that's going to be my life lesson is just continue to learn how to let go. But at age 50, I mean, what choice do you have? You're there. You're walking towards it pretty steadily at this point.
00:29:34
Speaker
Oh, for sure. It's like you reach a point too where you have to let go with the idea that tomorrow is a guarantee and come to grips with there's more time behind you than there is in front of you, which is really disarming. Yeah. And I think all of us, I think it's a topic that all of us have had to have this really deep
00:29:58
Speaker
crash course and to have like, you know, things are not always going to be the way that you expect them to be. And you have to be adaptable and flexible and sort of learn how to, you know, live with the way that things are, you know.
00:30:12
Speaker
Oh, of course. And the way your father passed away, I imagine that there's, and because it was a prolonged illness, that there's time for you to essentially pre-grieve before he passes. And then your mother, and I'm just so sorry to hear that she passed so suddenly. And then the grief comes after the fact. Have you been able to just kind of wrestle and wrangle with this notion of grief and how you've really contended with both kinds?
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I don't think that Relinkenda is a book about grief. I think it's a book about really just the day-to-day of illness and death and my relationship with men primarily. So I think that the things that I'm writing about now are probably a little more related with grief because
00:31:01
Speaker
there's no, you know, somebody, I think it was my psychologist saying like, Oh, you're filling the pattern perfectly of grief, which usually runs from nine months to a year. I'm like, Oh, damn, it's like another gestation, you know, you know, and death is like a weird rewind birth to also, you know, it's so because birth is not all happiness and joy. It's also scary. And you're like, you know, in the hands of doctors and God and whatever, you know, but I think that I think that the distance and the time
00:31:32
Speaker
um, makes you really contemplate things in a different way. So I'm still in it. Yeah, I'm still in it.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, the whole end of life being something of a reverse birth, it really hits home, because right now, my mother isn't dying, but she is suffering from dementia to the point where it's every five minutes or every minute or so, and I'm across the country from her at the moment, but it's just like,
00:32:03
Speaker
Constantly has to be told what to do, maybe even when to go to the bathroom. Needs a lot of assistance moving around at the moment because she had a fall and she's in this rehab center now. But her dementia is such that it is very almost baby-like how you have to repeat yourself constantly and she'll ask the same question.
00:32:26
Speaker
over and over and over again. It's like, even though you just answered it three minutes ago, you have to table your frustration and answer it fresh and new every single time. And it's this idea that's really, when it confronts you, it's, like I used the word disarming just a moment ago, but it is just like disarming and you're really hitting the face with this idea, the circularity of life and just how painful it is to watch people go through it.
00:32:55
Speaker
100%. I'm really sorry. My, my grandmother, she had Alzheimer's. And so for the last 10 years, there was also that degeneration. And it's hard. It's really hard because, you know, those the roles flip, you know, like this person that cared for you and that nurtured you. And you know, now it's very different, right? Because now you're the one that's trying and there's, there's a fight back because there's a moment to where you know, they're, they're adults and they realize like,
00:33:23
Speaker
I want to be independent and I don't want to be a burden or I don't want to, you know, like, they're scared of losing all those, you know, fakultadas, all those abilities. So I think that that's also an important theme and a topic and something that I think that maybe you're dealing with right now is like, you know, caring for others and also at the same time, caring for yourself, you know.
Role Reversal: Caring for Aging Parents
00:33:47
Speaker
I really have a big problem. I hate the word self-care. It seems to me. It sounds like masturbation to me. Just keep it to yourself, dude. Come on, don't announce I'm going to have some moments of self-care. Do it. That is really something that we do need, but true self-care, not going to get a manicure and a pedicure.
00:34:14
Speaker
And so I think that especially where you're in these intense moments of caring for someone that's in this kind of transition, whether it's a newborn baby or an elderly parent, and you're sort of like in the best of your life or whatever, you're like 30, 40, 50 at those moments.
00:34:36
Speaker
those sort of transitions all sort of meld together in a very strange way. And so the definition of what is a parent and what is a child really boils down to a humanness without necessarily defining like this man that I'm bathing and that I would never in my life would wanted to have seen my father naked, but that I'm bathing now is
00:35:02
Speaker
urgently necessary because he needs this care, you know? Like I'm bathing my firstborn son, you know? Yeah, and it comes, you know, you start thinking of like the, you know, with a newborn, not that I'm a parent or will be, but it's
00:35:17
Speaker
Newborn is just kind of like giddy and you give them baths and it's like yeah, everything's fun but like when it's when they're older there's this notion of dignity and having to an embarrassment and it's I can't it's gotta it's just something that it's got to be so hard to wrestle with as like a child having to you know care for a parent like that the way they once cared for us, but there's there's a there's a There's a difficulty there that I know a lot of people wrestle with but it's it doesn't make it any easier and
00:35:45
Speaker
No way. And I think that that's stuff that people don't want to hear about or talk about. You mentioned that my mom was like, oh, you can't write these poems until he's gone.
00:35:56
Speaker
And she'd read some of these poems and she'd say, but why do you have to write the thing about him peeing in the garden? Or like, why do you have to write the thing about him spitting into the napkin all the time? And I'm like, damn, mom, have you forgotten like what we have been living through? I'm like, you can't candy coat this thing. It's not a romanticized thing of where he lovingly drifted away as I was reading Rumi to him. It's like literally,
00:36:20
Speaker
I wanted to hold his hand and like have him feel my hand pressure on him and I squeezed my father's hand and just the pressure of my squeezing my father's hand when I lifted my finger from his hand.
00:36:35
Speaker
Brendan, a whole section of his skin lifted off like it was a dry leaf. And as soon as that happened, I was like, my father no longer inhabits this body. And I took his hand and I put it on his stomach and I put the blanket over him. And I said,
00:36:54
Speaker
whatever I'm contending with right now, it does not have to do with this body that is in front of me. And so there is like a grossness to it. There's a physicalness and it's like I had to linger in those things because that's for me was my way of processing through that loss of like, he's not physically here. My mother's not physically here anymore.
00:37:15
Speaker
And so it's become a much more like the question of the spirit. And I don't know, I guess I'm now going back into like thinking about like my Catholic upbringing, what happens to you when you died, when you die, my dad was an atheist. So that was also hard for me to consider like that, you know, that he was just like gonna go in a hole or he was gonna like be burned. And, and like, that was it. Yeah, for him, you know,
00:37:42
Speaker
Yeah, well he was such a, just based on the reading of the poetry that he was a very analytically driven person, very good with numbers, an engineer, and so I think that's part and parcel of that mindset where it's just very logical, like this is the only thing that matters or the only thing I can come to grips with and wrestle with is what is like physically in front of me and what can it be explained by the laws of physics or something. Right.
00:38:10
Speaker
I got to see it to believe it was very much his philosophy. I love how you mentioned too. It just struck me. It really struck such a chord too when you're sitting, you wrote that no time for pleasantries. You wait in your chair in this room that is not a living room, but a waiting room. And I was just like, oh my God, that is so true. There's no real living going on. We're waiting for the finale here.
00:38:39
Speaker
100 percent. I literally imagined my father that way. He was in this waiting room and then the hooded grim reaper was going to come in and be like, Mr. Litton, please follow me through this door. I think that I was also trying to be really empathetic with him and thinking, what happens
00:39:07
Speaker
to someone who's dying, who is that analytical and so it's like science and fact, you know, focused that, you know, at one point did he, did he ever cling to faith or did he ever, you know, at one point think anything, but you know, what he repeated to us, even, you know, the last few things that he ever said to us was like, I had a good life.
Father's Life Reflections
00:39:30
Speaker
You know, he's like, I had a good job.
00:39:34
Speaker
Um, I have children that I'm proud of, you know, um, I married a woman that, you know, we created this household full of creative, you know, um, people that are going to be doing good things in the world. And he's like, I traveled, you know, I ate well.
00:39:52
Speaker
And he's like, and that's it. And so this is so, so disconcerting for me to be so cut and dry, you know, with this phenomenon of like, well, curtain's closed, you know. And anyone who reads this collection is going to be, you're going to start noticing the use of the ampersand throughout the whole collection. And so what is the significance of the ampersand for you in this collection?
Symbolism in Poetry: The Ampersand
00:40:23
Speaker
Again, I'm so happy you noticed that. Well, there's a poem about the ampersand, which I felt for me was going to be the anchor. I love it as a symbol. I love the way that it was envisioned as a ligature, et al. And out of those words, Latin words, it became this typography symbol.
00:40:48
Speaker
I love that it has the shape of an infinity with a little hand kind of going like, hey, I'm carrying a little tray or check out this thing that I'm showing you. It's just like a quirky, beautiful typography figure.
00:41:08
Speaker
And I really liked that idea of tying things together. So that poem, for me, was an exercise of understanding the origin of the symbol of the emperor's hand.
00:41:21
Speaker
And also some strange things happened. I would find that it's a combination of the letters E and T and E is my father's first name Edwin and T is my husband's first name Tomas. And so it very much became to me then this idea of
00:41:39
Speaker
Fusions, connections, right? And so if my book talks about relationships and connections, connections that are worked through, like the one with my husband, because there's a whole section on my relationship with my husband and our parenting and all of that.
00:41:58
Speaker
It's also pretty rudely raw. Do you know how much I hate you right now? I think is the title of one of my poems dedicated to my husband. Do you know how ugly you are to me right now? It's a poem dedicated to my husband, but it's a love poem. And so the ampersand for me is about that.
00:42:26
Speaker
putting it out there that what I'm doing is exploring one-on-one relationships more so than a community. It's the one-on-one. And so imagining the ampersand as something that links or anchors two words together, I was just fascinated by that.
00:42:46
Speaker
Yeah, and you mess around with a lot of different forms in the way you construct a lot of your poems. And some are just big old blocks of text. Some are almost split down the middle with something on the side. And this and the summer just stacked and staggered in different ways. And I just wonder for you, like, you know, how do you make those decisions when you're creating and writing a poem?
00:43:14
Speaker
I think that when I write in my journal, I write in an unlined book. And so sometimes my handwriting is small, sometimes it's big, sometimes it's needed, sometimes it's sloppy. And I take those poems and put them into a Word document. And what I do is I took this idea from a poet friend of mine, his name is Eduardo Corral, who talked about pouring poetry into different vessels.
00:43:43
Speaker
And so when you pour it into these different vessels, there's a moment where it feels right. And so some of these large prose poems at some point might have been in lines, the smaller ones that are sort of lattered, or as you say, like, you know, like they have this this sort of spacing on two sides.
00:44:06
Speaker
For me, also, I think that visually I'm very moved by the letters, the words on a page and what they might suggest content-wise. And so if, for example, in a long poem that could have been a prose block,
00:44:24
Speaker
If it's a poem that's talking about my mother, my father, and I, I wanted to have it in three-line stanzas. Because for me, that was like an organizing form of also saying like, well, I'm sort of trying to understand
00:44:40
Speaker
this as three human beings and units of three somehow, you know? But I very much liked the idea of each poem looking differently or suddenly when I would say, oh, this is this kind of poem because it kind of evokes a certain mood and so they look similar or they have a similar voice and so
00:45:03
Speaker
it just became like, oh, that's the way that this poem should look because it's kind of a sister poem to that other poem.
00:45:13
Speaker
And I imagine that as a poet, it must be kind of fun knowing that you can just kind of make up the shapes you want or like the molds that you can like pour the metal into and then all of a sudden you're gonna get this thing that is shaped and evocative in its own way just by looking at it, let alone before you start dissecting or ingesting or metabolizing the material. So that's gotta be kind of fun for you to be able to kind of
00:45:40
Speaker
You know, kind of make up the rules as you go, in a way. Yeah, the freedom is great. And the freedom is great. The thing, though, is that, you know, I think you need to be able to explain why at some point, too, just to be like, I thought it looked cool. I do like prose writing a lot, and I am a prosely poet. I think that if I have a weakness, it's definitely like, you know, I have a friend of mine, Emma Trellis,
00:46:09
Speaker
who's also Santa Barbara poet laureate. And she was one of my first readers always. And she's always like, Alex, you know, you always have to go in there and cut out all of your extra, you know, articles and tighten, tighten, tighten. But to be sincere, though, I think that that's part of my style as well. I'm cluttery. I have a really difficult time being minimalistic.
00:46:37
Speaker
And because of that same sort of collector's passion that I have. So yeah, I would think if I had, if I have a style, I would probably say, yeah, my poems are kind of prosy.
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking of style and voice, that's something that is very hard to pin down for an artist and often takes a very long time of trial and error and trying on different hats and seeing what works, who your inspirations are. I'm going to experiment with this kind of style. Ah, that doesn't feel right. And then eventually you kind of settle into a groove.
00:47:13
Speaker
So what was that experimentation like for you over the years as you look to hone who you are on the page?
Impact of Translating Poetry
00:47:22
Speaker
I think that one of the biggest transformations that I had in my experience as a writer also was beginning to read and translate writers from Spanish to English.
00:47:35
Speaker
because the aesthetic in Spanish is so different that I began to sort of understand also how it reflected like a country's concerns, a way of approaching things, the way that things are phrased in Spanish, sometimes it's sort of like flip flopped, you know, you can translate something in Spanish that is a page and in English it'll be like three quarters of a page, you know,
00:48:04
Speaker
that sort of tightness or variety of exact words that are available in English compared to in Spanish where they use more words to describe a certain thing that can be said in one word in English. So I think that for me, one of the most transformative processes was really beginning to develop my interest and practice in translation.
00:48:35
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up translation because I wanted to talk to you about the art of it. I imagine there's a way you can take something in English and then you just like word for word, translate it to Spanish and everyone would
00:48:50
Speaker
have an idea of what's being said and we can be happy with that. But I imagine it's a bit more complicated than that as you look for different words that might have a different meaning or a deeper meaning. So for you over the years of translating, maybe you can take us behind the curtain of what that looks like for some of us who will likely never translate.
00:49:15
Speaker
I think that one of the most exciting things is to be able to translate living poets. So what I've been working on recently is translating Salvadoran writers because I have access to them. And so when I'll do a first translation, maybe the first pass will always be a little more literal, right?
00:49:38
Speaker
But then you let it sit for a while, almost to the point where you can strangeify that poem enough and distance yourself from the poem enough that your reading is as if somebody else had translated it. And this happens with your own writing process as well. But I think that the greatest benefit of translating living poets is that you can ask them specifically. I remember
00:50:05
Speaker
In just a couple of months, I think Poetry International is going to come out with a portfolio of poems by Jorge Galan, a Salvadoran poet that I translated, and also Elena Salamanca. And so having access to them and saying, you know, really spending almost 40 minutes talking with Jorge about
00:50:27
Speaker
What did you mean about this word? Do you mean arching over? Do you mean leaning over? How do you visualize this woman's body? Was she falling into the bush? Was she reaching over the bush? Because that subtlety of being able to understand what he was visualizing in his mind makes all the difference in that one word choice.
00:50:52
Speaker
that is like the last line of the poem because leaning, falling, arching, you know, all can give a totally different meaning to a poem. And so translating poets that are dead or that you don't have access to is definitely a bigger challenge. I am definitely much more in the way of thinking of translating the feeling of the poem and
00:51:20
Speaker
And trying to be true to the style, I won't translate anything that has rhyme or form. That's just way too difficult for me because I can't do that. But I think definitely keeping in the spirit of and almost in a way where the two poems are sort of siblings, they're not
00:51:41
Speaker
twins all the time, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Like when you run into it, so like the, the source text is written in a certain way and the author has written it with a, and you can certainly relate to this, like a certain measure of rhythm. Like there's a word choice there that is made to, cause it has maybe a certain amount of syllables and it just rolls off the tongue and it has the meaning, but it also has the right cadence.
00:52:07
Speaker
Do you run into problems with that when you're going to a different language? You're like, this is the right word that evokes the right meaning, but it also doesn't roll off the tongue the way it should. Yeah. Sometimes words in English are ugly. They're clunky, you know? And you're like, oh, I know you meant to say that, but it just sounds so ugly in English, you know? And so there's like a negotiation there.
00:52:30
Speaker
What's cool too is like translating my own work because a lot of times even like this has happened to me with other writers when I've been translating their work, you know, they've gone back and they said, you know what, don't translate that poem. I still need to work on it.
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah. So because then they start to realize, as has happened to me, you know, when I translate my poems that I've written in English to Spanish, I go, Oh, like, that's not really what I meant to say. Or like, man, that's, that's, that's kind of like not working hard enough. That was kind of like an easy, you know, metaphor, or like, I've used that before. And so, you know, switching the code to a different language,
00:53:10
Speaker
it makes you able to look at the poem a lot more objectively and look at it like in a really kind of like...
00:53:18
Speaker
blinding, you know, like cellulite exposing light, you know, where you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, like, you know, gotta fix this. That's great.
Writing Tools: Blackwing Pencils
00:53:30
Speaker
Well, let's see, I want to be mindful of your time, Alexandra. And the one thing I love to ask guests at the end of these shows is like a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can be anything from something professional to something software you like an app.
00:53:44
Speaker
It can be anything and so I'd extend that to you like what might you recommend for the listeners out there? You know professional or personal or whatever stay it's anything you like Well going back to my my obsession with collecting I have a I have a tradition where Every end of the year. I'll buy a box of black wing pencils. I love black wing pencils Right now Me too me too
00:54:13
Speaker
And so I'll always want to buy a different box every year. And I have my Moleskin agenda. I like to keep things written by hand. And I use a black wing pencil to keep my agenda every year. So I'll start off with a new pencil. And then I'll give a new pencil to some of my close writer friends or close friends and be like, OK, happy new year. Here's your black wing pencil for the new year.
00:54:42
Speaker
That's what I collect. And so I really recommend them. They're amazing. They have, like, I love the erasers. I have the special sharpeners for them, too. And they're awesome. Oh, they're great. I also, speaking of collecting, I, I'll take pencils all the way down to, like, you can barely hold them.
00:55:03
Speaker
and have what I call a morgue and it's just a jar of all my old pencil nubs like all down so I just have a pile of them and I just can't wait to see this jar over the years just totally fill up with just hundreds of pencil nubs. I love that. You'll have to send me a photo of that. I love that.
00:55:22
Speaker
Absolutely, will do. Well, Alex, this was great getting to unpack this incredible collection you did and just get inside your head of how you go about doing the work. So thanks so much for making the time and coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Brennan. It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot.
Podcasts vs. Restaurants: Engaging Listeners
00:55:45
Speaker
Well, we did it. We did it, CNFers. Feels like it's been ages since we had a fresh, hot interview. If you want a surprising and evocative poetry collection, check out Relinkinda. I think I'm saying that right. I don't know. I don't know, man. And I pre-order that sucka. Depending on when you listen to this podcast, you might even just order it at your favorite book retailer. So it's published by Beacon Press, beacon.org.
00:56:14
Speaker
there's one poem in there about our father's deathbed that like gutted me and then there was this other one that gave me all the feels and it was just incredible stuff so i just thanks to alexandra and of course you you you thank you for listening to the show subscribing sharing it and just spending uh spending an hour with us in this cnf and community anyway here we go so
00:56:37
Speaker
You know figure share this podcast on the internet and all if you tag the show I'll give you digital fist bumps and or a James Hetfield gift probably both. Let's be honest Okay, I said at the top of the show the parting shot would be about how podcasts are like restaurants And it's kind of true. So just hear me out. I was watching a top chef rerun my god the drama catsuji, dude, come on and
00:57:03
Speaker
And at Restaurant Wars, one of the judges said something like, I wouldn't order that again or I wouldn't come back here. If you're a restaurant owner, you can probably come to – you can probably get anybody, I should say, to come to your restaurant once. But the only way you're ever going to make it is by wowing people so that they come back once a month.
00:57:27
Speaker
twice a month, maybe once a week, and then they tell and or bring the others. There's only, you know, there's a finite pool of new people to come to your restaurant, but it's always those repeat people, right? It's easy to lose in the game of first impressions. The food might be good, but the staff might be surly. It took 10 minutes for a server to even fill your water glass, let alone get a drink going or an app. The food might be great, but will you come back? Probably not.
00:57:55
Speaker
And so it is with podcasts. People who are listening this far, by and large, are probably the repeat customers who like the menu, right? Let's keep beating the food metaphor to death. You can get just about anybody to listen to your podcast once or twice.
00:58:13
Speaker
but you always have to be thinking what will you bring to the show to bring your listeners back to have them subscribe to have them be excited when CNF Friday comes around or when Monday and Thursday comes around if your WTF listener or on Wednesdays when long-form posts or on Wednesdays also when a Kimbo post like I have these appointment listening podcasts as I'm sure you do
00:58:38
Speaker
You know, I really labor over this because that's the only way this enterprise grows to reach more CNN efforts like yourself. Be you a journalist, narrative journalist, long formists, memoirists, poets, essayists, documentary filmmakers, gotta get more filmmakers on. It's been a while. I recognize certain aspects of the show might be abrasive to the ear.
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah, maybe my voice, but I like heavy metal music people have commented on that and I'm sorry That's not going away. It's a small part of the show, but it's part of the character But I cut that richness I cut that butter the acid that cuts that butter is ensuring I don't talk too much during the interviews and I don't talk too much at the top of the show I save it for the back end
00:59:24
Speaker
And I research the fuck out of people, so it's a rich conversation that hopefully delivers, inspiration, celebrates their work, entertains, why not, and makes you a better reader or writer. Makes you excited to pick up the pencil. The Blackwing pencil makes you eager to dust off that manuscript, or maybe to start one. And once you get going, to help you keep going, because damn it, that's the hard part.
00:59:50
Speaker
And let's face it, like restaurants, there's a million podcasts out there all vying for your attention. How do you compete with that? Well, I think compete is the wrong word, like even though attention is very much zero sum, you can't, unless you're some weirdo with like one podcast in one ear and one in the other, more power to you if you can do that, but it might be impossible, who knows. Like the restaurant, you show up every day and you set up your mise en place and
01:00:19
Speaker
You go about the practice of doing the work, making good food, day in, day out. It's what you can control. You might lose some people. You might have a bad night, but you keep coming back as long as they let you keep coming back. And that's us, baby.
Closing Thoughts and Podcast Goals
01:00:35
Speaker
Doors are always open, and we hope you'll bring a friend or two and encourage them to do so as well when they leave the restaurant.
01:00:43
Speaker
so we can keep coming to work and making you a great show. And hopefully even a better show for years to come. I don't know what that will look like. Maybe it'll sound better, maybe it'll get tighter. Who knows? I don't know. But it's those repeat, the repeat customers. Am I repeating myself? I'm starting to repeat myself. Ah shit. God damn it. Ah, well you get my drift right.
01:01:10
Speaker
Stay wild, seeing efforts. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.