Ep 255: We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place feat. Kelly Weber

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SARAH: Hey, what's up, hello, welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay, a podcast where an aro-ace girl. I'm Sarah, that's me.

KAYLA: And a bi-demisexual girl, that's me, Kayla.

KELLY: And a non-binary, asexual, aromantic person, that's me, Kelly.

SARAH: Talk about all things to do with love, relationships, sexuality, and pretty much anything else we just don't understand.

KAYLA: On today's episode, aspec poetry.

SARAH AND KAYLA: Sounds Fake But Okay.

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SARAH: Welcome back to the pod.

KAYLA: Hello.

(laughter)

KAYLA: I didn't have anything good. Can you believe it? Two interviews, two in a row.

SARAH: Back to back. 

KAYLA: Treats for you

SARAH: We got so many aspec authors on the scene.

KAYLA: Yes, we're joined this week by Kelly Weber.

SARAH: Hold on, we have a small housekeeping.

KAYLA: Oh, sorry.

SARAH: The small housekeeping is that our book event is this week, when this pod comes out.

KAYLA: Yes, true. So if you're in DC, come see me in person and Sarah on a screen.

SARAH: Mhm

KAYLA: Links wherever you find them.

SARAH: (laughing) April 10th.

KAYLA: April 10th. It's free. You do have to RSVP, but come see us. Huzzah.

SARAH: Huzzah. 

KAYLA: Okay enough about us

SARAH: Alright, let's talk about things that are not nonfiction books.

KAYLA: Thank God.

SARAH: Fuck those informational garbages.

KAYLA: Don't need them. Today we are joined by Kelly, who has written an amazing poetry book that has many amazing aspec themes. So Kelly, do you want to say hello, introduce yourself?

KELLY: Yes. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here and even mentioning lots of nonfiction books. I'm so thrilled that we are, I think, getting more books on the market, which is lovely. And I hope that we can also continue to get more books in other genres, especially poetry, because I feel like there's not as much out there as I would hope and as I would want for with my little ace heart. So it's a pleasure to be able to be here today to be able to talk about it.

KAYLA: Yeah. No hate to nonfiction books.

SARAH: We wrote one.

KAYLA: We wrote one. Just want to preface that, but we've talked almost exclusively about nonfiction on the podcast lately. And I'm ready for change.

KELLY: There's also a beautiful new memoir that's out from Emma Bolden called The Tiger and the Cage from Soft Skull Press that is just stunning, that deals with aspec and is so beautiful. And having so many important things to say about reproductive rights and health care justice for so many folks. And so, yeah, absolutely no shame in nonfiction. It's such a beautiful genre as well.

KAYLA: Yeah, I'm going to have to look that one up. I haven't heard of that, I don't think.

SARAH: Me neither. We will look into that. So what is the name of your… Is it considered a book if it's a collection of poetry?

KAYLA: It's a book.

KELLY: It is. Yep. It is called We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. It came out in December of 2022 with Tupelo Press, who's a very lovely independent poetry press. And they've just been such a dream to work with throughout the process.

KAYLA: Yeah. Could you give us your pitch or what's on the back of the book for kind of what the book is about?

KELLY: Absolutely. So this is a book that is trying to find a lyric or lyricism or kind of a poetry for asexuality and aromanticism. And it's thinking about that in the context of an asexual, aromantic body who is very gendered by those around them, slash around her, there's both she and they pronouns in there, and thinking about a body subject to male gaze and patriarchal oppression. So it's about somebody who is speaker, as we would say in the poetry world, the speaker who is ace-aro and is navigating that in these very kind of rural landscapes where the speaker has been given all these narratives that are very much about the gender binary and about a particularly dogmatic view of scripture and religion, enforcing these gender binaries and allowing no space for queerness, for asexuality and aromanticism. And kind of through that process, the speaker is trying to find really kind of a way to express their asexuality and aromanticism separate from a lot of that. And so a lot of my goal in this book was to frame asexuality and aromanticism as not absence or lack

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KELLY: Or this kind of missing component of the speaker's life, but rather something very lush and very beautiful, which has been kind of my experience going through life as an ace aro person. And I find my life very full indeed, and not kind of this built around this absence, which I think, unfortunately, just through the words that are used, I think sometimes asexuality can be defined as something that's missing or absent.

KAYLA: Yeah, absolutely.

SARAH: Yeah, it's a lack is often the word used as well.

KAYLA: Yeah, I would love to start you kind of mentioned that your experience has not been that lack, it's been, you know, very robust and beautiful you're not lacking anything in your life. I would love to start just by kind of learning more about, like how you came into your identities as aspec and non-binary because I think I'm sure so much of that informed this work as well. I always just love hearing stories from people like how they realized asexuality and aromanticism were a thing and everything like that.

KELLY: Yeah, absolutely. And I think like so many folks coming up at least in my generation, it may be different now for Gen Z and younger generations but I certainly had no exposure to the terminology for aspec identities at all until my 20s. And I initially kind of came through it through social media. In fact I think it came through it through a social media post that was like 20 jokes you'll only understand if you're asexual, a post title that I later used to create a poem based around that title. That’s it's in a different book but because I found that so compelling. And I don't know what prompted me to click on that, but I was like oh asexual. I – immediately, I think something about the term resonated, and so I clicked on it and was reading through these different kind of memes and jokes about asexuality and already just through that I thought something is clicking here. So from there I went into a deep dive and thought oh yeah this is definitely me. So it then took another year for me to really kind of come to terms with the fact that I was queer and that this is a queer identity and this is the thing that you can indeed be. So that was around my mid to late 20s, close to my mid 20s. Prior to that, I remember even in like junior high high school when I would encounter the word asexual in connection with biology, even at the time I remember thinking like gosh if asexuality were a thing that would be me, you know, so it's like even when I didn't have the terms for it I had the experience kind of around that.

KAYLA: Yeah

KELLY: And once I kind of realized this is a valid identity and I could accept myself as queer from there I just started learning as much as I could about that, and aromanticism, and just kind of understand like where does, where's the community at there's a lot of discourse, I think both positive and negative in connection with aspec identities, but doing that was really helpful to just kind of find out where's the community at, where do I fit in that community. And, you know, that ultimately sort of led into this book. It took me longer to really understand my non binary identity again I had no exposure at all to the term non binary as a word. I grew up in very, very queerphobic and transphobic rural areas in Missouri and Nebraska. Missouri unfortunately is, I think, now officially passed a lot of transphobic laws and Nebraska is trying to at the moment. I fortunately did not grow up in a very fundamentalist Christian household but the communities I grew up in were very fundamental, very fundamentalist in a lot of ways and just very queerphobic. And so I didn't even know non binary was a thing until, again, my later 20s encountering it as a term and meeting more people who were non-binary. In fact, the, some of the first social media pages I followed were non-binary, aro, and ace pride kind of combined together. And so, when I was consuming the ace and aro content I was initially just there for that, but I was getting non binary pride bits and pieces as well and I was like I initially was just it was just enby was how it was shortened to in the group and I was like what's an enby and I felt so silly that I was like I don't know what that means. And so I had to do some research and always knew that I had kind of a tenuous connection at best to very traditional female womanhood gender roles, but didn't really I think do a ton of pressing into that until after I'd written through this book. And in many ways this book is kind of a grappling with daughterhood and about what that means. And so, in some ways

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KELLY: I feel like I had to kind of write through that in this book to then arrive at a place where I could start to kind of think about what even is gender for me where am I at on the gender spectrum? And then during lockdown, when I was in quarantine and my hair was getting long, and I was feeling increasingly dysphoric, I finally started to do more active research into where I might be at in terms of my gender. And so then that was kind of a long process from there with kind of accepting like okay, I think this is the label that best fits me my experience and, and who I am so very kind of long process over several years of coming to terms with both those things.

KAYLA: Yeah, I feel like that's how it is for so many people especially I think people that are, you know, millennials or like me and Sarah right on the cusp between Gen Z and millennials like we just didn't have that growing up like I think it's so much more common now for younger kids to see this stuff earlier. But yeah. I do love that you said that you know you kind of worked through those questions as you were writing and I feel like you really can feel that especially later in the book you talk a lot about like you said, the concept of like daughter and mother and you talk a lot about, not a lot, I guess, I don't know. You talk about like abortion and female anatomy and kind of you know the restrictions that people put on that. And it was just so interesting because going in I was like okay yeah like aspec poetry and then it was so much more than that as well which I really enjoyed. 

KELLY: Thank you. And I think, you know, part of what was interesting about the process of writing this book is that the book kind of started with just trying to find ways to write poems about asexuality and aromanticism, but as so often happens when you're writing a book or something kind of like this in a poetry collection. It kind of expanded into other concerns that I had around how has gender been taught to me, how has sexuality been taught to me? What narratives have I been allowed to live and to exist and what narratives have my family been allowed to live and exist in. And I think, exploring what daughtering quote unquote has meant for me and then being able to in many ways kind of move away from that or really dramatically genderqueer that has been, I think, a really lovely and freeing process in the process of writing the book and I think beyond after writing the book it kind of enabled me to kind of move forward and ask other questions from there.

KAYLA: Yeah, because those concepts are so connected, even if you don't think about it and you can see that so naturally in the book.

SARAH: That was exactly what I was going to say. It was just that you know, something that we've found additionally in writing our book was the more you dive into this, the aspec lens the aspec experience, the more it just becomes linked with gender.

KELLY: Mm. Yes

SARAH: Because, especially for someone who was assigned female at birth, and, you know, raised in that environment, like, your sexuality is so much related to your gender and the way people perceive that.

KELLY: Yes

SARAH: And so I think, you know, I love how it definitely dives into that, I love how this book talks about like being a daughter, and what that means I just think it's so it's so interesting and it's so it's so helpful to like be explicitly connecting those things.

KELLY: Thank you. I 100% agree they're so inextricable. You know I found that in the book it was hard for me to write about expectations around who I was supposed to marry, date, have an interest in growing up without all like talking explicitly about how that was interconnected with the way I was viewed as an object, you know the expectations that were built into the way I would be pursued, and it's a big kind of, I think fundamentalist term pursued by men was all bound up in these kind of pretty rigid norms around sexuality and the way I needed to be, which I think you know we were talking about, you know, how we kind of come to terms with things. I think it was only reaching adulthood that I look back and realized how different my experiences and puberty had been from friends who were allo, you know, because we would get to adulthood and start comparing notes and all my 20 something friends were like oh this, you know this this person was my sexual awakening and it was like oh, I never really had one of those, and whenever all my friends had crushes on people as a kid I always assume they were faking because it was 100% fake for me, anytime I would, you know, slightly fake an interest in somebody to fit in. So I kind of assumed everybody was just sort of making it up to fit in until we, you know, reached later teens and adulthood and realized oh no, they're not faking, I'm the one who's having a different experience here.

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KAYLA: Yeah, I feel like we did a whole episode, a couple weeks ago about like signs from your childhood that you were aspec because there was so much that came up of looking back of like, oh, hmm, yeah, I thought this was normal and everyone is saying that this isn't what they did. So that's weird.

KELLY: Yeah, 100% 100% very different experience very different. I think a lot about how strange and bizarre the concept of crushes and early relationships were to me until I suddenly had a framework as an adult, everything, everything suddenly made sense retroactively once I kind of have the framework as an adult.

SARAH: Like what do you mean you have a crush on someone as a fresh 10 year old? What?

KAYLA: So baby.

SARAH: Hello?

KAYLA: Switching gears. But you said part of this book was loosely based on like the metaphor of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon.

SARAH: You killed that. Very slowly.

KAYLA: I did it!

(Kelly laughing)

KAYLA: You've said that, but probably you said it correctly. Anyway. And you can see kind of, I had to go look up the myth myself because I'm very out of practice with my mythology. I'm sure Sarah is a lot more in tune with it

SARAH: Little bit

KAYLA: but – no?  So what was your kind of like thinking and bringing that in as a metaphor and kind of like what did that mean to you?

KELLY: I think one of the things that is very interesting about the myths we find in Ovid, for example, is how fluid the bodies are within it. I gave a reading recently where somebody commented on that fluidity and that really resonated with I think the interest I've had in them, and certainly we read so many of those myths also as very queer. So I think there's a lot of reasons in general that queer writers especially are very drawn on to those myths. And in the very earliest versions of this book, instead of thinking about Artemis I thought about the myth of Daphne, and the myth of Daphne is that she is being pursued, I believe by Apollo, if I remember correctly, and she ends up transforming or praying to be transformed into a tree in order to escape them as he is chasing her. And so she is transformed and we can see that pattern in other myths where there is some sort of aggressor and the object who is trying to escape that sort of harm transforms into something else and sort of has their, their body, sort of their bodily autonomy changed in this very sudden way in order to escape harm. And what I found was in the early versions of the book, it was the wrong place for the concern to land. It was the wrong story to kind of hold this particular concern. And so I went back into my particular translation of Ovid and was reading through and realized that the myth of Artemis and Actaeon had more what we would call heat in the central metaphor for a couple of reasons. One is that I think Artemis as a figure has been embraced by a lot of the ace community as kind of an asexual figure, which I didn't fully understand that until really kind of after I written this book and then I saw I guess how many places her name crops up on Tumblr too. 

KAYLA: (laughing) Yeah

KELLY: I think I've seen a lot of references to Artemis in there. And so I think that's one kind of key reason. The others and then in this instance when Actaeon is looking at her and my version of the poem he's explicitly doing it as somebody who's enacting male gaze. When he looks at her as she's nude, she's not the one who transforms to escape him, she causes him to transform. And I thought that was a much richer place for the book to really kind of center on for a variety of reasons. It flips the usual power dynamic, but then there's so much ambiguity and nuance and his transformation into a deer. And then in what other stories maybe kind of this transcendent moment of becoming a different animal is immediately followed by this very extremely violent event when he's torn apart by his own dogs. There was a myth I also read at a very young age it was like a book of like Greek myths for kids because they're so accessible for children with stories in them. And it was just like very shocking and I remember the illustration of the deer with the hounds rushing at him

SARAH: in a kids’ book?

KELLY: Yeah, there is there is no gore fortunately but it was like this very panicked looking like formerly 

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KELLY: human deer like with with lots of dogs rushing at him which you know again very appropriate for eight year olds. It was like perpetually on display in the sale section of Barnes and Noble. And it just yeah that. There are a couple other books like that they grew up with and I'm like, was that actually appropriate for children?  But I'm grateful to have encountered it early on because then it was really formative and useful later on to kind of explore the the many types of and the fact that his bodily autonomy is sort of changed or violated in some ways is very upsetting. I think there was just so much in that that had a lot of heat as a metaphor and so kind of the angle I ended up taking with that was Actaeon really becomes about the patriarchy more than an actual person. And the poem kind of starts off from his perspective in a lot of ways, looking at Artemis, and then by the end as he's kind of transforming and his body is changing into a different body, the patriarchy and the abstract concepts that he represents also kind of come apart at the seams he ceases to be like a coherent identity or person and becomes the more abstract concepts that he's made out of in this particular poem and so those were the  reasons that I kind of landed on that as a myth rather than the earlier Daphne there is a poem left in the book that I still have in there that engages with the Daphne myth. But I felt that the Artemis story was more helpful I think also for the images the book was cohering around which was more of the deer, and a lot of the deer hunting culture that I sort of grew up around, as opposed to the tree image with Daphne.

SARAH: Yeah, I wanted to ask about that because there definitely is recurring deer imagery throughout this book. Was that just inspired by, like the myth of Artemis and Actaeon was it something else that, you know, came, came out to you? You know,

KELLY: (laughing) No pun intended

KAYLA: (laughing) Hello, I'm ace! Hello!

SARAH: Hello! No, I'm just curious about how you landed on that as such a recurring theme. I mean it's in the title of the book.

KELLY: Yeah, I think it comes from many different sources. One is that I grew up in rural spaces that had a lot of deer in them. I grew up in Missouri and Nebraska certainly deer are very plentiful I'm sure they're plentiful in most, you know, areas of the country but they were really direct and close by especially Missouri they would run through the trees behind our home and there were does who would run by at a group and then bucks would scrape their antlers on the trees, right behind us and so it was like very, very present very direct and very close by. So certainly they were an animal that was always around. And something I've been thinking about kind of recently is those deer were in many ways enacting a very, how would I put this… a very kind of traditional sexual pursuit happening really close by in ways that felt very removed from my experience as an ace person but also very familiar as somebody who was at the receiving end of male attention and male gaze and who was expected to be quote unquote pursued. And also the rural communities I grew up in really prized deer hunting and extended members of my family who are big into deer hunting and again not an immediate practice with – within my immediate family, like within my household. But a lot of our extended family members do a lot of deer hunting and there's so much bound up within that culture. And with it, then I think a certain toxic masculinity with a lot of the men I knew who participate in that culture that felt, I think inextricable with the values of those communities I grew up in that were very much cisheteronormative and queerness was explicitly evil. All kinds of queerness were explicitly evil. And so I think because of that it was hard not to think about that in writing this book and thinking about a lot of these very kind of rural spaces and I'm interested in rural stories of queerness because it feels very different from the experiences folks in more urban areas may have of queerness. It certainly it feels very different from the experience of being a queer person in Fort Collins, then it does living in kind of these more rural kind of remove spaces out in the woods when I was in Missouri and kind of out in the very tiny town in Nebraska when I lived there. And so because of that I think these are the reasons that the deer come up over and over again. 

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KELLY: There's a lot of tension. There's different types of gender that are embodied by the deer. I think all of it was a central place for those big concerns of the book to land.

SARAH: Also deer are just everywhere. Like, I know that this doesn't necessarily apply.

KAYLA: Sarah has beef with deer.

SARAH: I have beef with deer. I – They killed one of our lilac trees at my parents house

KELLY: Oh no!

SARAH: because the bucks were rubbing their antlers against it

KAYLA: Sarah has a lot of thoughts about it

SARAH: and they killed a tree. And so, but I also think that's also just a good metaphor for like, all normativity. It's everywhere. You can't escape it. There it is. There's the fucking deer again.

KELLY: Oh, that's so true and they cause so many accidents. I mean so many accidents, you know, and it just constantly and it's like you seriously so many dead deer by the highland. There's so many dead deer by the highway. You know, it's like you can't drive without seeing one that's either been obliterated by a semi like near your house, or, you know, that is just like by the side of the road they really are everywhere and like you said they can cause so much destruction especially since so many of our natural predators have been extirpated from those places. It's a reason the deer can just go unchecked in a lot of these areas and cause so much damage. I’m also struck by how they look so fragile and pretty and delicate, but they will wreck you if you get close to them you know they can they can really cause you a ton of damage to you, to pets. Never an animal I would want to really get close to.

KAYLA: No, yeah Sarah and I both grew up in Michigan so we are very familiar.

SARAH: Those don’t veer for deer signs on the side of the road.

KAYLA: I really am – like that really does like strike me though because I also grew up in a very rural area, and we had like woods and there was deer everywhere. And I also have a lot of family that deer hunts and is, that's very much a part of their life so that really strikes me and I felt that coming through as I read as you described kind of like these rural landscapes and everything I was like, I know this place and I think you're also right rural queer stories are so different and I think also so often underrepresented people kind of you know they look at these more like red southern states and they kind of just say like oh well there's you know there's no hope for them they don't think about the activists that are living and working there the queer people that are trying to make it work there. And I think those stories just are kind of lost.

KELLY: I agree.

SARAH: The only version of it that they see is Brokeback Mountain. It's like it's Brokeback Mountain, or it's just conservatives who are secretly gay and 

KAYLA: Yeah

KELLY: Yeah

SARAH: repressing it like those are those are the things that they view and it's really so much more expansive than that when you're talking about the queer experience in rural communities

KELLY: That’s so true

SARAH: because obviously queer people are everywhere.

KELLY: Yeah, I saw something actually that said something just like that I wish I could remember. I think I saw most people saying this on social media because there is a Nebraska legislature representative who has been a member of legislation not sure her exact title who has been filibustering. For I don’t know how many days straight to hold up that anti trans bill, and

SARAH: she's holding up every single bill, she's holding up the entire legislature

KELLY: Yeah exactly and people were posting on social media in response to that from Nebraska saying we're you know we're so much more than just the quote unquote flyover state we're so much more than those particular narratives it's a diverse state there are many queer people here there are many people fighting for queer people here. And, you know, it's untrue to just kind of blanket statement say oh it's only these folks who live here because it's so much more than that.

SARAH: As someone who's from the Midwest, who now lives in Los Angeles. Sometimes the shit people say just pisses me off so much. It's just like no those are like actual people that live there, like it's yeah, and they have real genuine experiences and just because you're from one of the coasts doesn't make you, you know inherently better because y'all got problems too. I have thoughts on the matter. 

(laughter)

SARAH: Anyway. Also something that I was noticing as I was reading and forgive me for not having like a broader varied understanding of the poetry landscape. But the one thing that I do have the context of is the poetry collection Crushed by Richard Siken. And as I was reading I couldn't help but think about the parallels between his work and yours not necessarily in terms of content, but in terms of being a representative and transformative

(30:00)

SARAH: work in terms of aspec entities versus the gay experience that he writes about. 

KELLY: Mm

SARAH: I know you mentioned that, you know, when you were looking into writing this book, you realize that there wasn't a lot of representation actually this might have been before we started recording but you know that there's not a lot of aspec poetry in this landscape. So was that something that it was your goal to create something that represented this, or was it more so like you had to get these stories out of your system, and that's what it became or a little bit of both?

KELLY: I love Richard Saikin's work so much fact I right before I wrote this book I picked up his I believe his second collection, which I am blanking on the name of the title now but his work is so beautiful and it's such a great queer example. And when I, when I was writing the book I looked at plenty of other queer examples that I could find the queer experiences to, you know, because there wasn't like a always a direct poetry example I could find for thinking about asexuality I look at other queer authors and just kind of see like okay what can I learn from their work and the way that they're thinking about queer identity, and then think about those kind of skills in my own work. Certainly when I was writing, I did think about both the need I felt to be able to write about the experience that was what's kind of coming up naturally as I started writing these poems, but I did hope to be able to contribute to the burgeoning… let's say aspec kind of literary landscape with the caveat that I think a lot of the aspec media in general that we have is broadly over representative of white identities and so you know even though I'm very glad to have my collection published, you know, I myself am an extremely privileged white author as well. And we have miles and miles to go yet to make sure that the publishing field is just as diverse as the actual aspec individuals who are out there, and I think aspec community in general has been really dominated by white voices and so I'm glad to see more literature coming out and my hope is that even more diverse literature would come out after this and I hope that there's there's increasingly more and more, better representation for all types of voices and identities in our communities, and not just white perspectives.

SARAH: Even just looking at the, the aspec books that have come out recently, we've had we've talked to a lot of those people on the podcast we are some of those people, but it has been overwhelmingly white, you know, Sherronda J Brown's book came out which was delightful

KELLY: I loved that book

SARAH: but most of the other books that have come out in the recent months have been by white people. And I think that's something we grapple with as well because it's like we absolutely want to give a platform to these books, but we also don't want to be like, this is a white aspec pod, you know

KELLY: Yeah

SARAH: and so it's a delicate balance that I think the community as a whole kind of grapples with.

KELLY: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And it's, it's again it's nice to see, I hope that that continues to change and to open up in publishing although as we know so much publishing continues to be very white dominated and very well sis hat dominated. And I think, I think it's Vita publishes a lot of the good numbers on that every year and it can feel like nothing is changing, unfortunately, but I hope that that continues to happen as we go forward. We definitely need a much broader constellation of voices than just a few and trans poetics is the same way. And we've had some really like excellent poetry collections that have been published within the non binary trans community, and we need more that aren't just white voices as well. 

KAYLA: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of  kind of the poetry landscape and I feel like this is also a question very clearly coming from someone who's like not very educated in poetry, but I think to kind of like your layman or average person when you first think of poetry in general, the first thing that comes to mind is like, oh well love poem like they're oh they're so romantic.

KELLY: Yeah

KAYLA: Is that something that's difficult to grapple with as an aro person or are you so like, is that so like not even a thing to you because you know, obviously that that's not true.

KELLY: You know, I think, I think it's so ubiquitous within our field, I can't really even articulate the number of times I encountered the belief or statement or something somewhere about how you know the the love poem is so universal or it's this universal experience

KAYLA: there's a line about that in your book. I was so struck by that line. 

KELLY: And I think, you know

(35:00)
KELLY: even just like saying that one particular type of love poem is universal is already problematic because it's like universal for who that usually is a very white very cishet experience, but even separate from that, I am struck by how the sonnet form, for example, has historically often been a poem that's used for love poems. I believe it's Robert Hass who says, he quotes a different whose a name I unfortunately don't remember but in in his book a little book on form. He quotes another author says that one of the reasons the son it may be appealing is its resemblance to a human face and therefore it's really well suited for lovers and that's what makes the sonnet form appealing. But as, as somebody so rightfully pointed out in a recent queer poetics workshop I taught, the sonnet form is really about rhetoric and argument and the turn that that poem can take with arguments so it's not always historically about that. But I was struck by how much of that form’s history is about the love poem and how so often the love poem like gets its own kind of category. In fact I've got a book on forms and the love poem is its own particular category in there.

KAYLA: Gross

KELLY: And I'm, I'm struck by the ways that's usually just assumed that romantic love and sexual love are usually conflated with one another. And there's no really kind of deeper questioning of that, and so I'm equal parts frustrated with kind of the assumption that that's a really universal experience when it's really not or it's something that everybody experiences, when it's not. And also the ways in which a love poem can only be about romantic or sexual love and I, I know that there are I think lots of good poems out there that fortunately are about platonic love and I think to there needs to be more. I think it was a poet named Dorothy Chan and I think Chen Chen who who both called for more friendship love poems you know more poems that celebrate other people in our life just as much as traditional romantic and or sexual love poems or allosexual poems as well and so I think and there's lots of beautiful poems that are about sexual love romantic love but I think it's important to have space for that to not be a kind of experience that resonates with everybody. And for that to be expanded into lots of platonic types of love too. I would love to see more platonic love poems because I think it's such an important but also maybe not as much written into kind of genre for poetry.

SARAH: Yeah, I also think that runs parallel to the kind of lack of non romantic or sexual just songs. 

KELLY: Yes. Yes.

KAYLA: Yeah

SARAH: Because you know I mean I mean music is absolutely a form of poetry and so I think those two things just kind of run parallel to each other 

KELLY: Yeah

SARAH: and I would like to see more platonic love poems and I would like to see more platonic love songs and I have

KAYLA: I know one that's coming out. I'm so it's not coming out yet and I also don't remember what it's called.

SARAH: Thanks. So helpful. 

KAYLA: But there's this, there's this singer I think peach PRC or PCR. Anyway, she's like a pop artist, but she has this new album coming out that she's promoting and it's this song about like, oh, what if we were bugs together like oh I think we knew each other when we were dinosaurs basically about like soulmates or whatever.

KELLY: Aw

KAYLA: And then she made a video saying like, yeah, you might think this song is romantic but actually I was high as fuck with my friend, thinking about how much I loved my friend and how I thought we knew each other, thousands of years ago as dinosaurs and I was like yes. High friends being dinosaurs. Yes.

KAYLA: I think that's so true and I think that needing a video to explain or making a video to explain that really resonates with me. My second book is about sapphic queerplatonic relationships and friendships, and I realized it was hard to find ways, especially in a poem where you're really not trying to like give somebody a nonfiction description of things. How to make it clear like in some of these cases I'm really just talking to friends you know it's not about, like an ace, like a traditional sexual or romantic kind of love it's ace and it's friendship and it's all these things, making that legible for a non aspec audience was really hard. And in some ways I found ways to label it explicitly to make sure that that was upfront. And sometimes I have to kind of let go like it's not going to be legible always for the non aspec identities and that's just kind of how it is, until we think we have more asexual, aromantic, aspec literacy. We may not always have those tools, unfortunately, for kind of reading for reading poems that way. But yes, so all the friendship stuff 

(40:00)

KELLY: and what you're saying with with songs is so true. It took me a long time to really enjoy music because I found so many songs, unrelatable, you know I listened to a lot of instrumental stuff growing up, partly because I love movies but also, I think so many songs my friends were into I would sometimes appreciate the melody, or the lyrics from like a more abstract angle like I believe you guys to that episode on reinterpreting a lot of those love songs from a new from an ace perspective which I really related to. But oftentimes I've appreciated a lot of songs from a craft perspective or a persona perspective, more than I have finding it really relatable I am a very late Swiftie, because so much for early work was about you know these things that were supposed to be so universal about being, you know, quote unquote a teen girl and whatever that was supposed to mean. And all of it was really unrelatable because it was just very different from my kind of lived bodily experience and you know it's only now as an adult that I appreciate the back catalog from a writing perspective a lot more even as it's like oh yeah I never went through all the universal kind of like breakup experiences, and first love especially like pining over a boy like so unrelatable in so many ways. So, yeah, it's a challenge to kind of, to I think find those kind of examples of like, oh hey if you find it very strange and unrelatable hearing about these sorts of experiences. Here's alternatives to that.

KAYLA: Did that make it hard for you to get into poetry at all in a similar way?

KELLY: You know, I desperately wanted to be a novelist when I was a kid this is my big dream when I was 12 was to like, write the next dragon fantasy series and which also feels very asexual.

KAYLA: Yeah

SARAH: (laughing) Yeah

KELLY: And for like throughout my teen years, I was just like, I just want to write this dragon book for like tour fantasy or something and then I discovered that, unfortunately I don't like plot character dialogue.

KAYLA: (laughing) That does make it tough

KELLY: It's like, it's pretty tough if you're if you don't enjoy writing those things you can write maybe more experimental fiction but even then, oftentimes your next kind of closest corollary to that is poetry so unfortunately I feel like I came into poetry by default, and I would take poetry classes and folks around me were like, I think maybe you should consider doing this you seem a little bit better at it. And then I would desperately try to write the stepper fiction class and people were like, um, okay try again. That was, that was, yeah, okay.

SARAH: It was a good effort.

KELLY: It was a good effort. Maybe try again. And then over time, the more I did poetry, I also had very little exposure to it in high school and early years beyond kind of the basic like the feels like 10 poems that everybody teaches like an old dead white guys right 

KAYLA: Yeah

KELLY: your Robert Frost and not that there's not valid craft things with that but it's also like, no, no digging further into very problematic legacies of those authors, etc. But outside of that, so I really had not a ton of interest in poetry, until really college when I had like actual good teachers who were poets who were like, let me give you some contemporary queer literature or you know like stuff that's… actually like resonates with contemporary experience that's not a dead white guy, it was like –

KAYLA: Yeah

KELLY: Oh okay well this is more interesting. And then from there, you know, it was kind of a rapid process of discovering more and more like oh this is really interesting like I really love concrete detail that was something I always liked in writing of putting in a detail like that and so you know my way in I think, I think that was one thing I did notice in the difference between how I came into poetry and how some of my friends came into poetry was they were like it I wrote a lot of like break up poems or I like processed a lot of my romantic relationships through poetry and listening to a lot of those songs. And, you know, my initial exposure to poetry was like well if I can't write about dragons because it's a very limited, limited thread you can write on for poems. What am I going to write about? I just didn't have a lot of those kind of similar experiences to my peers and so it took me a long time to kind of figure out what that was and one of my, one of my very favorite poets and one of the first poets I read when I got into poetry Sharon Olds, who writes these really beautiful very frank poems about the body. And for her like very open sexuality, but I think it was all about the very bodily experience of what it's like to go through menstruation and to go through these things that just like certainly were not in any of the Robert Frost poems I've read like, in no way was somebody's diaphragm 

(45:00)

KELLY: and somebody's used tampon in a Robert Frost poem and so it was like world-shaking that she could do these things and then I think just through that and like slowly writing I managed to kind of find my own way in that wasn't through more traditional kind of listening to a lot of pop songs and that kind of stuff when I was growing up.

KAYLA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense thinking about the friends I have that like write poetry very casually, like thinking about the things they write about like it's all allo shit.

(laughter)

SARAH: Not the allo shit

KAYLA: No hate to that, you know, that's what they're writing about.

SARAH: I have a friend who got her master's degree, partially in. I mean I don't think her master's degree says poetry on it, but it's so it

KAYLA: you can – that’s a thing you could have

SARAH: I don't, I don't. Well, it doesn't just say poetry, like it's not just like you have a master's degree in poem

KAYLA: it would be an MFA.

SARAH: But, and so like I've seen some of her work and like it is. It's so refreshing to see work that is not just about like romance and I'm like, fuck it up. Give me more. And I have another I have another friend who writes poetry and they're non binary and so like their, their poetry also really reflects that experience and I'm like, fuck it up. I want to see that shit. Fuck it up. Give me that shit.

KELLY: There's so many good collections to about like, oh, there's a great collection by Jake Skeets called Eyes Bottle dark with a Mouthful of fFowers that has a lot of poems in there about just like these beautiful poems about queer romantic and sexual love that are just stunning and there's so many collections that do do that well. And as you say it's so nice when when they’re collections about things besides that and I think there's lots of really wonderful books out there that explore all sorts of things you know sometimes outside of relationships or exploring other types of topics, and it's… but I love when we can also find the poems where it's like somebody is talking about friendship or somebody's talking about these other things, you know where it's not just. I take a lot of issue with romantic and sexual love as a hierarchy, you know where it's like these certain types of relationships are a are at the top of the pyramid of relationships which I think is just kind of problematic from my experience.

KAYLA: Yeah. Absolutely. And you can see that come out in media and not just poetry but also songs and TV and movies like you can just see that meet that hierarchy so ingrained and so it is so annoying for like people like you and Sarah who like that's your career, but you're also aspec like, I'm sure that that is just very grating.

SARAH: I hear one more thing about how this needs a love triangle

KAYLA: she'll die

SARAH: My boss loves to bring up love triangle. 

KELLY: I just can’t

SARAH: And me and my other coworker are like, look, sometimes, sometimes, if it if it's organic, okay, but we don't need to just like we don't – No.

KELLY: Yeah, yeah, 100%.

SARAH: No, but now I'm just thinking about my friend who writes poetry and a lot of it is so much like platonic and familial love and I'm like, oh, yeah. Anyway, Kayla, did you have any other questions you wanted to hit on?

KAYLA: I think I asked. I think I asked them all.

SARAH: I think you did too

KAYLA: I think I did all I asked all the things I wanted to.

SARAH: I have two statements that aren't questions.

KAYLA: Oh okay. I would love to hear your statements. 

SARAH: The one I wrote the section about a pap smear, the crown of screws felt. And then the other comment I wrote was raw af. 

KELLY: (laughing) Thank you. Thank you. I gave a reading in Seattle I was there for AWP conference a few weeks ago and somebody like stopped me outside of this place where I'd given a reading and they're like, your poems are just so honest and that was, I love hearing that from folks that it was honest or really felt those are the things that I think I most I most hope the work can do is for it to be, especially for folks who need that who need representation or who to find their experiences reflected on the page, because there's always going to be folks who are like asexuality I can't relate to that at all. You know there's gonna be plenty of folks who find that on the page but I'm always really happy to hear when it's resonated with folks in that particular way and it's felt feels reliable I'm sad that some of these experiences, unfortunately with things like the pap smear do feel relatable, but I'm also really glad that the page connects with folks in that way. So thank you.

(50:00)

KAYLA: Raw af. I cannot recommend this enough, especially to a specs that were raised as female, like it was there was just so much that's fairly relatable and especially as someone who doesn't have a habit of reading poetry a lot, I was like, man, I gotta get into poetry. Shit slaps. 

KELLY: Thanks

KAYLA: So, it really, I recommend it highly to everyone who's listening it's so, so good.

SARAH: Yeah, please tell the kids at home, including me, where this book can be bought.

KELLY: Absolutely. So, Tupelo Press you can buy it directly from their website that's T-U-P-E-L-O Tupelo Press and they've got it on their website it's also I think it most major book retailers I know I've seen it on Barnes and Noble for example I believe it's also on bookshop.org now as well.

KAYLA: The best one 

(snapping)

KELLY: I think probably most of your favorite independent bookstore retailers, hopefully, should carry I think I even saw it on Walmart.com at one point 

KAYLA: Ooh

KELLY: which is wild but fun. It's on Walmart, you can add it to your list next to like chicken. Yeah, I think you can find it in most of those places. And, yeah. 

SARAH: Wherever fine books are sold. 

KAYLA: Yes, I'll try to add a link. 

SARAH: And also bad books but it's a fine book. It falls into the fine book category.

KAYLA: I'll try to add a link to the bookshop.org page in the description of this podcast so everyone can go find it.

KELLY: Thank you.

SARAH: Amazing. Alright. Well, is there anything else you want to say about it that we didn't hit on in our conversation.

KELLY: I don't think so. My social handles are at Kelly Weber poet on Instagram and Twitter. And so those are the best places typically to connect with me, if anybody wants to follow and I typically post pretty regularly on both of those with poem excerpts and new poems that I have coming out in journals. So it's a good place to kind of get a feeling for the types of poems that are in the book as well.

SARAH: Nice. 

KAYLA: Yeah, and you've mentioned your other works. Do you have something else coming out soon. Are you working on all of their things? What should we be looking up?

KELLY: Yeah

KAYLA: I know I hate getting asked this question. I'm sorry to ask it to you. I realized that but SARAH: what's next?

KELLY: I, my second book comes out with Omni Dawn press this October, and that dives into core platonic sapphic friendship platonic relationships.

KAYLA: I will be reading that

KELLY: I also know the thing where I was like I can't find anything about this specifically you know it was like how how to talk about like I love you in a soul platonic that kind of way it was really hard finding examples of that. And so I wrote that book and also there's some homes in there about gender identity and being non binary and so that is coming out this October. And that will be, I think, also out probably wherever, wherever books are sold in October I'm sure there will be preorder links but I'll be sure to post all things pre order and social media and poems ahead of that on my social handles. 

SARAH: Does it have a title, or is it still 

KELLY: oh yes that's probably good to share. So it's called you bury the birds in my pelvis, and 

SARAH: Ooh

KELLY: that's forthcoming in October, and I'm excited for that to come out some of the poems from it are coming out now in journals and back one that I think will be coming out very shortly in the next week or two and some others that are set to come out in the next few months so that's a good way to get a feeling for the book and the types of poems that it dives into.

SARAH: Wonderful.

KAYLA: Excellent. I see a cat in your background.

SARAH: Me too it’s very exciting.  Alright. Kayla. What is our poll for this week. Have you bought Kelly's book, and if not, why not. What's your problem.

KAYLA: Do you like deer, or like Sarah, do you have a vendetta?

SARAH: I –  now I'm thinking do I hate deer or geese more?

KELLY: Oh

KAYLA: I've definitely heard you complain about deer, a lot more than geese.

KELLY: There is a goose –

SARAH: But geese

KELLY: that hangs out to the near the entrance of my apartment complex, like an after school bully who wants my lunch money and he's always there when I get home from work. And he hisses at me and I have to kind of like, do my own little like what at him every time I go by

KAYLA: What a bitch

KELLY: so he doesn't come after me. Gosh, I've been threatened by way more geese I feel like than I have by deer. 

KAYLA: Yeah, they're much more hostile.

SARAH: I feel they're, they're, they're more of an aggressor than 

KAYLA; I think maybe that should be the poll. Who do you hate more geese or deer. When's your geese poetry collection coming out. Just a quick question. 

SARAH: And for the record

(55:00)

SARAH: I don't know about y'all but I'm talking about Canadian geese. Yeah, Canadian geese are the devil. That's the worst thing to come out of Canada.

KAYLA: Yeah, I was just gonna say so unlike the people of Canada.

SARAH: (laughing) I was hanging out with some Canadians last night and they were nothing like Canadian geese.

KAYLA: Bitches. 

KELLY: Oh, it's true. It's true. Oh, yeah. 

SARAH: Alright. Alright, some, they're, they're gonna be a poll. You'll find it. 

KAYLA: There’ll be a poll somewhere

SARAH: Kayla, what is your beef and your juice for this week.

KAYLA: My beef is that it's Sunday which means tomorrow is Monday, I feel like this was my beef last time.This is what we get for recording on a Sunday because then tomorrow is Monday and I don't want to work. 

SARAH: No one wants to Monday.

KAYLA:  No. My juice is that we finally after like six months of living here put up some wall decorations in our living room so it looks like people actually live here now. And the paint by number painting I've been working on for also perhaps six months is almost done. So that will also go on the wall. It's really big. Okay, it's like 

SARAH: it is. I've seen it. It's very big

KAYLA: and that's in the, in the numbers are so small. Okay?  So it's not me. I've put so many hours of work into this and it just keeps not being so

SARAH: sometimes you'll text me and you'll be like, I just spent four hours.

KAYLA: And it’ll be on like this much like the other day, I can't even describe to you, I can't even describe how many hours have gone into this and how not done it is. It's shocking. Anyway

SARAH: amazing. 

KAYLA: That's it for me.

SARAH: my beef is that Bogey the cat yesterday unprovoked ruthlessly chomped my hand,

KAYLA: you got

SARAH: and it started bleeding, and it's like right it's between my thumb and my forefinger, right where my hand bends 

KAYLA: Oh in the pit.

SARAH: Yeah, so it's not great. My other beef is that I also ripped one of my nails off and picked it a bunch of skin during this podcast. 

KAYLA: And I love that for you

SARAH: shouldn't have done that.

KAYLA: Mental illness

SARAH: My juice is D day, Agust D album D day announced today, it's coming out. The first the first release will be out by the time this podcast is out whiplash Hello, what? That's all.

KAYLA: Okay.

SARAH: Kelly. Oh, what is your beef and your juices. 

KAYLA: So what a great question. I think my beef is that I forgot about meal prep until today and it is also Sunday and at the end, and I'm realizing, I'm going to need to do some meal prep tonight which is not the end of the world, but it is also just a task, a task that I find really annoying to do. Every time I do it it's like I'm surprised all over again like, oh, I need to eat so much as a person, like, again, you know, it's like, anyway

SARAH: why do I have to keep eating.

KELLY: Yeah exactly. I feel like I have to keep doing this thing over and over and over again. It's fine. We all very complicated opinions about meal prep at work and I guess but complicated a lot of us don't like doing it and get frustrated by it but

KAYLA: fair.

SARAH: I have to go grocery shopping today. Not enthused about it. I have no food like it's not an option, like I have to. 

KAYLA: Yikes.

SARAH: I hate that. Hate that for both of us. Yeah. 

KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. My juice is that I will be returning back to work in the office later this week. In the sense that it's my juice to be able to get back into a normal routine I've been recovering from top surgery for the past few weeks, and I'm gradually getting my, my arm and chest mobility back at least a little bit I still can't lift very much. But I think the more I kind of get back into a normal routine again the more kind of comfortable I feel? I feel very decentered anytime I'm off my routine even a little bit 

KAYLA: Oh same

KELLY: and it's been like way off my routine for a few weeks. So I think it'll be nice to kind of feel like I'm in my normal way more the routine and more used to, which I think will be a nice thing to return to. 

KAYLA: That's very exciting. I love a routine, personally.

KELLY: Same. Yeah. 

KELLY: Alright.

SARAH: And congrats on the top surgery.

KAYLA: Yeah, that's very exciting. 

KELLY: Thank you.

SARAH: Alright. You can tell us about your beef or juice, answer our poll, tell us your favorite thing about Kelly's book on our social media @SoundsFakePod. We also have a Patreon, patreon.com slash SoundsFakePod where you can support us if for some reason you feel like that's something you want to do. I'm going to throw it to Sarah from the future to read the patrons. Hopefully, she'll do a better job than she did last week. Hello, it is Sarah from the future here with your patrons. If you want to become a patron, you can do that at patreon.com/SoundsFakePod. There there are perks.

(01:00:00)

SARAH: It's like unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks, except also nothing like that. Thank you to our $2 patrons. We don't have any new ones this week. I just wanted to thank you. I think you guys rock. You're the best. Our $5 patrons who we are promoting this week are Adam Klager, Alex Istar, Al – hello Alex. Hello? Oh, I can't hear myself because I didn't properly plug my shit in. Where's my where's my cord? Y'all. I said that I was going to do it with the mic this week and I did. But at what cost? Please hold. Going to be honest with you, I don't even know if that recorded properly. It's not sounding right in my ear. Wait, I still can't hear myself. What's going on? Help. Y'all, I'm so mad. I swear to God. I just want you to know that my mic was being a little weird. So I was like, Oh, let me do what like the company told me to do when they finally answered my email. Like two weeks later. And then three days later, were like, why haven't you answered us? Yes. And I was like, girl, you took like two weeks to answer me. Calm down. Anyway, I did the things they asked me to to like check and make sure everything was working. And it actually made it stop working. So I am now having to record this on my phone after all. Everything is so chill and fun. Okay, where were we? Our five dollar patrons, Adam Klager, Alex Istar, Aliceisinspace, Amanda Kyker, and Ariel Laxo. Our ten dollar patrons who are promoting something this week are Potater, who would like to promote potatoes, Purple Hayes who would like to promote their friends; podcast, the Host Club, Barefoot Backpacker, who would like to promote their podcast, Travel Tales from Beyond the brochure, Ruby, who was a new patron last week and would like to promote their blog and Instagram @ASpeculations. We love a little, little wordplay there. And SongofStorm, who would like to promote a healthy work life back. Life balance. Our other ten dollar patrons are the Steve, Zirklteo, Arcnes, Alyson, Benjamin Ybarra, David Harris, Derick and Carissa, Elle Bitter, my aunt Jeannie, Maggie Capalbo, Martin Chiesl and Mattie. Our fifteen dollar patrons are Andrew Hillum, who would like to promote the Invisible Spectrum podcast, Changeling and Alex the Ace cat, which wait, did I ever? Hold on. I'm so sorry for the way that I am. Well, if Changeling did tell us, certainly didn't do it on Patreon, which checks it out. I feel like you would do that on Discord. I'm sorry. Anyway, you're still promoting StarshipChangeling.net. ClickforCaroline, who would like to promote Ace of Hearts. Dia Chappell, who would like to promote Twitch.tv/MelodyDia. Hector Murillo, who would like to promote friends that are supportive, constructive and help you grow as a better person. John Young, question mark. Keziah Root, who would like to promote people who come into your life for the fall time, but just when you need them. Maff, who would like to promote catching up on the podcast after two years. Nathaniel White, who would like to promote NathanielJWhiteDesigns.com. Kayla’s Aunt Nina, who would like to promote Katemaggart.Art. No, KateMaggartArt.com. And Sara Jones, who is @Eternalloli everywhere. Our twenty dollar patrons are Sabrina Hauck, Christmas and Dragonfly, who would like to promote mics that work. Please. Okay, back to Sarah from the past. Wow, thanks Sarah from the future. That was maybe good, maybe bad. I don't know. Okay, that's it. Kelly, once again, can you just repeat your handle where people can find you?

KELLY: Yeah, I am at Kelly Weber Poet. That's K-E-L-L-Y-W-E-B-E-R. So Kelly with the Y and Weber with one B. Kelly at Kelly Weber Poet on Instagram and on Twitter.

SARAH: Follow them now.

KELLY: And theoretically, I've got some kind of handle on TikTok with no content posted and maybe never any content posted, depending on what happens with the restrict act. So yeah, save the username. 

SARAH: Depending on if they fucking ban the entire app in this whole country. Anyway, that's a beef. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much again, Kelly, for joining us and for writing this delightful, delightful book of poetry. Tune in next Sunday for more of us in your ears.

KAYLA: And until then, take good care of your cows.

(01:04:15)