Ask The Author: Kejt Walsh

Just how tall is Charles Wright? What shouldn’t you put up your nose? Should we all move to Eugene, Oregon right now? Find out this all of this and more in our interview with Kejt Walsh from the August issue.

1. When I read George, I kept picturing someone sewing my face shut. It felt bad, yet seemed awesome. Have you ever put a needle in your actual face? Do you like needles?

I have never put a needle in my actual face, but I did once put a bead up my nostril to see what I would look like with a nose ring. The bead got stuck; my mom called 911; paramedics came. I got the bead out by blowing my nose. This is the only story that I can think to tell when people ask about my most embarrassing moment, as it might have been the only time I’ve ever been truly humiliated.

2. Could you be with someone who had a great personality but was a terrible kisser? Would you try to teach them or what?

Kissing can’t be taught, only developed. If I was dating a bad kisser, I’d take them to a workshop where fifteen people would kiss them in a row and then offer feedback- what’s working, what is falling flat- while my dating person sat silently and listened.

3. What’s Eugene, OR like? What’s the lit scene there?
Eugene is blue and green and gray. Sometimes I eat vegan cashew butter ice cream out of paper cups. It’s cold and I walk in the rain a lot. It hasn’t been raining the past two months because it’s still considered summer in the Northwest, which means the sun is actually out and there are no clouds. It’s gorgeous.

I saw Charles Wright do a reading in an art museum but the room was too full and a fire code violation, so they put dozens of people in an empty gallery and we listened to Charles Wright over the PA system while we stared at blank walls. I liked the really gentle way he pronounced “poem” to sound like “po-eem,” and that I didn’t know what he looked like or how short he was until after the reading. I don’t really know any writers in Eugene.

4. Clotho was one of the Fates in charge of the threads of destiny, she also helped create the alphabet. What do you think the connection between fate and language is?

The connection must be that as we weave ourselves an identity and history through language, we determine and construct our destiny. I think a lot about the power of narratives and naming. I think more than being just a sexual preference, a word like “lesbian” is used to indicate the larger narrative that a person’s life falls under.

5. Reading your poem aloud is a real mouth workout. you’re playing with a lot of sounds. Did this poem start with liking the way something sounded together or was it the image that begat it? or something else?

“George” is an ekphrastic poem about a portrait of George Tooker taken by the photographer George Platt Lynes. In the poem, I was really trying to grapple with the homoeroticism that Platt Lynes’ portrait conveys and the significance of that.

6. Are you now or have you ever been madly, MADLY in love?

Isn’t every poem written by someone who has fallen madly in love?