Whether in serial bullying, the joshing of friendship, or the post-trauma epithets that cut and remain tender in life, the names we call one another really matter. Far beyond the locker-linedhallways of high school, these slurs can take on power and rob the recipient of the fundamental agency of self-naming. Katie Beswick’s new collection of poems explores these realities by going mano-a-mano with an old term of derision for women—taken from what is to be cast off from smelting of metals. This gendered put-down is her material and she works it with all the skills of a theater artist, writer, and scholar with the energy and ability to explore naming with great inventiveness.

I’ve always gravitated to poetry. I remember writing in high school for the literary journal. Then, in college, I started taking creative writing courses, specifically poetry ones and even changed my major to English from Anthropology—primarily because I had taken an Intro to Poetry writing course and loved it.
I realized I had to do this for better or worse.

There was nothing about my upbringing, on the surface, that would have prepared me for the life I was going to lead—one that now seems fated because of the way I went after my interests, which were not the interests of the people around me. I read constantly. I checked out recordings of Broadway musicals. I was interested in performance.

That realization that over the course of my conscious, known life, I had spent less than 24 hours with my mother, did not occur to me until very late in the writing and editing process. That realization changed the writing of the book, it changed the arc of the book, it made the book what it is. Which is wild, because it’s a very simple thing: how much time have I actually spent with her?

I love writing about animals and nature. I write about animals as well in my short fiction, and it just occurred to me that Dolores is an octopus. Octopuses change color. I love octopuses and am fascinated by them. That was where I went initially with that image. Then I started thinking about who it was that was telling us this, who it is that’s observing this. Why is she interested in this?

I birthed twins this year. That’s how it has been with three of my poetry collections, each written alongside a novel. They weren’t published together, but Jubilee and Landscape with Headless Mama are twins, Trinity Sight and Rosa’s Einstein are twins, and Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon are twins. In both the poetry collection and in the novel, I am healing bloodlines of mother-daughter.

I feel like I took a relatively non-traditional path to where I’m at right now. I think it involved a little bit of ignorance early on in my writing career. When I say that, I mean, I never planned on being a writer in the traditional sense of like, “I want to get a book published.” I wanted friends, I wanted to engage with people, and I wanted community.

Lovato: I had several original titles, one of which was Digging for Salvation. Another one was Américan with an accent on the E because I stopped calling myself American long ago. As you read my book, you’ll discover I saw some horrific things done with the support of America…

Because of the fact that I did my MFA in fiction, I actually hadn’t read that many memoirs. But then I started as a staff writer for Buzzfeed News in the fall of 2015, and one of the first pieces that I wrote for them was a genre review of trans women’s memoirs. That was when I became interested.