I felt pretty honored that Essay was selected to be in WP’s January bundle of books in their Small Press Subscription Program! Their incentive for starting the subscription program is to offer assistance to publishers affected by Small Press Distribution's closure.
Q: If your book were an animal, what would it be? Why?
A: I'm going to go with the obvious and say a cow. I just visited Woodland Pattern and my book was on display with two other books that had cows on the cover (mine has one of Peter Hujar's photographs of a cow) but as far as I could tell only my book is literally about cows and the material lives of individuals in a specific dairy herd. I want people to know that the cow isn't a metaphor or symbol and to understand that the animals we eat have emotional lives and social structures. Our knowledge system obscures animal lives--if we are conscious of those epistemic forces I think we would make different decisions as consumers.
Q: What is one unexpected question that surfaced as you were writing?
A: The more I wrote Essay, the more I wanted to learn about bovines. So I wrote another book that attempts to bring together poetry and ethnography called Dispatches that I haven't tried to publish yet. The question was, how can I do more work with cows, what can that look like? So now I am in a Masters program in Anthrozoology and bovines are my focus species.
Q: What would your child/teenage self think of this book?
A: Ha! I am my teenage self for better or for worse! We all love the book. When I think about what I was writing about as a young person, my family, I realize that all 12 of my books are still about family--they each represent a widening. We love that.