“Community is such an important part of being a writer!” says author and editor Lilly Dancyger in her FPP Interview and I couldn’t agree more. Read her thoughts on women’s anger, her upcoming memoir Negative Space, and her advice for emerging writers, then hear her read live with Sam Perkins, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Sarah Van Arsdale, and Mimi Wong this Sunday at Silvana from 6-8pm. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Books sold by Word Up! Books. Admission is free. Please RSVP via Eventbrite here.  – SPL

Sophia Shalmiyev calls Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger “a potent literary offering…glorious, punk as hell, and utterly necessary.” As editor, you wrote that despite soliciting work on women’s anger, you sometimes had to prod writers to allow that anger come across unrestrained on the page. What did you learn about women’s anger and its expressions while editing this book?

I think the most important thing I learned—which I guess I always knew, but editing this anthology really drove it home for me—is that there really is no way to get rid of anger by denying it, or shoving it down. In so many of the essays in Burn It Down, the writers talked about what happened when they tried to deny their anger—and it always found another way to come out. It came out as sadness, or illness, or guilt, but it always came out. The only real way to stop anger from having power over us is to acknowledge it, accept it, and learn to harness it.

You’re the founder and host of Memoir Monday. You’ve served or continue to serve as a contributing editor, writing instructor, columnist, and assistant books editor. You’ve proven yourself to be a devoted and significant literary arts community builder.  What has this work taught you over the years? How has it informed your own writing?

Community is such an important part of being a writer! There are definitely times when it feels cliquey, or tiring, and it can sometimes be hard to balance the extrovert work of going out to events and connecting with other writers with the quieter work of actually writing… but I think it’s such a misconception that writers are solitary creatures. Sure, sometimes you have to lock yourself in your apartment for a week and wear dirty pajamas and tune out everything other than the draft you’re writing, but talking to other writers, reading other work, seeing what’s out there and the conversations people are having—that’s how you grow!

Finding community has made my work so much better because it’s made me aware of the conversations that my work fits into. Paying attention to what else is out there has helped me see what’s possible for my own work—what groundwork has been laid for me, and what I can add. It’s essential, truly.

Carmen Maria Machado selected your memoir Negative Space as a Sante Fe Writers Project winner, to be published in 2021. Tell us about this book and what the process has been like for you to-date.

Negative Space is a braided hybrid memoir—it’s the story of my father’s life, art, heroin addiction, and death; and it’s the story of the decade that I spent uncovering his story by interviewing people who knew him, reading his notebooks and letters, and engaging with the imagery of his work. It’s been a long, long process—I started writing this book when I was still in undergrad, it was rejected more than 50 times over 5 different rounds of submissions to agents and small presses. I cancelled a book deal and fired an agent along the way. And then I did one last major overhaul revision and I told my husband, “I think this is it. If it doesn’t land somewhere this time, I’m gonna have to put it in a drawer and move on.” And so of course that was when Carmen selected it! I am so grateful to her, and to the whole SFWP team who have been absolutely incredible so far. I am a small press evangelist—and not just because I’m also a small press editor! I really do love the flexibility and the dedicated attention you get with a small press.

What advice would you give emerging writers today?

Get on Twitter. Don’t get sucked into the political nightmare side of it, but use it to find writers who are coming up through the muck with you—and writers who are where you hope to be. Go to readings, introduce yourself to people in the audience and to the readers. Tell writers whose work you admire that it resonated with you. Read contemporary writers! The classics are great but your work is not going to be in direct conversation with the classics—get to know your peers. Identify a few publications, editors, and reading series that feel like really good fits for the work you want to do, and then get to know them. Read your goal publications, attend your goal readings series. Just get yourself out there into the thick of it.

Thank you to Max S. Gordon, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, David Tomas Martinez, Ed Morales, Nara Milanich, and Sarah Van Arsdale for blowing us away last Sunday, November 10th. Still thinking about your readings. Thank you to our audience. Thank you to Word Up! for the bookselling. Thank you to Silvana for hosting. And thank you to former curator and digital editor Melody Nixon for joining us. See you in 2020!

In this 2019 FPP Interview with Max S. Gordon, he shares with us his conviction that only poetry can fight vulgarity, that real poetry “makes sure that evil doesn’t have the last word.” Hear Gordon read live tonight at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. He’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, David Tomas Martinez, Nara Milanich, Ed Morales and Sarah Van Arsdale. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

In your recent essay on Ava DuVernay’s four-part Netflix series on the Exonerated Five, When They See Us, you describe what you call “12 Years a Slave Syndrome,” or the refusal of some of us to watch movies that we fear will be more traumatizing than redemptive. You make a strong and beautiful case for watching When They See Us. What still stays with you?

What gives me hope is that despite all that is wrong, there is still a lot of creativity. We are hearing more from voices we haven’t heard from before. And truths are being told, lies uncovered. I felt this way when I watched the series, When They See us.

I believe that part of what has been so difficult over the last four years is that we, as a country, under the leadership of this man, have moved deeper into vulgarity.  It isn’t like we weren’t warned. The comments about Mexicans being rapists, The Obama/Birther “movement”, and “Grab ‘Em By The”…, are all individually obscene – each comment mortifying on its own.  Any of those transgressions should have had the power, if we were listening, to stop us in our tracks.

But like checkpoints, once you pass one, you find yourself further in the new country, until you reach the next checkpoint.  We have allowed so much vulgarity to go unchecked that now we are no longer bystanders, we have lost the right as a country to be appalled by this man. Any attempts to say, “Oh my, I can’t believe he said that” are disingenuous, and the rest of the world judges us. We are approaching the point where no one will believe that this was only a grand error of judgment, an offending sensibility, an aberration, a country hijacked by a monster. We are the monsters.  The more we enable him, the more he continues to defines us. We say we’ll leave, that one day we’ll “put our foot down,” but we all know people who say, “If he cheats one more time, I’m leaving” and we just nod and pour them another cup of coffee, because we know they aren’t going anywhere. Condemning Trump at this point, expressing outrage without action, is just a bunch of words, “breaking news” on CNN. If what we’ve seen at this point isn’t enough to let us know, then something is deeply wrong, not with him, but with us.

The answer to vulgarity – as I plan to speak about at our event – is not more vulgarity, it is poetry.  When asked about writing the novel Beloved, author Toni Morrison said in an interview:

“There is so much more to remember and to describe for purposes of exorcism…things must be made, some fixing ceremony, some memorial, something, some altar, somewhere, where these things can be released, thought, and felt…The consequences of slavery only artists can deal with. There are certain things that only artists can deal with. And it’s our job.”

In When They See Us, Ava DuVernay did her job; she took a profound cultural obscenity, the incarceration of the innocent, and children scapegoated because of their race, and showed us, particularly in the episode devoted to Korey Wise and that stunning performance by Jharell Jerome, the triumph of the human spirit.  What happened was so ugly and unfair and such an indictment of us as Americans and of American racism, some people don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to look. Just to read the court documents, to follow the story in its rawest form, can feel sometimes as if it will overwhelm us. But what an artist can do is make something beautiful, and there is a lot of beauty in When They See Us.  Which isn’t to say that anything is being covered up or denied; real poetry brings us closer to the truth, not further away from it.

We seem to have a man in office who has no use for art, for poetry, for creativity. We never hear this man quote from his favorite poets, we never hear which political leaders have inspired him, we don’t know what music he likes, or if he listens to Bach, or Liszt, or Joni Mitchell or Iron Maiden. Maybe he’s been sharing this somewhere and I’ve missed it, but I feel I’ve been watching him pretty closely and I have no idea what inspires him other than money and power and ass.  I even suspect he refuses to have a dog because his narcissism is so profound he doesn’t want to even compete with a puppy for attention. Poetry is like holy water at an exorcism for this president. He may have no use for it, but it is the only way back for the rest of us, it is the only thing that can restore us, wake us up from the dream.

I wrote about When They See Us because I think it is a story of redemption, not for the Exonerated Five, but for us as a society. We need to be reminded by our artists that there is always a path, if we are honest about who we are and what we’ve done. Poetry doesn’t give evil a pass, it isn’t perfume meant to cover up the stink of lies: that’s sentimentality, another form of vulgarity.  Real poetry makes sure that evil doesn’t have the last word, it is the epitome of hope, a reminder that what is true will always prevail. In times like these, poetry is a decision that we make. The irony is, despite the human rights violations that lie at the bedrock of the American experiment, our constitution isn’t just a set of rules and regulations. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are deeply poetic –  just listen to the language. It is a road map if we’re willing to let it guide us back, if we can finally acknowledge to ourselves what is true in this cultural moment: we are lost.

Max S. Gordon is a writer and activist. He has been published in the anthologies Inside Separate Worlds: Life Stories of Young Blacks, Jews and Latinos (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of African- American Lesbian and Gay Fiction (Henry Holt, 1996). His work has also appeared on openDemocracy, Democratic Underground and Truthout, in Z Magazine, Gay Times, and other progressive online and print magazines in the U.S. and internationally. His essays include “Bill Cosby, Himself, Fame, Narcissism and Sexual Violence”, “Resist Trump: A Survival Guide”, “Family Feud: Jay-Z, Beyoncé and the Desecration of Black Art”, “A Little Respect, Just a Little Bit: On White Feminism and How ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is Being Weaponized Against Women of Color”, and “Sticks and Stones Will Break Your Bones: On Patriarchy, Cancel Culture and Dave Chappelle.”

In his FPP Interview, Ed Morales shares what’s surprised him about the “Latinx” discourse, what meaningful acts will tip the scales in 2019, where he’d take us in Puerto Rico and much more. Hear Morales read live at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. He’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, David Tomas Martinez, Nara Milanich and Sarah Van Arsdale. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

You have written profoundly on Puerto Rico past and present in your new book Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and The Betrayal of Puerto Rico. If you could take us all to Puerto Rico with you today, whom would we visit first? Why, and why now?

It’s hard to pick just one place. The first thing I would think about is going to the El Yunque Rainforest, where my mom’s side of the family is from, because it’s a humbling incredible place dominated by nature and emblematic of the island’s indigenous past. But the hurricane has unfortunately closed most of the trails, so that bums me out. Then we’d drive down the mountain to go to Luquillo Beach and then the kioskos to get cuchifritos and agua de coco.

What do you wish every American knew about Puerto Rico?

That our colonial status is unjust and we don’t have full citizenship on the island, and that it is so green and beautiful.

You’ve written about the joy and power of Puerto Rican #RickyRenuncia protestors.  How are those protests still reverberating today? What lessons should the rest of us take from their example?

Just last night there was a major demonstration in Old San Juan led by students and workers protesting austerity cuts on the University of Puerto Rico and the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. It was just as raucous as the Ricky Renuncia protests of last summer and has already generated the hashtag #invierno2019.

Your book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture is shortlisted for the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Has anything surprised you about the life of “Latinx” to-date? How is the state of acceptance vs resistance in 2019?

I’m surprised at the negative energy it has created here and there. I respect people who identify as African- or indigenous-descended, both identities which resonate with me but I don’t think we should giving up on the potential of Latinx unity by ceding Latinidad to marketers and those who marginalize people of color. I think Latinx people should strongly identify with national identities, African and indigenous identities while at the same time try to forge ties with like-minded Latinx and make it an identity that privileges marginalized people.

There is also an attack from the right wing which claims the word is a gringo imposition on Spanish, which is ridiculous because there are so many English words used by Spanish speakers like “Internet,” for instance. They also claim it is an elitist term imposed on people when no one is imposing, just choosing to use it. It’s possible new labels like “Latine” might come along and replace, and that’s fine with me. But I do think that many LGBTQ people take seriously how Latinx includes them and we should recognize that, and it’s one of the reasons I embrace it.

Is there a piece of writing– yours or someone else’s–that really speaks to your experience in November 2019?

I don’t know, 1984, maybe?

What should the future be?

Resistance, liberation.

What gives you hope?

Lula being freed from a Brazilian jail.

What keeps you awake at night?

The desire to get it right.

What is meaningful action these days? What will tip the scales?

This should be a combination of small acts at home and in the community and public discourse and writing and speaking and taking part in protests and solidarity actions.

What kind of speech, political or otherwise, resonates with you right now?

I think an important thing is trying to get past the idea that identity politics and class politics are mutually exclusive and to continually engage in a critique of unequal wealth distribution and raise awareness about the climate crisis.

Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, and The Guardian. He was a staff writer at The Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture (Verso Books, 2018), Living in Spanglish (St. Martins, 2002), and The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock (Da Capo Press, 2003). His new book, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico was published in September 2019 by Bold Type Press. Morales is also a poet whose work has appeared in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1993) and various small magazines, and his fiction has appeared in Iguana Dreams (HarperCollins, 1992), and Boricuas (Ballantine, 1994). He has participated in residencies as a member of Nuyorican Poets Café Live, touring as a spoken-word performer in several cities throughout the east coast, in California, Florida, Texas, and Denmark. Morales has appeared on CNN, Democracy Now, HBO Latino, CNN Español, WNBC-TV’s Visiones, WABC’s Tiempo, BBC television and radio, and The Laura Flanders Show, and hosted his own radio show, “Living in Spanglish,” on WBAI-FM in New York from 2015–2018.

In her FPP Interview, Sarah Van Arsdale shares how her current work, a “braided memoir,” has become a “pressure valve” for her “rage and frustration about the crimes the current administration is committing” and how more than ever she feels the need for her writing to “address the mess we’re in.” Hear Van Arsdale read live at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. Shel’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, Nara Milanich, Ed Morales and David Tomas Martinez. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

As a teacher, you’ve shared excellent guidance for writing memoir. You’re currently working on a mosaic memoir about growing up with a family of psychologists and artists in the 1960s that includes watercolor illustrations you’ve painted yourself. Tell us about your mosaic process. What advice would you give to yourself if you were an instructor engaging your work right now?

The mosaic memoir has morphed into being more about our current situation in the USA and less about my childhood. It’s becoming a braided narrative, bringing together strands of becoming guardian to a minor immigrant, our climate catastrophe, and my own experience as an adolescent. The more I worked on it, and the more involved I’ve gotten with immigrant support, the less urgent or relevant my own personal story felt; I’ve been feeling more of a need to have my writing address the mess we’re in.

I’m now calling it a “braided” narrative, a term I learned from the non-fiction writer Ana Maria Spagna, because it moves forward in time; when I was thinking of it as a mosaic, it was more static. I think (I hope!) this makes it a more engaging story. And it now acts as a pressure valve for my rage and frustration about the crimes the current administration is committing.

My advice to myself is to trust the process, to allow the work to shift as my own experience shifts. To allow my life to inform the work, and the work to inform my life. And to not hold back the truth, even when it’s complicated and uncomfortable.

You’ve created a book-length poem called The Catamount that includes your watercolor paintings.  What drew you to this animal they say has long been extinct?  How did paintings become a part of the work?

I wrote the poem many years ago when I lived in northern Vermont and first heard rumors of this animal, which is a subspecies of mountain lion. There was debate about whether it still existed in northern New England. At the state historical society, there was a file of photos people had sent in, claiming to be of the catamount, and usually being of someone’s ginger tabby. I was drawn to the mystery of the catamount, and to the thought that it could still be roaming the wilder mountain forests; I’m sure it’s a metaphor for the wild places in all of us, the wild creatures that inhabit all of us. When I picked up the poem again a few years ago and fashioned it into a book, everything about the natural world had changed; we’d gone from worry about pollution and forest fragmentation to the global collapse of our environment.

I’ve always drawn and painted; it was part of the fabric of the family I grew up in, with a grandfather who was an illustrator and a mother who was a photographer. It was after publishing my first novels that I started to take my love of painting more seriously. I feel very fortunate to have this additional means of creative expression; it acts as balance to my writing, and since I have very little formal training in it, there’s less pressure on it.

You recently led a writing retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico. You’ve also set fiction in that mythic city. What is it like for you, in 2019, to travel between New York City and Oaxaca, between the fictional and the real?

I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca. When I was a kid we went there, partly to look for pottery as my mother was then working in ceramics. It was a different world then; you were hard-pressed to find the things that were familiar — cereal, or bottled water, or Crest toothpaste. As I’ve continued to spend time there, I’ve seen it become less foreign—at first gradually, and then in the past few years in a sudden rush of American-style coffee shops and “boutique” hotels and expensive clothing stores. Unfortunately, little of this seems to have done much to ameliorate the poverty the people there live with, although there are now more organizations focused on aiding women and children and helping the Oaxacaños gain agency and self-determination.

But the city remains one of the most art-centered places in the world; every few blocks there’s a print-making studio, its doors open to the street, young artists inside creating fabulous art. Artistic creativity is woven into the fabric of life there. My heart sings when I’m there, and I have a kind of longing for Oaxaca, even when I’m there, like Basho did for Kyoto:

      Even in Kyoto—
      hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
      I long for Kyoto.

I started writing the novel decades ago, and it, like my current project, has transformed many times over. When I go there now, I see the streets and storefronts through the eyes of my character, and since the story is set in 2006, I also glimpse the older Oaxaca that persists under the newer, glossier Oaxaca.

You’ve written about frustration you had early in your writing career for being categorized as a lesbian writer. How have those feelings shifted and not shifted over time?

It’s a funny position to be in: I identified as a lesbian much of my early adulthood, and my first novel had a lesbian protagonist, and was hailed as a “crossover” novel, meaning it crossed over from being in the lesbian publishing ghetto to being published by a mainstream press. Now, I’ve been living with a man the past 13 years, so people who meet me now and don’t know my writing assume I’m straight. But I’m still involved in the LGBTQ publishing world, and still carry the knowledge of what it means to identify as “queer” in our world. As the world breaks down stereotypes and categories, such a category seems less important.

What is meaningful action these days? What will tip the scales?

I really wish I knew. I know that I’m planning to do whatever I can to get the current occupant of the White House out next year. Right now I’m about to read “Resist Trump: A Survival Guide” by Max S. Gordon, one of my fellow readers with you on Sunday, and see if he has any tips.

Sarah Van Arsdale is the award-winning author of five books of fiction and poetry. She teaches in the Antioch/LA low-residency MFA program and at NYU, and leads writing workshops in Oaxaca, Mexico and Freeport, Maine. She co-curates the BLOOM reading series in Washington Heights.

In the FPP Interview with Nara Milanich, Milanich discusses how parentage testing is a “technology that absorbs the social and political agendas of those who use it,” from the Nazis’ obsession with paternity to recent DNA testing of immigrant families at the US/Mexico border to expose “fake families.” Hear Milanich read live at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. She’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, David Tomas Martinez, Ed Morales and Sarah Van Arsdale. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

After declaring your new book Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father “dazzling in scope and masterfully written,” Steven Mintz says Paternity “delves beneath the quest for certainty to find what we are really looking for in paternity and why it continues to haunt us.” What led you to write a book about paternity?

I was working on a totally different topic when I stumbled across some strange medico-legal texts from the 1930s and ’40s that explored different methods of testing paternity. There was an essay by a Venezuelan lawyer about using hereditary blood types to reveal the father’s identity. A Brazilian dentist claimed to be able to establish paternity by examining the teeth of a man and his putative child. An Argentine treatise described the use of fingerprints to fix paternity.

I was struck by the curious methods proposed. Did they actually work? And when had tests of biological paternity developed? The short answer was that the test we today take for granted, the one that websites promote as 99.9% accurate and pharmacies sell for less than $100, is a very recent development. It dates only from the 1980s, when a British geneticist developed the technique known as DNA fingerprinting.

As a historian of family and gender, I was curious about the social and cultural history of this pre-DNA search for the father. Scholars have written excellent histories of contraceptives, artificial insemination and even sperm banks. To my surprise, no one had written a history of paternity testing. Tracing the rise of testing illuminates changing ideas about family, sexuality, childhood, race, nationhood, and identity.

What are some of the ways that nations have used paternity science for racist or nationalistic purposes, as you write in the book?

The most disturbing case is that of the Nazis. Because the National Socialist logic of racial classification was genealogical, it required that an individual had two known biological parents in order to know the individual’s “race.” The Nazis worried that adoption, illegitimacy, and adultery could obscure parentage and hence racial identity, causing Jewish individuals to be falsely classified as Aryans and Aryans as Jews. Testing paternity thus became an obsession.

But the Nazis’ obsessions inadvertently opened up a potential avenue of escape for their victims. Jews could strategically challenge their own paternity in order to change their racial classification. People went to court claiming, for example, that their true father wasn’t their mother’s Jewish husband, but the Aryan gardener with whom she’d had an affair. It’s likely that thousands of Jews were able to save themselves and their family members using this strategy. In the Third Reich, paternity testing literally became a matter of life and death.

Do you see echoes of this in the United States today, with the Department of Homeland Security’s recent pilot program to test the DNA of migrants on the southern border?

Following the separation of thousands of migrant parents and children on the border last summer, some observers advocated using DNA tests to reunite them. More recently, the government piloted a new “rapid DNA” program to genetically test migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose is to expose “fake families,” whom the government claims are falsely posing as kin. I wrote about this practice in a recent op-ed. The testing of immigrant families has become increasingly common, and as I discuss in the book, the origins of this practice lie in the Cold War.

Parentage testing can be used to connect and reunite but also to separate and exclude. DNA has been called a “truth machine,” but this characterization is somewhat misleading. It’s a technology that absorbs the social and political agendas of those who use it.

You teach a class at Barnard College called “Seeking Asylum” that studies the roots of Central American emigration with a particular focus on American empire and policy in this hemisphere. As part of the class, you take students to volunteer with legal aid at an immigrant detention center in Dilley, TX. Tell us about this work.

Beginning in 2014, the border witnessed a surge of refugees from Central America, many of whom were fleeing gangs or domestic violence and arrived seeking asylum in the United States. The surge attracted media attention because it included large numbers of what the administrative lingo called “family units,” mothers with children, as well as unaccompanied minors. In response, the Obama administration built detention facilities specifically for these “family units.” The largest is the South Texas Family Residential Facility, located on a dusty county road in Dilley, Texas, a little over an hour south of San Antonio. While it’s euphemistically called a “family residence,” the facility is in fact a for-profit prison.

While at the Dilley Pro Bono Project recently the facility was at capacity with more than 2,000 mothers and children. A few arrived at the border with the “Caravan” that’s been in the news. Over and over again, we heard from women who fled from their home countries because of imminent harm to themselves and their children—harm from gangs who extort, threaten, and murder community members or who try to recruit young boys as gang members and young girls as “girlfriends.” Many other women were fleeing from violent partners.

What surprised you most about what you witnessed at the detention facility?

The women detained in this facility have been through unspeakable traumas—the violence in their home countries that forced them to leave as well as violence and deprivation on the journey northward, often with very young children in tow. But when they told their stories, the trauma they have the hardest time making sense of was what happened to them once they crossed the border to “safety” in the U.S. With equal parts incredulity and indignation, they recounted how they and their children were warehoused in cement bunkers where they slept on the floor next to overflowing toilets. They described being taunted by Border Patrol agents who threw away food in front of hungry children. Women repeatedly said things like, “I never imagined this could happen in the United States.”

Once they were transferred to the Dilley facility, many women were likewise at a loss to understand why they were there. One woman inquired, “Is this a jail?” And then she asked, “But what have I done?”

Nara Milanich is Professor of Latin American History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches and researches the history of family, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law. Her most recent book, Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019), came out in June and received coverage in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, NPR, Scientific American, CNN, and Time, among other places. The book explores the quest for a scientific proof of paternity and the social questions that, over the course of the twentieth century, these new genetic technologies were called on to answer. One of the book’s arguments is that since the Cold War, genetic tests of parentage have been used in immigration proceedings to fix the racial boundaries of the nation. Milanich has also worked as a translator and legal assistant for Central American mothers and children incarcerated in the country’s largest immigrant detention center, located in Dilley, Texas. She has written about this experience in the Washington Post, Dissent, and NACLA: North American Congress on Latin America. Last semester, she taught a class on the asylum crisis and took her undergraduate students to work in the detention center.

In the FPP Interview with David Tomas Martinez, David shares insights into his day to day, how “aesthetics and perfecting skills” are always priorities, be it cooking for his family, be it writing, be it “correct foot placement to stop an inside out dribble and shoot a jump shot efficiently.” Hear Martinez read live at “What Just Happened: Writers Respond to Our American Crises” at 6pm this Sunday, November 10th at Silvana in Harlem. He’ll be joined by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Max S. Gordon, Nara Milanich, Ed Morales and Sarah Van Arsdale. Silvana is located at 300 W. 116th St near Frederick Douglass Blvd. Admission is free.

You once said “it’s our job to hold on to who we are while the world tries to change us,” that “we assimilate and integrate the forces and the strategies that help us to become better people.” In November 2019, what do you hold on to for fear of loss? Are there forces or strategies you’ve found that help you now?

While change is an inevitable part of life, I gravitate toward that which advocates advantageous outcomes. Revolutionary, right? Not as a coping mechanism but I hope there’s some clarity to the conscious pruning of my behavior through introspection. So I’m still trying to hold onto what has allowed for whatever moderate success I’ve attained. I’m still trying to read, think, and make myself the best version of myself, as I see it. And the “as I see it” part is simultaneously the most important part and most dangerous. Which is what I fear losing most, the balance I have in my life now. If I lose that balance, everything from sobriety to a loss of the desire to read will be affected. Though, that aint nothing new in my life, and sometimes I’ve been balanced, other times out of control, the difference now is that I’ve become better at recognizing why and how I lose balance and correcting it before it becomes too unruly.

You’ve declared that “perfection and beauty were never white [only] aesthetics.” Tell us about perfection and beauty in your life and work these days. 

Aesthetics and perfecting skills are a large part of my life, whether it be tinkering toward accurate diction in poems or the correct foot placement to stop an inside out dribble and shoot a jump shot efficiently. I believe strongly in a devoted life, which means I do a lot of shit. I have a family and do my best to make sure they eat well, so I spend a decent amount of time planning and cooking meals. Plus, I shop for my family so that they stay fly. In the work, well, that’s a long drawn out war against time that I’ll lose, but that’s cool. I’m going to get a hit or two in before I go down for good.

What does it mean, for you, to be a formal poet? Is that something you consider yourself to be?

I’m assuming that you mean not formal as in form or metric poet but formal poet in the sense of considering oneself a poet, being able to make a living or construct your life around poetry. That I am. Mostly because I produce poems, think through language predominantly as a poet. As long as I do that, I’ll consider myself a poet.

David Tomas Martinez is the author of two collections of poetry, Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, both from Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, NEA poetry fellow, and NEA Big Read author. Martinez lives in Brooklyn.