Nature is Queer AF: Nikolai Ryan interviews Jennifer Conlon

Jennifer Conlon is the author of Taking to Water, chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize. They are from North Carolina and earned their MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. They were awarded the 2015 Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Katharine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets. More recently, Jennifer won the 2021 Boulevard Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets, and Taking to Water was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Prize in Transgender Poetry. Their poems have been published by Bayou Magazine, Juked, Bennington Review, DIALOGIST, Threadcount, and elsewhere. Jennifer lives in Tempe, Arizona, where they teach at Arizona State University.

Taking to Water, published in late 2023 via Autumn House Press, is a triumphant debut from poet Jennifer Conlon. The collection braves the murky depths of queer childhood, shame, and religious trauma, all set against the backdrop of small-town North Carolina and the sublime beauty of the American South. In this interview, we explore how Taking to Water came to be, as well as their writing process, inspirations, and journey of self-discovery. Taking to Water is available to purchase here.

Nikolai Ryan: Let’s start with you, as a person, a writer, a creative—how would you describe your identity? I mean this, of course, in terms of gender, but also in terms of anything you feel that describes and/or defines you.

Jennifer Conlon: I am trans nonbinary, queer, and Southern af. These identities show up in so many parts of me—how I think or see the world; my accent and idioms and storytelling; how I cook and dance and make art; and what I wish for queer futures.

NR: Taking to Water exhibits incredible thematic cohesion. What inspired this collection and its themes? Did you intentionally write pieces for this work as a whole or did it naturally come about over time?

JC: This collection was written before and after I knew myself as trans nonbinary, and writing it was part of my questioning process. The first ten pages or so came from exploring one of my image obsessions—catfish—in a class with Natalie Diaz in my MFA at Arizona State. At the time, I didn’t know the word nonbinary. I just knew there was something about myself that I couldn’t name yet. The MFA ended, some time passed, and I went through a process of questioning my gender identity. During this time, I was reading some old poems, and I came back to those catfish poems. When I read them, I laughed and cried. I experienced seeing myself on the page even though at the time I had written those poems, I didn't have that language. I could see what I was doing with those catfish poems—questioning and exploring gender through another body. It was an intense experience to feel that I had been talking to my future self—one who knew they were trans nonbinary. So I decided to take those initial catfish poems and keep exploring. I found myself pressing on all the points of tension in growing up queer in the South—the church, social and cultural structures, school, parenting. I also have my incredible editor, Mike Good at Autumn House Press, to thank for helping me arrange my book. He was phenomenal at showing me how these themes work across the book when considering the order.

NR: One major theme is fish—observing them, catching them, cooking them, being and embodying them. “Bait” very effectively lays the groundwork for this as a continuing theme throughout the collection. Could you talk a bit about the significance of that?

JC: When I began exploring fish as an image, I first worked with memory. In my childhood, I was surrounded by men who fished, and sometimes I was included. Most of the time, I was an observer. There was something about men fishing that made me think of the violence of being removed from your world. Of course, when fishing, bait is used to lure the fish from their world into death. I began to think about what was keeping me in the water and what were the ways I could move beyond that, even through the fear that leaving the water could mean a kind of death. So in “Bait,” I explore this through parenting, because parents can be our first models for how to perform the gender we were assigned. In that poem, I was attempting to balance the love and protection my momma has for me with the conflicting idea that I might not be the person she thought I was upon birth, and what would it look like to release the shame of that? 

NR: Speaking of fish, reading “Can I Just Enjoy the Water?”, I’m reminded of that popular David Foster Wallace anecdote about two young fish coming across an older one that asks them, “How’s the water?”, to which they respond, “What the hell is water?”—we often cannot perceive what we are constantly surrounded by. In Taking to Water, societally constructed gender is the “water” that drowns us and is invisible to those who have not examined their own. How did you first become aware of this “water,” and how did you first navigate it after discovering its presence? How do you keep from drowning?

JC: Like some other folks, I came to this understanding during the pandemic. The isolation afforded me time with myself and healing that led me to questioning my gender identity. Social media accounts of genderqueer folks helped me to find language for what I was discovering. At first, it was so difficult. Like, mental-health-crisis-level difficult. So I reached out to the few trans and genderqueer people I knew. I found a nonbinary therapist. I also did a lot of reading. I read trans history like Transgender History by Susan Stryker, and I used a workbook called You and Your Gender Identity by Dara Hoffman-Fox, LPC. Many books were focused on youth, and I didn't find many resources for people like me who were in their 30s, so I felt quite alone in the beginning. These days, I keep from drowning by continuing therapy and surrounding myself with people and media that are trans-inclusive. 

NR: As a trans/genderqueer person myself, I recognize the sense of depersonalization and dysphoria in these works—these feelings are beautifully and acutely expressed in lines like “The inside of the body is rinsed with cold / running water until the water runs clear. / I am trying to run clear.” in “When there is No Evidence Upon Initial Assessment, We Must Re-Examine the Body”. These feelings are, of course, abstract and often difficult to communicate to those who don’t experience them. How do you approach writing about these feelings?

JC: I feel like my approach involved two things: writing the poems for myself (and thus other folks who relate) and locating an image strong enough to hold it all. For me, the first part was really hard. I evaded writing about myself for so long, likely because I didn’t know how. I didn’t have any examples growing up in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It wasn’t like I finally found courage either; I just got so desperate to read a book that understood me that I wrote it myself. The second part, imagery, is a skill I honed in graduate school. I realized how much emotion an image could hold if developed, so I got comfortable with the idea of image obsessions. I let myself write into an image as much as I wanted, and I tried not to look away from myself in the process. That’s difficult when writing about trauma and dysphoria, but it was also part of my healing.

NR: This collection, the final section in particular, feels very spiritual, delves deeply into landscape, the animal, the grotesque. How do spirituality and nature relate to your experience of queerness? How does this factor into your writing? 

JC: Religious trauma is a part of my experience, and that's something I wanted to reckon with in my book. I also simply grew up outside. I was in the woods more often than not. In many ways, nature was my first spirituality, my guide, the whole truth. Yet the religion I was brought up with (Southern Baptist) was paternalizing and controlling, filled me with shame and fear. When writing Taking to Water, I thought of nature as the safe place, the place I could be myself without shame. In my research, I started looking into queer nature, and as I suspected, nature is queer af. Learning this made me feel much more confident. Like, how can I be wrong if a fish ain't wrong? A tree? A slug? They ain't wrong and neither am I. So in the last section, the animals and landscape have an active role in protecting and supporting me. I also wished to return the landscape and animals back to themselves, away from the systems of violence they are entangled in. That is, snakes in the Bible as evil; the destruction of waterways, and so on.

NR: Who and/or what are your major inspirations, both for this collection and in your writing overall? 

JC: At the time I wrote Taking to Water, I hadn't found many trans or genderqueer poets. One person that was really impactful though was TC Tolbert. I joined his workshop, Trans/Space is Expanding, where I was introduced to more trans and genderqueer poets like torrin a. greathouse, Christopher Soto, C.T. Salazar, and Cameron Awkward-Rich. For this collection, I was also initially inspired by a flower image in Lauren Barry's collection, The Lifting Dress. This helped me to identify my own images to carry such a large grief. Some poets that I'm presently inspired by—Evelyn Berry, KB Brookins, jason b. crawford, and K. Iver. All of these poets recently released their debuts and have kept me going as a queer writer. They are the folks whose books I was searching for all along.

NR: Final question—do you have any upcoming projects or anything in general you would like to share with our readers? 

JC: Before I faced my gender on the page, I wrote about war and American militarism. This is something I've written about for most of my poet-life, and it'll be the focus of my next book. I'm interested in the language Ronald Reagan used to declare the War on Drugs, and I've also been working with the US Army and Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual as a document for some found poems. The United States’ involvement in the Genocide in Gaza is also important to this writing and research. Unfortunately, there’s a long history of American imperialism to consider. I’m still writing and researching for this book, but it’s coming together. 

Nikolai Ryan (he/they) is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University completing a B.A. in English and a 2023-24 editorial intern for Hayden’s Ferry Review. His written work primarily focuses on trans and queer culture and media and can be found on Substack at All Things Have Names.