Amanda Larson Interview Transcript

Zahra Linsky: Hi, my name is Zahra Linsky. I'm here with Tara Tevald and we're gonna be interviewing Amanda Larson, who recently published her book, Gut. So the first question we have for you, Amanda, is how did you feel when you started writing this book compared to when you finished?

Amanda Larson: So, I started writing this summer going into my senior year of undergrad. I was in a very different place in my life than when I finished it; I would say I finished it two years later, and I didn't know it was exactly finished until I found out that it was going to be published. I was still messing around with a lot of the stories and the events that I described in it. When I first started it, it was my senior thesis in college. So, I wanted to do a piece that had to do with literary theory. And I was going to write poems based around literary theory. And then as I continued writing those poems, I realized there was a real narrative I wanted to tell and convey. So, the last page of that has almost always been exactly the same. And the final poem has almost always been the same. And I think I wrote that about like, two years before we finished the book. Once I realized the emotional conclusion I wanted to end on, it was just filling in all the space in between.

Linsky: What do you mean, when you said that you found out it was going to be published?

Larson: When I got the call from Omnidawn that it had been cited by Jericho Brown, and it was going to be picked up. And I'm really thrilled with the version of it that was published because I submitted it for publication, I submitted to contests in fall of 2019. And then I got that call in the fall of 2019. And I got that call in the summer of 2020. And during that period of time, I messed around with the manuscript a lot. There's another version of that on my laptop, that looks very different. But I'm really thrilled with the version that ended up being published.

Linsky: That's really interesting. What is the role of Gut in your healing process?

Larson: I would say Gut was really important to me, in terms of… I wanted to create a narrative that I hadn't seen before. And I was reading a lot of books about the Me Too movement, about sexual assault, and I wanted to write a book that really considered circumstance, and that really considered individual power dynamics. I also thought that a lot of stories of campus sexual assault take into consideration the agency of both individuals, and I wanted to write a story that I think did take that into consideration.

Tara Tevald: So you mentioned that there's another version of Gut that exists on your computer. I'm wondering what the difference is between your first time writing about the event versus what ended up being published.

Larson: I think that Gut is a big part about justifying writing and the act of writing. And so when I first started writing about my experiences, I was writing throughout Scotland. I write all the time in this very big document I have on my computer that I don’t show anyone because it's not great. There's a lot of revision that goes into it and there was a lot of revision that went into Gut. I mean, I read it every single day for like two years. As I was reading it, I would revise and revise and revise until I was absolutely sure that was what I wanted to say. And the order in which the words appeared and things like the syntax— I’m a very big syntax person— syntax is really important to me. So making sure the syntax of everything was great. There’s some edits that I made at the time that were important to me.

Tevald: So, How did you decide that this was the final way you wanted to structure this? How did you decide that this was going to be how you're going to structure what was going to be published?

Larson: I really wanted the book to be like a tapering off. And I think it does do that. And I care a lot about the presentation of the words on the page. I wanted it to be like a continual argument and to be about the act of arguing and verbal argument. At the end of the book, I wanted that verbal argument to dissipate a bit. That was really important to me. I think that also reflects that there's a lot about trauma in the book, there's a lot about the way that trauma disrupts time. So there was never going to be like a linear telling. I don't think we really experience our lives in a linear way. I don't believe in linear time. The way that memory recurs is very interesting to me. I think poetry is a space where that memory can present itself in a really, really interesting way.

Linsky: I was wondering, in your other writing, what age of your life do you keep on coming back to?

Larson: So my second manuscript is all about childhood. I've been returning a lot. There's no one specific age, I would say, but I've worked with children as well. I'm really interested in childhood. That we were all children is so fascinating to me. I wouldn't say there's one particular age that I continually return to, but I am constantly considering transitional periods of life. Specifically when I was writing that, I would say I was writing it for young women specifically between the ages of 18 and 21. Because I think, which I presume you both know, I think it's one of the most fascinating periods of time in your life, where you're transitioning to adulthood, but you're still not quite an adult and how we present those transitions on children and how we create expectations is really interesting to me.That's something I explore a lot in my writing.

Linsky: Interesting. What is the role of writing your life when it comes to personal events? You said that you keep that rolling document? Do you often come back to those themes?

Larson: Yeah, I feel like I write about language a lot. I write about other people's language and conversations a lot. I try to be very ethical and mindful in my writing about personal events and protecting the privacy of individuals is something that's important to me and to other people, obviously, who I write about. I consider myself a pretty private person, but my writing is extremely powerful, which is an interesting dichotomy I maintain. I've been thinking a lot about how in one of your questions you described Gut as poetic nonfiction. Listen, it was very much marketed as poetic nonfiction. And it is poetic nonfiction. But I've been thinking a lot about my decision to do that. And I think there's like this amazing James Baldwin quote that talks about writing about pain. If you're writing about pain, you have to have been pained. And so the pain is therefore real and should be represented, but I don't want to write in a way that is ever vengeful. I want to write with grace and resilience; that's what I attempt to do. There's definitely some writing in that big document that will never see the light of day or will be like published after my death. I'm very particular about what meets the public eye.

Linsky: How do you go about balancing that privacy with getting your story out there?

Larson: There were books that I had read that were big influences on me, that really changed me. I knew that I could write a similar book that would change people and that was really important to me. I felt like I really had to. I love that Gut is like my first book, because I really had to write it before I wrote any other book because, like I said, it's a justification of writing. I didn’t write it to exactly write. There were ways I could have told that, I recognized a myriad of ways that I could have filled the story. I could have published a newspaper, or I could have done all these different things, or written an essay or something like that. But I didn't want to, because those weren't the things that have really changed me; what really changed me was poetry. And I felt like poetry allowed for this space. Like a consideration of language, consideration of power, all these different things that I really wanted to be considered, and that I felt like I wasn't seeing being considered, and conversations surrounding these things. The stories I'm writing about now, they're still personal stories, I would say, but they're more focused on language. And like, if you can reach those universal themes, of like I believe there’s like a couple universal themes of like, love and knowledge and power and like time and language and like those, those can be addressed. I can do with people knowing whatever about my life, as long as they see that there's like a bigger point to be made.

Linsky: So, you're talking about other people experiencing your personal vulnerable life. How do you feel having such personal work out there?

Larson: It's been fine. People appreciate it in weird ways. I don't mind it that much. I'm really moved from people are affected by it. I like that. I like that; I think poetry’s a great medium because they can choose to engage with it. They don't have to read it. I never make anyone read my book. But yeah, it hasn't been something that has overly affected my personal life in any way or anything like that. And it's the best thing that's compliment is that it's like me teaching which I really really love doing. And that's amazing.

Tevald: So, what was it like, for the process of publicizing your poetry?

Larson: It happened very quickly. There's no real way to do— I don't like doing it because I don't like drawing attention to myself like that. Poetry speaks for itself. So yeah, I have some ideas about how to like market it and then I did it. The big thing that I've done, which has been just fun for me is like, I'll go on, like Tiktok, and I’ll comment on people's Booktok. And I'll say, “if you like this, check out Gut by Amanda Larson.” That is my big marketing strategy. Some people have picked it up and found out about it that way. That's been awesome. That's been the main thing I've done. Publicizing it… I asked someone to do a review, there's been like a couple of really good reviews, and— I didn’t ask all of them, I asked one person to do one. And she did it. And she was like, I was already reading it. But it's having some great reviews. And I hope that it will continue to, like stand the test of time and holds up. And I think it will, I'm not very active on social media or any like, besides that Booktok commenting thing. And that's kind of important to me, because I don't want to be someone who's really active on social media, who are not selling like a version of my life. I think some of us do do that. And that's completely fine. But that's not something that I'm pursuing. I just want to write books and teach.

Tevald: So we noticed that red is a prominent color in Gut. Is there something about that color that encouraged you to make it significant?

Larson: I didn't notice that until you guys asked that. But you're totally right that it is. Red is a beautiful color. It's not my favorite color. My favorite color is blue. There's a lot about blood and like the body that comes up again and again in Gut, and; it wasn't exactly intentional. I use colors a lot in my writing; they're kind of great adjectives to tag often. I'm not a visual artist in the slightest, but I do love like the experience of color. I wanted to make the book as captivating and like gripping as, the pieces of media that have gripped me and captivated me but also as like social media and as other forms of entertainment.

Linsky: I can see that with Gut, it's definitely it was hard to turn away from once I started reading it. Even if I had homework to do or other obligations.

Larson: I really love to hear that.

Tevald: So on the subject of inspiration, what poets, or kinds of poetry inspired you?

Larson: I'm really a big fan of Louise Glick. And her poetry is really, really, very impactful. I'm also a big fan of Maggie Nelson, which probably comes through and also Claudia Rankin, and people who mess around with form. In that way. I'm— there's so many different poets who I owe credit, some of whom have also been my professors like Katherine Burnett, and Terrence Hayes are incredible individuals and poets, and whose writing impacts my own in a really big way. I also love reading novels. I'm reading novels all the time I would like to one day write a novel, but the novels of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are hugely impactful. I read that after I wrote Gut, but still, it that really enhances my writing. I read the work of David Foster Wallace this summer, and that's what I've been thinking about since. And his originality with language is so incredible, and I'm really grateful to just have all these wonderful writers whose work I can learn from.

Tevald: So, what was it like winning the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book prize in 2020, and the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2022?

Amanda Larson: It was very exciting. I was really thrilled with Omnidawn. I remember I was teaching a virtual class of first graders. That's what I did in the summer of 2020. I taught kindergarten through second graders creative writing and not that they can even really write or read at that age, but I was teaching them how to craft stories, and I put on a YouTube video for them at the end of class, because I saw that I had a call from like Oakland, California. I played it during class. I played it while the YouTube video was going and then I realized what it was. It was a voicemail. And then I ended class two minutes early. I called him back. I talked with Ken Higan and Rusty Morrison, who are my editors about the publication process and everything like that. And with the Norma Farber award, I was also in class, this makes me seem like a terrible teacher and student. I was in class in grad school, and I got an email and it just popped up on my laptop, when I had my laptop open. And I completely freaked out. With both of those awards, it was amazing seeing Jericho Brown and Mark Bibbins who were both judges for those respectively. And they both wrote really incredible things about the book, and interpreted the book in a way that was really meaningful to me to be read in that way and to be taken seriously. And cheering for being called terrifying, which was wonderful.

Linsky: That's a great line to hear about your brand.

Larson: Yeah, this was just my brain when I was 20. That was very important to me as well, in the writing of the book. I set out to write a book that showed a reality that was maybe glossed over or not talked about. That was genuinely terrifying at the time. I am extremely grateful to both of those individuals for that reading and for the award. Thank you for making such a fuss.

Linsky: Congratulations on your awards. It makes sense that you got called during a school hours; awards don't really care for your time schedule. What advice would you be giving to the young writers and young students that you wish you would have received yourself?

Larson: I received this advice, and I'm very grateful for the professors and the teachers I've had who gave me this advice, to just continue writing. I think writing every day is really important. Not everyone will say this. I think writing every day is really important. You don't have to publish every single thing that you write every day. It's really important that writers believe in what they have to say, and that their writing can impart some kind of change because if you don't believe that, then it just ends up not being good. And I think a big part of Gut was me recognizing, I didn't take writing seriously for a long time because I thought it was an indulgent thing. I thought it was something that could never help anyone and I wanted to help people. I think young writers should recognize that they can help people through their writing, but you have to do it every day.