A Conversation with Gaia Rajan, by Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo: So as an emerging poet, you've got two chapbooks out. Can you talk about what drives you to write? What is your writing practice like, and what are some aspirations for your career?
Gaia Rajan: Yeah, absolutely. I think I've always been writing. As a kid, I was like seven or eight when I made my mom wake me up at five a.m. every morning because I just gotten this book by Ted Kooser called the Poetry Home Repair Manual, and it was my very first instructional book on poetry—and I was obsessed with it. To the point that at one point in my life you could give me a page number and I could recite what he writes on that page. I was obsessed with this book. I spent an entire year just reading it over and over and attempting drafts. But my drafts, at that point, were very derivative.
GR: So that's how I started out, and then I just decided on it. As a sustainable discipline. And it's a very interesting way of viewing the world. I memorize poetry in addition to writing poems, and it's not something I do consciously, but it's a thing that just happened, and so I go everywhere, and I just I'm thinking like, oh, yeah, Anne Carson, “the human custom of wrong love,” you know, like I don't know why I’m like this, but it's a great way of, you know, experiencing things in a rigorous way. Everyone picks their academic discipline. It might not be academic, but, you know, the world, this is mine.
GR: And in terms of writing practice, like I obviously started out with a very, a super strict, poem-a-day kind of thing. And then that stopped being helpful to me sometime like a couple of years ago. I just realized that you know that had gone from a fun constraint to like an actual limit on where my poems could go. And so now I'm taking longer with my drafts, and that's been pretty rewarding. I don't write for like six months, and then I think about a new collection all the way through, and I know exactly how it's going to move, and then I write the whole thing in like a month. So that's incredible.
JA: Can you talk about the title of your chapbook, Killing It? Because I can think of a lot of things that you would be trying to kill in this set of poems, like desire and societal pressure, or something within yourself. Where did the title come from?
GR: So killing it was originally a part of a seventy-five page hybrid thesis about hauntology and partition. So I do a thing where I write a seventy-five page thesis every single year, and I've done this for most of high school, and I also did it like, you know, post my eligibility for any of these scholarships that would be helpful. I just decided on it. You know it's like a way of just putting myself to make new work. So my thesis at the year of Killing It was hauntology. Hauntology is this idea by Derrida that the present is haunted by lost features. Basically, I was writing a bunch of poems, an interlocking series of short fiction, and also a paper on hauntology. Then I finished the thesis, and I was looking at my work a couple of months later, and I was picking things out, and I saw the thread of a new, either full length or chapbook in it. And there's that point. I thought it was a full length and I decided to call it Killing It because I was reading Minor Feelings at the time and thinking a lot about the ways that I had unconsciously erased myself to be good or more legible to the institutions. And so you know, there's a lot of murder going on there. And also at the time I came upon a quote where they talk about the ways that our cultures, definitions of achievement, are very much inclined towards colonialism and in violence so like, Killing It. Target audience, knock it out of the park. We have so many ways in which our conception of success are intrinsically tied with violence.
JA: You're writing a tradition of queer literature. Who are some queer poets and writers who have inspired you on your journey and writing Killing It and some of your other work?
GR: So I'm going to do people that I know personally, and then people I don’t know.
The first person is Megan Fernandes, whose work I followed for years before I met her, but I met her in New York, and it was pivotal to this collection existing. She's incredible. Her new book is called Good Boys and yeah, she's amazing. The way she reads is just insane. So her, and Dorothy Chan, who was my mentor for several years; she’s amazing. We met on Twitter, and I started working for her journal. And also Claudia Cortese, who I met through the Adroit mentorship when I was fifteen. And then we started a correspondence. We just kept emailing. She’s also from Ohio, so we really understood each other on some things. I met her in person in New York also, and we read together at the Black Lawrence Press reading.
GR: For people I don’t know: Anne Carson, love her. Autobiography of Red saved my life. Natalie Shapiro’s poems are insane, incredible. Paige Lewis was able to blurb my collection, but I don't know her personally other than that. Also, Jameson Fitzpatrick is a poet that I’ve been really into lately, especially “Divorce Song.” So yeah, that’s my small list. I could talk about this for ages, but I don’t want to.
JA: That’s a great, what’s the word, canon?
GR: Also, I would be wrong if I didn’t mention Bhanu Kapil, because Killing It would not exist without Schizophrene.
JA: So one of the recurring themes in Killing It is cameras and places where there should be cameras. Can you talk about the theme of surveillance, and how it affected your writing? I think that also speaks to just being young and female, feeling like people are watching you.
GR: I think that I became aware when I was around a sophomore in high school around like fifteen that I had just been accustomed to seeing myself as a possible threat in all sorts of experiences. Not that I believed that I was capable of harm, but that I believed that everyone believes that I was capable of, you know, violence. But I did have this constant feeling that people perceive me as like a lot more of a threat, or like harsher or more violent than actually, you know, I was, in every space. And I feel like that's like a brown girl thing, but also just like a queer thing, because I would go into women's spaces, and feel like a monster, you know.
JA: I think that's absolutely correct.
GR: So I'd walk everywhere, feeling like a bomb. There were cameras in every location in my old school, and so it was just like I'd be walking into my door at nine p.m. and there would be a camera, and I was like fifteen just figuring out how to live like and be a person in my own right, and it was just kind of pivotal for me to realize that the surveillance was not just external. It would also become internal, and I was always like monitoring myself for signs of harm, you know, and I was always trying to make sure that I was not, in fact, a monster and I kind of decided in Killing It, to say fuck it and be the monster, and, like you know, kill my old self—like I do snap her neck at one point. And it's because, like myself, actualization was not pretty. It was not dainty, and it was not feminine in the way that, like people want it to be feminine.
JA: Another recurring theme other than cameras: There’s ghosts, there's blood, and there's the body. So can you talk about how these poems echo through each other, and how poems can kind of go through a chapbook? By which I mean how poems come together to become a chapbook. Alternatively, say something about what ghosts, blood, and the body mean to you?
GR: I love this question. It's amazing. So, I wanted Killing It to feel haunted. And it’s the structure of itself, you know. And that started with, the core poem in the manuscript for me with the ghazal crown, because it was the centerpiece, but also the longest one. And so it felt the heaviest, right? But then ghazals are also a traditional South Asian form, and so bringing them together, I hope to mirror the geopolitical aspects of partition, and that was the centerpiece of the thesis, and so the form itself is haunted. And then in the callbacks that these ghazals to each other, because obviously, there’s word repetition, there was a haunting, but also a clarity. You know the call back to prior moments is exactly what I wanted for the overall movement of the collection. Not just that poem. And so there are several sustained characters. And there's a prodigy series that all have the same titles. Right? I want the reading experience to kind of mimic a full length. The collection comes in at forty-three pages, so it’s just shy of that forty-five page mark. I wanted it to be that weighty and significant like a full length not just like a collection of pieces, you know.
JA: Yeah, I think it feels meaty. I think it feels cohesive. As opposed to like a kind of a throwaway chapbook. Not that I throw away chapbooks. There's so many good chapbooks.
GR: I wanted it to be more than just a list of poems that I’d written in the past years, although I love some chapbooks like that. But that's not what I was trying to do with this. I think it was what I was trying to do with my first chapbook. You know it's just like: here are the poems I've written in the past three years.
GR: So I think I understand where you're coming from with that exactly. Also, because I think in units of collection. I planned the women of this from the beginning, which is a little psycho of me. It didn't actually stick like the way that I imagined that it would. I don't know. It feels a little bit antithetical to the point of poetry. The point of poetry, you know. Air quotes. But it’s against the point of poetry to outline. And so that's not entirely what I was doing. It was more emotional than that. It was like Jess Riz’s An Inkling with Teeth.
JA: I think that all of the best poets have a lot more structure to their work than you realize. Like Anne Carson, for example. There's so much behind the scenes that goes on, like if you look at “The Glass Essay.”
GR: I’m deeply indebted to Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen. She was talking about how she spends the whole year thinking about how she’s going to write her book, then writes the whole thing in fifteen days during winter break.
JA: That’s incredible.
JA: You often speak of “this town” in your chapbook. What’s the significance of the town, and how does it feature in the book?
GR: Richard Hugo has this collection called “The Triggering Town,” where he talks about how the best way to talk about the small town that you’re from is to imagine the exact clone of the hometown that you are from, except without any of the existing events that have occurred there. Right? And then just set everything in that town and figure out how to link it back, make it a route from that. I was figuring out that I’m from a town in Ohio, and I spent a really long time attempting to piece together my fraught relationship with this town. And it got a lot easier when I removed my allegiance to the town, as like the town, as it is named. That’s a lot easier of a course myth to come from than like an entire town with so many people with their own lives. And so it felt less journalistic. Once I decided on “this town” rather than like this specific hometown that I’m specifically, theoretically, from, right? And so this town is the triggering town.
JA: That’s great. I love that. So I just have one more question for you, which is: what’s next? Are there manuscripts in the future? Should we expect a full length?
GR: So, I am in the middle of another cycle right now. I started a new thesis. It's going to be done in February. It's code named but that’s not what it's actually called. I'm not going to actually call it that, but I'm working with the idea of reincarnation as an internal logic for a bunch of poems, and also short fiction. And so I'm talking about how early South Asians like, for example, believed in reincarnation, and how this impacted the way that they made their societies. And um, I have this entire series of short stories about people who see themselves. You can be reincarnated while you're not dead in this universe, right? And so you view reincarnations of yourself all the time. You just like, come across them. They walk like you. They speak like you, and they ride a bike like you, you know. It's called Afterlives. I have filled my entire bedroom all with ideas and like weird little visions. And so yeah, this looks like it'll be done by February. I'm going to play with it after.
GR: Also, I'm in the screenwriting class. I'm learning how to write scripts. It's so fun and such a weird way of conceptualizing dialogue. I love it.
JA: I can’t wait to see what you do next!
Gaia Rajan is the author of the chapbooks Moth Funerals (Glass Poetry Press, 2020) and Killing It (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her work is published or forthcoming in the 2022 Best of the Net anthology, The Kenyon Review, THRUSH, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of the WOC Speak Reading Series, the Junior Journal Editor for Half Mystic, and the Web Manager for Honey Literary. She is the first place winner of the Princeton Leonard P. Milberg Poetry Prize, Sarah Mook Poetry Prize, and 1455 Literary Festival Contest, and a runner up for the Smith College Poetry Prize, Nancy Thorp Poetry Prize, and Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize. Gaia is an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University studying computer science and creative writing. She lives in Pittsburgh.
Joanna Acevedo is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of three books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021) and List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Apogee, Hobart, and the Rumpus. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry and The Masters Review, Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, and a member of the Review Team at Gasher Journal, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2020 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021 and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income for Artists.