Kristy Bowen is a Chicago-based poet, editor, and publisher who is the founder of dancing girl press. She is the author of in the bird museum, the fever almanac, The Archeologists, brief history of girl as match, and several other books. Her work has appeared in Cranky, DIAGRAM, Agni, Rhino, Slipstream, Backwards City, Caffeine Destiny, and other publications. Recently I spoke with Bowen about her literary influences, dancing girl press' recent publications, and her recent collaboration with Julie Strand.

DG: How did you first get interested in writing?

KS: As a kid, I think I was always drawn to writing in general if not poetry specifically. I remember being four or five and scribbling in notebooks, pages of wavy lines that, at least in my head, told a story that was completely evident to me but gibberish to everyone else. After actually I learned to read and write, of course, I was hooked. I was determined to write a horror novel in junior high, my genre of choice in those years, and first started writing poems after an assignment freshman year of high school English. I have a little blue lock diary somewhere full of poems about cats and flamingos and hopeless crushes. Granted, my subject matter has changed over the years, and I’ve vacillated between genres a couple of times in terms of what I was writing, but I’ve been doing it ever since.

DG: Did you finish the horror novel that you started to write in junior high? 

KB: Like all of the fiction projects I have ever started, I no doubt abandoned it somewhere in the middle. I have always admired novelists for their endurance, something which I am sorely lacking. I think most poets thrive on short bursts of inspiration and creative energy. Someone once described it well as the difference between running sprints and long-distance. Some of the projects I've done are more narrative than others and sustain that narrative over many poems, but I am still working in fragments. 

DG: What do you remember about some of your first poems in high school? Do you still have them?

KB: I have a set of folders that archive everything I've ever written, and there are a few tucked in there. That blue diary is somewhere at my parent's house. There was one about a dead seagull that was trying to comment on the state of the world and the Gulf War written in 1991. Another about school violence. 

DG: Who are some of your literary influences?

KB: When I was in high school, I fell in love with Edgar Allan Poe’s "Annabelle Lee." Later, it was Sylvia Plath, though I have to admit, my appreciation of her work ripened as I got older. In college, my poems were incredibly Dickinsonesque and, god forbid, mostly end rhymed. I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, but I didn’t have much of a grasp on any contemporary poetry until I was in my mid-twenties.

DG: Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favorite poets. What do you like about "Annabelle Lee"?

KB: Oh, what 16 year old girl isn't into all that true love and tragic separations? It's the same reason we love things like Wuthering Heights and Romeo Juliet. I had it memorized at one point. For a while I was interested in the trope of dead girls in literature, what they both signified and left unsaid.

DG: What’s your favorite poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay? 

KB: My favorite, and my first encounter with Millay was "Never May the Fruit Be Plucked." Those lines "The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins, / In an orchard soft with rot" stick the knife in and twist, which I think all great poems do at some point. 

DG: What were some of your influences when you were in graduate school at DePaul?

KB: I was drawn the poets available to me in the library at DePaul -- such as Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds -- and all of whom had an influence on the poems I was writing for my first chapbook, The Archaeologist's Daughter. But what I would say actually broke open poetry for me was not even contemporary at all. I had to read "The Waste Land" for a lit seminar, and suddenly something just clicked. I had been trying to write poems for years but suddenly, so many possibilities opened up to me as far as what was actually possible in this crazy thing called poetry.

DG: “The Waste Land” is a masterpiece. I remember when I first read that, and being amazed and confused, and then reading up on all the allusions, etc. What are some things that you like about "The Waste Land"? There are so many aspects of that poem that I really like; one of which is how Eliot uses collage as a technique.

KB: That is a big part of my love for it as well. I think before, I was convinced that a poem had to be this very structured Keatsian thing with a beginning and end, a problem and a resolution. All of which "The Waste Land" DOES do, but not in a traditional and obvious way. There is so much layering and undertow there, so much sifting and building. I think it gave me permission as a poet to do that sort of layering. To stop feeling as if I had to write poems that were firm trajectories, but maybe could also be circular and messy and still be great poems. 

DG: How did you come up with the idea for “The Archaeologist’s Daughter”?

KB: I had been writing a lot of persona-like poems that had been inspired by things I was reading-mythology, history, visual art pieces. I wound up writing the title poem and suddenly everything sort of clicked together, how each poem became an escavation of self through these other personas. I had tried to put together a collection before but it lacked a center, but suddenly I had one. 

DG: What are some things that you like about having a space in the Fine Arts Building? That's where dancing girl press is located, right? 

KB: That's right. I used to walk by that building every day on my way to work, and for awhile visited a bookstore/coffee shop, always dreaming that someday I might work there or have a studio tucked somewhere upstairs. Another great love is old architecture, so I had long ago researched the building's history as a coach factory and an arts colony. When I decided to start looking for a studio space in the fall of 2007, it was entrely serendipitous that I managed to land a space there.

DG: How did you come up with the idea for dancing girl press?

KB: I had been publishing an online journal, wicked alice, for a few years, devoted to women’s writing, but I am also a huge geek for papery things and ephemera, with an interest in collage art, so I suppose it was inevitable that it would take on some sort of print incarnation at some point. One day I was fondling and perusing the chapbooks at Quimby’s Bookstore, and thought, “Hey I can do this!”.

DG: What were some early developments with dgp?

KB: We started by mostly publishing standard folded and stapled/sewn chapbooks, but I am also interested in ways to expand the notion of “chapbook” and some of the things we’ve done delve more into book arts territory.

DG: What are some examples of how your press has delved into the territory between the chapbook and book arts? 

KB: A while back I did a collaboration with poet/artist Lauren Levato, an homage to surrealist Joseph Cornell’s work. It was called at the hotel andromeda, and it contains poems, and art, and ephemera in an envelope. Billet Doux, an anthology project, charged 14 poets the task of making letters and postcard manifestations of their work, and collected them in a box. I am also interested in the intersection of poetry and other arts, and many of our books contain visual artwork or are inspired by visual art in some way, including an upcoming full-length poetry photo collab between Robyn Art and Robin Barcus-Slovina.

DG: How did your collaboration with Lauren Levato develop?

KB: I'd started a series of just poems based on Cornell's work in 2004 and over the course of a couple of years, I decided I wanted the end project to manifest itself in the spirit of the his boxes themselves, using ephemera and odd bits, all sort of things to be opened and fondled. Lauren mentioned that she had a similar love of Cornell and it became a collaboration involving my text and her images as the center of the project. 

DG: What are some recent releases with dgp? 

KB: The last batch of books that were released contained books by Carol Guess, Joanna Penn Cooper, and a collaboration between Sophia Kartsonis and Caleb Adler. I think any book we publish with dgp is usully something I love so much I wish I’d written it myself, so I suppose it’s all prone to a little narcissism and proprietariness on my part -- books so awesome I want to have some part in bringing them into the world.

DG: How would describe "Mesmer"? 

KB: Joanna’s work in Mesmer deals in a lot of the same subjects I feel myself compelled to write about -- girlhood and mysticism, a layering of darkness over loveliness, and vice versa.

DG: How would you describe Kartsonis and Adler's "EMUseum"?

KB: It's a quirky, smart, fun, little book with a lot of humor with is a nice juxtaposition to the other two books, which are a little darker.

DG: How would you describe Carol Guess' "Doll Studies: Forensics"? 

KB: It's part of a series of poems devoted to Corrine May Botz's The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a book that crossed my path coincidently around the same time Carol sent me the manuscript. I loved both and had to publish a segment of it. The full length is due out in 2012 from Black Lawrence Press.

DG: Would you say you have an interest in miniatures? ("The Nutshell Studies" is an interesting way to approach miniatures, and Cornell boxes have a miniature quality to them.) The doll house room at the Art Institute is pretty interesting. 

KB: Perhaps it's not miniatures so much as collections, or the power of objects to retain memory and emotion, or even to evoke memory and emotion even without a definite connection in the viewers mind. I've always been a little creeped out by dolls and doll houses.

DG: Would you explain your interest in the macabre, horror, and or Gothic? You've mentioned several interests and projects (Edgar Allan Poe, "Wuthering Heights," "Wicked Alice,” the "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"), which seem to connect with those subjects and genres. Do you also like the work of artists such as Edward Gorey and Tim Burton?

KB: Oh definitely, I think sometimes this is my biggest interest. I've always been in love with horror movies since around the age of four. I think, unlike most parents, mine never sheilded me from watching them. The end result of which was that while I was growing up I was simultaneously afraid of nothing and of everything.

DG: How did your obsession with horror and the Gothic develop as you got older?

KB: Later, it was devouring horror novels by authors such as Steven King and Dean Koontz, and I remember checking out every ghost story book in the Cherry Valley Public Library about four or five times. I spent the first night in our new house at ten reading Amityville Horror cover to cover and freaking the bejeezus out of myself. Even today, in my netflix cue, the horror genre outnumbers every single other.

DG: What are some examples of how horror and the Gothic have appeared in your writing?

KB: My writing has always tended to be sort of Gothic at least in a Plath-like sense, and I have a great interest in the subject of Midwestern Gothic, the loneliness of dark roads and abandoned farmhouses from around where I grew up. Years ago, I wrote a series about Resurrection Mary on the South Side, and would say even the projects that aren't directly related to the Gothic and the supernatural are in some way.

DG: How did your collaboration with Julie Strand develop last year, which you both presented during Chicago Calling 2009?

KB: We sort of had a vague plan in the beginning that involved exchanging postcards, and it took us awhile before it got rolling, but it was much easier once things started connecting and the work started building on itself. I think at first you have these separate pieces, but then they start connecting in the most delightful way, which was why we decided to call the project constellations. It was also an interesting experience reading them aloud at the Chicago Calling event and hearing the ways in which the fragments resonated. 

DG: Was that project with Julie Strand something that had been developing for a while before Chicago Calling? Is it still developing? 

KB: We started it in early 2009 right around the time I released her chapbook The Mae West Defense from dancing girl press. We are hoping to continue the project. I took a little break from producing new work over the winter, so we put it on hold momentarily. The nice thing about postcards is that they can be sent from wherever, whenever. 

DG: What other projects have you been working on?

KB: I am in the process of revising a new book manuscript, havoc, which I've been working on over the past two years. There are also a couple of series that are in progress, one a sort of novel in prose fragments. Otherwise most of my efforts lie in the press, and we'll be releasing about 25 more books in the next year, and are currently reading for the next season.

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