On Conjuring and Manifesting: Exploring the Magic in Anastacia-Reneé’s “Side Notes” and “Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere”

On Conjuring and Manifesting: Exploring the Magic in Anastacia-Reneé’s Side Notes and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere

Interview completed July 5, 2024

Diamond Forde: So, at the time of this interview, you’ve had two books released with Harper Collins Publishers, Side Notes from the Archivist (2023)—a poetry collection that wiggles deftly between genres and mediums (more on that in a second), and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere (2024)—a polyvocal and multigenred poetic prosing, a genre-blend, or as your publisher’s website describes it, a “bold hybrid collection of poetry, flash fiction, and Afrofuturism sci-fi.”  

Already, in the description of these two books, there’s some resonances cropping up across both, resonances I will dive into shortly. 

But first, I want to ask how are you? What’s it like touring and selling two recent books, while also being a resource to the writing community? How are you balancing rest? How are you balancing writing? Are there other priorities you’re navigating right now? 

Anastacia-Reneé: I am navigating and renegotiating what it means and feels like to “rest,” and thank you for beginning the interview with the heartfelt intention of what I call “checking in” on me. The upside about being on book tour is sharing the work I am deeply excited about with others— especially with those who have no idea about the work that has been published recently or any of the work I have done in the past. Both books are still relatively new in terms of sharing the work out loud and to/with an audience (especially Here In The (Middle) Of Nowhere) and this both makes me nervous and excited! But I must admit maintaining the balance of giving my all while conserving energetic energy and giving my body what it needs to function at its best is not impossible, but there are some moments when I think about the back-to-back flights or the 1000 percent I put into a reading and book signing that I ask myself “When will I rest?” 

The words I often repeat in all caps (to others)—“SELF-CARE,” “SELF-PRESERVATION,” etc., only appear in fine print for myself.  As far as balancing writing, I can honestly say I do not suffer with the pangs of writer's block or not being able to write. I have to. Writing is in fact one of the most consistent practices I have upheld for a number of years. And just like writing, I will always give what I can to multiple communities and I never grow tired of the giving, sharing, helping, teaching or nudging. 

I am surrendering to the power of myself. I am actively balancing being both a teacher and a student of writing, of life, of spirituality and of creativity in general. I admire all the folks who have graduated from the academy of the “nap ministry” and everyone else who has been able to take adequate space to reimagine and rejuvenate. I am working on it! ☺

Diamond: I want to start out in praise of Side Notes from the Archivist, which, from jump, made me think about community. In particular, how your work spoke to/through/with Saidiya Hartman’s essay, “Venus in Two Acts.” In it, Hartman writes about wanting to recover “Venus,” two unnamed Black girls murdered on a slave ship—but also all Black girls archived through death. Hartman discusses the impossibility of that recovery, reminding us that the archive of slavery is founded in violence.  

I think Side Notes carries that conversation forward, spinning us from the ‘80s onward, pointing out new language and delivery for the same violences Hartman discusses, while queering and trans-ing the archive in ways that are necessary but impossible for Hartman and her Venus. 

And while these poems catalog a collection of losses, stares unflinchingly into the (read: minstreled / read: sacrificial / read: commodifiable) violence of anti-blackness, these poems catalog life, too. There is even photo evidence of that life! 

The book progresses through decades, from Black Girl(hood) to Black Woman(hood) and makes some of the smartest transitions between mediums I’ve ever seen, from the mixtape, to television series’ episode pitches, to a Q&A, to footnotes, to quizzes, and prayers. This is a beautifully expansive archive, one that not only constructs an archive but calls into question the act of archiving. To clarify, I’m thinking of the “episode” poem series here, which to me called attention not only to what performances already exist within the archive and how they are  expected to look, but also who constructs and archives these performances.   

Which is why I think it’s dope that we’re thinking about the archivist and the archivist’s side notes in this book. So, I was wondering, can you talk a little bit about the importance of the “side note” to this archival project? What opportunities does the “side note” offer conceptually? What unexpected challenges, if any, come up in trying to construct a deliberately “archival” project? 

Anastacia: My goodness! Thank you so much for your appreciation of my work and recognizing the multiple layers and conversations I am having (with other writers like Hartman) to explore, peel and sugar scrub our present(s), histories and all the in-betweens. I want to begin by saying some of  the “Episodes” were first published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in The African Diaspora literary magazine with guest editor Douglas Kearney. They appeared  as they do in the book but the “Editor’s Notes” were displayed as yellow Post-It notes.  When I saw a few of them in that form (thanks to Kearney’s genius mind) I knew there was a larger suite of poems brewing and building. This leads me to the structure and purpose of the Side Notes. In some cases they are straight forward side notes in the book and sometimes the Side Notes take on the form of the person, place or subject I want the reader to take note of… their “retrofuckery” or nonsense or the ways in which they continue to shove the bitter taste of injustice down the throats of Black women or Black people. But the seeds as well as the container for Side Notes begin with me being an observer, asking questions, taking copious notes, sound notes— ear hustling and seeing so many long and short term interactions and experiences that I wanted answers to. Side Notes were actually some of the beginnings for subject matter for poems. They start out as questions and eventually end with researched answers—I wanted to provide receipts for  some readers and notes of confirmation for others. Deliberately constructing an archive was never a problem but deciding what should or shouldn’t be in this particular archive was a struggle. There were fragments in time where I felt like I was in an area of literary purgatory because Side Notes is not fully academic and it is not fully a book that only involves creativity, poetry and no research. I struggled with who its readers might be and if folks on either side would benefit. If they’d like it? I somehow totally forgot that some folks just want to read books and are not married to either side! 

Diamond: As a fat, Black woman, the mammy figure is a trope I find myself contending with again and again in my own poetry, so I was personally invested when I came across the Aunt Jemima series toward the latter half of Side Notes. One scene that still sticks with me is the speaker in “Aunt Jemima’s Crown” greased and whispering with Aunt Jemima as they braid her hair. I was captured, I think, by the intimacy of that moment, among other ways you were able to contextualize / actualize Aunt Jemima in a contemporary landscape, from an archive and history of violence.    

My question is process-based, seeking insight into how you (re)construct a familiar character across multiple poems—how did you, as a writer, teach yourself to see (and then re-see) Aunt Jemima in/through/against the violence defining her history? What advice might you give other writers trying to do the same? 

Anastacia: Diamond! That series of poems kind of scared me the most. I knew that some Black folks would be like, “Why is she writing about Aunt Jemima? Haven’t we had enough?” But like you, I have experienced the historically open salt wounds of tropes. I was so disgusted with the energy behind Aunt Jemima during Trump's election and the ways in which that trope and problematic history literally at one point became an exciting thing to raise hell about from white republicans—(read the Side Notes.) But this made me so angry. It was not a new anger but I felt like I had to write about Aunt Jemima. Part of the work that I do is to reimagine dead people or previous “characters” or tropes as living in the present. I ask myself what might my relationship be with them? Why might they be important? What have they gone through? There are several poems about Aunt Jemima that did not make it in the book that might end up in another book or elsewhere. This reimagining energy is always present when I am working. In (v.) (2017), I used this reimaging to write stories of Skipper and Barbie. In Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere, I wrote the creation story of Bloody Mary. 

There are so many dynamic writers doing innovative things in their writing! If any writer was interested in heading down the pathway to reimagine or deeply get reacquainted with a trope, character or ancestor I would say first start with the fairytale prompt which is to choose any fairytale, nursery rhyme or fable that you know by heart and re-write it! Change the ending or the beginning. In my opinion this prompt unlocks a creative door in the brain which makes it easier to step into the room of the trope or historical figure you want to “get closer to.”

Diamond: So, I want to position the two books in conversation slightly and celebrate a theme of abundance I saw running through them.  I’ve talked, for instance, about the ways Side Notes employs structural abundance through its various use of found mediums, but Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere takes that work and builds abundantly upon it.  

I love how its simultaneity and multiversality builds into abundance. I love how its grammar (the grammatical tensions created in your (re)use of parentheticals) lends itself to considerations of abundance. I love how stunningly polyvocal it is, a choir of Lucilles on high. But also its LANDscapes—capital LAND because the settings are characters here and deserve some respect on their name. Linguistically, sonically, imagistically—this book is abundant and then some.  

Do you see “abundance” in connection with your work, and if so, in what ways? How has hybridity influenced your work’s connection to abundance, and how do you navigate the synthesizing of a hybrid project?  

Anastacia: You know…I DO see abundance in my work. I see hope in my work. I see joy in my work. But I often think that readers would not classify my work as hopeful, abundant or joyful. (Insert cackle here.) I think that there is freedom in being able to write about bullshit. Freedom in writing about pain, grief and sorrow. Freedom in expressing anger. Freedom in asking questions. Freedom in grit. Freedom equals abundance. After such a long history of imposed physical and mental silence, energetic and religious erasures and the proof of pain being “shut up in our bones,” on some level I feel a responsibility to write about these issues and I am happy to read the work of others who address joy, freedom and abundance in other ways. I have to mention as well that my “definition” of joy is that it is our intrinsic right. It is our birth right. I don’t believe that joy can be given or taken away. It is the steady hum. The heartbeat. The blood flowing. The breath. The air. Source. There is deep abundance and freedom in that “knowing.”

I began my writing career as a journalist with a stack of poems in a notebook. I thought that being a journalist would be a more lucrative career. I also did like the feeling of “getting the story.” I liked the chase of the research. Later I realized though I’d write a story and want to add more of my feelings or opinion and so I moved to more of writing editorial essays. I liked this a lot. It held the same amount of research and the desire to research and get the story and add my opinion but still—I felt like it was missing something. Poetry. At the time, If I incorporated poetic language the editors would call it ”flowery.” They did not want flowery in their articles. I found myself still writing poems, and then writing shorter essays in my journal. I had also begun to do research on random topics and these became my “weekly obsessions.” I started to write plays because I would feel like in certain persona poems that I still wasn’t able to fully embody the character. Still by this time I had begun to move in the world as a “poet.” One day I woke up and said “It’s too hard to hide or keep separate all these other genres I am writing.” And I announced (via a bio) that I was hybrid writer and I started saying “hybrid” or “multigenre” writer in public. 

When I have written at least 20 pieces that feel like a suite or series or when I see some recurring themes or can’t stop writing, the work moves from single poems to a “project.” Once it becomes a project for me, I am free to incorporate other genres or writing devices. Footnotes, glossary references, song quotes, research, or mathematical formulas. 

Diamond: I want to return to my early mentioning of the LANDscapes in Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere. Mostly because I want to gush about a thing you did that I thought was cool.  

There are characters that dip in and out of the book’s interwoven narrative, characters whose voices contribute to some of the polyvocality guiding the book, characters like Laverne, Luther, or Bloody Mary, among others.  

I received a review copy from Harper Collins so that I could read the book in print, and I think I was about twenty-plus pages in before I was introduced to the book’s central cast of characters. This stunned me—for two reasons. First, HOW DID YOU DO THAT? (lol) How did you withhold that hand for so long? But also, second—I am astounded at the amount of world-building that happened before that moment, again linguistically but also in the ways the LANDscapes define the characters as much as the characters define the LANDscape.  

And that’s what I think I admire most about this technical decision—is what it dismantles amongst the hierarchies in our genre. Like, of course, I expect the cast of characters detailed on the first page; I’ve learned under a hierarchical system that privileges the human first, a system that ignores the equal and reciprocal ways the World shapes us in turn. As your book asks, “What if God were a Black woman?'' while simultaneously tending to the god in Black women, you don’t necessarily dismantle binaries so much as reposition our ideas and thoughts into configurations we are taught to forget: configurations that can be simultaneously possible.  

Do you want to talk a little about the ways time might influence this book or the exploration of these ideas? Any insight into the binaries you saw, if any, at stake in this narrative? And, in a callback to a previous question, how did you teach (and reteach) yourself to see new possibilities as writing the book progressed?   

Anastacia: It is really a blessing to know that someone is gushing about my work, especially someone who is so brilliant and thoughtful as you are! As well as an established and amazing writer. Thank you. 

Wow. There are so many influencers of time and time constructs in my life. In the Collection of Audre Lorde poems, there are certain poems where the time or place is in the title. In my childhood diaries and even my journals now, there is always a time and date attached. In many of Octavia Butler’s books her characters are moving through and beyond time. Sun Ra and Star Trek. Astronomy. All of these things (and a million other influences) have been seeded in my brain and I wanted to figure out a way to see what happened if I let the idea of time/no time/other time/alternative time actually be one of the main characters in my book. I consider time to be the character that moves stories, landscapes and characters in the book. 

I am a firm believer in magic too. In conjuring. In manifesting. In spirit. And I was trying to figure out ways to incorporate these beliefs but also questions of the unknown into the book. Lucile and the belief that Lucile was the God of all gods and that there were many layers to the God Lucile was in my mind the only way I could tie all of that together.

Yet at the same time I did not want this idea of “God” to be a perfect entity hovering in the sky judging us. I wanted the idea that God is in all of us to play out in these stories. That God is all around us and she might be drinking bourbon and frying bacon. She might be taking a friend to get an abortion. She might be wearing white and leading a ceremony. She might be reading an interview. ☺

The landscapes are super important to me. I wanted Here In The (Middle) of Nowhere to feel like home to every reader. In truth its landscapes are embedded in places I have lived: Kansas City (where I was born and raised), Philadelphia (where I went to middle school and lived), Seattle, San Diego, Japan, New York, Arizona, and New Orleans (where my dad’s side of the family is from and where I feel at home in.) 

I have always felt that land/landscapes hold energetic footprints. I was attempting to tell a story where the idea of those footprints begin, but never truly end or where the footprints are happening simultaneously. 

In this feeling too, I have felt the erasure of full lineages through time, space and landscape. Claiming or having a book where the “place” or “home” is also an essential character—working with and through time was my heart's desire. 

About Anastacia-Reneé

Anastacia-Reneé (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, playwright, former radio host, TEDX speaker, and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Gramma/Black Ocean), Forget It (Black Radish); Sidenotes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins/Amistad). Side Notes From The Archivist was selected as one of “NYPL Best Books of 2023,” and, The American Library Associations (RUSA) “Notable Books of 2024.” Anastacia-Reneé is a recipient of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award and, she was selected by NBC News as part of the list of "Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021's Must See LGBTQ Art Shows," for “(Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts” an installation at the Frye Art Museum. Anastacia-Reneé served as Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019) during Seattle’s inaugural year of UNESCO status. Her work has been anthologies and published widely.

About Diamond Forde

Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.