The Limits of Freedom: a conversation with Cavar about their debut novel “Failure to Comply”

The following is a transcription of a conversation between Diamond Forde and Cavar at Firestorm Books on August 8, 2024 about Cavar’s book, Failure to Comply. 

Diamond Forde: I’m gonna go ahead and kick off the conversation with a question I already told you was coming, same question I ask a lot but I think it’s really helpful to hear for folks who are either pursuing a book for the first time, or folks like me who have already done the debut who are kinda looking back at that experience and being like, “How can I make this better the next time”—to ask you—how do you feel now that Failure to Comply is in the world? 

Cavar: I feel a lot more at peace than I thought I would feel. I think that I had so many anxieties about if I get too excited about this book, I'll jinx it, you know? I'll attract the evil eye and something will go wrong. And I get that way a lot—and sometimes that actually manifests. And I don't think it actually has any connection to my excitement, but deep down, it's also like, oh God, I got excited about it and then it got messed up. But with this being out, it's just like this thing I've spent so many years of my life on, it really is entering the world. I haven't jinxed it, it really is there. People are now able to say they liked it or say they hated it or anything in between. But by now, I've been thinking so hard about it, and I've been thinking so logistically about it, that now that it's here, it's like, oh, it's here. I got this box of books, and I was so excited, this is my book, but I wasn't leaping out of my skin excited. I was like, oh yeah, there it is.

Diamond: Yeah, yeah, the kind of matter-of-factness of its existence, right?  

Cavar: Yeah.

Diamond: I like that, I like that. So, has there been anything in particular that surprised you during this process or maybe failed to surprise you? Was the lack of that kind of “jumping out of your skin” excitement surprising?

Cavar: I think that the amount, actually no, I know exactly what surprised me. And so I made the very good decision early in this process to hire a publicist. And Addie Tsai is my wonderful publicist, and I love them very much. And I realized in seeing a fraction of the shit that they have to do that I am not good at any part of the book process except for the writing part. And I knew this, you know, instinctively, 'cause I'm not a very social person, but this publicity stuff, the logistics, the scheduling, the marketing, the timing—all of that has been so overwhelming. 

And I think that was also part of the reason why my excitement about this was blunted. Because when you publish a book, you're getting the gift of a lot of extra stress. And of course, I didn't have to plan all these events. But if I wanted to sell books, then I did. 

So now I get my wonderful novel in the world, and I also get all of this stuff that I'm really not good at...and need to outsource help for.

Diamond: [laughing] I like that this is already proving to be a kind of community process, right?

Cavar: Yes. Yeah, for sure.

Diamond: [laughing] I love that we're crowdsourcing the work. That Addie is in your corner, and Addie is a phenomenal writer themself, right? And so I'm really excited to kind of hear that you're working together to put Failure to Comply into the world. I can't imagine how stressful that is, and yet I can at the same time.

And I like that it's a community effort because of how much community is also an undercurrent in this book a little bit.

[Diamond and Cavar break to read a sample from the novel] 

So I have been instructed by people around me who know more about readings than me, never to do a reading of more than like 15 minutes, absolute max, 'cause people don't pay attention. And like, I agree with that. And I think that this is actually significantly less than 15 minutes. This is the reading I'm going to be giving at every event, and it's the prelude and then one piece from the back.

[Added post-event: This is the section that opens Failure to Comply, a kind of philosophical dis- or re-orientation that, I hope, prepares readers for some of the themes that come up in the book: the nature of compliance and obedience when the perfection demanded of us is impossible to attain; the toxicity and violence that can be smuggled under the cover of “love,” and the destruction of futures as not only something that happens when people are killed and disappeared, but also when the full potentialities of the imagination are foreclosed. Put another way, the prelude is a portal, and through it we travel into the text as bodyminds able to withstand its force.]

[Diamond and Cavar read the first sample]

Cavar: And I'm going to skip ahead to something near the end of the text, and this is a section that is actually a little bit more on the poetics end because for those not currently with a novel in front of them, it does all kinds of sort of weird things with space and time and words. And the visuality is pretty crucial to it, I would say. I would say—I'm the one who wrote it, so I would say. 

So, I'm going to read part one from a series about killing people with axes.

[Context: the imagery of the axe comes up throughout the text, as “deviant” bodies seeking privilege/cure sacrifice their counterparts for a chance at redemption. The prelude’s first line, “the long necked axe struck me clean…” refers to the narrator, i’s, experience being axed and institutionalized as the price of another deviant’s salvation.]

[Diamond and Cavar read the second sample]

Diamond: Mm. Wow.

I think the poet in me (as if I'm not just all poet, right?) is really delighted when I hear the work, especially now that I'm hearing it out loud for the first time. Reading it on the page and then hearing it and reading it out loud—it’s kind of a different experience in terms of what it does sonically. I think that your work in general has just like this beautiful, keen attention to language and doesn't really take language for granted. I'm still haunted by that line. I'm paraphrasing it poorly, but “love is like the force that makes power go down easy”—right? That's... that’s haunting to me. But again, it's kind of like taking that idea of love to task. And I think that this book is very much a novel taking language to task, taking the page to task, taking voice to task ‘cause there are so many voices that seem to occupy. It's like a collection of—for those of us who haven't read it, it’s this beautiful collection of...it's like logs and letters. And at once it's poems and sometimes it's novel, and it's like just the fullness of it, right? It's a beautiful celebration.

And I think we used language like “anti-genre” when we were talking about the book for the event today. And I'm really interested in that. And for me, anti-genre, when I'm thinking about it, it's the resistance of the limitations and classifications the come with genre. For me, when I engage with genre, I'm constantly aware that there's a racial component—the kind of racialized idea of limitation when engage with genre. And I'm always trying to push against that slightly. In general, I'm trying to push against anything that doesn't really let me be as extra as I wanna be.

And so I guess I wanna know about your own experiences writing something that is at once a novel and at the exact same time, maybe anti-novel? What is it like to kind of strive towards that anti-genre writing? What are some strategies that you even use to employ that? What does anti-genre writing look like for you?

Cavar: Oh, that is such a great question. And I will say—I'm gonna go ahead and read it for the sake of the recording. In the notes section—if I was allowed more space, I would have probably written a whole 'nother book on the citational element of this.

(Diamond laughing)

But I do want to specify very explicitly for the sake of the anti-racialization of genre and anti-genre that this book would not exist specifically without black feminist fugitive poetics. And I cite here, sort of in the black radical tradition, Moten and Harney, Saidiya Hartman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, C. Riley Snorton, Legacy Russell, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and of course, Janelle Monae.

And like there are even more scholars, poets, activists, anti-label, anti-genre that are circling around this work, but it really was encountering works by authors, including the ones I just mentioned, that made me realize that nobody ever has to be one thing.

Growing up, I always thought, oh, well I'm good at writing fiction. And poetry is for like Robert Frost and Shakespeare, and not for me. And I didn't really encounter contemporary poetry or frankly any poetry that interested me until college. And then when I was in my freshman year of college, I went across the street to the indie bookstore, Odyssey Books by Mount Holyoke, and I got a copy of Not Here by Hieu Min Nguyen, and I got a copy of Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith, and I read them both one after another, and I was like, all right, I'm a poet now. 

(Audience laughs)

And then I started reading and writing poetry and submitting my really bad poems to literary magazines, some of which took pity on me and picked them up. And then I started writing better poetry. And then I sort of came into an identity as I think a lot of people see me mostly as a poet. But I think that I don't really identify as anything, but I think what people see is also what you picked up, which is the fact that I'm kind of obsessed with language, and I'm kind of obsessed with rhythm and sound. And I find that with writing, regardless of what genre I happen to feel like I'm falling into, I can curate words in a way that's really interesting to me.

And so, I really seek out any sort of writing—literary, et cetera—opportunities that allow me to curate words in ways that are interesting. And it just so happens that poets tend to be a little bit looser about that kind of thing than prose writers. I'll hang out with poets before prose writers any day, but I'm really not either one.

(Diamond laughs)

Diamond: I like a couple of things that you brought up there. The first, thinking about how you thought about the labels of genre and how they kind of reflect back and become part of identity. For me to say that I am a poet because I write poems is a purposeful kind of decision. But I think there is still something just as legitimate, just as purposeful in saying, “I'm not a novelist, I'm not a poet. I just am.” And I think that anti-genre lends that malleability to the identity of the writer in ways that I deeply admire. And I'm really glad that you articulated that for me.

And then the other thing that I was thinking about is that this felt like an archival book. So, all of those influences that you were mentioning, like hearing Saidiya Hartman's name, hearing Fred Moten, all of those experiences or those folks that you were engaging with as you were writing this anti-novel makes sense to me. Because there is so much of this book that feels like it is an archive of the world. 

For those of us who are kind of walking into this book and expecting whatever the hallmarks of a novel are—what do you need when you have a novel? You got the protagonist, the antagonist, the plot progression that has the climax, the denouement, whatever. Anybody walking into this novel expecting those hallmarks is going to be rudely awakened, I think. Because I think that this book felt almost like a mental archive of the world that we occupy in this book. And that every kind of chapter was this mental progression through the space. And I'm saying that (“mental”) very purposefully because there's some fun and funky stuff happening in the body in this novel that I wanna talk about in a second.

But I think that every time we move through another chapter, we're given a new—I wanna say—“perspective” of this particular world. And so if you're going into it expecting to have that climactic arch of progression—already the book is pushing against you. Because I think that the expectations of genre create a hierarchy of values.

Like, if I have particular expectations of a book, that means there are particular things that I value for that book to do. And I think that that idea of value is just so dangerous for archival work in particular. Because when we create value systems or hierarchical systems based on what is allowed to be archived, what is allowed to be history, what is allowed to be representative of that, we're creating gaps, right? 

And very purposefully creating those gaps…. So, I really love what the anti-genre does for this novel as archival work. Was that—any of that—in your brain as you were building this novel?

Cavar: Yes, very much so. I could like listen to you talk about archives all day, 'cause like this was just really delightful to listen to. (Diamond laughing) But very much so. I think coming into college, I, as a teenager, I experienced forced institutionalization for being Mad and a sort of lifetime of medical and psychiatric abuse prior to and subsequent to that. And I was trying to figure out the way I was going to relate to this sort of language that had been used, both as an excuse and as violation in and of itself toward me. And I couldn't go so far as to disavow it because that would be proving the powers that be right. And I couldn't embrace it because, you know, obviously I'm not gonna do that. And so, obviously I learned that the word I should use for this is disidentification when I first read José Esteban Muñoz. 

But around that same time, I was also getting super, super theory-headed in my freshman year of college. And, reading Muñoz, reading Foucault, reading Spillers, reading Hartman, reading Moten, reading all of these people who all were talking about the same thing—and that is whatever violations power attempts to make, those violations are immense, but they're never totalizing. That's literally not possible. Because if power were totalizing, we wouldn't be able to name it.

And of course, many people in the context of this novel are not able to name the power that RSCH has over them. Because RSCH, the imagination in this novel is a database that is never complete, and never searchable, fully. And there are words and there are linguistic turns of phrase that are only able to be thought about in very particular ways. And that's of course a way of narrowing the forms of thought that are allowed. And therefore, like the possibilities of resistance.

But as someone who is not… I mean, we're getting closer and closer, but we're not quite here. And by here, I'm pointing to the cover of my very scary book. (Diamond chuckles) We still have the ability to a degree to think, to think at the frayed edges and the borders of power, to think at the edges of legibility and common sense.

And all of these writers that I was reading were kind of talking about how do we step beyond this or how do we at least peek? And so I'm interested in thinking about what is archive, thinking about what is sensical, what is history, what is normal. 

In being like, okay, what if we just rip that? Like these stickers here (Cavar grabs a set of stickers from the table). There's wax paper and then there's plastic. And so what if we just do this? You know what I mean? For the audio people, I'm peeling the sticker off of the wax.

And so I'm thinking about how to write a book about archives and about memory that does that.

Diamond: Mhm. I love that. First off, I'm really glad we're recording this because I think the idea of violences in making is going to be a ghost haunting me for a while, and I need to return to that a little bit, but also thinking about the ways that we can use language to operate on the fringes, or at least to make the fringes present. It feels incredibly fascinating to me. And I'm gonna be thinking about that a lot.

Another thing that I think anybody who kind of picks up this book and has to navigate it is…this novel kind of pushes against even character, right?

So the central character is largely unnamed... kind of? (both laughing)

Cavar: Their name was kind of rudely stolen by...

Diamond: Yeah! Exactly, right? As they were uncitizened...they lose their namesake, right? Which is in itself obviously very compelling tolook at that kind of parallel and think of being uncitizened, and then also being de-named, it’s fantastic, right? Metaphorically.

But they're (referring to the protagonist) at times “I” in the book, right? We do kind of get that subject occupation—we get the “I” at times.

Sometimes “us,” which I love. I love the complication of that. I love the ways that, again, this book takes language to task in such fantastic ways, even pronouns...are being taken to task. So sometimes it's I. Sometimes it's us, and I'm like, ooh, right? And I think that even in that kind of “lack of naming”—and this is where my sneaky interest in embodiment starts creeping in—I described it as the main character being at once disembodied and also hyper embodied.

So for those of us who haven't read the book yet, the landscape of the book is that we are living in a society that's largely regulated, right? By the R-S-C-H (spelling the word out), right? And this is the kind of, I'm gonna say police force, they’re essentially the police force. They're the kind of regulating body. They're the limiting body. They kind of determine what is “citizen,” what is allowed, what sort of bodily occupation is even allowed or disallowed based on the common good…

And so we have, obviously, the R-S-C-H kind of creating all of these limitations and disallowing human beings to occupy their body through pleasure, through self-expression, through anguish. You can't even cry properly, right? You can't be angry properly. There is essentially a removal from purpose, strangely, which is kind of difficult to unpack 'cause technically, they give you a purpose… And I'm saying "they" very purposefully 'cause the book uses "they" very purposefully in that instance, right? They give you purpose, but you're not allowed to find and discover that on your own. 

And because we are living in this book, in a landscape in this book-- (laughs) Because we... both in this book and in this world, are living in a landscape that is all based on limitation.

We become super aware of the body, right? So sometimes the speaker doesn't have a body, they're not moving through the landscape sometimes. And then other times, because that body isn't there, we become so hyper aware of it, right? And then, even thinking about the moments when we do see the speaker's body, there's like three arms, two stomachs…

Which is so fascinating and fantastic to me. Because I see that, and I'm like "that is outside of my understanding, of my normative understanding of the human body," right? And that becomes a kind of hyper embodiment for me. And yet, just as easily as that detail slips in, it just as easily disappears. And so we're kind of constantly being pulled between this disembodiment and hyper embodiment. And so, I wanted to ask you, because that's me geeking out and being a dork...of what you saw as the kind of role of the body in Failure to Comply?

Cavar: So, what's interesting about both, I mean the world in the novel and also our world, is that our bodies are things that we are constantly expected to disavow and separate from ourselves. We're expected to sort of practice this Cartesian dualism. That's like, I mean, it's not possible, but we're continually pushed to practice it. So, we're simultaneously distanced from ourselves and also, I mean, our worth as persons is so utterly attached to embodiment and ideas of health and appearance and desirability, that these two things are wildly in contradiction. And yet this is one of the many contradictions that pervades the world we live in. And when I was thinking about this disembodiment and hyper-embodiment, I was really pushing this Cartesian dualist strain to its, like, logical endpoint in this, where your purpose as a citizen, as dictated by—you can pronounce it R-S-C-H, you can, the point is that it's unpronounceable 'cause there are no vowels—but I've always pronounced it “Research.”

Diamond: “Research!” (referring to RSCH) That's fantastic.

Cavar: Yeah, the point is that, within the context of the book, the point is that it can't actually be said.

But as RSCH (again, “research”) dictates, the point is to be mined for and then sort data for them. And you don't really need a body for that. So, your body is beside the point. And the thing you need to do for your body is keep custodial care of it. So, you need to have very specific sexed and gendered traits, very specific size and other health regulations. And you basically do that just to do it. There's no higher goal. I mean, it's just fascism. There's no other. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to.

And so, what “I” is doing within all of this and having escaped from the immediate capture of RSCH into this forest where there's a small bit of fugitive grace, there's a little bit more freedom, is trying to navigate the hatred for their body that they've been brought up to engage in and practice. And also this  immense desire to do something that feels good or feels fun or feels creative. And they compromise with a lot of self-harm. (laughing)

They're like, this is fun, and this is creative, but it also helps me show how much I hate myself. And is it like the best decision? Probably not. But it is something that results in a lot of the coolest scenes to write in the book, which were the body horror scenes. And it's also something that allows me and allows readers and anyone engaging with the book to think really capaciously about autonomy and what it means to do something out of love—I'm doing scare quotes here for the purposes of the audio—or out of hatred. At what point should one be stopped or should one be stopped at all? What are the limits of freedom? Is freedom always good? 

I'm asking these questions, and I ask them in the book because I don't have answers, but this is what happens when one removes themselves to a degree, to whatever degree is possible from the clutches of utter bodily authoritarianism, utter bodily fascism. Some of those free practices are not good, or not salubrious at least. But, they're also necessary and funky and meaningful.

Diamond: One of my obsessions coming out of the book, this scene in particular, I think, in the seventh chapter where the narrator admits to “skin cutting,” is how they described it. And I had the quote, I wrote it down because this is fantastic:

And they said, "I had no words to know that yet, but I knew, I knew I had to have myself. I had to try to have myself and I could only have me if I ruined me, if I made myself a despicable un-thing, if I was always defective, I would be the source myself."

Cavar: Oh my God, who wrote that?

(laughing)

Diamond:  Just some really incredible writer, right?

And I fucking, I love that. That moment devastated me in a lot of ways,  and it was complicated for me to wrap my head around this idea of self-destruction as being a kind of self-making. That really shook me to my particular core because I think part of what the book does is it lets pain exist normally.

Cavar: Oh, I love that. (laughing)

Diamond: Yeah! And what I mean by that is, like, if you are in a life that is regulated by RSCH so intensely that you're not even allowed to loathe your own body... that I am not allowed to even look in the mirror and hate myself… there is a kind of reclamation, a kind of power in being like, I'm going to be the source of my own self-hatred. Instead of allowing RSCH to take over that role for me, I am going to (re)build myself in this skin cutting thing again.

Cavar: Exactly.

Diamond: It’s incredibly complex and powerful, right? And really kind of shook me up, especially as somebody who is writing about chronic disability... writing... who has been writing through that and oftentimes, when I tried to write about my own pain, I tried to write about it in a way that gave the pain a sense of purpose.

And now where I am, I'm trying to kind of resist that instinct. To kind of resist trying to give purpose to my pain. Sometimes the pain just is, because what I was trying to do by defining pain in that way was I was trying to define myself? I felt intensely valueless. And so, by trying to assert some kind of meaning to this thing about me that I didn't really care about, I was also trying to inadvertently assert some meaning to myself. Which is not really working.

Why can't pain just be, right? What happens if I live in a world where I—and I do live in a world where I'm not even allowed to occupy my own pain: I have a job, I have obligations that I feel pull me from tending to my body—but this body knows when she wants the shit to be taken care of. She knows better than I know myself sometimes. And so if I can re-manage my relationship to pain, to allow it to be a thing that just is the way that this book feels like it allows the pain to be, I think there's something powerful and self-making in that.

And I guess I was wondering about what you saw as the between pain and self-making?

Cavar: That's a great question, and something that you said reminded me that I think, I think pain has its own autonomy. I think pain actually exists independent of me. And I think pain visits me. And I think that that's a better way to describe my relationship to it than, you know, sometimes I cause pain to myself or others. It's less that, and it's more that through my actions, through others, et cetera, sometimes pain visits me, and I have to figure out what to do with it.

And, you know, obviously it's way easier to write and philosophize about that in a book than it is to encounter it on my own. Because at the same time as I was writing the first draft of this, I was also becoming physically disabled. Growing up I was very able-bodied, if not able-minded. But as an adult, I developed multiple physical disabilities that are permanent and getting worse over time. And I think when I was putting a lot of that, a lot of my thinking… that I wasn't ready to think—

You know, throughout this book, “I” does a lot of unthinking and I also do a lot of unthinking. And the unthinking went here (in the book). And I think with the benefit of hindsight, the relationship I was trying to describe to pain was not... was one of visitation, but it was also one of neutrality.

And I was learning, and I'm sure you have a lot to say about this from a fat studies background, but I was learning about this idea of body neutrality as I was writing this book. And I was thinking about how scary it was to approach my body without love or hate. It's really scary to simply accept. And I don't think that that acceptance is ever gonna be finished or manifest, but it's really scary to think about my body self, my body mind as just a relationship to move with rather than as something to be attacked in a particular way. 

And I think what “I” within the book realizes over time, for those who haven't read it, they get all of these surgeries done by this kind of sketchy operator with eyes in its hands, which is pretty cool, but probably not very sanitary. (Diamond laughs) And over this time, “I” also experienced, experimented with what we would in our world know as hormone replacement therapy or gender affirming therapy. And then also gets an extra arm and an extra stomach and all kinds of stuff.

And throughout it all, none of it is done with the express goal of alleviating dysphoria or making them happy or progressing them to this next stage of acceptance or self-worth or joy. That's simply not the point. The point is creativity, and the point is relationship.

And I don't think I ever consciously thought that either in terms of myself or in terms of the book as it was happening. But as I was writing this and I was discovering body neutrality and I was getting my own trans surgeries, I was writing this book from the hospital room when I got my top surgery and my hysterectomy. I was writing this after my initial insurance denials and thinking, oh my God, I can't survive this. Sitting and typing away at Failure to Comply. And all of that ends up in this book that is about having a body and not, and realizing that you can't fight it. You just have to move with it.

Diamond: I’m thinking about neutrality in connection to something that you said earlier about the fringes, and I'm wondering if those two things are synonymous to me.

I wonder if the more that I move towards occupying neutrality or thinking towards neutrality or unthinking as a way of trying to achieve that neutrality, I'm wondering if I'm also simultaneously moving towards the fringes in that way. I don't know, I'm thinking out loud now. (laughs)

Cavar: I mean, body neutrality is certainly, in our present epoch, certainly a noncompliant way of thinking about embodiment. Like, we are not supposed to simply let ourselves be, never. And especially in a lot of trans circles, this idea of self-making is extremely tempting to go with.

And I've used it myself. It's a very easy way of resisting a lot of the most violent transphobic rhetoric. And the reason it's easy is because it actually complies with a lot of capitalist, neoliberal value systems. It just does so in a trans-friendly way.

But actually it's a lot more challenging and also a lot more interesting to say the surgeries, the hormone therapy, whatever I choose is not a matter of self-making. It's... I mean, what is it? Maybe I don't have words for it. Maybe—

Diamond: You don't have to.

Cavar: Maybe I simply don't want boobs so I don't have them anymore. Like that's kind of it.

Diamond: Yeah, like how do we get a little bit closer to just being in our bodies and being in our bodies in a way that we don't have to justify or explain or create purpose for. 

And kind of resist that instinct. Because I think everything that we do is trying to lend us purpose in the same way that RSCH designates purpose, right? That you are, that your body is a thing for productivity, however RSCH defines it—I think again, mirroring the world that we live in, right? (laughs)

The same kind of navigations for all of us is that we're all navigating an expectation for our body. We're all spoon-fed particular purposes. And so what happens if I can say, no, my purpose is to be. I think that's really kind of profound and powerful to kind of think through. Difficult, challenging– Every obstacle in the world is not gonna let us have that, right? But it is interesting to strive for. I think if nothing else, that's the point of being human is to keep trying, right?

Cavar: I think it's hilarious that we are talking about this, and yet we're both in academia.

Diamond: Yes. (both laughing) Yeah, mm-hmm, I'm a hypocrite. (both laughing)

Cavar: No, me too (laughing) me too.

Diamond: So we've been talking for a little while. So, I will get to the last question, which is mostly to ask, where are you going now? What are you thinking about now in terms of writing? Are you working on any new projects, anything?

Cavar: Always, always. So this will be more officially announced in September, but my debut full-length poetry collection—poetry—we talked about being anti-genre, but it is a poetry collection (laughing) called "Differential Diagnosis," and it’s under contract with Northwestern University Press. That will hopefully be a thing in 2026.

And I guess that is the next thing that will probably be published. I finished the first draft of my second "novel." It's speculative fiction in the sense that everything is speculative fiction, I think. But... oh God, why am I even talking about genre labels? See, this is me being a hypocrite and not abiding by my own. 'Cause it's hard to use language to talk against language.

In the language of language, it is a contemporary, slipstream novel, and it thinks about the sort of ongoing shadow of institutionalization and disorderly eating, and fatness and platonic intimacy and friendship, and also about being a confused dirtbag lesbian (Diamond laughs) who hates their therapist, (Diamond laughs) and also their ex.

I think this book, Failure to Comply, was the book I needed to write in order to write this subsequent book. This subsequent book is, like, if Detransition, Baby were about anorexics.

Diamond: Okay, I'm excited, I'm very excited.

Cavar: Maybe I should pitch it that way. Maybe that would scare some people off. [Editor’s note: since the time of this recording, the project has been agented with Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House.]

Diamond: Honestly, that should be the tagline. Yeah, I agree, I think that's fantastic. Cavar, thank you so much for your time.

Cavar: Thank you!

About Cavar

Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They are editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place, and their work can be found in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in Cultural Studies, Cavar teaches bicostally and lives on the internet. More at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.substack.com. 

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.