Running From or Running Towards Something: The Endless Volta of I.S. Jones’ Spells of My Name (Newfound)

This summer, Essays Editor Aja St. Germaine and Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, Dorothy Chan sat down with the lovely I.S. Jones to discuss her chapbook, Spells of My Name (Newfound). Jones’ two poems, “Nexplanon” and “Kitchen Work” were published in our inaugural issue. 

Dorothy Chan: Hi, this is editor-in-chief Dorothy Chan. Today, our lovely intern, the wonderful Aja St. Germaine, and I have the pleasure and honor of interviewing the multitalented, beautiful poet, writer, editor, creator I.S. Jones on her chapbook with Newfound – shoutout to Newfound – Spells of My Name. First of all, check out this very gorgeous cover and back cover. We’ll be talking much more in detail today on Sticky Fingers. Jones is a previous Honey contributor and her poetry and writing always has a home at our Hive, so Itiola, anytime, we’re always, always, always happy to promote your work. And her two poems, “Nexplanon” and “Kitchen Work,” are featured in Issue 1, our debut issue, and now we even have a new website, so go check them out yet again. We’re always happy, once again, to be working with Itiola, always a pleasure. The Hive is your biggest fan, and we wanted to send love to you via this long-distance Zoom call today. And in addition, “Nexplanon,” one of the poems I just cited from Honey, is also part of this chapbook, Spells of My Name. So please welcome I.S. Jones! And Aja and I had prepared some, I think, really thought-provoking, important questions today. I’ll pass over to you now, Aja, to start.

Aja St. Germaine: So, we really wanted to start with the historical, so whether that’s a world historical lens or the personal as historical. When we were discussing your chapbook, we discussed how studying literature and history really goes hand in hand, both as the citizens of our country and citizens of the world, to better understand and enact a deep historical change. That deep historical knowledge is absolutely crucial. So, history in your collection also works on a personal and intimate level – it intersects with matrilineage and the study of queer Black feminism. Can we please start talking about these intersections of historical study and allusion as well as creative writing and poetry and how it intersects with the historical?

I.S. Jones: Yeah, thank you for that question, Aja. In the first iteration of the chapbook, that was a crucial cornerstone of the book that was missing. When I first finished the chapbook, I sent it out to a bunch of places. It wasn’t working, so I scrapped the chapbook and I kind of rebuilt the end from scratch. I had an idea of these series of interviews with the American-Nigerian that [are] one of the few cycles that guide the movement of the chapbook. One of the lines in one of the American-Nigerian poems goes something like, “history never had the ambition to account for people like me.” I think all the time about how the Biafran War, the Nigerian Civil War, forever changed the trajectory of my family. I believe, or at least I want to believe, had that war not happened, I might have still been born. I might have been born in Nigeria, as a Nigerian woman, with Nigerian sensibilities. And I think often about how I said in the last of the four erasures, “violence and hope made me an American.” I think I forever have to reconcile with [how] my American-ness is forever tied into both of those things. In a lot of ways, the chapbook kind of felt like I was dipping my toes into the personal as history – my mother being jumped and left for dead by guerrilla soldiers, my father’s very arduous journey towards naturalization, and even reclaiming my name, and what that means to have my name that’s also my grandmother’s name and her grandmother’s name and so on and so forth. In a lot of ways, my name is… for a long time I’ve felt this way, that my name is the only part of my Nigerian heritage that I can hold on to. And now that I’ve moved through the world a bit more and made more colleagues and I feel more comfortable in my identity than I did when the chapbook came out, I know that that’s not necessarily true. I think, in a lot of ways, the story of history is also the story of the personal. They say that “history is told by the winners” – I mean, I say “history is told by the colonizers.” I think that it was really important for me to write these poems about the personal as history because I was scared to at first. I didn’t want to. I want to write all these beautiful, elaborate poems that do all these weird things with form – which is fine, and fun, but I realize that I was using that to hide from the really difficult poems, which were the ones about me and my father and how at the center of the chapbook, that’s what the poems are trying to get at, the sort of fraught relationship with both of us, and whether I’m running from or running towards something.

DC: I really love what you just said right here, Itiola, whether you’re running from or running towards something, and how you were also talking about your process just now in that, obviously there are many ways in the world in which to exist as a poet. And of course, one of those ways is that we can be extremely experimental and create extremely elegant and innovative forms that also, let’s say, push back against that white canon that has been shoved down our throats since the start of our education. But I do really admire the very core of what you just said as well – this confrontation of what was I most afraid of or dreading to write about, and really getting there, so you just saying that that consists of the heart, the middle section, what I would like to call the chapbook or the collection’s volta, I think is very remarkable.

ISJ: Thank you for that, Dorothy. And then, in the original iteration of Spells, the last poem was “My Therapist Asks, ‘Is the Hunter in Your Dreams Your Father?’” And that was the one that made me realize, “Oh no! This chapbook is about me and my dad!” I can’t escape now that I see it! I did not, I really did not want to write poems about me and my father at all, I really did not. But all of the poems, the poems were smarter than me and kept saying, when I got to the volta, they were like, “Oh, surprise, this is actually about you and your father.” It was that poem and also “Queer American.” With “Queer American,” I asked myself with writing a series of lines – is it written in monostiches? I haven’t seen the book in a long time, so I don’t remember. But I think it’s written in a series of monostiches where they’re declarative sentences, all then stopped by periods, and then when I got to the turn, I realized, all of these things, all of these conceits that I was making was really me trying to hide from what the poem really wanted to talk about, which was this fraught relationship with my father. And I think once I stopped hiding from that, the book clicked into place. And then I wrote two or three more poems that ended the book, so then the proper ending, the right ending, “How to Spell Infinity,” I think really got at what the chapbook wanted to end with. Not so much me winning over my father or defeating him, but being free of that violence or setting myself free of that pain and violence despite what has happened.

But I think also something that’s important, at least just for me, myself, the person, not so much me, myself, the poet, is that so much of this chapbook was me trying to make language around my father’s suffering, and around his pain, and humanize him in ways that I did not know how to before. Especially with the poem “On Transatlantic Shame,” that long poem towards the end. I wrote that poem probably like a year before I realized I was writing a chapbook. And then I realized, “Oh wait, all of these poems are speaking to each other and this is the long piece that wants to be the book.” And I think in a lot of ways it gave me peace and allowed me to forgive my father in ways that I might not have been able to. Because I’m not interested in painting him to be a monster; I’m not interested to say, “These are the things that he did to me and I want everyone to know” – that’s not really interesting writing to me. Like, you know, you can go to therapy, it’s always an option. But I think that I was really interested in the gesture of compassion, trying to understand what made him the way he is and how he carried his wounds into fatherhood and I inherited those wounds. My healing began with kind of going back in time, which is what “On Transatlantic Shame” is doing – pressing the fast forward button and going through twenty years of my father’s life until he came here to the States and that’s why I was born. That was a long-winded response to what you said.

DC: No, I love that too because, especially in – I think of “Queer American,” [which] to me is such a major standout of this chapbook. It is a poem that I like to teach, it is a poem where I want to, like, reading the first two lines aloud, I just start laughing because it’s like what Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon calls “Truth with a capital T” in poetry. I mean, do you get better than two opening lines that start with “I have sex with men but make love to women.” There is nothing better than that! And that is all yours, and thank you. And then, following that up with “I only wish to fuck men who also desire to be fucked by men,” and then going back to your father the way that we finally land in this poem, the way that we finally end with “he knows nothing about me. There are things we are too embarrassed to say.” I think connecting these observations to “On Transatlantic Shame” is this idea of how everything in this chapbook is also named, and through the release we also get that power, and also through this nuance and complexity and naming the violence, the speaker brings out that power too. And it is not to shame the father figure but bring on a greater understanding of what is inherited and then what ends up being rejected and maybe something else, something much more powerful and feminist and beautiful, becomes rejuvenated and that is what rises. I also wanted to now bring attention to one of the poems in Honey Literary Issue 1 and having you, Itiola, as part of that debut, when our magazine was just starting, it was just like the greatest honor – I still remember the day when Rita had told me that you were in her inbox and we just really excited because, when we were creating this journal, your work and your presence in the literary world was one of the inspirations as well. So, I want to draw attention now to “Nexplanon,” which – we talked about this, Aja, but “Nexplanon” really exemplifies why a space like Honey Literary exists, period. One of the reasons why I think it’s like the ideal poem for Honey Literary, which, to the audience members who are watching now who don’t know, Honey Literary is a BIPOC focused lit mag; it is run by all women, queer, and femmes, of color, and within this poem, speaking of queerness, I underlined the words “virginity,” “boyfriend,” and the combo “tribe of girlhood.” These combinations really intrigued us a hive, and they’re all a satirical contemplation of the self. One’s engrossed by heteronormative ideals and expectations. So I guess what I’m trying to say here too is, it’s a study of a tone within a poem. And Honey’s motto, by, once again, the great Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, is “when writing, we want to fuck with the ineffable.” Could you talk a bit more, Itiola, about how you use words like “virginity” and “boyfriend” and how the usage of the words and combos speaks to effing with the ineffable?'

ISJ: Yeah, what a beautiful question. I wanted to say, first, real quick before I forget, the poem “Queer American” is indebted to Nicole Sealey, like very much so indebted to her. I just want to say it on the record. So, with “Nexplanon,” it really means a lot what you said about how “Nexplanon” exemplifies what Honey Literary’s doing because, when I wrote it, I was just going to let [it] live in the chapbook – I was never, ever going to publish “Nexplanon.” It was such a very deeply intimate poem to me, and I never talked so publicly about my birth control. When I finished the poem, I just said, “I’m going to put this very privately in the chapbook; no one is ever going to see this unless they get the chapbook.” But when I saw Honey Literary and I saw y’all’s mission statement, I was like, “Wow! My little poem has found a home! This is great.” I had no intention of ever publishing it until Honey Literary. Then I said, there’s no other magazine I could think of that would have such a home that is so deserving of it. So it means a lot – that just warmed my heart. When I wrote “Nexplanon,” I was getting my birth control replaced for the third time and, if you all know anything about birth control, it lasts three years, and it can have very adverse effects on AFAB people because it’ll either stop your menstruating altogether or you’ll menstruate for six months straight and then stop for, like, two and a half years. And I really loved the idea that I could control my own menstruation. As someone who’s also negotiating a lot of dysphoria around menstruating, that was really nice. And I was still trying to find the language around my sexuality as well – I knew that I was, how you say, “done with men.”

DC: That’s always the greatest phase, isn’t it?

ISJ: But I knew that I still wanted the protection and, in the poem, I said, “I wanted what any woman wants: protection and pleasure. I sought out a small savior adorned in white.” I meant pleasure as in sex, but I also meant pleasure as in “I could do with my body what I wanted.” Some poet had said something about, like, “there’s some pleasures you keep for yourself.” That’s an example of one of the pleasures I keep for myself. To eff the ineffable…I don’t know, I mean, I’m sure there are other poems about birth control, but I don’t know if I’ve ever read any that encompass girlhood and sort of the soft and quiet language of girlhood, about what it means to lose your virginity – because I remember, when I first did the deed, I was excited because I had some sort of social currency to trade with other girls. Like I had these stories to tell. I didn’t care so much about the person who I lost it to; I just wanted the story. And then later, when I got older, I was like, “that was kind of a weird way I looked at it.” But I think even at 17, I think it was really fascinating because I cared more about what my girlfriends thought about my losing my virginity and how I would now be perceived than so much the actual act itself. And I’m glad that I wrote this poem when I was older and I had a bit more clarity. So there’s that, and then also some questions toward the end come up – “Do you want children someday? How long have you been on this birth control? When was your last period?” It was really important for me to have these moments of reflection throughout. I mean, the entire poem is about reflecting back, about childhood and pleasure and how I equated girlhood with pain. I equated the space between girlhood and womanhood with pain, and something about the body shedding something of itself. What was the other part of the question, Dorothy?

DC: I think it was also looking specifically at words such as, “girlhood” and “virginity” because something that you were also kind of alluding to just now, Itiola, was about how, to you, at that age much younger, that was a form of social currency. So there was an act, let’s say between you and this other person, but you didn’t care as much about the act itself but more of like, what social currency it brings, which I find really fascinating because I think that that also sheds so much light into how virginity itself is just this heteronormative concept, but more importantly, it is also this social construct as well.

ISJ: Yeah, I think that, especially at that age. I do feel for girls in high school because they’re at the intersections of so much. Negotiating around their own body, negotiating the language around their own body. They’re just now realizing their own sexuality and, right at the crux of that – at least in my experience, I had a lot of older men hitting on me; the person I lost my virginity to had no business talking to a high school senior. My mom knew about it; it was actually very inappropriate, but she had faith that I could take care of myself and ultimately I did. I think growing up in a very religious house, the idea of saving your virginity for marriage was really important – this idea of, like, keeping yourself pure for your partner. But none of that really meant anything to me because, also, there was the thing of, “why is it that me as the AFAB person in the relationship is expected to keep pure while the person who’s AMAB is not?” What sense does that make? Like, even at 16, 17, I would ask people and no one could give me a proper answer that obviously wasn’t some sort of rule about sex.

DC: Exactly.

ISJ: I think I should have known very young I was a lesbian because there were a lot of heteronormative dynamics that didn’t make logical sense to me and I just didn’t actively ascribe to. For example, in high school, a lot of my girlfriends were like, “oh, you know, as soon as I’m done with high school, I’m going to get two kids and get a little house and me and my high school sweetheart…” and I’m like, “that’s cool, bro, I really want to travel and go to all of these places where I’ve never been to before and try foods and I’ve never eaten and hang out with my friends in beautiful cities.” I came from a…it was not a small town but it had small town values. You got married as soon as you got out of high school; you settled down as soon as you could. And the idea of having kids – especially because most of the people I graduated with in high school, a lot of them have had like, one or two kids – the idea of doing that was so unappealing to me. And I was kind of just like, “Why is this what y’all aspire to?” I mean like, it’s okay to aspire for children, but I just reject this notion that your life is incomplete as an AFAB person if you don’t have children. And I think indirectly the idea of me keeping my virginity for the person I wanted to be with was so antiquated and silly to me at seventeen. I just kind of wanted to get it out of the way so that way I could, like, I don’t know – be better at the actual task.

And then as for the boyfriend, except for a lot of the people, a lot of the partners are all named whether it’s redacted or unredacted. I put “boyfriend” because who the person is really is inconsequential to the story. It’s about how I learned about sex and intimacy at the same time that I also learned about power dynamics in relationships. Because my partner at the time was so much older than me, it wasn’t until I was older myself that I realized, “Oh, wait, you were only with me because this was a power grab for you. You were only with me to satiate your own ego. You were only with me because you could date younger girls and they wouldn’t know any better.” They wouldn’t know how, how you say, underwhelming he is. So I don’t think that I directly address it in “Nexplanon,” but those are a lot of the things that the poem is negotiating – sex, intimacy, power, girlhood, all of these things, bodily autonomy. And in our current sociopolitical climate, unfortunately, the poem feels more and more apt. I long for the day when a poem like this eventually becomes antiquated itself, but it’ll be a long time before we get there.

DC: I love what you just ended with – longing for the day when a poem like this is antiquated itself. And I think that’s also one of the many reasons why Honey exists, why we’re also doing this interview – really putting it out into the world. Not only this is a poem, but this is a poem that aspires to, while also looking at this much larger historical context as well. So thank you so much for that really amazing response, Itiola.

ASG: What really resonated with me was the way you were speaking about how the queer trajectory and our goals are just different. Especially as an AFAB person, I feel like goals as a queer AFAB person have always been so dramatically different than what has been narrated or paved for us. And that was really what I got from this piece as well.

ISJ: Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that, Aja. Yeah, like I said before, I should have known earlier, but I think also just – I was like, “Hmm, why is it that I put up with this mess just because I’m a woman? What if I don’t want to do that thing?”

ASG: Absolutely. Yeah, that really speaks to my entire experience as well. So our last question: in “Self Portrait as Itolia,” which we were speaking about earlier, the speaker’s similes allude to this continuous sacrifice of self-desire and this sacrifice of this reproduction of invisible labor under capitalism, which is something we were just speaking to. And there’s an obvious connection between the first line of “I tell myself I’m above capitalism” and the last line, which is “I long for the days when men went to war and never returned.” And Dorothy and I were admiring that intertwining of the femme queer experiences of the past, present, and future selves. So we really want to talk about tone and lens and the ways that humor and satire can be so underrated within the realm of literature, particularly in queer, AFAB literature. And the first and final lines can be read as this burning satire where the speaker is acknowledging and critiquing the system we live under, but we can also laugh about how, you know, we’re endlessly waiting for our package to arrive. So we were really hoping to hear about what you think about the role of satire in queer lit as it relates to contemporary queer poets of color and the ways we grapple with the systems we’re living under.

ISJ: Hmm, thank you for that question. I am not naturally a funny poet; I’m very bad at humor on command. So, especially with that poem and the chapbook as a whole, I was really trying to task myself with talking about these heavy, difficult subjects while also trying to balance it out with humor. And I’m glad that it worked out. This poem was interesting because it was very much a last minute decision. I really wanted to – this was my attempt, in a lot of ways, at a quarantine poem or a pandemic poem, which I… as a poet myself and as an editor, I’m very averse to reactionary poetry. Which is why the pandemic appears nowhere in the poem. Rather, it’s me renegotiating the domestic space where I’m kind of confined to as opposed to it being a source of replenishment, which is often how I view the domestic space. In terms of how it might be in conversation with other queer poets… I mean, I think I’m always in conversation with Audre Lorde in a lot of ways. Lucille Clifton is not queer though, but in my heart, she’s like my other mama. I’m also thinking of other poets that I admire who are also queer contemporaries. I’m thinking of Aricka Foreman, who’s also an amazing poet that I admire a lot… Kemi Alabi, who’s brilliant, like, damn. I feel very fortunate that we are writing at the same time as them because they’re so brilliant and their debut collection is so lush and decadent and exciting. While I was writing that poem, I was also negotiating a relationship that just recently ended. Their name is in there. This is a funny kind of a side answer to your question. My ex, who is mentioned in the chapbook – am I allowed to say their name? Should I not say their name?

DC: Up to you.

ISJ: Oh. Yeah, their name is [ ]. For some reason, they brought their fiancé with them to my reading. It was my last week in Madison. So I had decided to read the poem about them and un-redact their name. And it was very liberating for me in part because it felt like the circle had kind of fully been closed on a lot of what the poem was negotiating. I guess “false promises,” for the lack of better phrasing. Because one of the lines goes, “The chiaroscuro of light haloing his body hair, his hands tracing the dry want of my mouth. He says, every day I want to wake and choose you… I say, don’t promise me that. I know this world,” and the poem keeps going. That same person is also in “Queer American” trying to take their ‘internalized homophobia out on my naked body.’ But, yeah, I think that I really wanted to write a poem that makes these sort of direct notes to capitalism. But because so many poems like that already exist, I felt the only way to do it without taking the poem too seriously was also tampering with some humor – I feel like it was really important to have a blend of the two, otherwise I feel like a lot of what the poem was trying to do would be lost in translation.

I appreciate what you said, Aja, about the memory and history kind of being both my past and future selves. I never thought of it that way, though, but that does actually track when I think about what those things are supposed to do. Because I kind of see memory and history at odds with each other – memory is a personal history of the self. But that’s not always reliable, because how you remember things is not always how things happen, if you think about trauma and how trauma affects the mind. And history claims to be an unbiased account of how things happen, but that’s not always true. History is by virtue of the person who is the record-keeper of history. And all humans are, by virtue of being humans, biased. The back and forth that happens between me and these two other figures, who are really just facets of myself, as we move back and forth between these moments that happen in the poem, I was worried initially that it would have too much going on, but I’m glad that it all kind of worked out in that the poem keeps transforming every time someone else reads it or tells me about it.

DC: Oh, that’s just so beautiful – the poem itself transforms every time someone else reads it and interprets. I love to also call that the endless volta of the poem because, as we’re writing the poem ourselves as poets, we need to reach for that volta. But at the same time though, when it is in the hands of the readers, once the poem is published or at least shared amongst a group of people, it is always transforming itself. And I think another thing I wanted just to point out in your beautiful response, Itiola, was how this poem was created during the pandemic, but you didn’t want to create a pandemic poem because you are against reactionary poetry, and I think that that’s such a valuable conversation especially as editors because I feel the exact same way! Yes, you can create a poem during the pandemic and be remarking on something, but if you get rid of the word pandemic or any synonym of it, how does it function as well?

ISJ: I’m actually going to be teaching a workshop about the domestic space through Brooklyn Poets in October, and I’m really fascinated – I mean, I’ve always been fascinated with the domestic space, especially when I think about Lucille Clifton’s work, which is so much grounded in the domestic, and so much of her work informed my own poems – but I’m also just fascinated with how a lot of us had a really hard time coping during the pandemic because we couldn’t make boundaries between our space of rest and our space of work. Our space of personal intimacy and our space of maybe “machinery,” for lack of a better term. Things we have to do to sustain ourselves and things that we do for our living. And so I’m really fascinated with exploring that first site where poems often happen. None of us write our very first poems in the home; we experience our most intimate emotions in the home. And I wanted the poem to reflect that, because I have that line – I never thought I’d put it in a poem – that line, “I’m lonely, but at least I belong to myself.” When I wrote it, I was like, “Ah, no!” I resisted it so much, but I was like, “Oh wait, maybe this is working because I don’t want to do it.”

DC: And I thought that I’d also kind of just tack on one final question regarding this gorgeous chapbook, Itiola. First of all, shoutout to Newfound. Do you want to talk just a little bit about the process of working with the editors at Newfound and what your process was like publishing this chapbook as well?

ISJ: Yeah, I think I said this before we started recording that I sent the chapbook out to a lot of places; it was rejected by every place I sent it out to. My chapbook actually did, fun fact, win a contest. But I withdrew the chapbook because what was being offered in the contract was not enough for me. It was really important to me to have both physical copies of my chapbook because I have friends here in the west but also all over, and it was also really important to me to have a say in the cover, and my understanding, with that contract, I wouldn’t have a say in the cover. And I just refused.

So then, I sent to Newfound for the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize. It did not make it to the final round. But then, I said to myself, “I think this is my press.” I just had a feeling about it – nothing was really driving the feeling, but I just had a feeling. “This is my press, they’re going to publish my chapbook.” So I cued them via Twitter and I said, “Oh hey, even if your chapbook was rejected, can you send it again?” And they were like, “Yeah.” So I scrapped the chapbook; I reordered the poems; I added in a bunch of new poems as well – there are like four or five poems in the chapbook that are not published anywhere that live in the chapbook. And just for me as a poet but also an editor, I think that’s really important. I love when poets publish good chunks of the book elsewhere, but I also, as a reader, love to get some exclusives – like, if I buy the book, I’ll get like ten poems that don’t exist anywhere else. It makes me, as a reader, feel special. Like, “Okay, I get the exclusives, this is great.”

So it was late December, early January. This is just for transparency – I had a really bad and scary end of the year. I was really brutally depressed and I didn’t really have much hope for the future and then it kind of felt like getting the email from Crystal felt like a light at the end of the tunnel, like, “Okay. You’re going through a lot, yes, everything sucks, yes, but also, your book is getting published!” So Crystal and I talked. We actually had two very long phone conversations before I signed any contract because, Dorothy, you know the story of having an unpublished chapbook and also several full-lengths. I was excited by the event and I wanted to sign, but because of what my peers had gone through in the past and stories they had told me, I was apprehensive until I had built a strong enough rapport with my editor that I felt comfortable.

Crystal was so good about answering all of my questions, sent me a bunch of books from the catalog – she just was like, “Oh, if you want to know what your chapbook is going to look like, I’ll send you a bunch of books.” And she didn’t have to do that, and I really love the precedent that they set because they gave me a lot of time; I think they gave me like, three months extra time just to sit with my book, and they gave me the opportunity to write more poems that I would not have been able to write otherwise. We went back and forth through multiple revisions because Crystal was like, “I want you to publish this chapbook and be totally happy, I want you to get everything that you want,” and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” I didn’t know that chapbook presses go this hard for their authors!

I got two editors who worked on the final typeset, two very amazing poets in their own right as well, and I just felt so taken care of. We went through multiple iterations of what the cover would look like. I really wanted a deer rotting in a field. A lot of people were like, “Oh, the cover’s gorgeous!” And then they were like, “What’s that?” And I’m like, “Oh, it’s a deer, you see his ribs sticking out?” And that’s funny for me. Before the book cover was revealed, Taylor Swift As Books had said – they had seen the announcement and they were like, “Oh, we can’t wait to see the cover so we can support it,” and I said to myself, “You’re not going to, it’s a dead deer!” Because I’ve seen what kind of covers they promote and my cover is not that, which is more than fine for me.

But I was really anxious about the cover, but L.K. James, who drew the cover – it was so crazy. She had just finished giving birth, and then she was back in the office next week and she drew up my cover. I had no idea until after. When Crystal told me I was just like, “What?!" Thank you, L.K. She really worked overtime for me and I’m just so grateful. And I really want all authors to get that experience, that sort of royal treatment – I feel like that’s royal treatment, because I got to ask for whatever I want and the press just made it happen. Especially for how small the press is, they all work so absurdly hard. Yeah, I love Newfound. They really went above and beyond for me. My first print run went by so fast. Like, it’s not even a year that the book has been out and already the first print run is done. So, yeah! And then I even had a say in the font too, which was, what?! As someone who has typeset books before, the fact that I got a say in the font was a big deal to me. I was like, “Wow, this is nuts.” Yeah, Crystal showed me different versions of it and it was really great; I feel very fortunate for that.

DC: It is a gorgeous font. You really have, like, the winner of all fonts, Itiola.

ISJ: Thank you.

DC: Yeah. Thank you so much for also sharing what that process was like – I’m really happy to hear, and not surprised, that you got the royal treatment, especially since the editors at Newfound do work so hard, like what a lovely, lovely time led by Crystal. And thank you so much for spending time with us today to answer questions about Spells of My Name! I can’t recommend this chapbook enough, and it just means the world that we’re able to connect today, so thank you again.

ISJ: Thank you both. This was great – thank you so much. I’m really excited to see when it comes out.

About I.S. Jones

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She is the co-editor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019­­–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound. Formerly serving as the Literary Arts Program Manager of Hurston Wright and the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry, she is currently an instructor at Brooklyn Poets.

About Aja St. Germaine

Aja St. Germaine (they/them) is Honey Literary’s Essays Editor.

Things I love: Anishinaabe beadwork, Cass Elliot lux, catty gossip, coalition-building, gift-giving, hefty glass frogs, lesbian subtext in horror movies, pistachio ice cream, stegosaurus spines, zine-making.

Favorite writers: Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Cherríe Moraga, Claudia Rankine, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, José Esteban Muñoz, Joshua Whitehead, Joy Harjo, Lynda Barry, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Xan Phillips.

Email me: interviews@honeyliterary.com