#teaching myself how the program we use works on the fly cuz i didn’t remember if anyone showed me how to edit past entries or not

[tauforged]

every day is a battle to not beat myself up over every mistake and assume that everyone looks down on me cuz i’m new to this job. i’m getting there but oh my god is it a struggle

[5questions]

Joselia Hughes

Joselia "Jo" Hughes is a Black 1.5-generation Cuban-Jamaican-Guyanese-American writer and artist from the Bronx. She lives with Sickle Cell Disease (HBSC) and ADHD.

Where did you find the 3rd grade poem? How did you decide to include it? What other collage or found art/poetry do you like?

The 3rd grade poem was from a collection of student works, Witch’s Brew, released by my grammar school, Horace Mann. I have two issues from 2nd and 3rd grades. Both of my works were quartered in the “Fantasy” section. There was another section called “Feelings” and, I think, The Sky more accurately suggests a feeling. Scratch that: it explicitly discusses a feeling. This misidentification by academic administration/curatorial staff (which doubles as a political demonstration) is telling. I think it explains a lot about the root confusion between what I have felt/feel to know as Experientially True versus what I’m told to know as The Truth. When considering the emotional and material lives of Black femmes, we must remember Black femmes have been historically disallowed, disavowed and dispossessed of creative virtuosity. Too often, we are strapped in the monolith of stereotyped caricature dictated by the manifested destiny written into commandments/constitution of misogynoir. Black femme virtuosity is reappropriated, regesticulated and worn like some earned bloody body wisdom by the Opps (Oppressive Forces). While I didn’t have those terms as a child, I experienced the consequences of misogynoir in conjunction with dis/ableism and classism, which aren’t separate entities but necessary vices that amplify asphyxiation. Is disabled Black femme loneliness only permissible when classified as fantasy? That shit don’t sit right in my spirit. I also used the poem because the title is Witch’s Brew and my zine, Heartbeats But No Air (HBNA), is a kind of exorcism. A few years ago, I pieced together that my maternal grandmother was a covertly practicing Bruja. With the widening reclamation of ancestral wisdom by BIPOC, in an effort to decolonize our existences, I was tapping into that tender tendon of wisdom.

Understanding my grandmother’s practice reminded me that she wanted to name me Darthula Verbena (daughter of God, enchanting and medicinal). I started referring to myself as DV, my pre-name, and inspected my childhood. That’s been a remarkable endeavor. I had to teach myself to play again. Through play, I learned how to feel. Learning feeling meant learning the qualitative and quantitative nature of the labyrinth of my thoughts. Once I learned some of the turns of the labyrinth, I could feel to know how to navigate the terrain without fear and engage in the rigorous study that’s always characterized my central self. Play is a code switch. I often think of code switching as a means to subvert/refigure power differentials. To hide in plain sight by retooling “seeing” to perception/sensing. How much are we perceiving/sensing? How often do we mean perception/sensing yet default to “sight”? Perception/Sensing adds dimensionality that isn’t always articulated with and through “sight” and “seeing”. Ralph Ellison’s identification of “lower frequencies” and J. Halberstam’s configurations of Low Theory do this work. I toy with these multiplicities in the zine. I work low to the ground which means I work close to my heartbeat, my central drum. I work meta; I go beyond. I like to sprinkle codes, tickle clues, tuck in questions, sew in wisdoms so I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, who I’m doing it for and to always remember the fun of FLiP (Feeling, Learning, iPlaying).

Some of the works/folks who’ve helped me FLiP are Dana Robinson’s meditative and piercing collages; Zulie’s mind bending, heart wrenching, time suspending zines; Nikki Wallschlaeger’s I HATE TELLING YOU HOW I REALLY FEEL; Seth Graham’s tattoo practice/paintings/unbounded love of outer space (they’ve done 3/4 of my tattoos); Amanda Glassman’s razor sharp poetry and encyclopedic curiosity;  L’Rain's music has literally helped me scale the side of a mountain and carried me through hospitalizations; KT PE Benito’s multidisciplinary liberation praxis and collaborative friendship; Zoraida Ingles' holistic creative prowess (a conversation with her is why Heartbeats But No Air, as a title, exists); and Marcus Scott Williams’ writings/video/sculpture work that readily embraces the persistence of ephemera. This isn’t an exhaustive list—I have a solid library of books and papers and zines and tunes at my crib—but, genuinely, I’m inspired by everyone I’ve had the honor to encounter.

There are themes of love and race and beauty and culture and self-transformation in this book. Paired randomly, some pieces may not make as much common sense together, but as a whole, it feels powerful and cohesive. What was the structuring process like for this chapbook? Each zine is different, right?

It is one zine. I find it cool that you consider HBNA a chapbook made up of many zines. The word chapbook had never crossed my mind. I walked into the process with DIY zine logic and HBNA was printed using office photocopiers. I think the feeling of cohesion you mention is what happens when you witness a lot of parts of one person. In this case, you’re witnessing a lot of different parts of me, my thoughts, my actual labor. Whole is the goal ‘cuz people are whole. I am whole. I consider HBNA a single revolution of myself— one big twirl around a fire, a sun. I was in a very strange place. I’d alleviated, with the help of acupuncture and CBD products, a significant amount of the chronic pain I’d been experiencing since August 2014. I fell around love with someone and rose in love to myself (thanks Ms. Morrison and Ms. Stanford!). I was in an unfamiliar painless trance. I created and tinkered with all of those pieces during a very short period of time from Summer 2017 to Summer 2018. HBNA was originally named Girl Pickney (the prose pieces were written under that moniker) and before that NggrGrl (a nod to Dick Gregory). I wrote the poetry in an even shorter period of time—March to July 2018—and the poems are actually part of a full length collection that I wrote in those four months. I didn’t decide on the layout of the zine until I was with two friends formatting it for printing two days before I was going to read at The Strand and sell it. I kept all the pages, the puzzle pieces, in a folder. A lot of book structuring, for me, is based on emotional knowing—when to slap, when to pound, when to breathe, when to confuse, when to stun, when to anger, when to tell, when to soothe. All of my structuring decisions are fly about to get swatted dead but fast enuf to fly away first intuitive. If I’m channeling that intuition, I know I’m in running in the proper heat and lane.

You were in an MFA program at one point. How does this chapbook contrast with your style from before that program and during that program? Did that program have an effect on your writing? This doesn’t feel like the most MFA-y writing, which is why I ask, and which I mean as a compliment.

I’ve attended a few schools. I’ve completed fewer than I’ve attended. Until my late 20s, I was shy and desperate for people, those noun-verbs, to stay. This desire for people to stay meant I spent an inordinate about of time and energy relegating the difficult parts of myself to the margins of the margins and continually stepped into social/academic shoes that did not fit. HBNA was the first fitting of the bespoke shoes I can now emotionally afford to make. The first copies I sold had typos! I misspelled my own pre-name and that’s exactly what I needed to happen. It needed it to happen because I’m full of mistakes and yet! I try! I understand HBNA as a radical refutation of embarrassment. Depending on when you purchased a copy, you’ll see I used white-out to make a few corrections. No two zines are the same; only 80 copies exist. I’m printing 12 more copies (they’ve already been claimed) and then on to new pastures! The zine was printed in three different places (two offices I don’t work in and a local printing shop) and I was lugging around 800 individual sheets of paper that I stapled, numbered, indexed and decorated with stickers by myself…standing barefoot on the carpet of Staples in Co-Op City, listening to Ryo Fukui’s Early Summer on repeat until I finished and then I jetted to the Strand to read. HBNA was how I knew to embody my physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual labor. I’m a goofball with zany ideas, an indifference to external definitions of relevancy, sickled cells and a lot of chaotically grounding love. I write for myself first. Of the school lessons I did receive and learn, there weren’t many I didn’t later disassemble to rebuild, freak unfamiliar or completely misunderstand. J. Halberstam calls this “failing”. Rejigging failure has been such a gift to me. How wonderful! A failure AND still happening? Fuck yeah! I was a wildly uneven student whose knees buckled at mere thought of rigid academic authority. After years of shame and refusal, I can finally admit I am an autodidact. I intentionally get lost and navigate in and to the direction of my own senses. School didn’t teach me to write for myself and that’s who I always have to write for. If that’s selfish, so be it. I am my first audience. If I’m sus of me, then me and myself got foundational problems. I know my writing is non-institutional and that lack of institutional alignment and support, while scary as shit, pushes me to make and take risks to believe beyond the immediate demands/plans/remands of whatever external force I am facing. My writing is constantly colliding into A New I can’t predict. I’m fully committed to unfolding, unraveling, for curiosity’s sake.

What’s a typical day like for you?

My day to day life is as predictable as it is unpredictable. I am formally unemployed and have been for awhile. I live on very little cash and am kept afloat because my mom is a gem and hasn’t kicked me out. My days are 100% influenced by the weather and I spend a good portion of my time negotiating how to minimize the occurrence of vaso-occlusive crises and other complications from the disease I have, Sickle Cell. Between January 2018 and January 2019, I was hospitalized three times. Each hospitalization was about a week long and recovery took significantly longer.

Here’s a sketch of what I call a really great day: I wake up before 10. If the night’s sleep was especially restorative, I can comfortably rise at 8. Depending on how my body feels, depending on how much pain I’m enduring, how much fatigue is shrouding/clouding my faculties, I decide if I have the energy to take a shower. I do the bathroom routine, get a cup of orange juice and take my medications (Endari, sometimes Adderall, Folic Acid). I use the first hours of wakefulness to connect with loved ones via text-phonecalls-DMs and browse the internet for headlines-news-updates-new smiles. I wear my fits comfortable. I call comfort my uniform—upend normcore to body sensible—sweatpants/leggings, pullover, one earring (although I’m leaning to pairs again), handy dandy baseball cap and sneakers. I keep it simple. If the weather is aight—if it isn’t too cold or too hot and if precipitation is mostly at bay and air quality isn’t extremely poor—I go outside and get some living exercise. When able, I take extremely long walks. Once I walked over 50 miles in a week! It’s my preferred form of meditation. Walking/body movement grounds my ADHD symptoms more effectively than stimulants, strengthens my body for potential Sickle Cell episodes and satiates my unyielding need to feel connected to other people. I’m at my best when outside and happening. Illness can create an inescapable interiority. Inside reminds me of the hospital and my relationship with the hospital is, at best, fraught. Walking allows me to follow myself. I engage in peek-a-boo with babies, witness accidents, smile at strangers, duck the eyes of leering people and learn how to love differently too. I go to playgrounds and swing. I take photos and notes. If I’ve got a lil cash, I ride the subway for fun. I poke into shops, admire graffiti and other street signs. I have one woman dance parties on sidewalks. I rest on park benches and read. I pick up grub from hole in the wall spots—you know—I live my life and embrace as much as I can while centering kindness and gentle flow. The walks are my favorite part of my job, which I do not have. When I return home, I rest then get to crafting which I sometimes call spelling. Crafting/Spelling can be anything from adding to my I-Box, spitting verses from the abstract (poetry), spinning short stories, detailing journal entries, doodling, painting, knitting, researching & studying,  dancing & stretching, bugging out on Twitter or reading. My bedroom is my studio so I work small yet widely. I intentionally provide myself with many targets so I can a) keep my thoughts and feelings flowing b) find the connections between all of my actions and c) mitigate the stress that sits in the heart of a lone project. I am a multifaceted, multifauceted being. Why not turn on all the taps?

The more long form prose pieces in here have the feel of nice punch-y flash fiction. Are you writing a fiction collection without poems and collage in it? I want to read that, too :)

Hahaha! You’re onto me! Yeah, I am writing another book of poems, a manifesto zine and a collection of fiction. I’ve been writing a collection of fiction since 2012. I had a lot of the difficultly writing the fiction because I was too attached to the title, the characters I conceived needed to grow up with me, and I experienced many years of unremitting and improperly managed mental and physical illness. I was holding onto and telling lies. The shame woven into those lies kept me silent and scared. All of that shit needed to get integrated or dropped. I couldn’t enter the prose/fiction I’m currently writing without learning how to survive myself and the world and bottom-belly-believe in survival too. I’m getting there— healing with primary, secondary and tertiary intentions. Won’t say much about the fiction pieces of than: ~15 stories, lyrically speculative fiction, capital B Black, disabled, and queerfemme parables of creation and destruction and maintenance. My website is in flux but I do readings and performances. Hit me up on Instagram , Twitter or email me at joseliawrites@gmail.com. Might take a minute for me to respond because I’m thoughtful yet questionably organized. Now go play, ya’ll!

Unintentionally wrote a poem in the interview. I call it A.B.B in Lieu of A.B.C

beyond

fly, about to get swatted dead but fast enuf to fly away first,

always believe beyond

[followtheyellow-brick-road]

Tagged by @thejordipie 😊

1) What was the first piece of media (movie, book, TV show, etc.) you were obsessed with?

First movies I was obsessed with (I can't list just one!!) most of these titles I'm still obsessed with to this day: Anastasia (the music❤️, the characters--how they are actually believable and Anya(anastasia) doesn't take crap from nobody, and because I'm a sap the romance-because not only were the characters believable, but their relationships were), Prince of Egypt (again the musicc--the songs still give me chills/goosebumps, i like how it's a movie about fighting for what's right even if it seems impossible), speaking of impossible makes me think of another old favourite movie Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1997 Cinderella musical lovee Whitney Houston and her song in it called "impossible"💜, 13 going on 30 is one I'm always up to rewatch, and star wars.

First book series I was obsessed with : as a child: Romona Quimby books, Wayside School book series but the book series that really got me interested in reading was Twilight😊

First TV show I was obsessed with: Sailor Moon of course!❤️❤️ Other early years obsession TV shows : Kim Possible, 6teen, Deliah and Julius, Cybersix, Gargolyes, Instant Star, Radio Free Roscoe, Phil of the Future, That's So Raven, The Amanda Show, Zoey 101, Escaflowne, Archie's Weird Mysteries, Sabrina the animated series, avatar the last airbender, ouran highschool host club, fruits basket, Cardcaptors, Danny Phantom, teen titans (original not teen titans go), Hey! Arnold, inuyasha, friends, and many many more

2) Given the choice, would you want to have the ability to fly or to effortlessly adapt to various climates and environments?

Hmmm if I had the ability to fly that would be pretty cool and I would be able to visit my friends overseas a bit easier, but I wouldn't want the government to go after me cuz I'm this mutant who can fly and what would I do if I all of a sudden get tired over the ocean? I guess on a positive my arms will get toned from all the flying, unless it isn't me who physically flies but i invent a devise that allows me to freely fly whenever I want (I think i like that idea better) I consider myself a pretty adaptable person as is and where I live currently the weather changes from one extreme to another frequently so I think I'm good! I have clothes in my closet for all types of weather situations!

3) Is there a type of food that you never liked, no matter how hard you tried to give it a chance?

I'm not really a picky eater, like I'll atleast try something before I pass it off as a no-go. I guess vegan cheese is something I'll never have again (my brother is a vegan and he made this pizza and the cheese made me sick), also i don't like squid, eel or escargot.

4) Describe a time/moment in which you were scared out of your mind.

graduating university (I've been in university for so long that I got used to it, comfortable. Then I was entering the job force to work in a career--super crazy feeling to me! Plus the uncertainty of not knowing if I'd get hired was quite scary because I was afraid of letting everyone down. I still am. Another scary moment was my first parent teacher interviews--god was i ever terrified of what the parents thought of me.

5) Hand-drawn animation or CG animation?

Nothing beats hand drawn❤️❤️

6) Has there ever been a time when you agreed with the phrase “Love sucks”? (by this I mean romantic love)

I've been so focused on my career/school that I've honestly never been in a relationship and now that I'm in my mid-twenties with no experience I have absolutely no idea where to begin/how to relationship lol

7) Describe something funny that has happened to you recently.

When it was my last day of teaching my students at the school I taught at last school year, a young student of mine pulled me aside and said " here this is for you because I want to thank you for being my teacher" he gives me two nickles, 10 cents. Then he adds "Get something nice" I didn't want to embarrass him because he was very sincere and seeious about this gift, so I didn't laugh I thanked him because to him 10 cents was quite a bit of money so that was thoughtful. So I guess this is a funny/cute story lol

8) What was the worst book you had to read for school?

Lord of the Flies

9) Did you go through any particular phase that you regret? If so, what was it?

I don't know if this is considered a phase, but I do regret how shy I was in school. In university I made myself get involved and that shyness mostly went away. I am not afraid to do presentations or introduce myself to people I don't know. I wouldn't say I'm an extravert now, no I'm still introverted but a more brave introvert than I used to be. I regret that way I used to be because I feel that it held me back from doing what I wanted to do.

10) What song are your currently listening to? Or what was the last song you listened to?

The last song I listened to Grease movie: You're the one that I want.

11) What are you sitting on right now?

My bed, I should probably get up and eat breakfast but I'm too determined to finish this questionnaire lol

1) What do you most want to be remembered for?

Kindness, being a good friend, being helpful, hard working.

2) Top three favorite song lyrics?

"Lean on me, when you're not strong And I'll be your friend I'll help you carry on For it won't be long 'Til I'm gonna need Somebody to lean on"

"So no one told you life was gonna be this way

Your job's a joke, you're broke

Your love life's D.O.A

It's like you're always stuck in second gear

When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month

Or even your year, but

I'll be there for you

(When the rain starts to pour)

I'll be there for you

(Like I've been there before)

I'll be there for you

('Cause you're there for me too)"

"If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends

(Gotta get with my friends)

Make it last forever friendship never ends"

Honestly I can't think of specific lyrics but these three songs lyric choices I think all send a good message. I'll probably think of different song lyrics after I'm done this questionnaire lol

3) What is your favorite kind of weather?

Warm sunny day where there's a nice cool breeze to make it the perfect temperature.

4) Where would you most like to travel?

So many places. Probably Japan is the top of list because I have quite a few friends living there, also with UK, but first I'd like to travel to each province/territory in Canada to fully experience my home country.

5) What literary quote best defines you?

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

- Cesare Pavese

6) What is your go-to comfort food?

Grilled cheese, chocolate, ramen noodles, sushi.

7) Tell me a time you felt great about yourself or an accomplishment.

Graduating from my Education degree program and being placed on Deans honor list for both of the two years of my program.

Getting my first teaching job, and sticking through it through good&stressful times to the end of the year.

8) Do you cry when confronted or get mad? Blush when embarrassed or laugh it off?

Yesss if I get frustrated because I'm really mad I do cry. When I'm embarrassed I do blush but also try to awkardly laugh it off as a joke.

9) Do you know what you’re heading for in life or just know the general direction?

I know the general direction. Teacher in early years ages. But I have no idea where I'll end up in future. I like the idea of having a family but have no idea when that'll ever happen lol

10) What would you think of to produce a patronus? Is it a real memory or fake?

Real memory.

11) Describe your boggart and how you would repel it.

My biggest fear is either being a disappointment/failure or being forgotten. So I think it would appear to me as a group of ominous shadows of people surrounding me that are gossiping about me and laughing. I would repel the boggart by talking about all that I accomplished and saying that I'm far too cool to forget lol