Note: this conversation contains mentions of suicide and miscarriage.
Kristi D. Osorio: Hello and welcome back to The Chat Room. My name is Kristi, and I thank you for listening to my first two episodes featuring Melissa Tanis and Armani Mines respectively. Today I’m back with a conversation with poet and publisher Whitney Koo.
In her poem “Work,” Whitney writes:
This excellent poem is from Whitney’s forthcoming debut book, Any Gesture, and I was lucky enough to sit down with her for a conversation ahead of its publication. We talked about the joys, challenges, and future of small press publishing, and she shared about her journey founding Gasher Press. I met with Whitney just a week before we both went to the AWP conference in Baltimore—the most overwhelming place for writers. A book fair filled with millions of vendors handing you things, a marathon of readings, impossible attempts to see all the friends from your past lives. An event like that, wonderful as it can be for us writers, can leave you feeling jaded, too. It can leave you feeling empty. Reading after reading, you find yourself asking, doesn’t anyone have anything to say? Well, dear reader, humble amount of listeners, Whitney Koo certainly does.
Welcome, Whitney Koo, to the Chat Room.
Whitney Koo: Thank you for having me.
Kristi D. Osorio: Instead of starting off with a professional bio, introduce yourself on your own terms. What’s important for us to know about you? What are your values? What guides you? Who are you?
Whitney Koo: What a loaded question.
Kristi D. Osorio: Everyone says that so far!
Whitney Koo: I’m a mother. I’m a poet. I’m a teacher, I’m an editor, I’m a book designer. I feel like I’m just someone who wears many hats and my research and my writing is also focused on the elegy, and I think that the fact that I’ve pigeoned myself as a person who has decided to wear 12 different hats at once, and then also my work in the elegy, I think both kind of span from the fact that I’m really motivated and invested in creation and I kind of live my life and I get excited by this act of making, and I find the elegy, even though it’s kind of writing about loss and death, I find it to be a really generative space because death is that great unknown and this kind of really mappable kind of space that you can always jump into and make anything out of. I mean, it feels like a space of possibility. So I would say, yeah, if I was to kind of distill myself down, I think I’m just someone who’s really excited and motivated by creating things. Whether they’re good or not is not my business, but I do like to create things and I think that’s what has motivated me over the years.
Kristi D. Osorio: I think it’s really important to not be focused on whether it’s good or not. I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit and I’m in this faculty writing group and we were talking about, well, they’re all scientists and I’m just a random creative writer. We read this article and it had to do with the myth of the magnum opus, and it was like how many grad students come to grad school and are like, I’m going to write the thing that wins all the stuff and I’m going to change the world with this document that I’m going to write during the most stressful period of my life. I’m really interested in people not having that attitude and kind of being like, I’m going to write something that kind of sucks but is meaningful to me, or that I’m just going to try putting something down on the page and see what sticks. And yeah, we should all be open to writing bad stuff more.
Whitney Koo: When I was writing my dissertation, it was terrible. I had been in a three year writing slump. I think because of the pressure of trying to make sure that I was building a CV and could be publisher, it could be that poet, you needed to have that kind of book where it was going to perform in that certain way. I knew it was a terrible dissertation and I gave it to my friend I knew from my masters and he was a dear friend of mine and he’s very kindly, but so brutally was like, I don’t understand. You used to be a good poet. It’s just like, where is weird, Whitney? Where is the way that you write, which is very surreal and image heavy and it feels so not you, and it was this great permission. I highlighted everything, deleted it, and went back to this idea of playing, which is really why I’m so interested in the elegy to begin with, is that I find it a really productive space.
I think that death is actually wildly productive and creative, and so once I started just playing more, I wrote my whole dissertation in one semester, then I had to defend it, I deleted it all. I’ve been working on it for two years, deleted the whole thing and wrote it in a semester and passed that, and then I rewrote it a third time before it became a book. So I mean, it went through so many iterations because I think it took so much playing around playing and trying things and hating it and deleting it and trying again. I definitely do not find my poetry to be precious in any sort of way. I’ll delete it and never think of it again. It’s like, yes, it’s out.
Kristi D. Osorio: Yes, I think that, yeah, the preciousness really needs to end. Thinking about when we did our reading together last year in April, I’m always the one who goes up there feeling shame about, I’m about to totally kill the vibe, and I used to in my MFA program, I would be like, oh, I’m the grief girl. I’m going to bring it down. I hope somebody funny didn’t go just before me! And I think that was one of my only times I was on a reading with a fellow grief gal, so that was really cool. I was like, wow, more reading should kind of be like that and it can be really meaningful. And I love what you said that it is a really productive site. It is something that we all deal with. And if you haven’t already, I hate to say you will, right? So it’s interesting to think about that as a side of creativity and productivity, and I really like how you said that. Okay. Will you tell us about your journey with Gasher? How did founding your own press come about?
Whitney Koo: It started as a literary journal. I was in my MFA program at Boulder and I was at the end of it. I was in my last year and I had applied to PhD programs and I was about 99% sure I was not going to get into any PhD programs, so I was like, okay, I’m going to be leaving this space. I really had only known how to be in the literary world as a student. My undergrad was at University of Arizona and they have the big poetry center, so they brought in all these poets to read, and then I was in grad school and I was in a literary community that was really kind of based around me being in graduate school, and I thought if I leave and go into a normal job in the normal world, I actually have no idea how to maintain being a part of a creative writing space.
I was still really young as well. I was only 25 at the time, and so I just didn’t really know how to navigate. So I thought to myself, I’ll just create my own space. I’ll just create my own community around me and then they can never kick me out. I just built my own community around me. So I started gastric journal, and originally I had it set up where it was daily doses, which was a really small micro issue of only six pieces, and they would come out monthly in a digital format, and the idea was that you could read it on your commute. I used to take the bus, Boulder has great public transit, so I would take the bus and I would just be sitting there thinking I could read this on my bus ride, six poems in and out. And then I had one print issue that came out at the end of that year that lasted for exactly one year.
It was a lot to sustain. I basically was running around asking people, please give me all my friends and acquaintances that I barely knew. I was like, please give me poem to publish. Please let me do this. So after a year, we changed to quarterly issues and we did a kind of standard digital quarterly issue, and then I really felt I missed the artifact. I think I have been in this digital age that we’re in that I just felt like it felt so empty, this kind of digital publishing space. Nobody really reads literary journals anymore. They certainly are less motivated to read them when they’re online. And so we changed to printing in print. And along with that, we were also doing chat books and I really fell in love with the artifact of publishing. So eventually we decided to close the journal and switch to a formal publishing house, and it just made sense. I love the artifact. I love making, I really was falling out of love with literary journals and that kind of industry as it were. So I felt like there was more benefit and investment to the literary community by being an ethical book publisher, making beautiful books. They’re high quality, we don’t skimp on our printing materials. We’re author centric, we put them in the center. They are more collaborative. And so I felt like that was more impactful. So we moved to that and oh my gosh, we’re still here. It’s crazy.
Kristi D. Osorio: You have so many beautiful covers. There’s one that comes to mind. I don’t know what the title is off the top of my head, but I remember seeing on Instagram and being like, wow, you will not see a cover of this quality at any of the big publishing houses. You can really see the pride that you take in your work and in the artists that you’re uplifting. And that really comes across, at least from my outside perspective of what I’ve seen. I’m just a fan girl on Instagram. I feel like, yeah, there is an emptiness. It’s hollow. One thing I’m really interested in about Gasher is, I’m always saying a better literary world is possible, and I don’t know that I fully believe that other people think that. And when I look at your website and the stuff you’re doing, I’m like, okay, here’s someone who’s actually doing it, and that’s so important. And so yeah, amazing covers. Whoever your designer is—
Whitney Koo: It’s me.
Kristi D. Osorio: No way. Are you serious?
Whitney Koo: Yeah. I literally taught myself how to do book design. Literally watching YouTube videos. I just taught myself how to do it.
Kristi D. Osorio: I’m in shock right now. That is crazy. Wow.
Whitney Koo: Yeah, and I will say I’ve been really trying in the last year to have more personal boundaries of how much labor I put in by saying, okay, we can only offer you six cover options. They get to have a lot of say in that design process, but we give them six options and then it ends up being 12 cover options later that we land on something. So I have no personal boundaries of how much labor I’ve put in for. And that’s the other thing, gas, mostly volunteer work from everyone involved, including myself. And so there is definitely a love of the game that is pushing this press through.
Kristi D. Osorio: I also love how you have an emphasis on—in the time that we’re in there has been this anti DEI backlash. There’s this emphasis on decentering identity and that’s impossible to do as writers. And I really respect that Gasher has these prizes that are identity based and that our language based. And I just think that is amazing to see in this time where that’s increasingly becoming less common because people are pandering to that sort of growing trend. I think we’re also seeing a full on assault on sites of intellect and learning like libraries and universities. We saw the dismantling of the NEA grants for writers and publishers. And then within that we’re also essentially seeing an attack on the public’s right to read and tell stories that center diversity. So how do you view the future of publishing in this moment, and then how do you envision Gasher fitting into or troubling that landscape?
Whitney Koo: Another impossible question in some ways, but I have a lot of thoughts on the publishing industry. I really do feel like it can change, but I think small press really can save the world. Truly. It publishes what big publishers won’t. It doesn’t flatten experiences. It allows for craft to move forward because it’ll take risk on experimental work. It looks for what might not be commercially sellable. So I really feel like that is all still there. I think we’re though really caught in a place where ethics in small press are being compromised. The reality is is that there’s no support for the arts anymore. And the remaining institutional grants that are around really are catering to mid-size publishers. Someone like Graywolf or Copper Canyon where they have this more attractive programming. So small presses, something like Gasher really left kind of in this landscape of nothing.
There’s nothing left, there’s crumbs left. So how do you sustain a small press when there’s really no institutional support? And I don’t push maybe some of these fundraising efforts really harder for us in the sense that I already feel like anytime that someone submits to Asher and they’re paying that reading feed, that is their donation to us as a press. So I don’t need to come and come after people’s pennies. Writers are already struggling. But with that being said, I think that there are two things that are happening in publishing that I am wary of. One of them is I think that we’re exploiting people for their money who are often marginalized and they’re often coming from low income backgrounds. Writers don’t have a lot of money in their pockets. So we’re in some ways really taking advantage of those people to keep small presses afloat.
Gasher tries to keep our submission fees as low as we can, and we also all work as volunteers. We have honorariums for certain things, but for the majority of our work, about 90% of it is volunteer work. That’s how we kind of try to operate. I think mid-tier presses are actually the most criminal about this. They’re like $35 submission fees and you’re already taking $30,000, $50,000 in grants a year, and then you have your big fundraising pushes and it’s like it feels greedy at some point. It doesn’t feel to be this kind of grassroots effort anymore. And I think Rider are the ones who suffer because they’re the ones footing that bill that usually targets marginalized people. I mean, if we think about who is going to be left out of being able to submit to that press. So that’s something that I think about.
And then the other thing is that I think there is this really shallow attempt of diversifying publishing catalogs that are happening. And this is where I feel like the author Bio has been really exploited, where people are forced to kind of codify themselves in this series of codification. It flattens real experiences. It’s flattening real lived experiences to then have to in a bio essentially list off in this kind of really flat way. So Gasher has been, as a staff, we’ve opened this dialogue last year where we’re asking how can we have more meaningful diversity where it is organic, where it’s naturally occurring because that’s what we’re invested in, not because we’re filling this shallow look of like, see, we love everyone, or we’re into diversity just filling a catalog where it definitely is a checking a box kind of thing. And I feel like I’ve been seeing that in some bigger presses in particular.
So obviously we have our prizes, the Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize, and then we have our two languages book prize, which we’re expanding so that it’ll have more languages that are included in that. And then we also decided to do away with author bios and instead we have artist statements because how we identify and how we have to operate and navigate the world through our identities comes out in our concerns related to craft and subject matter and themes. And so I’d rather hear you illustrate what you’re concerned with in your writing where I now see a lived moving experience and instead of this kind of flat, forced, I feel like it’s exploiting honestly. I think that it exploits writers to have them have self-identify in this really kind of flat, shallow way. So instead we move to artist statements, and this is still an open dialogue when we meet again spring as a staff, we’re going to continue talking about what we can be doing more.
We talked about this, we’ve talked about this in layers, I think, and it’s something that’s ongoing for us. We are not a perfect press. I don’t think that we have it down, but we are trying to do more anonymous submissions asking for craft statements as opposed to bios and then keeping our prizes up. I think where you have real monetary benefit, the transport broadside prize I think costs like $3 to submit to, and the prize is $500 plus these beautiful letterpress broadsides that you get versus you’re going to submit to a prize that’s like $15. These journal prizes that come out, they’re like 15, 20 bucks for you to submit a poem.
Kristi D. Osorio: It adds up.
Whitney Koo: It adds up! And again, it feels so like taking advantage. Are you really trying to uplift these voices? If you are, why are you taking a $15 submission fee for them to submit a single poem? That just doesn’t make sense to me. So unfortunately, money you can never get around in publishing, but we are, especially in small press, there is nothing else to fund it. I mean, publishing a book is extremely expensive. I mean way more expensive than I think people realize. And that’s even to do it on a small scale. So there has to be something to hold up a press. But at the same time, I think that it’s trying to navigate an ethical way of doing so where we’re not just totally nickel and diming people out of their livelihood. I think that we’re just a lot of people doing the best we can with a really shitty publishing landscape right now. There’s no money in the arts. Gasher is never going to change our mission or we’re not going to get rid of prizes because of whatever a government says. So that also may keep us out of future grant money.
Kristi D. Osorio: Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea of the artist statements. I think that’s so interesting. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the blurb economy and how I feel like that’s another side of exploitation on either side, having this person read your book and then put their name on it. And I’ve been thinking about that in a different way since the American Dirt scandal where the person from Jane the Virgin had blurbed this book and then it ended up being the source of this huge scandal about publishing and about excluding Latinx voices. And then it seemed apparent that none of the people who blurbed this book had actually thought about it critically and really read it in a meaningful way. And then of course it took this sort of Twitter backlash to open up this conversation.
I’ve just been thinking about, what is the purpose of a blurb? What is the purpose of a bio? What is the purpose of all this promotional and marketing? To use your word, yeah, it does really flatten, I think the author’s identity, the author’s experience. And it also maybe does too much tone setting around what a reader can expect when they go and pick up a book. And it’s like students in my workshop were asking me the other day, can I attach a letter that explains everything about my piece? And I was like, I’m sorry, but no, because the work has to stand on its own and every reader’s going to be different. And it ties into this idea of we have to trust our reader. We don’t have to tell them, you definitely want this book because they won a prize by so-and-so and so-and-so said, you should read it possibly without even finishing reading the book themselves. So I think there’s a lot of problems, and of course we could talk about this all day, but yeah, I mean I think it’s really cool to see what you’re doing and the ways that you’re even making those kind of seemingly small changes around bios at least opens the conversation for other people to follow suit.
Whitney Koo: Yeah, I think us as readers, and I’m a reader myself and so are you, so I think it’s also a big part on readers to really step up. I think as well, are you buying from small presses or are you only buying the names that come off of the big press who won the big prize or has this blurb? So think about where you’re investing your money as well. I have people who submit to Gasher who have never read a Gasher book, and they probably never will. Everybody wants to be published, but nobody wants to read. So you have to also be a reader. It one makes us better writers, but also it makes a healthy literary community.
If people were buying books and investing in literature and not just investing in their own writing in their own work, then we would have a sustainable literary landscape. Presses wouldn’t necessarily have to nickel and dive or you could have more agencies at writers to be like, we’re not submitting to the place with a $35 submission fee. We have other robust thriving options that are not going to do that to us. But right now, we’ve really limited ourselves because as readers, we’re not actually sustaining a literary community. Nobody’s reading. I mean, there’s a reason why literary journals, I ask myself, why am I submitting to literary journals? Nobody reads them. There’s a thousand literary journals. They pop up every other day, but they don’t actually get read, which is why they collapse quite easily. Or you can see literary journals that are really not ethical and have these big scandals.
Well, we don’t really cultivate a literary community as readers. Everyone just wants to be published. Nobody actually wants to read literature. So I mean is it goes both ways. I’ve been thinking about that myself as a reader. I started only buying and getting subscriptions for print journals because I’ll sit down with the print journal and read it. So there’s things like that where I think about, I always tell my students, pick one journal. Online, in print, whatever, but pick one journal that you’re going to read every issue that comes out. Do it for one year and see how you feel. Because that journal probably has never had anyone read it from start to finish for an entire year. Be that person, pick your journal, support them.
Kristi D. Osorio: Yeah, that’s great advice. That’s really cool. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on people not reading. I was just chatting with somebody who was like, oh yeah, I want to be a standup comic. And then I was like, well, who’s your favorite comic to watch or listen to? And this person was like, I don’t do that. In my mind, I’m like, your comedy is probably bad because you have no mentor text to go off of. I think that is such a common problem these days too, writing without having read anything. You’re not going to make up a new form, you’re not going to reinvent the wheel. Just kind of knowing, I think, also what traditions you’re a part of or what traditions you might be able to trouble and sort of complicate through your work is really important as well and is part of all this and figuring out your own voice. I wanted to go back to something you mentioned, you kind of brought up your mission and I wonder if you could talk about this quote from your founding mission, “Make everything useful.” What does that mean to you and to your readers and writers of Gasher’s books?
Whitney Koo: My philosophy on poetry is that it is getting at the essence of a thing, which is what really makes it different from prose writing. We can argue like, oh, genres do they really matter? I think if you are going to separate genres for poetry, it’s because you’re getting at the essence of the thing. So then there’s a way that narrative is a secondary supportive piece, but I find that sometimes what I’m reading slush piles, I see where poets are using the narrative as a kind of crutch. So they’re relying really heavily on the narrative or they’re relying really heavily on traditional form to be this point of interest. And when I was starting Gasher and thinking about the poetry that I love, it was poetry that got at the essence of a thing, which is this kind of sustained attention and care to be in a place that may not be narrative at all points.
That is this really kind of zoomed in articulate space. And so to have that articulation that you need, which is in order to get to the essence of a emotion or experience, you have to have that degree of articulation that’s using the arsenal of what we have for poetry. The line break the blank space. People don’t ever think about how blank space is working on their page, punctuation, the image musicality, all of this that I think about. I wanted that sense of everything in the kitchen sink I used to try and articulate this thing that is never going to be able to be articulated with language. Language is the ultimate failing kind of tool that we have as humans. It was there to tell us that I’m hungry, there’s danger over there, watch out. I mean, it’s there for survival. It certainly was never there to talk about the loss of your first love.
So we’re working with really crappy tools, and so when I say make everything useful, I really want poetry that feels urgent and that feels like it’s used all of its resources. There’s this kind of almost desperation to articulate this thing where we have this kind of obsession. And I felt like I was not seeing enough poetry that had this kind of desperation behind it that had this sense of urgency as a poet. Not the poem itself might not be about the topic of urgent struggle, but you could see that the craft felt urgent. The writing itself had this great kind of pressure behind it. This was also what kind of got the name Gasher. This was before, I want to just say this. Gasher was created before whatever video game now has a character, like, an end boss called Gasher. Now if you search Gasher, it’ll be Gasher Press and then it’ll be this end game boss from some video game. They stole that from us, okay?
Kristi D. Osorio: Copyright infringement!
Whitney Koo: Copyright. Because when I started Gasher and I looked up the name, we were all was there, we were it, but it was this idea of I wanted that. I loved the poetry that I just felt like I just feel like I’ve been ripped apart that way of the way that language can just be so guttural. And so that was how Gasher came about as a name in that kind of led us to this kind of line in our mission statement, which was that we just really wanted urgent poetry.
Kristi D. Osorio: Yeah, that’s amazing. I have always wondered about the name actually. So that’s really cool. I love that because it’s part of just actually embodying the mission, right? It’s like down to the name and I think what we call things is so important in these times. Going back to this time of decentering identity and things like that. It’s like, naming the thing is so important. I love that idea. Especially thinking about literary organizations that are housed within institutions and are thus beholden to whatever happens with those institutions. I think we’ve seen that quite a bit in the last few years. I used to feel like submitting to a journal that’s housed within a university is like, there will be no link rot. It won’t just disappear one day. It will always be there.
And that’s actually no longer the case because now this time where we are really devaluing the arts, what is the easiest thing to get rid of? That pesky little lit journal where all these people are talking about their feelings. So going back to this idea of urgency, I think the moment we’re in feels very urgent. So we’re in these times of tension, violence, grief, we’re seeing the news and all of this kind of really intentional disinformation and manipulation of the public. And I guess I’m wondering whether through your work as a poet or as a publisher or a book designer in all the many hats that you wear, what’s a pressing issue you’re concerned with right now and what might others do to help?
Whitney Koo: There’s a lot of really big problems in the world right now.
Kristi D. Osorio: Totally.
Whitney Koo: I think what I keep coming back to is the fact that there is such a lack of investment in community. And I think that we have a part of that is that we no longer have grace towards one another. And I think back to the literary world’s Twitter era where it was new scandal every week. I mean, but this is really kind of culturally been our new narrative is that we are just witch hunters constantly looking out to find who’s bad when we go out into the world, assuming everyone’s bad and looking for the bad and this great sense of pride when you feel like you’ve gotten someone. The anger is real, but the anger is misdirected. Our neighbors are not the people who are making your groceries too expensive or are the people that make you feel helpless when you can’t do anything in Gaza.
That’s not your neighbor. Those are bigger institutions. So I understand that the anger is there, but I feel like people don’t change because of you yelling at them or outsmarting them or shaming them. They change when they are invited spaces. I can’t change the world tomorrow, but I can invite people into spaces. I think about, I had a student who told me they were homeschooled. They come from a very, very religious background in West Texas and they were struggling to make friends and it’s coming out in their writing that they have thoughts that I definitely don’t agree with. And it’s really easy to just say that student is just a terrible student and say this is what’s wrong. And then there’s another way of inviting that student and not telling them that they’re wrong. This is all that they’ve known.
I’ve been trying to teach this actually, this is now coming into my lesson plans, which is that we all walk around as if we live in a capital R reality that we have—that capital R reality is how we operate and work through the world when in reality we are all little Rs. My reality is a little R because your reality is different than mine and so is this person. And the fact that we have, I have students who say, well then why can we live in a society at all if we all have different realities? Well, because we have enough overlap through community spaces where we engage in the same things. For example, we used to all go to public school together, so we had similar experiences in that way. We all go to the same third public space like the park, or we had enough of these shared spaces that our realities were close together. So they were different, but they were close. And so we could embrace the fact that we all had different perspectives. Now we all walk around as if we have, our reality is capital R reality.
And this is mostly because we are doom scrolling on Instagram, which has an algorithm to tell you that your reality is the only correct reality. And so our Rs are now way spaced out from each other because I can watch the news. My algorithm is going to tell me what I believe and think. The people I associate with tell me what I believe and think the things that I participate in tell me what I believe and think. I can literally isolate myself into where I’m basically looking into a bathroom mirror all day long. I just see myself reflected constantly. So of course now we seem like we’re so disparate from one another. I can never be in the same room as a MAGA person. So different, our Rs are so far apart, our realities are so far apart. But if we actually started sharing spaces with people who seem so disparate from us, we went back to investing in community, we actually would find that we have a lot of the same shared fundamental aspects, wanting to feel safe, wanting to feel loved.
We could go back to the foundational things and then you invite people into these shared spaces and you find that we can move people back to being close to sharing because you need that for a society. So I’m looking for that in the books that we publish too. Gasher can be a community. We can invite lots of diverse people in. We’re obviously never going to tolerate hate. It’s not about tolerating things that shouldn’t be tolerated like hate, but it can be a community space that is invitational. And I think we look for books where writers are working through real challenging topics and experiences, but do so with this sense of invitation and grace where we’re at the essence of the thing as opposed to this kind of lecturing or this kind of angry finger, which again, I think anger has a real productive place in the world.
It’s cathartic, but I don’t think it’s reparative. And I think we’re at a place where we have to start repairing the country or else we’re just doomed. I mean, we’re just doomed. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot. How is Gasher attributing to being reparative in some ways? Everyone’s welcome here. We don’t put so much heavy emphasis on one thing or another because I’m really trying to create a truly inclusive space, something that is really community centered. But I mean, we put in our mission, we don’t want vulgarity. We don’t want hate. I’m not interested in your racist takes. Obviously there’s boundaries, but that’s where I’m at right now.
Kristi D. Osorio: No, that’s really real. I think it’s energizing to hear about that because I feel like in this time when the division is of course intentional, there’s so much individualism and narcissism and those things go hand in hand. One antidote to that is instead of looking in the mirror like you’re saying, why not look outward and kind of see what you might find? I feel like as teachers, we get to see that kind of happen in real time. I love this story where I had somebody who didn’t sign up in time for his presentation and he ended up getting “stuck” with having to present on Baldwin and was just very not wanting to do that. And then during his presentation, he was really emotional, and he was like, I loved this reading so much. I never would have read this. When James—and he called him James—was talking about being so angry he could kill someone, I actually really connected with that because when you feel like somebody hates you, it makes you feel full of hate. And this is somebody who was openly conservative and obviously felt some type of way about having to engage with a Black voice.
And that was just a moment where I was like, wow, witnessing that transformation of what happens when you look outward and you kind of are like, I grew up hearing one thing and now I actually have agency over my own learning and the way that I see the world and I’m going to engage with this thing I normally wouldn’t have. Yeah, that’s where community comes from. That’s where that connection comes from. And so what I will say to my very humble amount of listeners is, you heard it here first, Whitney Koo is calling you in. So join the Gasher community. It’s a really wonderful place. It’s a really admirable kind of way of thinking about the times we’re in. Okay, so before we go, I did want to, I don’t know if you ever watch those “Hot Ones” chicken wings videos where they—
Whitney Koo: Yes!
Kristi D. Osorio: That guy’s truly just amazing when it comes to interviews. I wish I could come up with such good questions. But at the end, he’s always like, this camera, this camera, this camera. Tell the world what you have going on. And so I was wondering if you wanted to tell us about your book that is coming out, if you wanted to tell us about it and where we could go to order it and purchase it and read your poems.
Whitney Koo: Yeah, I have, look at this. [shows copy of book on screen] I have—
Kristi D. Osorio: Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful.
Whitney Koo: My first book. I’ve spent years publishing other people, and then I finally got around to publishing my own. It’s called Any Gesture, and it’s coming out on Black Lawrence Press April 7th. I’m really excited. Black Lawrence Press has been wonderful also. They are great people to work with, but it’s a collection of elegies. There’s three different threads going through. One is my sister who has been dealing with, battling suicide over several years. And this was during a particular period of time that it was really something that we were trying to walk her back from off the ledge. So this kind of pre-elegy is what I sort of started to feel. I felt like I need to start preparing myself now. And I started to mourn her early right before anything had happened. And so there’s that pre-elegy.
There’s also a thread about a character named Ophelia who is a real person that I have changed in order to protect them and their family’s identity. But this was someone who actually did die by suicide when I was a teenager, and I was among the few individuals who were there when it happened. And were dealing with the aftermath of witnessing that happen. And then my own struggles with infertility. I also was writing this during a time that I had had a miscarriage and was really struggling to get pregnant. So there’s this compounding loss that’s happening. I know this sounds so depressing.
Kristi D. Osorio: No, I’m eating it up. I’m ready.
Whitney Koo: Let me entice the plot a little bit, because as depressing as this sounds, there are black holes. I have this interest in black holes that comes throughout. There’s a lot of kind of faux telephone phone calls that are happening. There is this ticker that runs down the length of the book vertically, and it is kind of like this aside where I’m kind of mocking myself about how I’m talking about death in this urgency of life, and yet I can’t finish a book and I’m interested in black holes, but I don’t want to actually learn anything about them. And I’m watching YouTube videos. So I think there’s some humor and there there’s a little bit of science, a little bit of black holes in there. And so it’s not all doom and gloom, but it is mostly doom and gloom. But I think the book is really concerned with narrative, the elegist’s kind of narrative privileges and the losses that happen in this re-narrativizing the dead.
When we try to fill this outline of this person to reanimate them, we actually are creating so much loss in that act alone because that person doesn’t get to speak for themselves. We have one perspective of this loss. We have this shitty tool set, which is language, that can’t do what we want it to do. So there’s actually so much loss generated in that. And so that’s what the book is really concerned about. There’s this idea of narrative and the cost of narrative. So, get it, be in a dark sad place when you read it, and then go out in the sunlight and walk around feel better.
Kristi D. Osorio: Oh, that’s awesome. Yes. I love the black hole thing. Like, a woman in STEM among us. Okay! Very cool.
Whitney Koo: A woman in partial STEM. I know it very poorly. I have very poor knowledge of it, but I walk around as if I have the key to life. I’m like, you want to know something interesting about black holes? And I have one fact to tell you.
Kristi D. Osorio: That’s amazing. Oh, cool. Well, I’ll put a link to it so people can order it and well, congratulations, and I can’t wait to read the book.
Whitney Koo: Thank you so much.
Kristi D. Osorio: Thanks so much for joining me here and telling us about your journey with Gasher and the work you’re doing, and hopefully you’ll have some new fans out there from, again, my very humble set of listeners.
Whitney Koo is the author of Any Gesture (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Georgia Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. Whitney is the Executive Editor of Gasher Press.
