Chapbook Interview: hand-me-down resistance by Amelia Gothreau Newett
- dmalech1
- May 16, 2021
- 6 min read
Mira Stone: It was impressive to witness your process of creating a cover for your chapbook, as well as the accompanying buttons. Can you say a little bit about the cover you chose and also about your experience collaborating with creatives in your own family?
Amelia Gothreau Newett: This chapbook is centered around my own interactions of personal and political, but for me, all of that traces back to my family. My parents taught my sister and I from a very young age to be involved in politics and make our voices heard. So many of the poems in this collection trace back to exact moments or conversations I’ve had with my family. So it felt right to include them in the design process. Both my father and my sister are visual artists so it was never a question to me that they would be involved. The cover I chose was designed by my dad. It’s a photo of a t-shirt he hand painted for my mom for a protest they went to (hint: it’s a protest in the chapbook!) and a tape from his punk band, Civil Disobedience. Without knowing those components, I think it’s still a very nice cover that fits with the vibe of the title of the collection, but I love all the hidden meanings in it. About halfway through the process of pulling this book together I decided I wanted to include buttons with the packaging. The idea was for them to be almost protest style buttons, but with hidden connections to the poems. My sister is an amazing digital artist so I just sent her a couple of lines from poems and vague ideas for button designs and she did an amazing job bringing them to life. I’m so grateful they were both so eager to be involved in the process of bring this chapbook to life!
MS: Are there any poets in particular that had a strong influence on you while you were writing and assembling this chapbook?
AGN: Sierra DeMulder has been incredibly important to my entire journey with poetry. She’s amazing and so vulnerable in all of her work which I admire so much and strive to achieve in my own poems. So she’s always in the back of my head when I’m writing. In the context of this collection in particular, there are more specific poems than poets that fueled me along the way. “The Opposites Game” by Brendan Constantine was one that I ended up writing in response to and kept appearing in my mind as I was writing. Another poem that I thought a lot about during this process was “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay. That poem is so beautifully devastating and so well done. I can’t even really trace it to any of my work in particular, but I kept going back to it. And the last poem that kind of kept me going when I was having a difficult time being vulnerable was “communion” by Jeanann Verlee. I quite honestly scream every time I read that poem and my goal was to write a poem that gave me the same reaction.
MS: I’m particularly interested in the last poem of the collection, “hand with the sapphire ring,” written about your mother. Your chapbook is nimble in its movement between deeply personal moments and biting reflections on America. What was your experience like writing these more intimate poems, knowing they’d be in some kind of conversation with your more big-picture poems about American society?
AGN: Thank you for calling attention to this poem in particular. I feel like “hand with the sapphire ring” is a huge outlier in the collection in that it was the only poem that I wrote during that process of piecing this chapbook together that I had absolutely no intention of including. My family is a huge presence in this collection and specifically my mom in the ways that I’ve learned to be a woman from her. At the end of the process, this piece felt necessary to the conversation as it added this breath of honesty that wasn’t remotely political, but that called attention the way women so often fall into the role of taking on others’ hurt. This moment, and all the other deeply personal snapshots, were hard to place among other poems that feel so graphically violent. But that’s the point of this collection. The personal and political are so intertwined and affect each other in so many hidden ways. I wanted to uncover those moments and show what some of the ties have been in my own life.
MS: There are several found poems in your chapbook. What drew you to the found poem for this chapbook in particular? Did it feel necessary in writing about certain subjects? How did these found poems influence your thinking about the visual layout of your poetry?
AGN: I love found poems and how they so quickly turn one person’s words into someone else’s playground. I had the poem “answers to questions at a job interview” in my back pocket for awhile and I knew I wanted it in this collection in particular because of the material it was pulled from. I had just considered writing about the testimony it was pulled from, but it seemed more powerful and poignant to use his own words against him. The other found poem in the chapbook was meant to be a jumping off point for me to think about some of the political activity my parents were involved with when they were younger. I never intended it to be a final poem, I was just reading news articles about the protest to get inspiration and kind of fell into that poem. I think it’s a nice balance visually to have more than one but I also didn’t want to include too many. I think sometimes they can be tricky to read and I tried my very best to make sure mine were not. Hopefully I succeeded in that!
MS: Having completed this chapbook, do you have any plans to work on a new chapbook, or perhaps a longer project? Was it difficult to cut this collection down to chapbook length?
AGN: I came into this project with a bunch of poems ready for major edits, but overall had a pretty substantial amount of poems. A lot of them didn’t end up making the cut and were replaced by very new poems. This collection does feel complete the way it is now, but I also wonder what it could be if I brought back some of the poems I decided not to include. Not every poem felt ready at the time and I would never want to include a bad poem just to have more pages. I don’t have any concrete plans right now for any projects, but I do want to keep the ball rolling and sit with some of those other poems for longer. Aaybe they’ll eventually have a place in this collection or maybe they’ll ask to be something entirely different.
MS: Which poem in the chapbook took the longest to write? Why? Was it a poem you wrote specifically for this chapbook or something you’d been working on before?
AGN: “kill her voice” and “ode to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford” are both poems that have been in the works for years. Honestly most of the poems in this collection have existed at some level for a long time. These two were the last two of the collection that I finished editing and finally felt some peace with. That being said, most of the time I took with these poems happened away from the actual page. The poem that took that actual longest to put down on the page was “i try to write you (again)”. That poem was written during a period of grieving. I was really struggling to cope with the loss of a friend of mine and every time I sat down to write about him, it either didn’t feel like enough or I would have to take a break just staring at the page after almost every line.
MS: One of my personal favorites from this chapbook is “i want to tell everyone how it feels to live with my uterus.” While there are many vulnerable poems in this collection, this poem feels distinct in its stream-of-consciousness narration. You write “i have been trying to write my uterus poem for years.” How does it feel to have written it and included it in your chapbook?
AGN: Thank you so much for saying you like this poem! I was so nervous to include it because of the stream-of-consciousness you noted. I wrote this poem in probably fifteen minutes during a particularly bad day of my period and edited it minorly a couple weeks later. I was honest that I’ve been trying to write about my uterus for a long time, it just always felt so taboo to speak about. But in the context of this collection and among poems about external female pain, it felt irresponsible almost to not give space to the pain that my body inflicts on itself. It’s a very personal poem and probably a lot of information to put out in the world for people who don’t know me, but it feels great to know that part of me is taking up space outside my body. I don’t want to live my life conforming to the idea that people should suffer in silence.
Amelia Gothreau Newett is a graduating senior studying Writing Seminars and Social Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the chapbook “hand-me-down resistance,” a collection that explores and challenges the relationship of the personal and political. After graduation she will continuing her time in Baltimore and pursuing her Master’s in Education at Johns Hopkins through the Urban Teachers program.
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