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Author Statement
Suitably Mangled is a distillation of all my sickness and healing. I’m navigating a season of dramatic personal change, and writing has been the bedrock that’s helped me keep my head. ‘Pain-to-power’ is a formula universal to all humans. I hope I did a good job painting an honest portrait here.
3 Questions
Lee Gill
INK: What most inspires you to write?
L.G.: Writing is my personal magic—logomancy—so I try to capture any experiences or ideas that point me higher or deeper. It’s that sublimation of the Thing behind things into art that interests me most about creativity in general, and I think people who come across my work really connect with that.
INK: What does your writing routine look like?
L.G.: I bought a typewriter Spring of last year: an Olympiette. It’s been a godsend for my creative output. I catch a signal from the source then get to pounding keys. There’s an authority in each keystroke you can’t get from a laptop. The focused analog process forces rewrites until I’m left with the most untarnished form of the work.
INK: Name a favorite poem you feel everyone should read and why.
L.G.: “Where? When? Which?” by Langston Hughes. It’s a chilling little thing from one of my favorite writers and really captures a Black Gothic feel I’ve gravitated towards recently.
Q&A with C.W. Bryan
C.W. Bryan: Suitably Mangled covers such a wide variety of subjects, but all of it feels tightly connected. How did this collection come about? Was a chapbook always the end goal, or did the poems included all happen to work well together?
L.G: So, I started up with poetry in earnest after a stint in a psych ward. At the time, I wanted to write but didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything more complex. It became evident very quickly that poetry was a perfect channel for me to fire from the hip when it came to all the emotions and revelations I was experiencing. In terms of the chapbook, I found it a good stepping stone to publishing something larger. Dave, a good friend of mine, read the heap of poems I put in front of him and really helped me give the book a shape that conveyed the themes well.
C.W. Bryan: Some of my favorite moments in the collection came from your haiku. I particularly loved “Mourning.” What inspired you to use this form as opposed to just writing short free verse?
L.G.: To me, a haiku is narrative in its purest form. The restrictions of the haiku structure pressure me to SAY THE THING. No preamble or pretense. And the specificity I developed in my word choice and imagery translated to my longer poems. Not a single syllable I put on a page should be an accident.
C.W. Bryan: I imagine this project was very cathartic to write and especially to have published out in the world. Now that Suitably Mangled is out there, do you have any plans for the following projects? Any direction you’re particularly excited to work on?
L.G.: I’m currently querying agents to represent a larger poetry collection that expands on the pieces in Suitably. I’m also in the middle of writing a fresh collection that really dives deep into gothic and occult themes.
