This week’s installment of Ten Questions features torrin a. greathouse, whose poetry collection DEED is out today from Wesleyan University Press. In this formally and lyrically innovative collection of poems, the speaker explores the appetites and the costs of queer sex and desire. Written in a range of received and invented forms, including caudate sonnets, sestinas, acrostics, and the burning haibun, this poetic triptych centers on the question of how, despite violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power that disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, to write an honest poem about desire. The poems “radiate a sort of joyous physicality,” according to Library Journal. torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Their debut collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainer Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
torrin a greathouse, author of DEED.
1. How long did it take you to write DEED?
While DEED was the MFA thesis I worked on from 2019 to 2022, the earliest poems in the collection were written in 2016, before I even began work on my first book, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound. From the first drafts I wrote toward a failed chapbook titled “Ode to My Mouth” to the final copy edits, DEED took eight years to complete.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging aspect of this project was the book’s central section, an eighteen-page sequence titled “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire.” Beginning as a three-page poem, the particular nuance and degree of complication this poem demanded caused it to keep growing out of control before I pruned it into the form it takes within the collection. It’s the longest I’ve ever spent revising a single poem, from 2019 to 2022. It was both the first and the last poem I workshopped during my MFA.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’d love to be the kind of writer who sits down at my desk at a specific and predictable time—the same time and place every day—and write, but I’ve never been that writer. Most of my creative work gets done at weird hours in weird places, hell, most of my first book was written riding public transit around Boston. These days, I write via scraps and fragments jotted down on sticky notes or in my notes app, letting these accumulate until they develop gravity and begin collapsing toward one another into the beginnings of a new draft. There’s a distinct compositional pleasure to the process of attempting to improvise in the gaps between these accumulated pieces of language.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m a really ambitious reader, but frankly terrible at actually finishing books. What this means is that I usually have about a dozen partially-read books scattered across my apartment. Some that come to mind right now are Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Icarus by K. Ancrum, Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes, Eat the Apple by Matt Young, With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany by Justin Phillip Reed, decompose by Séamus Fey, and Pig by sam sax. As you can tell, I’ve been on a little bit of a prose kick lately, though a good handful of those are books I’m reading to or for the people I love.
5. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
DEED’s organization was a fairly ambitious undertaking, as the book is structured around a triptych mirror, wherein the first and third sections contain direct reflections of each other, while the second section, comprised of the poem “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire,” is largely doing its own thing. I’ll give you an example: The first section’s poem “Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs” is a meditation on sex and violence couched in a consensual BDSM scene, while in the third section, the piece “On Confinement” complicates the earlier poem by providing an origin for the speaker’s fixation on handcuffs—a traumatic event at the intersection of domestic and police violence. This was an extremely difficult organizational strategy to make work, but I think that the result is a collection that rewards the reader’s attentiveness.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It’s an unsatisfying answer, but this really depends on what you want to get out of it. I don’t think that anyone benefits from applying to an MFA thinking it will teach them to write or give them a career out of the gate. But if you want time to focus on finishing a book, health insurance, and mentorship... well, those might be good reasons to pursue one. There are plenty of ways to become a damn good writer without an MFA—including resources like this collection of craft texts for non-MFA poets assembled by Airea D. Matthews—and, while I do work at a damn good low-residency MFA (the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University), I don’t think that getting a master’s degree is a one-size-fits-all solution to your writing woes.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of DEED?
This might seem like a no-brainer, but the most surprising aspect of DEED as a project is how inextricable it feels from the work of the poets I am closest to, the Double-Six Collective—George Abraham, Julian Randall, Tarik Dobbs, and Bradley Trumpfheller. Those four writers’ fingerprints are all over DEED, and their work really affected the book on a formal, rhetorical, and lyrical level. Because much of my first book of poems was written during a time in my life when I lacked this kind of centralized writing community, I'm still struck when I return to the poems throughout DEED by just how clear their presence feels to me. As I write in my acknowledgment to them, they truly are the school of my poetics.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started DEED, what would you say?
Don’t try to write a book of sex poems during a global pandemic when you aren’t having sex. But, in all seriousness, I think what I’d actually tell myself is to trust the process, that the book would be finished when it was finished, and that rushing it wouldn’t help at all. For the longest time, I was convinced I was going to die young and this really propelled my writing process, but it was also terrible for my mental health. The biggest lesson past me needed to learn was that I had time, more time than I thought, and that the work would be better if I was patient with it. In some ways I’m lucky that it took nearly two years after the end of my MFA for the book to find a publisher because this forced me to be patient whether I wanted to or not.
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
A lot of the process for writing DEED was the work of actively avoiding writing, to allow myself to fully process ideas before putting them to paper. In practice, this meant I spent a lot of time watching TV—including a fifteen-season rewatch of Supernatural—building scale models, and picking back up gaming after almost seven years away from the medium. The most interesting aspect of the non-writing work that went into DEED, however, is the sheer amount of etymological research I did for these poems, some of which involved reaching out directly to Merriam-Webster for information on the history of certain terms. I was so persistent that they eventually connected me directly with a professional etymologist for any further inquiries, which feels a little bit like a badge of honor as a poet.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
There are so many fantastic pieces of advice that I’ve been given over the years that I always struggle to answer questions like this one. The idea of narrowing anything down to a singular “best” always makes me feel a little like I’m about to break out in hives. The piece of advice that’s been on my mind recently is something that my thesis advisor Douglas Kearney once told me: You can spend forever trying to account for how certain readers will deliberately and maliciously misread you, but sometimes you just have to lean in and say exactly what you need to say, regardless of how these readers might read. DEED is coming out at a particularly fraught time to be publishing anything as a trans woman in this country, especially a book like this one. Doug’s words have served as a reminder that no matter how certain readers may try and misuse my words, I wrote exactly the book I needed to.
