UIndy’s Potluck Podcast: Season 6

Whirling Prize Team: This is UIndy’s Potluck Podcast where we host conversations about the arts. Etchings Press, a student run publisher at University of Indianapolis, awards the whirling prize to a book each year that demonstrates an excellent and compelling response to a theme selected by students. The 2023 theme was mythology. And in this episode, the student judges in English 479, Abigail Bailey, Emma bond, Olivia Cameron, Camille Dobbs, Sarah Durbin, Amber Phillips, and II Alexander Phillips-Hedge, have a conversation with poet Elizabeth Kate Switaj, author of the winning collection, the Bringers of fruit. Elizabeth Kate Switaj has worked at the college of the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific since 2013. She is author of Supply Chain Problems, and the Bringers of fruit. Her third full length poetry collection At Ghost Depth is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press.

Whirling Prize Team: Welcome readers. I’m Camille Dobbs. We are talking with poet Elizabeth Kate Switaj winner of the 2023 Whirling Prize. She and her formerly feral cats live on zero at all, where she works at the College of Marshall Islands. We are excited to have this opportunity to talk with you about your work, The Bringers of Fruit. Let’s meet the judging team.

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Abby Bailey. I mean, we’re

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Amber Phillips.

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Olivia Cameron.

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Sierra Durbin.

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Emma Bond.

Whirling Prize Team: I’m Alex Phillips-Hedge.

Whirling Prize Team: Okay, let’s get started. Welcome Elizabeth Kate Switaj.

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: Yaqui from the Marshall Islands. I’m happy to be here.

Whirling Prize Team: Okay, so my first question was, did you have any real life experiences that inspired any of the poems? Yeah,

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: I definitely had my share of toxic relationships that went into this collection. Clearing up the question of Persephone’s consent is a poem that came out of my own wrestling with situations I’ve been through where it was hard to place the extent to which I really could consent and the extent to which I was complicit with my own oppression, for example.

Whirling Prize Team: So my question for you is, is there a way to analyze The Bringers of Fruit within the disability theory lens? So in what ways?

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: Sure, in a sense, everything that I write already represents a neuro divergent perspective. You can connect the multiple moving layers and varied rhetorics to work like Janine Josephs decade of the brain. But at the same time, it’s been really challenging for me to think about how to make neuro divergence something that’s overt and always present in the work without making it something fixed and commodify trouble. That’s actually part of why I would say neurodivergent instead of autistic, there’s latitude to change, and perhaps throw new malfunctions into changing systems. This is a way of thinking that legacy Russell’s glitch feminism has really helped me develop from something that’s a little more in Kohut. She’s got a quote in her book from black artists, ie James Nope. I am not grappling with notions of identity and representation in my art. I’m grappling with safety and futurity. 

In The Bringers of Fruit that idea comes back to disability in the second Intermot. So because there Persephone is receiving letters of support from women who have been monstered in the way disabled people so often are, and to me that really touches on the kind of community that disabled people have formed phenom mine through letters or electronic letters rather than through more physical contact. 

Whirling Prize Team: Why did you choose her Stephanie’s stories in the point of views you did? And were there any that didn’t make it to the final piece? 

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: Sure. So I have loved Greek mythology for a very long time going back to elementary school, I think it was maybe third grade when we did the Persephone myth as the class play. I was cast as Hera which probably says something about how my teachers saw me. But I really came back to that when I was working on my MFA and poetics and Creative Writing at New College of California in San Francisco. So many of the modernist writers that we studied in my first semester there really drew on Greek myths. And that led me to learning about how there were different local cultures and the multiplicity of some of these figures. So it was kind of a more mature way of understanding Greek myth and the other stories and mysteries, which focus on Demeter and Persephone rather than Hades and Persephone, were particularly of interest then. 

And, you know, for a really long time, I associated that renewed interest in Greek myth, just with that more mature perspective that comes when you understand that the stories are not so simple, are told in only one way. But then, just a couple months ago, I was listening to the Blind Boy Podcast, and he had an episode on Greek mythology and simulation theory. And he was talking about how he was reading hesed in the wake of his father’s death. And he really made the strong connection between a kind of existential absurdity in Greek myth where suffering is essentially meaningless. So, he made the connection between that and the experience of his losing his father, just when he was coming to an age when he could start to have an adult relationship with his father. And I realized that was very similar to the experience I had, because my father passed away literally the day before my orientation for my MFA, and I was 21 at the time, so I wasn’t a child, but I still hadn’t had that opportunity to develop an adult relationship. So really, the Persephone myth has been incubating in my head for a while. 

It’s harder to say why it came out when it did. I think the multiple voices have a lot to do with the fact that I was reading a lot of Bakhtin at the time, and he talks about polyglots. Sure, there have been a lot of one-off Persephone poems over the years that just didn’t fit into this collection. Some that fit into better or not better, but some that fit better with other projects.

Whirling Prize Team: Persephone’s voice is written with complexity and emotion that makes her feel very real to the reader. What did you do to prepare writing in her voice?

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: I read every piece of Persephone literature that I could get a hold of fiction, poetry, just whatever I could find. I think it helps with the voice that I’ve dabbled in fiction, mostly short stories and a couple novels that never quite reached the novel stage. I think there’s a lot to be said for studying television dialogue.

Whirling Prize Team: Throughout the collection, we see musical terminology such as innemetzo, coral preload, and aria that creates sections for the poems. What significance do these elements add to the poems and what inspired you to write The Bringers of Fruit as an oratorio. And to add on to that you mentioned that your class put on a play where you cast as Hera. Do you have a background in music and have you done theater outside of class?

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: I wrote most of this book while I was working on publishing my dissertation on James Joyce, and it really owes a lot to Finnegans Wake. In a way that’s true also of the musicality. So when I was at Queen’s University, Belfast, where I did my PhD, my supervisor Brian Cara, her often talked about the wake is music. I tend to think of Finnegans Wake as a long poem. And of course, music and poetry have a long and ancient history together. 

So I was really primed to think about these two is going together. So here I’d written a lot of pieces that fit into this project. And putting them together using this musical structure, created another layer of code through performance. And another way of thinking about structure because I do a lot of playing with that and playing with form in this work. I don’t have as much of a musical or theater background as I would like to have a when I was younger, I would have loved to have become an opera singer. But I had no idea how to pursue that. And I had a really terrible experience in high school choirs. I didn’t get the guidance I would have needed at the time. You know, I’d been in all district choir in eighth grade in ninth grade, my voice started to become very unruly. I had this whole huge part in the middle of my range that I just couldn’t sing. The choir director at the time thought I was just shy or misbehaving. 

When I returned to singing in my last year of my bachelor’s degree. I started to find out that that experience of having a huge breakpoint in your voice and your voice just becoming a little weird and difficult to control is actually really typical of the experience of somebody with a contralto voice. And, you know, I sing now, and I actually live in a culture that’s very musical and has singing at all kinds of events. I have a very distinctive low singing voice. And I do still love opera, but I don’t really have that background of putting it into practice. 

Whirling Prize Team: What sort of sparked your idea to blend the myth of Persephone with modern technology?

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: Well, to me myth is really only interesting if it’s living. And technology is an easy shorthand for bringing something into today. I think the challenge with technology is that as soon as you include technology, it becomes dated in a way. But I also think that trying to avoid being dated, can make a work less authentic.

Whirling Prize Team: So certainly to follow that up and get a little bit more specific, what inspired interest splicing of HTML into the work, are there any other forms that you would like to try to bend and experiment with in the future similar to how you work with HTML here?

Elizabeth Kate Switaj: One of my ongoing interests, because I have a lot of different influences from different schools of poetry is and how to bring really disparate rhetorics and styles together in a way in which they all retain their sharp edges, instead of becoming kind of a big mushy pile of the HTML tags have actual visible barriers. So it’s an easy way to represent that kind of attempt. All the HTML tags in The Bringers of Fruit are actually from the text encoding initiative, which is something I learned about at the Oxford digital humanities summer school. So the text encoding initiative, it’s a digital humanities community of practice, that develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital forms. So really, in the same way that thinking in terms of performance added a layer. 

So thinking of the poems as manuscripts and representing them in this way, I guess it was a way of carrying the ideal of archival poetics into parts of the work, in which I wasn’t actually practicing the archival poetics. As far as moving forward. I’ve been playing a bit with Python and error messages but haven’t hit on anything that I really like. I do want to experiment a little with using Twine for poetry. Twine is a software application that’s typically used for interactive fiction.

Whirling Prize Team: Thank you so much, Ms. Switaj. Listeners, we hope you check out the Bringers of Fruit: An Oratorio by Elizabeth Kate Switaj. You can learn more about the 2023 Etchings prize winner at our website, which we will link in the podcast description.

Whirling Prize Team: We thank you for listening to the UIndy Potluck Podcast, which is hosted by students and faculty of the University of Indianapolis. We would like to thank our guests in the Shaheen College of Arts and Sciences. To learn more about you and these potluck podcast and hear other episodes, please visit etchings.und.edu/the potluck podcast. Thank you for your support!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai