RKB:
I’d like to know a timeline of when you worked on
all the books and when you got the ideas for them.
MT:
"The Beautiful" are poems I wrote from 1993-1997.
It was Jenny Joseph’s (the publisher of Manic D Press)
idea. and at first I was a little hesitant because they’re
so old and my perspective on a lot of the things is really
different now. I was worried about having a book out that
I’d have to read from that I don’t even feel
anymore. But as it turns out, there’s enough poems
in there that I have affection for that I can do readings
from it and just ignore the ones that seem a little bit
dated.
RKB:
Why 1993-1997?
MT:
That’s when I started writing poems. I was in San
Francisco, I was writing 1 or 2 poems a day, it was crazy.
I was really inspired. And then I just kindof stopped because
I started focusing on prose. |
 |
RKB:
Do you still write poems? Are there any post-1997 ones?
MT: No, I
haven’t written a poem in a while. I think a lot of it is
that I haven’t had my own bedroom in five years. I share
a bedroom with my boyfriend, it’s hard, I feel like to write
a poem you need a certain amount of privacy and space for the
poem to well up in your consciousness, and if you’re always
filling your consciousness with people and projects, there’s
no space. We’re looking to get a new apartment, so I’m
going to get my own bedroom, and I think maybe I’ll have
the space to let poems come out again.
RKB:
They’re about a lot of different topics, but do you think
there’s a theme amongst them?
MT: They’re
really, really feminist. I was grappling with a lot of stuff that
could be filed under feminism, I guess, and I was just dealing
with a lot of issues for the first time and felt really angry.
So they’re really angry, they’re really feminist,
they’re very drunk and they’re a lot about pining
after girls.
RKB:
Before that were you writing?
MT: A little
bit, but I took it a lot more seriously when I moved to San Francisco
and I realized that there was this whole other way of being a
writer that wasn’t going to college or getting your book
published by a press, all these things that felt out of my reach.
I realized you can be this other kind of writer who writes and
brings your stuff out into the streets and reads in bars and publishes
your own poetry.
|
RKB:
You have a lot of well-known writers in "Pills, Chills,
Thrills, and Heartache" and a lot of really diverse
people, some of the things that are represented here are
not seen in other kinds of literature. Was it easy to get
them in, were people wanting to write about them?
MT:
A lot of the pieces that we got were previously written
though not previously published so people gave us pieces
that they already had lying around. They’re all people
who, if they’re publishing at all, are generally publishing
on small presses.
RKB:
Do you think it’s groundbreaking?
MT:
I feel like it’s in the same vein as "The New
Fuck You," the Eileen Myles’s anthology and the
High Risk books, but I don’t feel like there has been
for a few years a collection of what’s going on in
the underground with underground writers, people who aren’t
writing on the big presses, who aren’t fasttracked
in the New York publishing world, people who are really
dedicated and their voices are more transgressive and they’re
plugging away and publishing in zines or self-publishing
or in small presses. |
RKB:
You are someone who’s known as touring a lot, between Sister
Spit and all the open mics and performances you’ve done
in San Francisco. Is that something you feel as a writer is vital
to you, to get out there, even if it’s different kinds of
stuff than the poetry?
MT: Definitely.
I really feel like because I didn’t go to college and I
didn’t get the connections that a person gets in college
and I didn’t come into publishing in that way, like I didn’t
get an agent and I didn’t have my book shopped around, I
just knew that the kind of writer I was, if I was going to get
an audience, and I did want an audience, I didn’t want to
feel like I was doing something all by myself up in my room, then
I would have to make my own audience by going out into the world
and reading my stuff.
RKB:
Does it feel like a different act, is performing more akin to
acting than akin to writing when you’re reading out loud?
MT: I wouldn’t
say it’s like acting, it’s definitely a form of writing
for me, because I work it out while I’m reading it, I can
tell what’s not working after I’ve read it out loud
in a way I sometimes miss when I edit it by looking at it. It
sometimes takes a few times reading a piece out loud before I
know what edits to make on it, am I can reread the piece eight
times and I can skip stuff, but once I get up on a mic I’ll
realize that there’s a certain rhythm to a sentence that
feels awkward or flat, and I can go back and work on it. So it
feels like writing.
RKB:
I wanted to ask you about the Sex Workers Art Show, and also your
upcoming book "Rent Girl." The topic of sex work, there’s
a lot in The Beautiful and a lot in your past work. I saw you
read on the Sex Workers Art Show and you seemed very excited about
being on it, but how do you feel about having that tag on you
for the rest of your life?
MT: I don’t
mind. I was a sex worker, especially in this culture that we have,
it seems like you have to be a repented, fallen sex worker. It
feels a little weird only because I haven’t done sex work
in so long and I likely will never do sex work again, although
you never know. It’s easy to forget about how incredibly
intense of an experience it is, and I have enough distance that
when I’m writing about it now, it’s really easy to
only be in the absurdity and humor of it, because I’m sortof
detached from it, so while working on "Rent Girl" I
had to make sure I also gave a lot of time to the aspects of it
that were really disturbing and depressing and problematic so
that it wasn’t just a cartoon of the experience.
| RKB:
And is "Rent Girl" fictional?
MT:
It’s not fictional. It’s an illustrated novel,
so it’s not panel-by-panel like a comic book. I worked
with this artist Lauren McCubbin, who’s amazing, she’s
a painter who’s also done comic books, she’s
the art director of the magazine Kitchen Sink. She would
read the text and then select one image or one scene and
then illustrate that.
RKB:
So did you approve the art?
MT:
No, in fact I haven’t even seen it. We’ve done
it completely independently. One thing that I was worried
about initially was that the book was going to be really
sexy, and my experience of sex work was not sexy, there
was nothing sexy about it, it was a job and it was a hard
job. |
|
And
the reality is that while you’re illustrating it you are drawing
women who are dressed up to look sexy in various stages of undress.
I think what’s going to happen is there’s going to be
some really sexy images next to some really disturbing text. And
I think that can create its own interesting tension, so I‘m
just making peace with it.
RKB:
Do you plan to keep writing about that?
MT: About
sex work? I think this is probably it. There actually is really
one really intense story that I could still write about it but
I doubt that I will. I can’t imagine how it would fit into
anything unless I just wanted to write it for the sake of writing
about it, but this is probably it. It’s a place for the
stories I’ve already written about sex work to go and live.
There’s one really really long piece that was very fun for
me to write that was more contemporary and it was about the last
time I did sex work. I had this butch girlfriend and we tried
to do girl on girl sex shows.
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