Home / Creative/Critical Graduate Student Spotlight / Kirstin Wagner

3 Questions with Creative/Critical PhD Student Kirstin Wagner

1. Describe your work in three words/phrases (for instance, “sunsets, mothers, ‘where did I leave my wallet?’) domestic violence, daughterhood, all the stores of the body 2. Share your favorite line from your work. When I turned back, there was only the specter of her face against the blooming ocean; the music of water reaching for sand. 3. Tell us 1) the most fragrant location (the fragrance can be lovely or putrid, of course) that you’ve ever had the chance to write in, 2) the noisiest site you’ve ever written in, and 3) the softest place you’ve ever written in (can be metaphorical or literal). I am thinking of a slice of shore off Highway 3 near the Head of Saint Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia. I was staying with my uncle at the tail end of a research trip, collecting oral histories from family members. On the drive from his house to my great aunt’s, I stopped at the small inlet where my mother learned to swim as a girl. This was not, empirically, the most fragrant, noisiest, or softest place I have ever written. But something about the way the water calmed as it stretched itself towards the beach made all my senses amplify. I sat and wrote poems in a damp notebook that collected sand in the hand-sewn spine I’m still shaking out.

I taught a class I designed this winter called “Body Theories and Embodied Poetics in Contemporary American Poetry.” My students were brave, vulnerable, brilliant badasses. We read, thought, wrote, and experimented together to map some of the many ways language and bodies insinuate each other to recount violence, grief, intimacy, love, and lay bare modes of empathy, community, resilience, and transformation. I adored the experience. So many books broke me open this year. Here are a few: Carry by Toni Jensen, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, Un-American by Hafizah Geter, Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Oh, and I managed to publish a couple things: 1. "Storying Grief: A Familial Performance of Death and Dying" in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 16, No. 3 (2020). You can read that piece here: http://liminalities.net/16-3/grief.pdf 2. "Murmurations: Scale-Free Correlation and Atmospheric Attunement in Families Organizing around Domestic Violence" in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (December 2020) https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa186 White supremacy, global capitalism, and the pandemic continue to lay waste to so many people’s lives. I am grateful to my friends and family this past year who have modeled ways to show up for myself and for others with authenticity and humility. I believe in self-education, listening, and sharing stories as integral to the hard, daily work of building a better world. As writers, let us continue this work together.