My first question is about, predictably, the weather. I also grew up in tornado alley—though, in a newer part of the alley, in northern Alabama, where the alley has seeped into as a result of climate change. I wanted to first ask about the complex tangle of feeling that comes in the waiting for a tornado—fear, a sense of danger, dreadful anticipation, concern for others—but also fear of the wild unpredictability of a tornado, of what could possibly happen. When you’re inside the house waiting the tornado can be on top of you or next door, it could manifest or not, it could be behind that wall of rain or it couldn’t. I sense that in your book, but I also sense ways that this bad forecasting mirrors in other moments of your life. Can you say more about the parallels, convergences, points of connection or departure in the book, between the weather, race, and queerness? That “tangle of feeling” is something that stuck with me as I continued writing through this book. I began to notice my fear and anticipation never quite left, even after the tornado did. It would return at every tornado warning or scary weather forecast I experienced, but that same tangled feeling kept showing up in so many other areas in my life: like when I turned on the news and saw signs of persistent racial discord and anti-blackness, or when I dove further into my coming out process and queerness. The dread and the grief all began to feel the same in my head and in my body. I found myself feeling at odds with the world around me, much more than I’d anticipated would be the case as a child. It became clear that “normalcy” and the perceptions and expectations that came along with it, were a threat to so much of not just my own existence but of so many communities I cared about. The feelings of my fears all started to blur and I felt like I was in a constant state of questioning (or forecasting, as my therapist would call it). What if the sky is always threatening to whisk me away? What if the police stop a family member on the way home? What did that man yell at me from his car? What if violence is building under the surface of everything and what if American history and imperialism ensured it so? Occasionally those fears are just fears or projections of the worst case scenario. But sometimes they aren’t just projections. Sometimes the worst thing that could happen does happen. What will be under each of these rocks when we turn them over? As the book continued to develop, these threads of race, queerness, and weather began to not feel just like parallels or iterations of one another, but they interacted. Sometimes they compounded on one another all together, sometimes they had their own tension between them. To borrow your example, the narrow alley of possibility kept growing and expanding. Bad Forecast was meant to be about that, but also made them more apparent to me as the project continued. I’m always interested in form. When writing myself I encounter it as a sort of search, a new search each time. Writing a book is also finding the form of the book. I’m compelled so much by the forms of Bad Forecast, the mixture of recursion and seriality, the role of reiteration and revision, the mixture of poetry and prose. What was the process of finding that form like for you in this book? The form for Bad Forecast came in gusts. I think certain pockets of my writing life produced certain types of form. (Before considering myself a proper writer and deciding to go to school for it, I was doing a lot of doodling and marginalia-writing while working as a middle school tutor. This environment was different than, say, when crafting essays in a workshop, which was different than taking a class with poets. And the work that was produced looked different.) It took a while for me to understand that these bursts of expression could all live together. They all ultimately cycled around the same narrative. I believe that the essay space was where I was first most comfortable in writing about the tornado, but as I began to enter more lyric, hybrid, or Poetry-Proper spaces, I saw what each of those could afford the material—and it began to feel like the material was specifically calling for such range. The forms began to speak to one another. For instance, I’d notice that in my poems a journalistic quality would show up as I worked to archive what wasn’t always archived on the national news; I’d notice that the essays would break open and be able to breathe more with lyric spaces placed across them. The more I went back and forth between prose and poetry, the more they each seemed quite similar to each other. I wanted the final version of Bad Forecast to be able to hold and speak to this. I do believe there is a narrative, serial arc in Bad Forecast, but it’s an arc full of recursion and looking back. In revision, keeping the fractured and recurrent nature of things made sense. That feels more apt and true to me than a simple, traditional narrative. The storms of life find their way in and make you look back at all those previous to them. I was recently re-reading one of my favorite essays by Toni Morrison—”Memory, Creation, and Fiction”—and how Morrison describes memory, which is stood in contrast with fact or reality. She writes: “Memory…is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.” And when I read this again, I got taken back to your book, and the role of memory in it—your own memories of this past, writing it into being in your book. How do you conceive of memory in Bad Forecast—that re-membering of this past in your present? It’s funny, I think the book to me (now also as a reader!), is a re-entry into those memories. There’s a way in which I feel I’ve put a lot of this behind me, so to re-enter the book is to re-engage and re-remember what was felt. It’s interesting to experience myself, as adult reader, noticing when certain moments of a younger me feel not so dissimilar to how I feel now. It’s this strange sense of self. But I think this speaks to this dwelling. I think there is almost this out-of-time space that’s created and channeled there. The dwelling literally forms and crafts new space, new worlds on the page. It’s a time travel and collapse, and to Toni Morrison’s point it is distinct from the facts or the reality that was known and experienced before. Thank you for that offering! I wanted the book to feel like something that could be entered—that required your attention from its beginning—but then could be finished. And perhaps be done so even in one sitting. I imagined Bad Forecast as something you can read, then put down and away. Until the next time. Until life brings you to re-enter it. I didn’t want it to feel as if it had too much negative gravitational pull or that it was impossible to shake. It’s a sobering read at times, but also an important contending. My friend Callum Angus read the book after its publication and said that it “make[s] the devastation of the world both more and less bearable”. I want the book to offer something, but I didn’t want it to say, hey everything is suddenly going to be okay. I wanted it to offer solace, but not force any extra feelings of respite that aren’t already in its narratives. (Though there is some respite!) I like Cal’s words because they made me think. What does it mean if something makes things more bearable, but also less bearable? Is there utility in that? I’ve landed on the sentiment that there is. I see it in other similar work that I like. That kind of writing can provoke us into feeling, and those tangles of feeling can provoke us into the communion, love, and care of others. Lastly, as I began to understand the full scope of the manuscript and its dealings with memory, shape felt very much a part of Bad Forecast’s DNA. The funnel shape is perhaps the most obviously important example of this (as becomes clear in “Inclement”) but it occurs all over. I radically reworked and revised “The Mole” and put that near the end of the book to interrogate that. The piece is integral to the book, even though in the text the storm isn’t literally or explicitly present. I wanted to make these connections of feelings between its narrative and those that come earlier a bit stronger. So I needed more from that piece. It needed to last longer, and carry more weight. It needed to be an experience. I needed the grief that’s present in “The Mole”—which is an exploration of consent, a crossing of a line, a shift in innocence—to feel just as big as a tornado. It left me feeling sad and scattered in the same way. So that recombinant nature of the piece and the shape I made it take on made sense. (It began as prose blocks and is now radically different.) I had a reader-friend, poet Umniya Najaer say that the pages of “The Mole” when laid out in book form, looked “like wings.” Like of an angel. Or a butterfly. The more I sit with the final product of Bad Forecast, the more variant shapes of narrative and memory I’m learning to see.
originally published in asides // besides #1 in December 2024.