Jordan Rich joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read her poem "How to Build a Closet," featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Jordan discuss the genre of queer poetry, writing representation into literature that is positive and healing, using real life experience, sharing as a relief, words as power, workshopping writing, and the treatment of self-acceptance and self-love in a queer context. Jordan is now a student at Bay Path University studying child psychology.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Jojo Rich: The prompt was, “How to Build a Closet.” Yeah, and I was so excited when I saw it because I immediately knew exactly what I wanted to write. I was like, "Is that what we're doing today? Can we get started on that please? Let's go!"
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices of the Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine, all of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in this series are featured in A New Land, an anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill, and courage. Some of them were born in Maine, others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures.
Jojo Rich graduated from Portland High School, and now she's a student at Bay Path University. In this episode, Jojo reads “How to Build a Closet,” a poem she wrote at The Telling Room's Queer Characters Camp. Then we talk about what characterizes the genre of queer poetry.
Jojo Rich: “How to Build a Closet,” by Jojo Rich.
First, you construct the baseboards out of bias.
They build up around you from the moment you’re born,
in all the little things people say more than the things they scream.
“That haircut makes him look gay.”
“You’re going to make your husband very happy someday.”
“Don’t look at her like that; people will think you’re a lipstick
lezzie.”
The villains in all your favorite Disney movies are queer-coded
—Scar, Ursula, Jafar, all of them—
and the only time you see queerness on TV, it’s a punch line or a tragedy.
You have your baseboards.
The doors are made of fear.
They sprout from the bias that has always
surrounded you and lock you inside.
Every time someone you love scoffs at the idea of queerness.
Every time you see old men on street corners or television
screaming, “Homosexuality is a sin!”
Every time a rumor starts that one of your classmates is gay
and you are expected to shun them, the doors get heavier.
You don’t even get to know yourself before you start to fear what you
could be.
You fill the closet with shimmery, soft knock-offs of silk and velvet, and
these are the lies.
“Yeah, he’s cute, I guess.”
“We’re just really good friends!”
“I just haven’t found a boy I like yet.”
Whether you tell them to yourself or the people around you,
they seem to make the closet gentler, padding the walls and giving you
comfort.
But the more you tell, the more the closet fills up
until they’re pressing in on all sides, and you can’t breathe, and you
realize they don’t feel as good as you thought they did.
They’re fake.
Acceptance is the handle.
You dropped it somewhere along the way in construction,
but you find it again eventually.
Your mother smiles, says,
“She sounds lovely.”
You can breathe again.
You use your courage to screw it back into the empty slot
in the doors of fear and swear the closet itself is fighting to keep you in.
That’s silly, of course.
It’s just a closet.
Finally, the handle fits,
the door swings open,
and you learn for the very first time that there is a whole world,
open and flooded with sunlight, right outside of the closet door.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you. And when did you write this poem?
Jojo Rich: The summer before my senior year of high school.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And how long had you been coming to The Telling Room?
Jojo Rich: I'd been coming to The Telling Room since middle school, and then I did two summers with the Queer Characters Camp in a row. It was largely about learning how to represent queer people in literature in a way that's positive and healing.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And did you write this... Was there a prompt?
Jojo Rich: The prompt was "How to Build a Closet," and I was so excited when I saw it because I immediately knew exactly what I wanted to write. I was like, "Is that what we're doing today? Can we get started on that please? Let's go!" And I'm really happy with how it came out.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Did you do a lot of drafts for the poem?
Jojo Rich: Too many, actually. I initially didn't say "knockoffs of silk and velvet." It was just "silk and velvet." I wanted it to be entirely clear that this was not a positive or healthy thing. Lying to cope isn't positive or healthy, and feeling like you have to lie isn't positive or healthy. I didn't want the luxurious feeling of just saying "silk and velvet," because I feel like that does carry positive connotations. So I wanted it to be undeniable that this was a negative experience. So I put in "knockoffs" to indicate that it wasn't as luxurious as it seemed.
My biggest revisions were, initially, I didn't have quotes anywhere but the first stanza. All of the quotes in the first stanza are all things I've just heard in like day-to-day life. And the "she sounds lovely" line, I actually based that on an interaction I had with one of my English teachers where I wrote a vignette for her class that was very obviously about a girl who had a crush on a girl, and even though I was pretty much out, I wasn't trying to hide it, I was a little nervous about how that would be received. And she pulled me aside after class, be like, "Oh, good job.” Whatever, very sweet conversation. And then she stopped me before I left and was like, "Oh, and by the way, she sounds lovely.” I actually wrote about that experience in The Telling Room where the prompt was, "A time you felt you were seen as yourself." It was such a simple sentence, but it carried so much weight and so much acceptance just in those words. So I was very to get a chance to include that because I wanted that sort of feeling there.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What a wonderful thing for your teacher to say.
Jojo Rich: I know. I was very moved, probably got more emotional than she was expecting, but it was... Oh God, it was just such a relief. It's such a weight off your chest to hear something like that, especially when you're so nervous.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So did other kids... Did they see closet the same way?
Jojo Rich: As you can probably tell, I viewed it as a little bit more of a negative, kind of restrictive thing. I felt like some of the other kids in the camp viewed it as almost a place of comfort where it's like, "Okay, here, you're safe. You can retreat here, if you need to," sort of thing.
One of the other people in the camp wrote about decorating the inside of a closet to make yourself feel more at home there, so it was really fun seeing the different interpretations. We had such different perceptions.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So with queer camp, they're already kids who know their sexuality?
Jojo Rich: From my understanding, the people who apply have come to a conclusion about themselves and want to be around other people like themand get that kind of support. This is something we've all kind of figured out about ourselves, and through this, we got to learn a lot of history about the LGBT movement and how we conceptualized what these different sexualities and orientations were.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And how we use language about it, right? How it's characterized.
Jojo Rich: Yeah. We talked a lot about reclaiming words like queer and dyke, and how they're becoming positive and being adopted back into the LGBT community, which was a really interesting discussion because you think these words have power, but they're just noises. So they're really what you make of them, which seems so obvious when you hear it said like that, but it's not something you ever really consider. You just hear it and you absorb it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Reading a poem like this gives it such power. The reader gets to go inside that same closet.
Jojo Rich: And that was a very important part of making it because I feel like, from an outside perspective, it's so easy to be dismissive of how challenging that can be. And like I said, I was very fortunate. I knew people in my life were open-minded. I knew they were going to be supportive, but there's so much doubt for so many people, and people are so quick to diminish how daunting that can be. So I thought it was very important to show people it's not always that simple.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Have you written other poems around this theme of being closeted?
Jojo Rich: Not specifically. I've written undeniably queer poems, but not specifically about the closet experience. I have explored it a little bit just in personal writings when I'm writing from the perspective of someone in the closet and trying to really get across that feeling.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And what would characterize a queer poem?
Jojo Rich: Well, I just meant in the most basic sense of I'm usually writing poems about girls who like girls. But I feel like poems that really emphasize self-acceptance and stuff could be characterized as queer poems because more and more that's becoming such a big part of the LGBT community is really pushing for self-acceptance and self-love and all that. So I think there are certain elements that you could be like, "Okay, I'm reading this in a queer context."
Stuart Kestenbaum: That seems like... The support systems now seem much greater, do you think?
Jojo Rich: Oh, definitely. I've never had a negative experience having someone find out that I was bi, which is a tragically uncommon experience. Almost everyone has at least one person who, even if they're not someone they were close to, someone who was turned away by that. But I think it's becoming more and more normalized, and it's very sweet because I'll get questions from family members who want to understand, which I think is also very major and something that was very uncommon. Whereas before, I feel like it was just an immediate doors are shut and like... No. But now I feel like more and more people are willing to try and understand and try to become more accommodating and more accepting. And it was very important to me to have the ending be stepping outside of the closet and not just conclude with the full construction, because I wanted to give that hope, too, that you always have the option and the ability. I know it can feel really restricting and you can feel like you're stuck, but you can always get out if you need to, which I felt is something a lot of people need to hear.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Where are you in school now?
Jojo Rich: I go to Bay Path University in Long Meadow.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And what's your major?
Jojo Rich: I'm majoring in child psychology. I want to be a family therapist, hopefully writing on the side, if everything goes according to plan.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Have you been in writing groups other than The Telling Room, like in college? Have you been in writing courses?
Jojo Rich: I've taken creative fiction at Bay Path, and then in high school, I took two creative writing classes. Other than that, not any clearly defined writing groups. I was in creative writing club in high school, but mostly it's just through The Telling Room is my main outlet.
Stuart Kestenbaum: The Telling Room seems to give young writers a real sense of how to put a piece together, how to revise, how to think about what you're doing, strategies. When you get together with other writers at college, do you find you have a more refined sense of…?
Jojo Rich: I do think, to a certain degree, I'm able to do it with a little bit more ease just because I've had more experience working with The Telling Room, and they've given me so much good advice. Hearing the advice they'd give me about revising, I'd be like, "I wouldn't even have considered that." So I learned a lot through observation in The Telling Room, which is also very important.
The Telling Room definitely helped hone my vocabulary, my language, how I want to present myself in my writing, and they helped me really find my voice in it. Everyone here has always been so supportive, and they're just so great. I could sing The Telling Room's praises for years. I love them.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So do you mostly write poetry?
Jojo Rich: I actually kind of struggle with poetry a little bit, usually. I'm such a perfectionist, specifically with poetry. I'm like, "Oh, it needs to be perfect." And it's never going to be, and I need to accept that. But usually I stick to more short stories and vignettes, and I was very lucky this past year where I really connected with my creative writing professor in university, and he is a part of a literary journal. I was fortunate enough to have one of my short stories for my capstone published. So I was very excited.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Great, congratulations.
Jojo Rich: Thank you. I'm very pumped. I go and look at it every now and then. I'm like, "Ooh! That's me in there." It's super exciting. But, yeah, poetry is not usually my forte.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So the stories that you're writing, give me a sense of what they're about.
Jojo Rich: There's a lot of variation, but the capstone is probably my best example. For that, I wanted to write about all the different little ways that love can be expressed because in media we put a lot emphasis on the grand romantic gesture, when really it's usually the little things that really show that you love someone. So I wrote about, I think I wrote five in total, and I wrote about five different couples and the little ways that they showed each other they love them.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What are you writing now?
Jojo Rich: I'm actually preparing for a trip that was supposed to happen this past summer is now happening next summer because of COVID. I'm going to be going to Dublin for a week to do a writing workshop. I'm very excited. So I've been working on the piece I want to workshop once I get there. They want to write a short story about a fisherman who takes in a little selkie girl who has lost her seal skin and helps her get it back so she can go back to the ocean. It's a little daunting because it's probably going to be my longest short story to date, but I’ve got the general plot points I wanted to hit down, and I know I want my last line to be something about how his fishing nets never went empty ever again.
More and more, I've wanted to write stuff that is positive, show what things could be without this prejudice. And maybe it's a little bit of escapism. Maybe it's a little bit of a coping mechanism, but I find that the more negative things are around me and the more turbulent, especially in this grand giant way that's so, so prevalent in day-to-day life. I want to produce more positive content because obviously it's so important to talk about the negative, and it's so important to have these discussions, but I think it's equally important to have a means of comfort sort of thing when everything is so terrible and so much tragedy is happening every single day.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode is by Jordan Kramer. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. Thanks for listening.