An Interview with Dorsía Smith Silva

By Keinana Shah

What does it truly mean to drown? According to Dorsía Smith Silva, it means more than you would think. Her upcoming debut poetry collection, In Inheritance of Drowning, explores the devastating effects of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day. The book is set to be published by this fall, November 2024. Yet I had the privilege of a sneak preview as well as a chance to talk about Dorsía’s writing process and ideas.

KS: What inspired you to write this anthology of poems?

DSS: I wrote In Inheritance of Drowning because I wanted readers to have a deeper understanding of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is too often depicted by glossy photographs of beaches and sunshine. Readers are probably unaware of the extent of the damage Hurricane María caused in Puerto Rico and that Puerto Rico suffered the longest blackout in U.S. history. It took about eleven months for all of Puerto Rico to have electricity. Over two thousand people died, and several flattened buildings and homes have never been repaired. The response for aid to Puerto Rico was and still is lackluster, so you can imagine the widespread devastation and the emotional, physical, and mental toll on us. The roots of Puerto Rico being under the thumb of colonialism with the U.S. are crushing. Some of the poems in In Inheritance of Drowning also explore the experiences of those that had to leave Puerto Rico after Hurricane María because they became homeless and jobless.

I also wanted to examine oppression in the United States, which was bubbling to the surface with police brutality, Black Lives Matter, immigrants’ rights, toppling of racist monuments, and COVID-19 while I was writing the book. In Inheritance of Drowning enters this conversation of how these moments can drown/undrown disenfranchised communities.

I think the poems In Inheritance of Drowning are essential. We need more BIPOC stories, and we need to tell our own stories that are intersectional and move across disciplines. So, In Inheritance of Drowning, is a story that I want to tell, and I hope readers enjoy it.

KS: Many of the poems are written in a first person narrative, such as “Widow” and “Ghost Talker Poem”. Are any of the poems based on your real life experiences?

DSS: A few of the poems are based on my life. For instance, “Ghost Talker Poem,” is based on a time when I wondered why there was a dearth of media coverage on missing Black and Brown girls. It was very hard for me to understand as a young child why the media would not cover our disappearances, especially when there were so many stories about white women and girls that had disappeared. I wondered, “Weren’t our stories newsworthy too? Why were our cases going untold? Where was our respect and justice?”

“How I Lost My Name” is also based on a personal experience when a teacher didn’t want to call on me because this person thought my first name was “too difficult” to pronounce. I was nervous about being stereotyped as the “difficult black girl” in class and the repercussions of telling the teacher something without being called on, so I politely waited to be called. However, I kept waiting for my turn to speak and I was kept waiting. Some readers may be able to relate to this experience and recognize the tactics to dismantle our identities, keep us silent, and try to make us feel invisible.

KS: In “Widows”, your use of enjambment is significant. What were you trying to convey through this structure? How does it enrich your poem?

DSS: In “Widows,” I wanted the poem to have a certain flow that would encourage readers to continue reading until they reached the end of the poem. I hope the effect creates more tension in the poem and builds a certain momentum and fluidity. The poem has some sprinkles of narrative qualities and colloquial language too, where I can envision the speaker contemplating disaster capitalism, social injustice, and violent hurricanes with others. Overall, I think enjambment emphasizes the important details of the poem and engages the reader in the beauty of the transitions, especially as the poem moves from the color black to FEMA’s irresponsibility, complex physical and emotional damage from Hurricane María, and drowning.

KS: Your book is named after “The Inheritance of Drowning”, why did you decide to name it after that specific poem?

DSS: I knew right away that the title of my debut poetry book would be In Inheritance of Drowning. I love the title because it encapsulates the confrontation of the survival of BIPOC communities and how we are constantly inheriting a world that unfortunately is grim—a world that keeps trying to drown our identities and blame us in the process. The title poem “In Inheritance of Drowning” was originally published in this journal in 2021, and I was beyond thrilled when it was accepted by Cream City Review. The poem delves more into the historical moments of how Black and Brown bodies have been drowned, such as the Taíno and African slaves, and links to our contemporary drowning when the poem asks at the end, “How many ways can we drown?” It is asking, “How many ways do the systems of oppression (try to) kill us?”

KS: There is a recurring theme of drowning throughout the anthology. It serves as the overall focal point. What does the concept of drowning mean to you? In your eyes, is it a physical or physiological burden?

DSS: Someone told me that drowning functions as an extended metaphor throughout the book. I really like this explanation of how drowning links throughout the book. Overall, drowning is a physical and physiological burden. It is what keeps us shrouded in doubt. It weighs us down, so that we never reach our potential. It keeps us from achieving our dreams. It overwhelms us. It robs us of our identities. It rips apart communities and families. It keeps us tied to complex trauma and oppression. You can think of the literal history of how people drowned during The Middle Passage, and how others drowned as victims of police brutality in In Inheritance of Drowning. There is also how certain places like Puerto Rico are drowning in debt because colonial oppressors have exploited them and stripped them of making decisions that would give them autonomy.

KS: A lot of the poems deal with heavy topics such as death, oppression, and trauma (as seen in poems like “Ghost Talker Poem” and ““The Inheritance of Drowning”). I am curious to know what your headspace was like when writing this. What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book and why?

DSS: I have been told that I am very serious as a writer and poet. In keeping with what I think is an accurate description of myself, I wrote in the mindset of creating protest poetry. Therefore, In Inheritance of Drowning is not light verse. I would not be true to myself, if I trivialized the impact of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. Many people died, and others lost their homes and businesses. Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the U.S. was also strongly enforced, as Puerto Ricans got tired of waiting for aid and started removing debris and trees on their own; people started looking after their own neighborhoods because FEMA’s response vacillated between slow and non-existent. Puerto Rico is still recovering in many ways, and Hurricane María was almost seven years ago. There is also no way for me to address the current state of oppression in the United States without a solemn mindset. The current state of events makes me apprehensive for historically marginalized people. I wonder what the landscape will look like as there have been more barriers—more drowning—for BIPOC communities.

KS: There are many themes of generational trauma and family within your work. Are these themes important to you? How have they shaped your writing?

DSS: Yes, generational trauma and family are very significant themes to me and influence my writing. For example, I have edited and co-edited several texts on mothering and motherhood, including Latina/Chicana Mothering (Demeter Press), and a part of my research on Maternal Studies has been exploring how the trauma that the birth mother carries—this may be done consciously or unconsciously—can impact the child. I write about this cycle of trauma in In Inheritance of Drowning as inherited trauma that is largely due to the sinister legacies of discrimination and oppression. I think many of the poems reflect the harm of generational trauma and how “we wake up drowning.” Of course, there are ways to have something more than a promise of coping and achieve actual healing. I am exploring how these tensions become resolved in some new poems.

KS: What was the process of writing this book?

DSS: Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. We lost electricity a few hours after María struck, and we lost water a few days later. I started keeping a journal as a way to record my feelings and unravel what had happened. I had many questions that had no answers— When would the electricity be restored? When would the birds return? How were others coping? Eventually, I had filled several notebooks, and I revised these initial thoughts/manifestations of the mind into poems.

Then, there were movements like Black Lives Matter, several high-profile cases of police brutality, and the pandemic. I started writing poems that grappled with these topics, and asked more questions, such as where is justice for those that have been historically marginalized and when will society be ready for a social transformation.

When deciding the structure for the book, I knew that I had wanted the poems about Hurricane María to frame the book, and to be the first and third sections. The other poems that focused on the different forms of oppression in the United States would then compromise the second section of the book.

KS: Your poems present a history of colonization, racism, and feminicide, leading to a legacy of “drowning”. You seem to raise questions about generational trauma —and by extension, the inheritance of pain. With all that being said, what would you like readers to take away from this book?

DSS: My hope is that readers are prepared to have a candid conversation about the need for social transformation. By the end of In Inheritance of Drowning, it would be wonderful for readers to demand an end to what drowns us and call for what enriches and sustains BIPOC communities and Puerto Rico.

Dorsía Smith Silva’s debut poetry collection, In Inheritance of Drowning, with a foreword by Vincent Toro, will be published this fall (November 2024) by CavanKerry Press. It is now available for pre-ordering at  https://www.cavankerrypress.org/product/in-inheritance-of-drowning/.

BIOs

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Obsidian Fellow, poetry editor of The Hopper, and professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published in the Denver Quarterly, Waxwing, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Good Girl, editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering, and the co editor of seven books. She has a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature and Language, and her primary interests are ecopoetry, social and racial justice, mothering and motherhood, and migration. She has also received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and is a member of the Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort of Poets & Writers in 2024.

Keinana Shah is an UWM graduate of English- Literature and Cultural Theory and Business Administration. In pursuit of exploring her various passions, Keinana is learning skills through many types of creative mediums, with a focus on her dream of pursuing art and history.

Book Review: The Band by Christine Ma-Kellams

By: Alanda Jackson

Former Cream City Review contributor Christine Ma-Kellams’ latest novel, The Band, is a satirical page-turner that explores K-Pop, cancel culture, and fandoms.

In this novel, we meet Duri, one of five members of The Band, everyone’s latest K-pop obsession and rising boy band. After Duri releases his latest solo single, he finds himself at the head of a controversy that leaves him being canceled by the overzealous fans. On the run with nowhere to go, he meets a psychologist, a married Chinese American woman with two children at a Los Angeles H-Mart. Against her better judgment, the nameless psychologist decides to take Duri into her home and offer him shelter from the brewing storm.

Safe from the public eye, Duri begins his exile and contemplates his relationship with The Band and what it means for him. With the help of the psychologist, Duri dives deeper into his mind and works through the deteriorating state of his mental health that threatens to overcome him. Through his journey of self-help, Duri and the psychologist find themselves getting closer, as a bond begins to grow just as one is threatened to break apart.

Meanwhile, the past comes back to haunt the music producer of The Band. In the wake of spiraling events, he recalls what happened to the original girl group, predecessor of The Band, and the tragic fate that befell them. As long-buried memories resurface, a ghost from the past threatens The Band and the music industry forever.

In The Band, Ma-Kellams examines the world of superstardom and the pressures of the entire world watching your rise to fame. From obsessive fans to cancel culture, she takes these elements and uses them to explore mental health and the effects it has on the minds of her characters. I found myself becoming entranced with the mental state of her characters, and in turn, mental health itself. I wanted to know more about what was going on in their minds and how their environments shaped them into the kinds of people that they are.

Like most mental health struggles, it takes a lot of courage and strength to acknowledge that something is wrong, let alone ask for help. The relationship between Duri and the psychologist emulates this very well, so much so, that we get to learn things about Duri that he otherwise would not have admitted himself. As for the character of the psychologist, Ma-Kellams utilizes her background in cultural psychology and gives agency to one of her most important characters. It’s through the viewpoint of the psychologist that we get to see Duri’s transformation firsthand and understand just how complex he is as a character.

The world that Ma-Kellams has created in The Band is filled with complexities that surround mental health and the inner struggles that accompany it. It may feel like a never-ending battle that you have to fight alone. In the words of the psychologist from Ma-Kellams novel:

“Spend enough time around people with classified mood disorders and you realize that what the suicidal person really wants is not to die per se—it takes effort to die these days, at least in the first world, where we generally lack lions and tigers and bears and random aerial drone attacks and cartel assassinations and civil wars—but rather, just to cease to be for however long or short of a period of time it takes for them to get some relief from the compulsively addictive thinking going on inside their own head” (Ma-Kellams 86).

If there is anything to take away from this story, it’s that mental health looks different for everyone, and you may never know what someone struggles with. It’s important to be there for people when they are at their lowest because you may just be the lifeline that they need. A credit to Ma-Kellams, who employs humor to talk about mental health in a sensitive but effective way, raising awareness towards a lived experience, and making her characters all the more attuned with reality.

Bios:

Christine Ma-Kellams
When she isn’t writing short stories or novels, Christine Ma-Kellams is a social-cultural psychologist and college professor at San Jose State University. Her other writings can be found in HuffPost, Salon, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Since its publication, The Band has appeared in and been recommended by the New York Times, People Magazine, and Public Radio.

Christine Ma-Kellams’ The Band is out now and available for purchase here.

Alanda Jackson
Alanda Jackson is an undergraduate student at UW-Milwaukee majoring in English with a focus on rhetoric and professional writing. Wanting to hone her craft, Alanda is learning how to write across all forms of literary mediums in the hopes of pursing her dream of becoming a writer.

Mourning for What the Western Wilderness has Become: A Review of Red Shuttleworth’s Straight Ahead

Red Shuttleworth

By Jacob Collins

Boxer and poet Red Shuttleworth’s poetry collection, Straight Ahead, transports its readers to the dusty, forgotten landscape of the western wilderness. Shuttleworth captures this landscape on page in vivid detail and colorful words. This is a rocky land full of coyotes, loss, and “sunflower-tinged dying clouds,” where “the rosy curtain of dusk falls on sagebrush, / silent as something buried-by-hand decades ago” and “the sun gouges an irrigated cropland horizon.” When you read Straight Ahead, it is as though you are out west, wilderness all around you and vibrant sky above. You can feel the oppressive sun beating down on you, hear the coyotes howling in the distance, smell the smoke and whiskey.

But Shuttleworth does more than simply describe the landscape in captivating five-line poems. He instills in this collection a sense of mourning for what the western wilderness has become. As urban areas have expanded, the wilderness has been torn apart, broken down until “you can shake / funeral ashes from the pockets of bankers, / realtors, developers: crazy drooling at ranch houses.” Along with this loss of the wilderness comes the loss of youth an innocence, which “gets left behind like coils of rusty barbed wire / on aged-loose, wobbly corral posts.” Shuttleworth doesn’t just describe this mournfulness to his readers, however. He actively puts his readers into the shoes of one who has lost much in their life, telling them “You’re sober these days, clumsy though, / a sun-scorched, one dog-short, thirsty / old man, blood in your glacier-water eyes.” With only a few lines, Shuttleworth manages to convey a whole life of hardship and loss that any reader will feel deep in their bones.

Shuttleworth masterfully evokes images of a beautiful, dying landscape and fills it with a harrowing mournfulness. Even readers who have never had the chance to lay eyes upon the old western wilderness will feel as though they are there. Straight Ahead leaves readers longing for the wilderness, mourning for its loss even if they’ve never properly known it. Through many small glances into this landscape, Shuttleworth paints a grand picture of a land all but forgotten to time.

You can find Straight Ahead and many more poetry collections here.

 

Friday Flashback: Ted Kooser – Fireflies

In the lead-up to our 50th Anniversary next year, Cream City Review is revisiting work in our Archives. Below is one from Ted Kooser, Pulitizer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and one of the great living writers of contemporary poetry. This poem would go on to appear in his excellent collection Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Ted’s website can be found here.

Fireflies

The cricket’s pocket knife is bent
from prying up the lid of a can
of new moons. It skips on the grindstone,
chattering, showering sparks
that float away over the darkened yard.

This is the Fourth of July
for the weary ants, who have no union,
who come home black with coal dust.
Deep in the grass you can hear them
unfolding their canvas chairs.

There is a pier that arches out
into the evening, its pilings of shadow,
its planking of breeze, and on it
a woman stands snapping the shade
of a lantern, signaling someone.

– from Cream City Review 16.1 (Spring 1992).

In Conversation with Coby-Dillon English

By Jacob Collins

Have you ever wondered what your relationship with someone would be like if you had met them at a different time in your life? Coby-Dillon English explores this idea in their short story, “First Date, Last Night”, which appears in the latest issue of CCR. I had the chance to talk to them about their story’s themes and their writing process.

JC: What was the inspiration behind this story?

CDE: I can’t really pinpoint my inspiration for this piece. Some stories take me a long time, and this was one I wrote over many years. I wrote the initial scene with Leslie’s name over four years ago and then set it aside. Then the form of the continuous first date came to me much later. I am working on a collection of insomnia stories, and for this story, I was thinking about the experience of playing a scene or situation over and over again in your head when you can’t sleep, questioning if you made the right choices, what could have gone differently, etc. That’s where I started with the story, that scene of a first date and that idea of spiraling around the same night, and the rest slowly formed around those two elements.

JC: This story is told in fragments, with sudden jumps into the past and future of Naomi and Leslie’s relationship. What made you choose this style of presenting the story over, say, a more linear one?

CDE: Short answer is because I find that more interesting! Longer answer is that, for me, the timeline in this story is a contradictory one. A lot of the scenes in the present or future are moments I view as possibilities, not exactly hard truths. Certain facets of the first date change, which then change those outcomes. Many of the dates fail, and thus have no future as it pertains to the story. All those possible changes and possible futures become all knotted together and I wanted the story to mirror that feeling.

JC: So much of this story takes place on Thursdays, especially Thursdays in September. What, to you, is the significance of this?

CDE: For the most part, this had a lot to do with setting. I wanted a moment in time to be our marker in this story, either as a sign that we are returning to something or to mark how far we have come. And the setting of Chicago was always clear to me. I was born in Chicago and have lived there in the past, and it is a city and a people that I love deeply. When I think about Chicago, I think of Chicago in the late summer, when it is bright, warm, and social. When I was thinking of a moment in time and space that I wanted to continuously write around, it was Chicago and late summer, and so that certainly influenced that choice.

JC: Names play an important role in this story, between Leslie not liking his name and Robin and Riley having unisex names despite Leslie’s desire to give them masculine names. It’s an interesting theme – what does it tell us about Leslie?

CDE: This is a story about the birth of a family, the various expectations of family making, and for me, gender is a big part of that. I was raised with certain ideas surrounding masculinity, as all people are in some way, and the names in this story were something I could play around with that spoke to those gender expectations. Leslie is a character who, at best, feels murky about who he is, as a man and as a person, and his name was a great way to expose that feeling. His name is a kind of live wire of masculinity that he is constantly being forced to reckon with. When thinking about the sons’ names, I was thinking about how people put a lot of expectations for themselves on their children. Giving his sons unisex names was a way to acknowledge that having sons was not going to save Leslie from the work of figuring out his own character.

JC: There are two scenes in the story in which Naomi seems to give up parts of herself to Leslie, specifically on the train when “Naomi felt two rib bones break off inside, making room for a man like Leslie” and when the two of them are talking about wanting kids and “Naomi plucked two molars from her mouth and offered them up to Leslie in the dim light.” What does this say about the nature of relationships?

CDE: I’m not sure what this says about the nature of all relationships, but for this one in particular, it’s a bit of a willing sacrifice. If Leslie doesn’t know who he is, Naomi doesn’t know what she wants, and she’s willing to give up pieces of herself in order to figure it out. Naomi has the confidence in herself to not lose her entire personhood in a relationship, but she can offer up a piece here and there.

JC: Leslie and Naomi go back and forth a lot in their relationship, constantly separating and coming back together again, but ultimately they stay together in the end. When you started writing this story, did you know what their fates would be?

CDE: Eventually, I did. For a while, the story was just a handful of scenes; I didn’t know what any of it would be. But once I realized the form it wanted to take, the ending was very clear to me. In order to explore the possibilities of who Leslie and Naomi could be to one another, I had to know where they would end up. The harder work was figuring out how we got there.

JC: You’re currently completing an MFA at the University of Virginia. What has that experience been like?

CDE: The worst part is that it is coming to an end soon! I am very grateful to have had the privilege to study literature and writing for the past few years and to do so alongside some incredible writers and scholars. I have deep, deep admiration for my cohort, who are all brilliant, marvelous, and talented people. Literature and people are the most important things in the world to me, and I’ve been lucky enough to spend my time with some spectacular instances of both.

Bios

Coby-Dillon English (they/them) is a writer from the Great Lakes. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, they are currently an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Virginia. Their writing can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Moon City Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and others.

Jacob Collins is an undergraduate student majoring in English on the Creative Writing track. He says that the best thing about interning at CCR has been reading the wide variety of stories that people from all walks of life submit for publication. Outside of school, he likes reading, writing, and playing D&D with his friends.