We’re thrilled to introduce the 2018 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipients with individual features on our blog! Out-of-state judges spent several months evaluating the 400+ applications we received, and selected eighteen writers and two publishers to receive grants of $3,500 each. The 2019 OLF applications will be posted at the end of April, and the deadline to apply will be Monday, July 9, 2018.
2018 Oregon Literary Fellowship Recipient
Milo Muise
Category
Poetry
Bio
Milo R. Muise is a Portland-based writer who grew up in New England. They graduated from Hampshire College where they concentrated in creative writing, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Their poems have appeared in FreezeRay, Noble/Gas Qtrly, Prelude, Tinderbox, and elsewhere.
Q&A with Literary Arts
What are your sources of inspiration?
I’m inspired by questions—the act of inquiry, introspection, investigation. Most of my projects start from some gap in (self-) knowledge that my life is asking me to engage with, and I write my way into (and hopefully through) that gap. As a result, I spend a lot of time with the work of critical theorists and other writers who are wrestling with their own questions (thinking here of Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Olivia Laing, Hilton Als…).
I’m also invested in the properties of language itself (what are its possibilities and limits? How does language act on or shape the body? Where does meaning reside?) and my writing plays with and works through those questions.
How would you describe your creative process?
I usually work on large projects/sequences rather than one-off poems or pieces. As I said above, I’ll start with a question. The question is usually too big or overwhelming to address directly, so I spend a while circling it, trying not to look at it head-on, while I give myself the freedom to write whatever I feel compelled to write. I usually end up finding through-lines back to the original question, and they tend to feel more surprising and genuine than if I had been writing more consciously. I use those surprises to guide me forward.
I use organization as a procrastination strategy, but it can also be useful! I’ll make huge amounts of notes, listing out everything I want to say on each theme/topic/whatever in the manuscript. I don’t write from that, but it’s helpful for me to feel like I’ve said everything somewhere so that I can be free to omit whatever needs to be omitted in the manuscript itself. Once I’ve amassed a decent amount of writing, I’ll start looking at different sequences, tracking the arcs of various themes, where they’re intersecting, how they’re moving, how the transitions are reading, what associative strategies are moving one thing to the next, etc.
What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship?
The freedom and possibility. How it changes the question from “What can I afford to give to this project?” to “What does this project want?” I’m excited for how that kind of expansiveness will shape and influence my work. Plus, how it urges me to (continue to) take my work seriously.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been working on a couple of different projects. I’m completing a book-length long poem called “garden party” which tracks (among other themes) gender, how self-knowledge we might not be aware of can act through us, and the mythologies/meanings I constructed around self-harm in my adolescence.
The other is a very early stages (!) long form essay currently centering around my suspicion of the virtues of self-reliance based on its limiting and ruling presence in my own life. Right now I’m looking in a lot of directions: inward, to my/my family’s past, to the social/US-ian culture, how this plays out across identity…
What advice do you have for future applicants?
If you feel called to submit, then submit! If nothing else, the tasks that the application process requires (inventorying and describing your work) can be clarifying and illuminating in their own right.
Judge’s comments:
At once vulnerable and wise, Milo R. Muise’s beautiful poems explore rituals of feeling and embodiment, queerness and awakenings: “i stood/under the water/until the burn/moved past my skin/and into my blood/my pulse/another being/ready to rise/out of me/like a hot knife/through butter”. The poems offer the possibility of a tenderness and love that can be invoked even in rituals of self-harm and in a family setting where religion becomes a form of pathologized shame and anxiety. The speaker spent their adolescence the way most of us do—“searching for a way/to talk without risk/of misunderstanding”, of “letting you in/to my true self.” A heraldic new voice, these are poems of a hard-won resilience. -Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poetry judge
excerpts from “garden party” (a previous version of after in the steam appeared in Prelude)
after in the steam
my body a white
blur still damp grass
in the morning
before the sun i drag
the blade light
over my shoulder
feeling the marks
i haven’t made
yet a moment of ritual
and then i begin
///
the acronym
for the eating disorder
program spells out
n e e d
the sign outside
the door locked
with a buzzer
on the sixth floor
of the hospital
that acts like a church
statues and busts
of saints tucked
into archways
in the walls as i walk
to the elevator
not allowed
to take the stairs
until i have been re fed
and my body slides back
into some common rhythm
i am not convinced exists
in the main room
everything is purple
couches and rugs and walls
painted with diagrams
delineating emotion
and reminding us how
shame is useless
which i find
offensive since
it is the one piece
of my emotional landscape
i can identify
and like naming
a wild animal
i’ve grown attached
outside the glass winter
stretches patient
on the sides of the road
inside hair comes out
in my hands loose
strands a golden river
at my feet i have
been eating for two weeks
but i haven’t stopped
dying yet curl
my head to my chest
curve a seed
from my dense body
under snow dead
grass topsoil ice
into wet dirt i resist
the cliché but
i begin to grow
and keep going
back to the hospital
for a month
and then three
everyone but me
taking up knitting
during group therapy
misshapen scarves
wrapped around
the necks i don’t want
to describe to you
i don’t want to believe
in the proportions
of sickness
as if internal suffering
exists in direct correlation
to physical symptoms
i don’t want to talk
about bodies
why am i lying
still get that
bit of glow
when i lean closer
to my lowest number
i got rid
of the old photos
years ago
so i now
have the freedom
to reimagine them
with whatever body
fits my narrative
was i really
that bad
i circle
the past like a hole
aching to lower
myself back down
seduced by the blunt
metaphor of starvation
its simple process
of elimination
doesn’t it feel good
to say no is how
i spin it when i’m
feeling corrupt
no need for blood
or body or mind
no reasons no
long theoretical exercises
on healing and
its subsequent rituals
i could go on forever
about cutting
which is why
it was a form of staying
alive and starving
was a form of death
something my father
understood when i refused
breakfast crossing a line
that had been untouched
yelling he could deal
with the razors but this
he shook the empty
plate would kill me
and i thought
yes and even then
pitied him
and his attempts
at forcing me
into life when
he had no idea
why i was trying
to leave
to be fair neither
did i
excerpt from current work
on walls: i construct a room to experience my pain. i step into the bathroom and close the door and a wall is built inside myself. it goes up as if it was already built, waiting. i wear long sleeves for three years. that feels like a wall. so does my silence, thick in the air, like a sphere around me. what does the wall keep out? what does the room keep in? who does it protect—me, or my pain? where is the line between us?