The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.
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Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first translation project was poems and short stories by young Colombian writers for Historias de vida y muerte/ Stories of Life and Death. That writing came from workshops I taught in Cazucá, a slum south of Bogotá where many of the writers had been displaced by violence and rural poverty. The poems are raw, intimate, fearless, and some are by writers so young they had not even learned how to use a cliché yet.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
As an undergraduate, I took a Latin American literature course in which my head exploded. I read Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Gabriel García Márquez, María Luisa Bombal, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo...
Jon Hoel: The natural world is pretty frequent in your work over the years; in these recent poems, though, there are two terms specifically I wanted to ask you about, “decolonization” and “land back.” Both are ideas many people are likely familiar with, but some might not be. I was curious what these words mean to you and in the context of the Pacific Northwest more broadly?
Phil Elverum: Land back specifically… those are powerful words. The idea of giving all the land back to the people that it was stolen from. Okay, yes. But how? The specifics of that? How do we give North America back? As far as I know, no one is articulating a step-by-step plan, but the spirit of it, the gesture of it, is admirable.
Like my...
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece I remember writing was a short story I wrote for school when I was about seven or eight. It was about a little girl (definitely me) who went on tropical vacation with her family (definitely my family) and, while on a boat ride, fell into the ocean and was rescued by a friendly dolphin (probably Flipper). The reason I remember writing this story was because my dad, also a lover of words and to whom I’d given the handwritten assignment to read, typed it up, inserted some ocean-themed clipart, and printed it on heavy, cream-colored paper. I remember his pride in my work, and then, seeing the care and time he invested to allow me to share my words with others, pride in my own work began to develop...
Through the tent flap the child saw bomb-light
streak the sky, heard the drum of thunder
that was not thunder. She should have been
too young to grasp the proximity of death,
but this was Gaza. She asked her mother pensively,
What if I were a river? You could build a raft,
and I’d float you away from danger.
Her mother, not wanting to remind her that floating
is forbidden in Gaza, like other kinds of freedom,
that even the sea is walled off from the shore, replied,
Maybe you could be a river of song.
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