"I hope for readers to experience solidarity," author and poet, Vanessa Couto Johnson

It is always a pleasure to not only work with each and every one of our authors but to be able to sit down and pick their brains about all things writing... nothing tops that.

This interview with poet and author, Vanessa Couto Johnson about her new poetry collection, reMote control, is nothing shy of inspiring. So, sit back and relax as we dive into Vanessa's world of writing!

Nymeria Publishing: What was/were the main inspiration(s) behind this collection?

Vanessa Couto Johnson:

I wrote the collection from March 2020 to end of 2021, with a couple stragglers up to May 2022. The pandemic did factor in to some early poems, but more particularly, I felt interested in claiming agency over what contexts one enters and in going at one's own pace, even if it means “I complete the jerky / advent calendar twenty / days early.” This period also allowed me to investigate terms that can describe my gender experience. My Brazilian grandfather passed (from natural causes of old age; he was 90) and some poems consider this as well.

I wished for reactionary viewpoints (views that wish to return to the status quo ante, how things were in their idealized and unexamined vision of “before”) to be stopped/not continue to spread, as I wished to “dis-hone the nest / where the earworm fished” and “algorithm moral / up // you linked them / please un-”; alas, today, we are experiencing the results of their momentum and billionaire support of these regressions. 

I wished to acknowledge unfortunate trends, like “probabilistically / I won’t make it / to the arrival / of some future I hope / humanity sensible enough to rest in / with enough climate to huddle,” while also still being hopeful that we at present can “nay unto resilience.”

NP: What is your favorite section/poem(s) from the collection?

VCJ:

Here are a few spots I wish to highlight:

Poem “fix[ations/tures]” (page 10) with its “we can only / hope mean / isn’t average.”

Poem “happen” (page 15) with its “everyone reasons a happen, and don’t read that wrong.” (I don’t believe in “everything happens for a reason”; I think people find reasons to move forward with what they are given; that’s the power of human resilience.)

Poem “Friday the November 13th 2020” (page 17) with its post-election “waiting for the pee oneself resident…to leave camp.”

Title “FANBOY // grammarcare” that plays with the mnemonic for remembering the coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so [in this case leaving out “so”]) that then goes on in the poem (page 31) in which “each bloodslipped brainheart feels its net / result.”

Poem “portrait of my nonbinary self as Number 6 in The Prisoner (1967)” (page 62-63): 6 is of course a nonbinary number, and the speaker here gets to say “my life is / my won //” punning on the binary 1 to become an unrestricted affirmation of the self! The Prisoner is quite a surreal television show, and I wanted to use its themes to apply to the nonbinary gender experience of “I resigned from my own assignment // my own reasons”: the main character in the show is an agent who decides to quit and refuses to feel he needs to answer to the system for why that is; we are entitled to our own reasons to “resign” from what’s assigned at birth, societally constructed, etc.

Poem “availability heuristic, or against O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn!, ou proteja-se com queijo” (page 68) is a poem in which I have some cross-language punning.

Poem “tajaçu {approaching the cottagecore}” (page 73) with “there are three houses in you /// sticks and stones and bones”; “tajaçu” is a Brazilian Portuguese word for peccary and from the Tupi word for pig. I wanted to play with the Three Little Pigs home builds and the saying that seeks to not be hurt.

NP: What would you like the readers to take away from this collection?

VCJ:

I hope for readers to experience solidarity with being tired of regressive, circular thinking that is dismantling our society into further making equity, scientific research, education, safety, health (and more) challenging.

I wish for readers who are seeking to make it through these times that challenge our rights to “oil [their] own essential / to not retch at it all” and have “a spine through this spell” to hold our ground.

For other poets, I hope the poems show how techniques of slashes, asterisks, brackets, and other punctuation experiments can work for a poem. The algebra of titles like “f(_ace _ear)” invite the reader’s interaction to ‘distribute the f’ to face fear. 

I do want for how I use asterisks to be taken as allowing possibilities more than necessarily censoring. In “f(_ace _ear)” I have “f*c*”: I don’t mean this to censor a “u” and “k” as much as I mean for it to allow for those letters as well as “a” and “e”.

NP: How did you come up with the title?

VCJ:

Writing the poem “mote” (page 4) did lead me to the title. At the time that I wrote this poem in March 2020, the word “remote” was being used to describe the shift from in-person to online. The choice to use the word “remote” stuck out to me because it has other meanings as well: think of situations in which someone might say “hand me the remote” or “this is a remote location” that don’t have to do with internet use. 

Up to this point in my life, “remote” would most commonly be in reference to a remote control. As I experimented with using asterisks in many poems in this book, I decided I would stylize this as “reMote control” to emphasize the “mote” within “remote”: asterisks felt like motes that could allow variant meanings. 

I did consider simply “mote control,” but I decided the “reMote control” phrasing would keep the meanings of “remote” and that the capitalizing of the M does enough work to emphasize “mote.” I do worry if someone might see the title “reMote control” and assume these are poems about television watching; there are visual media references in several areas, so if the reader is looking for that, I hope they are satisfied. Overall, the book’s speaker seeks control over the motes/variables in their life.

NP: What were your joys and challenges of creating this collection in terms of publication?

VCJ:

It was a joy to me for individual poems to find homes in literary journals such as Superstition Review (a journal I long admired that has now discontinued), Club Plum Literary Journal (a venue for prose poetry, flash fiction, hybrid writing; they pair your piece with a song!), Star 82 Review (editor Alisa Golden kindly nominated one of my poems for the Pushcart Prize), and others noted in the Acknowledgments!

In terms of getting the overall book published, I did experience some obstacles: I had the positivity of an acceptance of the book in February 2022, but that publisher faced challenges and had to close by the end of the year before proceeding with our plans. I then had to decide if I would continue trying to find a home for the book: I worried if I should take this as a ‘sign’ to stop, but I decided no, that I owed it to both the subject matter and techniques of poetry to continue, and happily, Nymeria selected reMote control.

I am so grateful to Nymeria Publishing for giving me and others a platform to share our work, as well as to share my experience and thoughts in this interview!

NP: Lastly, what is something you would tell your younger writer self? 

VCJ:

When I was 18, I briefly had the idea that if I read more poetry that would make it hard for me to be creative, as though reading would make me think I would need to write works similar to what I read. I expressed this idea to a friend who, thankfully, pointed out that my writing is in my control and exposing myself to the works of others would not be detrimental.

I would tell this younger self that I am glad I changed my perspective and immediately read as much as I could. I am glad I would read poetry anthologies and literary journals, use those anthologies and literary journals to discover more poets, and then seek out the books by those poets. This is what I suggest to my poetry students to discover more and more poetry.

The more you read, the more you learn of techniques and subject matter and how other writers have handled these; this can then allow you, from this perspective, to find an approach that has uniqueness! 

More Reading = More Thinking = More Creativity Possible. Praise libraries!

We hope you are as inspired as we are to keep reading, writing, and sharing our stories with the world. And if you are, get your copy of reMote control by Vanessa Couto Johnson NOW!

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