In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Alice Paige

What inspired your poem, “An Untitled Hunt?” Where did you draw the title from?

This poem is centered around the miracle of survival and the expectation of violence and death to be visited upon the creature deemed huntable. The “untitled” aspect of this poem looks to elicit the unimportance of the hunt to the hunter, the everyday nature of death in his world, and the life viewed as forfeit by its lack of luck. 

As a transgender woman, I often write about the miracle of survival. In a country continually searching for new ways to invisibilize and illegalize those of us in the margins—only more so in the last year—I always wish to mythologize our survival. To say yes, despite all the world will do to us, we keep going. The hunters will always come, but we are so much more than the hunt. 

The doe at the end of the poem runs like an open wound. She survives to the magic of tomorrow, disappearing in the moment of the hunter’s mistake. His steps faltering and uncomfortable in her world. 

I have always survived through a well-honed instinct for flight. When I was a homeless queer youth, this need to step out of harm’s way at the arrow’s flight was necessary. To let it bite the flank but not kill. Never kill. There were mornings drenched in alcohol where my survival was nothing but a miracle. And I’ve spent my entire life around queers performing this magic trick over and over again. I’ve also borne witness to what happens when this trick fails.

There are so many colors—of the doe, the forest, the hunter—that this piece incorporates. What was the process of weaving color through this piece like for you?

Color seeps into all my writing, whether fiction, poetry, or CNF. I tend to write from one image to the next hoping to leave a reader with the impression of life in their palm. I want more than the still image, I want the sights and smells to jump from the page and press beneath the reader’s fingertips with a heightened urgency. I want the doe’s fur to be felt. 

Color informs so much of our experience of the world, yet is always able to surprise us when drawn forth in unexpected arrangements. Yellow can bring us to the onset of flesh decay or the brilliance of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. 

Color, when I’m writing, is a conversation with the world. An invitation to be surprised by the image as I pull it to the page. When I can surprise myself in the presentation of an image, I know I’m writing in the correct direction. 

I had the pleasure of hearing you read this piece at last year’s Water~Stone Review reading. What’s your preparation strategy for readings?

I started my writing career as a slam poet so I’ve spent far too much time thinking about how a piece is delivered aloud. I always begin by reading any given poem to myself repeatedly in search of the problem points. Where does one word have the potential to overlap another or become jumbled in delivery? What are the difficult turns in terms of emotion? By the time I perform a piece, I want to know it from the first syllable to the last. I’ll often mark spots on the page to look out for when reading to help myself over the hump of pronunciation or breath control. 

What I don’t plan is the emotion of the piece. I always want to discover the emotional core of a performance as it is happening as the tone can change depending on the night, the audience, or the venue. I want to preserve the capacity for improvisation and surprise during a reading. If a line hits me especially hard as I am performing it, that can propel authentic creative choices in the performance of the following lines. I always view a reading as a conversation between author, audience, and context. The joy of the stage is how dynamic it can be as a home for our voices when rooms are left wide open for creativity to arrive. 

What books and authors do you love?

Achille Mbembe coined the term Necropolitics to describe the allowable death we witness in society. It is a term that puts the agency back on the enforcers of various systems of oppression. To pull away the abstractions they hide behind. In this moment in history where the shadow of imperialism only grows, I am reading as many authors as possible who face down these enforcers and do not flinch. I wish to meet the world as one of those authors. 

I recently finished Omar El Akkhad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a book that faces the genocide in Gaza with pointed anger and condemnation. It was a book I sorely needed as it centered me in my humanity, empathy, and desire to affect change. I have a love for Akkhad’s willingness to wade into the world as a lifeline, a voice for change, and a witness. 

What are you working on now?

I am finishing up edits on what will hopefully be my first book. It is a bit of supernatural historical fiction titled The Ghost Cabaret, and is an exploration of Germany in 1932. This is a time period when the city’s swinging transgender cabarets were being shut down by police order and queers were forced to flee, find new homes, or assimilate. I’m a little obsessed with history’s short memory and the personal apocalypses we are so often forced to live through by design. 

So many queer voices were the doe in this time period, hooves beating toward escape. So many queer voices were caught up in the hunt. 

Alice Paige is a transgender author, educator, and activist from Chicago, Illinois. She has her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and her BS in biology from Iowa State University and is a LOFT Mentor Series Fellow. She writes about the healing power of community, the dangers of assimilation, and the ghosts of what we once were. Her work can be found in American Precariat, Take a Stand, Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Luna Station Quarterly, The Rumpus, and plenty of other strange places.