Reader Meet Author: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

What wins over the reader of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is her natural style and her far reaching content. In her latest collection, this poetry slam legend, touches on everything from office life to giraffes trained to rape humans. Always clever, Cristin clearly enjoys sharing her stories, her research, and her wildest dreams, and Every Thing is Everything reflects this perfectly. Her publisher is Write Bloody Press, and what is exciting is that they will be reissuing Cristin's previous four collections as well. 2010 promises to be a big year Cristin and I am glad to have her among my first interviews of the year.

Orange Alert (OA): From the title of your new collection a reader might think it tries to encompass a great deal and in a way it does. How would you describe the scope and themes of Everything is Everything?
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (CA): Wow, what a challenging question... I'm sure that there is likely a better response to this question out there, but I'm going to just say the first thing that comes into my head...

Which is that "Everything is Everything" is a very long road trip you once took with your family. There is a lot affection and exhaustion and annoying moments, a lot of things that are stupid-funny, and some things that are genuinely funny. Your mom reads to you weird things out of the newspapers, and you start thinking you really see the New Jersey devil in the woods off the highway. You start pining for the person you left behind. You get hungry and eat crap food. You got disproportionately happy when a song you like comes on the radio. You want to get out of the car, but when the car does do a pitstop, you kind of don't want to move. When the car starts up again, you realize how much missed the sound of the engine. You suddenly feel very grateful and made really aware of the present, like the right-right-now.

That's all kind of like "Everything is Everything" -- it's an odd, tender, spastic, claustrophobic and bizarre-fact-riddled book that is trying to appreciate the journey instead of obsessing about the destination.

Also, it should be noted that the book also contains a bizarre amount of poems about giraffes who have been trained to rape humans. But only because they really existed, and not because I'm a crazy sadist. Though be forewarned: you cannot *unlearn* about the existence of human-raping giraffes, so proceed with care.

OA: What has your experience been like with the folks at Write Bloody? >>
CA: I've been friends with Write Bloody founder, poet Derrick Brown, for a long time. In fact, he once crashed in my NYU dorm room after he featured at a poetry slam I was running out of CBGBs -- so it's been *that* long.

Derrick was / is part performance poetry vanguard, part rock star and part charismatic cult leader. When he talked about starting Write Bloody -- and creating gorgeous books for some of spoken word's hardest working touring poets, who were still forced to go the Kinko's / self-publishing route -- I thought it was a neat idea, but I was curious how it could be sustainable.

As you likely know, us ambitious artist types are always great at coming up with ideas! And then just *sorta* great at executing them... and then pretty darn shoddy when it comes to sustaining them for any given length of time.

But Derrick has kept Write Bloody strong for nearly a half of a decade now, and has constantly innovated and developed his approach as a publisher. I've been begging him to write an article about his various strategies, their successes and failures, but the guy is busy. I guess he'd rather do it than write about it.

When Derrick approached me about doing books with him, and agreed to take on not just my new collection of poetry, but also my four-book back catalogue as well (which were originally published on the fantastic, but micro-indie basement press, The Wordsmith Press, whose owner / publisher literally handmakes every book in his basement!), I was thrilled.

It's been neat working with the Write Bloody editors, and being a part of the Write Bloody family has been particularly sweet. Every event they produce -- from the smallest book release to absurd competitions held at city opera houses to poetry readings / pub crawls held on tour buses-- has been fun, inspiring and energizing.

And their beautiful-designed books help reaffirm how much jaw-dropping stage work can be translated and properly preserved on the page, provided the editors & publishers really believe in the poetry (and not just capitalizing on poetic trends).

I'm really proud to be a part of the Write Bloody fam, and am always eager to read their latest discovery.

OA: You are probably most well known for your connection to poetry slams. Is a piece specifically crafted for the slam or can any piece, if read properly, be a slam piece?
CA: One of the most delight & frustrating (or frustratingly delightful!) aspects of "slam poetry" is that a core belief within the poetry slam community is that "slam poetry" doesn't actually exist.

It's been a longstanding part of the slam community's credo that *any* poem can be "slammed" so therefore *any* poem can be a "slam poem."

Of course, anyone who has ever attended a poetry slam knows that this concept is pretty fishy -- since winning slam poems can tend to sound alike.

But, as someone who has studied the movement (Soft Skull Press published my book, "Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam" in 2008), I think it's important to remember that while poems at any given slam on any given night might sound similar, that those poems are popular in that venue and at that specific period of time.

Trends in slam -- much like trends in all areas of art -- are forever changing and evolving. What is cutting edge one year, is hack the next. Qualities that seem like bedrocks of the genre (for instance the use of first-person narratives in slam poems) are easily abandoned (the rampant popularity of persona poems in slam these days). Not to mention what works in a slam in Austin, TX might bomb at the Nuyorican Poets Café slam in NYC. And what kills at the Nuyo might be sniffed at by the Bay Area scene.

It's one of my secret dreams to do a big road trip and record regional showcases of slam poetry, where I am able to spotlight the trends, styles and approaches that are popular in various and specific slam locations across the U.S., to truly illustrate how diverse and weird the work being in created in the poetry slam movement is / can be.

But alas, a project like that likely requires a lot money... and a driver's license... and being a working class New Yorker, I got neither... but one can hope! Hope and apply for grants!

OA: I love your illustrations, on your site or on envelopes, why don't more illustrations make their why into your published work? Do you plan to do something bigger with these?
CA: I'm happy you like my illustrations -- thank you! My partner, Shappy, used to work at the best comic book store in Chicago -- Chicago Comics -- and so our rinky-dink apartment is stuffed to the gills with great comics, graphic novels and cartoon anthologies. I'm not a fan of the superhero stuff, but I adore autobiographical comics / cartoonists, such as Joe Matt, Jeffrey Brown, Julie Doucet, James Kochalka and (more abstractly) Ivan Brunetti. I even kept a cartoon diary on my website for a while, but now just do illos / comics on occasion.

I'd never thought to combine my graphic work with my poetry, but Write Bloody has convinced me to attempt to illustrate two of my previously published book: "Hot Teen Slut" the book I wrote about my year working as a writing in the porn industry; and "Working Class Represent," which is a book about being a working poet while being an office worker. Since these works are so autobiographical, it seems like a fun idea.

Right now I'm collecting / working on the illustrations, so we'll see if these illustrated editions come to pass. Fingers crossed. I guess I'm much more comfortable sharing my writing than my drawing, so I still have it in the back on my head that they might take one look at the pile of drawings and say, "Right, so these are crap... and moving on!"

OA: I work in an office during the day in a line of work that is completely unrelated to literature or publishing or anything artistic. What is the typical reaction by co-workers when they find out that you basically live two lives? Has your literary life ever stood in conflict to your work life?
CA: My day job is at the Artists Rights Society, which is an organization which manages the copyrights of our 50,000+ member artists / estates.

It's a great job to have because it allows me exposure to how artists handle themselves / their career / their art, without me feeling directly jealous or depressed about it, because all of our artists are visual artists, and not writers. Many of the people on staff do something artistic, so everyone knows and is supportive of my writing. When I had a book release at NYC McNally Jackson bookstore for "Words In Your Face" last year, the whole office came. It was pretty adorable.

There has been a handful of time that clients I'm working with have recognized my name and asked if I was "Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz the poet." They were mostly college-age women and it's always proven to be a weird moment, but we both get through to the other side okay.

And it should be noted there are only six people with the name "Aptowicz" in the entire U.S of A., and that would be: Me, my parents, my brother, and my brother's two kids. That's it. Thus, if a client googles "Aptowicz" to see who they are working with, it will yield very specific results... and YouTube videos wherein I'm screaming about crack squirrels rank surprisingly high.

I guess I could have gone the pseudonym route and saved myself a lot of embarrassment... but then how would the guys I had crushes on in high school ever figure out that I'm still writing obsessive poetry about them? I can't take that risk!

OA: What's next for Cristin Aptowicz?
CA: Well, I will be working with Write Bloody all year with regard to my re-issues, so hopefully come the summer, all five of my poetry books will be available on Write Bloody.

I'm also hoping to tour (as much as my job will allow) to support the new books & the reissues.

I'm always on the lookout for grants and fellowship applications which might help me with my next non-fiction project. I don't want to give away too much about it, but I'll tell you this much: medical oddities.

Bonus Question:

OA: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would it be? >>
CA: Ooooh! That's a tricky question! The answer changes by the minute! Would I want to use this coffee to resolve an longstanding issue in my personal life? Or would I use the opportunity to discuss life philosophy with some long-dead brilliant mind? Or, you know, talk to Jesus and be like, "Yes! I knew you were black! I knew it!" Argh.

But, like the first question, I'm going to go with my gut and answer honestly and in the moment. The answer would be James Buchanan, our only bachelor president.

For years, he lived with Alabama Senator (and briefly Vice President -- under the unbearably foxy Franklin Pierce) William Rufus King, and the two shared an extremely close friendship. Very close. Suspiciously close. In fact their relationship prompted people to called them "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy," and even "Buchanan and his wife."

Unfortunately, their nieces (suspiciously) destroyed their uncles' correspondences, and so historians can only speculate about the true nature of the relationship, and whether or not Buchanan and King were lovers.

Hence, I would love to sit down with Buchanan and find out the truth. And, if he was gay, I would love to let him know about all the great strides that have happened in gay rights here in the U.S. (though, obviously, we still have a ways to go).

Of course, all my Civil War buff pals will likely be furious that I'm not grilling him about weak positions on the southern secession and how that likely contributed heavily to the Civil War (indeed, Lincoln followed him a President, and secession was pretty much a fait accompli!).

But whatever -- I'm softie. If I have to choose between uncovering a secret love story in American history, OR berating a wishy-washy president who had no idea what his ambivalence would cause the freaking Civil War, I chose the first one every time.

Especially since without the Civil War, there would be no "North and South" miniseries. And who wants to live in a world that that doesn't exist?

For more information on Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz please visit her website.