AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (GINGER KO)
Bio: Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her latest project is POWER ON, a book as interactive app, produced by The Operating System. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com.
Book Title: POWER ON
Press: The Operating System
1. What is something that surprised you during the writing, editing, or publishing process for POWER ON?
I was surprised by the experience of discovery while writing this book, a kind of discovery that I had not yet experienced with writing my previous books. My first two books were more about bearing witness and finding voice, but with POWER ON I wanted to affirm my place in the larger web of connectivity and interactivity—and, thus, complicity and accountability!—and decenter myself as an individual within the poems. This decentering ended up being so nourishing and sustaining, and ended up bolstering my sense of others as individuals.
2. How might you describe the “experiment” or challenge of this book? What form, procedure, sound, or mystery enlivened your mind while writing?
Recording my readings of the POWER ON poems (which are featured in the POWER ON app) with my amateur audio recording equipment and even more amateur sound editing skills was a never-ending challenge. Lots of background noise stayed in the poem readings—dog nails clicking on the floor, train horns, lawnmowers, and sometimes just the wind crowding through all the southern pines around my house. I was once a writer who strived for the pristine (and by that I don’t mean non-messy, but the non-mitigated), but learning to love the inelegant artifacts that impose themselves—whew. The power of that is something I’m still learning how to utilize.
3. Can you discuss an edit, idea, response, or interaction with another person that helped this book find its way in the world—aesthetically, materially, visually, structurally, spiritually…?
I’d love to put the spotlight on my partner, Shawn Staudaher, who programmed the interactive iOS and Android apps that are accompaniments to POWER ON. Designing the apps with him helped me to think about my intentions for the physical version of the book—what a book stands for and what it can provide. Shawn is a patient and generous collaborator who is just as interested in the process as the end-product, willing to discuss all the implications and extrapolations with me, and that was a real gift for me.
4. Is there a physical place or space you associate with the poems in POWER ON?
All the poems in POWER ON were written in Georgia. Before I moved there, I didn’t know anything, really, about the south except for common narratives. Living in Georgia made me fall in love with the south and hold it in awe—this is a part of the country where one can’t behold the stunning beauty of the land without ignoring how it’s been inflected by historical architecture and land use that was—and continues to be—exploitative, and yet is the site of hard-won survival and flourishing in the face of that. I can be another outsider/newcomer to the south who waxes on and on, so rather than continue on in that vein, I’ll say that living in Georgia taught me powerful lessons about how justice is never guaranteed nor ever less than complex, and those lessons impacted the poems I wrote for this book.
5. What’s something that feels difficult about having a book—or this book, specifically—come into the world?
What’s difficult about having this book in the world comes from my difficulties with writing; I hope my poems won’t be misread as challenging a way of life that is inevitable or unavoidable. Idealism and analysis always feel difficult, because the structures that are in place (the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) do so well at convincing us that anything less than zealous loyalty is treasonous and ludicrous. Shallow counterarguments based on ideological loyalty and upholding feelings over facts are moves that are so difficult to refute when you are also trying to uphold belonging and emotional experiences! I try not to make grand pronouncements or consumable adages in this book, though our times make those things comforting and captivating, and that feels difficult for me too—that I’m letting people down or failing to capture interest or resonance.
6. What do you appreciate about the press (The Operating System) that published this book?
I like the community-driven message of The Operating System, and how the founder and publisher, Elæ Moss, is always thinking about sustainable art-making practices that offer resources to readers and writers, whether it’s in the form of facilitating workshops, collaborations, or experiments. The Operating System is about discovery and disclosure and advocacy.
7. Do you recall the most recent small press (micro, indie, DIY, university) publication you’ve recommended? What made you want to tell someone about it?
Surfaces.cx was an online press that published digital zines. It’s recently gone defunct but maintains its online archive, and so I’ll continue sharing it with anyone I think would be interested in a publisher of digital zines that was—in my humble opinion—at the forefront of DIY/outsider/self-taught art and writing. The artists and writers published are decadent, experimental, non-dichotomic, and reflect a thriving writing scene that is not only informed by digital space and its politics that impact meat space, but also seeks to assert meaningful art, satire, and agency of personhood. I love everything I’ve read in the surfaces.cx archive—it’s all thrilling.
8. Is there a text, song, piece of art, or made thing that your book talks to, borrows from, fights with, or is in tribute to?
My book is dedicated to J35, the killer whale who made headlines a few years ago for performing a public mourning ritual of her dead calf that lasted 17 days. The motivation behind her ritual will likely never be fully discovered by humans, but I view her performed ritual as a piece of art.
9. What adventures are you looking forward to, thinking about, or practicing now?
As is probably predictable from the kind of thinking I did with POWER ON, I’m still preoccupied with the consensual hallucination of online and digital life, but I’m back to the words that get transferred and projected into that life. It’s quite possible for me to spend more of my day writing to others and reading their missives and posts than physically conversing. Many of us are living a deeply epistolaric life that is dependent on technology, and I have many friends and acquaintances who seem to navigate this lifestyle authentically with a certain amount of ease, generosity, and fulfillment that I have yet to attain. I’ve been conducting interviews with these friends and acquaintances and hope to interview more folks to figure out how writers live a happy life in this age of the internet. I don’t know what this kind of endeavor is building up to, but it’s been really fun to think through.
10. Who will you gift a copy of POWER ON to? Or where will you leave it for someone to find?
Right as I started working on these questions, I received a delightful piece of snail-mail from Valerie Hsiung. It’s her latest book out of Essay Press, To love an artist, and I can’t wait to read it! I’ll be responding in kind, sending her a copy of POWER ON, and I just have to say that this kind of fellow-writer exchange, pen-pal-ing our books to each other, always makes me feel like my heart is blooming and beaming.