OF QUEER GUIDES AND COMPASSIONATE FUTURES, an interview with Tobias Wray

*** this interview took place in april 2022 between Kevin Latimer and Tobias Wray, winner of the 2020 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition.

kl: “Turing Tested” feels like—among many other things—a guided queer meditation that is so peopled! (from our guide Turing, to Monroe, to the fantastical in Snow White). Curious on the process of making and how this poem came together, and how it is to juggle that many characters, pasts, and histories in one book.

tw: I really love that question and honestly it’s perhaps one of the hardest poems in the book for me to address in that way, because at its core it really just wants to do honor by Turing and his really difficult story. I think over the course of the book, every iteration (even the earliest) was always interested and thinking around bad dads, fragile masculinity, and the violences that men receive as a framework to describe how to be a man or how to be masculine. I realized I needed to anchor some of that interest and some of that creative potential into certain stories, and Turing sort of jumped out to me. I think in part because his story serves as a cautionary tale of how bad it can get, right? Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, all these men who fell prey to Gross Indecency laws for hundreds of years. There’s another poem in this book about the Buggery Act . . . This idea of the queer elegy is something that I think queer men struggle with how to avoid. We live in the shadow of AIDS, in the shadow of all these injustices and I think it would be wrong to consider the subject of masculine identity, of queerness without honoring the ghosts that brought me into existence.

kl: This is an easy pivot to the title, too: No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man. It feels like an anchor.

tw: An anchor. It really is. The line comes from . . . and I tweaked it a bit—a letter that Turing sent to a friend of his just prior to his final ordeal in prison; in which he said something to the effect of I shall emerge from it all a different man, but who that is I don’t yet know. I think that as a title for the book, it just kind of stands as this what can any of us become. In another poem in the book I say, there’s more we can become. I hope in this violent history of what we’re doing under the title and rubric of “man” or “masculinity,” we can take that difficult history and move into a direction of real empathy and care. We can rethink gender norms, and rethink gender, and rethink what we want to do with our body and our stories in this precious time of human existence. It gets a little woo-woo, you know? (laughs)

kl: The best things in life often are.

tw: Right?

kl: Let's talk about the feelings of family and community, especially as queer people. So much of our history of family is people we chose. Or people we had to choose. Or people we found.

tw: I think that of all the threads of the book that were difficult to do justice by, and to go past my comfort zone, and say all of the things that I felt I needed to say or could say or could risk was all in the thread of the book where the problematic father figure is directly addressed–who exists as this sort of man-shaped colossal shadow— . . . and the history with my own father and having to think through the mist and the mystery of the no answer. That there was no reason for these wrongs. That there was no reason for the pain in our family other than the near-sightedness of how one should act and what love and compassion should look like. I think that thread of the book was the biggest risk in some ways; and it’s true in my own life that I turned to queer community to fill in those gaps. When I didn’t know where and how to walk in the world I turned to my queer peers and men who had come before me to understand that better. And I turned to all the women in my life!

The other beautiful thing that I hope is something that becomes apparent in the book is that I learned mostly from women how to be in the world. I am as lucky in the women in my life, and my family, and my friends as I am perhaps unlucky to have the father that I have. It’s kind of interesting to hold those two ideas in sway. I feel very very lucky to have my family’s support to write this book. I don't know if I could if I didn’t have their permission, and I recognize how many other queer writers don’t or can’t have that same type of support.

kl: These have been really thoughtful answers. Thank you. That last (and hardest) question: What’s your favorite color and your favorite shape?

tw: I love this! Well, orange—but of course, a specific type of orange. I don’t try to name it because I don’t want it to be that specific, but think like an earthy-rusty kind of orange. The kind of orange that if geologic time scraped a hill back, you would see.

kl: a little rocky orange, I like that.

tw: Yeah, yeah. My favorite shape. That is surely something that I’ve never named before, but in this moment I’m going to say an enneagram, like a nine pointed shape. I feel really drawn to the number nine.

kl: We got you to answer what your favorite number was. A three-for-one.

tw: Yes! Thank you. That was hard.

***

TOBIAS WRAY’s writing has appeared in journals including Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, Third Coast, and The Georgia Review as well as The Queer Nature Anthology and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures. He served as a poetry editor for Cream City Review and holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas.

KEVIN LATIMER lives in Cleveland with his cat and an assorted set of green sticks. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He is the author of two books.