Meet the Author: Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

This week's author interview was such a fun and wide-ranging one. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and I talked about everything from poetry to the physically demanding labor of truly self-publishing your own books (and why Cyrée prefers traditional publishing!).

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Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is the author of Watchnight, winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Slingshot, winner of a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry (affiliate links*). He was a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and a 2024 Disability Futures Fellow. He writes from the Catskills.

You can find Cyrée at his website or on IG/TikTok: @cyreejarelle

Tell me about your journey to writing your books.

I have five books. I would say that Slingshot and Watchnight and Rainbow Tarot are my most bookish books (affiliate links*). My other books are a children's book called How Greek Immigrants Made America Home and a self published chapbook called Something to Remember You, and I have a couple of zines.

I think Slingshot I lived with for a long time. All my poetry books are pretty close to autobiographical in persona. I take experiences that happen to me in life and turn them into a kind of poetry called serial poetry, which means that the story is told over a number of poems.

I am a formalist, so I am generally experimenting with traditional form. When I was about fifty percent of the way into Slingshot, I thought I was more done than I was, and I began to shop it around.

I'm lucky that my publisher, Nightboat, took an interest in it and did pick it up at that time. I spent the rest of my MFA finishing it, and it came out shortly after I graduated from my MFA.

What does a day in the life of your writing practice look like?

I'm very specific in my writing practice or else I won't get anything done, so I write every morning with a bunch of other queer, trans writers from 6 to 8 a.m. every day.

I'm very, very, very grateful for my morning writing crew. I think ultimately having a body double that early in the morning, it almost feels like I'm stealing time, because it's just so early that my brain and body don't really register it as time that exists.

It kind of black holes on me, and it's just gone. But then it's eight o'clock in the morning, so it's like, did anything actually happen? I think writing that early makes me feel more experimental, and writing that early in the morning helps me have a regular routine, because it's almost never interrupted by anything else.

Instead of being like, should I write, or should I go hang out with a friend, or oh gosh, no, I have to go to work. Really, the only other temptation is like, should I write or sleep? As long as I'm getting enough sleep, it's a pretty easy choice.

Is that a routine that you started during your MFA or has it developed separately?

That's a good question. It's a habit I developed because I've always worked a lot. When I was young, I mostly wrote late at night, but that was before I had to work all the time.

When I think about my early days as a writer, getting paid, it was sort of catch as catch can, but once I started working full time and I had somewhere to be at 9 a.m., it became a lot easier to justify waking up early and staying up late.

I started writing very early in the morning during my MFA, mostly because my commute from Brooklyn to Columbia was so long that I really did have to be out pretty early to make a 9 a.m. class or what have you.

I remember when I was first working on the serial poem that would become Slingshot, I was working on that as part of Culture Strike. I was on deadline from Culture Strike and I was like, “This has to be done.”

I was at a friend's wedding, and I woke up very early. They were all staying in one house for the wedding, and I woke up very early to knock things out. And that's where I finished it.

So, yes, I would wake up before the sun does. I feel like when I start working after the sun hits me, what I write isn't as smart. If I start writing in the dark, what I write will be smart enough. Maybe it won't be perfect, maybe I won't like it, but it'll still be of a more intellectual variety than when the sun touches my writing.

I get up, I drink my big water and I drink my small black coffee and ice and I get to work.

Are there other strategies that have been supportive for your writing? What helps you finish a manuscript?

For Rainbow Tarot and also How Greek Immigrants Made America Home, it was that I had a deadline. I think I had to finish How Greek Immigrants Made America Home in six weeks. I was on a really short deadline for that from Rosen books, which was affiliated with Britannica.

With Rainbow Tarot for Chronicle, I was also on a pretty short deadline, and so I really had to ration that work out. I like that. I feel like, when I'm writing a small but useful book, like a tarot deck guidebook or a children's book, I really like there to be a short deadline so I can work backwards.

Even some of Slingshot, I definitely had to finish that zero poem on the deadline. I had to be open to work so I can break it up into pieces and figure out what needs to be written.

That’s kind of impossible for me with nonfiction. With poetry, with the novel that I'm writing, it's not beholden to those sorts of things, and that's what's tough about it.

What helps when you don’t have that deadline, to keep you engaged with the project?

If there is no deadline, then I think it's a matter of scheduling it like it’s a task. If I left my writing up to chance and just hoped, it simply would not get done.

That said, I have been helped a lot by Julian Shendelman’s Sit & Write, which is out of Philadelphia and his Substack. Just generally, I think I've been writing with them for five years. I've been writing with them for a really long time.

I remember it started at the very beginning of the pandemic, I started writing with them. And, you know, just having that appointment on Saturday really helps me through the week, because I know that even if everything is awful and I haven't found the time to write, I can get through it. I can write there.

I think also, and this is something I believe very strongly, the faster you can finish anything but poetry, the better. Writing pulls off and loses its thing, its propulsion, and people can feel that.

I need to write in small bursts, and the sooner I can finish something, a draft, whatever, the better. It doesn't keep. For folks for whom that is not true, great for them. For myself, there has to be a level of consistency and speed in order to produce.

How does experimentation show up in your creative practice, both with poetry and more generally?

Experimentation, for me, is the product of structure. Having a container in which to play, committing to that container, understanding form, understanding what I'm breaking, understanding why is a major part of why I enjoy writing formally, in terms of experiments.

As someone who has often felt very misunderstood, both in speaking and also just as a person, my attraction to form and also my attraction to experiment, is an experiment in being understood, an experiment in being heard, an experiment and container-building structure for an idea that is in itself amorphous.

What is the role of professionalism in your writing life, in your creative life?

On whether or not to be a professional writer, I think of writing like something that often makes me money. But writing is also a hobby of mine, an interest of mine. It's something I enjoy.

I love to write for its own sake, and I think that there is a lot of pressure on people sometimes to think of themselves as professional writers, and I understand the market forces that compel people to desire that.

I just don't share them, and I think that part of it is because I've always had a job. I am a trained librarian, archivist specifically, so Marco Rubio, watch out, I guess. Anyways, I worked in communications until very recently, and I'm opening up a brick and mortar herb shop.

I've always had another job, and I feel like it keeps me from being too hung up on the rat race of it, and it gives me space to make my own fucking work. If I was a professor or whatever, the professor has the pressure to produce.

Not that I wouldn't be. I do love to teach. I love speech. I've had lots of students, and my students are universally brilliant and kind and wonderful. I have been blessed by having some of the most talented and wonderful students in the world. But I'm sure every teacher says that.

I definitely enjoyed teaching a community. In fact, I'm teaching a class on automatic writing with Tin House. But I think that if I was constantly chasing writer money, my work would reflect it. I feel like I get to do interesting things.

It's also because I am a formalist. So, I'm not writing the dominant writing style at the time. I don't necessarily want to have to be marketable. I don't necessarily want to have to write something I don't want to write in order to sell something that I'm not interested in.

I can write free verse. I just don't like it as much. Honestly, I like structure. I do, and I think that structure can act as a metanarrative to help us understand complex concepts, and also as a meta critique on society and social systems and structure itself.

That's not always marketable, and it's not always something that people want to publish. So I really think that the relationship to keeping one's day job can give you more freedom.

And also, to be honest, I think it can also make you less inclined to be a hater. People are doing their own thing. I gotta pay my bills.

What has your publishing experience been like, within that context?

Good. I feel very satisfied with my life as a writer. I feel like things have gone as well as I could have wanted them to so far. I hope that there is more to come.

When Slingshot came out, I was really surprised at how well it was received. Same with Watchnight. You know, you get your odds and ends. Everybody's not going to like your book, that's what it is.

But I feel great. I've gotten to go places and do things and speak at stuff I would have never thought and been on stages I only ever dreamed of being on. It's great.

I have really enjoyed being published by Nightboat. I really loved working with Chronicle. I liked working with Rosen too. I did not like self-publishing as much.

Interesting. Why not?

I actually went to my MFA program so that I didn't have to self-publish anymore. I don't like it because it takes so much more time than people are honest about.

If you're doing direct to print, where you're giving your book over to the algorithm, and it's spit out some books for you to sell, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're sitting and saddle stitching shit or using a bone folder, you have a very different relationship to self-publishing.

That was my experience. I was there with the bone folder and the long arm stapler and the waxed thread and having to wax it, with the awl, and it was very much physical. It was physical, and then the distribution was physical, and people wouldn't get their shit on time because I'm making them handmade.

When I put out Something to Remember You, I was like, “That's quite enough. I would like a publisher.”

There is so much physical work that goes into creating an object. It's a huge project.

There really was, and I think as time went on, I just didn't have that kind of time, and it wasn't my favorite thing to do.

I feel the same way, a little bit, about editing literary journals. I was an editor at Dead Poet Society when it first started, and I did that for a while. I edited mass reviews, the disability issue, and it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to do that kind of work.

I really just want to write the book and then be like, “Here, please take this book and make it into a book,” and then I will say, “Hi, I made a book, and this person made it into a book. Would you like to buy my book?” That's really what I’m built for.

I can't say that self publishing was my favorite thing.

You're also working on a novel. What's next for you creatively?

I am working on a novel called Male Girlfriend. It is about class and, of course, gender and sexuality through the lens of a couple of black trans folks.

I am also working really hard to produce my third book of poetry. That is the third and final edition in the series that my first two books started.

For Male Girlfriend, I'm on a final draft. I'm most of the way through a final draft. I've been working on that for a long time, which is why I say, if you don't do it quick, it can be difficult.

I've been working on that for less than two years. I think I've been working on it for maybe a year, in this current form. The third book of poetry is not ready. It's not ready at all. But it really can't be rushed. It takes me about five years to finish a book of poetry, and I'm okay with that.

Poetry is one thing that I don't agree with about the timing. I think that it takes a little bit. After those first two books, it's kind of a challenge to figure out how similar or dissimilar I need this to sound to what I've already produced. What is similar, about the concerns, what's different, what makes them a unit? Especially because they are connected.

So it's taken more conceptual time. I wager that once I'm finished with Male Girlfriend, it'll really pick up, because that's generally how things work for me. I can only write one book at a time.

I can noodle on it. I can think about it. I can make some sketches, some drafts, some outlines. But I can't work on two book projects at once unless one is straight-up nonfiction.

If you had to give a piece of advice to another writer, what would that be?

Advice I have a complicated relationship with. I guess if I'm thinking about a poet, my advice is: Read whole collections of poetry, not collections like anthologies, but entire manuscripts of poems.

Something I always tell my students is poetry is often taught one poem at a time, and that will make you feel bad. It's essentially like buying, Now That's What I Call Music CDs of art. You know what I mean?

It's like, “Oh yeah, I read the literal most loved poem by Walt Whitman, and then the most loved poem by William Carlos Williams. And then I read the most loved poems by Pat Parker, June Jordan, Audrey Lord. I read the most loved poem by Langston Hughes.”

They have other poems. You're judging yourself based on the best of the best, on the best day of the best.

When you read somebody's whole collection, their entire body of work, it's often both of a piece of what they're most famous for and then vastly different.

The writer I've most recently read through all of was Robert Hass. And I must say, I am a member of the Hass hive both because I'm a Pisces, a lover of nature, all sorts of things, right? I really liked it.

His most famous poem is from his second book, Praise, after Field Guide (affiliate links*), and it's called Meditation at Lagunitas, and that's the one where he's going “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

That's his most famous poem. And yes, it does encapsulate what he's writing about. But he's also very influenced by travel.

He's a travel writer and a writer who spent a lot of time writing about being in Asia. He's also a wife guy. One thing about Robert Hass is that he is a wife guy.

These poems are about nature, right? They're about aging, and I think reading Meditation at Lagunitas is like, yeah, you're going to get some of that.

You're going to get some of his precision and some of his prose. It's a beautiful poem. I love Praise. It's an excellent collection. I really love his work.

But I think about somebody else, you might read somebody's best work and like them so much from that. This is why you read the whole collection.

And sometimes you're like, “This was not what I wanted. It's not what I wanted.” I won't name names here.

The difference between reading an anthologized version, where everything is right up against each other, there's an implication from an anthology that, “Oh yes, she was thinking about this all at once. This is the master plan. What has been omitted is for the good of the collection.”

But it's not complete. It's just collected. When you read from the monographs, it's like living little bits of someone's life with them.

I think about June Jordan’s Argo and love poems. That's just such a specific part of June Jordan's life that you're reading through. I think about Cheryl Clark's Living as a Lesbian, where it's like, this is the work of somebody whose perspectives change over time (affiliate link*). And it's beautiful to see that.

I think about that too, as someone who's read almost all, but not all of Joan Didion as well. The concerns change. I remember when South and West came out and reading those journals—very, very different from The White Album, very different from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (affiliate links*).

I really encourage people not just to read one poem, one book, even one essay. I really encourage people to take a long time with artists and their work, especially if they plan to write themselves. Writing careers and even books of poetry, they have ups and downs. They have high points and low bullet points.

The goal is that all of the poems or all of the work comes together into one meta work, into one collection of thought and one collection of ideas.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

I hadn't really read a lot of Virginia Woolf, but I knew that I wanted to read some so I listened to Orlando during the beginning of the pandemic, and then I listened to To the Lighthouse (affiliate links*). I want to see these sentences, and I wasn't disappointed.

I also read The Importance of Being Earnest, which is a play (affiliate link*). Not too long ago, I felt like I wanted to read some classics. Maybe I’ll like it, maybe I won't; maybe I'll finish it, maybe I won't.

​Mrs. Dalloway didn't disappoint (affiliate link*). I’m on a little bit of a World War I kick, like somebody's ancient dad. What were they doing? Why were they doing it? Gas masks. That's scary. Terrible, terrible war for no reason, really.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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I loved talking with Cyrée about his early morning writing practices and his thoughts about the role publishing plays in his process.

I'd love to know—what poet are you going to read after this interview?