Chaun Webster, author of Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world
Poetry Category, sponsored by Wellington Management, Inc.
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
I don’t know that there were specific details that I wanted to include in the book but couldn’t, but the writing transforms, a line is cut, a revision is made where I can see another entry point in addressing something, another sequence is made of the many fragments this book is made from, all of this makes an-other, specific, text out of so many possible ones.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
Wail Song is a thinking with, it is a thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake, a thinking with Calvin Warren’s Ontological, an attempt at taking anti blackness into consideration not just as a force that is isolated in its devastating impact to black people, but as both apocalyptic and world-making in function and scale.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
Not a book from the past year, or one that I first read last year, but a book that I have been coming back to continually over the last year is Krista Franklin’s, Under the Knife. I learn something important about folds, about multiplicity, about the stakes of articulation, about erasure, and not telling, and telling through folklore in the work of Franklin. I go back to this text often.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
I’m pretty introverted. I like bad movies. A lifetime ago I was once studying to be a pastor.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
I love the radical potential of libraries. To be a space that welcomes, that takes sides, that thinks critically, that fosters such thinking and the action that accompanies such thinking.
Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing. Webster’s debut book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, received the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for poetry.