In this interview, Tell Tell Poetry chats with Katie Condon about finding beauty and strength in the profane and how she uses the voices of her favorite poets for inspiration. Katie shares tips with us about how she broke into publishing great poems and how to find a balance between the validation of traditional publishing and having confidence in your poetic instincts. She also reveals how she got the guts to cut beloved poems from an amazing manuscript that ended up winning a big award! Katie reads her poem “On the seventh day God says, ‘What you’ve got is virgin charm & a knife in your pocket.'” (first published in BOAAT JOURNAL) and shows how some sweet persistence got her poem “Origin” accepted in The New Yorker! We’ll hear how collaging lines from old journals keeps her poetic practice fresh and trace the origins of some floral imagery in her poems. Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her poetry appears in the New Yorker, Tin House, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, among other places. Katie has received support from Emory University, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Inprint. She is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas with her husband, the writer Richard Hermes.
Keep a look out for forthcoming poems “Called Back” and “You’ve got to stay if I take you off your leash, kapeesh? I say to my dog as we pull up to the trailhead in Amherst.” in Poetry Northwest and “Married six months, I dream of the ex I long thought I’d marry” in Ploughshares!
If you want to kick up your poetry reading life, check out this recommended book list from Katie!
Transcript of Video
Layla: All right. Hey there. This is Layla Benitez-James for Tell Tell Poetry. I’m a really lucky duck because I’m sitting down with Katie Condon to talk poems and publishing and Praying Naked, which is the amazing title of her debut collection. And Praying Naked won the 2018 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and was published in 2020. Katie Condon’s poetry also appears in the New Yorker, Tin House, and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day. Katie has received support from Emory University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Imprint in Houston. She’s an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas with her husband, the writer, Richard Hermes. Katie, thank you so much for joining Tell Tell today.
Katie Condon: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here talking with you, Layla.
Layla: Yeah, me too. Well I’d like to just jump right in and ask about your writing process. Like where you go for inspiration, what writers you love, and what do you do when you feel like you just absolutely can’t write?
Katie Condon: Those are all really good questions. I think in general I go for inspiration to other poets. I read a lot. And I think in Praying Naked specifically, I turned a lot to the poets who made me want to be a poet like Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara and Dorothea Lasky. And I like to think of our canons as sort of like communities or conversations of which I want to be a part. And so in the book, and still now in my new poems, I sometimes borrow other poets lines as a sort of starting point and either sort of revision them or revise them or speak back to them. I’ll give you a specific example. It’s sort of different with every line or with every poet, but when I was writing this book and I was reading a lot of Whitman, I was so drawn to Whitman’s confidence in his sensuality. He sort of like oozes it.
Layla: Yeah.
Katie Condon: He’s a sexy guy, I feel like.
Layla: Totally.
Katie Condon: So one thing that struck me was, at that time, I didn’t know of many female poets who sort of oozed the same way. I think I should-
Layla: Yeah.
Katie Condon: – figure out a different verb. It sounds a little strange. But you catch my drift? And so I was interested in how Whitman’s language would feel uttered from, from a female speaker’s mouth. And so there’s one poem in the book where I sort of use many of his lines from “Song of Myself” to sort of explore or hyperbolize, or really just capture realistically the possibilities of female sensuality. And so that’s one way that I hope I’m sort of expanding a conversation rather than anything else. So that’s one place that I get inspiration.
Layla: Yeah. What I love at the end of your book, you have your notes. So you’re like calling out the different poets that you are in conversation with. I love that.
Katie Condon: Thanks. Yeah. And it’s something I love to do, and it is something that I also do. Another question you asked was what do I do when I feel like I can’t write or I feel stuck and reading is really helpful and just consciously starting a conversation with another poet is really helpful. But something else I do is I give myself writing games or writing prompts. I find those really helpful to get myself out of my own head. This is my own experience. And I think probably people get writer’s block, quote unquote, for many different reasons. But for me, whenever I feel stuck writing, it’s often because I’m trying to prescribe something on a poem draft or decide what the poem is going to be about or do before I write it. And prompts and games are a really helpful way to get out of that mindset. So, that’s something else I do. I don’t know if it’s inspiration, but it’s another way to start.
Layla: Yeah, no, totally. And do you have a favorite game or a favorite prompt that’s your go-to, gets you out of your own head kind of thing.
Katie Condon: Yeah. My favorite thing to do is to collage. So I’ll collect all of… First of all, I’ve kept all of my journals, like way back even to high school which is a while. But I’ll pull all of those out and I’ll go through and sort of skim through them. And I will highlight or circle or write down lines that I think are interesting or something. And then I try to arrange them into a poem. That’s my favorite thing.
Layla: These are your own lines?
Katie Condon: Yeah. They’re my own lines. Although I sometimes do take lines from other places. Magazines or something. But more often than not, I start with my own lines. And I think I do that because I need to prove to myself that I have written lines that are interesting and I still can do something. You know what I mean? It’s totally an ego thing, but it works for me.
Layla: Yeah. I know. That’s great. I love how you mentioned Whitman, because one of the things that I loved about Praying Naked is that a lot of it is kind of like religious imagery and you have that kind of cadence, but then you also mix the profane and just things that normally I wouldn’t put together. So where did that come from?
Katie Condon: It came from my own personal experience with religion growing up. But also it comes from just an interest in how different kinds of language and tones work together. So I’ll start with what I said first. I grew up Catholic and if any of you know anything about Catholicism, I wasn’t super thrilled with the way that women were portrayed and asked to act within that… I don’t need to get into it. I’m sure most people know what’s up. But I was interested in profaning the female role in that space. And I think actually “profane” sometimes has a negative connotation, but I wanted to sort of give it a kind of power. And so thematically, that’s what I was interested in. Giving a woman, a female speaker, the space, power, and ability to say, fuck you, God. Sometimes it’s like most literally.
Layla: Totally.
Katie Condon: And on the other hand, on a level of poetics, I mentioned Frank O’Hara before. One thing that I really love about Frank O’Hara’s work is his tendency to talk about opera and hamburgers in the same poem. Just on a level of language and tone, I think that mixing high and low culture can give a poem a sort of vitality. It can make it sort of dynamic. And it tells us a lot about a speaker’s psychology, too. So I didn’t want my speaker to only be super headstrong and profane. I also wanted her to also have a kind of reverence for this religion that she is rebelling against. Like there’s sort of a push and pull. And I think that the high and low play of themes and language hopefully makes my speaker sort of complex in that way.
Layla: Yeah. No, that totally comes through. Yeah, you’re totally right about profane usually having a negative connotation, but it felt more honest and more raw and more true because it wasn’t that kind of shiny, chaste relationship with God. Yeah. I think it worked really well.
Katie Condon: Good. I’m glad. I’m glad.
Layla: Yeah. No, it totally is. It was good. And oh yeah, I wanted to see, will you actually read a poem? I know I suggested a poem. Which one was it? “The Virgin Charm?” Yeah.
Katie Condon: Yeah. I would love to read this one. And I think it’s actually a good one to read because this is actually a poem I wrote out of a collage of older lines.
Layla: Oh wow! Awesome.
Katie Condon: It came out of a prompt. Yeah. So every line in the poem, including the title is something that I had written sometime between my undergraduate years, and I think I wrote it in 2017. The only lines that I wrote new were the dialogue tags. If people are interested in what collaging can do, that’s this poem. And I’d be happy to read it.
Layla: Yeah, read it.
Katie Condon: Okay. On the seventh day, God says, what you’ve got is virgin charm and a knife in your pocket. And I’m like, thanks. The heart finds its anchor in the sky. The woman is told she has a tabernacle. On the 43rd day, I confuse my hangover for grief. God says your longing will be for me and I will dominate you. And I’m like, nope. The morning wears a cotton dress. Is this all I will amount to? The hot breath of months in my pocket, every telephone pole I mistook for a tree, the melancholy suspicion of library security. Nah.
The bartender hums the tune of a hummingbird rising from its flower. I say, I inherited Sappho’s pussy and I believe me. God says, thou shall not kill. And I’m like, but what about with my eyes? I never asked for the capacity to love ugly things, but here I am. Carnation, daisy, lavender. Lately, the lavender of late. I boil my stock exclusively with wishbones. I say, I like my men smooth and far away, reticent as a bookshelf. And God butts in, I can do that for you. His eyes search me like a pendulum. I’ve scraped a dead man’s ashes out from under my fingernails, like lice eggs. A woman raised in contest with other women is a child of God. God says, this is getting serious. And I’m like, you bet. I remember my ignorance and miss it. The skies open silently with a woman’s legs. Morning glory. Morning glory. Morning. Hallelujah.
Layla: Ah, thank you. Yeah. I’m going to link to that and some other poems. But yeah, I love that. And knowing that it came from collage, I can hear it now, because some of those lines are just so, so, punchy and they don’t have all of the connective tissue, but they don’t need it. Like there’s just wonderful gaps in between. And I love the idea that possibly some of those lines were written years apart and in different journals. That’s amazing.
Katie Condon: Yeah. It was certainly an exciting one to write. And I think it’s the only poem in the book that came from a prompt like that. There was something, I would say on the whole I’m sort of generalizing this isn’t true of every poem, but I would say on the whole, the poems in the book, in Praying Naked, have a sort of narrative thread or narrative context, as opposed to being purely associative leaps or something. And that’s just sort of my taste for this book. And so I sort of liked the energy of that collage that I’d written, but I was like, how can I make it a narrative? And so I imposed the dialogue onto the poem and it’s the poem that… Of all of the poems people will email me and say that they like or ask that I read, this is by far the most asked for one, which is exciting because anyway, I digress. But it was so out of left field in terms of how I usually compose poems that it’s exciting to hear people respond positively to it.
Layla: Yeah. Totally. And I think that’s a really good thing about different kinds of forms of experimentation is that sometimes you need the reader feedback or a journal saying, yeah, that’s my favorite one. And you’re like, oh, okay. I’m going to do that again.
Katie Condon: Yeah, exactly. Good to know. Good to know. And it sort of has given me permission to not feel so beholden to my own process. I think play and experiment are so important and sometimes yeah, we do need the outside validation to say it works, but yeah. But yeah, it was a fun one to write.
Layla: Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about how you arranged and ordered Praying Naked? The classic thing is printing them all out and kind of moving them around and playing with the order that way. But I noticed the moving from “Origin” to “Resurrection” and some of the other poems had these lines that seemed to like carry across, like then in “What Matters Most” has a hymn and then the next poem is “Hymn.” And there’s all these little threads that connect from one poem to the other. How did that shuffling process happen?
Katie Condon: Well, it took a long time and there were lots of different arrangements that the book had. I worked on it for about seven years, from the first poem to it being a book. And over the course of those years, it for a long time, for example, was in two sections and now it’s in four. It was much longer. It was way longer. And my husband, who I mentioned in my bio, Richard Hermes, is an insanely talented editor. And he gave me some advice that was really hard to take actually, but in the end helped the book get to its final iteration in terms of arrangement, which was to make the book shorter because a lot of poems were in there. They were weaker and they were doing the same work as stronger poems.
And then he pointed out that on a level of global arrangement, I had all of my rebellious and sort of like louder poems in the first half of the book and sort of more, not sad, but morose poems at the second half. And he suggested that there was a narrative arc that could be composed. And I think he was right. A sort of like coming of age, maybe.
Layla: Yeah. I could see that.
Katie Condon: Yeah. And so in summary, he helped me. We spread my poems out all over the floor on my office at the university where I was getting my PhD, where we both did. And we spent a long time arranging it, and arranged it into four sections that isolated different moments in the speaker’s life. And so tonally, each section is a little bit more diverse than it was originally. But on a smaller scale, you were mentioning that some poems sort of have images that feed into the next poem, like touching the moon or mentioning moonlight or something. That’s my favorite kind of thing to arrange for and plan.
Once we had sections, once I had done that really, I might have even cried, like cutting some of the poems. But once I got all that out of the way, it was nice to think about the different ways that each section could be arranged. So some poems transition into one another because they’re an obvious plot line that the following poem will develop. Some of them transitioned into each other tonally because they share an attitude. But the most fun poems to put next to each other were the ones where the images sort of spoke to one another. It sort of felt like putting together a little puzzle or creating a crossword, maybe not filling one out. And that was really fun. So I just looked for things poems had in common, be it tone, narrative, or image, and saw what they would do if they went next to each other.
Layla: Yeah. No, it really, it works beautifully. And I didn’t realize, the first time I read it, I didn’t really catch on to all the flowers either. Because I don’t know, it didn’t come across like a very flowery book, but on rereading it, I was like, no, there’s wild flowers. There’s all sorts of flowers in it. And it works really well. Those images really are rhyming with each other. It’s awesome.
Katie Condon: Thanks. Yeah. I really love gardening. That’s why there’s so many flowers.
Layla: I love a good garden poem.
Katie Condon: Yeah, I love a good garden. Yeah, yeah, no, I love flowers. That’s why they’re everywhere.
Layla: Yeah. But really there’s joyful flowers and then death flowers. It runs a gamut in the collection. It’s really, yeah, it’s good.
Katie Condon: Thank you. Thanks. I’ll just say quickly that I sometimes am a huge nerd and read field guides for fun.
Layla: I love it.
Katie Condon: Like books that explain the scientific words of flowers and where they grow. During my MFA, I got at Brazos Bookstore actually.. No not at Brazos. Kaboom, at Kaboom Books. I got a field guide that was published in the 1940s and all of the text about the flowers was like highly poetic and some of them were sort of spooky. It was called How to Know the Wildflowers, which is a title of one of the poems in Praying Naked. I sort of lifted it from that field guide and borrowed some of the attitudes that they would use to describe those flowers. Like this flower can kill you, and your skeleton will rise into the sky. It was like an amazing… Anyway, I’m digressing in a huge way.
Layla: I need that book.
Katie Condon: I will definitely share it with you. It’s amazing.
Layla: I need to read it.
Katie Condon: Well. Yeah. I love taking things out of context and making them into poems. And it’s interesting to get inside people’s minds, especially from the forties when it’s like, what do you really think about these flowers?
Layla: Yeah.
Katie Condon: It’s amazing. And it frames itself as a sort of scientific guide, but then the language is so… Yeah. It’s amazing. I almost said the language is so flowery, which it is.
Layla: Well, I also wanted to pick your brain a little bit about submissions because you’ve been published in some incredible places, like The New Yorker, that little magazine.
Katie Condon: Yeah. That one. Yeah.
Layla: So, how do you select journals for submissions? A few questions. What are your dream journals? The New Yorker is like a dream journal of so many people. So what are some more dream journals? How many submissions do you send out a year? Do you have a submission schedule? And I’d specifically like to hear about the New Yorker one, because in another interview you were mentioning that that poem origin was also like a digression of what you would normally write and you were kind of trying to get out of your own normal writing routine. And then that was the one that is picked up.
Katie Condon: Yeah. I quite literally, I put together a packet. They take six poems. So I put five poems in there that I felt really good about. And then I threw “Origin” in at the end. It was on the last page. I was like, I guess I’ll throw in that one. Like, we’ll see. And then the editor, Kevin Young was like, this is a great poem and I want it. And I was like, wow, cool, that’s great. So it was very surprising to me. And it was just another example of an outside validation of something that was an experiment and meant to be sort of playful in my own writing process. That was really helpful to me moving forward as I wrote. But I had been submitting to the New Yorker, which is certainly a dream journal and still is. Maybe I’ll get published there again someday. We’ll see.
But anyway, jokes aside. I had been submitting to the New Yorker every year since 2013. I think I maybe skipped one year. I submitted twice in 2016. I went back and peeked because I was interested. But I submitted six poems every time. I submitted, I think, five times. So I had sent them 30 poems that were rejected by the time that they accepted one of them. But I just think that, well, I’ll say this. Lately, my approach to submissions has been to move more deliberately and at a slower pace than I had even four years ago. So some other dream journals that I have are the Paris Review, or Poetry, of course. I think so many people want to be published there. The Kenyan Review.
And I, in the past, would have a submission schedule and just throw whatever poems I happened to have at them as the scheduled progress. But I’ve sort of reversed it in the last few years. I have gone long periods of time not submitting at all, or submitting very few poems. In 2019, I also took a peek at this, I only submitted to five places over the course of the whole year. Six last year. And I think that’s because I’m trying to intentionally put my dream journals first, and many of them take a long time to get back to you. So it means that I’m submitting less. But I’m also only submitting poems when I absolutely feel like they’re ready, not if they’re sort of half ready, and hope for the best, because that’s what my schedule says to do.
Layla: Yeah. Well, how do you know? How do you know when a poem is ready, ready, or just like, it’s a feeling?
Katie Condon: I think it’s a feeling. I give them to other people to read. Richard reads a lot of my poems and helps me. It gives me suggestions for revision. I share my poems with close friends. I give you some of my poems sometimes.
Layla: Yeah.
Katie Condon: Done that. Anyway. So with a lot of community input, I really found the workshop space in graduate school to be really helpful with helping me get poems ready for submission. I tend to feel like when I have other people’s eyes on it, I have a better sense of when the box clicks shut, as Yates said about how to end a poem. When I isolate myself, I have no idea. But that’s just me, you know. Everyone handles it differently. So that’s how I know. When it’s gone through a few phases of revision with other people’s eyes on it.
But yeah, I think I’m digressing a little bit. But in short, my submissions process lately has been really getting poems ready and then submitting to the places I really want to get into first. And then once they’re rejected from every single one of those places, going to my second list of dream journals, like second place dream journals. Kind of silly maybe.
Layla: Yeah, totally. No, it doesn’t, I don’t think that sounds silly.
Katie Condon: I’m going to correct that. So that’s how I go about it. Yeah. It takes a long time, but my perception of acceptances is higher since I’ve done it that way, as opposed to putting the schedule first and the poem quality second, if that makes sense.
Layla: No, totally. Yeah. And I was going to ask too, what advice do you have for people who are newer to the submission process? Like you’ve gone through all these years and have moved from submitting a lot to submitting a little less, but if you had a time machine to go back to talk to first submitting Katie, is there anything that you would tell yourself?
Katie Condon: I think that’s a really good question. One thing that I do for my students, and one thing that a professor had done for me when I first started submitting poems, is I show them my submittable page and I show them all of the rejections that I’ve gotten over the years and compared to the amount of acceptances. My rejections page is like seven pages long. And my acceptances, there’s not even a second page on submittable to click to. And so that’s one piece of advice I would give anyone, and my younger self too, I would give her that advice again.
Because as we’ve said earlier in our conversation, getting outside validation can be so valuable, but actually it doesn’t happen that much. And so it’s important that we don’t rely on that validation because rejection is just inevitable and more frequent than getting accepted to journals. It’s just the way it is. I would just say don’t lose your sense of self when you get rejections. There’s a great poem by Merwin called Berryman about all of the advice that the poet Barryman had given him. And there’s a line where he says to paper your wall with rejection slips and to not lose your… Do you remember the word? Don’t lose your confidence… Your arrogance!
And I think that’s really important actually, when you start submitting poems. You have to believe in yourself to send them out. And, as I said, I sent out so many poems, lots, lots and lots when I was young. And I don’t know if I would advise against that.
Layla: Yeah, yeah.
Katie Condon: Yeah. But so that’s the succinct version of the advice that I’d give someone who’s just starting out. Be a little arrogant. Be prepared for rejection. And when you get that validation, really feel awesome about it. You deserve it.
Layla: Yeah. I like that. I’m going to shift gears a little bit. What are some of your favorite books? And, it could be people or books that just came out. Who would you recommend that people don’t read enough of?
Katie Condon: Well, I have a whole stack of books that have been published in the last five years below me to sort of show off. But books that are-
Layla: Go for it.
Katie Condon: I will. I’ll say just two books that have been very important to my writing life. Bernadette Mayer, in general as a poet, I think is someone who, not many people read. She’s a second generation, New York School poet. And her book, it’s a little purple book called Bernadette Mayer Reader, is so phenomenal. She is formally experimental, but not so much so that her work isn’t approachable. She, for example, writes a bunch of experimental sonnets. One of them is called “You jerk, you didn’t call me up.” And the first couple of lines are “You jerk, you didn’t call me up. I haven’t seen you in so long, you probably have fucking tan.”
So she’s just like cooky, coarse, and funny, but her poetics are so interesting and smart. So I think she is really wonderful. And another book that’s incredibly important to me is called Black Life by Dorothea Lasky, who I think people read. And I hope they do. If you don’t, you should check her out. All of her books are great, but that one was really influential to me. And then books that I’ve read lately. I guess this is just the library version of it. But Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 2017. And I think it’s just a phenomenal book. She’s also sort of formally experimental. She also has lots of conversations with other poets. She has a series of poems in here that are text messages with Anne Sexton. It’s just amazing. It’s amazing. I think you would actually really love it, Layla, if you haven’t read it.
Layla: I haven’t. It’s been on my list, but I haven’t read it. I love the idea of text messages with Anne Sexton.
Katie Condon: They’re really amazing. The whole book is great. High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain was published, I think, years ago. She writes beautifully about queer desire and she does it in sort of a quirky sort of whimsical, but also highly intellectual way, I would say. I’m trying to think of poets to compare her to, but I really think she’s sort of in a school of her own. It’s an amazing book.
Company by Sam Ross. If you could see how-
Layla: I love your sticky notes.
Katie Condon: I think this is an absolutely beautiful book. Carl Phillips selected this for the Larry Levis Prize in poetry at Four Way Books. It’s a beautiful book. It’s a bunch of lyric poems, again about queer love. But he is so measured, but warm. He’s amazing. So anyway, I’m going to keep going because I have four more books, and I don’t belabor this.
Layla: I love that you have this stack there.
Katie Condon: I do. Second Empire by Richie Hofmann, I think, is a beautiful book. He sort of reminds me of Henri Cole. Lots of sonnet-esque poems, really beautiful. Rodeo in Reverse by Lindsey Alexander. Her poems are sort of like talky, conversational, very funny, but also sort of dream scapes, a little bit, I would say. It’s fantastic.
This book by Allison Pitinii Davis called Line Study of a Motel Clerk. Some of the poems are written in persona. But it’s about a motel clerk. Her family owns a motel. And her poems are funny. They’re sharp. And they’re about a family living in the rust belt, a working class family. I think it’s really amazing.
And then last but not least American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan. If you-
Layla: Oh what a cover!
Katie Condon: Isn’t it beautiful? If you are someone who doesn’t believe that poems can be funny and also be good, or if you are a person who loves funny poems, please read Luisa’s book. It’s absolutely amazing. I think it’s maybe my favorite book that I’ve read in the last few years. It’s just really remarkable. So, that’s my huge stack of books that I would recommend.
Layla: I love seeing all the covers. Will you actually, I meant to ask you before, will you hold up your cover? I have the e-version on my phone, which I could hold up. Yes. I love the rattlesnake.
Katie Condon: Thank you. Yeah, she’s got tan lines. I don’t know if you can see on the screen.
Layla: Oh, you know what, I didn’t even notice the tan lines.
Katie Condon: I think that’s my favorite detail. The words sort of cover it a little bit, but-
Layla: Well, I remember when you very first showed me the options for the cover and all of them were amazing. I mean, it was like, naked woman with snake, is like… Praying Naked. That’s just, oh, it’s amazing.
Katie Condon: The painter who painted, I just took all of my options from her, with her permission. Her name’s Dorielle Caimi. And she’s just fantastic. I mean, this is one of her more like straight ahead paintings. Many of her other paintings get really weird and sort of surreal, but they all almost always have the female figure featured prominently. I think she’s a phenomenal painter, representing the female body the way that it actually is. Like it’s tummy rolls and sunburns.
Layla: It’s such a good, yeah. The whole cover is really good. I need to look at more of her artwork. That’s a conversation for another day, but I love cover design now with different poetry collections. Some of them are just too good.
Katie Condon: I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Lately they’ve just been fantastic.
Layla: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Well, Katie, thank you so much for chatting. I think that’s all the time we have for now, but I’m excited to read your new poems. We’re going to link to a bunch of them in the notes. And then whenever the ones that are forthcoming, where are you getting published? Tell us.
Katie Condon: I have a poem that was just recently published in Ploughshares called “Married Six Months, I Dream of the Ex I Long Thought I’d Marry.”
Layla: Yeah.
Katie Condon: My husband helped me edit, actually. He’s pretty awesome. And I have two poems coming out in Poetry Northwest. One of the titles is very long. In fact, I don’t even think I could remember the whole thing, which is so funny. And the other one is called Called Back. So, that’s very exciting. And I will keep you updated if anything else happens.
Layla: Yeah. Perfect. Well, I’m going to… Yeah, we’ll link to those and then we’ll update when they’re all out. So yeah. Thank you so much. And I’m looking forward to reading more stuff.
Katie Condon: Thank you so much for having me. It was a huge pleasure to talk with you.
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