Conversation with Andrew Kozma

Andrew Kozma's poems have appeared in Redactions, The Baltimore Review, and Best American Poetry 2015. Their book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and their second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.

Andrew is the author of “The Coercive Institutions” from Radon Issue 8.

Q: What was the spark that led you to writing “The Coercive Institutions”?

I wrote “The Coercive Institutions” in February of 2020, before COVID was known to be in the USA but after the fear had begun to infect the country and world. It was that fear, building on the purposeful terror of the first Trump administration, that I was trying to reach in that poem.

I say that as if I know for certain, but I don’t. I’ve been distracting myself since 9/11 through reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. So much of the story of those books is how a malicious government can turn its people against each other.

I think this was promoted as anti-police violence, and it is, it is. But it is also about each of us becoming our own police officer, dedicated to silencing what we might say, what we might do to help others, all in fear of what will possibly happen to us instead. We can’t survive as individuals. We have to support each other.

Q: As a radical writer, how have you been navigating these past few years of increasing political violence?

Apparently, it’s by becoming more radicalized. I’m not sure I would call myself a radical writer. There are many others more political than I am, more actively involved than I am. I declare myself a democrat, even if most capital-D Democrats don’t support most of what I want. UBI. Universal healthcare. More open borders. And, fuck it, a welfare state. What good is a government if it doesn’t take care of the people who it is supposed to represent?

I guess I’m a democrat the way that my parents were Catholics, in that they were raised that way and believed in God but didn’t subscribe to many of the prejudices and dictums of the Catholic church. My mom was a nun for seven years, and now she doesn’t go to church. Not because she doesn’t believe in God, but because she doesn’t need church for her own beliefs, and those beliefs also don’t necessarily line up with what the Pope may or may not say.

Is it radical to just want to make everyone’s lives better?

Q: What draws you to photographing insects, plants, and the many discarded items found by the wayside near humans?

I’ve always been interested in small and overlooked things. In the beginning of my Instagram account, I was often taking pictures of everyday things and expanding them so that it wasn’t clear anymore what the original object was. I guess it’s all about making the normal and usual seem strange and uncanny. Granted, some of what I find is naturally uncanny. For a long while, there was a stop sign in my neighborhood that someone had affixed an action figure to, up at the top where no one would really notice it except by chance.

The captions I give those pictures are an extension of that attempt to reach uncanniness. I try to come up with poetic misinterpretations of what I’m capturing, the relationship between the photo and the text a kind of miniature poem, a metaphor forced into reality.

That all is an explanation that came after the fact, though. The true beginning is that I’d just broken up with my longtime girlfriend and was walking everywhere. I decided to take a picture every day in order to get myself out of the house and make sure I was doing something productive. Like my writing, it isn’t the starting point that determines what is the result, but the process of making art that reveals what it that art wants to be.

Q: Your online pseudonym is The Drellum. Does the word Drellum have particular meaning to you?

My pseudonym is actually Thedrellum, one word. The origin story is a little silly: in middle school I was writing my first story in order to get into an English-focused magnet school, and so I decided to write about one of my Dungeons & Dragons characters. But all my characters only had first names, and I knew that you can’t write about someone without knowing as much about them as possible, which means that this character would have to have a last name. And so Thedrellum was what I came up with. The character was a thief whose first name was Aliem (pronounced a-leem with a hard A), which just goes to show how I like coming up with things that are ripe for multiple interpretations.

Q: What are your opinions on six-eyed kittens?

It’s the mixture of cute and creepy I like, just in the same way that I like to mix horror and hope in my writing. Not much of my writing could be called hopeful in terms of the endings, and yet I believe that the sort of self-knowledge I try to show in my writing is a form of hope. It is the struggle to understand the horror around us and how that relates to the horror inside of us which I believe is worth it. Ideally, outside of the writing, that struggle becomes action.

Q: What is your relationship with your agent Jessica Sinsheimer?

Good. It’s important to have an agent that likes your work and trusts your instincts and, in my case, also provides good criticism for improving what you’ve written.

I left my first agent because she’d read the manuscript of a new novel and said there was too much blood and vomit in it. Jessican embraced the blood and vomit, and saw what the novel was trying to achieve rather than attempting to mold it to what she wanted it to do and be.

Q: How did your experiencing receiving a PhD in Creative Writing differ from your MFA?

Here’s where I’m going to say that you need to extract from writing programs what is useful to you and leave the rest to rot. My purpose in both my MFA and PhD programs was to give myself time to write—and many programs provide funding for graduate students. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to live on, and then you just need to make sure that the busywork of graduate school doesn’t overtake the real work of writing. I say all this acknowledging the fact that I am really privileged in terms of health, lack of debt, lack of family to take care of, etc., and that it might not be easy for others.

But that doesn’t really answer the question. I do love school and learning, so the PhD was different for me in that it really encouraged diving into the academic side of writing. One of my comprehensive exams was self-designed around the history of speculative fiction, and though that’s something I’ve always been interested, it is different to be part of a program that specifically says, Yes, go explore your niche topics!

The other major difference for me wasn’t particular to it being a PhD program, but the school I went to. It was much larger than my MFA program which meant a much larger community of writers to interact with and to find real connections in.

Q: What is your previous experience with performing at reading events?

I love reading and performing. One of the benefits of being in grad school for creative writing is that readings are happening all the time, so you can take part if you want. And I want.

My beginning as a writer was as much related to theater as to simply the writing on the page, and readings give me a chance to give voice to my writing. Public readings are also where emotion lives for me because I work out my feelings and thoughts in the process of writing, and the result of that process isn’t necessarily made real until I voice the words aloud.

This happened when I did the launch reading for my first book of poetry since much of it was directly about the death of my father. I want the emotion to be there for the listener, but sometimes it can become overwhelming in a way I don’t expect and can’t really prepare for. At Basket Books & Art in Houston, we started an annual Halloween reading. This time I read a flash called “Small Sacks of Children” which I’d written at the beginning of Trump’s first term. It's about building a wall on the border of a country, and that wall is built with children. I chose to read it because I was scared of Trump’s re-election and wanted to put that fear into words and try to encourage everyone to vote, and halfway through the reading, I was choking up, the flash is so dark, and I wanted to stop.

But it was too late. And the emotions were real. And they were real to the audience, too, which was the point, even if it hurt.