Julia Rose Lewis and Beir Bua Press. A Mini Interview.

1. I started writing because there was something bothering me, a thing that I wanted to put into the form of a question.  Writing for me is most often rewriting and rewriting again.  I love working collaboratively, because it opens me to another perspective.  Paul Hawkins really rescued me from a project that had completely overwhelmed me.  He made me realize that the subject was the state of being overwhelmed and not what had led me to become overwhelmed.  This was a turning point in my thinking.  Paul and I begin collaborating on a series of visual poems about the relationship between traveling and the state of being overwhelmed.  Beir Bua Press was generous enough to publish a chapbook of these collaborations titled Holding Patterns.  

2. My writing style is strongly influenced by science fiction.  I am fascinated by the idea that I can build a world in language through a series of interrelated poems.  My pamphlets and books exist very much as thought experiments.  Writing is a way for me to explore a world and all the better if I can explore it with another person.  

3. I suspect that I write the way that I do, because of who I am writing towards.  Whether or not I am collaborating, I am always writing to an ideal reader.  All my poetry is epistolary.  I write to engage in in a meaningful exchange with other writers by means of collaboration and influence.  

4. My favorite Beir Bua Press publication is Via Shirley’s Grotesqueries for the Apocalypse, because of the complicated relationship it has to her other pamphlet Corpses.  I am fascinated by writers organize a selection of poems into a pamphlet.  Nothing is more revealing than comparing poems written during the same time period, but published separately.  This is just my obsession with series and world building again.  

5. Paul Hawkins and I have continued to collaborate.  We are extending the work in the Holding Patterns series and will soon have a full length collection of visual poetry.  

Julia Rose Lewis is the author of High Erratic Ecology (KFS 2020), The Hen Wife (Contraband 2020) and Phenomenology of the Feral (KFS 2017).  Nathan Hyland Walker and she co-authored The Velvet Protocol (KFS 2022).  James Miller and she co-authored Strays (HVTN 2017).  She has published the pamphlets: Zeroing Event (Zarf 2016), Exhalation Halves Lambda (FLP 2017), How to Hypnotize a Lobster (Fathom 2018), Archeology and the Beast (Luminous Press 2018), Miscellaneous (Sampson Low 2019), NAG (Gang Press 2019), and Holding Patterns with Paul Hawkins (Beir Bua Press 2021).  

Lewis and Hawkin’s book, Holding Patterns is available to buy now!