Shannon Vs. Shannon
The Self Interview of the Century featuring, me and my shitty brain.
Hello and welcome to an episode of Shannon talks to Shannon or, Brain: Can You Please Just Not? Today we’re here, in my head talking art, poetry and anxiety bubble guts. Please welcome, Shannon’s Brain or SB for our purposes.
The cast:
S: Shannon’s heart/feels. Our interviewer.
SB: Shannon’s Brain.
AB: Anxiety Brain.
Assorted body parts chime in.
#
S: Hey, Brain thank you for sitting down to talk. How are you? You’re looking plump and wrinkly today.
SB: …..Thanks. I guess.
Distress signal sent to SB from the anus, SOS. GOING TO LET FART OUT. PLS HELP.
SB: Please don’t.
Anus: ……….sorry.
S: The bowels are really putting in work today. Do you all need a moment alone.
SB: Yes.
Anus: Nah I’m good.
Armpits: NOPE HA LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!
Underboob areas: US TOO!
SB: Fuck me.
S: Well all righty then. Gang is all here; can we talk about our amazing poetry book please?
SB: *Whimper*
Rest of body: *Sweating intensifies*
S: Hey, come on y’all. It is small and has sequins on it and is beautiful and the dream of a baby potato writer who was once told their poetry was too “personal” to be taken seriously. I mean, someone asked us for it, we wrote that shit and some folks like it! Come on.
SB: I guess.
S: So let’s talk about the process of Gasoline Heart being made and how we put it together.
SB: Well, I didn’t-
Anxiety Brain: DO NOT TELL PEOPLE THAT STUPID.
SB: But-
AB: No, you tell people you wrote it by hand in a handbound moleskine notebook.
SB: That’s fucking dumb.
AB: IN CALLIGRAPHY. While sipping artisanal um, mineralized deionized wheatgrass infused….
SB: Stop.
S: Stop.
AB: FINE FUCK U NOBODY LIKES U ANYWAY.
SB: Anyway. I write poems on the memo app on my phone. Gasoline Heart was entirely composed standing at bus stops, on the bus or hiding in a corner at Starbuck’s trying to be calm. A lot of the time it is how I warm myself up, let out some feelings so I can breathe.
S: *Snort*
Anus: *Fart*
AB: U A LYING ASS LIAR…LIAR
Rest of body: *Sweat*
SB: I said trying you assholes.
Anus: LOL I AM UR ASSHOLE.
SB: ………….
S: ……….
AB: This is why nobody likes you.
S: Go on please. Did you have a theme in mind?
SB: Sort of. When I started writing the poems for Gasoline Heart, I had been mostly writing poems that were perceived as being autobiographical but, were about other women and femmes. Some of them I wanted to be, to touch, to honor. I wrote a series of poems using “I” and “me” in the context of a macro or plural I. Not I as in I Shannon Barber but I as in the voice of the woman or femme I was talking about. I performed some of this work and people got that right away but, it got soundly rejected from lit mags usually with a note about how they didn’t publish “confessional” or “personal” poetry.
AB: In other words, you suck.
SB: Shut it.
S: Calm down you two. Go on please.
SB: It started with this concept of using the word Queen, in Queer AAVE parlance to talk about Femmes. The first one I wrote, Spider Queen got rejected a lot. One editor asked if maybe I could, rearrange the AAVE to be “more universal” and I got angry and stopped submitting poetry for a long time. I still only do it rarely. A lot of those rejections of the Black Femme Personal, when I’d read the magazines and get cis White dude personal or cis White woman confessional and nothing for me, it just soured me on the poetry end of the lit biz.
The Spider she Queen.
The Spider she stunt.
The Spider she whisper
AB: Don’t do it bitch.
SB: I know what the fuck I’m talking about.
AB: Don’t….
SB: I really started writing more poems because I was having-
Bowels: *Ominous bubbling intensifies*
AB: I said don’t do it, I’ll set it all off.
SB: Please…
S: Y’ALL!
SB: Don’t cry…don’t cry..don’t cry.
AB: UNLEASH HELL!
~
Fifteen minutes later.
AB: Lol.
Body: Tired now.
SB: …………………..why am I like this?
AB: LOLOLOLAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
SB: Fuck.
AB: I will ruin everything. Try me.
S: Can we continue?
AB: For now.
S: Okay so um, you were saying you were having?
SB: Um…I have no idea. Let me start over, I made a pome. I did a pome. Yes, I did that thing people hate and not only made up a word but I verbed it too. IDGAF.
S: Yeah okay a lot of them. What brought you to the poems in Gasoline Heart? What brought you back into yourself as subject?
SB: OH! Right! I have a lot of feelings, all the time and there’s the anxiety-
AB: OH HEY BOO HAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
SB: Not now.
AB: ANY GODDAMN TIME I WANT.
S: …….
SB: …………
AB: Don’t start no shit.
S: Um.
AB: I’m good. Continue bitches.
SB: I was thinking um, okay. I write a lot of things other than poetry. Essays, fiction blabblabla. I kept circling back to the fact that I have a lot of feelings and that some of those feelings don’t fit into the worlds of the other stuff I write so, they become poems. I want to cry at the bus stop, I write a poem. I don’t know where else to go in an essay about racism, I write a poem. I write a poem to stay awake, to self sooth, to feel like I can be seen. I actually had no intention of anyone ever seeing these poems.
AB: GOOD.
SB: Anyway. I was still submitting other poems and I found that the poems that got rejected most, that were closest to the work I was doing for the book, were the poems that audiences felt.
S: Oh, that’s right you returned to performing your poetry in public. How was that?
SB: It was better than it was in my late teens and early 20s.
S: When you were a baby potato?
SB: I was a super shy baby potato and I would go once or twice a month to one of the open mics. I’d whisper my poem, make zero eye contact and leave immediately. Worse if anyone talked to me then, I’d run away faster. I lost a notebook that way.
S: Yikes.
AB: Good times man, good times. You remember that time you shouted I LOVED YOUR POEM in that one girls face and then bolted? So funny.
SB:…………..no.
AB: Liar.
SB: SHUT UP WE HAVE COMPANY YOU JACKHOLE.
Bowels: *Menacing bubbles.*
SB: Sorry. Yes, I remember. I wound up kissing her later on so it was fine.
AB: Don’t start none.
S: So how was the culture?
SB: I always felt like a neon sign. I’d gone to some Slams at the OK Hotel but, I’m not a slam poet.
All: *Moment of silence.*
SB: I had NPR voice before NPR voice was a thing. I had to learn to use it.
S: Why did you stop?
SB: My first feature, afterwards a White woman walked up to me, after I’d read a poem about suicidal ideation and wanting to die and told me she was disappointed because she was so hoping I’d be one of those “slam bam” poets. That is literally what she said. I was so mortified I almost shit my pants.
AB: Shit yeah that was terrible. White people ruin everything.
All: ……..yeah.
SB: Yeah.
AB: Yeah.
Anus: *fft*
All: Go ahead, sing your song.
Anus: ……….I can’t now you’re all listening.
S: What has made you want to read again?
SB: I have met some people who actually have listened to me on a gut level and wanted to have my voice present. That’s been a lot. I still don’t read publicly regularly for a lot of reasons but I’d like to do it more. I love it now. A few years ago I was invited to a reading series in Portland by Dena Rash Guzman and Jenny Forrester, it was the best audience and since then, watch me go. A few times a year. But only a few.
S: Why?
SB: Aside from being self-conscious about my teeth and lisp, via social media I’ve been able to be exposed to the performances of a lot of different people and I can sit and watch and know I belong in that stratosphere of wonder.
AB: Cause nobody likes you and well……
SB: True.
S: True.
All: Shit.
S: Hey, hey people like you. Come on, some people you don’t even know bought the book. Calm it down bitches.
SB: I guess.
All: …………..
S: Okay so, are you going to do more with Gasoline Heart?
SB: I want to. I want to do some totally accessible readings videos. Captioned by me. I want to maybe offer up some essays or other work about using my voice this way. I dunno. I’m not famous…..
S: Yet.
AB: LOLOLOLOLOLOL U DUMB BUNNY.
SB:……………..see what I have to deal with?
S: Yeah.
Anus: Yeah.
AB: YEAH YOU GODDAMN RIGHT.
S: Ahem. Thanks for coming y’alls. I got this from here.
All: Bye bitch.
S:
This has been brought to you by the associated anxieties that generally fuel my work and prevent it. This interview has been a very real look at what is happening inside my brain and body at any given time. For most of my career as a writer I’ve tried to compartmentalize this Anxiety Brain self into their own little box. Keep them quiet so I could try to be professional or be a good writer or whatever I was doing at the time.
In the last few years I’ve been slowly letting go of the idea that in order to ‘succeed’ and do my best work, I had to work in this fractured way. I have had to accept that this behavior doesn’t let me do my best work. I have had to accept and release the shame of being the neurotic, anxious, weirdo I am. I sweat when I write because most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m terrified. When people say nice things about my work I may or may not have a panic attack and feel my bowels want to let loose.
This is who I am. Who I have always been. When I allow myself to work in a more whole person manner, I do the work that fulfills me. In the context of writing poetry, the work in Gasoline Heart is the realness. It is the often rejected, the work called too personal, too (insert thing here) and the most true to my weird sweating potato life.
Outside of the realness, the other thing about this work is that it is my most enduring form of protest. I am not a marcher. I sling words. I get emotionally naked and dare people to look and hear. I hold out my heart because it is all I have. I can’t save the world but I can give it my heart and the hope that somewhere, there is another sweaty potato who needs to hear me. That’s enough.
Thank you.
~
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