Vanessa Angélica Villarreal just signed on as nonfiction editor at LA’s own Gold Line Press. She’s an innovative poet who isn’t constrained by genre; her work is electrifying, form-melting, challenging. I asked her about Gold Line’s upcoming chapbook contest and her work as an editor.
How did you get started as Nonfiction Editor at Gold Line Press? What is it you particularly like about the press?
To be totally honest, it came out of necessity. I was facing a surprise separation from my partner of ten years with whom I built a life (which included financial commitments), and the prospect of getting my PhD on a limited income as a single mother living alone was terrifying. An administrator offered me the position to help fill the summer funding gap (no, we’re not guaranteed summer funding), and it was a great opportunity. I write nonfiction and lyric essays, my poems inhabit that gauzy space between non-fiction and poetry, and I’m most interested in formally innovative personal writing, so it was kismet in a way. I needed this, and they needed me. I’m working to leave my mark on Gold Line now, and I think it will be a great relationship benefitting marginalized voices.
I was going to try to find a more positive, less personally revealing way of answering this question, but I think it’s also important to reveal the rigors and challenges of women’s lives outside of the “writing/editing/submitting” vacuum. This is demanding work done in the face of hardship and overextension, limited power, limited resources, mental health challenges, grief, nurturing. It’s important to talk about the absurd scarcity of resources for women working in such specialized fields requiring expertise and experience. My answer should sound like, I love my job! I love submissions! I am passionate! But the threat of no summer funding combined with sexist circumstances marks my path, and that’s, to me, what never gets talked about.
What has the process been for choosing judges for the nonfiction chapbook competition?
I was like, who wrote the most LIT books of the last two years? I had a lot of folks in mind—the fearless Randa Jarrar, Khadijah Queen, Joe Jimenez, Aisha Sabatini Sloan—but I reached out to BEOTIS (a talent management agency out of Chicago) to inquire about Dr. Eve Ewing (author of Electric Arches) and Hanif Abdurraqib (author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us) first, and I was luckier than I could imagine. Dr. Ewing suggested they co-judge, and they agreed! So we have two superstar judges judging the Gold Line nonfiction contest, and it’s for a full-length book. I’m thrilled. Y’all—BEOTIS is a dream to work with.
How do you see your craft as a writer and your work as an editor intersecting? Do you find one strengthens the other?
As I said earlier, my work flat-out refuses the constraints of genre. I see genre as a capitalist constraint, a way of domesticating work into marketable categories, a way of labeling work so that readers know what section in the bookstore to go to. And I have a really hard time with that, because my process just isn’t linear or contained like that. My writing process is constantly drawing from personal experience, pushing it toward new ways of saying via formal innovation and fresh formal choices, reaching out into fictive reconceptualizations, imaginings of the past, imaginings of what can’t be known but is nonetheless true. Human experience, at least for me, finds its language in many forms, and I want access to all of them to tell the truth as I know it as artfully and as critically as I can. Every form is a tool and a blueprint, and I’m most excited when a writer can use the whole palette to make something real.
I’m so glad to be looking at nonfiction because of this—it’s such a rich, inventive space for braiding memoir, criticism, lyric, theory, and speculative narratives through the constant re-invention of form. Jennifer Tamayo’s You Da One is an artifact of ferocious resistance and the daughter-heart’s journey through a fragmented, post-colonial selfhood. Tim Jones-Yelvington (Strike a Prose) and Kai Cheng Thom (Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir) blend personal detritus with near-fabulist exaggerations that queer ideas of “truth” when that truth is a site of alienation and trauma. Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson have shown us that the memoir can be choral—told in polished, interlocking fragments, linking memory to a complex pastiche of theory, journalism, and criticism. So when I look for work, I’m looking for evidence of an expansive mind at work, a mind finding its language, forming that language, making deliberate and artful choices about how to tell.
Gold Line Press is one of many independent small presses publishing fresh and new work. Do you have other favorite indie presses?
Not because they’re my press, but Noemi is doing fearless work right now. Nightboat, Button Poetry, Birds LLC, 1913, University of Arizona, Operating System, Essay Press, Coffeehouse Press, Timeless Infinite Light. I know I’m missing some, I’m sorry!
What are you most looking forward to about being editor at Gold Line?
Omg, the submissions! I L O V E seeing new work in its vulnerable, forming stages. I’m a mom through and through—I was always that friend who mommed the fuck out of her friends (like calling y’all to remind you to change your oil, paying for your plane ticket, making you a big-ass Mexican breakfast, you know who you are). Part of being a mom is recognizing potential and encouraging that potential by boosting self-esteem and self-confidence, praising what’s being done right, nurturing natural talents. I want your mess. (Wow, that sounded like a George Michael lyric and now I’m sad/slightly aroused, THANKS GEORGE MICHAEL but for real, how sexy is “Father Figure”? Whew.) I want the work you are way too afraid to show anyone else because of all the risks you’re taking and wanting to self-edit. Send me everything. I want it all. Believe in yourself, tell your story. Someone out there needs it.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and featured as a Best of 2017 book at The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, BOMB, Literary Hub, and Entropy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Boston Review, The Academy of American Poets, Buzzfeed, Epiphany, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.