{"id":1037,"date":"2019-01-02T10:23:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T18:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2025-02-25T10:31:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T18:31:01","slug":"suzanne-highland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/suzanne-highland\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 83: Suzanne Highland"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Suzanne Highland<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Suzanne Highland is a queer writer and teacher from Florida currently living in New York. She has an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, where she received the Miriam Weinberg Richter Memorial Award in 2016. She has also received support from the Sundress Academy of the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Brooklyn Poets, where she was a fellow in the summer of 2018. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Redivider, Yalobusha Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, glitterMOB, and Bomb Cyclone, among others. She teaches critical writing to high schoolers as well as composition at Hunter College, and she is a mentor and teaching artist with Urban Word NYC. Online at suzannehighland.com<\/a> and @emotingsweater.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cThe Collector\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I wrote a first draft of \u201cThe Collector\u201d at the beginning of 2016 and it\u2019s gone through ten or eleven different revisions since then, which, I don\u2019t know, is that a lot? It\u2019s a lot for me. The first draft started in a story my mom told me\u2014that as a child I would walk around the house, pick up all the drink coasters, and put them into a perfectly aligned, perfectly stacked tower\u2014and even though the coasters themselves disappeared by the third-ish draft, they were the wellspring I kept returning to: the question of gathering, accumulating, like or unlike data and trying to keep it all in one place, and for what? As the draft developed, the question developed, and this \u201cyou\u201d came in, but not until later\u2014the poem\u2019s opening line, \u201cWhen you came close enough, I wore you like a raincoat\u201d, was in the second to last stanza in the first draft. Then I read \u201cDeep Lane\u201d by Mark Doty, the \u201cDeep Lane\u201d that begins \u201cNovember and this road\u2019s tunnel\u201d, and the line \u201cI have a lake in me\u201d became part of the emotional fabric of my poem. In later revisions the \u201cyou\u201d climbs closer to the top and the speaker keeps reaching and reaching\u2026 The poem turned out to be about obsession, I guess. I gather things\u2014literal things, but also memories, experiences\u2014in an attempt to cohere with them, to draw a border around the self, in order to understand it. And I think a lot of people do this, either gather or let themselves be gathered, even by other people, even trying to align with them, to evaporate into them, because it\u2019s uncomfortable and painful to obsess over your loose ends. The poem wasn\u2019t hard to write, but thinking about what it means that it\u2019s out in the world is hard. Writing it taught me that the interior lake is deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve had \u201cAssume Form\u201d by James Blake on repeat the past few weeks, another beautiful album from the world\u2019s last excellent man. I\u2019ve also been listening to Clara Rockmore, the theremin player, which, if you haven\u2019t heard someone play the theremin before, get ready to feel haunted. When I\u2019m walking around the city, I\u2019m listening to A Tribe Called Quest. And I\u2019ve been building a playlist that\u2019s mostly alternative women artists and women-fronted bands from the 90s: Bj\u00f6rk, Hole, PJ Harvey, Alanis Morissette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m eating chocolate Newman-Os right this minute, and I still drink the beer I drank in college. I\u2019m a creature of habit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have two tattoos: one says \u201cin medias res\u201d and the other says \u201c(write it!).\u201d I\u2019m wildly attached to both, but one would have to be to get tattoos like those in the first place, I think. I want to get another, more complicated one, but honestly, dropping hundreds of dollars on anything is an anxious act for me. I need to be paid fair wages. That\u2019s not a statement about tattoos, really. See: austerity at large public higher ed institutions in New York City, elsewhere, everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just moved in with a friend with a dog who has almost the exact same black and white patterned coat as my cat, so my domestic life has become an incredible series of photo ops. Their relationship\u2014first time living with another animal, let alone their sworn enemy\u2014is also teaching me a lot about communication. They\u2019re bad at it, but they try desperately to talk to one another, and it\u2019s kind of endearing and hopeful to watch, even when it\u2019s evident they\u2019re coming from two different experiences and with two different ways of being. And they can be sweet to each other still. A tonic for a rough era.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n

“The Collector” by Suzanne Highland<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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