Buy: This Is My Body by Jonthan Fletcher | Northwestern University Press | January 2025 | $12
What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?
The non-living writer who had the biggest influence on my debut chapbook, This is My Body (which just came out from Northwestern University Press), is Lucille Clifton. The first time encountered her, I was in Emmy Pérez’s poetry workshop focused on African-American literature. Though I know I’m not alone in my admiration for Clifton and her work, I was absolutely blown away by her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” especially the final (and widely anthologized) lines: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” In that moment, I felt like Clifton could’ve been talking directly to me and the mental health challenges with which I struggled for years but refused to let define me. Before I encountered “won’t you celebrate with me,” I was writing (albeit not as regularly as I am now or as with much discipline as I do now), but I was also writing less autobiographical pieces and more persona poems. This is not to say there’s no place for persona poetry in contemporary literature, though I do think one needs to be careful with such form, as there’s always the risk of appropriating the experience of another and getting it “wrong.” I, for one, have been guilty of that. After I read Clifton’s arguable magnum opus, I also leaned more into my own experiences and, in doing so, opened up some facets of myself of which I had been previously unaware. Does that mean I’ve since written only banger after banger? Of course not. But thanks to Clifton, not to mention Prof. Pérez, I think my poetry has significantly improved. If nothing else, I have since become a more prolific writer, more in tune with myself and my creative abilities.
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
The first line of This is My Body is “Though I did not call you / you were my David” and the last line of the chapbook is “we’d fall asleep, / warm and peaceful, in one another’s arms.” To be honest, I hadn’t initially planned on the collection bookending so nicely, as the manuscript was originally arranged in a different order. Thanks to the invaluable feedback of Chris Abani, an amazing Nigerian American poet, as well as the 2023 judge of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, I rearranged the collection and even omitted two poems that would have otherwise stayed but would have probably diluted the thematic cohesion of the chapbook. Until now, I hadn’t noticed how well the opening and concluding lines of the collection fit, but they really do.
More than that, though, they speak to the gentleness and vulnerability with which I approached the chapbook. This is not to say that every poem in the collection is necessarily gentle. In fact, quite a few of them aren’t. Nonetheless, there was a care with which I chose each and every piece that was included. Call it naivete, but I do like how the innocence conveyed in the lines bookends the chapbook. If nothing else, it allows the reader some relief in what is an arguably emotionally challenging text. Again, I didn’t necessarily have this in mind when I compiled the poems into a collection, but perhaps there was some subconscious intent. And, of course, Professor Abani’s careful and skillful eye and pen.
How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?
I’m not sure if this is exactly how I got into poetry, but I can pinpoint a memory in which I was complimented for my literary abilities and encouraged to continue writing. In third grade, my tough (though no less beloved) English teacher Ms. Williams asked my classmates and me to draft a poetic response to an image she had shared with us for a unit over the Underground Railroad—an exercise I later recognized as essentially an ekphrastic poem. While most of my classmates wrote theirs about a runaway slave, I wrote a piece from the perspective of the runaway slave. While I, of course, wouldn’t write a persona poem like that today (owning to the problematic assumption that I know, or could ever know, what enslavement was or felt like), I nonetheless demonstrated a great amount of imaginative empathy through the assignment. Unbeknownst to me, Ms. Williams, impressed and moved by the piece (“Escape on the Underground Railroad”), sent it off to a children’s literary magazine, which accepted it for publication. How many third graders can claim they’re published? I doubt many. While I wasn’t thinking in terms of, or interested in, publication, let alone a career in writing, at that young age, I was still intrigued by the idea that my words could have an effect, that they mattered to
someone in my life who wasn’t family or a friend. Scrawny as a child, I wasn’t very good at sports, and I often struggled in math and science. Maybe writing was something in which I could excel. Or so I started to wonder, unaware of the significance of that early, fortuitous literary experience.
What’s your favorite line(s) from your book?
My favorite line from my chapbook is the penultimate verse paragraph from “Dirigibles”: “Though neither as sleek / nor as swift as jets, / we glided nonetheless— / graceful crafts / carried by heat.” Perhaps not surprisingly, I consider that poem the heart of the collection. In fact, that was the original title of the chapbook. However, when looking at the collection as a whole, I thought “This is My Body” worked better, as it spoke to the religious themes present and woven throughout the chapbook. That said, I think “Dirigibles,” more than any other poem in the collection, encapsulates it—the idea of the body as a site of exclusion and despair, revelation and reclamation, and transformation and hope. At least that’s what I intended as the
emotional core of the chapbook.
Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?
Currently, I’m working on a project in which I’m taking pages from my mother’s doctoral dissertation in special education (“Prediction of Risk for Parenting Disorders Among Mothers of Patients in an Intensive Care Nursery”) and erasing large sections of them while responding to the leftover texts. As a transracial adoptee, I was struck, while rereading my mother’s dissertation, how the themes of motherhood, children, and family not only determined her doctoral research but paralleled nicely with the lacunae in knowledge of the circumstances of my birth and biological identity, my early (and most formative) relationships, and my own journey of self-discovery. Though my mother obviously didn’t have in mind her dissertation being used as a "found text," she is completely on board with the project and has encouraged and helped me in ways I wouldn’t have necessarily expected and for which I did not ask. Though This is My Body was dedicated to her, this new project, however similar in some thematic aspects of my debut chapbook, is not so much for my mother but with her. For that very reason, I am not only more excited about this project than I have been for any other literary attempt but am all the more dedicated to seeing this project through publication. Maybe no press will ultimately pick it up, but if that turns out to be the case, it won’t be for lack of my trying.
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.