MQR’s Online Series, “Celebrating Writers in Our Community,” is inspired by our upcoming special-themed issue, “Why We Write.” The series of interviews is a celebration of the diversity of Southeast Michigan writers, their talents, their motivations for writing, and their significance to our community.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and currently teaches high school in Minnesota. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, he has worked as a teaching artist, a university lecturer, and a bookseller. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published by Missouri Review, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. You can find him online at marlinmjenkins.com.
Lillian Pearce (LP): How do you involve your own motivations for writing in the work you have done and are currently doing with young people?
Marlin M. Jenkins (MMJ): For me, writing is about communication and community and wonder and growth, and asking questions. These same things are at the core of my teaching and mentoring. We learn and grow through relationships, whether with other people or our relationships to ourselves and to language.
Working with young people, in particular, helps remind me why the work matters. When I see or hear a student be brave in their work, or feel seen by something they read, or grow closer to their peers through sharing, the value of writing feels urgent and immediate, and apparent. Without that, it would be much harder to pull through the difficult moments of feeling distant from art and writing.
LP: In your latest chapbook, “Capable Monsters,” how did your reasons for writing intersect with Orwell’s four motivations for writing?
MMJ: I feel a bit prickly about Orwell’s categories; ironically, both their specificity and their scope feel flattening to me. Instead, I turn to Carl Phillips: “I think of poetry as being more a transformation of experience rather than a transcription of it.” And to Lucille Clifton: “I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”
When I started writing the series of poems that became the backbone of the chapbook, those ideas were my starting points: What intrigues me about this subject material? What connections can I make across context and subject? How can I transform the language of a video game into a different but related experience?
LP: MQR’s special-theme issue “Why We Write” seeks to illuminate perspectives and examine the motivations of writers specifically in relation to how they are influenced by social and political conditions and social justice. How do these concepts influence you?
MMJ: The short answer to if these conditions influence my writing is yes; of course they do. That’s evident in the work itself, but even if it wasn’t, those factors are always at play in the background of any writer’s work. Money plays into every level of writing—the availability of time and energy to produce work, education, publishing, etc.—just like identity and other political factors shape who we are and therefore shape our art—directly or indirectly.
I recently published a poem that included the sentence: “i am so / privileged and so afraid.” I feel like I take that idea with me a lot—that intersection, the many paradoxes, and seeming contradictions. I grew up poor, and I carry that experience with me; at the same time, I live what feels like a middle-class life now, and I was able to apply to a large handful of graduate programs with financial help from my dad; it would be irresponsible to ignore either truth. I am Black and Arab and queer, but even within those marginalized identities, I hold various kinds of privilege. On a different note: the fact that the market for poetry is so much smaller than it is for prose means there’s less financial pressure in the process of publishing, and therefore, in theory at least, a freedom that comes with that lowered pressure, though with the trade-off of most people not being able to make a living off of poems. In other words, it’s like a quote from an Elizabeth Alexander poem that I tell my students often: “Many things are true at once.” I want my work to hold the many truths—the intersections and complications—all at once, and I want my process and how I move through the world to be aware of them, too. I want to steer toward awareness of those multitudes.
LP: In reference to the act of writing or the writing life, how do you think about community?
MMJ: I think your community is whoever you interact with, build with, grow with, are accountable to. And it’s also the people you are in a position to serve. That could be unofficial or official, named or informal. Personally, I have little-to-no allegiance to organizations or institutions but to the people those orgs or institutions are meant to serve. That might seem obvious, but I think it gets taken for granted. Lots of “community” ends up being people invested in institutions or just looking out for their immediate circle of friends. But I want everybody to eat, not just those who are already on the listserv; I want to use my skills and resources and experiences to help whoever needs them, not just the people I already know. I think lots of people in writing communities struggle with building and serving those communities, and that’s precisely where I want to focus my energy.
LP: What would your council be for young people looking to find their voice and narrate their experiences in times of uncertainty, injustice, and the unknown?
MMJ: Be reflective and intentional but don’t let that get in the way of being open and teachable. Be more invested in what you have to learn than in what you already know or already have to say. If you go to the poem or the story or the essay for clarity, let that clarity be emotional clarity; be skeptical of un-nuanced certainty and easy answers. If you’re wondering if you should write something or not, I encourage you to write it, but never forget that sometimes the work is just for you: be discerning about when to share the work and when to keep it to yourself, letting the process be what’s of value. You deserve to take up some space, and others deserve for you to know when you shouldn’t be taking that space. Read a lot. Read work you identify with and feel seen by, and read work that feels like it’s from a different world than the one you live in. Writing won’t save the world, but it might save a few people, and it will help us along the way, and it can give us the fuel to do the work that writing itself can’t do.
