![]() ![]() So I felt a lot more confident to just trust my instincts with this book. They had already been at the forefront of my mind I had already written about them before. A lot of those themes that are covered like abortion, climate change, growing up black and queer in Texas, transitioning, those kinds of things that I cover in Freedom House. It is definitely, probably close to three times bigger than How to Identify. So a majority of Freedom House was written probably in like a month and a half. Then it kind of turned into a book afterward when I was like, oh, again, like, what do I have to say and, now that I have that first book pressure off of me, maybe I feel like I have more license to say it. ![]() So yeah, it first was just a workshop that I was doing. So it just like, how do we merge these both a bit more artfully, a bit more tactically, and talking about the history of art? That is a part of social justice movements, you know, a lot of people look at the Black Arts Movement and other kinds of movements that incorporate art. I was just like, “Okay, what would it look like if art was an integral part of our social justice, our movement work?” I was talking to a number of people who are organizers and also writers. With Freedom House, I think I was a bit more confident … In 2018, I did this workshop titled Freedom Houses, which was about the kind of colliding of poetry and social justice. So yeah, that was a very long process, really, because I had to get over a lot of, I guess, impostor syndrome, and had to also figure out what are my themes? Like, what do I have to say. ![]() I had poems out there, obviously, before that book came out, but I hadn't had any culminated into one bound book that a press believed in enough to invest resources to. But it was a lot of starting and stopping because I had to gain confidence in myself as a writer, and really figure out what it meant to be a poet, like, what it meant to me to be a poet, what themes I wanted to talk about … first book has a lot of kind of pressure, because it's like your first debut to the world in a lot of ways. When I moved to Kallisto Gaia Press, was at it's more finished state, ended up accepting it and having it win their Saguaro Poetry Prize contest. And really, it was a iterative, on and off, starting and stopping process from 2018 to 2021. Around that time, then I was like, oh, okay, I can, you know, do the whole book thing, started, you know, putting together poems that I thought we're talking to each other. I didn't consider myself a quote unquote poet in the professional sense, probably until, like, 2018. I was just writing poems, you know, first as a hobby. But I didn't really know it was a book for a long time. That was a process that I think was culminated over a number of years. KB Brookins: So How to Identify Yourself With a Wound, it's considered a chapbook, right? Smaller book of poems, 30 pages of poems, specifically. This interview has been edited for clarity and lengthĪustin Chronicle: How did the writing of this new full length book Freedom House differ from the collecting and writing of How to Identify Yourself With a Wound? Ahead of Freedom House’s April 2023 release date, I caught up with Brookins about their new work. Long story short, we are now the proud proprietors of Freedom House Bed and Breakfast in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.Preorders for Freedom House are open, and available for purchase on multiple platforms including local booksellers like BookWoman and Black Pearl Books. This beautiful yellow farmhouse in a quaint Maine town kept coming to the top of our list, and spurred many late night conversations about whether we were really up for the challenge. The metaphorical search became ever more real as we found a few properties that really spoke to us. During the Fall of 2018 we started looking at bed and breakfast properties just for the fun of it. We had frequently daydreamed about “someday” running a bed and breakfast together, but that “someday” was always in an ever-elusive future. Life is an ever-changing journey for sure! Mike and I never would have guessed that we would be sharing this new adventure together-and with YOU, our guests! Mike has had a long and fulfilling career in higher education, and I have been privileged to run our busy household-as together we have raised three great children to adulthood. ![]()
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