The Ways I Tried to Do Comp Het

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Bi Pod, a podcast about all things bisexual. I'm Evan and my pronouns are they and them. And I'm Christina. My pronouns are she and her. We welcome anyone who has any kind of relationship with or curiosity about queerness. The Bi Pod is an ad-free community-supported podcast. You can support us for as little as $2 a month. To join the community or get more information about the podcast, visit patreon.com slash the bi pod.

[00:00:25] This podcast is one piece of the long history of bisexual and queer discourse. We don't know everything. At all. We're here to be part of the conversation. Let's get into it. Hi, Christina.

[00:00:54] Hi, Evan. You have a book coming out. I do, don't I? Yeah. Very soon on February 22nd, you will be able to get your hands on the ways I tried to call you home. Yeah. By the time this episode is up, we'll have a pre-order link for people. Yeah. So even right now, you can pre-order. Something I've learned from this process is that I will never have a title this long again. I like it for the collection. Never again.

[00:01:23] In the future, I just get two words. That's it. That's a good, yeah. But yeah, we are putting the book out with ourselves. Our press. Our press through Double Text Media, which has been a really cool experience. Evan, thank you so much for all of the work that you have done on the book. It's been lovely. Yeah. It's been nice to make a thing and have hands in every step of it.

[00:01:51] And also, everybody who worked on this book, mostly you and also our writing group, loves me and is invested in me. Which is not the experience that everybody gets to have when they put a thing out. I feel like earlier in my life, I had a really different view. Not a view for other people, but for myself of self-publishing something. I had some imposter syndrome about it. And now I'm like, I'm never going back. Everything. I want the rights back to all of my work.

[00:02:21] It's all going to be Christina's version. No, it's fine. There's pros and cons. But this has been a really great experience. And it feels like a very personal book. So it's been nice. It's been a personal experience. We're also, we have a press. We do have a press. You're not just like, I don't know, releasing it to Kindle Unlimited. It's true. Yeah. I don't know if people do that with poetry. I think it's maybe. That's more novels. Yeah. I would think. I don't know. I don't read fiction. I have no idea.

[00:02:53] Yeah. It's also been cool for us to be doing a new business thing together. We also put out your book. Yeah. And I'm excited to put more things out through Double Text Media in the future. Do you want to give the pitch for the book? I don't. Yes. I was going to say I don't have a pitch. But my last book was very difficult to explain to people because it was too long. This book is a book of breakup homes. So it's I'm in my bag. I'm doing what I do best.

[00:03:22] But it is specifically about healing from codependence and holding on to relationships in a way that maybe doesn't serve anybody. And like memory and nostalgia and other related things. How was that? Not very good. I'm going to work on that. This is the first time you had to give the pitch. Yeah.

[00:03:47] Which I didn't realize until both right before you hit record that I would have to do that. Okay. Now you give a pitch. Well, I can tell you the blurb that you wrote. That you wrote. It's on the back of the book. Yes. At least the first sentence of it. I think it's two sentences. Which is that Christina goes beyond the breakup poem exploring the universe of absence created by another person. Wow.

[00:04:13] Oh, and this book is for anyone who has ever held on to someone who may not have been completely there to begin with. That was better. I'm just going to steal your pitch and I'm going to pretend that I wrote it. Great. Yeah. And then when people are like, that's weird. It says Evan Chelsea on the back of the book. I'll be like, yeah, I don't know that. They copied me. Ghost writer. Ghost writer. Yeah. That's what the book is about. And it's short. It's a chapbook. 40 pages. 40 pages. A tight 40. Mm hmm. Yeah.

[00:04:42] So why'd you make this book? How dare you? Well, as the people may know, if they listen to me talk at all or if you have read my other work, I write a lot of breakup poems, especially considering the fact that I've been an extremely long term stable monogamous relationship. But I just like the form. And I also like work through a lot of things in relationship, as I think most people do.

[00:05:10] And so when I am like reflecting on past relationships, I am like reflecting on myself. I used to feel really self-conscious about that, like that there were like too many breakup poems in my repertoire. And then I decided maybe I'd just go with that. And so the like longer manuscript that I had been working on, I pulled these poems out and was like, this is the suite.

[00:05:35] And now that other book maybe won't have any breakup poems and that'll be new territory for Christina. But yeah, I really I also like wanted to see what it would look like to like try to piece the poems together in a loose narrative. narrative. It's not exactly, you know, you know, one, two, three narrative, but they're all about different things and different people and different times. And some of them are not rooted in a thing that really happened.

[00:06:05] And it was interesting. The first time that I put all the poems together, I was like, I realized that I had them in an order of like roughly when they happened. And I was like, that doesn't really make sense to anybody except for me. And then I have been playing with them. I put them into a narrative order and I was like, OK, this is interesting and also compelling to me because instead this is a story of me. Other relationships, other experiences. And yeah, that's how we got here.

[00:06:32] One of the things that we talked about before we talked about this with girl teeth was the way that you get to engage with your work in a different way or that other people get to engage in your work in a different way in a book because you are seeing a series of poems. You're seeing them side by side. You're seeing them in a particular context as opposed to just consuming them one at a time.

[00:06:55] What new things came to the fore or what what did you get out of the experience of of putting these poems in context? Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like I really gave myself permission to like look at the same thing from different perspectives or to like see what it looked like to process the same thing more than once.

[00:07:18] And some of those like didn't make it to the final manuscript, but like I have a suite of poems in there that I kind of like they were one poem and then they were like three different versions of the same poem. And now it's a poem with two addendums where I'm like going back to the same thing. I even comment on how I'm going back to the same thing.

[00:07:39] And I think I said this about Girl Teeth as well, but I feel like I had permission to like not have to tell the full story in one piece because I could presume that maybe somebody will pick up the book and just read one poem and walk away. But like I have given them the context. Yeah. Which felt good.

[00:07:56] I also feel like I like putting creating a narrative that didn't quite happen, like most of the things in the book did happen, but like putting stories from different points in my life into like a new narrative felt very liberating because I was like, I'm now telling a different story than the way that I experienced it. Although also it sort of feels like the way that I experienced it.

[00:08:25] But it just like felt really freeing to be able to like connect things in a narrative way that like maybe don't connect like in the 3D world. And I also feel like I got to kind of like explore some deeper feelings doing that because I was like, I'm sort of thinking about the big picture and also able to pull in different moments from different experiences to tell something cohesive, which was cool. That's hard for me to do in a single poem.

[00:08:56] Yeah. Before we started recording, I was looking in our bipod drive and I saw an agenda for our comp het episode, which if you haven't listened to. That's one of our best. Yeah. Good episode. And you, Christina, were like, oh, that's not relevant for today. And I was like, well. I see you've come here to attack me.

[00:09:26] Yes, I have. Do you want me to try and put this into a question? You can just say talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A couple, like I would say two of like kind of the primary experiences that the book that I draw from for the book feel very like as I reflect on them, I'm like, ah, I was doing a comp het. Like one person, I'm like, I am not convinced that I actually wanted to be with you.

[00:09:56] And yet at the time, I certainly was. And another person I think I did want to be with in some capacity, but also like it not working out felt like it meant something really big about me. And I feel like that relationship, I can't quite articulate it, even though I wrote a book about it.

[00:10:22] But there was something about like this is a very like, like this is a normal relationship. This is what normal people do. Like at the time, this I was kind of framing it. And I was like, if I can't make this work, well, then what the fuck am I supposed to do? And which doesn't actually really say anything about the other person. They were nice. He was nice. This is comp het. So, you know, it's a man. But like inputting and like seeing those patterns in myself of like, how do I like carry this memory?

[00:10:50] Like, how did I, what was hard for me about grieving those relationships? And it wasn't exactly the person sometimes, but it definitely feels like I was doing comp het in a way that I maybe wasn't quite aware of. But I can remember like going back to that time in my life and being like this relationship ending is a very short relationship. That's my bag. Like if we're together for six weeks, that's perfect. I could write a million poems any longer than that.

[00:11:19] And I know too much information and it's boring. But, you know, six to eight weeks and then like months and months of will they, won't they? Yeah, that's that's my preferred format, I would say. But I can just remember feeling like, why is this so like other than being sad about not being with the person, which, you know, fine, valid. I was like, there is this feels like a life thing for me. So, in other words, yes, I was doing comp het.

[00:11:44] But and as you said something a while ago about like, I don't remember the context, but something about like categorizing this book is a bi book. And then I was like, oh, my God, it's not a bi book, which is not true. It is because I, in fact, wrote it. And then I felt self-conscious about it being about men because that's my own stuff. But then I was like, well, like it's about men, but also it's about me.

[00:12:10] Yeah. And it was interesting, again, to like be able to put all those different like relationships in like a different narrative shape because I was like, ah, I was trying to make this thing work that like sort of no matter who I came across, it wasn't going to work because I was trying to do a thing that I don't want to do. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:00] Like something different maybe from a relationship. Yeah. Like I felt like if I can just make this one thing work, everything else is fine. But it's all going to, you know, click together, which in fact is not true. But I didn't know that we had an interesting conversation about the title because in my head, it's always meant that like to make a home of another person. Mm-hmm. And you were like, it's like calling someone, hey, like to come home. Yeah. And that never crossed my mind. Mm. Yeah.

[00:13:29] Because you have a line about like a wandering heart or something and your first task is to catch it. And so my mind was like, you are like wrangling someone in some way. Yeah.

[00:14:10] Well, also that. Or think about what you might work on next. Like how is this leading you to future projects? I, like I said, I write a lot about breakups, but I also write about other things as listeners will know. We did an episode about my other work in progress in which I am absolutely telling on myself. And I think it has been great to like have a container where I'm like, this is the thing that I'm doing. I mean, I do go, as Evan said, beyond the breakup poem, but like that's the container.

[00:14:40] That's the frame. I have permission to write as many of these as I want. And taking all of those poems out of the like collection of poems that I'm working with right now, I was like my next book might not really have any like recognizable breakup poems in it. I mean, it might. I'm allowed to do whatever I want. But it was like cool to get to see. I just feel like there's always an element of that when I'm putting a collection of poems together, which is fine. That's what I write.

[00:15:09] But I feel like I am now writing different things. It was also interesting to like just have the space to be like, I am unapologetically writing poems about situationships from eight years ago. Like that's what I'm doing. That's the vibe. Can't relate. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't know what that's like. And it made me it was interesting and I felt invested. I feel invested in the work.

[00:15:38] And also I was like, I actually feel like kind of distant from these experiences now, which like in my life is true. But in my creative life has not been as true. Like it's felt like that's like where I want to like, I'm doing a thing with my fingers. Like that's like where I want to go creatively. Like that's what I want to work on. That's what I want to talk about. That's what I want to explore. And I might go back to that at some point. I, you know, have many years of writing ahead, presumably.

[00:16:08] But I feel like I've sort of gotten some iteration of that out of my system. And I'm interested to work on other things that, you know, I still write a lot of like retrospective self-focused poetry. But I have in fact experienced other things besides breakups. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm interested to like see what that looks like. Because, again, that's always been at least some element of my work. And it maybe won't be in the next project.

[00:16:39] Like even you, I was like, I took all the breakup homes out of this collection. You were like, what else is there then? In fact, there's a lot left. Yeah. Turns out no one is more shocked than me. Before we wrap up, do you want to read us one of the poems? I think I will read what I think is your favorite poem in the collection. I could be wrong. But it is one that you've requested before.

[00:17:07] This book, which this is true of my relationship of my work in general. Every time I read it, it like seems different, even though it's not. Like I read it a couple weeks ago when we got the first proof. And I was like, this book is so short. Like I feel like I worked for so much time and there's nothing here. And then I read it again and I was like, this is so long. It's like, it's the same book. The font is just different. It's me. I'm changing. And so every time I read it, it seems different.

[00:17:36] And I've noticed like different focuses. Foci? Is that it? I don't know. Focuses. And different themes like that come out to me and like different sort of central points. But the last few times I've read it, I have felt like this poem is sort of like the central poem. So I'll read this one. I am writing to tell you, I don't want to write poems to ghosts, but I do. I am writing to tell you, you were wrong about me.

[00:18:05] You turned your head too soon and didn't see me catch the light. You didn't see me shine, but if you had, you would have stayed. I am writing to tell you that I am more than what you remember. I am writing to tell you, I wish you thought about me the way I think about you. I am writing to tell you that all of my poems are about ghosts. I am writing to tell you that you are a ghost and I see you everywhere. Every time I open a new door, I think maybe you'll be there,

[00:18:34] sitting and waiting for me the way you've never been. I am writing to tell you that I've never made a space you couldn't fill, never wrapped a sheet around a bed you couldn't warm. I am writing to tell you you will always be here. You will always be something to me. Hmm. That's a poem. I never get over anything. I updated that to be in my bio. You'll find Christina living in Long Beach and never getting over anything. Yeah. We have some events planned.

[00:19:03] If you're in Long Beach on the 22nd, there's a launch. We'll put a link in the description to the pre-order. If you are interested in buying the book, pre-orders are great and helpful. Also, you can request it through your library. You can request it at your favorite local bookstore. Mm-hmm. And you can get it from our site. Yeah. Yeah. And on our site, which we will link to, there is a playlist for the book, which I think, in an unbiased stance, is very good.

[00:19:31] It's also exactly two hours and 22 minutes long, which was not intentional. And you'll notice that the launch is on 222. It just worked out that way. I don't know. As well as the other events that we have planned currently, and there might be more. So we will keep you posted there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, goodbye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode. The Bipod is made possible by our patrons. You can find us on Instagram at thebipod and on our website, thebipod.com.

[00:20:01] This show is produced and edited by me. And our theme song is Coming Home by Snowflake. Free audio post-production by our phonic.com.