An Interview with DJ Hills Regarding Leaving Earth (Split Rock Press)

Interview by Crystal S. Gibbins

Crystal S. Gibbins: When did you begin writing the poems for Leaving Earth? What was the biggest surprise as you were writing and gathering poems for the chapbook?

DJ Hills: The first draft of “Nostalgia” was written in 2015 and “After a Long Vacation,” the poem in the book that I wrote most recently, was composed in April 2021. All the other poems were written somewhere in between.

I didn’t mean to frame the chapbook chronologically, but one of the surprises in putting the book together was how it took on the shape of my own journey of finding home and community across my lifetime.

Many of the poems in Leaving Earth are situated in specific places (e.g., Maryland, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oxford, England), and some of these poems explore the trauma of place. Can you tell us more about your connection with place and how it informs your writing?

I became aware of my own awareness of place when I was abroad. No one I met at Oxford had a real sense of where I grew up, so I had to constantly describe it, and in doing so, realized how profoundly tied my identity was to this tiny cluster of towns at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Friends and family who have been engaging with my writing for years now can tell you that I’ve been writing about or around the idea of “home” for so long—and may continue to do so for the rest of my life. It’s part of the consequence of carrying this tension between feeling inextricably connected to spaces and knowing, as a queer, non-binary person, that I am not always welcome there.

What is the most difficult part about putting a poetry collection together (or the most challenging aspect at any stage in creating a collection, making it whole, and seeing it through to publication)?

I’d say the most difficult part, and also the most rewarding, was trusting myself to let go. I probably could have nit-picked at the manuscript for the rest of my life trying to achieve some sort of perfection, but as you and any writer knows, there reaches a point when the work needs to stand on its own. When you reach that point, you find it frees up all this mental space to focus on new projects.

You’re such a creative talent. Not only are you a terrific poet, but you’re also a playwright and theater artist. Do you find that your theatrical work influences your poetry and vice versa? How so?

Thank you so much, Crystal. That’s so kind.

Apart from navigating the different expectations an audience/readers have in approaching theatre versus poetry, the two processes aren’t that different for me. I find a great deal of overlap between writing poetry and crafting plays.

I’ve written a “ghazal for the stage,” that borrowed the poetic structure of a ghazal to tell a theatrical story. And just last spring I had a production of a one-act play whose core text was deeply influenced by a prose poetry workshop that I took through Oyster River Pages.

On the poetry side, there are poems of mine that are really these hyper-intimate, lineated scenes that arc the way a scene in a play might.

When an image or a line pops into my head, it’s often a tossup as to which medium it might end up in. But I think American theatre is becoming increasingly more open to the presence of poetry onstage and I’m hoping that as the lines between genres become more muddled, there will be more space in the poetry world for theatricality.

What’s next for you? What are you working on now, and what can we anticipate in the future?

I’ll be wrapping up my MFA in playwriting (at UCLA) in 2024 so the project most immediately on my radar is my thesis production.

It’s a play titled I SWEAR TO GOD that explores the effects of religious trauma on queer youth, focusing on a group of thirteen-year-olds putting on a passion play in the early 2000s. The kids are portrayed by ministry puppets and so I’m thinking a lot about bodies—the pain we ask actors to hold in their bodies and the consumption of the body by spectators.

Somewhat related, I’m also putting together a full-length collection of poetry that I’m tentatively calling Love Poem with Dead Bodies. There’s no timeline for when that will be completed but it’s something I’m actively working on.

As Leaving Earth goes out into the world, who do you hope will read it? What effect do you hope it will have on readers or the larger world?

I had a writing professor in undergrad who told us, “If your writing only reaches one person in some distant place, you’ve succeeded.” I carry that advice with me into every project I take on.

I don’t know that I have a specific audience or reader in mind, but I know that queer books saved my life as a kid. I suppose my hope, as Leaving Earth takes its place outside of me, is that the poems will join a larger rallying cry of queer literature.

And maybe if that cry gets loud enough, the folks who need to hear it, will hear it, and feel less alone.

As a publication focused on place, environment, and the relationship between humans and the natural world, we’re curious: if you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you take with you and why?

Assuming I’m going to make it back alive . . . [laughs]

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

It keeps being recommended to me and it’s nice and long so it’ll keep me busy during my expedition.  

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Who needs food when I can chew on any given paragraph of Offill’s for days?

Devotions by Mary Oliver

It’s missing a few of my favorite Mary Oliver pieces, but I selfishly would want as many of her poems with me as possible so I can turn to them when my own words fail to capture the beauty of the natural world.

Also, if I don’t make it home, let me die clutching a Mary Oliver collection, please and thank you.

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Leaving Earth by DJ Hills was published by Split Rock Press in November 2022. The book is available for purchase on Split Rock Review’s e-store, Amazon, and through your favorite indie bookseller.