It was an unbearably humid August morning when I made my way to my computer for a Zoom conversation with I.S. Jones, a big deal for an emerging writer like myself. Dressed in a cardigan sweater, she just seems so much cooler than anyone I have ever encountered. I.S. looked me in the eyes as she spoke cold hard truths.
“I expect that if I did my work well as a writer, I come with 50%. I expect my readers to come up with the other 50%,” she admitted to me at one point. Then, after noticing the bewildered look on my face, she followed up saying, “I have a poem in my chapbook called ‘Nexplanon,’ which is my birth control. Many people have never even heard of it. But, I do expect my readers to research the birth control if they’ve never heard of it before. Years ago, I got into an argument with a professor who said that it’s not reasonable for me to expect my readers to do the extra work. I replied, ‘Well then they’re not my readers.’”
What has your role as the director of ALL's Watershed Reading series been like? How has it shaped you as a writer personally?
ALL was, in a lot of ways, my introduction to Madison. My incredible colleague, Chris Greggs, put me in the line of vision to work with this amazing organization that brings so much art and culture to our little corner of the Midwest. Being the Watershed Director, I am able to curate a unique experience of literary arts by pairing poets, essayists, fiction writers together from not only the Madison area but (because of us switching online) also all over the world. As a curator, one thing I love to do is pair emerging writers with established ones. Here I am thinking of our reading with Dujie Tahat, Victoria Flanagan, and Adrian Matejka. The value of the series is connectiveness, is celebration, is a delightful meeting of the minds. I’m biased, of course, the readings are always but I so love the conversation after where I get to pick the brains of the writers which feels like a profound privilege. As an avid reader, sometimes I wish I could ask the poet / novelist / essayist about their process in real time and in a lots these talks post-reading satiates that desire to see writers as humans using language to work through their larger ideas. What the Watershed did for me, as Itiola Jones, is set me on the path towards success. Before I came to Madison, I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t yet know what I wanted my “daytime work”, for lack of a better term, would look like. I love art administration. I love the demand of it. Coordinating events, readings, bringing people through this medium I love so much. I love how it shapes and better a community. I love how art keeps stories alive. ALL is an amazing organization and I feel profoundly honored to be a part of it.
What did you learn from writing your chapbook, Spells of My Name?
Oh, I learned so much. I had to rewrite it twice. I never thought I was going to write a chapbook, honestly. I didn’t initially think I would have one because I just didn’t have poems for it. The poems that appear in the chapbook are like a vestigial organ compared to what the second book would look like. But, at the same time, the chapbook is very much a self-contained collection. There won’t be much of a continuation between the chapbook and the second book, but there will be a lot of marrying between the two of them.
I had moved back home with my parents after my first MFA program. After living in New York for a while, I was not able to keep up with how expensive the city was. It’s so expensive. Man, I don’t know how I did it. I had a part-time job and I freelanced, and by some miracle of God, I was able to afford rent every month. It’s crazy. Never again. I like having a job and benefits.
I started two projects. I started writing a very long essay, and I had also started this chapbook. The African Poetry Book Fund solicited me for my small book. They have a chapbook box series for emerging African writers. The stipulation is the person must be an African poet, meaning someone who is of African descent or had at least one parent who is of African descent. Both my parents migrated here from Nigeria in the 70s and 80s.
I wrote the chapbook the first time, and that version is radically different from the version that’s being published now. I’m grateful for all of those rejections because none of those presses were a good fit. But, the chapbook was also not done, so I scrapped it and started again. And I remember I kept having these dreams of me as a black fawn running through this dark forest and this shadow of a hunter chasing me. The dream would always end with a bullet piercing my side and me bleeding out. And so I wrote the poem, “My Therapist Asked, ‘Is The Hunter In Your Dreams Your Father?’” In the second version of the chapbook, that was the last poem.
Then, I realized that’s not the end of the chapbook, so I started again. I rearranged it. I cut a lot—I cut over half of the poems out from the first version to the final version. Almost all of the poems that were in that version did not make it, which was for the best. I think I still need to rewrite them and figure them out. So, now I knew the poems were about me as this black fawn, my father as this hunter as the framework’s center. There are four poems titled “Interview with the American Nigerian” that govern the movement of the chapbook. So throughout, I’m this black fawn being chased by a hunter until the end of the manuscript. In between, there are talks about water, immigration, being an immigrant daughter, language, and sexuality. The book also deeply talks about me being a survivor of sexual assault as well, which was something that I didn’t know how to yet talk about until this manuscript. I don’t know if it’ll ever come up in any future manuscripts, but I was proud of myself for being able to find a way to do it in this small collection.
What’s also important is the idea of naming; the power of naming, the power of naming things and naming people. This also obviously brings up an ethical concern. When you name someone directly in a poem or short story, for example, what are the ramifications of that? In the chapbook, I name my abusive ex. I put their name in there. In the original poem, their name was redacted. Then, at the end when I was going through the edits with my editor, I made the choice to actually take off the redaction. It appears twice in the book. I thought to myself, Oh, they probably won’t read it. But, if it’s somehow reached them, I’m ready for whatever happens. I’m not afraid in the ways that I may have been before. I survived the worst, and there’s nothing else that can come for me now.
At the center of all of those other things that the chapbook is negotiating my relationship with my father. Everything that chapbook negotiates stems from that relationship. There’s a long poem towards the end of the chapbook called “On Transatlantic Shame.” It’s a condensing of my father’s journey towards naturalization. It’s also about our relationship and how I’ve learned to humanize my father despite his cruelty. It made me realize that much of the way in which I’ve learned to make peace with my father is to understand that he does not have the language for the wounds that he has endured throughout his life. He grew up in a version of Nigeria that was still occupied by British rule. Nigeria went through civil war when he was a child and the country is still healing from that civil war. There are a lot of ways in which my father and his generation of men still have to negotiate that pain. That pain is something that he has carried with him into fatherhood. And that pain is something that I have also inherited and learned to heal from. This is a lot for a small chapbook, but I think that it was also a measure of learning to forgive. How do you love someone through their wounds when they often don’t have that language? A lot of the chapbook is about different kinds of language. How do we make language where there was once none? How do we create language in the space of pain and trauma?
Why do you think your chapbook, Spells of My Name, would be a good choice for emerging writers to read?
If they’re a writer who, like me, grew up in a household of multiple languages, I think the chapbook would be a good choice for them. My mentee was extremely gracious enough to read the chapbook in its final-ish form. She said that there’s a lot of vulnerability, but there’s a lot of strength in the vulnerability that I approached the book with. There’s a way in which language is lush and unflinching and very direct. I think it’s also a testament to my growth that I’m not afraid to say the scary and sometimes rough things that I may have been afraid to say before. I think that’s what I’ve always wanted from the poetry. I want to see the poet not hide. There’s a difference between mystery and secrets. If you want secrets, maybe you shouldn’t be writing a poem. But, if there is mystery, maybe there’s something interesting to be said about the work that you’re trying to do. I would like to believe that my poem exists somewhere in the space between that, maybe more towards mystery than secret. I’m not interested in hiding anything. I’m not interested in flinching away from the difficult things that need to be said. I’m deeply invested in a rich, exciting language.
I hope that the poems in this chapbook make folks think like, Damn, I want to keep writing. This is exciting. This is what language is capable of? Oh, man, I can’t wait. I also think that there’s a lot to be said about writing something that heals you and hopefully heals other people. This chapbook got me through the worst winter of my life. There was a moment last year when I just did not want to live anymore. The chapbook was integral to helping me heal from a lot of personal pain that I was going through. I’m grateful for that time I spent with it. I’m also grateful to my program, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for awarding me the Kemper Fellowship. It helped me write many of the poems that ended up in the final version of the book. I sometimes see things online that say everyone who’s an emerging writer is expected to write a chapbook. No, you don’t have to write a chapbook. But, I think that there’s a lot to be said about how the chapbook is its own unique genre, right? Like a small compact collection of poems that is its own sort of closed field. I think the chapbook is a good test run, so to speak, about your process as a writer and about what’s important to you when you’re putting together a collection.
I had an idea of how to put together a collection, but I didn’t know for sure until I had gone through multiple versions of my chapbook once it was done. I’ll likely go through the same thing again when I finish my full-length [book]. You also shouldn’t be afraid to scrap a project and start again if you have to. The very first version of Spells of My Name would have been disavowed, and I would have pretended I never saw it. I wouldn’t recognize myself; it’s somebody else. But, the rejections in between versions when I was rewriting poems completely from scratch were important to my growth as a writer. I became a more deliberate and more succinct writer between drafts and versions and rejections. I’d like to believe that I’ve grown significantly as a writer between older versions of the poems and what will now appear in the collection, and that might be something worth seeing. Also, if you like poems about deer and sad dad poems, this chapbook is most definitely for you.
What challenges have you encountered in making your poetry accessible for public consumption?
There are different ways to define what accessible is. If accessible is a language barrier, much of my poetry as of late negotiates both Yoruba and English. It’s important for me that neither language has supremacy over the other, if that's the right word. Usually, if you have a poem that uses both English and another language, it’s almost always assumed that the language that’s in English will be italicized. To me, I think that’s a form of colonization, which I actively resist. So, it’s important for me that both languages have their own equal footing in a poem. That’s one measure of accessibility. Maybe another measure is how people physically get my poems. Much of my work is online, so that’s usually an easy way to access it.
For example, one of the reasons why I made the choice to sign with Newfound Press is because folks can buy both physical and digital copies of my chapbook. I have friends in Nigeria and Spain and different parts of the world, and it’s important to me [that they can access it]. I also found out that I have folks in Ireland who read my work. I don’t know how they found me, but that’s incredible, right? My press also ships internationally, but even if getting a physical copy is a barrier, the fact that they could just buy a digital version of Spells is important to me. Accessibility in that regard was critical in which press I would choose.
