Han Raschka is the author of the full-length collection Splinters (Collapse Press, 2022) and the chapbook Enamel (Bottlecap Press, 2023). They are one of three featured artists for the July 20, 2024, Watershed Reading. Raschka was interviewed by MILS graduate student Molly Nortman. Nortman is the student coordinator for the Wisconsin Women Making History Project at UW-Madison’s Gender and Women’s Studies Library at UW–Madison.
Molly Nortman: How did you start writing poetry? Do you have an origin story?
Han Raschka: I wrote poetry in high school. I wasn’t totally convinced I was capable of it, so I took time away from it. It was really not until the pandemic that I started seriously looking at poetry as a means to express myself. Over the pandemic, a lot of workshop groups went online, so I ended up taking a class through the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. In the first class, we all wrote something and read it out loud. It was the first time I’d read poetry that I’d written out loud to anyone, and I got a really good reaction, which was really heartening. The instructor, who is now a very good friend of mine, just gushed about it. It was a lifeline during the pandemic lockdown years, being able to write and share online. It’s still something I do today because it’s really a wonderful way to connect with people all over the country and the world.
MN: Who are you writing for in early drafts and who do you have in mind when you revise?
HR: I think when I first write, it’s just to get it out of me. Writing poetry is very cathartic. I’m the person who wakes up early in the morning like “I’ve got to write this down. I’ve got to get this out of me.” It’s like an exorcism, if that makes sense. So, I would say I’m writing for me, but that’s not really something I guide myself with. The guiding comes with the revision. At that point, I’m revising work in the hope that it connects with people in a certain way. But if it connects in other ways, I’m very happy about that. I have this very firm belief that once I throw something into the world, I don’t get to control it anymore. I don’t get to determine the narrative it has for people. So ultimately, even in the revision process, it’s not like I’m directing it at someone. It’s like I have this idea in my head when I’m revising, and I hope either that idea or something else connects with people in a way that makes them sit with it.
MN: What does your process look like at the beginning of a project, in the middle of a project, and as you near the end of a project? Do you have any writing rituals either for each new project or in your daily work?
HR: I use a variety of different processes. I’m big on freewriting. I try to freewrite at least 5 to 10 minutes a day, just getting out what needs to get out and seeing what I’m working with. At the beginning of a project it is really just that. As I progress further, whether it's a collection or just a short set of poems, I’m trying to find those connection points. I’m seeing what these have in common and what they’re trying to say together and separately. That’s how I set upon my first collection, and that’s how I’m going through this current one that I’m working on, asking “What is the poem trying to say, and what is the collection trying to say?” Because sometimes those are different things entirely. That’s the special part: that you don’t always know what the big picture is until you assemble it all together.
MN: How long did it take you to write Splinters, and then how long to find a publisher? What was that process like?
HR: This is a really fun question because I had a very unique way of getting Splinters published. The writing and editing process was a little under two years. That was a big, big undertaking for me. I had never put something of that size together before. I met and started working with my publisher, Collapse Press, through the course I took with the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. The instructor of that course runs Collapse Press. They had started out very small, and they were running an open-mic online every month. That was a huge lifeline for me. I was showing up to that every single month from the beginning. Through that, they developed an intimacy with my work that I really appreciated. They were soliciting manuscripts. They asked to see mine, and I sent it in. About a month later, we all sat down and discussed what Splinters was going to be and if this was something we wanted to pursue together, and the answer was yes. Collapse Press is a micro-press. They only publish a few books a year. It’s a very intimate process, so for about six months they were only working on my book. It was a really special experience to work one on one with this press to develop Splinters into what it needed to be.
MN: You write about a lot of very personal, painful subjects. How do you handle the workshopping process/receiving criticism on your work?
HR: This question is very important to me because it’s true, Splinters is extremely raw, personal writing. I’m very internal in the way I write. I’ve separated critique of the form from critique of my personal experience. They’re not critiquing what I went through. They’re talking about how I’m talking about it. Even then, it took me a while to understand that that wasn’t personal either. They’re not saying “You can’t talk about this experience.” The critique I’ve gotten on these poems has always been “We want to hear what you’re saying. We don’t know if you’re saying what you want to say yet.” Often it’s not a critique of how I’m saying something or what I’m saying, it’s just them wanting to dig into what I’m really trying to say, and I appreciate that. Ultimately, I think that’s something that ends up making the poem and the experience more meaningful for me, being recognized as an artist and a poet, having people that want to ask more from that.
MN: What are you working on now?
HR: I am working on my second full-length collection, tentatively titled Roadkill Daughter. It is this exploration of heritage and intergenerational trauma. I’ve coined this term “roadkill daughter.” It appears in the collection more than a few times as an archetype of daughters who have been run over and left on the side of the road. It’s an inheritable thing as people are born from traumatized families and grow up traumatized. It is this stacking, intensifying thing. You see roadkill, and you see two paths. You see an animal that’s dead, and you see an animal that could have lived. That’s how I conceptualize the roadkill daughter, someone who can either get out of this cycle or succumb to it. It’s a very personal collection. I’m doing some image-text work with it as well, collage, paintings, mixed medium art that visually encapsulates the manuscript. It’s been a really productive experience.
MN: What is bringing you joy right now?
HR: I am redoing my apartment right now! It’s so wonderful to walk into a place you’ve walked into before, but it feels different. It feels alive and new again, and that’s an energy I like to keep in myself as well, this utter joy of just being somewhere, of being here in the moment. It’s a really good way to kind of remind myself that nothing needs to be permanent, and you can create joy in the ways you see fit.
