Jocelyn Royalty
Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?
Jocelyn Royalty: I find that it is impossible to entirely divorce any writing—good writing, at least—from the sociopolitical context in which it exists. As writers, we draw on our own experience as individuals existing alongside the tensions of our countries, our leaders, our partisanship. That experience is a permeating force in my work. I find myself unable to write about love, or beauty, or friendship, or any of those “big” words, without also considering what forces endanger or complicate that love, beauty, and friendship. For instance, when writing about two romantically involved characters, my memories of love as an American lesbian are always lurking in the corner. Even if my characters are fundamentally different from me, I discover that I will often write their relationship as somehow halted or protected or tinged with sadness because the social landscape in which I have experienced love has come with these complicating factors.
ORP: Do you believe that hope is a luxury, a responsibility, a danger, or something else? Why?
JR: I think that hope is a kind of fuel. I remember the first time I really understood what my mom was doing when she was putting gas in our car at the filling station—actively adding something to make it go—and how shocking a realization that was. I must have been four or five, and I know it sounds strange, but I had never quite put the pieces together that “stopping for gas” was not just something done periodically while driving, but a deliberate behavior with an actual result. I think that the movement of the universe can be equated here to the movement of the car, and hope to gasoline. Like my childhood self, I think we as people have a tendency to assume that we are in perpetual motion without ever having been pushed. And yet, upon further examination, I see hope as the accelerating force behind every major and minor change made on this planet. Without the foresight it affords, our priorities would remain centered around our immediate needs and wishes; our imaginations would be limited to what we can sense. I believe hope is a resource as crucial and endemic to Earth as coal or natural gas, and one that deserves protection and attention. I think, too, that understanding hope—both what it looks like and what its absence looks like—is necessary to producing writing reflective of the human experience.
ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?
JR: The pandemic has absolutely been a changing force for my art production and consumption, though it’s sometimes hard to pinpoint whether it’s force has been positive or negative. There are the days that bleed together and my brain feels fuzzy; there are the days when listening to the morning NPR briefing makes me feel as though nothing I am capable of creating could be of any significance given the current state of my country. Those are the days that I wonder if I can ever write again. Sometimes reading even feels too grueling, like a relic from a time when we could afford to discuss the color of leaves, or the whir of the subway, or how a thunderstorm looks. But there are days, too, when I find myself noting absolutely everything I see, and writing down a million tiny scenes or lines of dialogue. I remember how many notes I took on the day that I had to leave my college campus. It seemed counterintuitive on such a busy day to waste time jotting down what the coffee maker looked like perched on the university-issued mini fridge instead of packing it, but that felt correct. I remember, too, how often I reread Dean Young’s Shock by Shock during the first few weeks of quarantine, and how soothed I was by both the familiarity and the playfulness of the language. The moments I spent reading his work were moments of true happiness in a time where that was very scarce. These are the days that art does not feel optional but instead like a living, breathing thing that needs to absorb the rich memories of a healthier world and ensure that they are not forgotten. Maybe this is what writing is: an exhausting but necessary mode of survival.
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
JR: I hope that my readers are able to appreciate the complicated and frequently pained ways these characters interact. I think that at the core of my piece is a desperate wish to connect, both between Grace and Maggie, and Grace and Laura. I have always been fascinated by writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Sandra Cisneros who seem to have mastered the depiction of the “unsaid” through images and indirect dialogue—I think especially of Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, which I love for its ability to conjure an unease through discordant scenes and interactions—and though these authors far surpass me in ability, I hope to have left the reader with a similar sense of linguistic impressionism. With any luck, Maggie Upstairs subtly conveys this sense of disconnect and demonstrates to the reader the human and imperfect ways in which these characters are striving to be there for each other, despite their interpersonal struggles. I hope, too, that the piece leaves the reader thinking about what death means when the deceased had been a person with which one had some conflicts, and how painful it is for any connection, especially a connection that one grappled for, to be severed. That being said, my work, like any other, is at the mercy of the reader, and whatever they choose to take from it is correct. More than anything I hope the work is enjoyed, on a simple and fundamental level.
ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?
JR: Without a doubt, Cathy Park Hong. An old poetry teacher of mine read “All the Aphrodisiacs” out loud in class once, and I remember feeling this tightness in my chest that I had never felt while reading a poem before. I once read on a Snapple cap that spider silk, if scaled up to human proportions, would be as strong as steel, and I’m reminded of this fact when I read her work. Her poems are as tough as they are delicate; they are beautiful and bare teeth at the same time. I find her use of sound and syntax, especially in her ballads, to be incredibly transformative of the poetic form, and I think she’s at the forefront of a new sonic movement. There is truly nothing I don’t love about her work: the way she harnesses mundanity, the surreal nature of her cityscapes, the way her poems float amongst images. The list goes on. (Also, she’s just so cool!)
