A Conversation with Chelsea C. Jackson
The Conversations series is about listening, asking, and exploring our humanity together. In this conversation with Chelsea C. Jackson, we discuss her inherited beliefs from her upbringing in Virginia, the power of language, and radical imagination — central themes in her latest book, “All Things Holy and Heathen.”
Gabriela Bittencourt: I had such a rich reading experience during All Things Holy and Heathen (ATHAH) I’m grateful you’re here. Thank you. Before we dive into all things ATHAH…
You’re a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. You are the Co-Editor of The Maine Review. You were the finalist in 2020 for the Driftwood In-House Poetry Contest; and, in 2022, a finalist for the Animal Heart Poetry Collection Contest. Your work has appeared in various journals, from Riverfeet Press to Coffin Bell Journal. You're a professional editor, writing coach, lead writing and publishing workshops, push back against the tyrannical book bans — what does this list miss?
I’m thinking about how your upbringing in Southeastern Virginia was really foundational to ATHAH. Could you tell us about the formative moments in your childhood, and even adulthood, that find you in your work?
Chelsea Jackson: Yes, I do a lot within literary spaces, though I think you pretty much covered it! And thank you for your kind words; I’m so glad you liked the collection!
Interestingly, I don’t tend to write about formative moments as they happen. I usually reflect and let things percolate so I can write with a certain amount of distance. That distance is actually how I learn what feels formative or unfinished enough to write about.
As for childhood moments, some make their way into the book in straightforward ways, like how I learned to ride a bicycle in a graveyard. And the poem “Controlling the Wind” is a kind of timeline of significant moments that stick with me. Other formative experiences are less singular, like my father leaving, the gradual loss of innocence that comes with growing up, or finding solace in a faith that I later deconstructed from. And finally, there are amorphous patterns that thread through the work. For example, before my parents divorced, we ate a lot of the deer my dad hunted, so deer have an odd way of popping into my work.
You mentioned the Southern/Virginia landscape bubbles up quite a bit, which is interesting, considering this collection was written while I lived in New Jersey and Philadelphia. I left Virginia in 2013, partly because I was told that between my “big dreams” and commitment to justice, I would never really “fit” here. But in 2022, my partner and I decided to move back, both to be close to my family (especially my nephew and soon-to-be-born niece) and because I no longer believed the lie that I didn’t fit. I was tired of feeling exiled from a place that had clearly never left me.
My work was wild with the swamps and rivers I grew up surrounded by, and that permeation revealed how fiercely I missed this land, culture, and people. So, I decided to follow the crumbs my poems were leaving for me and come back. And it turns out I do fit into the vibrant communities, activist spaces, and charged arts/culture scene that is, and always has, been here.
GB: I can relate to realizing when a past moment or childhood memory was formative because it’ll show up as themes in your writing, journal, life… There’s a bit of discovering oneself in retrospection, and especially through the medium of writing. Something this collection does magically is to reclaim your story and re-enter the story as an agent of change. Could you tell us about the earliest memory you have of becoming aware of the power of language?
CJ: I love this question! I don’t know that I had some big revelation. Growing up, I was always hyper-aware. I’ve always been empathetic. Whether my overall sensitivity is a blessing or a curse depends on the day, but I do think it’s made me a better writer.
It allowed me to learn the power not only of language but tone. What we say matters, but how we say it is really important. It’s why things like ordering and line breaks matter in poetry. A line can be humorous in one piece but devastating in another poem.
Of course, specific learning moments stand out. Moments when loved ones have said something hurtful that I’ll never forget, moments that made me pause and consider the tension between intent and impact that is so central to how we communicate with one another. I especially remember noticing how language acted as a sort of key that unlocked our inner landscapes and worldviews. I remember hearing comments or arguments and thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting. That statement probably leads somewhere else, to a belief or experience different from my own.”
In some cases, that was wonderful because it opened up space for conversation and learning. However, other times, the language used told of values and beliefs that felt demeaning, discriminatory, or dangerous. Like people making jokes that didn’t feel like jokes or slightly changing the tone or words they used to describe entire groups of people. I grew up thinking about those moments a lot, and it ultimately led me to study things like religion, where entire texts are used to either save or damn people based on who is doing the reading. From there, it was a short jump to unpacking and exploring language in my own writing. That intricate relationship between language, belief, and action has always fascinated me and is a cornerstone of my creative work.
GB: Your website bio says, “I use my creative work to ask hard questions and explore what it means to be human.” In your words, what are the hard questions ATHAH explores?
CJ: Every time I revamp my bio, I wrestle with whether or not to remove that line, only because I'm not quite sure if folks know what I mean, so it's exciting to be asked about it.
At its core, ATHAH is asking: What is and what could be? It's an invitation to take inventory of where we are, what we've inherited, and what beliefs/systems we might be working under or within; then, it accompanies us as we look beneath and beyond them. It’s a reclamation of our interdependent power.
I asked a lot of questions as a kid, and most of them started with "why." Why are some people's pain given more attention than others? Why is there war when we can talk to one another? Why are we killing the planet when we don't have to — when we know our survival is directly dependent upon it?
The responses I got were: Stop thinking so much. Stop caring so much. It's not that serious. And my least favorite: We've always done it this way. And I was never impressed by that response; it seemed unimaginative.
Imagination as a catalyst for change isn't a skill we're encouraged to hone (which is one reason art is so subversive/empowering). Growing up, I learned that imagination and thinking out of the box were acceptable to a point, sooner or later, you had to accept the dichotomies given: Good or bad. Strong or weak. Rich or poor. Sinner or saint. Us or them. Human or animal. Life or death.
The pull of division and categorization is all around, and any attempt to envision life outside these boxes, new ways of thinking that may birth new ways of being, are shut down as being naive or "too idealistic." ATHAH rejects these labels, rooting itself instead in our vulnerable (and messy) interconnection and inviting us to step into the freedom of liminality. It empowers us to tap into our imagination to train it like a muscle, one that can courageously interrogate our current beliefs and systems to see if they really can bear the authority and importance we've given them. In most cases, I suspect they can't.
GB: You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what is and what could be, or “radical imagination.” I’ve noticed a strain in my imagination. A really small example of this is being unable to see possibilities. A different outcomes. I blamed myself at first but soon realized that burnout is a trending topic because people are experiencing high-levels of mental exhaustion. En masse, might I add.
We don’t really subscribe to brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and feelings of helplessness as issues pertaining to decline in imagination. But why not? If you trace the problem to the source, you end up with narratives we’ve habitualized to maintain systems, institutions, and social conventions. The sense I get is that a decline in imagination is a symptom of our decline as a species, and now, we’re reaching a pinnacle where our minds, our bodies, the earth is pleading for an alternative — what is and what could be.
When I read “The First Human,” which for those who don’t know is a narrative poem where animals work together to create the first human, I thought to myself “Oh, fun!” That reframe felt liberating… Such an important question — what is and what could be… “The First Human” is my favorite poem by the way. It reminded me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, too. Any intentionality behind that?
CJ: I'm so glad the piece felt fun and liberating! I don't know that I was thinking specifically of Frankenstein when writing that piece. I have a high capacity for mental images. I would say roughly half of my poems start out with some sort of image or dream that pops into my head, and to be frank, many of these are pretty macabre. So, that's partly how "The First Human" came to be.
My tendency to engage inherited myths also led to the poem. (This is one of my favorite topics, so please excuse me as I nerd out for a second!) I love taking stories/lessons we think we know and writing them from another entry point to find new meaning or uncover something buried there all along. Doing so forces us to ask how we came to what we "know" and encourages us to consider what and who is lost in that "knowing." For example, just framing the creation of humanity from a beyond-human perspective asks us to consider what creation myth(s) we're told, which ones we value, and which ones we'll never hear.
I also really love the question at the end of that piece because it's meant to frame the entire book. After creating humanity, the beyond-human animals ask: "It is good?" And I wrestled with saying "it is good?" versus "is it good?" eventually landing on the former because it seemed to better embody [my] hope.
It can be a terrifying invitation, one that launches into a book full of wonderings. But I believe our radical (and collective) imagination thrives in asking the hard questions, providing us the space and tools to break outside the confines of both the problems and solutions we've been given.
In a lot of ways, this idea of myths, questions, and imagination comes back to the power and use of language; one of the first acts of violence toward a people is dehumanizing them through language.
Before swaths of Indigenous myths and cultures were stamped out, language was first weaponized to target these groups' intelligence, civility, and humanity — to see them as sub-human and, therefore, their wisdom, stories, technologies, and cultures of little use. Which today, we know is not the case at all.
We see this weaponization of language in how our mainstream culture talks about the earth and our "dominance" over it. In fact, there is an intrinsic connection between colonization and how we relate to the earth. I recently read an Ecofeminist article exploring how language shapes our worldview and relationship to the natural world1. An example it gave was how nouns that describe the natural world are often verbs in Ojibwe. For example, a "bay" is not simply an object, it is actively "being a bay." It is alive.
If we were to talk about the earth in ways that honored its aliveness and agency, it would inevitably change how we interacted with it — how we saw ourselves as inseparable from it. This is a central point of "The First Human." The poem is not only a call to radical imagination but humility. It is an imaginative subversion, as it doesn't question the aliveness of the non-human creatures we are taught to dominate but rather it questions our own.
GB: I love that as a writing exercise: Take a popularized story, myth, or folklore and write it from an entirely different vantage point.
One thing I noticed is that the stitching on the cover of ATHAH. Stitching, sewing or even the idea of “mending” came up when reading ATHAH. In “The First Human,” we get the image of Gorilla sewing his brethren’s bones into the frame of the first human. “I am a collage” felt like a weaving of different elements. With “Threadbare Flourishing” it's in the very title. So, I’m curious about the cover art creation, was this intentional?
CJ: Yeah, the cover art is amazing, isn't it! The artist, Theo Hall, did a wonderful job! One of the things I really like about my publisher, April Gloaming, is that they work with primarily Southern artists, editors, and writers throughout each stage of the publication process2. Collaborating with local, independent artists is especially important as generative AI continues to infest art and creative spaces.
I didn't have much involvement in the cover creation process. That being said, before starting the artwork, Theo and the April Gloaming team were gracious enough to consider a mood board I created. There were a lot of skeletons in my mood board, which I think Theo took to heart and made their own. Never in a million years would I have thought to use stitching in the cover art, but it fits so well with some of the poems and the book's overall project. It's that kind of thing you want in a cover artist, someone who is excited by your work but who can also put their own spin on it.
One process in which I had more creative input was in making a candle for the book. I worked with Ashley at Gnostic Apothecary to create a signature Holy & Heathen scent3. We landed on such a unique candle. It blends honeysuckle, rain, mushrooms, tomato leaves, and other aromas to create a complex fragrance that captures the integrated and earthy nature of the collection wonderfully. I love the idea of readers lighting this candle and being even more fully transported into the pages of this book.
GB: I truly believe that everyone asks a series of guiding questions, over and over again, throughout life. They typically begin with what, why, when, where, or how. For me, it’s ‘why.’ Why am I this way? Why do I keep doing that? Why and why not. Think about it. What are 3 guiding questions you ask yourself?
CJ: I love the idea of guiding questions. If we all took a moment to dig into the questions we ask ourselves, often without even knowing it, I imagine the world would be a better, more self-aware place. Personally, the questions I find myself asking are
What is underneath that emotion/belief/statement? (This could be mine or someone else’s)
In what ways can I limit harm and foster liberation?
What is, what could be, and how do we get there?
GB: You could have written a novel, a memoir, a series of essays, etc., but ATHAH came out as a collection of poetry. Why poetry?
CJ: Yeah, I’m a cross-genre writer and editor, but poetry is where I started experimenting with writing from a young age.
One of the biggest lessons I learned is that the personal is often universal; that's part of what makes poetry unique. I believe that all forms of literature connect and aid us in communication and understanding, yet poetry just has this way of getting to the heart of being — like a drumbeat. Drums are some of the oldest instruments in the world; there's something primal in rhythm and beat, and I think poetry functions in a similar way. Songs, epics, dirges, and myths are all types of poetry and are among the oldest literary forms we have as a species. They contain an essence that isn’t just hauntingly human but animal — something that speaks not only to our individual existence or even our existence as a human race, but to our very being living in concert with other beings. That universality is one of the reasons folks so often go to poetry in times of death, love, loss, celebration, etc. (I mean, go to a greeting card aisle and you'll find poetry fit for any occasion.) We are creatures of connection, and poetry offers one of our deepest collective roots.
As for what ATHAH does as poetry that it wouldn't be able to do otherwise, I think it gets to the heart of its project and risks faster than a prose piece would. In poetry, you're often "dropped in" to a piece, and, in fact, overly relying on setup, exposition, or summarizing can bog down the work.
Poetry bridges the individual and universal in ways that aren't as heavy-handed and distant. It also requires a tremendous amount of trust from and in the reader. For me, the gap between the reader and writer feels significantly more closed in poetry than in fiction, which felt imperative for the collaborative journey of this book — this invitation to cling to one another and stare into the maw of possibility.
GB: Chelsea, before we wrap, where can people buy ATHAH and how can they connect with you? Also, anything exciting in the making — another collection perhaps?
CJ: I have another couple poetry collections I am working on. I think I have almost all of the poems for one of them, but everything is still very much in draft form. Still, now that ATHAH is out, I'm sensing it's time to sit down and really focus on that project, in part because it feels relevant to this current moment. That being said, I also have a novel that I desperately need to revisit, and I have a short story horror collection that I am adding to as the stories come to me.
As for where folks can snag my book, you can find it at April Gloaming's website or at a bookstore (preferably an independent one) near you. And for anyone interested in a candle or candle book bundle, you can check out Gnostic Apothecary.
Author’s Bio
Chelsea Jackson is a writer, editor, and writing coach, as well as the author of All Things Holy and Heathen (April Gloaming). Their work has appeared in Fatal Flaw, Coffin Bell Journal, Beyond Queer Words, and Riverfeet Press, among others. Chelsea holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and is the Co-Editor of The Maine Review.
They live in Richmond, VA, with their partner and a very cuddly pit bull. To connect or explore their latest offerings, visit their website or find them on Instagram and TikTok @sea_c_j.