Camille Roy is a writer of many sorts – a poet, a playwright, an essayist, and a fiction writer. However, much of her work resists categorization, exploring experimental, nonlinear narrative forms. A prominent figure of the New Narrative movement, Roy’s work is a testament to the abundant possibilities of narrative. Her most recent collection, Honey Mine, is an urgent and intimate look at queer life. Roy’s lyricism and embodied language interacts with a brain much like a memory, unlocking a liminal space between the sensory and imaginary. It makes me wonder if I am here or there or, really, if there is any difference. Honey Mine is as much about the present as it is about the past. It is a book I come back to when I’m stuck with my work – when I need to be reminded of what narrative is capable of.

Last Spring, Roy visited a class I was taking on outsider literature to talk about Honey Mine. I was struck by Roy’s answers to our questions – her sharp, generous intelligence that sought all corners. After our class, I wanted to hear what she thought about, well, everything. So I sent her an email. A few weeks later, she agreed to sit down with me and my many questions. In the conversation that follows, we chat about not only her work, but also about queerness, time, generational divides, the intimacy of narrative, and on what we agree to be the only singular joy left on the internet: animal videos. 

Alex Connors: Honey Mine is a book I wish I had when I was younger. When I came out, in the early ‘00s, I felt very lost. I read queer books and media, hopeful to find a mirror for my identity, some way to ground myself. The past always felt distant to me. When I read Honey Mine, it gave me the feeling of belonging that my younger self was craving. Not in the sense that I had found a mirror for myself, but that I had found company and permission to experience the present moment. Honey Mine holds so many fragments and aspects of identity at once. Its language is constantly surprising; it allows for it all to be on the page. What did you hope the reader would find in Honey Mine? And what are your thoughts about looking to the past to understand queer identity?

Camille Roy: When I first came out in the ‘70s, it was into this very lively, political, rule-breaking, lesbian community. We all kind of had this moment of awakening – which was partly gay liberation, partly feminism – and headed out to the bars and into the streets with a sense of being chosen by history to innovate new forms of community and sexuality. We had a great, expansive sense of ourselves. When we got to the bars, we discovered these fragments of an older lesbian community, which was very butch/femme. There was a bar in Detroit we used to go to. I remember going with this friend of mine once. When we got there, she was stricken with horror because there was a wedding ceremony between a butch and a femme. The femme got on this chair and tossed a bouquet, and my friend was just horrified. It was especially odd because my friend was a cute butch but didn’t know it. What I am trying to gesture at is that she felt completely alienated from the previous generation. There was no point of contact. They were not interested in us, and we weren’t interested in them. There was this generational divide. 

I think it would be interesting to explore what happened to the lives of women – I’m going to use the word “woman” because it’s historically accurate rather than translating it into contemporary language – whose communities disappeared because of various political changes. There was the suffragette community, the butch/femme community, and then there was our community, which had a particular concept of feminism, womanhood, and gayness. I can occupy this latter community now because I still have friends from back then. It’s easy for me to move into that space as if the last 40 years never happened, but I also understand that, for younger people, it’s completely inaccessible. It’s as if it has completely disappeared. I remember when I was younger and looking at gay men, thinking it was strange that they had these cross-generational relationships, these older men and younger men. Then as I got older, I understood that one of the things that happened as a result of these relationships was that there were more intergenerational connections. I also understood that queer people, for the most part, grow up in heterosexual, conventional families and don’t grow up with access to queer culture. Whenever you happen to come out, that’s the moment. All other moments are sort of hypothetical. They don’t really exist. So, I think it ends up that the past doesn’t come through relationships for a lot of young queer people. It mostly comes through culture. 

I think that, in this respect, women have really been at a disadvantage. For example, I wasn’t very well supported when I was younger. Why would anybody support this dyke? There wasn’t a path for people like me. I wasn’t on anybody’s special identity list. There was no sense that my identity was one which was worth including in culture. But the truth is that, back then, it didn’t really matter. The whole women’s community was highly skilled at creating its own institutions and culture – bookstores, bars, reading groups, collectives, political this-and-that, even the softball scene. It was everything you could possibly need. You could live in a whole realm that was parallel and invisible to the mainstream. One of the consequences, however, was that the cultural products created never made it into the institutions that preserve culture. So, people come out, and it’s like I’m here everyone, and there’s no preserved past, no context. I’m not a moralist, but I think one of the downsides to this generational divide is what I catch in your question – this feeling that the past is gone, and, actually, I can tell you the past is not gone. 

There are two ways to deal with the past. There’s the way of the adolescent – I’m the new generation. I’m in a moment of rebellion. It doesn’t matter what they did; I’m free – which is a departure. Then, there’s the other way of dealing with the past, which is metabolism. It is not that you are attached to the past or that you live in the past, it's that you have metabolized the past, and when you do that, you carry it with you. It provides a kind of resource. I think for young queer people, there is a real problem in not being able to access the past and be fed by it. Honey Mine as a book is a metabolizing experience of the past that’s available to people who may feel the past has disappeared. Does that make sense?

AC: Yeah, that does make sense. That’s a better way of articulating what I was trying to get at – that feeling of freedom that Honey Mine made me feel. The past is not gone, but here and now, tied up with the present. 

CR: It would help if there were more support for work which is experimental and real, which comes from outside the mainstream. It’s particularly important for queer people because we don’t come into a sense of our history until we have managed to escape our communities or families of origin – and that’s late, that’s really late. It means you need to do work to be nourished by this past that you know nothing about. You have to go through the task of reintegration with this aspect of your cultural experience. I think that when you do that – and not everybody wants to do it, some people really do conceive of their identity as a complete break – it is possible to metabolize the past and find things in it that nourish and strengthen you. I’ve learned a lot about this with my process through grief. I knew a woman whose husband had died of cancer like my partner did. One of the things that she said was: “if there are things that you really miss so much, just become those things.” That is something you can get from the past; you can say, well, I am going to become those things that I miss. I have done that, in some ways. My partner was really generous, and I have learned to be more generous, and it is very nourishing for me to do that. I used to think about this in more literary, theoretical terms, but as I’ve progressed through these stages of life, I see it more as an aspect of human development.

It’s also true that I had an imperative to metabolize my experience because I found myself living narratives that were outside of my own understanding, even before I left home. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. It was very challenging in lots of ways just to understand the reality of what was going on around me. I’ve been presented with these challenges my entire life. New Narrative gave me a method which I could apply to my particular circumstances.

AC: Speaking of New Narrative, how do you metabolize your experience? It can be easy to grasp the past by way of nostalgic longing or disdain.

CR: I developed a writing journal practice as part of my struggle to deal with what was happening day by day. In that context, I would slip from poetry, to prose, to journaling, to notes, just flowing back and forth. With that kind of practice you can move into the present in a more experiential way. You might say that prose reflects life experience, whereas poetry is life experience. Poetry is not only a representation, it actually agitates the mind in a way that creates an experience through sound, rhythm, and the ripples of history and meaning that surround every word. Moving in and out of poetry in a journal which is purely private is a good way of allowing the past to become present. It’s a technique that I never knew was a technique, but it allows me to have access to what I’m thinking about. 

AC: I know this has been said before, but the way you use language in Honey Mine feels like it’s evoking a kind of poetic experience. I feel like this book hit me in a poetic, experiential kind of way. In Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, an essay collection edited by you, Gail Scott, Robert Glück, and Mary Burger ask, “What is the present? The present has never been described – how should we describe it?” Honey Mine feels like a description of a present that has passed yet somehow still feels timeless. What is it like for you to return to that work now? 

CR: There was a time when I wondered – why do I do this? Writing has never given me anything in terms of money. I’m not one of those people that’s had opportunities to get residencies, grants, jobs. So why do I bother? The truth is that it’s been an incredible tool for me to consolidate my relationship to my own experience. As I’ve gotten older, I feel that my work, in terms of its purpose and value for me, is personal. I could stop writing for other people and just continue writing as a private practice and that would be a reasonable thing to do. I used to have a concept that my writing was in relationship to community, and I don’t really have that feeling anymore. When I was younger, my community was similar to the community that I came out in, and my work was too experimental for anybody to relate to. Then as I got older, I was not interesting to others just for being older, for coming from an earlier context. So, I have never felt connected; I was just connected in my imagination. This has been difficult, but my writing has allowed me to go forward as an integrated person. I have a relationship with the person that I used to be. I appreciate that young woman, and in some sense, that’s all I need.

AC: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that’s really helpful to hear as someone who’s in an MFA program right now. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the literary world and everything that comes with it. I often find myself sometimes being like, why am I doing this? I also often find that the community I’m writing toward is often the community that probably won’t read it or have access to read it, you know?

CR: Here is something which is puzzling. Nowadays, so much of our social life is removed from physical life. I’m not just talking about Instagram, but everything. There’s been a removal of so many face-to-face interactions which is, in effect, the replacement of a real life by an abstract life. The amount of in-person interaction has shrunk. I don’t know what the consequences are, but I think that human beings did not evolve to subsist on this. This can’t be a good social-life diet. It just can’t. 

AC: It doesn’t make me feel good, scrolling for hours and hours, that's for sure. 

CR: We’re stuck in a historical moment, and the only way this can be changed is through forces that are much bigger than us. The problem is that these companies make more money when they stoke conflict. It’s like they are getting everybody to stop and look at the car accident, you know? If there’s no car accident, they don’t want to be bothered to stop and look. Judy Grahn is a great working-class butch poet who emerged in the ‘70s. I heard somewhere that her advice for younger people today was to be less thin-skinned, but I’m not sure that’s the problem we face. We are now in an environment that escalates conflict. There used to be more ways that people from different groups actually worked together in the ‘70s and enjoyed one another’s company. Now, it seems that has become more difficult. The apps and algorithms feel intentionally divisive. 

AC: It’s funny because I am now programmed to reach for social media when I feel lonely instead of, say, calling a friend. It always exacerbates the feeling. I always feel worse than when I started scrolling, but it’s now ingrained in my brain: Lonely? Open the app. It’s disturbing to notice this rewiring. 

CR: Yeah, I think we still don’t have a sense of how we’re being changed by all this. It’s hard to observe oneself. To be honest, the only thing that really gives me pleasure on the internet is animal videos.

AC: [laughs] Yes, same.

CR: Everything else I could get from a good magazine. But the animal videos? The internet should only be animal videos.

AC: Exactly. 

When I read Honey Mine, I was struck by the way it opened up the possibilities of narrative and challenged my expectations as a reader. In your introduction to Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, you write, “The possibilities of narrative are not exhausted by mainstream fiction – indeed they are not even suggested.” Can you talk about these possibilities? 

CR: Something that used to bother me as a young poet was that there was a lot of criticism of narrative. People thought it was so-called “linear.” There was a claim that thinking was constrained and controlled by being put into these linear narratives, and that in order to be a free person, a liberated consciousness, you needed to break narrative. That led to a lot of experimental forms, but the critique was never interesting to me because what I find compelling in narrative is the dynamics of attention. Whether it’s a person quietly reading the work years after I wrote it, or me reading or performing the work live, narrative creates a sense of intimacy that can even have an erotics to it. It’s very connected. When people read a novel, they give time in their life to reading that novel, those characters. What other art form takes that much time? I mean, maybe you would say a TV series, that can be true. One characteristic of those series is that you become really intimate with the characters. The acting of the characters expands, becomes more subtle and developed. It’s an art form that takes time. Artistically, it is interesting what you can do with intimate attention. I think that narrative is just an intimate experience, and that’s why it’s worth working with. 

There are times when I’m writing poetry and I’m aware that I’m shaping a narrative to create interest. I think a lot of poets avoid narrative because they don’t understand it. I find all of it interesting, how to bring a narrative technique into an experimental poem. It creates more tension. In narrative, you can raise the stakes in all kinds of ways, but it helps to have a clarity that that’s what you’re doing.

I like it when these art forms infiltrate each other so that narrative infiltrates poetry, poetry infiltrates narrative, dialog infiltrates prose. In a way, they’re forms, but in another way, they’re just different levels of experience, right?

AC: Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in like, “Oh, I’m a fiction writer,” and I get attached to that form. But really, they’re just different levels of experience that you can come in and out of. They don’t have to be segregated.

CR: That’s really true. In my current work-in-progress, one of the things that people who have read it remark on is that it’s got a gestural quality of going from poetry to prose, and it’s all just like breathing. People who are not poets at all really liked this particular aspect of it. So, I do feel that there is more room here than we are usually aware of. What makes this work is the expansion that accompanies a combination of pleasure and curiosity. Prose expanding into poetry, and poetry is expanding into prose.

AC: Wow, I love that. That’s a really beautiful way to describe the possibilities of narrative. Thank you so much, Camille. It’s been a pleasure.