Fried Hard

Shane Allison

For my mother it's not enough that the chicken is dead,

That it’s been slaughtered, feathers plucked like flower petals, and prepared in pieces, but she has to kill it again by baptizing it hard in hot lard.

The sizzle are the screams of a thousand roosters.

She cooks out all the pink until the bone is brittle,

Until the marrow is black and crusted on my father's plate, his fingers slick with grease as he nibbles on cartilage.

I make sure I have water to wash down something

That's meant to be tender and finger-licking

But is tough and rubbery.

Damn near unfit to consume.

And if I dare complain,

If I fix my mouth to mention the upside of air frying,

My mother is a wild hunter,

Quick to shoot me out of the sky.

"Well, you ain't got to eat it. Put my fork down and push yourself away from the table."

Neither of which I do.

Fried Hard, poem

Interview by C. VanWinkle
March 29, 2024

So tell me about the prompt you responded to. What was it?

Let’s see, the prompt was a drawing of a chicken, an eagle, and a baby chick, which I thought was pretty interesting. I see things like that as challenges, and I always like to meet that challenge. I wasn’t sure if I needed to respond to it figuratively or literally, but I didn’t think that would really matter. I just thought, “Okay, let’s see what I can come up with.”

We do like to leave that up to the artist, whether to stay close to the prompt or take it somewhere else entirely. So you saw this illustration involving chicken; how did you decide what to do with it?

Well, one of the things that first came to mind was a poetry piece. Lately I've been writing a lot of these prosy memoir poems about my family, specifically about my mother and my father and other extended family members. When I saw the prompt, I instantly thought of my mother and her cooking, and my dad's stories about when he was growing up. His siblings used to catch chickens, rip the feathers off, and cook some chicken. That’s what I instantly thought about because I've been writing these very poignant, visceral poems about family for the past year.

Ah, I see. I was wondering if this was autobiographical.

Oh absolutely! A lot of the work that I've been writing lately has been autobiographical. I have been going down some rabbit holes in regard to my family and my parents, but that's all in the process of creating. I don't shy away from sensitive subjects. Most of my subjects deal with sexuality and sex and things that, so this is a huge turn of events. This is a twist for me. I’ve really been delving into childhood memories that, as an adult, make more sense to me now. It's been very eye-opening to look back. So that's what I've been grappling with for the past year now.

I think that’s so healthy to use poetry and visual art to digest your past like this. Is art your therapy?

I find that with both poetry and visual art – they intermingle a lot of the time – it’s therapeutic for me. It's always been therapeutic for me.

How do they intermingle? What’s the relationship between these things for you?

I started writing poetry when I was about 15 years old, and from 15 to about 27, I was really into it. When I was in graduate school for my MFA, that’s when I started making collages, just as a hobby. I didn’t really take it seriously until I discovered Joe Brainard’s work. When I read his writing and saw some of his artwork, the floodgates opened after that. I went from making collages in old journals and notebooks to mixed media sketchbooks and drawing pads and things like that. I really didn't have a solid idea at the time as to what I was doing. I was just gluing things together, not really having a real aesthetic quite yet. Now I have more of a handle on things that I like to do. But that’s how it all started. Poetry led to my getting into collage and going from doing it as a hobby to taking it seriously as an artform.

I love that. I feel like it's this major rite of passage when you stop thinking of it as a hobby and start seeing it as your artform. That's so powerful.

Right, exactly! You know, some people have this gift and they don't really take it seriously. It's just something that they do for a class assignment or something, like a fly-by-night type of thing. But that’s never been the case for me. I think with both writing and collage, it's been more like, “Okay, let me do this. Let me see what I can do with this.” And it’s been fantastic. It’s been a great ride.

So now I'm getting a few things accepted for covers of literary magazines and things. I haven't done a lot of exhibit-type stuff yet, but there are some things in the pipeline coming down. So I'm excited about that.

Congratulations! That's lovely.

Thank you so much.

I sent you this one prompt and you responded with this poem, but you also threw in another little poem and a few visual things. Do you usually explore different media together like this, or are they normally more separate?

They're usually separate. With poetry, my thing is I can't sit in front of a computer and write. Not in the beginning anyway. I'm one of those old-fashioned writers who still like to write in notebooks and journals and things. That's the way ideas come to me, when I'm not being restricted to sit in front of a computer to write. I have to be in my element, which is usually in a cafe at a bookstore or something. And that's amazing for me because the work just comes right out of me. I don't know what it is, if it's the smell of books or the smell of coffee, but it's very inspirational for me to write in that way. As far as collage, I usually I have to be at a table with everything out in front of me. If I don't have everything in front of me so I can see all of the pieces, it's hard for me to come up with ideas for things. So it's a lot of spreading things out, setting things over here and seeing what I have. Usually, if I have an idea for a collage, I’ll have this image in my head and then I'll go and do it, and it comes out exactly the way I thought about it. That doesn't happen with writing and it always happens with collage. It comes out exactly the way I want it to.

I really struggle with that in my own visual art. I’m in the habit of going in with a specific plan, and I can be very controlling about it. But other artists allow themselves to explore and play and they don't know what it's going to be until it's finished. I’m still trying to find my own balance of those two things. I'll probably be searching for that forever.

Yeah, that's a struggle for me as well. I’m always trying to figure out: What idea do I want to convey with this? Is there a theme that I'm working with? What kind of collage is this going to be? Is it going to be décollage? Is it going to be analog collage? What is it going to be? But I think when you finally find something that works, that's when you can really work with it and do all kinds of things with it. Collage is so experimental. It's so “Let's see if this works,” and then you're surprised by what you come up with. That's usually the case with me, with poetry sometimes too. Sometimes they intermingle and I like that.

Me too. I think it's healthy for your brain to be able to communicate in these different ways and have them interchange with each other.

Right! Exactly.

Do you cook?

Yes, I do. I don't like to, but when I'm hungry for a specific thing, yeah, I'll get in there. Do you?

Barely, though I’ve been making a lot of soups in the slow cooker lately.

That’s great because cooking is another creative process. You have the recipe and you have the ingredients, but you can always put a little bit of yourself in there too. You can put your signature on what you create, even with food. That's always been the case with me. Even with cooking, you still have that creativity. It’s still about putting something together.

We've been lucky enough a few times to get a food or drink as someone's response in this project and it’s really exciting. It’s difficult though, because then we need the contributors to have geographic access to each other. I can’t really email food to someone. But when we can make it work, it's so cool.

Oh absolutely, I totally agree. You know, I don't get the chance to talk to other artists often about their processes and how they come to the work. It's been a lot of fun sitting in and talking with you about it! I don't get to do a lot of that. I do spend a lot of time on social media, messaging with people, bouncing ideas off people and finding out what their process is, but it's always fun to just sit with another artist and talk [live] about these sorts of things.

It's a perk of this job, for sure. The creative works that people make are fascinating, but in a way the interview is where the real magic happens. Last question: what is your advice for a new person getting their prompt today?

I’d say to let your imagination run as wildly as it possibly can. Don’t think too much or too harshly about the prompt. Whether it's a poem or a story or a piece of artwork, I say just get out there, be creative, and have fun. That's what art is for me. It's about having fun. There aren't any rules to collage, other than the rules you set on yourself for a piece. There are no rules, so just have fun; don't take it so seriously, but have fun. That's the best advice I could give.

Call Number: G116VA | G118PP.alFri

When Shane Allison is not writing poems in a Barnes &Noble cafe, he's working tirelessly on new art. His new collection of poems "Turbulent" is available at Hysterical Books and Amazon.