 Tiffany Babb is an essayist, cultural critic, and poet. She's a regular contributor to The AV Club's Comic Panel and the Eisner Award winning PanelxPanel Magazine. You can follow her on twitter @explodingarrow and sign up for her monthly newsletter about art at tiffanybabb.com/puttingittogether. Why do you write? What compels you to write? I don’t know what compels me to write more than the fact that I find writing compelling. I kind of picture my mind as those old film projectors. Once you get the crank going, it’s just ready to go at 24 frames a second. I guess that’s how my mind works, always in response to some stimulus. I don’t think I could start anything on my own. Everything I write is in response to something, whether I’m working on cultural criticism or a poem. I don’t think I’m particularly creative at all. I just write about what comes to my mind when I see things. Luckily, that stuff is not what a lot of other people see. What upcoming writing projects are you working on? I’m at the tail end of multiple projects right now, which is a funny place to be emotionally because it tends to be when spanners get tossed into things. I’m finishing up revisions on my first book of poems which will hopefully make its way out into the world in the next year or two. I’m also finishing up a monograph on the structure of superhero stories which will (all things going well) launch with a few other books of comics criticism on Kickstarter over at PanelxPanel Magazine later on this year. What are some of your artistic influences/inspirations? Ah, this is when I get to talk about E.B. White. As an essayist, I don’t think there is a higher standard to hold oneself to. White could cover strikingly different topics and never stumbled at hitting what was truly important about his subject (“Death of a Pig” and “Goodbye to Forty-Eight Street” are great examples of this). He was an essayist with an enormous capacity for empathy for everyone and everything and keen sense for how people might use fear to marginalize others (his writings on WWII and school prayer really speak to this). I don’t know if I’ve ever related to or truly “felt” a writer more. As for poets, I love Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif, Sam Sax, and Ocean Vuong. All Before It
—After Cy Twombly The Fire that Consumes All Before It (1978) (Originally published in Rust + Moth) Fire is always becoming something it is not. Acting, as itself, upon others. A brutal means of transformation from thing to un-thing. From orange to un-orange. From yellow to blue to white. Fingers scrape through fat mixed with ash, burnt bits of paper. The impossibility of imagining spring (Originally published in Dunes Review) We cannot show the scars of our pasts on our faces. Instead, we choose to not bear children. Afraid, so afraid of losing time, of losing self, of facing the worst that the world has to offer a child, to us. Barren. How to give name to a lack? Unable to know, we overturn frozen ground, reveal what winter has hidden. Comments are closed.
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