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GLOW | QUEER ARTIST FEATURE: Tiffany babb

8/16/2021

 
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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.

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  • Home
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    • Staff
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  • Programs
    • Show Us Your Spines
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    • Ina: An Exploration of QTPOC Pleasure and Consent
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  • Blog
  • Contact
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