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As I do with any new collection of writing that comes my way, when I got my hands on Dessa's newly released - and about to be officially released - book, Spiral Bound, I immediately flipped to the shortest entry. In this case it was a brief, Haiku-like poem entitled "My New Purpose." Though I'm fearful of copyright infringement, and more fearful of its author getting pissed at me, I'm going to print it in its entirety...now:

Without me,
how would my headache
get around?

Instead of giving a formal synopsis/review of the collection, I'm going to let this excerpt stand in for the rumblings about confidence of tone, strength of voice, wit, charm, and unforced (and therefore convincing) musings on Life that I would otherwise make concerning Dessa's book, which was self-published under the aegis of her music label, Doomtree. The collection can - and should - be purchased here.

SOTC got the chance to speak with Dessa - the local writer/rapper/poet - about Spiral Bound. There's an official release party this Saturday, February 7, at the Guthrie's Dowling Theater, with guests Jeremy Messersmith, Steve Marsh, Aby Wolf, and many others.

SOTC: The collection feels like a collection - all the pieces intertwine thematically, and feel like they belong together. But you do a bit of genre-jumping, with fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. How did you choose what pieces and sorts of writing would make it in the book?

Dessa: I didn't sweat the genre thing too hard. At first I was like, 'Should it be fiction or should it be non-fiction? Poetry?" And then I just thought: That's it, I'll put them all together.

I didn't have so much stuff that I was sorting through an infinity of writing - so to an extent it was governed by how much material I had. When I was putting it together, I didn't want too many pieces that dealt with really, really similar themes. I had a couple stories that had angels in them - either as imagery or as metaphor - and I didn't want to totally frontload this collection with angels. So I picked the pieces that, when going from one to the next, the tone and tenor wouldn't be too distracting.

SOTC: What emerges as perhaps the most common thread from piece to piece is your treatment of death. Would you talk a bit about how you came to write about - and fixate upon - this theme?

Dessa: I'm not religious. And I don't have any overriding faith in Fate or Destiny. Or that everything works out well. But I do have a strong belief that you should do your best, and hope that's good enough, and oftentimes it is.

But, yeah: Death is scary. The process - if not the condition - is scary. And I think a lot of my early twenties was about figuring out a way to make amends with that. To figure out what role this apprehension about death was going to play in my daily life. After rolling it around in my head for a while, and after some private conversations with friends whom I knew well enough to speak candidly with, it seemed that a lot of people do do a considerable amount of thinking about death, or have at one point in their lives. But very few people speak openly about it.

I've always been attracted to writing that addresses issues that are common, but internalized. In American culture I think we really tend to keep our pains personal, and part of the book was to be a frank discussion of how I feel. So it seemed honest. I wanted to write about what's fascinating and frightening. For this collection, for me, that happened to be death.

SOTC: You're an author, a poet, and a rapper. Do you consider yourself one of these things more than the others?

Dessa: I want to be a writer. Yeah. I feel like I have a lot to learn in all three. But it seems more like my writing informs my rap than the other way around.

SOTC: How do you know when an idea you get is for a poem, or a rhyme, or an essay?

Dessa: If it's self-contained and has some snap to it - if it can be expressed in twelve words - it'll be a rap line. If it's really profound - you know profound, ha - if it's an image, very often it'll go to poetry. And if it's a longer idea, it'll be prose.

But usually what happens is that if a single line presents itself, it will either be rap or poetry. But if a situation presents itself - if I meet somebody who's really fascinating - I'll try to take some notes and turn that into a non-fiction piece. Like when I met that guy Life, I thought he was born to be an essay. [Ed - Life is a German nurse whom the author met while backpacking around South America. He once administered CPR for seventy minutes to a sixteen-year-old boy named Angel in La Paz, to no avail. Also, Life was remarkably un-vain about his apparently beautiful, blue-green eyes - he blinked them and rubbed them and closed them to kiss.]

SOTC: More so than even most professional writers, you spend a lot of time with words. Does it ever get exhausting?

Dessa: No. There are parts of the job that get really exhausting, but nothing that has to do with actually putting down words. I put in really, really long days. Sending emails, answering the phone, making sure shows go well, trying to figure out how on earth to convince people who don't live in this city to care about my book. Those things get really long. But when it comes down to actually writing, or singing, it doesn't feel exhausting. I really like language, and I haven't gotten tired of it yet.

SOTC: Was there a point at which you knew this could be your job-job?

Dessa: I'd done a lot of writing in grade school and high school, but never seriously considered it as a profession until college. I took a class on creative non-fiction, which is a genre I really dig. I didn't know you could be a writer and write true stories that were short - I didn't know that counted. Like a writer - those cats write novels. So I read some Sedaris or something, and I was like, "This counts?! This is just a funny story. This isn't writing, is it?" It felt like cheating.

After that class, though, I thought that I'd like to do stuff like that.

SOTC: With the book industry sort of self-destructing lately, a lot of writers have started to put out their own books for various reasons. What spurred your decision to self-publish?
 
Dessa: I just got impatient. I did contests for a long time - a year or two - and I'd get all the writers' newsletters, and I'd take the advice pretty seriously. Like, I keep all the rejection slips just like they tell you to, and I have a wall in my office dedicated to all the places that turned me down. Finally, though, I just decided to put it out.

I didn't want to wait for somebody to say yes. I was unhappy that I hadn't published a book yet, and I don't think I realized how much it was affecting my rap career. It made me fussy. Professionally, I wasn't as much fun to be around. I think I got mad at rap, that it didn't write me a book. But then the first review of Spiral Bound came out, and all of a sudden my life looked a lot more like the life I wanted to have.