“We Hold Our Brilliance in Dim Hours”: An Interview with CD Eskilson

Split Lip Magazine is turning ten this year! 10! We are in the fourth grade, about to go to fifth. An anniversary is often a time of reflection and celebration. We are thinking about what we have accomplished, how we might grow, what we could do better, and the context of pandemic, war, structural racism, and heteropatriarchy in which we are all currently creating art. 

One of the things I am most proud of is our total, all-out, razzle-dazzle commitment to supporting the literary community and, in particular, the Split Lip FAM! This is a tradition that started long before I joined the magazine, through the incredible efforts of former EICs Amanda Miska and Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice. The #SplitLipFAM owes a huge debt of gratitude also to our GIF Queen, Becky Robison, who has poured hours, days, weeks into promoting our contributors in myriad ways over social media and beyond. At the same time, our readers and editors have enthusiastically grown the Split Lip FAM by publishing talented and diverse new writers and artists.

Photo by CD Eskilson

Our tenth anniversary year would not be complete without a celebration of the Split Lip family. So, this year we will be bringing you mini-interviews with staff and contributors. We hope to highlight their work and talk about everything from snack food to mermaids to fears to social change.

Our first interview is with CD Eskilson, who just became assistant poetry editor at SLM. CD is a trans poet and editor from Los Angeles. Their powerful and beautiful work appears in Hobart, Washington Square Review, and Cotton Xenomorph, and they are a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. (Yesssss—go CD!) CD is also poetry editor for Exposition Review and outreach coordinator for the Open Mouth Literary Center based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. CD is an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas and spends most days doting on their many houseplants. They were also once in a punk band, which they described to me as “mediocre,” but I have a hunch was quite cool. We spoke over Slack about reading submissions, horror, radical acts defying erasure, and cherry tomatoes.

Maureen Langloss: How long have you been on the SLM staff? Has it changed you or your writing?

CD Eskilson: I’ve been part of SLM for a little over two years—first as a poetry reader and now as assistant poetry editor. I’ve found out so much about my own writing by reading for the journal as well as how to question my poetic impulses. I’ve learned to see the themes and forms I personally respond to and interrogate those preferences to expand my view of writing. It’s done wonders for sense of risk-taking in poetry and also pushed me to try responding to outside media like art and film more in my poems. 

ML: This is music to my ears! I absolutely love that you’re taking more risks in your writing because of reading the bold submissions we receive! I’m fascinated by the wide array of topics people choose to write about in our queue. Do you have any obsessions, and how do they show up in your writing?

CDE: Horror movies! I grew up enamored with monsters and used to tell people I wanted to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon when I grew up. A lot of my current work is interested in investigating how representations of monstrosity pervade larger conceptions of gender, mental illness, and the body. My poems often rewrite and reinterpret horror movies and classical myths, creating sites of resistance to the violence against trans and nonbinary people, people living with mental illness, and disabled people. In doing so, I hope to craft empowering reinterpretations of the bodies often rendered monstrous and speak new futures into being. 

ML: The Creature from the Black Lagoon! Yes! I love that you use monsters and horror as a form of resistance. One of my favorite poems of yours is “When Arkansas Bans Healthcare for Trans Youth,” published in NDR (also one of my favorite lit mags because of the risk-taking work they publish). Your title sets up the expectation that the poem will unfold in political language. But you subvert our expectations in the most wonderful way when the poem is about flowers—flowers that resist, persist, thrive:

Ozark flowers coat the roadside with a quiet bloom

   of blue and violet. The yellow bursts find room

between the grasses, grab at rays of falling light.

To me, the monsters in this poem are the transphobic Arkansas law makers. Only mentioned once, they cast a shadow over but cannot extinguish this wonderful field of yellow bursts that is both a metaphor and a real, tangible place that your stunning language renders so vividly. My own experience of reading this poem was emotional; it has made me cry more than once. Can you tell me something about the day you started writing it, about how it felt to write?

CDE: For context, I started this poem last spring in response to the passage of the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act here in Arkansas. It’s the first law in the U.S. prohibiting doctors from administering hormones or puberty blockers to trans youth, and it also allows private insurers to refuse coverage for gender-affirming care to patients any age. It’s been temporarily blocked from taking effect, but the decision goes to trial this July. The situation is still incredibly uncertain and scary.

The law was passed around spring, and I had been simultaneously witnessing an explosion of wildflower growth in my neighborhood. Not only are they gorgeous, but incredibly resilient. You see splashes of color on the highways, in parking lots, making their way through concrete slabs. It made me consider how native landscapes actively resist anthropogenic degradation and alteration. More abstractly, I began pondering how such small instances of beauty form a resistance to structures of violence. How, at times, witnessing the existence of beautiful things serves as a radical act defying erasure. 

In a climate where state-level legislation works to criminalize gender-nonconforming bodies, the power of language to eradicate remains clear. Conversely, it is through a communion with language that the unsaid materializes, that a better future might materialize. In poems like this one, I hope to create sites of witnessing and reckoning with the structural and personal manifestations of transphobia, as well as envision futures full of trans love.

ML: That witnessing beauty can function as a radical act in and of itself is something I am going to think about every time I see wildflowers in spring. Thank you for that. I will also think of the subversive joy in your poem’s last line: “We hold our brilliance in dim hours.” 

Switching topics before we go—as you know, at Split Lip, we publish a lot of pieces with snacks. So, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you one last very important question: what is your favorite snack food and why?

CDE: Cherry tomatoes—always cherry tomatoes. They’re the perfect snack size and versatile when it comes to dipping options, or simply eating them like grapes. Personally, I recommend barbecue sauce. They don’t mess up your hands either for when you’re writing!

ML: I sometimes put out plates of cherry tomatoes with olive oil and sea salt for my kids. But you’ve inspired me—next time it will be BBQ sauce!