Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in
the small press ecosystem
Interview #20: Annah Browning is the author of the poetry collections Cryptid (University of Akron Press, 2026), Witch Doctrine (University of Akron Press, 2020) and the chapbook The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013), and is a cofounder of Grimoire Magazine. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and more. She earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hailing from the foothills of South Carolina, Browning currently calls southern Illinois home, where she is a professor of English at Blackburn College.
Michael Sikkema: What drew you to this subject matter? What about this general topic interests you, and makes it something you can really explore with poetry?
Annah Browning: I have always been drawn to the weird in the world. It is a continuous source of joy for me to look for strangeness, for anything that’s not been smoothed down or explained away, that opens up a tiny sliver of possibility in our capitalist hellscape. For me, cryptids and aliens are pure joy and weirdness, gloriously undignified. I wanted to write poems that were in a different world from Witch Doctrine, that leaned into irreverence and the “low brow” and gave me the sense of freedom and escape I wanted while I was deeply isolated and stressed in the early 2020s.
I started to write these poems at the height of the pandemic, freshly moved out of Chicago to a small rural area to start a new teaching position. I was spending too much time online, as I think many of us were. There were a lot of memes about begging the aliens to take us off of our burning planet, and a lot of discourse about cryptids as ways of celebrating outsiderness of all kinds. Both sets of memes really hit with me, and became a useful thought structure for moving through the loneliness I was feeling. I’m always looking for a scaffold, an armature for feelings and thoughts– a set of metaphors, images, and narratives I can hang whatever I am processing at the moment on.
As a chronic insomniac, I have often listened to supernatural podcasts as a way of helping me sleep; at this time, the ghost story podcasts I listened to while writing Witch Doctrine began to funnel me into broader weirdnesses like spontaneous human combustion, Bigfoot, and alien abduction. I got hooked listening or reading for the one weird moment that goes outside of the usual stories you hear, that is strange and particular and yet so mundane: the Bigfoot standing in the clothesline, the creature at the foot of the bed wishing you a happy birthday and disappearing. So these strange phenomena, alien, and cryptid stories became a new armature for me to use to write in.
A lot of people are interested in cryptid, alien, and weird phenomena stories as questions of belief, examining them to try to find out if they are true or what makes people believe; I’m not. I’m more interested in the longing behind them. They are speculative literature in the purest “what if?” tradition. That shiver of possibility– what if there was more to life than we understand? What if there was more around us, all the time, but we just couldn’t see it? – of course people get hooked. I think that longing is where the opening for poetry comes in. My favorite poetry is always about digging around under the surface of the mundane world, to see it anew and to love it.
MS: These poems are doing interesting things
with POV. Can you talk about that a little bit? How did you consciously make
choices about using POV? What happened organically and spontaneously in the
writing process? What did the poems teach you about POV?
AB: I love sliding on a character mask in poems; it makes me feel free.
Writing from the perspectives of the Lady Sasquatch and the Wannabe Alien
Abductee was pure joy. They emerged organically from the writing process and
became distinct in my mind with different attitudes and ways of engaging with
the world, even though readers have pointed out they both sound like “me.”
Later on, I had fun writing from the perspective of an entire town (“Postcards
from Piedmont”), and in a more instruction-manual, documentary-style 3rd person
(“Some Practical Substitutions,” “Cryptid Sightings,” the spontaneous human
combustion erasures) as a relief from the intensity of the 1st person singular
perspectives. 1st person accounts and 3rd person documentation are also the
most common perspectives when you’re reading about strange phenomena, so I
think I may have subconsciously picked up the POVs I was immersing myself in.
One thing I learned about POV was that its power can be as much in what POVs are missing (or what a particular POV leaves out) as in what POVs are included (or what a particular POV includes). Writing poems from the alien perspective, for example, never worked. I finally figured out that the aliens had to remain untouchable, unknowable, maybe nonexistent, seen only through the 1st POV of the wannabe abductee and her longing, for those poems to work. We can never know objectively if the aliens are real. It is all filtered through the unreliable 1st person POV.
MS: Can you tell us about your writing process? How do poems start? What was the process of putting the manuscript together?
AB: I approach writing as a crockpot or compost heap process– I throw lots of things in my brain and see what happens. I read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, and did a lot of idle noodling about cryptids, weird phenomena, and aliens. I wasn’t trying to be comprehensive in my research, and didn’t know quite what I was looking for– just a spark of weirdness and recognition as I was reading or listening, and then I would jot down that weird tidbit or line. Sometimes I would come back to it later, and at other times it spun out into a poem immediately. Sometimes something I read or heard weeks ago would pop up in my mind and spin into a poem. Usually when I start a poem it’s because a line or statement has come to me; I jot it down and then what happens next is what happens next.
I very rarely have a particular plan for how a poem is going to go; I believe in letting the poem tell you what it wants to be or where it wants to go (many thanks to my undergraduate mentor, Carol Ann Davis, for this framing of writing process– it has always stuck with me and been helpful). If the poem goes well, I am as surprised by it as anyone reading it. For this particular book, these speakers/characters were a fun surprise I arrived at over time, and after they were established, more poems started arriving from their perspectives. I love writing until discovery. That’s the joy of poetry for me.
Also, in terms of process, this book as well as Witch Doctrine was written entirely on my phone in my notes app for ease of late night scribing and writing in odd snatched moments. And for me, the mundanity and un-poeticness of the notes app really helps me keep from being too self-conscious as I write, which is a total killer. I have a lot less ego and anxiety when I’m writing poems in the same space I write my to-do lists. While some writers have to have a routine that makes the writing and poems feel special, (and that’s great if it works for you!) I'm the opposite. It has to feel ordinary and even a little secret to take the pressure off. Everyone thinks I’m writing a grocery list, but I’m actually writing about Mothman’s shiny ass.
As far as putting the manuscript together, I wrote a lot of poems over a long period of time. I tend to hyper-produce, and a huge chunk of the poems I write don’t see the light of day. I edited the strongest poems I had and sent them out to journals as I went along, but largely tried not to overthink it as a book. Every few months or so, I would read back through what I had, notice where there were some opportunities/gaps with each speaker, and then write more poems.
I started trying to collect, select, and organize what I had beginning in 2023, and finally nailed it into its current form in the summer of 2024. I printed out all the poems and laid them out on a massive table in the empty science building at my school, put on some Chappell Roan, and arranged, rearranged, and blew up the structure multiple times until it felt right. I tried interweaving the characters and themes more, but it just didn’t work; the rough alien/sasquatch/cryptids and paranormal in structure kept making the most sense, so I went with that.
MS: What ecosystem do you see Cryptid existing in? Other than the Art Bell and Monsters Among Us universe, what kind of literary landscape is Cryptid walking through? Are there writers or musicians or anyone doing work that you think is connected to Cryptid?
AB: First of all– I love that you got that old school Art Bell is an influence on the book, and I love Monsters Among Us! I listened to the latter a lot as I was writing.
As far as subject matter goes Tony Trigilio’s Proof Something Happened, a book of poems based around the Betty and Barney Hill alien abductions, was definitely an inspiration (though my approach to the material was very different), as well as the short story “Yeti Lovemaking” by Ling Ma in her short story collection Bliss Montage. Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets was a book that really helped me break back into poetry after several years of lying fallow, and the voice of the Wannabe Alien Abductee and her world was definitely influenced by some of the poems in that book. Matthea Harvey’s If the Tabloids Are True, What Are You? was also an influence, in particular the “Backyard Mermaid” poems in that book.
Lady Sasquatch and her position outside of domesticity peering in was definitely inspired by Frankenstein. The creature’s spying on the De Lacey family for a year from a hovel outside their home, and his longing to be human and connected to them– only to be brutally rejected when he reveals himself– is Lady Sasquatch’s story. She’s heartbroken, but she does take the rejection better in the end than the creature does.
The musician Neko Case (my favorite of all time) has always been a big influence on my work, too– she frequently speaks in the voices of animals, nature, and creatures, and is able to turn from funny and absolutely devastating in one chorus. She’s the queen of tough-girl heartbreak and collages moments of everyday life with references to tornadoes, William Blake, and Moby Dick. I love her music so much.
I didn’t get around to reading it until after I finished the
book, but the novel Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen
is a total delight, and you should read it if you want more female sasquatches
in your life.
Other creators and creations in the Cryptid ecosystem: the
documentary John Was Trying to Contact Aliens (2020); the
poets Ruth Stone, Laura Jensen, C.D. Wright, and Mary Ruefle; Goosebumps cover
art from the 90s; the Mysterious Universe podcast; artist M.R.
McGrath, in particular his Grouches series (one of which is the cover of the
book!); any Jim Henson creations; Nick Cave’s soundsuits; the American Oddities
Museum in Alton, Illinois.
MS: Do you have upcoming readings you'd like to promote?
Do you have any links to recorded readings that we could check out?
Are there any people/work/stuff you'd like to shine some light on for us? What should be we reading, watching, paying attention to?
AB: If you'd like to keep up with future readings and announcements, check out my website, www.annahbrowning.com, or follow me on Instagram at @annahlbrowning.
I’d love to shout out my University of Akron press-mates’ new collections: Kindall Fredericks’ I’ll Take My Body to Go and Ryan Teitman’s Paperweight are both wonderful and also have the fabulous cover designs of Amy Freels, who also did Cryptid's cover. I am seriously obsessed with the lobster-eating in bed on Kindall’s cover.
Jen Julian has a new novel of creepy Appalachia out now called The Winter Folk that I think everyone should read, particularly fans of the rural horror-- ditto the novel Smothermoss by Alisa Alering, another fabulous Appalachian gothic that came out last year. The poetry collection Spine of the Hug by Alec Hershman is coming out from Iron Oak Editions on September 15th; like all of Alec’s work it’s a killer collection of absurd humor, linguistic hi-jinks, and beautiful lyricism.
Here's some fun internet stuff to check out if you like Cryptid: the artist @binky.and.crumb, who does modern versions of those weird medieval illustrations of cats and other creatures with middle-aged men's faces that are also weirdly encouraging in these times. The artist Anna Mond @annamond also does incredible weird paintings of fantastical creatures, and designer EdaBirthing @eda_birthing is doing some magical monstrous things in fashion and drag. For fellow travelers from and friends in the South, the work The Bitter Southerner magazine is doing in reporting and documenting the South right now is really important, and their photography and art features are absolutely beautiful, so you should definitely follow them, too.
MS: Thanks for the great interview!
Michael Sikkema is a poet and visual artist living in West Michigan. Lately he's been having improvised performance fun with his friend Rootboy.
