How did the mentorship relationship work?
Toni was familiar with most of my work because it had been first created in workshop. Toni had an extremely respectful approach to critique and I felt I was able to make extensive edits while Toni rigorously helped maintain the integrity of each piece. It doesn’t make sense for me to think of most of my poems as “finished pieces.” They’re all works in progress about my work-in-progress life. There’s a comforting sense of possibility when nothing is labeled as “finished.” What have you been doing since graduation? Besides working at Houghton Mifflin, I’m addicted to my routines: morning coffee at Panini, weekly lunches with friends, rehearsal with the Princesses of Porn with the Dukes of Dykedom. I’m still having too much of a crush on everything [in Boston] to want to move away. Also, as I’ve moved within the city three times in the past two years, I’m in no rush to see my life packed into neat stacks of equally sized brown boxes. Where do the Princesses of Porn with the Dukes of Dyked
