Rainie Oet is a nonbinary trans woman who writes poetry and fiction for adults and young readers. From 2019-2021, Oet released three poetry collections: Porcupine in Freefall (Bright Hill Press), Inside Ball Lightning (Southern Missouri State University Press), and Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press). These cohesive and conceptual collections feature the epistolary, imaginary friends, doppelgängers, sibling relationships, surreal childhood memories, and more. The poems are full of empathy and tenderness and imagination and heart. With two picture books in the works - and seven (7!) total manuscripts in various stages - I spoke with Oet about everything from Miyazaki to multitasking, from D&D to Octavia E. Butler.
What's the last rewarding/memorable video game you've played?
I don't play video games much but I still think about Celeste. A perfect game. And Yume Nikki continues to be an all-time inspiration for the kind of art I want to make.
You've released three collections of poetry in the last three years. Were they all written on top of each other / at the same time? What was that writing/submitting/promoting process like?
Sorta. I'd be writing one while revising another, while submitting yet another. They kept getting to finalist status in contests but not getting picked up, so eventually I was submitting them all at once. Then they all got accepted pretty much at the same time, and the way the publication timelines worked, we pushed them all out so that they came out in the order I wrote them. The juggling projects is typically my process now, except, now I think it's grown way more heads? Like I'm currently juggling two picture books that are under contract but haven't had finalized edits, one poetry manuscript in submission, a longer picture book project that's about to go on submission, a graphic novel script and a middle-grade novel in verse that are almost ready for submission, and another poetry manuscript that's probably a couple months away from submission. It sounds crazy when I spell it all out like that, but I do just try to work on one thing at a time now—I write for an hour a day, and you'd be surprised how that adds up!
You frequently work in the epistolary. Can you talk a bit about this form and your history with it and why you continue to return to it?
I just love fragments, and I love working out of characters' POVs. I love telling larger stories through highly focused scenes. For a long time, I just focused on poetry-based forms this way. But discovering Octavia E. Butler's work was really transformational for me. In all of her work, but especially in the Lilith's Brood and Seed to Harvest series, she often uses chapters separated by wide time skips to tell these incredibly expansive stories of world and character change. Since having my notion of what is possible in writing just blown open by her work and the work of other fantastic speculative fiction writers, I've been increasingly writing fiction that actually looks like fiction, instead of looking like poetry. But yeah, like, my goal is always to tell big stories, whether in poetry or in prose. I want to go really wide and, instead of giving readers a blow-by-blow of how characters and worlds change over each instant of time, I like to let the scenes and the space between them imply that change. Another really amazing book that taught me more about this was One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Many of your poems deal with imaginary friends, alter egos/split personas, the relationships between siblings, and/or childhood memories that seem to be slowly fading away. Is this accurate? Is this something you find yourself being drawn to? Can you elaborate a bit on this?
Yeah, I'd say that's definitely an accurate depiction of some of my obsessions, especially the idea of doubles/splits/doppelgängers, whether that happens in a relationship between two people or between one person and themself. I mean I also feel like this is just such a trans thing, at least me. Mirrors are important. Mirrors are scary. Mirrors hold a ton of meaning. The obsession with doubles/imaginary friends also spills into the things that scare me—like Helen Oyeyemi's vastly underrated The Icarus Girl. I'd say there are definitely some newer obsessions that haven't made it into my past books, but that I'm really leaning into in my current works in progress: xenobiology, weird ecology, and people's connection with nature and animals. Octavia E. Butler is the master of that though. Her influence is now irrevocably in everything I write or think of in those fields. Also, now especially since I've started writing books for younger readers, I've been embracing a feeling of responsibility to nurture in myself and impart in my work a way of seeing and of being that will inspire people to make the world better, to love it more, to take better care of it and of each other.
Rather than simply collecting previously published poems, your books are often full-length ideas, or narratives that push the story along. There's a through-line which you don't see enough in poetry and I wonder how you approach a book and how you find these poems talking to each other?
Usually what's happened with my poetry books is I just write poems for a while, and then I look at them, and I want to find a way to organize them. So at some point, usually in the middle of the process of generating poems, I'll start to ask myself questions about the pieces and organize my answers into—characters, story, change. I mean, with Glorious Veils of Diane, for example, I started off with a short sequence of poems imagining Diane Arbus as a child, another small group of poems about random dreams I had, another small group of poems that all had fire in them, another based off of a blood elemental I created for a D&D campaign I wasn't able to attend more than two sessions of, and a bunch of other random poems. And then I started being willing to see them all as a group, and I realized that there were actually a few different POVs, and I gave the POVs to different characters, and then started organizing the poems to create the world and story of the book. Then I wrote more poems and revised existing poems to make sense of that. The very last thing I did in that book was to create a question to give to the reader as they open the book, to help them organize their experience: "On so and so day, Diane disappeared. Where did she go?" It's really important to me to treat the revision and organization of a book as an equally creative process to the writing of the original pieces.
That said, I'm definitely not ruling out publishing a book of assorted poems without a throughline. There's quite a few new and old poems that I've never been able to work into any projects that I don't know what to do with.
via Wigleaf
Do you have any other project-books in the works? In other words, what are you currently working on?
Okay, how much to spill here, haha. Sure:
A picture book about a nonbinary child's magical birthday party, which should be coming out from Astra Young Readers in the next couple years.
A picture book about two siblings, monsters/being trans, and a thunderstorm, which should be coming out from Astra Young Readers in the next couple years.
A poetry book of elegies for a dead, imaginary twin sister, which is currently out on submission.
A book of picture book stories that I won't say more about for now except that they're all thematically linked and I'm really excited about them. That's about to go out on submission.
A graphic novel script about foxes that's inspired by Octavia E. Butler, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope to have it out on submission soon.
A middle grade novel-in-verse about a beloved rollercoaster park video game series, coming out as trans, first love, and school life. I hope to have it out on submission soon.
A poetry book about my relationship with my amazing partner, Ariel Chu, which I hope to finish in the next few months.
There are some other things swirling around but I'll keep them close to the chest for now.
You are also a game designer and passionate about music (I remember watching a sung poem a couple years back and being mesmerized). How do you see these worlds colliding? Or do you find that you keep them separate?
Oh yeah, I mean I feel like I'm frequently turning songs I write into poems, or poems I write into songs! There's a video game project in the works that's inspired by a book of poetry—I'm collaborating with a great team at Syracuse University around that. I've designed a few board games as well that I'm pretty proud of, but those are pretty small-scale for me right now. I'd publish them if I got an opportunity to, otherwise I'm happy just pulling them out for friends. And yeah, I love learning from other forms of art, and I feel really energized by playing around. It feeds my writing work, and vice versa.
Outside of poetry, have you written any prose or longer form pieces? I see on your website that a 2023 children's book is coming out?!
Yeah! More and more and more! I had a kind of breakthrough last winter. I just started writing, for the first time in my life, about an hour every day. After about two months, I had a novel draft (which is currently on the backburner—I need to decide whether I actually like it or not). But I realized that it was actually possible for me to write longer form things, which I never thought it could be. So now, I've given myself permission to write longer works, and it's been really fun. That's where the bulk of my writing energy is going now.
Outside of your own art and writing, what albums/artists/plays/films have captivated you in recent months?
Yeah, awesome. Okay, I'm just gonna go since the start of 2021, because that winter/spring was a really transformative time for me and I'm still impacted by it:
Books:
Everything Octavia E. Butler wrote, especially Lilith's Brood and Seed to Harvest
Nausicaa (the complete manga) by Hiyao Miyazaki
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Remembrance of Earth's Past by Cixin Liu
Entangled Life by Martin Sheldrake
Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (literally how does anyone read it and think it's not sapphic as hell)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Music:
There's so many songs and artists I've loved this year. My strongest album rec though is The Turning Wheel by Spellling
Movies/TV:
Attack on Titan season 4!!!! goddamn!!!!!!
Arcane
Centrifuge Brain Project
HoSo Terra Toma on Dragula season 4
Probably a lot more but these are the ones I'm remembering!
If you can, provide a photo of your workspace.
For this ongoing author interview series, I'm asking for everyone to present a writing prompt. It can be as abstract or as concrete as you choose.
Write about your worst fear, in a scene, but make the scene feel super mundane.
In closing, do you have any advice for early writers? Or rather, what's something you would have liked to have known when you first started taking your writing seriously?
Develop a writing practice, even if it's just 5 minutes a day. You can grow it from there!!!!
Any final thoughts or words of wisdom or shout-outs?
Ariel Chu's killing it this year and I love her very much. Keep your eyes on Ariel!
![[TITLE] written while listening to Zushi by Dean Blunt](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/580fa9f7e58c62cb7501937b/1665847727162-7ZB4MQGXPPQSXY3GSJX1/zushi.jpeg)
