Issue 3: Interview with Michelle Cadiz
“I’ve been dreaming lately of being held. Last night it was a waterworld and a ship and a boy who kissed me. We were heroes. There were mermaids. It was all very coming of age.”
~ dream sequence by Michelle Cadiz
Your piece "dream sequence" is a suite of four prose poems, each a surreal episode about wanting to be loved. What sparked the inspiration for this piece?
I started writing "dream sequence" sometime in early 2020. Right before, I had asked out the girl I had a crush on and we dated casually for about a week before deciding we were better off as friends. (We're not friends anymore, but the fall-out was due to something entirely different.) At the time, she was more interested in someone else. In the first drafts of the piece, the fourth prose poem focused more on the fantasy where I was, quote, "more than second best" to that Someone Else. It later evolved to describe a "dream" meaning a "fantasy version of real events" and not "something you see when you're asleep." The other three prose poems were based on actual dreams I had, where I'd dreamed of being loved romantically and then woke disappointed. Those three prose poems were placed first to establish the persona's longing to be loved by this abstract, dream "someone" and then the fourth prose poem would be the revelation that there's a real concrete "you" that the persona is longing for. In time, I realised that while I'd had a crush on a real girl, and we'd gone on two real dates, the girl herself was less important to me compared to the idea of being loved and being happy. She was just the closest I'd gotten to the real life possibility of it.
You describe yourself on Twitter as an "aspiring poet, aspiring biologist." Have your biology studies shaped or influenced your poetry - or vice versa?
My twitter bio is "aspiring poet, aspiring biologist" because they're the two things I'm truly passionate about, and in both fields, there's no test or licensure that lets you know that you're now an Actual Poet or an Actual Biologist. You just write poems, or do research, and then try to put it out into the world and hope for the best. I've had advisers and mentors tell me that writing a scientific paper or article is like "telling a story," and then I'd just quietly panic to myself, thinking "I write poems, I don't know how to write stories!" But they're similar in the sense that the purpose of your writing is to get someone else invested in what you're writing about. In both science writing and artistic writing, you're trying to explain something to an audience, and you're trying to get that audience to care about what you're saying. In terms of one inspiring the other, I'd say it's more that studying biology and learning about the natural world has inspired my poetry more than studying and reading poetry has inspired my research. There is so much wonder in the natural world that it can't not be poetic.
Your poetry has been published widely, and often explores themes such as the climate crisis, mental illness and womanhood. What draws you to exploring these themes in your work?
First of all, it's completely bananas to me that my work can be considered as "published widely." I'm just kind of bopping along and trying my best. I'm grateful every time an editor decides that what I have to say is important enough to be put into the world. I write a lot about the climate crisis, womanhood, and mental illness because those are three things that greatly impact my life and my worldview. I'm a woman, I'm mentally ill, and I've grown up through the worsening climate crisis. A lot of what I write is an attempt at processing these things, and to provide readers with some sense of not necessarily community, but a sense that they're not alone in a struggle. In that sense, love poems are the outlier of what I write. I've never been in love, or been loved romantically, but I think the desire for love (romantic or otherwise) and understanding and acceptance is just part of the human condition.
What is at the top of your reading list at the moment? Are there any great poets from the Philippines we should look out for?
I've been very busy with work lately, so I haven't had much time to read and my "to read" pile has been growing for months. I have some poetry collections I picked up in September that I haven't gotten around to yet: "Swamp Isthmus" by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, "The After Party" by Jana Prikryl, and a selection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm also about halfway through Franny Choi's collection "Soft Science," which I've been reading on and off for almost a year now, and about one third through Isabel Yap's collection of short stories, "Never Have I Ever." I also recently added "The Greenhollow Duology" ("Silver in the Wood" and "Drowned Country") by Emily Tesh to my shelves, as well as "The Gilded Wolves Trilogy" by Roshani Chokshi. Yes, I bought all the books in two series at one time without reading any of them, but they came highly recommended! For Filipino poets, the established writers I'd have to recommend are Conchitina Cruz and Isabela Banzon. My favorite emerging writer though is Gita Labrador, whose work you can find here.
Michelle Cadiz was born, raised, and resides in the Philippines. She is currently studying coral reef ecology.