A conversation with carolyn decarlo & jackson nieuwland
Passing Into Another Dimension
Carolyn DeCarlo and Jackson Nieuwland are writers based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Together they run the bookshop Food Court Books and the publishing house We Are Babies. They live with three cats (Jareth, Hamilton, and Samwise), two humans (Sarah and Jordan), and one dog (Dora).
Caro’s chapbook ‘Winter Swimmers’ was published in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019. Jackson’s poetry collection I Am A Human Being was published by Compound Press in 2020.
How did you start writing – and do you remember the first thing that you wrote?
Jackson: I always wrote bits and pieces growing up, but the first time I really took writing seriously and worked on the craft of it was in high school when I started writing raps. I was big into New Zealand hip hop, particularly Frontline and the Breakin Wreckwordz collective. I was also hugely influenced by Lupe Fiasco. I spent countless hours coming up with punchlines and multisyllable rhymes. That was when I really started learning poetic techniques. I remember one verse I wrote started, ‘People try to size me up like you upsize a cup but my size is such that I’m supersized like the Hulk.’ I was pretty proud of that lol. Eventually I realised that what I enjoyed about rap wasn’t the actual act of rapping itself (I wasn’t particularly invested in flow or breath control and was much too shy to perform on stage) but the writing, and at that point pretty quickly pivoted to poetry.
Caro: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. I picked up reading quite early on and I just always remember my parents encouraging me when I felt like writing or drawing as a child. It was never discouraged. I was that kid in the restaurant reading a book while the adults talked to each other.
I’m not sure about the first thing I wrote, but I remember starting a lot of chapter books – writing chapters 1-3 and then running out of steam. I do vividly remember getting the American Girl dolls who came with a series of 6 printed books; then there were American Girl of Today dolls, which came with a series of blank books. I was forever working on those books, expanding their storyline and including new characters.
As well as writing, editing, running a bookstore and publishing together, you’re also partners – how did you meet one another, and start working together?
Caro: Jackson and I met online back in 2011, while Jackson was living in Wellington and I was in the second year of my MFA in Maryland, in the States. At the time, there was this group of writers connected by a website called HTMLGiant, and we were all interested in experimental writers and small presses. There were some forums cropping up – most prominently, a site called Let People Poems, which allowed anyone to publish their writing on the site, and anyone to comment on it. One of my friends in my MFA program started that site, so I kind of joined the scene through him. There was a group of writers from New Zealand including Jackson, Stacey Teague, and Alice May Connolly (currently of McDonalds fame) who were all really involved in these forums. We would video chat with one another on a platform called Tiny Chats, and eventually Jackson and I just started staying behind once everyone else had left the chats. We all just shared one account, and I remember one time the owner of the account, Ana C, came on to use it to talk with a friend and we were still lurking in there, several hours after the group chat had ended. I think that’s when everyone started to realise, oh, these two are kind of into each other.
Jackson: We started working together right from the very beginning. While Caro was still in the States we would write each other steamy private poems all the time and send them back and forth. That flowed directly into the first project we wrote together: FOUR, a chapbook/zine themed around four letter words. We each wrote a few pieces for it individually and we also wrote a couple of collaborative poems. From there we just continued working on collaborative writing projects.
In terms of publishing, the first thing we worked on together was an online journal that Caro started soon after we met called UP Literature, which was focused on writing about the body. Caro had started it with a friend of hers, but they pulled out really early on and so I slid in to help out with the project.
We’ve worked together on so many projects over the years, I often forget about some of them. We even worked together at an after-school care programme for a while when she first moved to Aotearoa. Working together has always been a huge part of our relationship. It’s hard for me to imagine what our partnership would look like without that aspect to it.
Caro, sound and rhythm are really important aspects in your poems; their musicality. What writers have had the biggest influence on your own work?
Caro: I think when I started writing poetry, I was most influenced by Zachary Schomburg and Mary Ruefle, and also by some of the writers I was finding in the online scene Jackson and I were in. I didn’t really start feeling serious about my poetry practice until my mid-20s, but I think underlying this was an earlier interest in Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, and the Beat poets. Whimsical and/or dark writing with some hefty emotions – not always sad, but always a bit over the top. That passion and excitement, translated into poetry, really got me going. I would also be remiss not to include my original poetry group in New Zealand: Hannah Mettner, Morgan Bach, Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Emma Barnes, and Anna Jackson. Their encouragement and careful assessment of my work was crucial for me when I was still finding my own voice, and the payoff was the poems that appear in AUP New Poets 5’s ‘Winter Swimmers’ collection. Of course, throughout this whole process of my development as a poet, Jackson has been there listening and helping me to shape them into their final forms. They’ve always been my first reader for my poems.
Jackson, each of your poems in I Am A Human Being begins with the line ‘I am a...’ and then continues from the point of view of a different object, animal or occupation. How did you come up with this restraint and what did it allow you to do that other poetic styles might not have afforded you?
Jackson: The first ‘I am a’ poem that I wrote was ‘I Am A Robot’. This was in 2011 when I was in the middle of a major depressive episode. That poem came from a very sad and lonely place but I also considered it the best thing that I’d written at that point, so immediately began writing more poems using the same formula: unicorn, virgin, mermaid, clown. Once I had a few of them, it just seemed to make sense to write a whole book of them. I wrote the first full draft of the collection while studying creative writing at Whitireia and then gradually changed, added to, and tweaked it over the years.
The ‘I am a’ form really allowed me to explore identity in multiple ways. I could investigate elements of myself I didn’t yet understand, inhabit different versions of myself, and even attempt to escape myself entirely into different identities. And that was all before I learnt about the concept of non-binary gender and realised that I’m genderqueer. Once that happened the book really clicked into place and started making a lot more sense to me.
Together you wrote the collection Bound: An Ode to Falling In Love, published by Compound Press. What was your process for writing poems together, about one another (and in the personae of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West)?
Caro: Well, this is a funny one. Chris Holdaway called on the two of us to write a collaborative chapbook, and gave us no constraints. We had been sitting on the project for ages and I think he was getting ready to ask us how it was coming along. I don’t know how it started, but all we had was this idea that it would be about or from the perspectives of Kim and Kanye. I’d seen a lot of the Kardashian reality shows at that point, and Jackson was a big fan of Kanye. This was right after Yeezus had come out, and the music video for ‘Bound 2’. But nothing was working, until we decided to make Kanye a reptilian alien. We booked this AirBnB for a weekend and just smashed the whole thing out. All the titles of the poems come from lines in ‘Bound 2’.
Jackson: We played with a few methods of collaboration in Bound. Again, we wrote some of the poems solo, Caro writing from Kim’s perspective, me from Kanye’s, but we were sitting next to each other on the couch when we did it this time, rather than on opposite sides of the planet.
We wrote the poem ‘You remember where we first met?’ collaboratively as a dialogue between Kim and Kanye. I would write a stanza of what Kanye remembered and then Caro would write one from Kim’s side.
In the final poem of the collection, the two characters’ voices merged and we went back and forth writing a line each until it reached its epic conclusion lol.
Me and Caro weren’t the only ones collaborating on this project though. Our friend Josephine Jelicich both illustrated and printed the book on her risograph, giving it a really cool and distinctive visual element. Chris Holdaway was also an important part of the collaboration. We wouldn’t have written Bound if he hadn’t solicited it, and the way he designed the book had a huge impact on how it reads. He was also very determined that it be printed on this specific type of paper that Caro and I couldn’t find anywhere in Wellington. We ended up having to drive out to this industrial warehouse in Petone to pick it up. We had no idea what we were doing. It was worth it though, beautiful paper.
What do you feel are the most important things about the other's writing?
Jackson: What I love most about Caro’s writing is how it transports me. Whenever I read one of her pieces, no matter how long or short or what it’s about, I feel like I’ve passed into another dimension. She does it in a variety of ways, sometimes through incorporating fantasy elements, sometimes through atypical syntax, other times just through tone, but most often I have no idea how she achieves it.
She has this poem called ‘The Car and the Man Inside’, in which she describes a group of children playing ‘catch-the-toad’ and she does it with such authority that I was certain that it was a real game. When she told me that she’d just made it up, I was dumbfounded.
Caro: Jackson has this way of connecting emotionally with writing, both their own and other people’s, and I really admire their ability to draw an audience into feeling this connection. Like, this has always been the case with us – I might read a poem and feel totally uninterested in it, totally disconnected. Then Jackson will read the same poem aloud, and I will love it. There’s this openness with which Jackson approaches writing that I think is really enviable – there aren’t any preconceptions about what a thing can or cannot do.
I think this comes across in Jackson’s own writing as well. They know how to keep things playful even if the topic is kind of fraught, and it always feels like there’s no pressure to be smart or well-informed about a topic before reading their writing. I Am A Human Being is so totally shocking in its impact, because you flip through the pages and you see puns, you see this person having fun with language and seemingly maybe just messing around. I remember Jackson and I got into it with each other once about 8 years ago over the word ‘ladler’ – as in, one who ladles. I said no way, and Jackson said if they could make it work in a short story that would prove it to me. So they wrote it into this story they wrote called ‘Fishbowl’ about a man who pooped out a fish and it turned into a dog – the man was working as a ladler in the kitchen of a local restaurant. I still think about that story almost every day.
You are the co-founders of Food Court; a zine/poetry reading collective that has been operating for seven years. How did this get started? Can you describe what your favourite Food Court event has been and why?
Caro: My first year in New Zealand, Jackson and I would have these meetings with Greg Kan and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle to discuss the state of poetry events in Wellington. I guess our dissatisfaction rubbed off on the rest of our flat, because the next year, 2014, Eamonn Marra, Simon Palenski, Jackson and myself decided to start a reading collective. We had been attending book launches at Unity and poetry readings throughout the city and found their lack of diversity unsettling. There were some brilliant groups in the States and Australia putting on regular poetry events, and we basically just stole from them to create Food Court. At the time, we were all quite invested in the annual Wellington Zinefest and I know we decided quite early on, to make zines as artifacts of the readings. Every reader would be asked to contribute a small amount of their work to the zine, and we gave them out for free to all attendees. It felt important to put their work in print, both for the new writers and for the people coming to our events who might not otherwise remember the poets’ names or work, since very few of them had their own first books out yet. It’s been great to see so many of these writers grow and publish their work in their own right.
Jackson: There have been a lot of great Food Court events over the years. There’s this magic with readings that I can never predict, where some of them just coalesce into a special moment that’s more than the sum of its parts. One event that stands out in my memory was a reading we put on as part of LitCrawl in 2019 called ‘Food Court Goes to the Airport’. All the readers were from out of town but we had a great audience that packed out the venue. It was at Jhana Millers Gallery and it was so hot and sweaty in there, at one point we had to pause to open all the windows. I was encouraging the crowd to whoop and cheer whenever they heard something they liked and they responded really well. I remember Vanessa Crofskey and Rose Lu getting super into it lol. It was just such a joyous gathering and felt like a culmination of a lot of work we’d done that year.
Last year, you ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to expand the Food Court platform and opened Food Court Books, a physical store in Newtown, Wellington. The shop specialises in selling zines and books from independent and local presses, or texts that are otherwise hard to come by, and also functions as a work/event space. How did you find the courage to start the store? What were the challenges and highlights along the way?
Jackson: Running our own shop is something that we’ve both wanted to do for years (especially Caro), but the opportunity to make it happen only came about when we were attempting to get a much larger project off the ground. We’d been meeting with several other people from the literary community about the possibility of starting a writers’ centre in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. The idea was that it would house office space for various literary organisations like VERB and Zinefest, as well as desk space for writers, a venue for readings, launches, panels, and workshops, and a small bookshop. It’s something that we still want to make happen eventually but we quickly realised that it was more of a long-term project and it was going to cost a lot of money. But while we were looking at locations for the centre, our friend Randy sent us a photo of the ‘For Lease’ sign in the window of 84 Constable Street.
When Caro and I went to check out the space, we knew immediately that it was too small to function as a writers’ centre, but we thought it could work as a bookshop. It was the only property we’d seen that we could afford to rent just the two of us, so we decided to take the leap and open the shop.
Caro: The space was in a real state of disarray when we found it. There were hundreds of nails in the walls and everything was so dirty from long-term neglect. The last thing running here had been Tickety Boo, a second-hand shop, which had closed over a year before we began renting the space. The electricity had to be rewired, and we didn’t find out about that until after we’d finished painting and wallpapering. There’s also absolutely no piling under the floor, and heaps of scratches in the glass panel at the front of the shop, which while unsightly, aren’t seeming to compromise its integrity.
That said, this space has turned out so well for us. I think Jackson and I have really made it into a comfortable space for ourselves and for Dora, that we could see ourselves working from for 35 hours a week. We are running a lot of events and our new press out of the space so it was really important that we get it right. This place would not look the way it does without the help of our friends and family, specifically Jackson’s whānau (Marg, Al, and Andrea), and Joey Lameche, David Summerville, Rachel Lynch, and Willie.
I think one of the highlights of starting the store for both of us has been the response from the Newtown community and on Instagram, and the early success of our Boosted campaign, which we ran during the month leading up to the opening of the shop. We met our goal of $5,000 in just five days and by the end of the campaign had also reached our stretch goal of $7,500 to restart our publishing house. It was a complete surprise to us to see such strong support for what we were doing, and it felt really encouraging and validating. Ten months in, we’re still feeling the love and the generous community support. Newtown is a beautiful place.
Through the store you also run a monthly book club, where participants don't know what book they’ll be reading until collecting the package from the store. How did you come up with this (wonderful) idea and what have been some of the group’s favourite books so far?
Caro: Well, not to toot my own horn but this was definitely my idea! I’m glad you like it, haha. I have been a big fan of subscription book clubs for years, especially the Book of the Month Club which is unfortunately restricted to North America. Every year or so I send them another e-mail begging them to open up for international sales, but I just don’t think it’s in the cards. I set my mom up with a subscription for her birthday last year so at least I can live the book selections through her. I’ve also spent a lot of time on BookTube, watching some of them set up subscription services through the years as well. I always wanted to create some version of this myself, and once we got this space for Food Court Books, it kind of all fell into place. We’ve got all these books that no one knows about, and we want to bring in new international small press titles, so what better way to highlight all these unknown presses than by creating an audience for them amongst a group of voracious book club readers?
Jackson: The first book we read, Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, was a big hit. Mitchison was a contemporary of JRR Tolkien and Travel Light, a fantasy novel for young readers with a female protagonist, was published before The Hobbit, but had been out of print for a long time before Small Beer Press put out a new edition.
R E D by Chase Berggrun (published by Birds LLC) also had a lot of fans. It’s a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from a trans perspective. We were really impressed by the way Berggrun crafted their own playful and raw poetic narrative that stood on its own, separate from the source material.
More recently These Wild Houses by Omar Sakr (published by Cordite) was very popular with the group. Sakr is a bisexual Arab Australian, whose poetry is immaculately crafted and paints a vivid picture of his childhood in Sydney.
But honestly I’m most excited when people don’t like the books! That’s what leads to the really fun, meaty conversations. Now I’ll often start our discussions by asking, ‘Did anyone hate it?’ and hope that someone pipes up.
You are also about to (re)launch Food Court’s own independent press We Are Babies, and publish debut poetry collections from Cadence Chung, Khadro Mohamed and Nicole Titihuia Hawkins. What are you most excited by about each of these collections, and what advice would you have for any aspiring authors hoping to submit to the press themselves in future?
Caro: Well, first off, I can also announce that we will now be publishing a second collection of poetry from Rachel O’Neill in our first publishing season as well! This is really exciting to me personally because I’ve been a fan of Rachel’s work since their first collection, One Human in Height, came out with Hue & Cry Press. Chloe Lane did such a wonderful job on that book and with the press, it’s definitely been a big influence on the ethos of We Are Babies. Rachel’s work is fantastic, and this collection came to us in a real state of perfection.
With Nicole, I have been a fan of her work since I watched her read a series of poems about grief that had me and the rest of her audience in stitches. I think she is so perceptive. Her poems are purposeful and, seemingly, fearless. There is a power and a relatability to her work that puts the reader in a mind that they are part of her conscious audience. Khadro’s work is so smart and honest. She writes from a very personal place, but has a mastery of her craft that allows her to reach into these moments of relief and reflection. Her work is poignant, sometimes philosophical, but also often quite hilarious. I love that. Cadence is just absolutely so prolific. When we asked her for a manuscript, she gave us two – and a few weeks ago, she wrote a whole script that has already been performed now at Wellington High School. I can’t believe that. Like you said, with all three of these writers we are publishing debut collections, and in some ways that is in and of itself the most exciting thing to me right now.
Jackson: I would tell authors that are planning to submit to We Are Babies that what excites me the most in a piece of writing is seeing something that I’ve never seen before. We want to publish work that feels new and unique. We want books that only one person could have written. We want to receive manuscripts in which writers embrace their obsessions and idiosyncrasies. We love a good gimmick, but it has to be followed through with passion and honesty. We’re trying to publish books that wouldn’t find a home anywhere else, so write books that wouldn’t find a home anywhere else!
You are huge advocates for independent publishing and marginalised voices and have done so much to contribute to this space in Aotearoa. What changes would you still like to see in the local literary landscape?
Jackson: For me it’s all about the opening up of new and different possibilities. A lot of the time it feels like there’s only one path to being a ‘successful’ writer in Aotearoa: you go do your MA at the IIML and then get published by one of the university presses. I want people to see that there are so many other paths available: look at the reach Hana Pera Aoake and Courtney Sina Meredith have, what Becky Manawatu has achieved, what Dominic Hoey is doing, and what David Merritt has been doing for the past however many decades. There are infinite ways to make a life as a writer and I want people to be encouraged to pursue some of the less commonly followed paths. In order for that to happen we need more indie publishers, more easily accessible funding, and more grassroots organisation and community support. We’re getting there slowly, but I want us to get there more quickly! There are so many writers in Aotearoa who I want to see flourish and thrive.
Caro: I would still like to see presses loosening up about what they’re willing to publish. Even amongst the smaller and independent presses, there can be a real rigidity about what fits and what doesn’t, or what they know what to do with. Whether that has to do with a writer’s background, the genre of their writing, or even what category it fits into, I’ve found publishers both here and abroad can be wary of breaking the ‘rules’. I’d also like to see this lack of fear pushed further in local bookshops and festivals. It can be easy to stick with what already sells, but pushing boundaries and trying on new things for size is healthy, refreshing, and important for all sorts of change and growth. Of course, I’d also love to see more money allocated to writers from the government for writers’ residencies and conferences, and opening spaces to those who have been denied access to grants in the past – migrants, visa-holders, etc. Overall, I think we all just need to keep bridging the gaps and making everyone feel comfortable and welcome in our literary spaces.
What advice would you give to any young writers out there who are worried their work may not align with a mainstream publisher? What avenues would you recommend?
Caro: I wish I had that knowledge myself. I am still holding onto manuscripts from 5-10 years ago that have not found a publisher, so it would be irresponsible of me to try to give advice about what to do and where to go… if they figure it out, maybe they can let me know?
Jackson: I would recommend putting your own work out to start with! Make a zine with a friend, share your poems on social media, sign up for open mics and slams. These are all great ways of getting your writing in front of people and building your confidence. I also believe it’s really important to become part of a community, whether it be IRL or URL: go to events, reach out to writers whose work you admire, join in on discussions. You’ll learn so much and the relationships you build will be invaluable.
What will you be working on next?
Caro: Not so much next as ongoing – there’s the epic fantasy I’ve had in my pocket for a couple of years, there’s the first full-length poetry collection, there’s the unfinished short story collection. The list is endless, which can be intimidating but also exhilarating, depending on my perspective on any given day.
Jackson: I’m trying really hard to master the art of getting a full night’s sleep and attempting to find the time to finish my novel.