Tell us a little bit about you.

My name is Alana! I’m originally from Ithaca, New York. I completed my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and Literary History at Sarah Lawrence College. I currently live in Providence, Rhode Island, and am about to start my second year of my MFA at Brown University. My dominant medium is technically fiction, but I’m interested in hybrid/unspecified modes of writing. I work as a barista part-time when not in school.

Can you tell us the story or inspiration behind your postcard poem?

I spent a springtime at a writing program in Dublin in 2023, and after the program ended I had the exciting opportunity to do some travelling with a few friends over the summer! During our travels, we spent a few days in Prague, and our first night there I had a kind of jarring encounter with a man in a bar. He was trying to dance with me, and I wasn’t interested. Both my friends were there, and we were pretty clear with him to leave us alone, but he got increasingly aggressive, and ended up grabbing the back of my hair to try and pull my face towards him. We got out of there very quickly. We were all okay, but it was startling, scary and strange, considering the fact that we were surrounded by people and no one else even attempted to intervene. It was a violent experience that could have happened anywhere. One of the things I really wanted to see in Prague was this Jellyfish Museum– which was essentially an entire aquarium of just jellyfish. It was absolutely beautiful. The interior was dark, cool, serene, and blue, and the walls were lined with these huge tanks of different types of jellyfish. It felt like we were in outer space. I think back on these two experiences that occurred so closely to each other. We are so aware of our bodies in the summertime: it is hot, often suffocating and humid, we feel naked and alive, we move and experience our bodies in the world differently during this season. And the idea of this gelatinous jellyfish, whose body is so transformative that it can multiply in outer space, and its own mode of asexual reproduction is almost like underwater mushrooms just completely fascinated me– the ways in which we might wish our bodies could abstract themselves in the same way. That we could possess those same magical qualities which might protect us from harm.

What drew you to the postcard form? How did the format influence your writing?

I generally enjoy writing in a micro/flash format. I was very inspired by the challenge of keeping this poem under 10 lines as a postcard poem. It made me wonder how might I try to articulate these feelings and thoughts to a loved one in such a brief amount of time, as if I were truly writing a postcard? I remember trying to describe this incident to a friend far away soon after it happened. Sometimes there just isn't more to say other than the facts of the matter-- besides talking around it. It necessitates a trust that the recipient will read between the lines and reach for understanding. The words become precious. I think this format forced me to be clear and concise in my imagery and sensory details, which was in some way a relief– there is no room to kill or suffocate your own prose by overwriting, which is something I am guilty of in long-form work.

What does “summer” mean to you, emotionally or symbolically?

Summer is always a strange time of year. It is so brief and so strong. I find that I grieve summer even while I am in it– all the things I hoped to do or accomplish, or the person I believed that summer would finally allow me to be. Especially in July and August, I suffer the summer blues. But summer is a beautiful season. The earth is breathing in summer. It feels that the summer months are less for people to enjoy than they are for the plants to experience the sun. It's also so nostalgic– I often find myself using summer as a marker of time, to think back on my childhood or summers past and notice how much has transformed around me. Or even sometimes, summer makes me feel the exact same as I did when I was small. Either summer stays the same or I do? Either way, it is a time for reflection and curiosity when everything is so sensory and heightened– the smells, the feeling of the air, the sounds of insects, people’s expressions of both aggression and love. Everything is raw. When summer eventually ends, it truly does feel like a real ending, as opposed to the end of winter or spring, which trails off into the next thing. It’s bittersweet to live in summer.