Always Singing, Always Writing Poems
In stories and poems, Alex Gallo-Brown explores labor in the twenty-first century.
BY PATRICK MCGINTY
HERE’S HOW I BEGAN the 2010s: recommending a slim book from a small Seattle press that came out in 2009. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets wasn’t prose poetry, I’d say. Saying ‘lyric essay’ felt wrong, too. I at one point referred to her as ‘hybridizer,’ a term that sounds more like a cheap horror film or a bad carnival ride at an agricultural fair. I was new to Portland, Oregon, when I was making these recommendations, which were really just ways of trying to score Literary Snob Points. It quickly became clear that I needed friends, not LSP’s, and so I stopped trying to categorize Bluets. I started saying things like: ‘I know the exact shelf Bluets sits on, let’s walk to Powell’s, read a few pages, and I’ll buy it for you if you dig it.’ I made three good friends this way.
Here’s how I began the 2020s: recommending another hard-to-define book from a small Seattle press that came out in 2019. Alex Gallo-Brown’s Variations of Labor contains stories. It’s got poems. There’s visual art. I could devote all sorts of critical energy to unpacking and explaining why I love Gallo-Brown’s book so unreservedly, but I think I learned my lesson with Bluets. I’d rather just walk someone to buy it, particularly if this person has spent any time whatsoever thinking about the role labor plays in their life and in the country. Yes, it’s a ‘Northwest book,’ a ‘Seattle book,’ but I feel confident that Variations of Labor will resonate with anyone who has felt their social and emotional footing grow more unstable as technologists flick and prod at humanity like some kind of spinning top they can spur relentlessly ‘forward.’
Gallo-Brown has worked inside and lived alongside many of these companies. He has sought to provide a voice to the labor movement in both his art and also in his professional life, which has often involved organization efforts. In the ensuing email exchange, he outlines his own personal history of worker advocacy. He provides a stellar list of labor-themed art. His work was fuel for me. At the end of our exchange, he very kindly noted that our back-and-forth had provided fuel to him, too. I write this introductory note as Covid-19 forces employees and employers to rethink what ‘labor’ might resemble in the coming weeks, and anyone eager to advocate for what labor should resemble thereafter would be well served by cracking open Variations of Labor.
This email exchange has been lightly re-arranged for clarity.
McGinty: I saw the movie Parasite sometime in December and left thinking, “Wow, that was extremely artful yet also extremely accessible. It was rather obviously political but above all it was super, super...real.” Within a day or two, I read your book, and after every entry in Variations of Labor, I thought, “This, like Parasite, is so artfully accessible. My most culturally-dialed-in experimental poet friends could dig Alex’s work, but my dad would be able to get it and love it, too.”
It’s hard as hell to create art that engages and excites those two groups simultaneously, and I’m wondering whether that’s a goal of yours or whether it’s just an organic byproduct of your work. If it’s a goal, how do you make it happen? Like, do you have an inner sense, particularly when writing the stories, where you say “Okay, above all, it’s got to feel real, that’s what I’m after”? Or, “Once a paragraph, I’ve got to twist the language a bit with some repetition or something more artful”? Are those concerns equal (or perhaps non-existent) for you?
Gallo-Brown: First of all, those are enormous compliments—both being compared to Parasite, which I loved, and also that people who self-identify as poets or as “art people” would like my work but people who don’t would, too. That’s less of a goal for me and more of a natural byproduct of who I am, I think, as an artist and person. What I want most fundamentally is to communicate—and not only with a very particular group of people, such as the “literary community” (whatever that means). I do have a master’s degree in creative writing, I care very much about literature, I have good friends who are poets and so on. But I also spend a lot of time with people, both at work and in my personal life, whose only interaction with poetry was in a high school English class (which they hated), who could give a fuck about the new, hot novel being dragged on Twitter, who have no idea who Sally Rooney or Maggie Nelson or Fred Moten is. And I want to reach them, too. I’m not sure I think consciously about how to do that so much; instead, when I write, I’m always searching for something that feels true to me—something that touches that emotional current, that pushes me forward, that gets me wanting to come back to the page. It’s a process of discovery. In my heart, I am both a literary snob and a worker wearing an apron, as well as many other things, and writing is often an attempt to reconcile these different parts of myself.
“I do believe that people who are politically anti-union or conservative could read a story about a cafeteria worker and come away changed in terms of how they think about work, class, our economic system, etc, but it might take them some time.”
McGinty: You bring up wearing an apron, so I might as well jump ahead to “The Job at the Technology Company Cafe.” That story is the reason I’m interviewing you and not writing some other kind of piece about your book. I read that story and felt critically...deactivated in a way that doesn’t happen as often as I wished. I guess the simplest way to describe my experience is to say that I “identified,” but that’s not quite the full extent (I’m going to identify with any book that features poker tournaments, union organizing, Sonics/Blazers references, and Sorry to Bother You).
What I’m talking about is the narrator thinking of himself as a “spy” as he works in the kitchen of the technology company. I don’t think I’ve seen that specific feeling expressed so well or, really, expressed period. It’s the same gimmick I have set up in virtually every job of my adult life (temp jobs, current jobs, all of ’em) where I, like the narrator, conceive of myself as a spy—at times to do “Something exciting for a change,” as the narrator of that story says, as though I’m going to report back to Special Agent Word Doc, and in other instances I think it’s been a way to...I dunno, position myself as being outside of what’s going on at a certain company.
At some point in the past few years, it became rather obvious that the biggest companies in the world are WAY better spies than I am ever going to be and that I’ve at times used the ‘spy’ thing as a cop-out. I, like the narrator, have found my spy games to be “silly” (...this does not mean I have stopped, necessarily). This is a very long way of saying that seeing the narrator close that story by trying to construct a new routine and philosophy for how to exist in the twenty-first century workforce just floored me. I don’t even really have a question, but I did write in the margins near the very end: “Oh my god he’s doubling up [on the silliness of being a spy]. Guts me.” You essentially have the character repeat his thought process on consecutive work days, with these slight, have-to-read-it-twice differences in the language to show the character trying to construct a new mental routine doing mundane tasks. It felt like a risky move, doing that kind of repetition, which in poetry I’m sure has some kind of Greek terminology. Did it feel like a risk? Did it feel natural? The story could technically end in the section before, yet I love that it doesn’t.
Gallo-Brown: As might be apparent, the story you reference is in some ways based on personal experience. In 2015, I’d moved back to Seattle, where I was born and raised, without a job, and, as was my wont back then (before I got into the labor organizing world), found jobs in food service. One of those gigs ended up being inside of a prominent technology company (I won’t say which one), which paid me all of $13.50 an hour with no benefits. Like the character in the story, I was initially intrigued by the idea of getting a peek into the work lives of the people who were rapidly ruining my city (that was my feeling at the time, anyway, although it has since shifted a little). The experience wasn’t ultimately very interesting, but it was infuriating. As the character in the story concludes, what was the point of spying on tech companies when there’s no authority to report back to, no power to determine right or wrong? Unless you’re trying to organize a union, I suppose, which my character isn’t, or incite a violent worker rebellion like the protagonists of the great Steinbeck novel In Dubious Battle, which I wasn’t. In the end, the best he or I could hope to do was engage in minor acts of sabotage. (To be clear, the end of the story is very much fiction.)
As writers, I think that we are constantly spying on our own lives (on ourselves, on our loved ones, on the communities of which we are part). But if you tend to orient Left and you are forced to work shitty jobs, there’s another way in which one might be inclined to engage in espionage. Hopefully, we can channel the knowledge we gain toward productive ends, either by writing about it or explicitly engaging in political activity, such as unionization efforts or other kinds of worker advocacy.
McGinty: I love that you bring up In Dubious Battle. What else is on your own personal ‘labor art’ list? We’ve already mentioned a few movies, but are there newsletters you subscribe to? Poets or musicians or novelists, alive or alive-for-you, that are your navigational stars? Be as snobby or anti-snobby as you want.
Gallo-Brown: Yes, I do have a list! If we’re strictly talking about labor-themed art, I love John Sayles’ movie Matewan, George Orwell’s non-fiction book Down and Out in Paris and London, Mark Nowak’s poetry collection Coal Mountain Elementary, Nanni Belestrini’s novel We Want Everything, Herman Melville’s story Bartleby, the Scrivener, Travis Wilkerson’s documentary film An Injury to One, Paul Schrader’s narrative film Blue Collar, Heikke Geissler’s semi-autobiographical novel Seasonal Associate, Joseph Bell’s novel Out of this Furnace, and Mary Miller’s collection of stories Big World, to name a few. Sorry to Bother You and Parasite were great recent films. I’m sure there are many others that I’m forgetting now. I’m currently reading Hiroko Oyamada’s novel The Factory.
McGinty: I’m going to undercut that previous question here by wondering aloud if reading/engaging with art is even all that effective a tool for worker advocacy as far as changing minds goes. For instance: when my teachers’ union was preparing to strike, I was part of a group that met with students to answer their questions, explain our perspective and goals, hear their anxieties about a labor stoppage, etc. I wasn’t out there handing out copies of In Dubious Battle. Instead, I sat with students. I tried to listen and not talk too much. At some point in the last year I started reframing art about and from the labor movement as less about ‘changing minds’ about unionization and more about refueling people like me who have fought some fights but need to get juiced up for new ones. The idealist response would be: No! Art that functions as worker advocacy can reach the mainstream! It can change minds! But my union has had a tough year, as have I, and I’m telling you—your book was some necessary fuel.
Gallo-Brown: Well, first of all, thank you so much, that’s incredibly heartening to hear. I’m reading Mark Nowak’s new book Social Poetics right now and I think he probably would do a much better job answering this question than I can. An interesting personal story about In Dubious Battle: I learned about that book from one of my coworkers when I was explicitly engaged in a union organizing effort—he handed a copy to me while we were prepping food together in a grocery store deli. Given that the book is about communists inciting a worker rebellion that is not ultimately successful, the gesture did not bode well for his participation, although he did support us. And we are still friends!
The larger question, about how art relates to social movements or labor struggle, is complicated, deep, and important. One initial thought is that art moves slowly, both in terms of the time that it takes to produce and the time that it requires to work its ways through the reader or viewer or listener. But I don’t think that means that work like mine is only preaching to the converted. Hopefully, it’s not preaching at all. Instead, I believe that art is uniquely suited to introduce new ideas, new experiences, and new feelings into people’s most personal, emotional, sacred, and spiritual spaces. It really can crack people open. So I do believe that people who are politically anti-union or conservative could read a story about a cafeteria worker and come away changed in terms of how they think about work, class, our economic system, etc, but it might take them some time. And that shift wouldn’t directly lead to political action. Other forms of communication and organization, like the ones you described above, would be needed for that.
McGinty: I’m going to attempt and probably fail to ask questions of more reasonable length. At what juncture do you decide that a piece will be a poem or a short story? Does that choice happen before you start writing? With the first line? Part way through?
Gallo-Brown: For the most part, I have very different processes when writing poems and short stories. With poems, it’s more about quieting my mind and going inward, trying to learn about what’s bothering me, what I’m thinking about, what feelings I’m pushing away. I don’t do that all that frequently, but when I do and am able to retrieve something, to reel something in, it’s an extraordinary feeling, one of the best I’ve ever known.
With the stories, especially the stories for this book, it was more conceptual. I wanted to write about Seattle—the Seattle I’d known and loved before it got ruined by tech—which meant writing about poker players and drug dealers, service workers and union organizers, aging hippies and aspiring white rappers. I would start with a personal experience (the time that I was bullied in my neighborhood for dating a black girl, for example, or the time I worked as a union organizer) or character (the grieving friend or the white rapper) and proceed from there. But I found writing fiction to be very hard, almost impossible. I am more naturally a poet, I think. I’m not sure that I’ll write another story again.
“I graduated at the height of the Great Recession, and when I looked around at the society I was living in, I felt absolutely appalled. I had been left-wing before, but the desperation around me combined with the precarity of my own situation led me to ask more serious questions about politics and economics.”
McGinty: It both bums me out and makes complete sense that you’d feel sort of ‘done’ with stories. One thing I really admired about your work was how, in stories like “The Job at Technology Company Cafe,” the situation is the story. The character’s situation is that he needs a job and that this job creates problems, and that’s the story too: that the emerging type of twenty-first-century job is, to oversimplify it, creating problems for individuals and cities alike. There’s very little of those twentieth-century narrative gymnastics where you’ve got to gin up this fictional situation and bury meaning deep within it, hinting at ‘the point’ with all these gestures and glances while never saying the thing aloud, then the reader has to excavate a variety of complex meanings for themselves. There’s some of those gestures, but your stories are more just like: here’s what’s going on in my character’s world in the most straightforwardly artful way I can say it, now go excavate some change or empathy or, to use your words, some movement toward some more “productive ends.”
So, when you say you’re a more a natural poet, the word ‘natural’ sticks out to me, because your fiction feels so...natural. And yet when I read poems like “What I Have Become,” I think I get why you feel like poetry is your more natural form. You kick up a narrative, weave in some cultural scholarship, some pop culture, tell what basically feels like your whole life story...it’s a real ride. It seems like you’re both having more fun in how you set that poem up structurally while also being super, super serious about trying to...I dunno, figure yourself out. This is an extraordinarily lengthy (and I hope at times complimentary) way of asking: When you say you’re a more natural poet, is it because the form suits you better, or you feel like you are getting closer to figuring out something about yourself in the poems?
Gallo-Brown: It is complimentary! Thank you. I’m glad you mentioned “What I Have Become,” which took me a long time to write and is one of the only poems I’ve ever done intentional research for. And I think you’re right about the stories, in that I was never really interested in the traditional ways that writers are taught to approach fiction—world-building, “character development,” inventing some inciting incident that sends characters careening along until their true natures are suddenly and epiphanically revealed. I’m more interested in the interior lives of people, the interior lives of communities. In general, I don’t think that individuals change all that much. I don’t even think they possess all that much free will. But I am interested in the way they feel, their experience of the world, their sensations of being alive.
With poems, I think it’s more this sense of burrowing inward, which, when it’s working, can be tremendously exciting and create its own momentum altogether. Poetry, much more than prose for me, lives on the tongue, in the throat—it feels more like singing to me than anything else. And as someone who has experienced a tremendous amount of emotional pain in my life (I don’t know if I’ve experienced more than other people; I just know that it has felt like a lot to me), there is something about finding a song inside of myself, in singing it over and over until it feels exactly right (or almost exactly right), that I find cathartic, even emancipatory (if only temporarily). In the best version of myself, I am always singing, always writing poems.
Still from Matewan, the 1987 film directed by John Sayles.
McGinty: So at what point did you conceive of turning all that ‘singing’ into a book? The dumb way to ask this question is: how did this become a book? I do think this dumb question is an interesting one, given that I’m hard-pressed to think of other poem/story collections. Was there a particular model you were working off?
Gallo-Brown: No, no particular model. I think the catalyst was when my uncle, a career low-wage worker, died suddenly in 2017 and I began writing a series of poems to eulogize him. I was employed at a worker center at the time (working in “labor”), and my wife was pregnant (preparing for another kind of “labor”), and I started to think that all of my work over the past eight or nine years (writing about work and class and the changing city and grief and depression) could be grouped under that theme—that if I put all of that disparate work together, maybe it would make sense as an unconventional book. I was so fortunate to find a press here in Seattle in Chin Music and an editor in Bruce Rutledge who helped me assemble it and more or less publish it as I had conceived it.
McGinty: I imagine that as people read through your responses here, they’ll be stitching together an image of you via these various jobs you reference, and they’ll be thinking: Wow, this dude has had some experiences, I really wish the interviewer would follow up on them. I also happen to know just from emailing with you that you are very much engaged in current organization and advocacy efforts, so, in closing: maybe you can describe your entrance to working more forthrightly in and around various organization efforts and also what you’re up to now, to whatever extent you feel comfortable sharing.
Gallo-Brown: I don’t want to get into every job I’ve ever worked (there have been so many in a number of different fields), but my introduction to the labor movement came about a decade ago, when I was living in Portland, Oregon, after college and working as a caregiver for people with disabilities. It was basically a minimum wage job with no benefits that required me to live for days at a time with severely disabled people—give them medicine, feed them, bathe them, etc. I had almost no training, almost no oversight. I had expected, after college, that I might find some low-wage job and write poems and stories and live a bohemian artist’s life, maybe teach myself how to play guitar. But I graduated at the height of the Great Recession, and when I looked around at the society I was living in, I felt absolutely appalled. I had been left-wing before, but the desperation around me combined with the precarity of my own situation led me to ask more serious questions about politics and economics and so on. Around the same time, I coincidentally met an SEIU organizer, a neighbor in my apartment building, who was organizing caregivers, and she encouraged me to apply for a project position. So I spent a handful of months driving around Oregon sleeping in hotels, knocking on doors, and collecting union authorization cards.
I went away from the labor movement after that, mainly because I didn’t feel like it left me much time to write. So I went back to school to study creative writing, worked service jobs to support myself, had the vague idea that I might become a teacher. And after graduate school I did teach community college composition for a couple of quarters (another precarious, low-wage job). But then Trump got elected and I decided I wanted to get back into the fight. First, I was part of an effort to organize a grocery store where I was working, then I found a job as a labor educator at a worker’s center, and now I work for a union local here in Seattle. I’ve been fortunate to meet some really good people in the labor movement. The familiar tensions (between politics and art, between remunerative work and writing poetry, etc.) still exist, but I can’t really imagine doing anything else. The questions that we have been talking about feel to me like some of the important questions of our time. Where else should I be besides at the forefront of worker struggle?
Alex Gallo-Brown is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist based in Seattle. He is the author of The Language of Grief (2012), a self-published collection of poems, and Variations of Labor (Chin Music Press, 2019), a collection of poems and stories. Gallo-Brown’s essays, articles, poems, stories, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Salon.com, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Stranger, Fanzine, Vice’s Motherboard, Poetry Northwest, Crosscut, The Oregonian, City Arts, Seattle Review of Books, and Pacifica Literary Review. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter, where he works as a union organizer.
