Significant Otters: Carina Solis
The queen of Villa Rica discusses daughters, songs, and Daughtersong.
Significant Otters is a monthly interview series exclusive to this Substack, Things You Otter Know, featuring hangouts with some of my favourite writer-friends who happen to have books dropping and who (more importantly) happen to be Otters. Significant Otters, if you will. Past editions of Significant Otters include conversations with June Lin, Jessica Kim, and Stella Lei. My most recent interview featured Danny Liu.
If you have a forthcoming or recently published book (or if you’re someone who knows someone who would enjoy talking to me) reach out through my website and let’s get you some free publicity!
Our first Significant Otter of 2023 is Carina Solis, whose debut chapbook, Daughtersong, came out in February through Bottlecap Press.
Carina’s come a long way in just a few short years of writing poems. I was lucky enough to spend nearly two hours with her over Zoom, where we discussed nearly everything under the Carina Sol. I can’t believe I withheld this thing from y'all for two whole entire months, because there’s something for everyone in this interview—stuff about writing, about joy and grief and especially Taylor Swift. That’s why my hope is you’ll share our conversation with all the Swifties you know.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, because Carina mentioned that she is a happy person about fifteen different times.
🦦 —O— 🦦
OTTAVIA PALUCH: You’re the first person to have reached out to me and ask to do this, which I thought was really sick. Thank you for thinking of me. It really does mean a lot.
CARINA SOLIS: I don’t think anyone doesn’t know you.
[laughter]
That’s a compliment, I swear.
Where are you calling me from?
From the most rural town—Villa Rica, Georgia. I lived in Miami for 7 years, which is a lot more bustling. There was a CVS near me…a Ross…a strip club…
Clearly the most important thing.
There’s nothing here. We’re a mile out from the dollar store.
So you’re just hidden away from the rest of civilization.
Yep. I enjoy that, actually. I’m such a homebody. But what sucks here is that right across our street is a Trump 2024 flag.
NO! No. Noooo.
Yeah. And he’s got the red hat.
Have you spoken to him?
It’s not that bad, but when they wear that cap, you can’t help but look up once in a while. He’ll try to talk politics with my dad and my dad will try and get away from the topic.
Maybe we should talk about you instead, then.
Sure!
Here’s a classic question, then. Give me the lowdown on when you started writing.
Writing began with my grandma. She would always tell stories and it was cool seeing how words would come together. Sometimes I would transcribe them. One time she told me this story about how she stole these mangoes from her neighbour, and it ended in a really weird way. Something involving her and a gun, I can’t exactly remember. But I decided to transcribe it, and then I was like, why don't I try this for myself? And then I did. She had this typewriter, so every time I saw her I would write on her typewriter - poems and little short stories, ripping off novels I'd read like Percy Jackson. And then I slowly gravitated towards poems because she also wrote poems, and that's kind of how it started.
So when do you start sharing these with people?
I had submitted to Scholastic in 2021. I just did it for giggles, you know, because I didn't expect to win. And then I submitted it, and I got an award. I was like, “Oh, my God, that was cool. Why don't I try submitting more things?” Ice Lolly was the first to accept me. I was in the Ellipsis workshop, too.
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that because I was stalking your Carrd—
Oh my god! [laughter]
—and I noticed you had worked with Michael Frazier, and I’m a big fan of his work. What was that like?
He's really, really cool. He was so chill, too. Ellipsis I had just randomly found out about when I was looking for workshops online. He was doing this workshop called “The Nuts and Bolts of Poetry” and I chose that as my workshop since I was pretty new to poetic forms and everything. It was a great introductory course for writing and it was really enjoyable. And, as I continue to write, I realize that there is still so much to learn. Like, I literally just found out what a golden shovel was.
I hate those! They’re so hard to write!
What a weird name for a poetic form!
But anyway, Michael, he was really chill and helpful. He created good lesson plans and he’d give us journals to submit to, but they were actually kind of advanced—Adroit, Cream City, Diode, COUNTERCLOCK—
Those are so hard to break into!
I’ve submitted at least 12 times to Diode. I’m not gonna get in—
Don’t say that!
—but it’s still fun. There’s, like, nothing higher than those. Well, I mean, there’s Poetry Magazine and the New Yorker…
Yeah, but once you get into those you might as well retire.
I would just quit right now, honestly. I actually went on a break from submitting because I was tired of getting rejected. My self esteem was too worn out. So I stopped for a while. But now we're back in the game.
Do you think your confidence has gone up since you published this book?
No, not at all. I’m worried my teachers are gonna read it and be like, “CaRINA!” My teacher the other day was like, “I found your poetry. I took a deep dive into them. And I liked them! And then I read the one in Wrongdoing Magazine, which was too much for me.” And it's about a glow worm. She's like, “I got a little too much in my feels.” [laughter]
I was thinking about this earlier—you’re the youngest person I’ve spoken to for Significant Otters thus far. Which, congratulations.
I hope it’s not showing! I hope I don’t seem immature talking about random shit!
Oh, it’s fine. Everyone will know.
But, like, how has being a teen writer affected your writing?
I feel like being a teen writer is different. Because you're going through a massive growing process. I look at my writing from last year, and I'm like, "wow, that was crap.” I feel like the next few years are gonna be really formative and influence a lot of what I learn. And once you publish a book, like, what do you do after that?
You’re…you’re asking me?
Yeah! Let’s turn the tables!
But I haven’t written a book yet!
You will soon. I have a feeling.
It’s always in the back of my mind, but I don’t know what I would write about.
You could just write about sad shit. I have a Google Doc full of unpublished poems and none of them are happy.
Plenty of sad stuff in this book too, but we’ll get to that. How old were you when you started writing it?
15.
So, like, where does a fifteen year-old get the ambition to start writing a book?
Twitter. Oh my god. Comparison! You’re like, “Do I wanna be compared? Yes.” It’s collaborative and it makes you want to keep up.
So you felt…pressured to write this book?
I mean, I wanted to do it, but Twitter gave me an extra burst of energy. If you’ve been writing for a while, even if you’re a kid, you think publishing a book seems really outlandish. And I thought it would be a really humongous process, the culmination of my life. It was not. But I definitely enjoyed it.
I wasn’t writing this well when I was 15, so just, like, thanks for paying so much attention towards your craft and turning this book into this physical, tangible thing that people like me can enjoy. I think it’s really sick. And I think it bodes well for your future. As you said, your formative years are still very much ahead of you, right? You have so many great poems ahead of you. You’re just, like, scratching the surface with this book.
Awwww.
Not that this whole publishing thing should be a competition, but you’ve already managed to find a thematic framework for your poems, which is something I’m still struggling to do.
I had a question I was going to ask you, but I can’t seem to put it into words. I’m so good at making up sentences.
We’re good at that.
Yeah!
On paper. But not in real life.
You know, I try to prepare really well for these Significant Otters pieces, and yet somehow I’m never truly prepared enough.
This is why I do written interviews, so I can proactively close myself off from making a mistake.
I just try to do these on Zoom because I feel like they lead to better conversations.
They do. But if I did all my interviews on Zoom I’d be scared of people thinking, “why is she spouting nonsense?”
Oh, that’s already happening.
Geez, why was I worried? [laughter]
You call this book Daughtersong. Why? Because it’s a lovely title.
It combined both of the themes—family narratives and sadness. It encapsulated all of that. I read over the manuscript a bunch of times before I submitted it just to get a feel for how a reader would experience it. And I thought of it as, well, songs as poetry, the melodies behind words. And daughter for womanhood and girlhood and family.
…Do you have a favourite song about daughters?
[giggles] No! I don’t! All I listen to is Taylor Swift.
OH MY GOD. WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THAT.
YES, PLEASE.
OH MY GOD. GO AHEAD. THE FLOOR IS YOURS.
NO! I NEED A QUESTION! I NEED A PROMPT SO I CAN LET MY IMAGINATION RUN WILD.
Oh, okay—
I was with a friend today talking about “You Belong With Me” and he was like, “You really love [redacted] Taylor Swift.” And I was like “YES! I DO!”
Oh, god! [laughter] There’s no way I can put that direct quote in! We’ll have to make it a little more PG.
If she saw this, it would be the best and worst moment of my life. Did you see she won a Grammy for the “All Too Well” short film?
Oh, I didn't know that! I know she lost Song of the Year to Bonnie Raitt, which…
I didn’t even know who she was. I didn’t know the song.
No one knows that song.
I get it’s not a popularity contest, but no one knows that song. There’s like, 10 people listening to that song. No offence to her, but…
I only know one Bonnie Raitt song, and it’s the big one from the 80s. Beautiful song.
I don’t even know who Bonnie Raitt is! I think she’s a ginger.
Hm?
She’s ginger.
OH, she has ginger HAIR! I thought you said, “she’s gender.”
[laughter] Oh my god!
That’s going in!
Oh my god, we have to move on—
WAIT!
What?
What’s your favourite Taylor song?
“ivy”. Or “seven”.
Oh, so you like folklore and evermore. We can talk about that. They’re the best. My Tay Tay playlist rules: “epiphany,” “tolerate it,” “cardigan,” “mirrorball,” “exile,” “the 1,” “‘tis the damn season,” “cowboy like me,” “this is me trying,” “closure,” “evermore,” “peace,” “ivy,” “hoax,” “mad woman,” “champagne problems,” One Shawn Mendes song, “Mercy.” And then “it’s time to go.” Oh my god, and “the lakes”. And then there’s “Cornelia Street,” “Afterglow,” “Dear Reader,” “Endgame,” “…Ready For It?”, “Cornelia Street” again. “Sweet Nothing.” “Maroon.” “Snow on the Beach.” “Labyrinth.” “Cruel Summer.” “All Too Well,” the ten-minute version. Also, “MIDNIGHT RAIN” IS THE B E S T SONG ON MIDNIGHTS.
…I disagree.
You’re wrong.
I think “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” is number one.
…How much would you hate me if I told you I had that hidden on my playlist?
Why?!
I don’t know. I wasn’t feeling it. Just wasn’t for me. But I think “Midnight Rain” is the best song on that album. Anyone who says differently is just plain wrong. Like, the falsetto of the guy?! Also, I think it’s about the “the 1” guy who plays Loki. Tom Hiddleston. That makes it even better.
One of the most formative memories of my youth is the day folklore came out, and I watched the “cardigan” music video the moment I woke up, and at the end of it I was like, “Wow. She did that.”
I stayed up for the “Lavender Haze” music video the other day!
Me too! Do you have tickets for her tour?
I am noooot rich enough for that. I love Taylor, but I hate Ticketmaster.
What about evermore? When it came out, it was the only thing I listened to for, like, a month straight.
evermore popped off. She was like, “I'm gonna give you two amazing albums in one year, both country and also not-country, and all sad.” And the love triangle in folklore. The way I analyzed that as an assignment in English class.
Why am I not surprised?
My teacher is a Swiftie. She dressed up as Taylor for Halloween. She had the lipstick, the sunglasses, the “22” shirt.
So, going back to the poems in this book—which one’s your favourite?
“grief fish.” I don’t know why! I mean, the other ones, I hope they’re good. But that one is the one most people like. I love fish imagery. A lot of my poems, for some reason, end with someone turning into a fish.! It’s just so fun!
What about “how it feels to begin?” I wanted to bring it up, because it’s obviously the first poem in the book, and I just love that that means that this book opens in a Dollar Tree.
Villa Rica really weaved its way in there with the Dollar Tree! That’s the only reference to it in the book. It was the first one I wrote. I wanted to structure the book in a way where you wouldn’t get tired of it. I wanted it to start with me and just traverse through the family narrative, you know, go through my dad and my mom, come back to me, and then loop around again.
And I swear to God—can I vouch? I’m a happy person.
I’ll put that in all caps.
CARINA SOLIS IS A HAPPY PERSON.
I don’t have any proof, but I am. You can vouch for me, right? I just, like—I feel like you should write grief and experience joy. I don’t want anyone analyzing my happiness.
Wait, what do you mean by that?
Poetry isn’t performative, but poetry is catharsis, and you tend to spend a lot of time critiquing it, making sure it sounds good. So I do that with sadness, because it’s easier to express my emotions that way and allows me to turn it into something productive. But with joy you just kind of wanna have that experience for yourself. I guess that’s why I write sadness.
I want to live in joy, be in my joy. I don’t want have to write it down, critique it, analyze it, try and make it sound like something, try to make it symbolize something. I just want it to be there.
Has that always been your approach?
…Can I just say that it is, and that can be my excuse?
Sure! [laughter] I was honestly wondering if there was, like, a poem [you wrote] or an event in your life where the switch flipped.
No. I’ve just always written sad things. But I’m happy! I laugh TOO MUCH! I make jokes at the wrong time all the time!
Oh, same. That’s what this entire Substack is.
And then what I thought was cool about “growing pains” was how you start with this soft stuff about this solitary light coming into your bedroom, and then literally by the next page you’re talking about completely different things.
I wrote that poem with the Surging Tide Magazine prompt in mind. It was about making something different and trying to be experimental. And I wrote this thinking over my dad’s life and just playing with form. I wrote it as a prose poetry piece originally because it felt really serious to me, and then I tried to make it more witty and less serious. It’s still sad, I think, but I talked about “becoming nuclear” as in a nuclear family. So there’s a lot of wit in there, but also a lot about family and personal experience. Because that’s where most of my writing comes from.
So you write very honestly.
A little too honestly. Some things you can tell aren’t real, like in one of the other poems in the book, “the world has turned its’ back”. There’s a reference to a song in there, “Crazy,” by Patsy Cline that my mom and I loved.
I gotta hear more about this.
It’s a sad song about loving someone. I felt like it just fit well into the theme. It’s something I’ll forever remember about me and my mom, and since this is a poem about my mom and I, I felt it would work.
I think your honesty as a poet is one of your biggest strengths, because you’re being real. When I read this, I can feel it. You know? I crave originality from what I read, right, and you’re well on your way to getting there.
I would say I don’t try to soften the punches. If I had to describe my writing, it would be that I’m being as honest as possible…but I’m also lying. [laughter] I’m not omitting anything, but I’m adding certain things. Like, in “i wish we were paper-light,” my mom is not as pale as an egg. [laughter] I’m incorporating real things, but they’re just a little mixed up.
But we can’t tell.
Yeah. You can’t tell that my mom isn’t a fish.
They’re totally fish. Sharks.
I wish. If they were sharks they wouldn’t be getting eaten like they are in my poems.
How do you balance honesty with the non-truths?
…I don’t think I do.
Thanks for your honesty!
[laughter] I can get kinda careless with that, I would say.
[at this point Carina’s computer froze - she insisted I mention this in the published piece]
CARINA: I'm someone who keeps their laptop perpetually uncharged, and I think that's what people need to know about me. That’s what you can write on my tombstone, that I died because I forgot to charge myself.
I should’ve realized you were part-robot. You had that, like, 10-digit Twitter username for a long time.
Weren’t you the one who told me there was a way I could change that?! Oh my god! [laughter]
I was! [laughter] Was there meaning behind the numbers you picked?
They were random! I didn’t think I’d be on Twitter as much as I am. Once you start Tweeting, you don’t stop. You’re gonna flap your freakin’ beak.
What about “what a body can get used to”? It ends the book on kind of a pessimistic note.
The first line I wrote for that poem was the ending line. “how it feels to be good” ends with the line “over and over” and this poem ends with “again and again.” I was trying to imply something cyclical. It’s a poem I worked on a lot with my Girls Write Now mentor. A lot of my poems are written really quickly, and this was one of them. I took a lot of inspiration from a Kayleigh Sim poem, “Serenade of Burning City”. It was one of the first poems I had read from a teen writer, and it’s really beautiful.
A lot of it, too, is girlhood and grief, much like the rest of the book. Even with all of the change that’s taken place in this generation, with people learning to accept themselves more, there’s always going to be these body standards enforced. You see models and think that’s the way you want to look, right? Every girl’s going to keep going through that. The grief part was more implicit. Grief as in sadness, where the little pits of sadness in your life add up.
I mean, it’s a multilayered thing, right? And we’re teenagers. We’ve only scratched the surface of that. And I think it’s cool that through poems we have an opportunity to explore that facet of our lives while [we’re] in that stage of our lives.
Yeah. It’s a way to share emotions with other people. I can read how you’re feeling and relate it to my own feelings. It’s very human, I would say.
Were there any books you turned to when you were writing this book?
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison. You can bury me with that book. I reference this one passage so much, this one passage about Polly meeting Cholly and the “colours she tasted". I thought it was beautiful. I think it’s one of the reasons I started focusing a lot on feminism and women’s issues rather than just what was going on in my life. It was so different from the sonnets and Shakespeare I had been exposed to. I didn’t cry reading it, but it was very sad, obviously. Very life-changing book for me.
Okay, two questions left. Tell me about the cover.
The cover is a 55-thread email. 77, actually.
What do you mean?
It took 77 emails to get the cover right.
Wow!
The original design wasn’t looking right, and then I took inspiration from the cover of Warsan Shire’s Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.
I didn’t know covers took that long to put together.
I was just fickle. By the mid-30s we had mostly figured it out, but then I was like, “No! I want it to be white! What if we add a bluebird? What about flipping it?” It’s my fault. I was just being the teenager I am.
What’s next for you, writing-wise, life-wise, whatever-wise?
I want to do some mentoring. I’ve never taught anything of my own. I just want to see how that would feel. I’m still very new to this. A lot of people have a lot more experience than me, and I don’t think I’m going to be the best teacher in the world. But it’s something I want to try. Just to see how much I can help another person, and how much I can grow alongside them.
Thank you for doing this, Carina.
Thank you for accepting my random DM. Keep being the otter you are.
