Significant Otters: June Lin
Sure, it's September, but let's talk about June!
Significant Otters features monthly casual conversations 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. The name was suggested by this guy on Twitter I don’t know. You can read past editions of SO here and here.
New to the column: If you’re a writer with a forthcoming or recently released chapbook / full-length / novel / whatever (or if you’re a publicist or agent or, I don’t know, some other fancy person who knows someone who would enjoy talking to me) reach out through my website and let’s get you some free publicity!
(Those of you who are friends of mine and have books forthcoming, trust me, I have not forgotten about you.)
SO was off for the summer but it’s returned once more - this time with a Canadian guest, the first time that’s happened in the very (very very) short life of this column.
I was supposed to Zoom with June Lin a month ago but life got in the way. Instead I ended up talking to her the day before my birthday, and what a great birthday present it was. She told me all about London (Ontario), the complexities of social media, and also her debut chapbook, how to construct a breakup poem, which came out last month with fifth wheel press. June is a rockstar who believes deeply in her own work, and I hope that by the end of this interview you’ll believe in it as well.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity because I mostly came up with questions for June on the fly. Finally, I’m the one to blame!
🦦 —O— 🦦
Ottavia Paluch: So I know you have a very popular Twitter presence. Can you tell me how that came about?
June Lin: I don’t think I have a very popular Twitter presence! I have, like, I don’t know, 800 followers?
Well, let’s see!
*laughs* Let’s get the exact number.
Eight seventy-one.
Oh, no way!
Do you regret joining Twitter? Or have you enjoyed it? What’s the feeling?
As a Twitter influencer, how do I feel? Haha! There’s lots of people on Lit Twit who have thousands of followers and I just kinda hang out on there and retweet funny things and jokes about poetry. I really like it because I think our little circle of poetry teenagers is really fun and we have a really good time. And seeing people’s lives is really cool. As well as the other side of Literary Twitter, where you find out the drama and which magazines are sketchy and stuff like that. I’ve been using it a lot less lately, mostly because I don’t have time. And now that I follow so many people, there’s just so much stuff happening on my timeline that I can’t keep up. I know a lot of people find Twitter really tiring since there’s always something happening or someone getting in trouble, but for me it’s always been a good experience. It’s a fun forum to be genuine in. I’ve never looked at it as work.
What kinda role does it play in your writing?
If anything, having a big social media presence sort of makes you feel like you have more of a writing audience to be writing for, if that makes sense. There are poems that do really well and you have no idea why and then you start playing into that, feeling like you have to write more of the stuff that people liked. But that’s a hazard of writing and publishing in general, right? You see what other people like about your poetry and then you start writing more of the stuff that other people liked instead of the stuff that you originally wanted to write.
While we’re on the topic—being a Canadian teen poet. That perspective is rarely seen. How has that shaped you as a writer?
It’s like layers on top of each other! Writer is tough already. And teen writer is this very specific niche on Twitter. And there’s all these competitions and people are doing so much and they’re, like, 15, which is super scary. And then on top of that, when you’re Canadian, it’s this weird relationship because we’re like, “no, we’re not the same as the U.S., we’re separate and we’re better.” But you feel American on Twitter because there’s none of you. *laughs* And so everything is about American stuff and sometimes you’re eligible and sometimes you aren’t. It feels like I’m kind of in it—the circuit—but it also doesn’t. I’m kind of just watching and being like, “wow, that’s really intense, guys!” but not having to do the whole competition thing.
Also the whole shipping thing. So many times I’ve wanted to support people and order their books and then I see that Canadian shipping is crazy. Like, it’s not that far, guys!
Oh my god, I almost forgot about our obligatory location discussion!
Yeah, I’m in London, Ontario right now! Just moved off-campus. I’m sharing an apartment with four other people that I met last year. We threw a “party” with all our friends the week I moved in here where we hung out in the living room and had our alcohol. I can say that because I’m legal! The age is 19 in Ontario. It was fun.
Can you invite me next time?
Yeah, sure, just drive from Mississauga!
Sure, casual three-hour drive!
Oh, god. But normally we just hang out and watch TV together while we eat dinner. It’s really chill. I feel like the mom of the house because I like cleaning.
What’s your favourite chore?
Ohhh…laundry. I like things that become clean.
I’ve heard lots of things about London. Some people have told me it’s beautiful. Others say it’s the most racist city in Ontario. I know about Kettleman’s, the bagel place, I check up on the London Knights junior hockey team, I know about Fanshawe, and I know about Western. That’s it.
For those who aren’t familiar with the social geography of Ontario, London is just this little university town in the southwest. It’s 2 hours from Toronto except there’s nothing there besides a university - a party school, called Western University - and a college called Fanshawe. During the summer there’s no one here and then during the school year, I swear to God, the city doubles in size from students.
Okay! About your book. Since that’s why we’re here. This book is called how to construct a breakup poem. So here’s my million-dollar question: how do you construct a breakup poem?
What a great question. So in the first poem of the book, which is self-titled, I write it in the form of a very lyrical WikiHow article? It’s like, step one, step two, of how to construct a breakup poem! If you want an easy way to think about it, the way I put it in the book was: find a way to be hurt - and I’m not saying that in a way where you should actually go do it - but find a way to be hurt, find something a little bit self-destructive, wait for pieces of images and poetic lines to appear to you, and then cut-and-paste it together into something that speaks to you. And create a poem out of that pain.
In the title poem, I explicitly say to print it out and put it out into the world. Because I think one of the big themes of this book is the idea of breakup poetry as something you’re constructing. As a narrative you’re telling about yourself. As a way of processing what happened. And also as a way of making yourself able to understand the mistakes that you made, or the things that they did to you. I think it’s important that there was that step in the poem. Building a narrative doesn’t mean as much without an audience.
Did you have the title in mind as you were putting the book together?
I had been writing sort-of breakup poems for a while. That kind of angsty, very melancholy poetry. I wrote “how to construct a breakup poem” last March and after writing it, I was like, “oh, this kind of pulls together a lot of themes that I had been writing about before. Maybe I could build a chapbook around this idea of breakup poetry.” In April I did this poetry challenge called Escapril, where it gives you 30 prompts, and through that I drafted 30 crappy poems. A lot of them were written with this breakup theme in mind. I went into the book with this exact title.
So how do you stay in this constant mindset of, “breakuppoembreakuppoembreakuppoem”? Because that sounds exhausting to me!
This is funny because I write a lot of sad poetry, which can be very tiring because you have to be in that headspace of being sad all the time. Looking back, it’s kind of crazy to me that I wrote so many sad poems in a month. I don’t recommend trying that.
What I did after I had a gigantic document of drafted poems was, I made a fake table of contents and tried to read through it and decide, “how closely does [the poem] fit my theme?” I had a lot more poems than I really needed. Once I cut it down to what I figured I should keep, I printed everything out and started rearranging the individual poems. It was a very physical process for me because moving the pages around [helped]. You could probably save a lot of trees if you did it digitally, but I needed to be able to see it.
What I settled on was having the title poem at the start as a theme statement and then this progression from more intense, angsty poetry towards more peaceful, escapist poems that were escaping the toxicity, in a way. I liked the arc of it. I know some people scatter it out and do imagery grouped together. I think it depends on what chapbook you’re writing. This one was about narrative and because breakups have this sense of growth to them [already], it made sense to mirror that with the order of the poems.
What’s your favourite poem in this book?
Aura [Martin, another lovely interviewer] asked me the same question and I gave such a cop-out answer! I was like—
Why don’t you give me both answers then? The cop-out answer and the authentic answer.
Okay! Disclaimer: you can’t make me pick a favourite, I love all of my work! But honestly one of my favourite poems in this [book] is probably “and somehow i still do”. It’s not that long, just this little lineated piece about waking up and moving on and being sad. There’s this line at the end that says, “who doesn’t have a list of crazy things they’ve done for happiness, / theirs or another’s?” When I thought of that, I was like, “wow, June, you’re so deep and insightful!” It really spoke to me at the time.
My favourite is “pink moon.”
They go right next to each other!
I love ending poems. I feel like they’re just as important as the ones at the beginning of the book. And we just talked about the poem at the beginning [of this book] so it makes sense to talk about the one at the end. I want your thoughts on it. The language in here gets a little spicy.
Yeah! I start swearing at the end of this poem. It’s also one of my favourites. I’m interested to hear what made you like it. What I like about it is has this sense of hopefulness to it that’s not necessarily in the other poems. Because it’s the ending one, I wanted it to move out of the breakup, out of the sadness. I think this poem grows towards peace. Which is the entire idea of the book, right? And it’s a little more mature. It talks about how you can’t necessarily pin the blame for everything on one person. It tries not to wallow in being a victim.
The little kick of spiciness at the end, with the swearing, is kind of the last bit of anger that you feel when you’re moving on. Anger at yourself because you’re such a doormat, and anger at them for taking advantage of you. Despite that…it ultimately ends on the speaker saying, “tomorrow morning, I’m going to wake up and you’re not gonna be there. I’m gonna say goodbye in a very, like, peaceful way, put on my jeans” - very hardworking and practical - “and I’m just gonna move on with my life. I’m gonna get on with my day. I have better things to do.” And I liked ending a breakup poem collection on a line that’s about being done with the breakup. I think it’s really poetic.
Me too, me too. What attracted me to this one was not only how you describe it, with it being very final in the way that it’s written, but also the way in which you blend the personal with the philosophical. Like, the word that first came to mind when I first read this book—actually, I’ll let you guess.
Was it philosophy?
Tumblr.
Ohhh! Interesting!
It gives me total Tumblr vibes. And this poem specifically gives me Pinterest vibes.
*laughs* Why Pinterest?
I don’t know. I think it’s more matter-of-fact. Whereas the other poems are like, “fuck you,” and “fuck me.” [But] this one’s like, “you know what? Fuck this.”
That’s perfect. That’s exactly what it is.
I do get the Tumblr thing because I actually still spend a lot of time on Tumblr, so it makes sense that it’s leeching into my poetry. Tumblr is this platform, I think, where people are very emotional, and everything is very intense. And when you’re sad, you’re extra sad on Tumblr. I think that really matches the energy of a breakup poem collection.
That should be their slogan. “When you’re sad, you’re extra sad on Tumblr.” I would buy a shirt with that on it.
I have a few other poems I want to discuss. Give me the lowdown on “poem as every mistake i made for you.”
This is a really good choice. I really like this poem. I’m gonna say that about every poem because I really like my own work! It sounds narcissistic but I think it’s important.
This poem feels very visceral to me.
I think that’s the perfect word. It’s so intense. My favourite thing to do with prose poetry and these giant paragraphs is, because it makes everything really breathless, you’re just going and going and going. It’s like sprinting. That’s definitely what I was trying to go for in this poem. It just keeps hitting you over and over with all these crazy things. It’s listing all these mistakes but at the end it has this dynamic where it says, “sometimes you would try to save me from yourself, and I’d almost be grateful to have you.” The “you” is the best friend and the enemy. The saviour and the tormentor. The speaker never seems to see outside of themselves. It’s like, when you’re in it, you can’t see anything else.
While we’re on the topic of prose poems, there’s one that struck me as especially prosey. There’s like 16 of these poems that are especially prosey, but—
*laughs* Was it “i had a dream about you”?
Bingo.
It’s kind of hybrid, that piece. I wrote it before I even joined Twitter. It’s based on a series of dreams that I had. It’s very old school me, very emo! I tried to make it warm and slowly turn it into something creepier and nightmarish. Kind of like paint dripping down a wall. One fun trivia thing about this piece is that I try to describe the eyes differently. At the start I call them amber eyes. And as it goes on, it becomes “sour lemon eyes”. It’s those little details.
The thing about the sad elephant caught my eye. Out of context it’s a terrible metaphor, but you stick it into a June Lin poem and you’re like, “oh yeah, that makes sense!”
Yeah! When I was writing this, I was thinking of Eeyore. Who is not an elephant, I’m aware. I was thinking about how his eyes droop, the way elephant eyes do. Elephants are very smart and sentimental animals. And for me, “sad elephant” worked better than “sad donkey.” *laughs*
You seem like you’ve gotten a lot wiser since you wrote this book.
I sure hope so! Because I wrote it a year and a half ago, and I think I’ve definitely changed in terms of how I write my poetry and grown up a little bit. Looking back, it’s hard to see all the really, really sad stuff that I wrote, because it’s like, oh, I don’t feel that way anymore. But I still remember what it was like. It’s a bit like a time capsule, actually.
Do you think that as you grow older, your relationship to the book will change?
Probably. For now I’m still close enough to writing it to be able to read it as something that’s still part of me. But if you read work you wrote a really, really long time ago, or if you look at stuff you did when you were in elementary school, there’s this sense of, “oh my god, I can’t believe this is from me. It doesn’t feel like it’s a part of me anymore. I don’t feel like I own it.”
I think this book is still gonna feel like a part of me for a really long time because at my core, I feel like the intensity of these emotions is still very relatable. But I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to grow as a poet and eventually be like, “oh, this is really old work, it’s not necessarily what I’d write now.” I think that’s okay.
One of the poems [from this book] that makes me think about this conversation is “20/22.”
Mhm. Every time I look at it I always think it’s really funny because I’m the age that I was talking about, and I’m in the year 2022 right now.
That’s what I thought it was initially in reference to.
It’s a bit of both. I was projecting into the future, like, “it’s always gonna be this bad.” Which is a very teenager thing to say. The general core of this poem, to me, feels stagnant. That still speaks to me. But I’m glad that past June wrote this and thought that she would never learn from her mistakes, and [that] current June no longer believes that to be true. I think that’s good character development for myself.
The dedication in this book, “for my banged-up right knee,” feels very Juney of you.
I’ve always said that you’re only as strong as your weakest knee. It's been hurt, it’s been healed, you have to take care of it—I messed up my right knee while skiing a few years ago—but it’s still part of me. I think it’s very fitting for this book.
Are you gonna dedicate your next book to your left knee?
My left knee isn’t banged up. It’s fine. So that’s, like, way less poetic.
“To my perfectly fine left knee.” Ha!
So, like, who were the people that played a big role in this book?
Ohh, that’s fun!
Besides yourself.
I mean, I was going to say myself—
Actually, you can make a whole paragraph about yourself, too, if you want.
Yeah, actually, the best person is me.
No. I mean, there are people in my personal life who inspired emotions related to this book. But I don’t want to give them that credit. *laughs* Ultimately it was up to me to turn it into…the work. The same way that you can have raw materials and then the chef turns it into something delicious. Not that I’m saying my work is delicious, but you know. I like it. Anyways.
I think in terms of people who played a role in this book—I feel like the people I’ve met on literary Twitter have actually been a big influence. I’ve learned a lot about writing poetry and what I liked in poetry from reading people’s work that we were friends with on Twitter. Like, we were talking earlier about Danny [Liu, another brilliant teen writer-friend of ours], how he’s so efficient with his words and how I was trying to write shorter lines because of his influence. And if we’re gonna talk about poetic influences, I feel like every teen poet says this, but Richard Siken got me into poetry. There’s a lot of that intensity and emotion and panic and yearning behind his poems that I really carried into writing this book. That energy was really influential.
Do you have any advice for people putting chapbooks together or who want to in the future?
I always feel unqualified when people ask me for advice, but I’ll do it anyway! In terms of putting chapbooks together, there’s nothing wrong with taking your time. Because I feel like I kind of rushed it in terms of writing it and re-ordering it and publishing it. It’s a book! If you want it to be really, really perfect, you’re allowed to take the time and make it as close to perfect as you can. And also, for me, theme was really helpful in deciding what stays in the book and what doesn’t.
What’s next for you, writing-wise, life-wise, whatever-wise?
When I started university, I lost a lot of time that I used to use on writing. Which is really sad.
Same here.
Everything just stacks up so fast. I kinda miss being in high school and having a ton of time alone in my room to write. What I’ve been telling myself is that I’m going to publish and write a lot less, but I’m going to try and put out more poems that I’m really proud of and that are really high quality. Back in high school I think I put out poems that I liked but that weren’t the poems that I REALLY liked. Now that I have less time I feel like it’s only fair to make the work that I do put out [of a] higher quality.
But if you don’t have time to write, how do you make the work high-quality?
I know, it’s tough. I’ve been trying to just make little pockets of time to write. I was at the airport at one point over the summer and had a few hours to kill so I decided to write on the backs of receipts because I didn’t have any paper. And also on the train when I’m commuting or going home for the holidays. It’s about making time when you can find it.
I think treating writing as something serious that I have to make time for helps a lot. And then not being scared of letting it sit for a while to edit. Because I used to edit soon after writing [a piece], and think, “okay, this is ready.” Now I don’t have time to do that! Which is not a bad thing because you come back with a fresh perspective on the poem.
I feel like leaving the whole teen writer thing behind makes you realize that you can slow down and chill.
And you have for sure.
Definitely. When you’re in that phase, you’re like, “I need to publish a lot, I need to submit a lot, I need to always be doing something because I see all these other people doing this.” And part of it is because you’re applying for university, and you fear that if you don’t do all that, you won’t get into university and you won’t have anywhere to go. And then you get into university and you calm down and you’re like, “I need to take care of myself.”
Thanks for this, June. So good to see that you’re not a figment of my imagination.
Thank you for interviewing me! I love reading these.
June Lin is a poet from Canada. She loves practical fruits, like clementines and bananas. Her debut chapbook, how to construct a breakup poem, is out now from fifth wheel press.
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Stay significant, Otters! I’ll be back on Monday.