Significant Otters: Saturn Browne
The Connecticut planet orbits around BLOODPATHS, teen writing, and making fun of boarding schools.
Significant Otters is a monthly interview series exclusive to Things You Otter Know. It features casual conversations with writers about their new books—writers who (more importantly) happen to be Otters. Significant Otters, if you will. Past SOs include Danny Liu, June Lin, Jessica Kim, and Stella Lei. My most recent interview featured Carina Solis.
BECOME A SIGNIFICANT OTTER: If you have a book forthcoming or know someone who does, reach out through my website! Plenty of slots available for the summer…
May 2023’s Significant Otter is Saturn Browne (she/they), whose debut chapbook, Bloodpaths, came out late last month via kith books. Saturn is a fantastic young writer with a ton of interests and also a ton of drive and talent. They spoke to me over Zoom on the eve of their book being released. I wonder what was more exciting for her that day: getting a book published, or getting to talk to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, because Saturn said she was a very concise person and then proceeded to talk to me for almost 2 and a half hours.
🦦 —O— 🦦
SATURN BROWNE: I think I screamed and dropped my phone when I got your DM.
OTTAVIA PALUCH: Why?! I’m just some kid!
Because I was like, “Oh my god! It’s Ottavia!”
You know what it is? If you want to get my attention on Twitter, just get in my mentions all the time and I’ll eventually notice.
I had literally just seen your chapbook announcement on my timeline and figured I would take advantage of that.
[laughter] I was so surprised.
I think in general the teen writing community is really supportive. At the end of the day you’re always happy for everyone. But there’s still some people you look up to. Like, all the YoungArts winners are crazy. I feel so scared when I think about them.
I think that’s why the awards stuff is such BS. Writing itself should be the reward at the end of the day, in my opinion. I think we place too much stock in [awards]. I don’t think you have to win these things or get published in XYZ Magazine or nab a Pushcart to be considered a writer. Just the act of writing should be enough.
There was a philosophy book I read about how the version you see yourself as is your own version, and you’ll never be perceived the same way by other people. I tend to perceive myself as a teen writer, rather than just a teen who writes.
I say this as an old person—I can’t even say that with a straight face—when you age out of the system, it’s very…freeing. A lot of the folks I’ve talked to, like, I don’t know if you know Steph Chang—
Yep.
—I really looked up to her for a long time because she’s a young Canadian poet who’s had all this success and then one day we were messaging each other on Twitter and I was telling her how much I loved her stuff, and then she said something nice back, and I was like, WHAT. And that kinda taught me that we’re…all kind of on the same playing field at the end of the day. Which is what I’ve tried to do with this Substack; kinda demolish the complex in my own little way.
I think it’s working. Like, I’ve read all the posts, obviously—
NO! [laughter]
—so this is really cool for me, to be a part of this.
You’re 16, right?
Yeah, I’m 16, I’m a junior, I’m applying to college in the fall.
Oh, I’m sorry, man.
[laughter]
What’s, like, your dream school?
Probably Yale. I work in an archive that has a centre at Yale, so I could just go there and keep doing research and getting mentored. And they have this sustainable food program where they make pizza every Friday. And also talk about research. I’m really interested in European food history. Since eighth grade, I’ve been looking at cookbooks online, deciphering and interpreting them. That’s really interesting to me.
And it’s also, like, 30 minutes away from where I live right now.
Oh, okay! So you’re, like, in Connecticut.
Yeah. I like it here. The weather, the people, the fact that I can walk and take the train everywhere.
We should probably start with how and why you started writing.
I started writing because of Dana [Blatte, another teen writer]. I met her online on College Confidential [laughter]. She had posted her Chance Me and I thought it was really cool, the fact that she was so young and had published work. So I DMed her and she was really nice and friendly. She told me to apply to Kenyon [the Young Writers Workshop] and so I did and then I got in. And that was the session with a lot of writers you know—Stella, Danny,. At one point I showed Danny her ChanceMe, and he was like, “oh, that’s Dana.” And I was like, oh! So then I DMed her on Instagram and we became friends.
So before you met Dana, had you been writing?
A lot of stuff on Wattpad from, like, middle school, but nothing super seriously. I guess when I came into boarding school I wanted to explore it more, you know, dark academia or whatever, but it was hard because not a lot of people at my school wrote and I didn’t really know anything about writing outside of class.
In terms of poetry and stuff, did you kind of just learn as you went? Or were you reading it before you met Dana?
The day I started talking to her, I found the Smith College and Hollins contests [for young writers], and it was around the time they were due, so I wrote something that same day and submitted, and obviously didn’t win. But that started things for me, where I was getting involved with my school literary magazine. Like, I write satirical horoscopes for the newspaper. .
That’s so cool!
And that kinda brought me into writing, so the transition wasn’t as jarring, though I wasn’t writing poems until Kenyon. I met really great people there. But I had never read Vuong, I had never read Siken—
So let me get this straight. You got into Kenyon, a very competitive program, off the strength of poems that had not been exposed to the work of two of the greatest contemporary poets of our time?
Yeah.
WTF?!
I literally sent in my horoscopes and that was my portfolio. [laughter]
That’s the best poet origin story I’ve ever heard.
I actually have such hot takes related to Siken and Vuong.
Go ahead, I’m all ears.
I…I did not like Vuong’s new book. And I also did not think Crush was as good as War of the Foxes.
Oh, I get that. Just the first 5 or 6 poems alone in that book, it’s like, the LANGUAGE! And there’s this poem about a math equation in Foxes that I love. It’s like—are you a Nirvana fan by any chance?
Yeah.
That’s the poetry version of the debate between Nevermind and In Utero.
[laughter] You’re not wrong.
I personally stick on the side of In Utero. I think it’s their best record.
I love Nevermind.
I guess we can’t be friends, then. [laughter]
But, okay, you’re texting Dana, you’re at Kenyon—when does the idea for this book come into fruition?
I think the idea came along around last December, but I wasn’t really ready for it yet. But at the top of my New Year’s resolutions list for this year was the goal of writing 2 poems a week or publishing a chapbook.
[holds up list of 23 resolutions on her phone to camera]
…Get a 1500 on the SAT?
I love how you’re reading everything.
But yeah, it just aligned with other things I was working on. I’m taking an art intensive at my school, and every term we have to come up with a thesis. My teacher has been really encouraging, he thinks I should do something with my art and my poems. So I was like, “haha, what if I just wrote a book?” And he actually was like, oh yeah, that would be good. And he gave me a three-week deadline to write the whole thing. And I realized that a lot of what I wrote was already super similar: I wrote a lot about rivers, I thought a lot about water. So I just started pulling things together and seeing where they fit, and by the end of the three weeks, I had sent it out to a few presses.
Is it out in physical form yet?
Yeah. They sent, like, 50 copies to my school, because the school bookstore ordered them.
WOOOOOOOW! That’s amazing. You should sign them! And then kids are gonna see them and be like, “oh, THAT girl?”
Is there a poem in here that sticks out to you the most?
Yeah, I really love “unshelling”. I wrote it for a contest and I didn’t end up winning but it was the first time that I wrote about where I came from and my ancestry, along with writing and river imagery and my parental relationships. And that was really important to me, because I’m Chinese and grew up in China, but I hadn’t been back in 8 or 9 years. And where I lived there was a big river and mountains, and everything about it was super nostalgic to me. That was the first time I got to put that imagery into something I wrote.
I was going to go back in the summer of 2020, and that obviously didn’t work out. But I do want to go back. Maybe I’ll write good poems there.
They’re going to be even better. It’s like when I go to Québec and magically become a Francophone.
What immediately stuck out to me about this chapbook is, well, 2 things. The first is how well it holds up as a body of work. Like, thematically, everything ties together. There’s only ten poems in here, but you make it work because the thematic content of each poem kinda blends together. On a macro level it becomes this larger, more grandiose poetic statement. And then on a micro level, every poem kind of stands out as its own entity; each one has its own thing to say.
I think a lot of it was subconscious. A lot of what I wrote was already about water and it just felt right. And I also got to use some poems from when I first started writing. So “Self-portrait on river reflections” was something from when I first started writing at Kenyon, and then “Amongst Horses” I wrote in July. So there’s some really old poems in there, there’s some really new poems in there. I think it mixes really well, though.
When you write in the first poem, “I am trying to diverge but / without the waters,” I’m like, oh no. This is gonna be one of THOSE books.
[laughter]
Like, what draws you to water imagery?
When I was a kid I used to watch ocean documentaries all the time. It just became something I was super obsessed with. I love aquariums, things like that. It’s all sorta ironic because I can’t swim. But what I like about water is that even though the surface seems calm, you never really know what's going on at the bottom. There could be current or it could be calm. There could be dead fish, live fish. Water is so unpredictable. It could come in rain, it could come in a flood. And I think that's something I found I could really work with because even though it gives us life, it could also have the ability to kill us.
The other thing that I loved right away about this book is its maturity. There’s a real economy of language. A command of craft. It’s a real brisk but remarkably gutting collection.
Thank you! It’s funny to me because I still don’t know how enjambment works.
Oh, me neither. You just mess around and find out.
I just see pretty words and put them in.
I wanted to talk a little more about the first poem, “Creation story”. You were just talking about putting in banger words in your poems, and I think “ossified” is such a banger word.
I found it on Grammarly!
What?
[laughter]
Why are you using Grammarly? That’s literally a cardinal sin!
I think my academic work just carried over into my creative work! And you also just never know what words it can spit out, and sometimes they’re horrendous and don’t fit what you’re looking for. But in this case it was a word I knew was right.
I love the part in this poem where you write, “I am / crawling towards the horizon with my body / still tender, learning to thread itself / to bone & bruise.” How did you come up with that?
I have really vivid dreams, and I have a dream journal, so when I wake up I literally write down everything I remember. Sometimes stuff sticks with me. I have a poem coming out that’s not in this book about a dream I had where I’m on a highway and there are wolves behind me. And this is why I really wanted to do art alongside what I wrote, because so much of my writing is also informed by my imagery and just my art in general that I don't think I can do one thing without the other.
While we’re on the topic of creation stories, I just wrapped up my first year of university, and one of the courses I took was an English course all about narrative with this really friggin brilliant professor. And one of the readings he assigned was this essay by Thomas King, who is like this revered Indigenous Canadian author. And his whole thing is that “the truth about stories is they’re all we are.” And he spends some time talking about how creation stories explain to us how we exist with each other and the world we inhabit. How they can retrain our hold over our thinking even if we don’t think they’re true.
I wanted to chat about that for a bit, because I was wondering about the role creation stories play in your life and why you chose to start this book off with one.
In mythology, Saturn is the God of the ocean and the God of water, the coal. That idea really informed my work. Having that myth opening up my book just made sense as a whole because it was something that—like, my name literally was inspired by mythology. So much of my writing was inspired by mythology. So much of my life I've spent just reading and translating and interpreting that doing it just felt right.
This is such a hot take, but I really don't like diaspora poetry. I never wrote anything about cut fruit…my mom…the army…planes…[laughter} I just tried to have other ideas inform my work. Mythology has really helped with, learning other languages really helped with that. I’m able to see the original stories, how language itself is formed. Getting to work around that and work with it.
That's so interesting, dude. I love how you just care about so many things. Cause I’m only into, like, 3 things. Cool people. Music. Hockey. End of list.
I used to be super into hockey. I watched the Rangers game the other day. I used to live in San Jose, so I was a big Sharks fan.
Oh! I was wondering why you’d pick them. They’re an awful team!
Not long ago I went to watch my first boarding school hockey game.
Oh, so y’all have your own league and everything. Is it, like, Andover vs Exeter? The whole rivalry thing?
Yeah! [laughter] But a little worse.
That’s SO on brand for y’all.
I can’t wait for you to post this interview and [the subtitle] is how we spend the entire time making fun of boarding schools.
That’s so going in!
Okay, it’s already 3 o’clock. Let’s move on. I wanted to ask you about “silver bodies, golden heart”.
I love that poem. It was partially inspired by Ocean Vuong, how he used footnotes to tell a story. And Richard Siken, obviously. I love Richard Siken, even though I’m still leaning about his work. I wrote this in 30 minutes at 3AM on New Year’s Day, in bed, typing it on my phone. I wanted to write something about lakes, and I had the first line, “A boy found a nymph in a silver lake deep in the woods,” and I had to figure out what happened afterward. It was a good exercise for me because it was kinda prosey and I don’t write prose. Practicing storytelling within my own work.
There’s a line in “Amongst horses” that I really love: “What the stories don’t mention is that we run from the same god”. What are you trying to say there?
“Amongst horses” was partially inspired by this story that I read when I was eight, which I think was from a student writing contest anthology. It was in a documentary style and I really liked it. I think the concept of prey and hunger is really interesting. When we talk about the Bible, Noah's ark, how God himself created all the animals and everything that came to life - he created all of them, but he still made them at war with each other, until some giant event such as Noah's Ark happens, and they were forced to coexist together. And that was a relationship that I thought was super interesting, that I kept seeing again and again in nature and also something that I wanted to explore in poetry.
Yeah, I definitely picked up on religion as a theme. And then there’s also a lot of stuff about loneliness in these poems. Which is something I’ve written a lot about, either explicitly or implicitly. So a lot of what you have in here really hit hard and felt relatable to me. Your speaker in “Prayer poem” asks—begs, really, for a companion. At the end of “self-portrait as a house,” the house is like, “This solitude, / too, is all I will ever be.” In “Siren,” your speaker is literally rubbing nickels out of desperation. So I wanted to delve into that a bit as well, in terms of how companionship and solitude found their place in these poems.
It was definitely a big theme for me. A lot of what I write grapples with stuff that I experience in real life. I'm really lucky to have a good support system, but sometimes it’s hard being at a boarding school, because you're always in this bubble, and then you never really talk to people; you never really are able to have deep relationships outside. I think everyone kind of ends up more or less alone. And I feel like it might be the same in college, too, where everybody’s caught up in their own development, putting so much energy into a version of themselves that they want to be, but that they don't really end up investing without having other people [around them]. And that was something that I struggled with a lot, especially last year. And in January, it was cold, it was dreary, and I just felt really…alone. It just came through in the writing.
I came to this school for writing but it feels like not a lot of people do writing here. It’s hard to talk about writing-specific stuff. I also feel that especially in elite institutions, where students are supposed to prioritize working and education over a lot of other things, there is this idea that you can't really talk about stuff like mental health, you can’t really talk about stuff like loneliness, because you go to this elite institution that kind of solves all your problems. And once you get in you'll have your friends and college admissions and then you'll be happy, but it isn't really true. Like, I've definitely had my share of wanting to transfer out of boarding school just because I felt like my life balance was very uneven in that it’s supposed to be your home and your emotional support and all your friends are there. Your whole world is in a bubble. Which works out really well for some people, and less for others.
I think, relatedly, another one of the undercurrents running through this book is the idea of filling in gaps. As you mentioned before, like, finding space in the world, and kind of filling those spaces in.
I used to really be into spray painting. It kind of taught me what space meant. Writing this book was a really healing experience for me, because I had a lot of gaps within my own life. Like, when people ask me for a fun fact about myself, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to say.
Um, that you know Russian? That you wrote a BOOK? That you watch TV until 2AM instead of studying? Like, there’s SO many things.
When did I say that?
On Twitter, like, two days ago.
[laughter] It was the Hunger Games!
But yeah, you know, filling space was something that felt really interesting to me. I’m still figuring out my identity. And as a writer, this was a good chance for me to do that. When I started writing, I definitely felt this sense of having to speed-run things. But I don’t feel that pressure anymore. I used to force myself to write every day for a while, and recently I realized I could be more chill. I don’t need to figure everything out. My mentor, Nate, he was also super helpful in that he gave me reality checks, he was like, you're literally 16, you don't need to publish everything, But it’s really hard, I think, when everyone around you is, like, 16, and they have a book out and they have a Best of the Net nomination and stuff like that. You can kind of feel the pressure to do so as well. It's not just you writing, it's also you writing in comparison to everybody else.
What I think is really neat is that you include a few illustrations in this book. I wanted to ask you about your choice to include them in here and why they look the way that they do.
I was drawing Mitski fan art for Pearl Diver. [laughter] And I love pearls, oysters, shells. So it just fit. I think it definitely adds a cool visual component. I read this book called Life Between the Tides, and it had a lot of scientific stuff within it, but there would be these visual aids every so often for the little animals. It was a combination of original art and writing that the author did. I really liked that. I thought it added a dimension that isn’t so common in other books.
How do you feel about having a book out in the world at the age you are and with the experience you’ve had?
We were only going to print 30 copies of it but now we’re printing way more, and that definitely feels really nice. Maybe people do like my writing! I think I learned a lot about myself and about my writing and how it’s developed through this process. Even just the minute technical stuff, like how to do cover design and stuff like that.
You did the cover?!
Yeah! I had never used Photoshop for creative stuff before this and it worked out well, so I’m pretty happy. I wanted something with water—
Hahahahahaha! Really?
[laughter] I wanted [the photo] to look calmer than it actually was, and then people would read [the book] and be like, “What??”
Which is kind of what happened to me!
[laughter] I distorted it a lot, put a lot of overlays on it. But I was also really inspired by this one book called The Hole. I look at cover designs a lot, and I’m a big GoodReads person, so I would browse through different editions of the same book and see how the cover has evolved. And that helped me figure out what I wanted.
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about water, talking about gaps, talking about—what else did we talk about?—things…
Myths.
Yeah, myths! Creation stories! And then you decide to call this book Bloodpaths.
Yeah. That was always the plan. A lot of the book was slightly violent in that it was graphic, but not scream-your-head-off-bloody-muder violent. More of a silent-stabbing-in-the-night violent. So I knew I wanted something that tied back to identity and my struggles with inheritance, and then also myths and animals and nature. It just fit.
What’s next for you, writing-wise, life-wise, whatever-wise?
I want to work on a full-length this summer, and do more with non-fiction and prose writing. I’m applying to college soon, and writing this book was a really good exercise for me in being more introspective, and through applying to summer programs and submitting to magazines, I think I’ve learned how to write my own experiences. So I just want to incorporate more history and art stuff into my writing, too. I really like history, if you couldn’t tell.
And languages, and movies, and cheese.
Yep. Cheese. I really want to work in London as a cheesemaker next summer. I love food history, and I love food studies. So I wanted to go work somewhere I could interact with food. And hopefully I can bring more of that into my writing as well.
That’s interesting, because there’s not a lot of food in this book.
I was trying to stay away from it! If I started going there, I wouldn’t have stopped. “unshelling” filled my cravings for writing food, I think.
But yeah, I do really want to write a full-length. Like, not rush it, but just kind of figure it out. There’s always another poem you can write, there’s always another book you can write, and I wanna take advantage of the opportunities I have while I’m still in high school. I think there’s just so much more support available now to teen writers and I hope to be able to maximize my resources.
Dude. Thanks for being a part of this.
Thanks for listening to my ranting!
SATURN BROWNE (she/they) is a writer from New England. Her work appears in SoFloPoJo, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, and more. She is the inaugural Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate and an Adroit Journal 2023 mentee in poetry. She loves A24 films, matcha, flowers, and the mountains in their hometown of Guangxi, China.
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