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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: My Alleged Accident

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, My Alleged Accident. Let me give you a few beats in the story of Janine Joseph’s life. Janine was born in the Philippines. When she was eight years old, she moved to the US with her family. She was undocumented but didn’t know it. That only came out once she started applying for college and the full ride to her dream college evaporated. It knocked her down, but for only a second. Then she dusted herself off and kept going: community college, a PhD, all the while writing poems about her experience of being undocumented. During her graduate and postgrad years, she caught a lucky break: she became first a permanent resident, then a naturalized citizen. In 2008, in the course of just a few seconds, everything changed. She was sitting in the car with her dad at a stoplight, when another car smashed into her from behind. Janine whipped back and forth like a rag doll, shaking her brain so violently it left her with the kind of memory loss I only know from movies. Her childhood memories were gone, a large part of her identity was gone, the story of who she was was gone. The poems she had been writing became something of a guide. A trail left by someone she calls “before Janine”. She managed to finish the collection. It’s titled Driving Without a License, mostly about her time being undocumented. Now she’s come out with a new collection, where the accident and its aftermath take center stage. That collection is titled Decade of the Brain. Here’s our conversation.

Helena de Groot: The first thing that I was curious about is, there are a lot of poems in Decade of the Brain about the car accident that you were in in 2008, which is 15 years ago. And so I’m wondering what needed to happen in the meantime, you know, for you to be able to write these poems.

Janine Joseph: A number of things. So, the accident, as you mentioned, happened in 2008. That was my very first semester, my very first year in a PhD program. And I was maybe about three fourths of the way in Driving Without a License. And then this car accident happened. And so while I was recovering, while I was really deep into the recovery, I was trying to write the poems of Driving Without a License while trying to assemble my memories. And I was reading that book as a way of reading about myself, which is a really strange way of re-approaching the self when you don’t remember who you are, right? Because now what you’re relying on are the memories of an entirely different speaker, right? I talk quite a bit with my friends who have asked about what it’s like to forget things. And I tell them, you know, even now, the memories that I have, I’m not entirely sure I can trust them, because I feel like what I remember most about them are the stories that I’ve told about them. But sometimes there’s no emotional core attached to them. And I feel like when I had started writing poetry, I would always feel the heat of a memory. Say, if I was writing about something in my childhood, I would remember what that space felt like, what that memory felt like, what it was like to be there. Whereas now, I feel like I’m recalling the story that I’ve told. And we all know that we can’t entirely trust the stories that we’ve told. And when I’m writing a poem, usually I’m pulling a thread from this time period, a thread from this time period, and I’m creating an entirely new memory for a different speaker, one that’s based on me, but not one who’s entirely me. So, you know, I had to make my way backwards into that book, so that I could finish it because I was really terrified that I had lost that book entirely.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Janine Joseph: And so I kept telling myself, the faster I recover, the faster I heal, the faster I could write this book. And the faster I could write what is clearly going to be my next book. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. You knew that right away?

Janine Joseph: I did. I did. I don’t know what that says about me personally,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: but I immediately thought, you know, what are the chances that I’m writing a book called Driving Without a License, and then I’m involved in a motor vehicle accident. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Also, I feel like for people listening, I feel like you need to clarify that Driving Without a License does not mean that you didn’t know how to drive.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHING) Right, exactly.

Helena de Groot: Can you clarify like what it did mean for people?

Janine Joseph: Yes, yes. It just meant that because of my immigration paperwork, I was writing through a time of driving without a license.

Helena de Groot: Right, so the paperwork you didn’t have, but the skills, definitely you did.

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: And you were rear ended also, right, so it wasn’t your fault.

Janine Joseph: Exactly, yeah, so the police report estimated that the car was going anywhere between 50 and 70 miles an hour, which is fast for a semi-residential road.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: We were completely rear ended, right at an intersection. I guess, luckily, it was late at night, and there was no one in front of us. And there was no one who was crossing the intersection at the same exact time. This was right before the Christmas holiday. And we were maybe about two blocks away from the nearby fire department. And so I think they might have been the first responders. I have no recollection of that night. I feel like every once in a while, I’ll exhale in a particular way that makes me feel like I remember the breath that left me.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: When we were struck, right, like there’s something about, I guess, maybe certain patterns of my own breath that I hear in my ear. And when I hear it, it strikes a kind of memory. I think I was reaching down to grab something out of my bag. So I think I may have been sitting a little bit forward. My father suffered just a hairline fracture on his collarbone. And that was the extent of his injuries. In the pictures of the car, it looks like the driver who hit us turned a little bit to the right, maybe to try to pass or to miss us entirely, and so I guess slammed into the passenger side a little bit more. Apparently, I told a lot of jokes while (LAUGHING) enroute to the hospital, and also while being seen in the emergency room, which seems, you know, when I think about what is me, what is left of me, am I really—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Like that’s the core, if that will stay, then it will stay there forever.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHING) Yes, yes.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: When I was also in my recovery loop, right, this is also part of the work that needed to be done before I could write this book, right, which was, for my memory to come back, which hasn’t come back entirely, but even through that period, as I was in this continuous loop of “I think I have been in an accident,” which again, also I think kind of speaks to maybe who I am as a person that I didn’t say things like, “I’ve been in an accident,” it was always like, “I think I’ve been in an accident.” Or one of the refrains that I had was, “I seem to be confused,” not, “I am confused,” but the sort of, (LAUGHING) “It appears as if someone in this brain here is confused, or someone in this body is confused, but it’s certainly not me.”

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing. I wonder if that is about that maybe you did not feel confused, but that people react to you strangely, so, you know, you must do something that sounds confused, you know? Like, did you still feel whole if that’s the right way to put it?

Janine Joseph: I mean, really, at this point, who’s to say? I think what I find really interesting about that phrasing, and just the fact that I was on this continuous loop. It could have been that I said it once, and then it became the thing that I just kept saying because it was the only thing that I would recall. But so many of my memories were jumbled. And, you know, all of these past iterations of myself were existing simultaneously, you know, at that time. So this was 2008. I had been, by that point, a permanent resident for about almost two years, maybe about a year and a half. But I would suddenly remember being undocumented, and I’d be really worried that I might say something that would reveal that I was undocumented to someone. But then I had just moved to a new city, a new state, I just started a brand new program, I was just starting to make new friends. And so no one could—no one knew that I was behaving in a very different way. And I couldn’t confirm with anyone, which Janine I was.

Helena de Groot: Wow, that sounds scary. I mean,

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Because you’re laughing about it now, but it really, it sounds profoundly unsettling, you know?

Janine Joseph: Oh, absolutely.

Helena de Groot: And so, okay, so, you know, you told me that during the car accident, you were in the midst of writing your first book, Driving Without a License. And so you tried to, with whatever fragments of your memories that you still had, you tried to kind of finish that book, so that you could go on to write this one, Decade of the Brain. But so, there was still a good 15 years or something in between?

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And so, you know, I am wondering like, what, what do you feel changed in that time? Like in what ways can you see the accident in a different way than you did those first months after it happened?

Janine Joseph: So this is a tricky question, because my relationship to that accident, I want to say, has continued to change, but also has not changed at all. Because I just couldn’t remember the accident itself. And I couldn’t remember the times after the accident. Unless I sat down to write something, I couldn’t really rely on thinking to myself, like, “Oh, if I make a note on this, I’m going to come back to it.” I would make a note and then it would disappear. My phone, for example, is full of screenshots of things, where when I saw it, I would you know, take the screenshot and say, “This is obviously something worth writing a poem about. This is a way of writing into this particular manuscript.” I was also doing a lot of reading about post traumatic growth, about trauma, about concussions, because I kept somehow thinking that the only way to, to write through this experience was to ground it in existing research, which I should have known from writing, Driving Without a License, that that’s just not, that wasn’t going to work

for me, but also because I would read all the stuff, I would feel all of these things, and and then I’d close the book and it would be gone.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow, that is hardcore, that like, you’re trying to find the frame that can kind of help you get a start into a subject that is complicated, and you can’t. It’s like, sorry, you’re on your own, you know?

Janine Joseph: Exactly, exactly. And I kept thinking, you know, maybe if I found a metaphor, but I couldn’t somehow think through and nail down some kind of image that I wanted. It was like I had forgotten how to write a book, or I’d forgotten how to just trust, I guess, the way that poems happened to me. You know, Decade of the Brain, I found that I had to lean on the syntax and being able to hear and feel the way it was that the phrases, that the line, that the sentences were going to be constructed. Which felt to me more closely aligned, or more true to, what this experience has been like for me. Right? Whether it is existing on different timelines or having past, present, future all happening at once, whether it was leaning into, you know, the sentences that I would write sometimes for papers for my classes, where I would write words that I didn’t mean to write or I’d write them in entirely different orders and not, you know, not realizing until after when I was reading them out loud that something sounded strange about it, but not exactly strange, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was strange about it. And through this process, I thought about something that a friend of mine, another poet, the poet Ishion Hutchinson—we overlapped at NYU. You know, he had pointed out to me, we were at a, like a house reading, I think. And I had read a poem out loud. And he said, “You know, what’s going on with your syntax? You do really interesting things with your syntax.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You know, sometimes you’re, you’re flipping your words, you know? And they’re making an entirely different music.” And I was like, “What do you mean? Am I saying words in the wrong order?” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: And he said, “You know, now that I’ve pointed it out to you, that might be something to kind of keep in mind.” So it’s just really strange what ended up staying. But I really kind of tried to listen to that as a way of, you know, processing how my mind was working, and how this voice might be different from the voice of Driving Without a License. I should also say, with the voice of these various speakers, you know, one of the things that I think interrupted my ability to write this book was, I did a lot of readings when Driving Without a License came out in 2016. Because right, it was 2016, immigration was a hot topic, as it continues to be, but right, election cycles, it flares up again. And because I was doing all those readings, I kept reading everything in that in that speaker’s voice. And so she kept getting in the way. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Oh, interesting. Old Janine was like, “I still exist as a ghost presence.”

Janine Joseph: Yes

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Janine Joseph: Yes, yeah.

Helena de Groot: But I mean, it’s so fascinating what you say, you know, the way that your concussion—or concussions, right, I think?

Janine Joseph: So it was just that one.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Janine Joseph: But it was significant enough, that it just wiped everything out. And I think too, that I didn’t receive proper care after the concussion. Also, there’s so little that we know and we’re continuing to learn about traumatic brain injuries and concussions. You know, they just kept making sure that my brain wasn’t bleeding, and then otherwise, they were just like, “Things will come back.”

Helena de Groot: Oh, and what could they have done? What do you now know they could have done?

Janine Joseph: Really, not much.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Janine Joseph: I mean, yeah, at this point, I really don’t know. I know that there are some places, I think there’s one for example, in Utah, that specializes in concussion research, you know, where they can map your brain. I got none of that. I got, I got, you know, like, “We need to make sure that your brain isn’t bleeding. And so we’re going to write the directions to this other hospital because we’re seeing too many people right now. So we’re gonna write on this Post-it note directions to this hospital, and you need to drive over there, because you’re forgetting things.” And I’m just like, but, wait, “You think my brain might be bleeding, and you’re giving me directions to drive across these Houston freeways?” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You’ve also just been in a car accident, like maybe you, you know, even if your brain was not bleeding, potentially,

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: who sends like a recent crash victim into a car again?

Janine Joseph: Yes. Oh, yes, exactly. And as I mentioned, I was living in Houston at the time. Something that I didn’t write in this book, and I just had to make a decision, was that while living in Houston, I was hit three other times by other drivers.

Helena de Groot: Oh!

Janine Joseph: Yeah, one of them, someone crashed into me while trying to merge onto the freeway. And then the second one, I got T-boned at an intersection. And then the third one, a semi hit my car. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Oh, no!

Janine Joseph: I know, I know.

Helena de Groot: How do you still—you should move to New York and just never drive again, you know? Seriously, that’s only solution.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHING) I know, I think about it all the time.

Helena de Groot: That is so scary.

Janine Joseph: Yes, yes. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: How do you feel when you are in a car now?

Janine Joseph: I get really, really nervous. I have a hard time driving with other people in the car, especially, I mean, because they’re distracting, but then also, I feel this extra pressure not to mess anything up. But it took a while for me to be comfortable. I mean, I still had to drive myself everywhere. So, you know, going from my house to school, for example, I would get in the car, and then if I didn’t follow a routine that I’d set up for myself, like say, a car in front of me stopped and I had to go around them, that would change the routine, which would mean that I would forget everything. So then I’d just pull into a lot and just wait until I remembered where I was going. You know, there was a whole year where every time I got in my car, pretty much from point A to point B I would just cry the whole time, even though I had no recollection of the accident itself. And these are all things that I thought I would write about. You know, like I have these like one-liner notes in my phone app that says something like, you know, like “crying while driving.” And I somehow just couldn’t make poems out of them. I don’t know why. Like, I feel like there’s an entire like B side to this book of all of these other poems that I just couldn’t write. Maybe because they were too close to the thing that I don’t remember. But maybe there’s some part of me deep down inside that does remember, and won’t let me access it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: You know, in the readings that I’ve done about trauma and the ways in which our brains might be protecting us, I wonder if some of that is there. I also wonder if, you know, some of it is a different kind of muscle memory.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: So I’m always really curious about this other book that I didn’t write. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Absolutely, a ghost book.

Janine Joseph: Of all the things that I forgot. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow. I mean, like what you said now, you know, about the muscle memory, it also reminds me of what you said earlier about, sometimes the way that you take a breath or something will remind you of the accident.

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And I’m wondering, like, you know, out of the crumbs that you may remember, you know, like, do you have more crumbs than the breath or no?

Janine Joseph: You mean, in terms of memories about the accident?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, I’m asking you, because very recently, I was in a car accident. And I was reminded also

Janine Joseph: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it was not nearly as bad as yours. Absolutely not. And what struck me so much about how I experienced the accident was that there was no thinking. There was only body, if that makes sense.

Janine Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: I felt almost like a fish or something. You know, like, I don’t have—I don’t make plans, I don’t have opinions, I don’t worry, I am only a body bodying, whatever that means, you know.

Janine Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I am just wondering, because you mentioned the breath, if there are any other things that you wouldn’t maybe describe as a memory, because of memory sounds like it’s in your head, but that there’s another kind of awareness that you sometimes get inklings of?

Janine Joseph: Yes. I want to say all the time, but I don’t know that I’m aware of them all the time. You know, I mentioned the other three car accidents that I was involved in—actually, there was also another one, but it was in a friend’s car. But one of the ones, the one where I was T-boned at an intersection, immediately, my first instinct was, okay, I need to make sure that I get you know, the license registration, all this stuff from the other driver. Because they initially appeared like they were going to drive away. And so I kind of followed them. And then they stopped. And then I pulled over. And in that moment, it was really strange, I remember opening the car door, and that felt like a real out of body experience. And as soon as I felt it, I thought to myself, I need to contact someone who I know who, when they see me won’t freak out. And will just be able to come and just, you know, take down this information, and do whatever I knew already at that point that I was not going to be able to do. And as soon as they arrived, I said, “I need you to ignore me, because I’m probably going to break down.” And it was like, I gave a list of here the things that need to happen. And in this moment, it felt like there was a Janine that was in the control center, right, who was just watching this, these other levers start to (LAUGHS) go up and down, up and down. Because as soon as I got confirmation that they would be able to do these things, I like, sat down on the curb, and I just like spaced out completely. And I, it felt like I just kind of exited my body. Right? Like it was that moment where I had held on just enough to not feel the trauma of getting hit again. Because it was pretty much, right, so the big accident was 2008. And then the next one was 2010. The next one was 2011. The next, yes, yeah, so it was, it was

Helena de Groot: So it was after

Janine Joseph: Oh yes.

Helena de Groot: Oh my god, that’s maybe scarier

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot:  that, like, you had the huge one,

Janine Joseph: Exactly.

Helena de Groot: and then it just sort of kept happening in a way.

Janine Joseph: Exactly. And even now, you know, something will happen, or I’ll see something, or sometimes there won’t even be an outside trigger, but I’ll get this sense that I’m experiencing thing like déjà vu. Or there will be something that feels like a memory of mine, and this thing that happened in one of my poetry workshops, someone else would read the poem that was up for workshop. And so, you know, I was reading one of my peer’s poems, and I hit the word “escape.” And I was looking at the word and I was trying to figure out how to sound it out. It felt like a completely foreign word to me. So I finished reading the poem. And in that moment, while everybody was talking about this poem, I was having this really intense memory. And I was like, I’ve been here before, I remember encountering this word, and I remember thinking that it’s pronounced es-cah-pay, es-cah-pay, es-cah-pay. And the more that I zoomed out from this memory, it was like, there was water around me. There was like, some kind of barrier in front of me and I was seeing something. I was seeing the word “escape”, which I was reading as the word es-cah-pay. And it wasn’t until after that workshop that I realized that this memory that I thought was mine was a scene from—and this is the real kicker here—from Finding Nemo. If you remember Dory, the one who, the one who has memory problems, right, she sees that word “escape”, and she and Nemo are side by side, and she just keeps saying “es-cah-pay, es-cah-pay, es-cah-pay” while they’re trying to run away, while they’re trying to swim away from sharks.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: But it was really strange that I had, that I had taken the memory of a fish that constantly forgets

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) Right? And absorbed it into my own memory. So these blips kind of come up, which maybe that’s a kind of out of body experience, too.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: I mean, I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s, if that’s what you have, like, those are good crumbs, you know. I mean, it’s also funny, I think, to see the—or like, funny, is not the word, definitely not. But it’s also compelling, I think, to see the ways in which a hurt brain tries to compensate. Right, like where it’s like, “Well, I don’t really have a coherent sense of self with all the memories there, so let me just cast about for something to remember, oh, you know, this seems related.” You know, and you get like a scene from Nemo, you know, Finding Nemo.

Janine Joseph: Yes. I do have some very intense memories that have remained. You know, it’s so tempting sometimes to think that, or to believe that, these crumbs, right, the fact that I even remember them, means something more than maybe they would have if I hadn’t been involved in this accident at all. Like, I want to believe that because I remembered it, it must mean all of these things, or it must mean something about who I am. It must mean something about how I felt about a person, it must mean all these different things. But who knows how the brain restores information,

Helena de Groot:  Right.

Janine Joseph: has shuffled things around. You know, maybe it was something that was supposed to be filed and then dropped. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Exactly. Like, “We were going to throw this away, you just happened to restore the garbage can” or something like that. Yeah.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) Yes, yeah.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) So I’d like to get to the opening poem, maybe.

Janine Joseph: Okay.

Helena de Groot: And before you read it, could you explain what the title means?

Janine Joseph: Yeah, so, coup-contrecoup, it’s essentially the whiplash motion, right. So the coup is when your head is thrown back. And then contrecoup is when your head is thrown forward. And this is really the poem where the various Janines are introduced. And, you know, there’s a proliferation of Janines that then just continues to proliferate and replicate and populate across the collection itself.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Janine Joseph:

(READS POEM)

Coup-Contrecoup

I was at a low ebb when the ambulance

reversed along the gravel and the roar

traveled to Janine. For days the churned

rocks loop their sound until her brain

felt like the surf and the familiarity lulled

her to sleep. Lulled her in the hospital’s

machines, lulled her in the backyard

of her father’s home where she swayed

in suspension like the empty hammock

at first, then thrashed in the gale

like Odysseus lashed to the mass of me.

She could not tell you where I was though

the depths were in her. Wailing where

I waited were the sirens skirting the corner,

the vehicle still leagues away from rescue.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. It’s such a striking poem. It’s so evocative because it seems to stretch time in a way, you know? Like you don’t really know how much time passes, and especially because you have that kind of motion of an ocean, right, “I was at a low ebb when the ambulance / reversed,” so you have the sense that maybe you’ll be there for a long time. Especially because, you know, at the end you write, “the vehicle still leagues away from rescue.” I mean, the other thing that I’m really interested in is, you know, earlier, you said that after the accident, you didn’t really have access, like, the way you used to find your way into a poem was through an image. And you didn’t have access to that anymore. So you leaned on syntax instead. But I have to say, what really struck me in this poem, and in many poems in your collection, are exactly the images.

Janine Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, like the way that you kind of sustain and build on this metaphor of the ocean, right? Like you start with the low ebb. There are “churned rocks,” you know, there’s thrashing in the gale. I have two questions about that. Or I have one question, but it has two parts. You said earlier that you, you don’t remember the accident. And that whatever you remember from things, that the heat of that memory is gone, because you don’t really specifically remember the thing, but you remember yourself telling the story of that thing at some point.

Janine Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so this poem, I thought was so emotional, there was so much heat in it, because of that image. Because of that totally, like, bodily, I mean, I thought so, you know, like that feeling that you’re, you’re shipwrecked, and you’re thrashing around, and then you’re ejected onto the surf—you use that word also in the poem. You know, and it’s low tide, so you, you probably just lie there on the sand. And since you say that the heat kind of left your memories, how come that you imagine such a hot image?

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: Through a lot of work, and a lot of just like, re-creation. So, you know, something, I used to always listen to music when writing poems. A lot of pop music, actually, because there’s something about the repetitiveness of pop music that I could kind of throw to the back of my head. And often, if I knew I was gonna write a poem that felt just maybe emotionally sad, I would listen to like a really fast-paced pop song so that I can meet in the middle. Or if I knew that I was going to write something that was pretty, like, peppy than I would listen to something that was incredibly sad, to have something to write against. And for this one, what kind of kept me in the spell, you can YouTube like, hours of cars driving on gravel. There was something about the sound of gravel and the sound of trucks driving through gravel that I felt like would give me entry to this poem. It was really strange, because I’m writing so much about water. But it wasn’t water that I wanted to listen to, right. Like, there was something kind of specific, there was some kind of sound that felt to me much more like the texture that I wanted to access. And I just really had to trust that my brain was giving me what I needed to put this poem together. As opposed to thinking, “I have an image that I’m going to start with.” So it’s just really a lot of patience and trusting what was going to come to me. Yeah, I’ve learned since that my brain will, will come when I need it. You know, like one of the very first things that I remembered when I feel like I came to—so there was like a whole day where I feel like there was a Janine that’s absent. But one of the very first memories that I had, that I remember after the accident was like, lying on my bed, and suddenly remembering that I was a poet. And that was the first thing that I had been given back.

Helena de Groot: (GASPS)

Janine Joseph: Yeah. I didn’t know what it meant. And I didn’t know what I wrote. And I didn’t know that I was writing a book at that time. Right, I didn’t know I was working on Driving Without a License at that time. But it was like, all of a sudden, I just remembered I was a poet.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: And I was kind of intrigued by this, this idea of myself as a poet. And in retrospect, right, this is how I can trust that my brain will just supply. And I just sort of have this, this like, unexplainable faith that the writing will always come back to me, which helps me through these spaces, you know, these lulls that I think all of us experience, you know, where we begin to question whether or not we’ll be able to write ever again, have I wrote my, like, all the work that I’m going to write for the rest of my life? There’s a part of me that, you know, that is like, well, Janine will supply. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: Janine will come back.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, but It’s so interesting because, I mean, I know a lot of writers who, when there’s a lull, they get so nervous that they think, “Am I even still a writer? You know, I haven’t written anything in two years or,” you know, whatever. And it’s so interesting that when you came to, that your first thought, even without knowing that you had published anything or ever wouldn’t publish anything, was, “I am a poet.” As if that was like some incontrovertible fact, you know? Not dependent on you writing something. That that was just who you are.

Janine Joseph: Yeah. Yeah. Which is different than, “I seem to be a poet,” or “I think I’m a poet.” It was like, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Wow. “I think I was in an accident, but I am a poet.”

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHING) Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: That is very beautiful.

Janine Joseph: Yeah, I know. It’s actually kind of obnoxious. It’s so obnoxious.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Well, I was wondering if we can get to the second poem in your book, which is called “Into the Ganzfeld.” And which is such a beautiful compliment to the first. But again, would you mind first explaining the title?

Janine Joseph: Yeah, so a ganzfeld I learned about through the light installations of James Turrell. I was living in Houston at the time, and I was so taken by his light installations, right. And there was one particular exhibit that he had that were all these ganzfelds, which is almost like a complete saturation. So much so that, you know, you can’t quite tell where the ground meets the wall meets the ceiling. So it’s a German word. And people often compare it to like a complete whiteout. Except he was using like a saturation of color, and you’d enter the space, and they would actually have these museum docents set up against the walls, because people would walk into these spaces, and just be so completely absorbed by the lights that they would just walk right into the walls, right? Like they, you really could not tell. There was something about like how your eyes just kind of get fuzzy, right? Like you had no sense of the depth of the room. No sense of where you were in space. And I just kept thinking about being in that kind of like saturation of color, that whiteout, not having a sense of where you were in space. For a time I lived in Utah. And when I went to see the Spiral Jetty, which is like this earthware sculpture in the Great Salt Lake, right, I had walked out into the Great Salt Lake because the water levels were really low. And so you can walk out pretty far, actually, on that particular day. And I had tall water boots, and I walked out there and I couldn’t tell how far away I was from, I guess the, from where all of my friends were, because they just had regular shoes. I couldn’t tell where the water and the sky met. And it was this really strange—it was like, I was there, I was in the Turrell exhibit in Houston from years before, and I was suddenly in the space of the concussion. And so those three things overlapped for me. And sort of this, like, the saturation of experience, the saturation of color. And again, like, not having any sense of depth.

Helena de Groot: And so, the way that you connect it to the concussion, do you mean like that was the whole of your experience? Like there was no outside to it? Is that what

Janine Joseph: Yes, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Janine Joseph: Yeah. So like walking into this space where I have no sense of where I am in space, no sense of, right, beginning and end. And yet, somehow, my eyes and my sense of self is completely absorbed by something around me. And so, you know, it just felt like I’d walked right into this space.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: You know, it wasn’t like everything disappeared. It was that I’d walked into something and had been completely absorbed by it.

Helena de Groot: Amazing. Let’s read the poem.

Janine Joseph: So this is called “Into the Ganzfeld.”

(READS POEM)

With my grief counselor, I talk about hallucinating,

as a child, a double on the dashboard and my double

would say, Don’t you say a word,

though I’d already be looking past myself

and at the horizon of taillights reddening.

It is possible to have been this way even then.

Even then it is possible something split in me

the first time I lied myself a citizen.

At the tilt of a head, was I the young woman

or the old, the duck or the rabbit in the optical

illusion? After the accident I turned out

all of the lights in the room while I watched,

concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a fever

with nothing on the tip of my tongue.

Helena de Groot: Wow. I mean, it’s so interesting, you know, because you immediately complicate this story, right, that you tell about yourself and about the accident. Like the accident was the moment where this doubling started happening, right? Where like, the different Janines just kind of started crowding the room, you know? And in this poem, you talk about as a child, “It is possible to have been this way even then. / Even then it is possible something split in me. // the first time I lied myself a citizen.” I think it’s so beautiful that you connect those two things. And again, we’re talking about memory, right, and like, what are the crumbs that stay? What is the constitutional self-image? Right? Like, apparently poet is right in there, you know. But then, do you feel like, very quickly, you got a sense of like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I am a double. Kind of always have been.” Do you feel like that is constitutional? Like, is that how it feels to you?

Janine Joseph: I would say yes. I mean, this is certainly something that I continue to, to wonder about, right? Because there’s something about the accident that marks a moment in time, right? That there’s a very clear before and there’s a clear after, even though, right, like there’s a day or two where I’m just like wandering around the house and, you know, telling people I think I’ve been in an accident. And then there’s a day where there’s no evidence of my activity. I had remembered my Gmail password, for example, and then started emailing a bunch of people so that there’s like, evidence of a Janine that happens. But then there’s a period, there’s a whole day where there’s no evidence of Janine. So I may have been sleeping, I may have just been wandering around. I’m not entirely sure. But you know, it kind of splits my life. And I think, you know, it’s easy to believe that I can pinpoint, you know, there was this very clear Janine before and very clear Janine after. But I could do that really at any point in all of my other lives, right. Like, there was very clear like, Janine in the Philippines and Janine in the US. There’s a clear Janine that’s undocumented and a Janine that as a permanent resident. There’s a Janine that is a permanent resident and a Janine that’s a citizen. There’s a point where a Janine invents a story in order to survive in this country, and then there’s the story that happens after. Or even further back. You know, I used to have these really, these really kind of like outrageous, intense fevers when I was a kid, where the moment I got sick, I would go straight up to like, 104 °, 105 °. And I would just start hallucinating. And I would hallucinate versions of myself. And so, for me, it always feels like there’s been some other kind of Janine that’s there. Because I’ve seen her, right, as part of this hallucination. And so it’s like, if I only tell one version of my life, it feels neat and it feels untrue.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Janine Joseph: Right? Like, it feels like there are all these other splits that happened before then. And it didn’t seem like I could write a book that would just say, you know, even though I had to make a decision, like, I’m not gonna write about three other accidents, because then those accidents are going to crowd all these other accidents, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: and I’m not writing a memoir, I’m trying to write, I’m trying to write something else. But it didn’t seem like I could not talk about the fact that—or not address the fact or not even approach the fact that there had been all these other splits before me. There was something about those Janines as being central to or important to the Janines that I’m writing about in Decade of the Brain.

Helena de Groot: And how are you with all of them? Are you on good terms?

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Is there a sense of alienation like, “Oh, God past Janine, what was she thinking?” You know, what, what is the relationship amongst all of you?

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) I think so far we’re doing all right. I think we’re doing okay. I mean, I mentioned, you know, that even though I was really concussed, and again, like, even to this day I’m just like, how did I manage to not take a medical leave of absence? You know, I finished my program on time. I just stayed in school. I would like, fall asleep in class. At a certain point I’d lost my hearing too, which I, you know, I think it’s just one of the after effects of a concussion, where my hearing would go and it would come back. And so I’d just kind of sit there and pretend I could hear everybody. The notes that I would take in class would either make sense or not make sense. But you know, I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or what it was that I was supposed to do, because this accident happened in California. And somehow I had to, you know, the doctors just mostly wanted to make sure I could fly from California to Houston by myself. That was the extent to which people were looking after me. And I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. And so I trusted, you know, the plan that had been laid out by the previous Janine. And her plan was to get her PhD, stay in school, apply to become a US citizen. And so I just kind of followed what she had laid out. Because what else was I going to follow? She was she was the only trustworthy person around me. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right, so you are on good terms. She’s like, literally the one who saved you in a way?

Janine Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I think I have to be on good terms with all of them simply because they clearly are holding onto all the things that whatever operating Janine is in me, they’re the ones who hold those memories, they’re the ones who hold those timelines, those facets of my life.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: That’s very interesting, you know, that it’s almost like the memories are sort of gone unless there’s like a whole persona attached to them, you know, like, her memories aren’t gone yet, so I can kind of tap into what she knows. And then I’ll remember it too.

Janine Joseph: Yeah. The narratives, the storytellers who are attached to those narratives.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, the, you know, the line also, that’s very arresting, of course, is, you know, so in the poem you write, “It is possible to have been this way even then,” you know, split like that. And then you write, “the first time I lied myself a citizen.” And that is so interesting, I think, you know, the lie that is in there. And it reminded me of stories that you hear from people who live in a repressive regime, and who have like an entirely different set of things that they can say inside the house with their loved ones,

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: and outside the house where they can be overheard. And so, you know, what was that experience like for you? Like, where did the lie, where did the lie lie? (LAUGHS) Like, where was the lie? What kind of thing did you have to lie about and to whom? Like, who was in your trusted circle? Like, did you tell friends, you know, like, who, how small was the circle where you did not have to lie?

Janine Joseph: It was incredibly small. And then after the accident, I couldn’t always remember who knew what. I mean, that was sort of the thing about, you know, growing up undocumented was that, I had to make sure that I can trust someone. You know, so I was undocumented in a time before DACA. And I think, when I was in college, I’d read that it was like a misdemeanor for anyone who knew about someone else’s status to not report them, if they were here unlawfully. And so I was really afraid that anyone would either turn me in or would feel like they had to turn me in, right. And so, even the circle that I kept, not everybody knew the whole story. And, you know, that was sort of the problem with publishing Driving Without a License, right? It came out in 2016. But then I wrote an essay in 2014, right, three years after I’d become a citizen, where I finally kind of openly talked about the fact that I’d grown up undocumented. And it seemed to me that I needed to be the one to say this thing, simply because I knew that suddenly, all of these poems that each had a snippet of the story were all going to suddenly get in the same room together.

Helena de Groot:  Mm.

Janine Joseph: And they were all going to be able to corroborate (LAUGHS) in the way that I felt that people in my life, you know, would suddenly look back on something and say, “Oh. Oh! Ohhhh.” Right? That suddenly all of these people who had only gotten bits and pieces of me and of this story that I was telling, you know, in part so that I can kind of control who knew what, but also so that I would never put them in a position where they felt like they had to report me, or they felt like, right, they were like, they had been burdened with my status.

Helena de Groot: Like that they would feel implicated in a way.

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Like, “I’m committing a crime, and I didn’t even have a choice.”

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Right, right.

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yeah. And so I felt like I had some responsibility. You know, and so we’ve talked about, you know, all these Janines that appear, which makes it sound like all these various multiple personalities, but I think this happens to quite a number of us, right, where the people around us know versions of ourselves or parts of ourselves, or, you know, they know the work self versus the home space self versus the self that we have with our friends. And maybe those selves for me have always felt very clearly defined because I’ve had to protect myself in these different ways.

Helena de Groot: Like keep them separate.

Janine Joseph: Exactly. And also at a certain point, I had seen all of those pieces kind of laid bare in my own brain, and had to put them into their various piles.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Janine Joseph: Right? So everything that had been compartmentalized and organized very neatly, in the before, right, in the before the accident had all spilled out. And I had to sort of sort through them again. And then I had to identify them and know the difference between them.

Helena de Groot: And you know, what I think is also interesting in that story of, you know, lying, and you having to kind of protect the people around you and yourself, you know, from who gets to know what, is that for a long time, you didn’t even know, right, that you were undocumented?

Janine Joseph: Correct.

Helena de Groot: So, can you tell me how that like, why did you not know? And then when did you find out?

Janine Joseph: So, I came in the early ’90s.

Helena de Groot: How old were you when you came?

Janine Joseph: I was eight years old. I was eight years old. So I arrived on a tourist visa. And at a certain point, my tourist visa had expired. And I think this is something that’s quite common with people who came in that time, right, because it’s often laws that get written, laws that get created that change statuses.

Helena de Groot: Hm. Mm.

Janine Joseph: And so of course, I didn’t know that I had become undocumented after, you know, arriving on this tourist visa, and I didn’t find out until I was applying for financial aid. When I’d filled out my FAFSA, the way that people are supposed to fill out their FAFSA their senior year of high school, I had just assumed that I was a citizen, which was actually an error that I made, now, when I look back on that memory, when I was in elementary school. Because I remember now that at one point, I came back home, and I was recounting a story to my mom about how everybody was talking about citizenship, right, and asking this question of like, “Who’s a citizen,”(LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Kindergarten?

Janine Joseph: Right, like, I don’t know what we were talking—no, it must have been in like, third or fourth grade.

Helena de Groot: Oh, great, right.

Janine Joseph: And I said I was a citizen of this country. And she says, “No, you’re not, you just live in this country. You’re a citizen of the Philippines. That’s where you were born.” She was trying to explain to me what the difference was. But you know, like, I don’t, it was just like, I’m a citizen of that country when I’m there, and then I’m a citizen of this country when I’m here.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: And so, you know, I just checked off citizen because how, like, I, you know, I didn’t know one, what citizenship exactly meant, even in high school—I think certainly, probably high schoolers now, or even younger, probably know, because, you know, these conversations about immigration have entered sort of a national consciousness or at least national discourse. I mean, like, I graduated high school in 2001. That was when the first iteration of the Dream Act failed. And so the conversations then were very different. And so I checked off citizen, and it was in the letter that I got back, that it said, you know, like, “Here’s what your expected family contributions are.” And then there was a note at the bottom that said, you know, “But we cannot confirm that you are a US citizen.” And it was in that moment that I then asked, I asked my dad, you know, like, “What does this mean exactly?” And so, you know, I had graduated a high school valedictorian, I got into the schools that I applied to, I had all these different scholarships, I had a college that I had intended to go to. And then I went to community college afterwards, because I lost, I lost everything that wasn’t a scholarship that the college felt like they could give me, you know, because it was in-house scholarship, as opposed to a federal scholarship, or some kind of like, grant. So I went to community college, because I, you know, I wanted to go to school, and for me school, and the university system, you know, in many ways, was a haven for me, right, because it was something that I could do, that I could keep doing, that felt like, you know, gave me a feeling of progress. But it was also one of the reasons why I continued to write, right, because I didn’t need anyone’s permission to write. I didn’t even need school to be allowed to write. I just needed to keep reading. (LAUGHS) I was reading a lot of poetry, you know, in high school. And at that time, I had set out to write this novel, which of course, failed. And then I remembered that I wrote poetry and the only way to tell my story was to essentially like, refract it, right. And, you know, this is really what made my life possible was to work on poems and to be a writer and do the thing that the US government couldn’t tell me not to. So when people talk about things like needing permission, I’m just like, “You don’t need permission from anyone!” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHING) You just do it.

Helena de Groot: You’re a very non-neurotic writer. This is, this is very novel for me. (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Sorry, other writers. (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Were you angry at all with your parents?

Janine Joseph: No, and even to this day, no. I mean, one, I think, in the very beginning, I didn’t, I didn’t know exactly what to be angry about. And then, you know, I was mostly upset because I wanted to go to college, right. And, but then I, I immediately pivoted, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t skip anything. It’s like I came up with a plan almost immediately to go to community college. And so I was doing that. So of course I was upset. But, you know, I’m really glad that I never, I never somehow found the anger. Maybe it’s because, you know, I, I had a sense of how difficult it was to come here and to stay here. Even now, in retrospect, you know, I’m 40 years old now, and when I do the math, and calculate how old my parents were at the time, it’s just absolutely wild.

Helena de Groot: Like they were so young, is what you’re saying?

Janine Joseph: Yes!

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Janine Joseph: Yes, making these kinds of decisions. And, you know, I think, like, once I found out I was undocumented, I began to do a lot of research. And research, largely, I mean, even though like the internet, (LAUGHING) there’s very different kinds of internet that we have now. But I tried to find out as much as I could about immigration. I was living in Southern California. So pretty much any news article about the border, about, right, it was always about the border, because that was the only way that somehow people knew how to talk about immigration. And so, right, largely continues to be. I just did a lot of research, I did a lot of reading. I still have all these like, clippings that I had made. And just in terms of like, the changing of the laws. You know, I think I thought back even then, about how, how they had prepared in a very different way, largely based on how others had prepared to immigrate to the US. You know, I think for a lot of people, they were able to come and then figure it out when they got here.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Janine Joseph: Right, but then laws continue to change, attitudes continue to change, people get criminalized, when they weren’t criminalized before, people get amnesty in ways that they weren’t able, you know, all these things that are happening outside of, of these family units that are coming to this country. And, you know, I did know that, or at least, you know, there is a story that my parents had tried to work on our paperwork when we arrived. But all of their money was taken by someone who they thought was going to help with their paperwork, right, a lawyer. And, you know, like, my passport from that time, you know, has pages cut out of it, you know, that match up with the story. And at one point, too, like I had, I had thought that I had found, you know, other people who would be able to help, help me with my immigration paperwork. And it was like, a couple years later, I got like a letter from, like, from the US government that was just like, “You’ve been identified as a person who was scammed.”

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Janine Joseph: “And just so you know, like, there’s nothing that’s happening with your immigration paperwork.” You know, like, there was this couple that had scammed so many families into thinking that they could help them with their paperwork. I forget their names. But I want to say like a couple years ago, in the middle of moving from one place to another, I found the letter that had got sent to me. And then I Googled that couple and like, I think they served like a very short prison term sentence, but they’re just like out and about now. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: That’s very reassuring.

Janine Joseph: It’s really terrible.

Helena de Groot: That is so terrible.

Janine Joseph: It’s really terrible.

Helena de Groot: I mean, really, there should be like a special, extra tough hell for people who take advantage of other people when they’re at their most vulnerable.

Janine Joseph: Oh yes. Yes, yeah.

Helena de Groot: What um, because having to lie in order to be safe sounds extremely scary, even before you lose your memory. And you can’t even keep track of, you know, what you’re supposed to say to whom, you know? And so I’m wondering, what are the effects on you, maybe to this day, of having to have gotten so proficient at lying?

Janine Joseph: Yeah. I go to therapy. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

Janine Joseph: I’m very fortunate that I have, you know, a health insurance that allows me to go to therapy, so I can kind of just talk through this. I have writing. I, you know, I still have, you know, physical ailments because of the car accident. And also, I, you know, I do think that my body contains a lot of the stress that maybe doesn’t come out when I’m having conversations with people or doesn’t, you know, or when I’m teaching in my classes, you know, that I’ve got knots in my body that hold onto that, right, that they’ve, they’ve compartmentalized all of the strain. I think there’s, I don’t know, I think there’s something about like maybe a little bit of like self-awareness, right, just because I am in therapy. When I lived in the Philippines, I was a child actress. So I had a totally different career before I came to this country. So I acted between the ages of three and pretty much when I immigrated, so eight, so I had like a five-year career—that’s really strange to say—a five-year, six-year career, and but, you know, that background allowed me to practice being other people.

Helena de Groot: Wow, I feel like we’re getting to the core of the story here. I mean, the very starting point.

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Janine Joseph: So maybe, maybe that helps to some extent in terms of like, embodying whatever version of myself I need to, in order to kind of make it through the day. I, you know, I had to make a decision when I found out I was undocumented, right. I gave myself just, I mean, I don’t know how much time I gave myself, but I had to act quickly. I had to very quickly decide, you know, am I going to find a way to go to college? Am I going to find a way to keep writing, right? Am I going to find a way to feel like I’m doing something with my life? You know, my friends always kind of joke that I’m like the best worst-case scenario planner. But I usually have all these different options. If this doesn’t work out, there’s this, if this doesn’t work out, there’s this, and I kind of trust that. And then after the accident, you know, now, all the time, I just think, you know, it could have been worse. There’s so much more to my brain that I could have lost. I also could have died. You know, the car that we were in, my dad had a Subaru, they really don’t lie about the fact that Subarus can survive all kinds of crashes. I mean, just, you know, the car was completely totaled, but I think, you know, maybe in any other car, it would have been worse, given the impact. And given the fact that we were at a complete stop.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: You know, so I always kind of think back on that. I mean, maybe it’s not helpful or healthy to always think, “Well, you could have died, and you didn’t!” (LAUGHING) “So, what are you gonna make of it?”

Helena de Groot: I mean, there are entire religions built on that premise, you know, that you have to be grateful that, you know, you didn’t die, but you could tomorrow, you know?

Janine Joseph: Yes! Yeah. I mean, the life that I live now is not at all in any way a life I could have imagined, right. It’s like, I set up all of these worst-case scenarios, I set up all these different doors, and it was just a matter of just like, knocking on each of them, trying to, you know, jiggle the, the knob on each of them and seeing what one open walking through them. You know, I think back on the Janine who got that letter that said, you know, “We cannot confirm you’re a US citizen.” My life could have gone an entirely different way. So, you know, it’s just like, there’s only so much planning that I’ve been able to do. And I don’t know, I feel like, I feel incredibly lucky. I’ve prepared as best as I can and I could. But all the time, I’m just thinking like, yeah, it was really difficult to lie. It’s more important that I am able to identify when I’m lying, and when I’m not. And when I’m safe. And when I’m not. When I need to lie versus when I don’t. Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, (LAUGHS) who— I mean, all the time, I think, you know, like, who could have, who could have thought I’d be here? In all of these ways, right? Whether as a US citizen, whether someone who didn’t get deported, as someone who’s alive, who has survived the car accident. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Who do you thank for that?

Janine Joseph: Ah, maybe myself! All of the Janines. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes, yeah, exactly.

Janine Joseph: And really the people who, you know, something I tell people all the time, because I’ve had to keep so much of my life a secret, and I’ve had to hide so much of my life, you know, like, so much of my, my particular life, my particular journeys have been entirely solitary ones. You know, even, you know, even someone who has been in a car accident, even someone who’s had a concussion, someone who has gone through the immigration system, all of our experiences are very different. And so even if we have these sort of parallel experiences, you know, these tracks that we’re on are entirely solitary ones. But they’ve never, I’ve never been alone. Which for me, right, this is where a lot of the thanks gets built in. So even when I was having to do something entirely on my own, I was never alone. And I think that helps. A lot.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I thought that was such a beautiful thing, in the, God, what is the word now for the, when you say thank you at the end of a book? Is there a word for that?

Janine Joseph: The acknowledgments.

Helena de Groot: The acknowledgments! There you go, there was a word.

Janine Joseph: Mine are long! Mine are so long.

Helena de Groot: I love that. Like, I’m such a fan, as an interviewer, those are my favorite parts of a book often.

Janine Joseph: Same.

Helena de Groot: I mean, look, I love the poems, right, let’s not—(LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) Yes.

Helena de Groot: I love seeing like what is the, the warm nest that exists around the person, you know?

Janine Joseph: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And you know, one of the things that I thought was so beautiful, is that you thank two friends of yours, also poets, who knew you in “the before,” as you write, and for, you know, telling you about who you used to be.

Janine Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering what it does to have yourself reflected back to you, you know, the contours of who you sort of remember you are filled in by people who love you. What, what does that do?

Janine Joseph: Oh, it’s been fabulous. I mean, so I think you’re talking about R.A. Villanueva and John Murillo.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly.

Janine Joseph: And I think what I love most about them reflecting back to me who they know me to be, a lot of it really comes down to the sense of humor. The three of us are always making jokes. And, you know, one of our running jokes is often, actually has a lot to do with just making up memories.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Janine Joseph: So we had overlapping years at NYU, and, you know, something that we have a lot of fun with is just making up things. So like, we’ll say like, “Oh, remember that night when, like, right after workshop, we saw Sharon, Sharon Olds, and she just started beatboxing. And then everybody got around. And then like, you know, we were dancing in the—” right? And so, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Janine Joseph: So we like to make up these memories, which is also like having fun with the fact that, right, like, I don’t remember these things, and now we’re making these things up.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Janine Joseph: But knowing we’re making these things up. Or, you know, R.A. was someone who I talked with immediately after the accident, because, right, like I had, I somehow remembered my Gmail password. And we had used the G-Chat G-Talk function all the time. And when I was on this loop, and I still have a transcript of this loop, you know, at one point, he says, “Hey, remember when you said you were gonna gift me like, 200 bucks?”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Janine Joseph: (LAUGHS) And I was, and I’m just like, “Huh?” And he’s like, “I’m just joking. But I’m joking, and I’m making jokes because I’m scared right now because we’ve been having the same conversation for like, 30 minutes, and I really need you to tell me that you’re gonna be okay.”

Helena de Groot: Aww. And when you say the loop, is it the loop where you were like, “I think I have been in an accident,” or “I may have been in an accident.”

Janine Joseph: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Right, right, right.

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And at one point I said like I needed to go to the bathroom which I had written as “batchroom”, so I just kept saying “batchroom, batchroom, batchroom.” And then I’d disappear for about 10 minutes and then I’d come back and he says, “Did you go to the bathroom?” And I said, “Is that why I was standing up?” And he’s like, “Janine! Oh my god!” (LAUGHS) Yes. And so they’re reflecting back to me the, right, that sense of humor that I feel was somehow intact.

Helena de Groot: Wow, poet and sense of humor.

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: Those are like, still very much on board.

Janine Joseph: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s who I am.

Helena de Groot: There are worse things, you know, if you’re gonna have two crumbs standing, great, well done.

Janine Joseph: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

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Helena de Groot: Janine Joseph is the author of two poetry collections: Driving Without a License, which came out in 2016, and won the Kundiman Poetry Prize and da Vinci Eye Award, and Decade of the Brain, which came out in January of this year. She’s a co-organizer of Undocupoets, a MacDowell Fellow, and she teaches at Oklahoma State University and Virginia Tech. She’s also a librettist who has collaborated on chamber operas, song cycles, and choral works. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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