I’m excited to announce that we have a new quarterly interview series at Up the Staircase Quarterly! The Landing: An Interview Series “seeks to gain insight into the diverse creative processes of some of our favorite writers with the hopes that we can inspire others through this sharing. ”

I was honored to have Fatimah Asghar as our first guest to discuss her poem “Pluto Shits on the Universe,” published earlier this year in Poetry:

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free….

Fatimah describes how she chose to give Pluto a voice, how to navigate using profane language in poetry, and the catalyst for her poem. Read our interview here.