Megan Fernandes: How Do You Make a Space for Identity?

Megan Fernandes is this week’s guest. er new poetry collection, Good Boys, is out now from Tin House Books.

From the episode:

Brad Listi: You get to experience all these different places and you have a certain worldliness and sense of connectivity, I would imagine. But then also in a lot of ways, it can be harder because of that sense of dislocation, that sense of never fully belonging to a place. Do you have that?

Megan Fernandes: Absolutely. One hundred percent. This feeling of just consistently feeling inauthentic in every space. Kind of feeling like American, because that’s where I grew up in a predominantly, but also growing up in a household where like none of my friends could really relate unless they also were immigrants. But then going to India and also feeling not at all of that world. I think it’s a consistent feeling of that. Like, what does it mean to have a homeland that’s theoretical or imaginary or kind of rootless in a way? And how do you make a space for subjectivity? I’m an academic. I use these words. How do you make a space for identity? Like when everything feels more horizontal, then deep.

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Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is also the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015). An Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, Fernandes teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.