Megan Burns : part one

Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She also hosts the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans and is the co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com). She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has three books: Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. She has three recent chapbooks: Dollbaby (Horseless Press, 2013), i always wanted to start over (Nous-Zot Press, 2014) and her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018.

What are you working on?

I just released my fourth book, BASIC PROGRAMMING, a book length meditation on attachment, family trauma, suicide and complicated grief. I wrote it in two years as an experiment in shifting my own grief and as a program to shift grief in others. The book I just started researching and writing in the last month continues some of that work addressing how addiction works, and not just addiction in the individual at the level of a particular object or behavioral symptom but as an aspect of being human: That we are all born into a world that teaches addiction to suffering as a way of being human. I’m interested in how this manifests in our current culture but also how this intersects with texts like The Upanishads in addressing how do we transcend suffering.