
Earlier this year, Portland-based writer/editor duo Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan brought their groundbreaking project, A Mouth Holds Many Things, into the world. A diverse collection of hybrid-literary works from thirty-six women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists, every page of A Mouth is as strange and exciting as the last. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more—A Mouth decisively breaks the mold.
Closely in step with Fonograf Editions, the nonprofit press and record label dedicated to pushing the boundaries of sound, text, and genre, and De-Canon—Strom and Natarajan’s literary-social art project committed to encouraging new paradigms of writing and reading—A Mouth flips popular notions of “hybrid” and “literary” on their heads. In its commitment to the BIPOC women and nonbinary writers living “on the far peripheries, those both gender- and race-marginalized,” A Mouth has also created a space in the publishing world where, previously, there was not one.
Below is a conversation between Strom, Natarajan, and myself that occurred over several days within the confines of a Google Doc.
Justin Duyao: In your Editors’ Note, both of you take care to clarify what you mean—and, most importantly, what you do not mean—by words like “hybrid” and “literary” and “anthology.” Even though A Mouth might appear to be a familiar kind of project, after spending any amount of time with it, it becomes clear that it is the first of its kind.
Did either of you find it difficult to toe that line between conventional and unconventional? Familiar and unfamiliar? Legible and illegible?
Dao Strom: I will start by saying that the realm of what is sometimes designated as “unconventional” or “illegible” has, I believe, a lot to do with what one is already most familiar with—and, perhaps, coming from the contexts I’ve inhabited, by way of my own lived experience and body, it’s come easy to feel myself on the peripheries or outside of certain prevalent norms. I might attribute this to particularities of cultural background and life circumstances, but it could just as well be a factor of aesthetics/ways of perceiving.
That said, in my own work and in putting together this collection, the way I prefer to address the supposed divide between legibility and illegibility is from a viewpoint of generosity. I think, as artists, we are each attuned to our own deeper, private, and particular ways of languaging. Each artist has certain currents—underground rivers, let’s imagine—they are attuned to, nourished by or responding to, in communion with. And I think we are each trying to speak in that true/inner/hidden language to others and to the world.
To make work from this deeply particular place can mean being or appearing illegible to others, from some standpoints; but I like to think of it also as a potential act of sharing, of inviting another into those particular currents, without hand-holding, with a certain amount of trust in the encounter itself to convey itself. How do we encounter what we do not know (yet) how to read? How do we receive what we don’t fully understand, what is unfamiliar? If we listen generously enough to another’s language, we might not glean all of its meanings precisely, but I do believe we can still be moved, touched, taught by the experience of receiving another’s ways of languaging.
In bringing A Mouth together, I think we both wanted to honor those possible unfamiliarities of language and the transitory space/s in-between—namely to honor what occurs in those spaces where a text or artwork may waver between realms of illegible and legible, for some readers, where the experience of reading is itself an evolving process.
Jyothi Natarajan: As we were moving through the larger questions around hybridity and approaching the shape of this project, the question turned toward how we might create space within the form of the book to allow for the sort of generous reading Dao describes here. The very form of the print book is a convention that many of the works we selected were straining against. To translate a video poem, for instance, onto the two-dimensional book page would inevitably omit all the ways moving image and sound interplay to produce certain effects.
There were moments when I felt uneasy about the limitations of the form of the book, even as we embraced the ways it would allow for much of this work to travel. All along, we knew that a book would never be a sufficient container for the works we hoped to see, for the ones we selected. We just had to state that fact directly, which is why we chose to open our editors’ note with that sentiment. The project would have to exist across multiple mediums and be multi-modal, as well. For quite a few of the artists we collaborated with, their work is designed to be engaged with through multiple entry points, and in some cases the work is iterative, continually being returned to across time using different media.
I was also aware of the ways I’ve been trained as an editor to seek clarity in a piece of writing—especially when it comes to editing nonfiction. Working on this book with Dao had me reflecting on and challenging the nature of that search for clarity. In my mind, there’s a crucial difference between a writer finding their way toward the modes and forms that help them convey the vision behind a work and the clarity we might seek as a reader, in order to understand or figure out a work of hybrid literature. Dao and I both tried our best to listen closely to each of the works, which in some instances meant returning to them again and again to notice new layers, references, or reactions.
Dao, in your Foreword to A Mouth, you describe your experience publishing your own hybrid work for the first time “somewhat blindly, fumblingly,” and then, afterward, discovering fellow hybrid-experimental authors publishing via small presses. I imagine that, for many of A Mouth’s readers, this is their first foray into the strange and liminal world of hybrid literature. But I’m curious, are there any contributors for whom this is their first time publishing any experimental work? And, if so, what has it been like for you to be on the other side of the “writer/editor” relationship?
DS: My first hope is that the contributors to this collection have felt their work treated with care and genuine engagement. From the start, even in the process of reading submissions, both Jyothi and I were aware of the unique and more intensive receiving/listening that these works—being experimental, being hybrid, many of them abiding by their own very unique lexicons—would require of us as editors, as readers. This meant taking more time, reading intuitively, really listening to and feeling the energies of these works, learning from them how to read them, and stretching ourselves to understand their contexts. I think this is my basic approach as an editor (also as a teacher)—to try to receive and respond from an intuitive place foremost, more so than analytical or intellectual or comparative.
In the editing-to-book-layout process, since I was also doing the book design and layout, this project was unique in that we had to take special care—and differently for different works—in order to “translate” or “transpose” the works from their various multimodal forms into the 2D page format of the print book. In some cases this was easy, for instance with image-text works or visual poetry that could be presented on the page as images. Other works, though, came to us as links to digital and video poems/projects, as text and other ephemera related to performances, as images representing poetry objects. The editing-designing process for this required a good amount of trust and working with the writers to figure out the best ways to arrange the works for the anthology. I would say I got to know these works quite thoroughly and intimately (in some cases frame by frame, i.e. with video poems).
The editing process of this collection was unique also in its inherent limitation—that it is impossible to represent multimodal hybrid works (that reach beyond the page) wholly within the pages of a book. Thus, it was important to us to open our introduction with our statement about the book as “an insufficient container”—as Jyothi points out above. I honor this tension in hybrid literature and for myself as an editor, with the hope that the writers are as pleased as can be with the “representation” of their works in these “insufficient” pages.
Jyothi, you have worked in the publishing world for over a decade. You’ve worn plenty of hats, too—editor of the digital literary magazine The Margins, Program Manager at Haymarket Books, co-director of De-Canon—the list goes on. When it comes to translating big ideas to social practice, you have built your life where the rubber meets the road.
My question for you is two-pronged: First, what were some of the logistical challenges involved in making the dream of A Mouth reality? And second, for those who have explored A Mouth and feel inspired to continue the work you and Dao have started, what kind of advice would you offer them?
JN: First, I’ll say that we were grateful to have Fonograf as a publishing home for this project. When so little hybrid literature is published to begin with, we knew this book would be best supported by a small press with its own origins in a hybrid practice. Producing a book of multi-modal literature, however, necessarily meant that we were fashioning an art book, and as you can imagine, art books are expensive to make. At one point early on, we considered what it might look like to print the book in black and white, turning to grayscale all the four-color photographs and illustrations that are so central to these works. We looked at comparable books and became envious of their paper quality as we wrestled with what kind of book we felt we could realistically print. And at the same time, we felt a deep responsibility toward the writer-artists we had selected to feature in this project. We wanted to do right by their work.

The team at Fonograf cautioned us against scaling down our ambitions. “Make the book you want to make,” Jeff [Alessandrelli] at Fonograf told us. In early 2023 we applied for funding from the Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights initiative and later that year learned that we were awarded the grant. It was a huge relief and felt like an incredible accomplishment.
With the funding, we could afford printing the book in full color. Not only that, but we had funds to help support an exhibition associated with the book featuring works by twelve of the writer-artists that opened at Stelo Arts in Portland, OR this June. Even with these resources, we did things a little unconventionally, in large part to hold onto our vision and keep to our budget. For example, Dao designed the interior and cover of the book.

As for what advice we would offer to those who want to build from the work of A Mouth Holds Many Things, I’ll start by sharing an observation and a desire for what might come from this project. For many of our contributors, creating literature that doesn’t fall within the boundaries of text alone produced for them a sense of relative isolation. Dao speaks to this in her intro when she writes of her own experience as writer stretching across modes:
I found myself wandering a hinterland I had no map for—personally, creatively, professionally. In truth this was a very lonely period. At the time I knew no other writers who were trying to work across disciplines. I had no mentors; no community; no assurances that any of it was a very good idea.
In part, this collection became an asynchronous gathering space, a way to resist the isolation of writer-artists working in hybrid forms. Even if isolation, in some instances, helped create the ground for the work to exist, the book became a way to document connective tissues, throughlines, and unexplored conversations that isolation might obscure.
I guess I’ll say that I hope those who are interested in building off of this work feel less alone in their practice, and with each effort to share and make visible the experiments of multi-modal literature more space becomes available in the field to support their work.
Lastly, to give us a peek behind the curtain of your curatorial process, I would love for both of you to choose one of the works published in A Mouth and tell the story of your first encounter with it. What was it about the work that lured you deeper into it? Did it entrance you? Did it unsettle you? Was there a work that challenged or expanded your understanding of what hybrid-literature is capable of?
DS: I was immediately entranced by Jennifer S. Cheng’s “(Text)ile Asemic Book 1,” which we encounter in A Mouth as a sequence of photographs that show each “page” of this tiny book in which the writing occurs in embodied gestures of fabric and texture (a pebble, fabric scraps, string, yarn) and stitches. Accompanied by Cheng’s “Field Notes” lyric essay, the experience I felt encountering this work was one of my perception becoming simultaneously more intimate and expanded, where the small and nuanced and indescribable sensations become amplified, the quietness and stillness in the work very immersive and gently loud. I knew immediately that the way the work slowed and amplified my reading perception as I encountered it would be a perfect way to open the whole collection. There is a profoundly gentle and enervating experience that happens in seeing/reading Jennifer’s textile books, that I think can also connect us to empathy and care and the materiality of language; I feel this even more so after seeing the books as physical objects (we displayed several of her books in our exhibit at Stelo Arts).

The other work I’ll mention that was a bit more of a challenge in parsing “how to read” (and also how to “re-present”) is Anna Martine Whitehead’s excerpt from FORCE! an opera in acts. Martine initially sent us a libretto, video links of film and performance, and a website describing the entire, expansive project that centers around the experiences of Black femmes and women who have spent a lot of time in prison waiting rooms. I remember watching one of the videos that included experimental film and music performance and being moved nearly to tears by the sheer emotion and presence in some of the performances. As you’ll see in the pages of A Mouth, however, what we present from this project are visual collages, which Martine refers to as “maps of prisons” made in response to, and in a form of documentation of, interviews she made with women whose experiences in those waiting rooms inform the whole multimodal project. This is one of those examples of a project that was so multi-faceted, also too beautifully unwieldy, to be contained in text/pages alone. It took us several conversations with Martine to arrive at which aspects of the project would be best to excerpt for the anthology and how to frame the pieces.

JN: I remember my first encounter with the work of language artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles that we included in A Mouth—in particular the video poem “Completion: When It’s Just You,” which was written in collaboration with AI. In the book, we include two stills from the video poem, followed by the text of the poem. But as you might imagine, my first encounter was in watching the video, hearing the poet’s voice alongside the echo of a computerized voice against a contemplative, somber chord progression and melody.
Visually, the lines we hear of the poem repeat across the screen, resembling computer programming code. With the opening lines—“When it’s just you, will you be lonely? / How lonely? / Just how lonely / will you be?”—I felt encircled by the voice and interrogated as the viewer/reader, and also like I was listening in to another’s confession. As someone with a critical stance toward the presence and influence of AI in our lives, present and future, I remember feeling unsettled by the poem just as I felt enraptured by it sonically. Each time I watch “Completion,” I ask myself, what does Sasha’s collaboration with AI reveal about my own and our society’s relationship to technology? It is precisely the invitation to answer this question that has haunted me and drawn me toward Sasha’s work.
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Dao Strom (she/her) is a poet, musician, writer, and multimedia artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. The author of several hybrid works, including the poetry-art collection Instrument (2020), which won the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode, her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, and others; she is also the author of two books of fiction. In 2017 Dao co-founded De-Canon as a literary art and social engagement “pop-up library” project to center works by writers of color. She is a founding member of the Vietnamese women and nonbinary artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). Born in Vietnam, she grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Jyothi Natarajan (she/they) is an editor, writer, and cultural worker and has collaborated with Dao Strom as part of De-Canon since 2021. She spent nearly a decade working at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she edited the digital literary magazine The Margins and helped to establish The Margins Fellowship for emerging writers. Jyothi now works as Program Manager at Haymarket Books, where they administer a fellowship program for writers impacted by carceral systems. They are the recipient of the 2017 Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts and, with Dao, are part of the 2023–24 IPRC re/source residency. Having grown up in Southern Virginia, Jyothi is now based out of Portland, Oregon.
Justin Duyao is a Contributing Editor at HereIn Journal. His writing has been published by the Financial Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Southwest Contemporary, Clackamas Literary Review and the Northwest Review, among others. He lives in San Diego, California.
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