SUBHAGA CRYSTAL BACON

LE  Limit Experience Journal’s mission revolves around giving voice to the libidinally marginalized. Had you worked explicitly with this topic before submitting your piece to LEJ? If so, what aspect of the topic keeps you engaged. If it’s a new arena, what enticed you this time?

SCB I love the phrase “Libidinally marginalized!” I have lived with the topic for the better part of my life although I’ve more recently begun to write from and about it. My forthcoming collection, Transitory, from BOA Editions, is a chronicling of and reckoning with murders of Transgender people in 2020 interspersed with stories of my own experience as a Queer person. My new work in progress is more explicitly exploring the forces of family, community, and society that marginalized me in this way. 

LE  Sigmund Freud considered the libidinal energies to center around sexuality. His protege Carl Jung expanded the notion of the libido to include a more generalized richness of creative output. In terms of your work how would you describe your professional relationship to the libidinal realm?

SCB Interestingly (to me, at least) my first engagement with LEJ was with the Sacral/Sacred issue which featured some poems of mine that are more aligned with Jung’s interpretation. How do we characterize embodied consciousness, which to me is the “creation point” for all of life?  So for me, the libidinal energies are interwoven: the sexual and the creative cannot be separated. My exploration of the sexual has fed and been fed by the explosion of greater creativity.

“For me, being embodied is a form of libidinal well being.” – SCB

LE  How do you contextualize libidinal well being and is it necessarily part of a circuitous self-discovery process that you enlist in when putting time into the endeavor you’ve set before yourself as a creative?

SCB Wellness of Being is my innate state. Even when I am experiencing discomfort, which is fairly regularly on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis in the world we live in, I am sourced by Being and resting in it. For me, being embodied is a form of libidinal well being. I’m alive with my own creative source. I feel my own sexual energy as inextricable from creativity. 

LE  Describe your relationship to the ego while working in terms of how you deal with what some consider the last effort of the creative process, offering the effect of your process to the external gaze.

SCB There’s a way that ego is the driving force in creating. We are; I am. There’s a driving force in me that moves me to attune, listen, feel, and then create. The end point, or what you call the “last effort” feels essential to me. I write to be read, to share my lived experience with others who can relate to or glean something from it. Even though I am part of two writing groups who help me to refine my work, editors do a big part of that. I send work out, often in the white heat of “completion,” and then when work is declined by editors, after a point I revisit the work to see how I might continue to refine it. 

LE  What percentage of your creative engagement is never seen by anyone but you? What does it mean to you to maintain this private space with the passage of an idea, an image, an impulse?

SCB The best metaphor for this for me is the iceberg. So much of my creative force is internal. I spend a lot of time alone and alone in nature–a very wild, spare, unpopulated place. A lot of my creation happens there. Or it happens inside of me as a feeling, or an impulse. All of that is essential and private and unseen. Then it emerges above water so to speak and is seen by others. It’s essential for me to have this privacy. Without it, there would be no externalized “work.”

LE  Which writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists inspire you to be more daring and dangerous with your transparency as a person and as a creator?

SCB Joni Mitchell has long been an inspiration for daring and dangerous transparency. I think of albums like Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter which is a great examination of collective and individual shadow. For poets: Diane Seuss, Dana Levin, Dustin Pearson, Luther Hughes, Nickole Brown, Jennifer Martelli–these are the ones that first come to mind. I’m drawn to and nourished by poets who reveal themselves with daring and authenticity. 

LE What question would you most like to ask an experiencer of your work?

SCB Do you feel me? Did I move you? (that’s two, but they’re closely related).