An Interview With Taneum Bambrick at The Rumpus

At The Rumpus, Taneum Bambrick, author of the debut collection, Vantage (Copper Canyon Press, September), is in conversation with Aileen Keown Vaux. "Currently studying as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Bambrick and I spoke recently over the phone about growing up in a town that prized rodeo queens over prom queens, how insidious it is to be underestimated, and being given permission to write something ugly," says Keown Vaux. More:

Bambrick: When you grow up in a rural place you can develop a really strange style because you don’t have anything reflected back at you; you don’t have examples. Now that I am living in Oakland, I’ve had a hard time adapting because it’s the first time I’ve lived in a big city. I have felt confused about how to navigate all of the access that a city offers, how to compose myself in an urban space.

Rumpus: That really resonates with me—when I moved from Walla Walla to Chicago it was the first time I saw female masculinity represented in a positive way. And it forced me to completely rethink how I wanted to walk through the world. It was terrifying and exhilarating.

Bambrick: For sure. It’s difficult to understand yourself, not only in terms of what you like to wear and what you might like to eat, but also your sexual and gender identity, when you live in isolation. I started realizing I was queer when I was working that job on the river and the only people around me were straight older men. I was going through that experience feeling really alone.

Rumpus: The way you present your sexual identity in this book is compelling because you don’t compromise any complexity: you fall in love with women; you date men. You document sexual trauma and how that is often, unfairly, linked to a person’s sexual orientation. How did you intended to address sexuality in this book?

Bambrick: I wrote about my own sexuality in a way that was as true as possible for my experience. Of course it’s hard to talk about because it’s one of the most complicated parts of who I am. In “Sturgeon” there is a small section where I disclose that when I was seventeen I was assaulted by someone who was older, who I was in love with. I have never felt a connection between being assaulted and being queer, but a lot of my partners have wondered if that was the case.

I hope that the poems about sexuality convey, first of all, that linking sexuality and trauma is problematic...

Read it all at The Rumpus.