By Jay Dye
Nora Hikari’s poetry collection Girl 2.0 explores gender transition through the memetic online culture of trans women. Hikari weaves together references to anime, video games, and internet memes into the physical and psychological realities of transness, creating a collection that is both intimate and absurd. I loved Girl 2.0 and was excited to talk with Hikari about her work, writing process, and what being a magical girl means.
Jay Dye: When working on Girl 2.0, did you start with an idea in mind for the sort of poetry collection you wanted to make? What did it look like putting together a collection like this?
Nora Hikari: I’ve always been obsessed with nostalgia. I feel like our generation has grown up our whole lives saturated in the nostalgia of the ’80s and such. With this comes a kind of emergent cultural canon with which new media contends with and commentates on. I think with this kind of commentary comes a kind of legitimacy towards certain narratives and experiences. Obviously a lot of this media that is part of the “emergent canon” of the historical moment is saturated with cisheteronormativity and often outright transphobia. With Girl 2.0, I wanted to see if I could make a small offering to the emerging cultural heritage of the Zoomer Online Trans Girl. I wanted to make a collection contending with our childhoods, wrestling with our nostalgic impulses.
I read a relatively popular zine a few years back about growing up as a trans girl in the ’90s and early 2000s, experiences from a “cohort” a few years older than me. It really struck a chord with me in a way that made me realize that I needed to write something like this for our “cohort.”
JD: What’s your writing process like when working on a poem? Do you have a certain place you like to work from, or a certain way you like to write?
NH: Writing poetry for me really feels intensely like I sit down, I black out for an hour, and then I wake up and a poem is sitting there on my screen. I know everyone has a very different relationship with writing poetry, and I think some people have this really deep sense of awe and reverence for the writing project. For me, it’s always been necessary for me to consider the act of writing itself something relatively inconsequential, at least in the moment. If I get too in my head about the quality or value of my writing, I just end up writing gibberish. Which, if I’m honest, I still definitely do end up writing a bunch of the time. I regularly “trash” like 80-90% of my completed poems. But my writing process has always been facilitated by feeling indelicate with it. I’m definitely a “Notes app poet,” and I also do most of my writing at my computer desk, into a basic .txt file using Windows Notepad. I need as little interference between me and words getting onto a page as possible. I hate the deliberateness of the pen and paper. I know that’s kind of a faux pas to admit among a lot of writers, but I do. I don’t even particularly like the clutter of a Microsoft Word interface. I also can’t dictate, though. It has to be a physical, silent act for me. Dunno! It’s part of the mystery of the process to me. I love it, if I’m being honest. It feels like my favorite spell or ritual.
I tend to have a bank of poetry “prompts,” so to speak, that I jot down in my phone when I’m out and about. They’re usually brief snippets of phrases, maybe a stanza, or a single pair of words, or a particularly compelling image. Without getting too into it, I’m pretty used to having mysterious, foreign messages whispered into my headspace. I just tend to lean into it now. It’s pretty common I’ll be sitting at a bus stop or whatever and the first two lines of a poem will just slither through my head.
If it feels particularly urgent I might come home and immediately sit down and tap out a rough sketch of a poem, but often I’ll just leave them to sit in my Notes app until I’m in the mindset to write. I’ve got a few rituals to kind of trigger that mode. I might flip open one of my favorite collections — right now it’s probably Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind. I’ll put on some music that matches the mood I’m going for—on this note, I have something like 200 mood-based Spotify playlists at the present moment. However, definitely the biggest part for me, of being able to write with any kind of consistency is nurturing a disciplined regular writing practice. I try to spend a solid chunk of time writing anywhere between one to four times a week.
There’s a Tweet Ava Hofmann posted once, something along the lines of: “Editing is a scam designed to convince you to write fewer poems.” I definitely have an editing practice, but I also agree that often, writing a ton of really rough poems can be a way better teacher than grinding the same poem into dust over the course of several months. I’ve never been a quiet girl, and I’ve never really been intimate with restraint. I’m a bit of a maximalist in most aspects of my life.
JD: Who or what were your biggest influences while working on Girl 2.0? Where did you look for inspiration?
NH: Without question, MIKA’s No Tiger was a huge influence on this work, and all of my work afterwards. I feel like No Tiger opened some windows into what poetic writing could be to me. MIKA takes serious risks with her writing, which really really pays off in massive ways for the construction of a unique and identifiable voice. I have, humbly and reverently, cannibalized parts of that voice for integration into the flesh of my own writing. On that note, a lot of independent trans writers were foundational to my understanding of what writing could be, and their voices were integral starting reagents for the eventual project of Girl 2.0. I shout out Never Angeline Nørth and Porpentine Charity Heartscape in the chapbook formal because their works were so critical to me developing not only a voice but a confidence with my voice, both as a trans writer and as a writer trying to experiment with subject matters and styles outside of the conventional “journal” purview. Sea-Witch and Psycho Nymph Exile are both tied for my favorite books since I read them for the first time.
JD: Something I love in Girl 2.0 is the way the poems are interconnected. Repeated phrases (like “November becomes December”) and imagery (like cups) weave different poems together in a way that makes the collection feel cohesive. At what point in the process did you start thinking about the way your poems relate to each other?
NH: It’s hard to say distinctly when those things started, and if they really “started” at all. Chen Chen said in an interview with Poetry Off The Shelf, “[Y]our obsessions are going to surface one way or another.” A little bit of poet-telephone, I believe he was discussing a quote from Tracy K. Smith at the time. Anyways, I think that was made evident to me when I started working on constructing manuscripts, that your obsessions will make themselves clear to you if you let them. It’s not something you can really force, it’s more like, the gravitational center of what you want to write will manifest emergently when you write enough about a given topic, or even just in a given period of time. Your writing will reveal its quirks and idiosyncrasies because it is grown out of your own life experiences. I think a lot about people who are different but were grown out of the same stock — people who have the same experiences but different responses to those things. I think the points where those people converge in how they think of the world is much in the same way that poems will converge in how they articulate the world even though they are different. I think this is kind of the basis of a sort of mutual knowing and empathy.
In a different way, I kind of think that everyone has a secret hidden language they use to speak to their own internal communities, between the parts of themselves or their mind that contend with each other and love each other. I think that secret language is something that can be revealed slowly, and intimately, through poetry. It is, I think, one of the great joys of poetry to share in someone’s private language with their inner selves, and I think the revealed-but-not-explained glimpses into the private internality provide a bit of enticing mystery.
JD: I’m curious what your journey was like getting Girl 2.0 published. Many of the poems have niche references to things like internet memes and anime—how were you able to find a publisher willing to take on trans Madoka and Homestuck poems? Was there ever an issue with readers or editors not getting a reference or understanding something?
NH: I’ve gotten lucky by being able to be quite selective with early readers of the chap. I circulated it among my own circles of very online trans women and so many of these references were received with grace and joy, which is more than I could ever hope for. In terms of getting it published, Ron Mohring has been an incredibly patient and collaborative force in the nurturing of this chap. I tried to submit it around at presses that I had some kind of a relationship with — either through having them recommended to me by friends and colleagues I trust and admire, or through presses that have published work I myself have found moving and enjoyable. I think it probably helps that Seven Kitchens is a smaller operation, which means it’s not as beholden to, y’know, shareholders or whatever. It gives a bit more breathing room to the niche and idiosyncratic.
JD: Some years ago, Torrey Peters had a statement on her website about how she turned to self-publishing after finding that the publishing industry wasn’t interested in trans women. Now, her novel Detransition, Baby has been published by Penguin Random House to much acclaim and it’s even being made into a TV show. In interviews, she’s said that self-publishing was a key step on her journey—once she had an established audience online, publishers took her work more seriously. I’m curious how you see the publishing industry’s relation to trans writers now. Do you think publishers are more interested in trans voices than they were in the past? Did you have to build your own audience before publishing Girl 2.0?
NH: Oh, this is a big question! I think there is a very basic sense in which publishers are more interested in trans voices because we are kind of in the cultural eye at the moment. That said, I do think that for trans writers there is kind of an expectation of “you have to do twice as much to get half the attention.” In terms of building an audience, it certainly helped, I think, to be able to show people that my work was being read and appreciated by having a relatively filled out acknowledgements page. I hate to say that, because it feels really crass. But publishing is an industry, and it helps to have a bit of evidence that you’re marketable, even if that evidence is just for yourself to boost your confidence. I’ve been slowly accumulating (mostly forthcoming) publication credits in “academic” journals kind of in service of this process for my current project, my (hopefully) debut full-length.
I think in terms of marketability, there is a great gap in understanding for a lot of “established” writers about how the cultural psyche is changing, particularly through the arrival of the Zillennial/Zoomer as active cultural participants. We have our own canon, our own lexicon, our own obsessions and perspectives, just like every other historical moment. I think there are very few attempts to speak to those experiences right now and to contend with them. Honestly, one that stands out to me was the Netflix film Enter the Florpus. An Invader Zim reboot! That’s something getting closer to our generation’s canon. For better or for worse! I’ll know we’ve hit it when we see some horrific blockbuster Homestuck movie, or a Breakfast Club but for online friends who write kindrama callouts about each other, haha. And I think as our generation starts to clamber closer and closer into the opportunity to be relevant cultural innovators, so will the marketability of these kinds of pieces also increase. Detransition, Baby was cited by a friend of mine who is a bit older than me as “really captur[ing] the like, Pre-Tipping Point experience of being a trans woman that [they] remember experiencing,” as in, it was a book that spoke to their generational experiences and sentimentalities. I think there is a time for every moment, each in its time. “A time for everything under the sun,” if you will.
JD: In the poem “Dream,” you write, “My dreams have been giving me premonitions about my gender. / The other night a frog told me I should try out new pronouns.” In my own transition, I’ve been struck by the way my dreams interact with and reflect my gender experience. Was this poem inspired by a real dream you had? What is your relationship with your dreams like?
NH: It’s funny, those lines from that poem are actually from a past friend’s story about a dream they had. This poem was written as a gift for them. But I do think that gift came from a place of empathy and understanding of shared experiences. So I guess, this poem was inspired by a real dream, just not one I had. My relationship with dreams is more like, dreams are the place where my mind speaks in its native language to itself. I draw quite a lot of my writing voice and style from translations of the negotiations of my dreamscapes into spoken form. But maybe that’s just a bunch of gibberish! All this to say that I think it comes right back to people’s private languages.
JD: If you could become a magical girl, what would you wish for and why?
NH: Hahaha, this is a great question. I think it’s kind of complicated because I think in Madoka Magica the basic problem is that the entire structure of wishes and magical girls is fundamentally broken. It’s built to specifically exploit and do violence to girls at the price of their dreams, and contending with it on its own terms only ends in inevitable despair and death for the girls, and the benefit and profit of the facilitators/Incubators. I guess there are maybe some obvious answers, but I think at the end of the day only Madoka and Homura’s wishes were the ones that felt to me like they had lasting narrative consequence. Madoka wishes to end the cycle of abuse. Homura wishes to solve it from within, in an act of relative selfishness and desperate love.
If we’re going by the second film’s conclusion, or the conclusion of the show formal, the answer is that the only solution to the cycle of abuse is to utterly destroy it through contradiction and love — the revelatory and revolutionary power of hope. If we’re going by the third film, Rebellion, it kind of contends that the cycle will survive through the vessel of any person who clings to its truths, and recreates itself through their suffering. I want to be clear that I love Homura. I see a lot of myself in her. She’s a vicious, heartbroken girl, made that way by the cruelties of the people who would seek to control her, and she lashes out in a very realistic and understandable way. She clings to the ideals that have kept her alive, the basic desire of her wish. That’s something we can all understand, I think. But I think the way she is, especially in Rebellion, is such that she becomes a new, cosmic-scale vessel for the reinscription of trauma and suffering into others. She’s a girl who couldn’t get out. And that’s extremely compelling and heartbreaking, but ultimately destructive to herself and her loved ones. It’s not a solution, it’s just a terminal state, the kind so many become trapped in because they never had the opportunity to change or heal or be saved. I guess then it would be obligatory to answer with Madoka’s wish: that we might all be free from the cycles of suffering that chain us, and that we might find a way to free each other through our love for each other and ourselves.
Girl 2.0 is available from Seven Kitchens Press.
Jay Dye is a trans poet and artist from California. Her poetry has been published in literary journals including Calliope, Sapere Aude, and Scribendi; her art has been exhibited by the Clyde H. Wells Art Gallery and New Art City. She can be found online at jaydye.org, on Twitter @jayyyyyyydye, and on IG @ghostprincessxyz.