Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’ wide-ranging and intimate debut essay collection, Miss Southeast—released in September from Curbstone Books—is a portrait of the artist as a young person, tracing the author’s coming of age to both queerness and writing.

Miss Southeast opens with Rogers’ childhood in Greensboro in the 90s, following her to college in Oberlin, Ohio, and beyond—to a teaching job in China, the beginnings of adulthood in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., and finally, back to Oberlin, where she currently teaches creative writing. 

The author of two books of poetry, The Tilt Torn Away from Seasons and Chord Box, Rogers deftly harnesses the powers of language to hold multiple truths at once: the sweetness of childhood and the challenges of growing up queer in the South; the pleasures of art and the painful abuse Rogers experienced at the hands of a trusted music teacher; the joys of marriage and the hard work of long-term partnership.

Rogers made a stop in Chapel Hill, earlier this month, appearing October 21^st at Epilogue Books with author Joanna Pearson. Ahead of that visit, Rogers sat down with the INDY to discuss the collection, the relationship between poetry and prose, and the importance of the place in their writing. 

INDY: The title essay here, Miss Southeast, tells the story of a high school beauty pageant you helped to organize—and pairs that event with a moment of early queer coming of age. It’s such a brilliant combination that feels ripe for an essay—can you talk about the genesis of this piece? Was it always the title essay? 

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers: “Miss Southeast” is the oldest essay in the collection with the exception of “A Bearing.”  I wasn’t thinking about a collection at all back then; I had barely written any essays and was trying to teach myself how to do it.  Here, I was trying to capture my own tensions around gender and sexuality in my life as a teen–being a student at a conservative, rural high school, participating in all sorts of heteronormative-coded activities, but also starting to come out of the closet and push against some of the norms that governed everything around me. 

Reflecting on this period of my life, I begin to realize the discord between being involved in this beauty pageant and having an early lesbian experience. Like you, I thought, ‘This tension is ripe for an essay.’ The pageant is a campy display because of such exaggerated acts of femininity. It was so much fun to put this experience into language. 

Typically I’m against having a “title piece” in a collection–it just puts too much pressure on one piece! But in this case, the title of the essay was so germane to the concerns of the overall book, that I couldn’t resist using it. I’m drawn to the multiple meanings it evokes: “Miss Southeast” references the pageant, but it also calls up anybody from the South who performs femininity, anyone who might have “Miss” as part of their title. 

Having lived in Greensboro myself, I loved seeing the city in these pages—and in fact, place is an important part of many of the essays here, as you move from North Carolina to Ohio to China to New Orleans to DC. How do you think about setting as a writer? 

I think setting—or place more broadly—is my primary subject matter. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the South and have then lived mostly elsewhere, but: place and displacement are major concerns in all my work, poetry and prose. It’s not a conscious choice to emphasize things; it’s just my primary lens, the way my brain works. Everything that’s ever happened to me feels so deeply tied to location and the microcultures of that location. My adult life has been quite itinerant, too: so many addresses. 

You write a little bit in the book about moving from poetry to essays, but I’m interested to hear more about what led to that and what doors you feel like that opened for you. What do you feel like you’re able to do in Miss Southeast that you weren’t able to do in your poetry? How do you know when an idea is suited to one genre or another?   

I’m definitely still a poet. I was writing poetry most of the time I was working on these essays; Miss Southeast was my back-burner project for many years, accumulating slowly while I also wrote poems for my second book (and a third, near completion). I started teaching myself to write essays around the time I published my first poetry collection when I wasn’t sure what to do next in my writing life.

I’ve always been long-winded (an unusual quality for a poet) and been drawn to narrative, especially when writing about my life in the South. Sometimes you just need the space of an essay to tell a story or unpack an idea; it’s possible to do this in poetry, but harder for me. I’m a big fan of working in both genres. When one form isn’t working for whatever I’m thinking about, I can toggle over to the other. 

Another major thread throughout this book is your grappling with the present and later aftermath of an abusive relationship with a music teacher, which you manage to write about with great complexity and clarity. I can imagine this was difficult to write about, and I wonder—were there breakthroughs as you worked to tell this story? 

It means a lot to me that the relationship comes off as complex, and my thinking clear. Writing about this part of my life is not pleasant, to put it mildly. But this experience for me, for better and for worse, was formative, which is one of the reasons you see it more than once in the book—mostly in “Someone Older,” but also in “Encumber” and “Ear Training.” 

I began to write about it very early on, in college, as part of my healing and getting my sense of agency back.  As I get older, I begin to see more and more complexity. In “Someone Older,” I used this experience as a springboard to think about power in queer relationships especially, as well as the way that all interactions between women/girls are mostly ignored by the culture at large. 

Although our conversations around this kind of abuse of power have come a long way, I think there are still ways in which we idealize boundary-crossing teacher-student relationships, especially in the arts. As a teacher, how do you think about mentorship? How do you think about your own boundaries and teach your students to protect their own? 

As a creative writing professor, I try to de-emphasize the master-apprentice model that governed so many disciplines. My department at Oberlin as a whole has a real distaste for this kind of education and mentoring, even though we were all raised on it. Instead, we try to gear our feedback and mentorship towards what the student’s goals are, building on their strengths and seeing what they already have to offer rather than focusing on their vulnerabilities. And we also get them to build a peer-to-peer community. If a student asks me for advice, I always joke with them that most advice you get is terrible and to take whatever I say with many grains (a bag?) of salt. 

What are some of the books and writers that inspired you in compiling Miss Southeast? 

I learned how to write essays by reading, mostly reading women essayists. For the more “slice of life” type essays and those focused on childhood and family, Joann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth taught me everything I know–I sort of tried to do for the South what Joann Beard does for the Midwest in her essays from the 1990s. 

Eula Biss and Zadie Smith, both Gen X writers, were important to me in terms of learning to turn my essays outward, not just focusing on my own experience. T Kira Madden is someone from my own generation that matters to me. I read Long Live the Tribe of the Fatherless Girls while I was trying to finish up my own essay collection— the variety of essays in that collection gave me confidence. 

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