Author Bio: 

Michelle Ott is a queer poet and writer from the Mid-Atlantic. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University in 2023, where she served as a contributing writer for the university's MFA student-run blog, CafeMFA. Her poetry has been featured in BOOTH Magazine, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Impostor: A Poetry Journal, among others, and has been nominated for 2025 Best of the Net award. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Title of Contribution: Soul Studies

Talon: We, the editors, have our own interpretations and readings of the contributions we receive. But we are always fascinated with hearing the author’s intentions. What was your “purpose” behind this piece, if any?

Contributor: The intention of this piece is to explore the idea of what it means to be loved—how the act of loving and being loved blurs the lines between the self and the object of that love. So many of the things that make up my identity are things that I learned from or shared with the people in my life that I loved, regardless of whether they’re still in my life in the same capacity in which I once loved them. How am I to pick apart which parts of me are truly “me,” and which parts of me are borrowed from others? Is there truly a difference once the act of loving has been committed? If to be loved is to be changed, then I am who I am because I have loved and been loved. There is no pure “blank slate” of myself to return to, and to try and separate out which parts of me belong to only myself is, frankly and inevitably, futile.

Talon: What sparked the idea for this contribution, and how did you know that you had some good dough to work with when the idea came to you? 

Contributor: I read The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir earlier this year, and instantly was fascinated and obsessed with its underlying themes of love as violence, as consumption, as enmeshment. I was particularly struck by a quote in the third book in the series, Nona the Ninth, in which the character Paul says, “It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.” This idea that loving someone leaves an indelible, irreversible mark on them stuck with me, and I found comfort in the idea that love is not this tangible thing that can be given and taken away at will by the lover, but a state of being that continually shapes a person. You can’t “unlove” someone you once loved; you may stop loving them, but you can never change the fact that you loved them once before. The longer I sat with that concept, the more I wanted to pick it apart and examine the components—which is the exact opposite conclusion I came to about what it means to be loved.

Talon: What was the writing process like for this piece? Did it come easily, or was it more challenging? 

Contributor: I wrote this piece during a week in June of this year that I spent at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, in a workshop led by the wonderful Ari Banias. Both Ari and my fellow writers in the workshop encouraged me to “get weird” with my poetry that week—that is, do something totally out of the norm from what I usually write. I don’t consider myself a strict formalist, but I’d never really experimented with spacing and formatting like I ended up doing with this poem. My peers read an earlier draft of this poem that was in a more organized form and encouraged me to play with the line spacing, and since I was already in such a creative and supportive environment, taking that leap was fun and exciting rather than daunting and challenging.

Talon: Our editors and readers are always asking that same old question: how do you push through “writer’s block”? How do you keep going when you are at a loss for words?

Contributor: Man, I wish I knew! If I had some secret, foolproof way to push through writer’s block, I’d be selling courses about it by now. I’m someone whose creative energy comes in bursts; I can go months without writing a single thing, and then suddenly, I’ll get a huge bout of inspiration and spend hours upon hours writing. It’s never consistent or predictable when I’ll get “the big burst,” and in those periods of not-writing, it’s easy to be hard on myself about my lack of production. But I often find comfort in something one of my thesis advisors, Kyle Dargan, told me during a workshop session in graduate school: even when you’re not writing, you’re still doing the work. You are still engaging with art, with stories, with the world, and in those periods of downtime, you’re gathering new ideas and allowing them to develop inside you. So, my advice would be to turn to the world around you: read widely and outside of your usual genres, engage with storytelling in different forms and media, experience all kinds of art and allow it to capture your full attention. Something will inevitably spark that next idea or inspire you to take your current work in a new direction—and make sure to be kind to yourself in those periods of rest and recovery.

Talon: At Talon, we value the careful and precise decisions behind word choice, shape, and structure. What elements are you particularly proud of for this piece?

Contributor: I’m particularly proud of the way the line spacing and the continually decreasing indentation work to underscore the content of the poem and enhance the meaning of it metatextually. I have a background in science; I studied chemistry in college before I decided to pursue my writing, and when meditating on the idea of this poem, I kept coming back to this image of my research lab days, separating out different chemical compounds produced during a reaction. That’s where the phrase “a silica-packed column” comes from—to separate out different compounds, I would take this long, glass column apparatus and pack it with silica dust, saturate it with a solvent (often methanol), and then allow the reaction product to filter through. As it passed through the column, you could see the striations in the silica dust where the different compounds would separate themselves based on their molecular weight. I wanted to recreate the opposite of that effect within the poem, so instead of starting with a tightly packed stanza that gradually separated out with more and more space between the lines, I started with very spaced-out, discrete stanzas that came closer together the more the boundaries between “me” and “others” blurred within the text. I’m always excited when I can connect my poetry back to my scientific background—as well as give a reader a new, fun party fact to drop at their next book club.

Talon: Does this piece align with any of your past work, or do you plan on exploring these topics and themes in the future?

Contributor: A lot of my past work is self-reflective and semi-autobiographical like this poem is. Most of the poems that made up my MFA thesis (and that have since become the draft of my first full-length collection) are written from my experience and perspective, and focus on themes of identity, worth, and belonging. I think this is the first time I’ve approached these topics from a perspective of love rather than a perspective grief and pain, though—and I’m certainly interested in continuing to explore this angle!

Talon: Are there any other projects you would like to promote here?  

Contributor: I’m hoping to release my first collection of full-length poetry in the near(ish) future! You can find updates on my upcoming work and projects on my website at www.michelle-ott.com, or on my Instagram @chellexlouise_.