Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and a record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and Lutruwita/Tasmania. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020).  Kaya lives and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar Country, where their name means ‘hello’ in the Noongar language.

In this interview, I chatted to Kaya about family journeys, Star Trek poetry, multilingualism and growing up queer in a religious household. Their new book, Past & Parallel Lives is out now, published by University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP).

Image supplied by author.

Alex Creece: Hello Kaya! Thanks so much for chatting with me, and huge congrats on your amazing debut, Past & Parallel Lives. I received my copy with a wonderful zine to accompany it, and book itself has the most gorgeous collage cover artwork created by your sister.

Can you talk about the role of zine-making (and any other DIY forms) in your creative practice?

Kaya Ortiz: Hi Alex! Thank you so much. I know, I’m obsessed with the cover. I love making collages, and my sister knows me too well; she surprised me with the design.

I got into zine-making as a way of making collages on a smaller scale. I love the physicality of both collages and zines – how each zine, even after being made and photocopied, has to be folded carefully by my own hands before I give it away.

The making of a zine or collage itself is such a tactile thing. I like to use found text and images from magazines and various things I’ve collected over the years, including hundreds of screenshots. It’s a way to use the growing physical and digital hoard. When I turn it into art, it transforms it into something I can share.

I see the collage process as similar to writing poetry: taking images and snippets of text and fitting them together to make art – the joy of watching it unfold. And sometimes I just need to get out of my head and make something with my hands. It reminds me I have a body.

AC: I’m always interested in points of connection and divergence within books, especially poetry collections. Past & Parallel Lives is split into three parts: requiem, reincarnation and revelation.

Could you tell us more about the distinct themes, motifs and lines of inquiry in each part?

KO: Past & Parallel Lives kind of follows a linear timeline, and the three parts broadly represent grief, longing and self-acceptance, respectively.

Requiem is named after a Catholic mass or song for the dead. It immortalises a massive change in my life when I was a teenager – the event of migration. There was a loss of cultural identity because I didn’t know how to exist in my new environment. At the same time, I grew up in a religious family and I was scared I might be gay. So yeah, a lot of grief here.

Reincarnation implies a death and rebirth. This second part was born out of a deep longing (that very lesbian affliction), particularly from a time in my early twenties when I wasn’t out yet, and was just starting to deconstruct colonial ideas and the religion I grew up with. Also, Star Trek poems – I could talk about this for days, but let’s just say it’s a mirror wherein I can make sense of myself as being alien, queer and other. To sum it up: reconnecting with family hi/stories, questioning religion, and so many crushes (both fictional and real).

Revelation is the last part. I think these poems are really just owning my different identities – Filipino, lesbian, queer – without shame. There’s a lot of reflection about where I’ve come from; there’s homecoming, [there are] poems in language, and there’s love in many forms.

AC: Many of the poems play with gender and queerness in beautiful and exciting ways. I especially love how the poems talk to each other. For example, ‘Mask’, in the first section, elucidates the anxiety and tentativeness of queer discovery as a young person, whereas ‘Masc’, in the final section, is loud, proud and confidently butch – a celebration.

How does this arc parallel your lived experience of coming into your queer identity?

KO: Thank you for mentioning these poems!

Coming into my queer identity took a long time – and is probably still ongoing, to be honest! I mentioned I was brought up very religious, and that put a damper on self-discovery. When I was a teenager, I was constantly (and secretly) questioning my sexuality, scrolling Tumblr late at night.

At 21, when I discovered femslash fan fiction, I realised I was definitely into girls. Like lots of people, I cycled through a few different labels: bisexual for a while, then asexual (but biromantic).

I wrote ‘Mask’ when I was 22, for a ‘gender’ themed issue of an online poetry journal. That’s what started the gender binary breakdown in my brain (but I had to shelve that for later).

I was 25 when it finally clicked that I was a lesbian. I still remember on my second date with my now long-term partner, she’d turned to me from the driver’s seat, looked me up and down in my flannel and Timberland boots, and said, “how butch are you,” with a gleam in her eye, like it wasn’t a question – and the smile I couldn’t contain.

I wrote ‘Masc’ last year at 29, as an exploration of non-binary gender and soft butchness. The poem is confident; it’s how I wish I could always be. I’m still on the journey, but I’m learning to embrace the mystery and fluidity of it all.

AC: Your poems also deal a lot with childhood, family and heritage. You have such an acuity for language – blending languages such as English, Tagalog, Bisayan and Chavacano, as well as loanwords shared across different languages.

Can you speak to the power and significance of multilingualism and Filipino identity in your work?

KO: Thank you. For the first 15 years of my life, my family lived in the Philippines. Over there, it’s common to speak three or more languages, often intermingled with one another. I am conversationally fluent in two other languages, but my first several years in Australia, I assimilated hard, and got used to only speaking, reading and writing in English.

Luckily, I came across a wonderful poet early on in my writing journey. I always have to mention Safia Elhillo, a Sudanese American poet, because her work opened my eyes to the possibilities of language in poetry. There’s an amazing video of her performing a work titled ‘Alien Suite’, and poems that parse Arabic and blend it with English – changed my life.

I started to view language differently. Writing poems in and about language became a form of resistance against assimilation, and a reclamation of my heritage and culture. This goes hand in hand with returning to my Filipino identity as well. Elhillo’s poetry gave me permission to own and share that part of my identity and the stories I carried. And poetry gave me the shape to hold it all.

AC: I love your poems relating to space and the cosmos, particularly the Star Trek ones! As a teenage reader of fan fiction, ‘Self-insert Trek: Flashback’ was such a blast, and it made me feel like more poetry should incorporate elements of fan fic (and vice versa).

What role does pop culture play in your writing process? And how does the concept of alien (in any/every capacity) emerge in the book?

KO: I’m so happy to hear that! And I totally agree with you.

I love pop culture, and poems that play with it. Pop culture feels really accessible, and sometimes (like when I’m obsessed with a TV series, movie or an album – most recently it was Wicked) it occupies such a big part of my life that I can’t help but write about it.

For me, it’s about the emotionality, getting to feel things through songs or characters, sometimes very intensely. It’s almost like living a parallel life, such as in ‘Self-insert Trek: Flashback’. (That poem is proof that Star Trek made me gay.)

The concept of aliens most obviously comes through in the Star Trek-inspired poems, revolving around female characters that are all alien in a literal way – Klingon, Betazoid, Borg, etc. I wrote those poems while thinking about the interspecies relationships in Trek and how it was so rare to see same-sex relationships represented. In a way, it was queerness that seemed alien in this context, so in writing about queer desire through these characters, it was a way of making real what I needed to see.

At the same time, there are poems that, perhaps more implicitly, touch on the feeling of alienation that comes from experiences like being a new immigrant in different country, or being queer in a religious community, and what it’s like to find self-acceptance and belonging.

AC: What do you want readers to take away from Past & Parallel Lives? And do you have any advice for emerging writers?

KO: I wrote Past & Parallel Lives to tell the stories I thought I had to hide because I was scared or ashamed. I wrote it because I know I’m not the only one. I hope readers find a way to understand their own experiences, to name their feelings. I hope readers will know their stories are worth telling and worth hearing. I hope they know they’re not alone.

For emerging writers, trust your heart and trust the journey. Tell the stories you need to tell, and the stories you want to tell. I know you’re building the road as you go, and it takes time and patience – take breaks as needed, but always keep going.

There is no one path or one timeline, just a thousand small milestones that build and build. And find or make some form of writing community – it makes the journey so much brighter.

Past & Parallel Lives, published by UWAP, is out now in all good bookstores and online (RRP $24.99 including GST).