Evelyn Berry: On Accepting Past Versions of Yourself, Building Queer Writing Communities, and Her Debut Poetry Collection ‘Grief Slut’

I first met Evelyn Berry at a Pride Poetry open mic night in Charleston, SC. I, a nervous sort-of poet, was slated to be one of the featured readers for the event, despite not having much experience writing poetry, let alone performing it. Evelyn emceed the event to a packed house, ushering poets new and old onto the small outdoor stage with warm introductions and inviting laughter. In between sets, she performed some of her own poetry. 

She made me feel at home on the stage, and when I listened to her performances, I remember being struck by her words—tender but raw swirling images of queerness and grief—and the effortless queer community she cultivated that night. 

In her debut poetry collection Grief Slut (2024, Sundress Publications) Berry writes through the throes of grief and explores moments of queer love, lust, and acceptance. 

Sydney Bollinger: Can you tell me how Grief Slut began and where the title comes from?

Evelyn Berry: Grief Slut is my first full collection, which means that it was dozens of other books first. It’s the culmination of a lot of failed manuscripts. The version that was published started to look like it does now in 2020. A huge reason that the book shaped up the way it did came from two major life events. One was the suicide of a really good friend and the other was me deciding to transition. I’ve been writing about queerness and I had already been writing about grief, but those things happening at the same time in the middle of a global pandemic really crystallized a focus, though not necessarily one I might have wanted to focus on, and it really changed the book I was writing. 

So, I started to write all of these new poems, as well as revise old poems with a new mindset. A lot of the poems in Grief Slut were written pre-transition and revised at the beginning of transition or post-transition. [The collection] was written at that very specific time, at that crucible of change. 

The actual title Grief Slut was, like many titles I’ve created, not random, but definitely a lark. It was me just trying things. The book was called a lot of different things. For the longest time it was crown me queen of the chilling strut, which was maybe too long. It was also called Queer Ecology, but people kept thinking it was a biology textbook or nonfiction, so Grief Slut was just the very straightforward summation of the two major subjects of the book, which is queer sex and grief. 

SB: You mentioned a lot of the poems were written pre-transition and then revised post-transition. What was it like to look back on what you had written before transitioning and then revise it as your present self? 

EB: It’s interesting. To give you some context, a lot of that revision also happened at the very beginning of transition, but I guess I already had a sense of the fact that I wanted to do that for years. It just took forever to get the courage to do it. But looking back, it was interesting to see how much I signaled to my future self little hints about my future.It’s almost like the poems knew something about me before I did, and through rereading them and revisiting them, I figured out more about myself. 

And I feel like I still do that. Poetry and writing, in a way, is also a way to learn about myself as much as it is communicating something. 

SB: I think as a writer, too, it’s really interesting to think about revision as this process where you have to navigate that relationship between the past-self and the present-self. 

EB: One hundred percent. The poetry itself is the thing that bridges the gap. The very first poem in the book went through a pretty heavy revision. It was a kind of love letter to myself and, eventually, as I looked back on it, I realized, oh, this is a love letter to specifically the pre-transition version of myself. But, of course, when I started writing it, I was in college, so that was me as well. Every single time I went back to revise it, I thought about that version of me who was 21-22 years old, who was first writing it, and the final version was written when I was 28-29 years old.  

SB: Are you talking about “Praise Song in Lieu of Obituary”? 

EB: Yes. 

SB: In the notes section of Grief Slut, you say some of the poems, including this one, reference your dead name to not create a veil of shame about the past version of yourself, but to cultivate a relationship with care and passion to that version of you. So what does it mean for you to cultivate that relationship with yourself through poetry and how is that something that is so radical, especially in the American South? 

EB: I am tempted—and I would bet that many people are tempted—to disavow past versions of themselves, whether you’re trans or not. You want to distance yourself from any kind of mistakes you made, a person you were, or maybe just a cringe fashion moment. Whatever it was. But I think so many of those experiences were so formative to me and I want to not just acknowledge them but celebrate them as well and to think kindly of that person. 

The other thing, specifically with my dead name, I knew from a practical level that the name is out there because I published books under my old name and I published a lot of poetry under my old name. I knew that if I wasn’t as open with it, I would feel really shameful about it and try to hide it from people. So by including it in the first poem in the book, I could remove that shame and also remove the venom that [a dead name] has. Often someone’s dead name is used in an attack. It’s a good way to take that power back.

SB: Could you tell me a bit about what your writing process is like? I know you’ve mentioned you have a full-time job. How do you write as someone who works full time? 

EB: I have different processes for fiction and poetry. For fiction, I am a little more structured. On a good day, I usually try to wake up between 5:30 and 6:30 and write for about an hour. If that doesn’t happen, I write during my lunch break. Today I’m planning to write after this interview for an hour or so. I have a pretty structured way of [writing]. I also use the Pomodoro method. I have a clock that flips upside down, so [in the morning] I start with fifteen minutes and then maybe go get coffee to start my day, and [since] I’ve already started the writing and it’s unwinding in my own brain, I’m able to go back for an hour or so. 

Poetry is different and it changes over time. I’m not the kind of person who has lines stuck in my head and then I start from there. I usually actually start with form, so I’m a little bit more structured with it these days. I’ve been writing a lot of sonnets. For the past month or so I’ve been writing a sonnet every day or two. It’s fun because it’s a puzzle. It feels like doing a math equation to me. I don’t follow the rhyme scheme, but I do follow the meter, almost exactly. I always use iambic pentameter and it has to be fourteen lines, and if I break those rules, it has to mean something to the poem. It has to be on purpose for the sake of the poem. 

I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge of formal poetics and thinking through what those are. I think of it like doing my math homework. I sit down and I’m like, okay, today I’m going to write a sonnet. I generally have an idea or, usually, an image. I’ve been writing a lot about strawberries because I really like strawberries. I wrote about peaches recently, which are always showing up in my work. I’ve been wanting to write a poem about drive in movie theaters for a long time, and it’s been in my notes. Similarly, today, the poem I wrote was a sonnet about Moonstruck. I only just saw it last year and my partner is obsessed with it. Anyway, I was trying to write a Cher poem, and there are lines about Cher that have been in my notebook for probably a year and today and today they came into a poem. So it takes a lot of collecting ideas and things, and then the poem usually comes out in one big burst. It’s taking all these artifacts in my life I found and creating a collage of them, and giving it a structure which is usually metrical or a traditional literature structure. 

SB: So we’ve talked about “Praise Song in Lieu of Obituary,” but I want to ask you about “hungover.” You write, “what we write / cannot save us / only cements / what has never / existed into / permanent record … what is the use of words / if they only feed grief’s appetite, / the use of any of this if I cannot keep you alive?” 

As writers, how can we contend with the inadequacy of words in the face of something like grief? 

EB: This is not the first group of poems I’ve written about grief. I had a chapbook come out a couple years ago called Glitter Husk, which was also about a friend’s suicide. A different friend. I just remember thinking and telling people that the reason I was writing this was that it was a way of keeping people alive, of bringing them back. I think while creating some of the poems in Grief Slut, I stopped believing that. It’s a very pretty idea, but it’s not a true idea. And instead, perhaps the point of poetry was not so much for that dead person who could not feel or experience any of that, but actually for me. Maybe it was selfish, and not selfish in a bad way, just in the way of doing something for my own peace of mind. 

I think that’s something that always frustrates me. We talk a lot about the power of poetry, and I think poetry can be powerful, but in ways that are not enough and also in ways that we just don’t actually understand.

SB: I wanted to touch on another poem, “white point garden, 1984.” After I read the poem, I looked at Grief Slut’s notes and saw the reference toHarlan Greene’s book [The Real Rainbow Row: Explorations in Charleston’s LGBTQ History, which discusses the White Point Garden’s history as a cruising spot in the 1980s]. I live in Charleston and had no idea about White Point Garden’s queer history before reading your poem.

EB: Interestingly enough, “white point garden, 1984” almost didn’t make it into the book, because I’m writing a lot of poems about queer history right now and I thought about saving it for the next book. 

I’m actually deep in queer archive right now and Harlan Greene’s book has inspired a lot of that. Also [I have] access to the LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative at Historic Columbia, which interviewed queer people and collects documents. So it’s been really great to write about South Carolina’s queer history for a lot of reasons. One of which is that I’m—maybe against my better interest—an intellectual person who is not at all involved in academia. But it is through reading stories, especially true stories that I can make sense of myself and my own life. Reading about queer history also helped me realize I was queer. The more I learn about queer history, the more I can contextualize my own life and the people I love in a much longer timeline. I think the cliche thing would be to say we’ve always been here and we have always been messy. And I love that about queer people. 

A similar story that I’m really fascinated by, [which] will be in a poem called “The Garden and Gun Club” I wrote coming out later this year, is about the Garden & Gun Club here in Charleston. [There’s] also the history of Marion Square as a site of cruising. Where I live in Columbia that space is Senate Street. What’s so cool is I go there every other day. It’s maybe a block from my job. It’s funny going there and being like, wow, this is real queer history. This is where USC students went to give each other blow jobs at night, and, you know, I think that’s really beautiful. 

SB: Do these places feel different now that you know how they’re imbued with this history? 

EB: I think so, though I will say it’s interesting and strange to go to a place like White Point Garden and feel how it feels today, it being a very touristy spot. It was always a tourist spot, but a lot of these spaces have been sanitized the same way history has been sanitized, so it’s difficult to think through how public space is used today versus then. It’s not that cruising doesn’t exist today, but it’s just a far less common practice than going to someone’s apartment or something. 

To me, it almost feels unreal to go to a space and try to imagine a different history there, which is why I like the archives. They open up a different possibility. 

SB: Is this project about queer history your next big project? 

EB: Kind of. I’m working on a bunch of poems. It’s funny. People keep telling me Grief Slut is a book about being trans, though I don’t really think of it that way. I think there’s like four or five poems that are specifically about transness. Right now I’m writing about South Carolina queer history, queer family, specifically as it relates to polyamory and what it means to have a bunch of trans people try to create a family together, and kink is the other thing I’m writing about. It’s interesting to see how these fit together, but all of them are about community in different ways. It’s about the history of community and queer spaces and the ways kink brings people together and what all of that means. 

SB: That leads in nicely to what you’re doing in Columbia with the Queer Writers Group. Can you talk about what prompted the creation of this group? 

EB: I’ve always had writing groups I’ve either been part of or I’ve hosted and it’s because I’m really jealous of people who have MFAs. It came from being in college and seeing all of the kids who were in English class together being friends and being like, dang, I really wish I could be friends with writers. But outside of those academic spaces, there’s such little chance to have that peer-to-peer support group. 

Starting in college, and especially after college, I started to develop those on my own and thought about how [we could] create those spaces within our own communications. It looks like a lot of different things. We had a community related to a podcast I used to host called Contribute Your Verse and we would meet up at a local record store and write together. When I lived in Aiken, South Carolina, me and a friend hosted a writing group called Whiskey Writers, where we would meet somewhere along Whiskey Road and drink whiskey and write. 

When I moved to Columbia, I met with my boyfriend-at-the-time’s friend and they were really interested in creating a queer community. I was really excited about moving to Columbia because I knew I’d be around other creative people, but something I was quickly learning was it is so hard to be in creative community with non-queer people because the problem of queerness kept coming up, especially in places like South Carolina there’s always going to be someone who has a problem with you because you’re queer or you’re trans. It’s just so hard to create real community with those people even if you want to [because] those people cannot stop bringing it up. So everything you do, especially if you write about queerness, becomes a referendum not on the writing but on you as a person.

I was thinking about that experience and thinking about how many other queer writers that felt isolated for those reasons who might want support and community and then you put that on top of the fact a lot of queer people, especially if they come out young, don’t have the same opportunities. They might not have gone to college. Some people get to go do MFAs, but not everyone. The rest of us have to work, and not that an MFA is not work, but we have to go do our normal jobs and then write on the side. 

So, we started with write-ins, where we would meet together and just write. It was a way to hold each other accountable. Then we began offering some little workshops, and we just had our first open mic after a year [of meeting] at the local queer bookstore called Queer Haven Books. Last night, we did our first collaborative event with [the Harriet Hancock LGBT Center]. 

I think a lot of people want to share their work or want to build creative habits, but just have a lot of trouble doing so. Having a community where you actually know someone who’s publishing stuff provides a real possibility. 

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Evelyn Berry (she/her) is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She's the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and Buggery (Bateau Press, 2020), winner of the BOOM Chapbook Prize. She's a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and 2025 South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, South Carolina Review, Gigantic Sequins, Moist, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She's the creator of the educational series Ecstatic Stanzas. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina with her partner and their pets.