Creation in Isolation: Rainie Oet

Love and Terror in Verse

By The Editors

It's exciting when an underrepresented group of poets get their time to shine. Take Rainie Oet, for example. The writer and game designer's memoir in verse, Inside Ball Lightning (SEMO Press), made its premiere earlier in the year. Similar to other stories seen in this series, the book was ready to be shown off at AWP 2020 until many publishers, including SEMO Press, cancelled their appearances for safety concerns.

For Oet, it makes finding new readers for their book difficult. Should the circumstances call for even more protective measures, it may impact the release of Oet's third book of poetry, Glorious Veils of Diane to debut next winter. To give a sense of how promising the collection is, Glorious Veils of Diane was praised by George Saunders (yes, that George Saunders) as “complex, mysterious, finely wrought, and formally daring.”

We spoke with Oet about their craft, generational hauntings, and the work that inspired their own stories. 
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​What motivated you to use verse in order to tell the story of the relationship between yourself and your brother?
 
I needed to tell the story about those years, because they felt so central to my life for so long but didn't make sense to me. I am not sure if they completely make sense to me now, but I do feel a lot closer to my real self I think partially as a result of writing those poems. One of the strange and magical things about siblinghood is the way that it ties up our concept of self in these other people who’ve basically grown up with us, but in a parallel universe where things are almost the same but different in key ways. And vice versa, with me containing selves of my siblings.

I also am deeply connected to love, like the thing of experiencing the super strange wonder of being alive and sharing that with other people, and then being aware of it. Those years were full of difficulty and terror and estrangement, and also they were full of love. Loving my family and myself and the mysteries of the universe I think really got me through that. And love was also at the root of all the fear I felt. I loved the world, I loved my siblings and my parents, I loved my grandmother. What if they didn’t love me back? Or what if I disappointed their love? Part of the reason the idea of my grandmother’s ghost struck so much fear in me is because we loved each other while she was alive and if she was here to watch everything that I was doing maybe she would be really disappointed. I’ve always been a really sensitive person, and a lot of the things I remember or internalize about myself come from the way that I filter information in from the outside through the complicated mesh membrane of my own thoughts and beliefs and mostly imagination.

​This project really did make a lot to make sense of that time for me and was super healing for me as well. I’m proud of this book. It doesn’t replace having lived through that time, but it definitely adds to it. It’s also in that sense a gift to my past self.
 
Who are some writers you take inspiration from (or just some of your favorites)?
 
David B.'s unbelievably brilliant graphic novel Epileptic was probably a major catalyst for Inside Ball Lightning. It’s a deeply specific memoir about the writer, his older brother who suffers from epilepsy, and their family, depicted over the course of thirty or so years. Probably not hard to guess from all the endnotes but I was also rereading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at the time of writing Inside Ball Lightning. I love how flipping to endnotes mimics the act of memory and overlays different levels and time and awareness onto the text. I was also reading what was then my favorite poetry book ever, Flies by Michael Dickman (it’s now tied for that position with Playing Monster::Seiche by Diana Arterian). One of the things I’ve always been very impressed by in Flies, and also in Playing Monster::Seiche, is the way the strange poems all come together as a whole, to form a book that in itself feels like one long poem.

​There’s this wonderful quote from the card series Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt that I think about a lot in respect to the way I read and write poetry: “What are the sections sections of? (Imagine a caterpillar moving.)” I think I first felt that energy in Flies when I read it in my second year of high school, and it confused the hell out of me at the time. Although I read it breathlessly in one sitting, I really did not like that book. Then I came back to it as I was beginning to work on Inside Ball Lightning, and it was a revelation. It’s another brother book—a long elegy for Michael’s elder half-brother Darin Hull. It creates its own symbology and mythology, then complicates it over the course of its poems. Let’s see, I was consuming a lot of other media about family and childhood leading up to and during the beginning of working on Inside Ball Lightning. The anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was deeply formative. The play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. The movie Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman. And definitely a huge influence was also reading my MFA cohort members’ poetry, especially Bridget O’Bernstein’s super visual prose poems she was writing then about her love for her best friend.

Image courtesy of Rainie Oet and SEMO Press

How has COVID-19 affected your career and your personal life? 
 
I’ve been extremely lucky. Knock on wood my family, my partner, her family, and I have all been healthy and safe. My partner and I are both able to work remotely, we both have health insurance, and we have been able to get food safely. We have a spacious enough apartment to exercise in and our relationship is beautiful and healthy and we never get tired of each other. That all said, it has sucked not being able to formally launch Inside Ball Lightning. I was supposed to launch it at AWP, which my publisher had to back out of due to the pandemic. I have not been able to publicly read from the book since AWP, and I worry that the book, which I am so proud of and poured so much into, may miss its chance at finding a readership. I worry about all the books published during this time, that they will be forgotten when the next wave of books comes out after the pandemic. As far as my personal life, I love rock climbing, going on walks, playing board games, doing karaoke, and I have really missed doing those things with my friends. Videoconferencing is amazing though, and I am grateful to be able to have semiregular virtual game nights with my friends and family. When this is all over the first place I’m going to go to probably is the climbing gym with as big a group of friends as I can gather.
 
Why is it important for people to support the arts, even during times of uncertainty? 

Art is such a big part of what makes us human. It is about what is real and what is beautiful. Art provides meaning. I know people talk about art and science as if they are opposites, but I disagree. Both are about investigation of truth and finding beauty in specificity. Both art and science are a religion that worships beauty, mystery, truth, and, I would argue, love. During times of uncertainty, the things that matter can become clearer. I guess that for me an important difference between art and science is that while science helps us by reaching toward certainties that can improve our world and quality of life and help us understand the workings of the universe, the arts seem to me to be much more about standing in and celebrating the great uncertainties that are a fundamental part of human existence.
 
What are some books you would recommend (besides your own) for readers to add to their quarantine pile?

I would still recommend many of the books that inspired me while writing Inside Ball Lightning. In particular, though—almost nobody that I talk to seems to have read Diana Arterian’s Playing Monster::Seiche, which is a shame because it’s really an incredible book. Epileptic as well I would recommend, and Maus while we’re at it, as beautiful and moving portraits of resilience in the face of terror, confusion, and suffering.
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