Foglifter Press and Still Here San Francisco have collaborated to create a poetry chapbook prize for local emerging queer and trans Black writers, indigenous writers, and writers of color. Grayson Thompson, winner of the 2024 Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize invites the reader into Sand Bodied Florida Boy released earlier this summer. Thompson, a Black, queer, Jamaican-American, transgender cowboy poet who also manages to work as a clinical therapist has assembled a collection that revolves around formative childhood memories told through the lens of an educator and healer. Nimbly mirroring the highs and lows of adolescence and early adulthood, Thompson’s voice skillfully navigates tremendous range – at times sinking and sitting uncomfortably in the depths of loss and mourning before exploding upward to skim transcendent over the joys of self-discovery. These poems take the shape of a clear moment in time, one of becoming and the beginnings of knowing, and open the door to a grand narrative Thompson promises to continue in his full-length debut later this year. I had an opportunity to connect with Thompson and discuss the power of geography is his work, the strange power failure can lend to a collection, and the lessons his poetry might impart. 

SPB: Did you know from the start how these poems would be structured? Which sections came together easily and which ones took more thought and effort?

Grayson Thompson: I approached groupings from two perspectives. One centered how there is something very true and very visceral about the ways in which we “split”. How splitting can be so many things: identity, work, roles, sex, relationships, trauma, etc. The other focus was informed by the fact that I’m a teacher, at my core, and grouping helps busy minds find a way through. Words carry noise, whether we intend or not, intended noise and perceived. We, as writers, can choose what we want to do with the noise we bring and how we want to give, hold, break. Sometimes, a grouping, like a foghorn - is needed.

Surprisingly, this order made immediate sense. I printed all these poems, spread them all over the floor and these pieces came together as they did. I realized the story they told was about growing up, how messy and hard and often, horrible, that was for me. I needed this story, the poems that made them, separate from other stories I wanted to tell because this was both the same and a different body.

Part I: It Starts With Dying, for me, was a way to arrive terrified of what the book – maybe myself –– would become. Because doesn’t it all, start with a grieving? The baby from the body, the baby from a family, the inner child we are all still learning how to engage with? This section exposed me the most – it tells you upfront so much about the rage, the fear, the profound depression of my childhood. What if you, dear reader, ran away? Rejected my reaching? What if you enacted the similar violences manifested in my youth?

Part III: Signal Me an Apology took a great effort because it’s a section about shame. Shame is a feeling that can be dissolved with a whisper yet also becomes so big it bends us into things we didn’t know we could be. Most people will do anything to avoid feeling shame. It was a feeling that terrified me, a feeling that I ate whole. It became the weapon behind the harms I caused both others and myself. This section displays shame and embarrassment, this prolonged feeling of never coming out “just right” about queerness, about boyness, about the confusion and contusions of love. Most intently, the section is an apology to my teen-self. For all the ways I told him to settle, to bend; how he hurt people he cared for and took anything anyone would give him. Even their doubt, their uncertainty, their shame.

Part IV: Arrive on Purpose was most fun. I thought about it as a launching into my debut full length collection, A Congregation of Alligators, being released in September 2025 by Write Bloody Publishing. Part IV is breathing, it takes you out of the storm, the eye of it, the backwind that destroys everything. You made it. You make sense. Now, baptized from dinosaur bones; making sense of this perpendicular traumatown of your body, leading you back to yourself. You are home, the answer. I made it. I make sense. I did it all on purpose, whether I knew it or not. It’s a thank you, to everyone who is on the other side to see it.

SPB: Starting at the end of things, you open with “At My Funeral: Instructions for My Eulogy.” Funerals give us a great opportunity to summarize a life, but you do something interesting at the end of this one: you introduce another character. Could you talk a bit about the choice to conclude this first poem with a photo and a memorial to the speaker’s brother, Wayne?

GT: It was important to me to open with the image of me as a child, as the little person I was. I thought of her often when I wrote this, this chapbook started as a memoir. I was being brave and, ultimately, returned it to the genre of language that makes more sense to me - poetry. I only reference my brother, Wayne, in three parts of the book: this poem, “cease fire sandwiches for the revere beach boy” (the line, “hands choked the difference out of me”), and “growing into my clothes (the lines, “raise your hand / if you are afraid / of the dark / I am / even most when the lights are on).

My brother Wayne is one of four brothers I have (four brothers and two sisters - I moved out and was fostered by a Jewish family. I have very minimal thoughts and memories of him as anything but a violent or manipulating person. I included that picture because there is a smallness in my brother, that little boy you see, who had so much capacity for softness. In so many ways, he is the image of a man I lean against daily. What are siblings, but mirrors? I am no contact with him, in so many ways he has died – over and over again in the ways I tried to reach him. That boy, sometimes – such minimal times – let me sleep in the bed with him when I scared. I was so scared of the dark, of my monkey mind, and of him when I was young. I believe in liberation, I believe in the liberation of all people from shame, from suffering, from the ways we are unaware we are suffering. This book is also for him, his inner child, the man he is, so eclipsed in his personhood. For the daughter he is raising, who asked me once “is my father, father?” There’s a poem about that in the full length!

SPB: The title poem of the collection, “Sand Bodied Florida Boy” underlines the power of place in one’s personhood. How did geography inform the way you wrote these pieces? 

GT: To grow up in Florida is such a specific experience. I guess we all say that about where we grow up. There is something… biblical. Maybe a more accurate word my friends and I use is “bizarre”. I grew up in a place that is underwater, literally, and Floridians, especially South Floridians, grow up with an awareness of this proximity. This chapbook centers this orientation and fondness I formed when I left that place and moved to California. So many people pity this place, dismiss this place, write off its existence. That is one of the most dangerous ideologies - to pity or to forget. There are some of the most resilient, hilarious, big-hearted people in the American South. There are queer people here that aren’t stupid or hopeless for staying there, for loving there. There are Black and Brown marginalized and of the most marginalized people in that place; making sense of god in hurricanes. There is the most beautiful Buddhist Temple on a river with a Sunday market that I spent years sitting at.

SPB: Tell me what it means to be “baptized in dinosaur bones.”

GT: “Baptized in dinosaur bones”: gators are one of the oldest dinosaurs we live with. Have you experienced paddling through water alongside alligators? Heavenly bodies. Felt their eyes in the dusk, or a night, scanning your body? Have you held a baby gator as it calls for its mother? They are misunderstood and starving. Did you know they can survive 2-3 years without eating? What a queer thing, to be an alligator. Starving in so many ways, misunderstood, thriving in the dark. Underwater. Most Floridians don’t know some of our drinking water is pumped from below the Everglades. Most Floridians don’t know slaves escaped into the Everglades, its denseness a shelter. To be from Florida and queer or trans and Black or Brown is to become from the bones of dinosaurs and of slaves who liberated themselves; surviving when the world tries to kill them. To be from Florida, for any body, is to drink from a queering.

SPB: You mentioned your work as a clinician, and I wonder how often you incorporate writing – poetry prompts and exercises maybe – into your practice. How does poetry – yours in particular – make you a better therapist?

GT: In treatment I emphasize with clients the importance of internal narratives and their impact on our mental health. The brain is an automatic muscle. It doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction. It runs on the information and stories we tell ourselves. Both the positive and negative stories. Maybe people, maybe all of us, at some point in our lives run on stories that are not true: we are ugly, we are stupid, not good enough, unloveable, and it goes on and on. Our brain will create subconscious scripts that run on those narratives impacting our relationships, our jobs, our families, our health, and more. In some cases, I’ve closed or opened sessions with reflecting on a poem or pieces of a poem that relates to a client’s narrative or internal barrier. Funny enough, many of the clients I’ve worked with, like so many people in the world, can be intimidated by poetry - writing, understanding, lack of exposure all contribute to this experience that so many have. Some haven’t engaged in poetry since they were young(er). I think in my work, as a poet and as a clinician, centering in helping clients identify a story that is true is essential.

SPB: Jami Nakamura Lin and Freda Epum, whose speculative memoirs deal with living with mental illness in Black and brown bodies, come to mind when we talk about mental health and craft. How does it feel revisiting work that was written when you were in a different mental space? Do you find that your work takes certain shapes or tones when your mental health is trending up or down? I’m thinking of the opening lines of Does God Live in Attics? here “this used to be a poem/but it doesn't sound like me anymore.”

GT: I imagine I have a similar fear to many who write experientially - what if people think I still feel this way! There are poems in Sand Bodied Floria Boy that reference suicidality, self-hatred, gender confusion, etc. etc. Also, what if clients read this and think their therapist will be ineffectual or over-exposed? It’s a book about growing up and sometimes I consider the ways social reality can pressure folks, especially Black and Brown folks, to “grow up” and then punish us for not “growing up” in the ways that society (or our friends, family, partners) want or expect us to. What if readers won’t give me the grace of growing out of, or into, this life? In both Sand Bodied and my upcoming debut full-length, A Congregation of Alligators, when I think about shape and tone it’s important to include poems that felt unfinished, messy, or – dare I say it –  “bad”. Because those poems were born out of low mood, of depression, of a story that wasn’t true. I think an important lesson of being a writer that applies in grief, in love, in suffering - is the ability to let go and to be observant of our relationship to control. The experience of reading a poem that SLAPS and running into the brick wall of a poem that “fails” is curious to me. We’ve all felt it. And maybe, in witnessing that we are in a capitalistic culture, sharing these thoughts are not good for business - but it’s a practice for me as someone who is diagnosed with both bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder to invite people into my imperfection. To invite them into their own. To invite us all to hold each other’s multitudes.

SPB: How much of an influence do you find your Jamaican heritage playing in your work?

GT: I grew up in a home that only spoke patois. I operated in a social world (school, friends, work) where I did not hear my family, my culture’s language. On those standardized test forms where we had to put demographic information my mother would tell me to select “Other” and write in “Jamaican-American” and asserted into high school that I wasn’t Black-American or African-American. She herself would eventually get unsure in this country, how to identify me through its lens. For the language spoken at home box, she’d say “you speak English, but you don’t speak English” or “you speak patois, but they don’t have that here” and often name directly that my first language wasn’t American English. Growing up ages 0-11.5 in Massachusetts within a Jamaican family, then moving to Florida which has its own specific language, especially within the Black, country, and low-income communities was a wild experience of language and accents that created an early understanding of code switching. My mother has a speech impediment and you mostly hear it when she’s trying to talk like white people. When she immigrated here, and still today, Black and Brown people with accents are treated like they are unintelligent. My mom began code switching when she better understood living here and it has really impacted her speech because the languages are similar in tone due to colonization but there are many words that are ineffective in American English or syllables fall in weird ways compared to patois. Her speech has also been impacted due to the impact this country has on the confidence of Black and Brown people; especially women and those without degrees. I grew up explaining documents, communicating on the phone, writing emails, reading emails, writer letters - to help my family navigate American English yet grew up in a social context where Jamaicans were often the comedic butt of a joke, a country continuously exploited by white people, and stereotyped as beach lounging stoners. Jamaicans aren’t just musicians, athletes, and Kamala Harris. All this context, the good and the bad through science, literature, politics and more created a people that are often not taken seriously. 

I share all this to say, I’m not a perfect Jamaican person. I’m culturally removed as a first-gen human. My mother could not take me there as an older youth for various reasons which were primarily financial and then, later, fear of how that country would clock my queerness which was so loud. I haven’t been as an adult because my culture also holds so much trauma for me as it relates to my queerness and gender. 

I hope what comes across in my work both now and in the future - is that I don’t come from a resiliency. I am born from generations of people who are intelligent, hardworking, hilarious, and flawed. I come from a culture of people who freed themselves in mountains, made food from anything that grew, and erupt in so much color and dance. I am strong, but I am also proud. In the same way queer Black and Brown folks are often forgotten or pitied in the South and especially in Florida - I come from a cultural strength many people won’t understand. And I am proud to be from the South.

SPB: Growing up and the terror of becoming are hopefully things that get easier with time. What lessons did this collection teach you?

GT: The collection reminded me, when I looked back at all these growing up stories, how much I ate life alive. That I got a life, it wasn't clean and it hurt sometimes yet in the years across Signal Me an Apology, I went from a boy fantasizing about being desired to a man starting HRT. I started the collection, a child, not thinking I had anything to gain and ended with a notion I finally lived enough lives to know what lessons are true. “In the same century grief was first spoken / so was breviary / another word for hymn” (from a different poem I wrote). Grief and gospel. Exhale and tell everyone all about it.

SPB: You mention being a teacher at your core. This is something I felt in many spaces in the book, but especially when reading the final poem, ‘For Anyone Holding Their Breath.” What lessons do you hope to impart with this collection?

GT: Good question. Don't hold all this in. All the pain and all the joy. Who are we to believe the world doesn't deserve all our parts? Who are we to hide the messiness? As if those stories don't make us all the more real?