Alex Bortell was one of our Fall 2025 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we do Q&As with our residents to feature them, their work, and their words. See our Q&A with Alex below, and explore more Spotlights here.
TSW: Tell us about your work, writing, or project. What are you writing these days? How is your work changing, and how is it changing you?
Alex Bortell: My research- and somatic-based practice centers trans*crip erotics, Midwestern landscapes, and the archive. Recently, my poetry is expanding in length and intertextual breadth, taking up more visual space on and across the page to reflect my associative leaps. This evolution requires my sustained attention on multiple works-in-progress over many months, which is also changing my relationship to revision. This new process necessarily demands my patience and that I continually reinvigorate my obsessions.
TSW: What were you processing during our residency program? Did anything unlock for you? If so, what new entrance did you find for your work or for yourself as a writer in the world? And what caused that shift?
AB: When writing, I often struggle to imagine beyond the literal. During this residency, I contemplated my relationship to “truth” and how to represent experiences that deviate, complicate, or interrogate. To imagine into the gaps of memory and history, embrace destabilization and inaccessibility, and emphasize specificity allows for dissonant allusions and events to exist in conversation on the page, revealing a richer and more affectual poem. Through discussions and prompts, I learned to trust and further explore the surreal or speculative places my writing leads to. This coincides with my understanding of language as a malleable material: syntax or logic can be disrupted to better serve the essential needs of a poem.
TSW: What is something that someone said — a fellow resident, a past mentor, perhaps something from one of the bonus sessions — that helped change the way you see your writing or work?
AB: During a discussion on revision, Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin — a fellow resident — proposed a reorientation to “completion.” Instead of viewing completion as the end goal for a work, they suggested thinking in terms of process. Specifically, they offered a question to ask oneself while writing: how invested are you still in this work?
Additionally, during a bonus session, Amal El-Mohtar stressed the importance of pursuing the pleasure of writing. She noted that if you want to write but feel unable to enter a piece, you can skip to the part that excites you the most.
Together, these notions are particularly useful guides when I reflect on projects I’ve lost interest in and on the extended revision process for longform poems. I can always return to a project, but investing my time and focus in work that excites me in the current moment is how I build a sustainable writing practice. If my ability to reinvest myself in a piece is the roadblock to completion, then perhaps my motivation to write lies elsewhere, and it’s vital to prioritize and chase that impulse.
