An Interview with Liv Mammone

Liv Mammone’s new collection, Fire in the Waiting Room, faithfully documents the intersections between disability, queerness, and identity. She traces her experience through moments of childhood, dating, and daily life, approaching each subject with unmistakable candidness. She resists the societal expectation that marginalized voices edit out pieces of themselves—a resistance illustrated in choices such as writing about pleasure alongside pain. Her poems are seeped in nuance, like grappling with the conflicting demands of living in alignment with socially conscious practices, when they are oftentimes at odds with disability accessibility.

In this interview, Emily Lapomardo and Liv Mammone discuss the process of slow writing, writing for disabled audiences, and the complex relationship between pride and joy.

Emily Lapomardo: Throughout the collection, you write about disability, femininity, and sensuality in a disabled body, among other topics. What was your process like in creating a cohesive work that gave each of these topics their due? 

Liv Mammone: This book took a very long time to put together. It was about ten years of writing. I also didn’t write any new poems specifically for the book. I wanted to, but it didn’t ask that of me. Part of that lengthy process was my own anxiety and fear about the quality of my work. Part of it comes from simply writing more slowly than other writers because of my symptoms. The upside of that was, because many of these poems are quite old, I had a good time standing back from them and gaining a lot of enjoyment as a reader. I was able to look carefully at what was preoccupying me; what wouldn’t let me go over the course of all those years. So, discovering all the language around femininity specifically was a surprise to me as I read. After that, I decided I really wanted to have a kind of braided collection that combined that theme with the more obvious motif of the ableism I experience.

Much of my discovering all this was with the aid of the poet Shira Erlichman. We worked together closely and her focus was on helping me to visualize the manuscript as a physical object in my mind so it became less daunting and inchoate. She gave me exercises to trace linguistic, thematic, and formal repetitions and we organized the manuscript several different ways. Under her guidance, I also really developed a concrete sense of the audience for the book. I was specifically writing in conversation with other authors and held the image of my younger self reading this book in my mind. I think that really helped clarify the process.

EL: The poem, “The Crutches Speak,” resonated so strongly with me, as someone who has felt ashamed throughout my life about the things that, on the one hand, help me live with disability, yet mark me as “other” to those around me. Was the intention in writing “The Crutches Speak” to reach others who faced similar challenges, or was it more about processing this reality? Or perhaps a combination of both?

LM: I am so glad you found that it resonated with you. It was definitely a combination of the two. It took me a long time to get to the point where this book was something I was writing for myself because I needed to. My poems about disability began as a plea to a non-disabled audience to see what my experience was like. (There’s a poem I published that I cut from the book that is literally addressed to non-disabled poets in community with me.) It took several revisions and a lot of work for me to decide that I would rather be writing specifically to other disabled people so that they might see themselves.

“The Crutches Speak” specifically came out of the feeling that there was very little of my body’s movements in the collection. With my chronic illness, there was a lot of imagery of me laying down in beds in various contexts or responding to situations I didn’t have the physical means to get out of. I often think of my mind and intellect as very separate from my body. So my hope for my future poems is to bring them together and actually write about the physical sensations of being me. This poem is the first step on attempting to do that, just trying to capture how I literally move.

EL: In the opening poem, “First Dress,” the tone is joyful, but with a number of juxtapositions that keep the realities of disability in the periphery for the reader, such as “the dress is the color of a prescription bottle.” How did you come to the decision to foreground a moment of joy for a collection that has a skillful ebb and flow between joy and pain? 

LM: I have a complicated relationship with pride and joy, especially when it comes out of simple things. Non-disabled people react with great surprise and condescension to seeing me publicly doing tasks that they think should be difficult for me. (A lot of “good for you!” as I’m getting money from the ATM and such.) This often happens in moments when I am out trying to enjoy myself. So, I have a difficult time actually admitting to others that finding happiness is an active process because I don’t want to play into the idea of disabled life being an endless torrent of misery. However, I also live with clinical depression. So, I do really think it’s important to acknowledge that disabled people are working in a world that’s not built for them to create fulfilling lives. We should take pride in our smallest accomplishments. 

I do want to share my delight with people that I’ve made the choice to continue living. That creates a real tension between wanting to speak authentically while not wanting to play into a stereotype. I want disabled people to be able to render the full range of our emotions without them being diluted. I want my joy and delight to give permission to others to revel in whatever gives them joy and delight, but not because they might feel like they “don’t have an excuse” to feel negative emotions in comparison to someone else. It’s rough out here for all of us.

So, because this is the only poem in the book that deals with joy, I wanted it to be the opening statement so that readers didn’t forget that image while they read through the book’s more difficult moments. I wanted delight to act as a contagion and a torch on the journey.

EL: The motif of orange throughout this collection stood out to me, most prominently in the description of orange as, “The only color / that can be happy and angry at once.” Can you tell me more about that line, and what this motif represents for you more broadly?

LM: That line is taken directly from the first conversation I ever had with another person with cerebral palsy. I met her when we were both fifteen. She is a brilliant person. On its own, that was one of the most insightful things I’d ever heard. But on a bigger level, I hadn’t really understood until that moment that I hadn’t had another person who shared my disability in my life. I was missing such a large part of myself by not getting to talk about it with someone who shared it.

It goes back to the previous question about foregrounding joy. For a long time, I thought anger was a “useful” emotion and that happiness didn’t “accomplish” anything. It didn’t spur me to work. But I am learning who I am outside of my utility and, besides that, my joy is extremely purposeful and dynamic. If we could not feel happy, we would not believe better circumstances were possible and there wouldn’t be any point to the anger. The belief in happiness, and the lack of it, are why one gets angry and gets to work. 

EL: You titled the poem, “I’m Shouting to Myself. Could You Hear It?” in first person, and then the repeating line throughout the poem is in second person, “You’re not as trapped as you could be.” Without the title, I would have thought that the repeating line had been said by an external source. Is the repeating line something that has been previously said and then internalized, or is it a reminder to the speaker?

LM: That’s me talking to myself. So the title lets the reader into my varied internal dialogue.

The thing about that poem—it went through a really interesting, unintended change. That was a phrase that I was using as a mental worry stone. I had been talking to an old friend who was much sicker than I am and I was trying to think about my vertices of privilege. I want to always be cognizant of the fact that there are factors about me that allow my voice to be uplifted in the conversation for disability justice and allow this book to exist.

As this phrase was living and multiplying in my brain over several days, I was writing it again and again trying to visually represent my anxiety and rumination. Seeing it repeated, I saw that it contains all the letters that make up cerebral palsy. So, in the original draft, those letters were italicized in order and you could read the name of my diagnosis down the page. However, the italics got lost in a proof of the manuscript and I found I preferred the poem without pointing the reader to that element. Though, its commentary on the vast array of ways in which CP presents itself and affects the lives of everyone who has it is now not as visible.

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Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, The Medical Journal of Australia, and in many places. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam and was a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she is currently an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s poetry database, The Quarry. Her first collection, Fire in the Waiting Room is available from Game Over Books.

Emily Lapomardo is a queer disabled writer and educator from the Boston area. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in English from Bridgewater State University. She believes in the power of advocacy, and showing up authentically in all areas of life. In her free time, she enjoys reading literature and raging against the patriarchy.