Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, the 2019 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the 2019 Frank McCourt Prize, and the 2019 Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize.

Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Prize and was published in May 2018. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others.

She serves as Co-Director for PEN America Birmingham, Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, President of Alabama State Poetry Society, Board Member for the Alabama Writer's Conclave, Co-Founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, and proud board member of Magic City Poetry Festival. Her poetry collection, Defect/or, was a finalist for 2015 Robert Dana Poetry Award. She was a poetry contributor at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference 2019—and she is so grateful. She loves to collaborate across mediums.

Tom Simpson: Tell us a little about how Romania and Alabama have been defining places for you, in terms of your subject matter, struggles, commitments, and loyalties.

Alina Stefanescu: I'm forever divided by the allegiances of human life. In a sense, Alabama "raised me" and furnished my epistemology, while Romania gave me my ghosts, my family, my soul to inhabit or squander.

Thick with kudzu and toxic nostalgia, Alabama tends to court and create its own demons. Growing up here was a lesson in hard binaries: north/south, white/black, male/female, southern/not. I think histories that don't seek truth and reparation grow towards myth and idolatry. You wind up with a civil war that no one wants to lose or even win because that would kill the nostalgia.

I'm not innocent of falling for the "hurt south" mythologies. To understand that, you have to understand the experience of immigrants who know that they cannot criticize the hand they're expected to kiss. I wasted many years trying to fit in by serving as perfect immigrant apologist for southern culture and generator of wild excuses for racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and consumerist hogwash coming from the mouths of humans I loved. Alabama's mainstream political culture is apocalyptic and bent on destruction, and any excuses we make for that only delay the work of undoing it. My personal affection for Alabama doesn't make it easier to digest this sad, slurred limbo between religious billboards and pawn-shop salvation, this spiritual economy founded on theft and credit, this "down-home" bias against "intellectuals," "liberals," or outsiders, or the emotional poverty congregated beneath tailgate tents where people lose friends over football games...it's easier to poem than explain.

I was a child when I learned that loving ideas and books made you an "intellectual," and that being an intellectual made you less of a woman, less of a southerner, less of a "cool girl." An intellectual female can't thrive in an anti-intellectual environment unless she's willing to engage in performative self-loathing which estranges her from selfhood. But look, I love books. They helped me stay whole in the hospital after head trauma. Books were my friends through the year of physical therapy and constant pain. And reading voraciously makes it hard not to love complicated, non-binary ideas.

It's humiliating to invent excuses or justifications for the way my mind wraps itself around the world and digs deeper. That level of intense fascination and focused interest—that's love to me. That's how love looks—a little bit barnacle, a little bit winged. A passion for understanding that entertains the longing to be stunned or changed by life.

My relationship to Romanian history is more tangled, since my relatives and family were directly implicated in the crimes of the last century, whether by witness, silence, patriotism, or lack of dissent. The only stories I can tell about the south are the ones written from the margins, from those foreign bodies trying to get in, fit in, be accepted, be safe. Having studied the cost of entry into the stadium, it is difficult for me to pay it. With Romania, on the other hand, I don't have a choice; I am my parents' daughter, the child of defectors, the reckless blood of running away.

I remember sitting on the hill behind our home in Tuscaloosa, nine years of life to my name, when the moon threw her silver skirt over my face and swore there was more to life than boys and softball and sitcoms and bubble-gum lip gloss. I remember knowing that my close friends didn't know what it meant to leave one's native country, to be shamed by one's native tongue, to be indicted as "a communist" in a culture war that equates a nation's government with its people. I remember wishing I could talk to my relatives, my grandparents, the family left behind in Romania. I remember watching my parents chase the American dream as a ticket to not being deported, investing in perfected Americanism as protection against getting sent back to a country that deemed their emigration a criminal act, a crime against the Romanian state. I remember knowing, somehow, that my thoughts and questions, my curiosities and wonder, didn't belong. The most essential part of my emerging selfhood didn't and couldn't quite belong. And so she hid.

TS: How and when did you fall in love with writing?

AS: Writing is so natural to me, such a seamless part of my life and my way of being in the world, I can't imagine a girl named Alina who didn't carry a notebook in her backpack, in her purse, in her diaper bag, everywhere. There's this stunning collection of essays by Marguerite Duras (Me & Other Writing, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan), where Duras looks back on her life as a writer and admits she can't remember when she started to write, although she distinctly recalls that having a child stopped her from writing. In this sense, having a child was the unnatural act. This struck me like a wind-chime made from knife blades—perfect tuning, perfect timbre.

I'm not sure I fell in love with writing. I think my insatiable curiosity and love for this world, its every single shaken atom, grew increasingly less acceptable at school, at home, anywhere humans congregated. Writing offered me hide-out, a haven for marvel and terror, a space to engage the fascinations my friends didn't want to discuss. On the page, I could be "myself," which was (and is) a human who loves life too much to give it up for ideology. I could define the parameters of relevance to include a world in which my questions mattered. Enter the diary, journal, notebook that opened a door into all the possible ways of saying, speaking, feeling, tasting, touching—all the things I wanted to do—and that insatiable hunger. I'm still in love with this terrible world. As for falling in love with writing, that sounds too much like a choice. I'm not sure there's a word for beginning a story you can't resist.

TS: What kinds of music, literary and instrumental, have sustained you in your life? (I love the opening lines of "Women at Forty, Etc.": At forty, one knows why the loneliest / women wear the most spectacular diamond rings, / and why Stevie Nicks' voice rattles like a shitty transmission but never breaks down.)

AS: Thank you so much, Tom. That means a lot. Every single time someone says they love a line from a poem or a story, a little part of me melts. That weird girl stares back at me in disbelief. I will never get used to this feeling of interminable gratitude that comes with the opportunity to publish—to read and be read.

As for music, it depends on the part of me being sustained. I won't lie and say I wasn't obsessed with Stevie Nicks in my early 20's—I loved that she chose music over marriage and monogamy. I loved that she designed her own train wreck.

For my current poetry manuscript, I submerged myself in Maria Tănase, a Romanian folk singer whose music exists on all the videos my dad made of my childhood. Her lyrics and evocations speak directly into the particular and uniquely-Romanian word for longing that my recent poetry collection attempts to define. It helped to write straight from the skirts of those robust vowels, to imagine my mom dancing "Ciuleandra" on our back porch in Alabama, to cry a little for the world as Tanase does in "Lume." Like Stevie Nicks, Maria chose to marry her music and craft, to reserve her deepest loyalties for art. She breaks my fucking heart every time. I'm also working on a side project that translates Maria's lyrics in modified form that speaks to singers beloved by the Romanian emigre community in the south, including Patsy Cline and Leonard Cohen.

Recently, I've been obsessed with composer Kevin Volans' "White Man Sleeps" (and his work, more generally) for the way he abandons the European fidelity to proportion and embraces something closer to emergence, where rhythm isn't established by calculation. I love how Volans' patterns emerge from an additive process rather than the subdivision and serialism common to European compositions since Stockhausen. And I identify with Kevin's inability to identify solely with an African self or a European one. The freedom that comes with realizing you can't be faithful to one flag or identity marker is the freedom to compose anything. To write the world from outside its deepest divisions. To subvert the social constructions of loyalty that keep us unfree, bound by hashtag rather than humanity.

And generally, I have a deep, ferocious love for music that only be expressed in the genre known as playlist, which I made and leave for you right here: https://open.spotify.com/user/1276251775/playlist/5cRn9SE78ZhkeaMAlJLt0i?si=nkJ5yixBRq-dWeZyajq2cw

TS: Oh, that's fabulous. Thank you! So, what kinds of writing are you devoting yourself to these days, and where are you finding literary community?

AS: I wouldn't even know where to begin in thanking the Birmingham poets, writers, activists, publishers, and other humans who endow my life here with beauty and passion. Being co-director of PEN America Birmingham with Ashley M. Jones is such a dream come true—such a way to inhabit my deeply-held hopes, beliefs, and ideals in a place I love and hope to honor. Annie Finch's numinous anthology of writers poeming abortion is slated to be published by Haymarket Books, and I am deeply grateful to be a part of that project. I'm also excited about collaborating with Astralis Duo in New Orleans on environmental issues. There's a sense in which being alive and feeling for others makes it impossible not to write into an "activist" space. Being able to engage identity at the level of diaspora is so critical during these times of rising nationalism—being able to commit to queering all binaries is a challenge and a deep, abiding need.

My environmentalism, anti-totalitarian activism, and poetry emerge from the same tear in the cosmos. For the past year, I've been working on a poetry collection that explores the displacement of immigrant bodies through a particular Romanian word for longing that can't be directly translated into American. The word is "dor," a sort of wonder that desires without the purpose of fulfillment, that hungers without intent to sate, that thinks without becoming knowledge or hardening into the tangible. The significance of this word—and the look on my parents' faces when succumbing to it—is a challenge to American versions of longing, which tend to be saturated in self-help and notions of attainment. Is it possible to wish for something you can't have in a country that defines happiness based on the success of attainment? I'm still trying to understand why Americans are so plagued by dissatisfaction, and why every ounce of melancholy is pathologized rather than experienced as a soft simmer, a kindling, a respite, a yearn.

As for prose, I've been stretching in the lyric essay space, working on a series about memory, nostalgia, and identity (one of which was named a finalist in the 2019 Frank McCourt Prize), which is both terrifying and exciting. The cult of motherhood is a cognitive clitoridectomy, a deep socialization that ensures women don't stray far from their obligations. To make a house beautiful. To adorn the mantle. To make babies while babying adults. To burp, to cook, to knit and can fruits and salvage and save and make pretty. Activism keeps me from over-investing in the house, an extension of my body—and a consistent source of anxiety for American women. And I've been exploring this house-self through fiction by borrowing from Egon Schiele's approach to perspective, specifically, his use of multi-level mirroring, a painting technique that reflects the fractured relations between the artist and the model by disrupting the way flesh relates to mirror image. If you look at "Schiele Drawing a Nude Model before a Mirror" (1910), the model is sketched from the rear, including a portrait of the artist holding a pen. There are three visual planes operating at the same time, including the rear view of the model on the 'real' level, the mirrored frontal view, and Schiele's self-portrait. This felt like an epiphany for me on how to adapt perspective to certain stories that wanted to be told differently. I also think it's a great positioning technique for memoir and non-fiction in the age of social media.

Goethe said the biography of a writer could only be considered up to the 35th year of life (which also happens to be the year I first decided to submit a piece for publication). On this view, after the 35th year, life belongs to the struggle of one's art—to the loneliness of creation, to the endless fascinations that bring us to the page. And I'm intrigued by the way time changes voice. My younger self tried to say what everyone was saying, but to say it more lyrically or loosely—that was the challenge she engaged.

But this post-35 self finds value in her own voice, and fears dying more than anything, fears dying before I finish writing. There's a slow-burning horror in the knowledge that one must live in order to finish the books. And to lack solace, since no one in the cosmos can replace you in writing those books. No one else can say it or see it that way. Why, not even you can see it most of the time—only tatters, glimpses, shadows, winged migrations. Obsession has no substitutes, tolerates no substitutions, accepts no excuses, prepares the gallows to hang guilt and remorse.