Pitymilk was beyond thrilled to volley back and forth with poet powerhouse Kelly Lorraine Andrews. We at pitymilk are lon
gstanding fan girls of Kelly’s work, having featured it alongside Dolly Lemke’s poems in DUETDUET vol 4 and also her full length chapbook, What Happens When. Let’s dig in.
Pitymilk: Kelly!!! How exciting to finally have the chance to pick your cute brains!! We are still so excited about the book and having finally landed on something to dig our eager hands into!! We always like to start these interviews with a little orientation… tell us where you are in the world and where this text is coming from in space and time. Where in the world are you writing from? What do you see out the window?
Kelly Lorraine Andrews: Hi Edie! Hi Chelsea! Hi world! I’m writing from Pittsburgh, where I’ve lived the last 16 years. Outside my window you can see a highway, 376, with its constant whooshing of vehicles, which almost sounds like an ocean, aside from the jake brakes and occasional siren. From the front porch, the trains roll by with their screechy wheels, befitting for a girl who used to run to the edge of the yard to watch for the caboose across the field.
Time is a little trickier. We’re on the other side of the solstice, when the daylight starts to tick backward. Earlier this evening, I was trapped in a thought loop of a previous life, one that had some semblance of normalcy. I’ll stop being poet-y, which is to say, evasive. It’s 2025. What a fucking time to be alive.
PM: This book bears witness to a glacial shelving and upheaval of heart and home, how have your relationships to these ideas shaped this book? Is there a ‘home’ that remains from which you were writing? What are you finding in the metaphorical rubble? What does happen when?
KLA: Oof. The idea of home or the dream of a home is wound tightly around the idea of stability. “Most of the people // who know me now // never saw the burning house //where I grew up.” (Just out here quoting my own poetry.) I’ve always been seeking out a space to feel safe, that feels like my own.
I moved into my now ex-husband’s house a year into our relationship. His parents owned it, and from early on, I knew it wasn’t my home, but he paid the rent, and the location was good.
In 2022, I bought my childhood home and the acre of land it sat on from a family member. The walls had been stripped of any copper piping, years-old garbage strewn throughout. The house was condemned with a looming deadline from the township to raze it. My mother and I watched as the walls were pushed in, smashed down, and then lifted to the dumpster. I filmed it from different angles of the yard. My mother standing near the highway. My grandmother’s house, also abandoned, across the ditch. Bits of insulation floating through the air.
That house was rarely a home, but I clung to the idea of it being the only home I ever knew. When I asked for what I wanted –– a place of our own –– the marriage fell apart, almost instantaneously as we were in the process of buying a new house. I wrote What Happens When way before the hand money was deposited for the dream house that never was. Have I told you yet that I’m a witch?
In the rubble of my childhood home is the universal truth that none of this is stable. Everything, everything is temporary.
PM: We met you years ago in Pittsburgh while you were still running pretty owl, tell us a little about that project? How did it begin? How long did it run? Is it archived somewhere we can peruse it? Do you miss it?
KLA: Pretty Owl Poetry (POP) was a bonkers time in my life. I was in my first year of grad school at Pitt for my MFA, working a full-time job, a part-time graduate student assistant job to pay for my tuition, and taking the full course load of my peers.
I recruited Gordon Buchan and B. Rose Huber to start an online journal with me because I wanted to be immersed in the poetry world. I was reading submissions for Hot Metal Bridge, Pitt’s graduate-run journal, but I wanted to be more hands-on. I facilitated a reading series in Pittsburgh. Rose and I tried out podcasting. We brought on K.G. Strayer, who created poetry prompts based on Tarot cards. I hired interns who received course credit from Pitt for their work on the journal. Jessica Earhart joined as the art editor. Wheeler Light came on as a reader after we published his work, and I gained an incredible friend for life. But the hours and hours of work that went into all of that became overwhelming.
We shuttered our doors permanently in 2021 after a seven-year run. All of that work is still accessible on our site, and I plan to keep it up for as long as I’m able to maintain it. The thing I loved most about the journal was reading the submissions –– finding that gem of a poem or poems that you can’t believe someone else hasn’t published yet. I miss that portion of it, but I occasionally volunteer to read for journals when I feel like I have the bandwidth. There is so much I would do differently with POP if I had the chance. But I have no desire to run a journal again.
PM: Who are your creative heroes? Who do you keep going back to? Who continues to inspire you? Who, if anyone, does no wrong in your eyes… who has a perfect artistic record?
KLA: Mathias Svalina, Zachary Schomburg, Anne Carson, Stephanie Cawley, Ada Limón, Brenda Shaughnessy, Ross Gay, CA Conrad, Eileen Miles, to name a few on the writer side. There are some musicians I never tire of… Modest Mouse, Pavement, Roy Orbison, Beyoncé. I also have an unending love for Frida Kahlo, Carolee Schneeman, Hilma af Klint, and Francesca Woodman.
PM: Okay libra – what era of fashion makes you the most moist? Why? Who are some of your fashion icons?
KLA: Here is where my 40 years of age will really show. In my 20s and early 30s, I used to care a lot about clothing, appearances, all that. In the last five years, my body has changed substantially, and it’s nearly impossible to find beautiful vintage clothing that fits (with the exception of @jackiewhoavintage in Pittsburgh). I rarely shop for clothes now, and the only hint of style I maintain is dying my hair blue. Generally, I’m always drawn to 40s and 50s dresses –– classic A-lines with belts and buttons, that sort of thing, but I couldn’t name a fashion icon. To put it in perspective, the only time I put on a bra is when I’m leaving the house or a contractor is coming over to fix something. I occasionally dress up, but fashion just isn’t a priority for me in this phase of life.
PM: What Happens When obviously comes from a specifically mid-life perspective. As a bitch who just turned 40 themselves, this vantage point is acutely interesting to me. How do you feel about this aspect of the work? Who do you imagine as your audience? What do you want to say to them about the surprises and expectations of aging?
KLA: It’s v strange for me to think of my work as a mid-life perspective. Once, my mother told me that when she sees herself in dreams, it’s a much younger her, maybe late teens or early 20s. I’m nearing 41, and I can’t stop telling strangers that I’m 40, so I guess it makes sense that my poetry reflects that, though I feel stuck at some indeterminable age on the interior, similar to my mother. In general, my poetry has always been a fogged mirror of my life, confessional to the point of embarrassment. I stupidly want nice things at this age –– an expensive couch, a vintage dining table, etc. These things are bound to show up in my work. But I rarely think about audience. When I was an MFA student, I spent an ungodly amount of time sending out my poems to be published, researched which journals would be good fits, all that. At this ripe age of 40, I think my audience is my friends and myself. I’ll share poems to our group chat or exchange a few here and there with Wheeler, but I no longer concern myself with who will or won’t read my poetry someday.
PM: Have you always been a sad girl? Do you relate to this identity marker readily or reluctantly? What brings the joys lately? The smaller the better.
KLA: Oh yes! I am a crier through and through. I have a line in a poem about how I could have been a professional mourner, still could. There’s a lot to be said about my childhood, how joy was a crumb and so it’s no surprise I have photos of me as a child crying –– from a movie, from fear of tornadoes, from all the unknown. I still feel some sense of obligation to hold the weight of the cruelties of the world. Like, doesn’t anyone else see all the suffering?
It’s a dark viewpoint, but this is how you become a lifelong sad girl. Take notes.
The joys: two recent books my sweet neighbor Cherie bought for me as an early birthday gift: journals of Frida Kahlo and a beautiful Taschen book on witchcraft. Meeting the smallest chihuahua I’ve ever seen at Spigolo, my neighborhood coffee spot. Seeing two friends exchange vows in a gorgeous nature park. Dancing at the Pittsburgh Honky-Tonk Jukebox, always.
PM: What’s next? What are you working on currently? What are you excited about? Will you write us a follow up text? ‘What happened’? Where can people follow along with what yr up to?
KLA: I like working within the confines of forms, so I have two very different projects under construction at the moment. One is a golden shovel of Lucy Dacus’ Night Shift, arguably the best breakup song for all the sad babes of the world. The series is a long meditation on my failed marriage with the lyrics as a frame. The other project is a series of haibuns that are less concerned about being ‘poetic’ and more a way for me to play within writing while navigating the hellscape that is dating as a 40-year-old divorcee. There is a little thrill in being less concerned about being a Poet and giving myself that space to shit on dumb men who deserve it.
I am v occasionally sending out my work and getting rejected. I have (had?) a website I haven’t updated in ~5 years. There’s this great line in Joe Pera Talks With You where he’s discussing picture day at school: “I’m not too worried about my photographic legacy. In fact, I hope I’m not remembered at all, and that one day I can just disappear.” This sums up how I feel about people following along with what I’m up to. That being said, my IG is probably the only place you can find me contributing anything to the world, and by that I mean photos of my cats. @zecatsmeow
A friend (@songsofllore –– go listen to her music and thank me later) recently asked me if I’ve ever manifested anything in my life. Grad school was one, though it wasn’t without effort. The most obvious manifestation, though, is the house I bought at the end of 2023, just two months after being left. I told my friend to be careful what you ask of the universe. You may get what you want and lose the life you had in the process. For me, what happened is I have a place to call home, where no one can ever tell me I have to leave.
