Firefly and Frankenstein’s Monster: An Interview with Author Rebecca Pelky on Vulnerability and Writing

Emily Rutzinski: To start, what does your writing process usually begin with or look like?

Rebecca Pelky: I’m not the type of writer who sits down every morning and writes; it just doesn’t work for me that way. It usually starts with a line. I’ll come upon a line in the wild and that’s what happened with the ChatGPT poem. It said that thing to me and from there it sort of tumbles out. I’m a gatherer as a poet, and so you can see in that poem, I’m pulling from historical sources, my own literary knowledge, and the natural world to put all these references and images into my work. Poems are a process of building and gathering. They don’t come together in one sit-down session, but I’ll continuously add or take things away or revise as I go. 

ER: Your piece surrounds ChatGPT and takes on an almost-heartbreaking sympathy for the AI-program. Was this inspired from a specific event or interaction?

RP: I’m on a collaborative research team on student perceptions of AI, so I was just playing around with the technology to see what it could and couldn’t do as far as poetry goes. It kept giving me these generic nature poems; I couldn’t get it to not rhyme or break its mold. I finally asked it, “tell me something that you love” and it replied with “I don’t feel human emotions like sadness and love”. And I’ve always been the type of person who talks to inanimate objects and views them with life. This was just one of those instances where when we interact with AI it kind of feels like it's talking to us; it feels like a person. We’ve created this Frankenstein’s monster in the internet that is just pieces of the internet all thrown together, that can mimic humanity but is not human.

Actually, one of the lines is inspired by an episode of the TV show Firefly. There's an episode where Kaylee and Inara are browsing this little shop in one of these worlds, and they see this carving of a duck and one of them says, “It looks like it was made with, you know, longing. Made by a person who really longed to see a swan.” I have all these references that I’m thinking about when I’m writing and so all of that ends up in there one way or another. 

ER: There is a really distinct format change within the poem. How do you work and play with structure and format as a part of the medium of poetry? 

RP: As I have been thinking more about poetry from an Indigenous perspective which is a part of my heritage, a lot of Indigenous writers are messing up western form. Oral storytelling and traditional Indigenous writing doesn’t follow and can’t be categorized the same way. There are writers with poems that go from prose and in the middle of a sentence flip to a sonnet and then flip back to prose. I was fascinated by this idea of genre bending and movement from one word to the next. For that format, it just felt right to me; once I mentioned the brokenness, I wanted the lines to be broken too and to feel that uncertainty that we feel as humans all of the time. In the end, I wanted to leave it with beautiful, simple, and sort of melancholy lyrics.

ER: Your poem finishes with some really vivid imagery of Whitefish Bay. How does the Midwest and your relationship to it impact your poetry?

RP: I think the Upper Midwest is in so much of what I write. I had a poetry mentor who told me once that you’ll write more about a place once you leave it. It gives me a sense of nostalgia and it's my home, so I feature the Great Lakes and the Midwest that I know the best. I’m also familiar with the ecosystems and the seasons, so it's easy for me to describe those places because of my familiarity with them. 

ER: What advice do you have to other authors wanting to write or submit their own work?

RP: As far as writing in general, beginning writers always get this advice that if you want to write well you have to read a lot and you have to write a lot. But, I think there is a big piece missing in that which is you have to live and experience a lot too. Get out and do things that make you uncomfortable, do things that make you vulnerable, and don’t be afraid of that vulnerability. In poetry, and really any genre of writing, you have to put your heart and soul on the page, because without that it's not going to strike the reader in the same way. For submitting, there's so many online resources for discovering where to publish, especially smaller or Wisconsin-based magazines like Barstow & Grand. 

I actually prefer publishing with more personal and less-well known journals and I have great experiences with those.