No. 15 Heart Breaker Feature: Zoe Contros Kearl

The No. 15 Heart Breaker issue explores love and loss and everything in between. Zoe Contros Kearl wrote “Bösendorfer" and "Waves and Waves and Waves” for the issue and we had the pleasure of interviewing them.

Can you first tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from/what do you do?

My name is Zoe Contros Kearl. I was born in Denville, New Jersey and raised in Austin, Texas. I spent the better part of the last ten years in New York and now live in rural Vermont. I currently work a fairly crushing corporate nine-to-five (hey Dolly) but I’m making moves to get free.

In addition to the day job, I read for the magazine American Chordata and am the managing editor of a soon-to-come publication called Hg (pronounced “mercury” because Hg is the elemental symbol for mercury). I’m not totally sure what’s next in terms of work? Some of the local farms are starting to open to seasonal workers, the Home Depot is hiring, something good is going to happen. Catch me wherever is next.

How did you get into writing?

I started writing when I was maybe five years old. My grandfather loved poetry and that kind of kicked things off. I wrote poems about a lot of things, mainly my feelings because the confessional mode has always come easiest to me even though it’s usually not en vogue. There’s a great photo of me at my first-grade talent show holding a binder full of poems and in the shot the binder is falling from my hands but I’m smiling. Maybe that’s poetry. Idk. Definitely a Kodak Moment™ regardless.

What is your favorite thing to write about?

My favorite thing to write about … people, places, stories. Some true, some fictionalized. I like to write about celebrity culture and my own dumb obsession with romantic love and it’s fun to weave in elements of Greek myth, of pop punk lyrics, of the banal. I write about the decline of the US, about war and violence, about scenic views that linger far past the day on which you saw them, about sex and impossibility and longing and want. Sometimes about being gay. Often about sadness. Just about all of this around all of us. None of it linear.

Who is your favorite author and what is your favorite book?

Oof, this is a big one, huh? At the moment, my favorite book is Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey which is fucking sick. In the text Hawkey works in many modes (the book features prose, poetry, photography) primarily centered around the translation of work by Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Okay one more, sorry it’s so hard to choose, I’m enamored with Porn Carnival by Rachel Rabbit White.

As for authors, uh okay like as of this morning at least: Fleur Jaeggy, Don DeLillo, Anne Carson, Michael Dickman, Karolina Waclawiak, Stephen Kinzer, Dorothea Lasky, Bud Smith, Eve Babitz, ugh too many sorry I will stop!!!

What inspired your piece featured in Heart Breaker, "Bösendorfer" and "Waves and Waves and Waves”?

So, concretely, “Bösendorfer” is inspired by a series of experiences with someone who I love. First set in a Manhattan apartment and then set in a motel in a dying industrial town where people on the second floor of the motel flicked still-lit Newports from the balcony, creating halos of cigarettes around my shoes as I sat on the curb stop outside our room at dusk. It’s a poem about the nature of longing, about a woman on the brink, about the ever-presence of the divine within the banal. It’s about being desperate and about one single perfect kiss. The title is the name of an Austrian piano manufacturer and they make beautiful pianos. 

“Waves and Waves and Waves” is about want, summertime sweat, the notion of forever.

What does the term "Heart Breaker" mean to you?

Something, someone good enough to make you willing to lose it all. Something, someone to long for because ecstasy and loss are often just waving to each other through some metaphorical chain link fence. I mean, just someone who rends you and thus rends the sky of your entire life. Sorry, I’m melodramatic. Just, you know, something, someone that’s so good and when they’re gone it still hurts so good so not to say yolo but yolo. Sometimes it’s fun to be the heartbreaker, sometimes it’s fun to get broken. We’re all playing the same game but it’s true what they say: the house always wins.

How has the pandemic affected your writing?

I’ve had an extremely hard time writing, barely wrote at all this year. I’m working to get back to it. It’s hard. I know we all know. It’s very hard.

What advice would you give to writers with writer's block?

You can write about literally anything. In any way you want. When I think I have nothing to write about (which is never true as long as we are alive and engaged in the act of living) I start a list of memories, places, favorite song lyrics, phrases. Then I step back. The next day I look at the list and pick one or two things and try to write around them. This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does, and sometimes it helps me move into an associative state in which I’m able to write again.

Any writing plans for the future?

Nothing concrete. I’m trying to place a manuscript right now (lol) but overall, I think the work of writing is in the living so I’m hoping to just keep reading, learning, laughing, hanging around with people once we get to do that again. Remember sitting in rooms without being alone? Remember eye contact with strangers? Anyway. I look forward to writing about all of that. Maybe apply to some residencies. Maybe stop italicizing my titles. Definitely not gonna start a project book.

To learn more about Zoe, visit them on their website or @zoecontros!