MFA Student Spotlight: A Conversation with Gabi Graceffo
by Emily Collins
Welcome back to CutBank’s weekly student spotlight where we interview current MFA candidates at the University of Montana. This week’s spotlight is Gabi Graceffo, a poetry student and film photographer at work on a cross-genre thesis incorporating poetry and photography. I recently sat with Gabi where we discussed gender and queer studies, editing, and collaboration.
Emily Collins: What drew you to the MFA in poetry program at the University of Montana?
Gabi Graceffo: My undergraduate mentor, Greg Brownderville, has been coming to Missoula for the book festival every year. When I approached him last year about applying to MFA programs, he recommended I look into UM. I was a bit flabbergasted—Montana? You want me to go to Montana where I’ll be a chilly little Texan in negative temperatures, snowed in for six months? I wrestled with these thoughts, but as I found out more about the program—the collaborative atmosphere, the cross-genre options, the literature component, just a few of many great things here—I became much more interested.
When I got in and I was deciding between MFA programs, my friend and "poet sister," Taneum Bambrick, urged me to go to UM as she knew Keetje Kuipers through the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and knew I would be in good hands with her. Though I loved my experience in undergrad, all of my professors for creative writing were straight men. As a young bisexual female poet, I was really excited to come here and work with a variety of professors while also finding a great mentor in Keetje.
EC: Who are your favorite fiction writers, memoirists, poets, etc.?
GG: My favorite poet is hands down Meg Day, a deaf genderqueer poet whose work is absolutely stunning in terms of content, form, and lyricism. I started getting interested in poetry with people like W. B. Sebald; I’m quite interested in translation and this more literary approach allowed me to get closer with poetry at the line level. I also find a lot of inspiration from Rachel Rinehart and Annemarie Nì Churreáin.
EC: What are you working on writing-wise, and what do you hope to gain during your time at UM?
GG: Currently, I’m working on a nonfiction piece as I joined the nonfiction workshop to give prose a whirl. It is definitely a lot harder to write fifteen pages per submission than a page; it’s not that poetry is easier as it tends to be a lot denser with tons of little micro-edits, but simply producing that huge chunk of content has been challenging. The piece is about my time living in Italy and the issues of connection I found there physically, emotionally, and socially.
My larger project for the MFA will be a cross-genre thesis incorporating poetry and photography, based on gender and queer studies. It’s definitely a bit amorphous now, but I’ve built up a collection of largely nonfictional poetry about my experiences in recent years learning femininity and sexuality in the South which will definitely be moving toward the thesis. For the photography aspect, I’ll be making silver gelatin photographs which I specialized in for my Art B.F.A. I aim to create diptychs of text and image in a book format which I plan to make by hand, working with Iris Garden by William Gedney and John Cage as a base format.
EC: When you’re not writing, what are some of your favorite hobbies, interests, etc.
GG: When I’m not writing, I’m often reading, either on my own or for one of the magazines I review. I like soaking up as much text as I can, but at the same time I’m a sucker for a good Netflix binge. Now that we’re in the full swing of winter, I love going on snow walks or skating at midnight over at Pineview.
EC: When you look back on your journey as a writer so far, what excites you the most?
GG: I know I’ve got a long way to go; I’m one of the youngest people in the program and I often feel like I don’t have the same level of experience as others both in terms of life experience and poetic strategies. But this honestly makes me really excited to learn: to learn forms, content deviations, cross-genre hybrids, narrative positioning within lyricism, and how to be a better editor and collaborative poet in a workshop environment. I know that I’m at a unique moment because I am very clearly at the beginning of a new chapter in my life; I graduated from undergrad during the pandemic, moved across the country, and dove headfirst into a new world. Because of that, I am now extremely aware of my surroundings and in tune with how things are changing, which generates a lot of poetry. With the pandemic and the icy roads, I take a lot of time for introspection and journaling and I find myself noticing things I never would have before. So, I look forward and then look back, comparing and contrasting, so I can better understand the present moment.
EC: Bonus Question: If you could quarantine with any writer throughout history, who would they be and why?
GG: I think I’d want to quarantine with Meg Day simply because I want to ask a million questions about poetic technique, narrative arcs, and how to accomplish so much in so few lines. Day has a hallmark of using imagistic language in new ways, pushing the boundaries of logic a bit (a spine becomes a floorboard, for example) to create new resonances and connections. I struggle between extremes: writing everything exactly as I experienced it or writing something that has no bearing on reality. Day walks that line gracefully and I’d love to know more about how that works in the brain and in the heart while writing.
Gabriella Graceffo (b. 1998, Fort Worth, TX) is a writer and film photographer working in Missoula, MT. Graceffo received her BFA in Art and BA in English from Southern Methodist University in 2020 and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Montana. Her work has been exhibited in Dallas at the Pollock Gallery, the Meadows Museum, and the Doolin Gallery and at Fort Burgwin in Taos, NM. Graceffo served as the Meadows Museum Poet Laureate in April 2020 and has been awarded the Richter Fellowship, an Engaged Learning Fellowship, the Zelle Art Grant, the Doolin Art Grant, and the George Bond Poetry Prize. She is the Arts Editor of CutBank, an Associate Editor of Poetry Northwest, and an Interviewer for The Boiler.
Emily Collins is the Interviews Editor for CutBank and a MFA in fiction candidate at the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, The Atticus Review, The South Carolina Review, and others. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. When she’s not interviewing incredible writers, she enjoys hiking and volunteering.