Fort Collins Professor's New Book Explores Sex and Hunger

"Writing is so cathartic," says Fort Collins poet and CSU's Faculty Director of Literacy Through Prose and Poetry, Devon Fulford. "So many times, the impetus for the act of writing itself is pain."

It's a philosophy at the center of Fulford's new collection of poetry, gulp, which debuted late last year. Fulford will be reading from the book, a punk-scene, sexually-driven, coming-of-age collection set in small-town Colorado, on May 6 at Fort Collins' Old Firehouse Books. The event, at which Fulford will join fellow writers Camille Dungy, Garin Daum, and Veronica Patterson, starts at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public. For more information, see the Old Firehouse Books events page.

Fulford admits that the process of writing the book and its powerful composite poems was a surprising one. "It was uncovering things that I didn't even know I needed to deal with," she says. "It exposed some things that I wasn't even consciously thinking about. It was healing and restorative in ways I didn't expect."

Much of the awakening — sexual and otherwise — in gulp comes from Fulford's youth in Colorado, particularly her family's move from her earlier home in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina to Estes Park when she was one week shy of her Freshman year in high school. "Big shift," she says. "I was furious. I'd had a horrible time in middle school. But toward the end of 8th grade, I felt like I was really coming into my own — and then my mom moved us across the country."

Displacement like Fulford talks about isn't unique, of course, but her situation — and her reactions to it — were. "Estes Park was such a small place. Absolutely everyone knows everyone's business. My graduating class had 89 people in it. And it was wealthy, whereas my family was not. A lot of families have a lot of money there. But when we moved to town, we lived for a while in a hotel. And then we moved to a cabin. I went through almost my entire freshman year before we moved into an actual house."

Fulford says that one of the ways she dealt with all that pressure was through punk rock. "As an angsty teenager," she laughs, "it was a godsend. I'd grown up with my parents' music, a lot of doo-wop '50s stuff and surf rock. My first concert was when I was nine, and we saw the Everly Brothers and the Beach Boys. And so much of that music influences punk. I remember trying to turn my mom on to the Ramones, and saying, 'Listen, you'll recognize this.'"

Just as important was the outlet punk music provided. "It allowed me to be angry," Fulford says, "and in a safe way. And the punk scene in Colorado in the '90s was just special. Back then, it was so easy to reach out to a band that was touring and say, 'Hey, we have this zine, and we'd love to interview you.' And they'd give us a backstage pass. Go to the show for free, meeting all your favorite bands. So that's where the music references in the book come from. It was one of the things that saved me."

The collection is also about sexual awakening, and Fulford pauses when she's asked why that's a focus. "I don't think I had a choice," she finally says. "I think so much of my identity is wrapped up in my sexuality that it was a natural place for me to go. People think about sex a lot, but we don't talk about it much, or enough. I like writing about things that make people squirm a little. This is one of those topics. Poetry is a great segue between holding this thing you want to talk about and actually talking about it."

The question of sex and intimacy is one of the things that binds gulp together as a collection. There's a through-line of hunger and satiation that both opens and closes the book, from a line in the first poem ("I'd been starving for so long...") to two lines in the last two poems ("who was the one who made you hungry?" and "the thump thump thump movement of a well-fed heart.") It's something that Fulford says she doesn't think about when she's first putting a poem together. "But I get so excited when readers find things like that. And I struggle sometimes with poetry that can feel disconnected. I strive to provide that sense of wholeness for the reader and their experience."

And in the end, Fulford says that it was easy to meld the two forces in gulp. "Sex and hunger are so closely intertwined," she says, "not just in my brain, but in general too. It happens in some really beautiful and some really terrible ways."

It's a conversation that Fulford says is important, especially in today's America. "I've matured in a lot of ways from the little Devon about whom a lot of these poems are written," she says. "But I'm also still that punk-music girl thumbing her nose at authority. I've always kind of had that fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me attitude. I learned to hone it in ways that are more useful to me and who and where I am now, but I don't do things in the way I'm told. There are inherent risks in that, I get it, but I write for me. If that makes waves once it moves out of my hands and into the world? Good."

Devon Fulford's collection gulp is available now; she'll appear with fellow poets at Old Firehouse Books, 232 Walnut Street, Fort Collins on May 6.