To read the pieces in Lauren K. Watel’s debut collection, Book of Potions (Sarabande Books, 2025), is to experience a spatial anomaly that feels like sorcery. Though most pieces are only one page long—some are only a few sentences—to read them is to explore a strange, unending, and transformative space. Each piece is a spell, an elixir crafted from elements of Watel’s background as a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, to create something startling and magically new. The language twists and turns like poetry and builds toward the kind of brief but explosive narrative one sees in flash fiction. And yet, these pieces defy traditional ideas of genre. Watel herself calls them “potions,” which feels perfect for writing this mercurial, changeable, and transformative. Through these potions, we move from auditoriums to “the lands beyond life,” over fields and seas, warzones and homes and disappearing landscapes. Within the short structure of each potion, I found more and more space to discover, wander, to walk in joy and anger and terror. Most of all, I stood in awe of what Watel has created.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with Watel via Zoom about Potions—winner of the Sarabande’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry—and her long road to publication, her process, and the transformative power of the act of writing.
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The Rumpus: These pieces transform within themselves and then transform again when you read them together. In this book, a “potion” is actually your preferred form, as “potion = poem + fiction.” How did you decide to create this form?
Lauren K. Watel: I wrote these pieces years ago, first thing in the morning, really fast, as a kind of discipline for myself. I was very depressed and worried about my identity, because my only kid had left for college. I’d been so invested in being a parent that I’d let much of the rest of my life languish, and I was worried I would fall into an abyss of not knowing who I was. I had always clung to the idea that I was a writer, but I was scared I wouldn’t write. So, I made myself write before I was fully awake. I did this as a kind of physical activity: if my hand moved and wrote words, and I saw those words covering an entire page, I would somehow believe I was a writer and do my real work later in the day. Eventually I adjusted to my empty nest situation, so I put the notebook in a desk drawer, completely forgot about it, and went on to write a novel.
Years later, I found this notebook and started reading. It was the strangest experience. I didn’t remember writing any of it. It was like reading something someone else had written. I had no idea I was capable of this kind of writing—it terrified me. I wasn’t sure it was good, but it was exciting and unsettling. The strangest thing about it—and I can’t really account for this—is that it wasn’t nonsense. It wasn’t rambling. I was saying something.
To return to the question about form: I had these odd things, and each was one page in a notebook. I started typing them out, and honestly I didn’t know what they were. Once I’d collected the best of them, I started tossing around the words “poem” and “fiction,” and “potion” came into my mind. So, I thought, “Well, I’ll call them potions,” because they appeared out of magic. It was like my mind was mixing all these ingredients and trying to make some transformation happen.
My brain was like a cauldron, and I made potions in it. I didn’t mean to invent a form. I wasn’t an English major. I have a spotty reading history, and I’ve always been self-conscious about that. So, I was hesitant to say that what I was writing was prose poetry because I’d read almost no prose poetry and didn’t really know what it was. I decided to dream up a hybrid word for a hybrid form, mainly because it seemed fun to me, and maybe even true.
Rumpus: You said these potions weren’t like your other writing. How are they different?
Watel: I’ve always written really slowly. I started as a fiction writer. I had many novels, two agents, no success. I was an incredible failure. As a not-very-professional writer, I had no idea how you might publish a book. I didn’t even consider myself capable of it. I started writing shorter stories because I couldn’t bear to write another long novel and not get it published. It just felt too heartbreaking. I wasn’t an especially experimental fiction writer. I’m a fan of character-driven fiction, mostly about women’s interior lives. My stories were very thought-out and methodical.
The stuff that came out of this new way of writing was unmethodical, un-thought-out, uncensored. I literally just made my hand move. I wrote with a kind of compulsion and propulsion. Most of the pieces are somewhat uniform in length, because that’s how big the notebook page was and how big my handwriting was. The only thing I brought to the process was the writing hand and the subconscious. The assignment was simply to produce words. I wasn’t trying to make anything. What I didn’t realize, when I found this notebook, was that in encountering the person who wrote these pieces, I would discover how insanely enraged I was, how resentful, how scared! I feel somewhat qualified to write about my own inner life because I know about it. I don’t feel qualified to write about war or climate change. What do I have to say about large-scale global issues? I would never presume. But when I read these pieces, there were soldiers and war and fears about the climate. I kept coming back to the idea of green, that we would never have snow again, that we’d be in an eternal spring, and it would be horrible because we’d never have seasons. It was an accidental daring, to write about bigger things.
The writing itself, the language was very metaphor-heavy. Sometimes, a piece was just a metaphor, pursued for one page. I don’t know where that impulse came from. I can only say retrospectively that I had the urge, without knowing it, to make my inner turmoil into little scenes, or stories, or metaphors, or dialogues, or whatever.
Rumpus: Even if it wasn’t intentional, did this process give you a sense of agency as a writer?
Watel: I think that’s perfectly articulated and probably how it worked. Writing that way was my attempt to take hold of and own something inside myself that had a hold on me. I didn’t have a hold on it. I didn’t know I was doing that, nor did I mean to. I think that’s absolutely right, that the writing itself was a way of having agency. If you can’t see yourself, you can’t have agency. The way I felt was—I don’t know if this is a real word—un-agentic. I didn’t feel in charge of myself. I didn’t feel I could do the most basic things to get what I wanted. It was so weird, because everyone perceived me as a very strong person, and yet fundamentally I was very passive. I didn’t have enough of a self to have agency, which is why I had no book and no success. I blamed a lot of things, embarrassingly, and I even imagined that the publishing industry somehow had it in for me. It’s laughable now, but I had all these narratives and feelings because I couldn’t really confront the idea that I wasn’t there. I didn’t know how to be there, and I didn’t know how to advocate for myself. Looking back, I have compassion for that, and I understand why, and I think these pieces showed me that person. It was like reading myself, and it was hard to see, and scary, but also extremely interesting.
Rumpus: So, are you speaking of empowerment in terms of publication?
Watel: No, I mean, aside from submitting, we have little to no agency when it comes to getting published. Why does a journal or publisher accept anything? Especially from someone unknown, with no publishing record? I have no clue. I mean, it’s a miracle I had a book published. I don’t know how that happened. Whenever any submission of mine would get accepted, I’d think, “How did that happen? How did it even make it through the screeners?” And, “Well, wow, thanks!” Yeah, you can’t control any of that. It just seems like luck.
We can control the writing itself, what we make of our work. That is our superpower, our magic, and it’s where we can exercise agency to the fullest. That’s our best investment, emotionally speaking—the work. The publishing part ideally should be merely practical—though necessary, if you want to achieve a certain kind of success in the world, to be recognized by your peers, and most importantly to me, to make your work available to readers.
Rumpus: I was fascinated by you talking about the idea of perpetual green due to climate change, because I saw so much white in the book: snowy fields, white rooms, white lights, a white mask that replaces the speaker’s face. How did you use color, or the lack thereof, to write?
Watel: I, too, noticed the white: whiteouts, white rooms, white things. I’m not sure why that bubbled up for me. Possibly it’s the disappearing ozone layer. Everybody who thinks about the earth’s future has their version of this fear, but I’m scared we’ll eventually be unprotected from the sun’s burning rays, that we’ll dry up and burn alive. With the heat we’re increasingly feeling, night becomes a relief. So now night doesn’t seem like night, and darkness doesn’t seem as scary. The unrelenting sun, drought, the glaring whiteness, the sun beating down in a cloudless sky, and no rain in sight, seems totally horrifying.
When I was writing an essay about the work of Toi Dericotte, she asked me to send her some of my potions. One was about everything vanishing into the white, and she asked me if I was thinking of whiteness in racial terms. The answer was no, I didn’t consciously have that in mind. But her question affirmed my nagging sense that whiteness, in terms of ideas about race, is annihilating, erasing, destructive. After that, I wrote a piece in conversation with her observation, called “Only Now.” I ended up thinking not only about the whiteness of an obliterating sun but also about whiteness as an obliterating signifier that is ruinous to all humans.
Rumpus: It’s interesting that you mentioned obliteration, because there are themes of displacement, disassociation, alienation, and disappearing in these potions. How did those images come to be, and what did they come to mean to you?
Watel: I think they’re reflecting two deep fears: one is that I wasn’t there. Many of these pieces were written after a very long period of feeling invisible. I perceived myself that way, partially because I had no success. Also, because I was middle aged. The visibility that, for better or worse, I had felt as a young woman, as a sexual object or just as an aesthetic object, had disappeared. It was strange to walk through a crowd and realize nobody saw you. Most importantly, I didn’t feel visible to myself. Whatever you might want to say about being a parent, I found that over-identifying with motherhood was not healthy for me, nor my offspring. My intense self-image as a parent and trying to be the best parent—I can look back on that now and say it was a way of not tending to myself. It was a way of ignoring my full self, and it was a way of not growing up. When my child left, being a parent was no longer something I could hide behind. Thankfully, I had the good sense to think I shouldn’t over-function for a child who’s gone off to college. I should probably try to let them grow up. But the person who hadn’t grown up was me. Who had I been? What was I? I couldn’t even see myself. There were so many ways in which I felt invisible.
There was also this idea that everything we know about the world, in the largest sense, is vanishing. It’s terrifying. It’s a scale of possible calamity [that] an individual person cannot, in any way, influence, unless you’re one of a handful of world leaders who can make policy that could change things. But we don’t have people making that kind of policy. We have scary people making bad policy.
So, yes, there were disappearances and erasures and vanishings, from the most internal personal realm to the largest possible scale. I think the earth will survive us, but I don’t know if we’ll survive ourselves. I think we won’t. I feel we’re likely to extinct ourselves. The only question is, When? What will that look like?
Rumpus: This book is a perfect example of how to put a collection together. It’s exquisitely built and perfectly ordered, but inside of this gorgeously constructed book, you really do feel a person struggling with their own interiority and identity. How did you balance the struggle with exterior forces that nobody can control?
Watel: We’re all alive in an ever-changing world. Therefore, we are faced with change at every moment, and we have a greater or lesser ability to adapt to that change. There are the local changes in your neighborhood, in your house, in yourself, in your body, and then there are the larger changes, which we’re well aware of every single minute of every single day, because we have the internet and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. We’re aware of stressful, world-altering events, and at the same time we’re aging and breaking up with people, getting married, moving houses, moving jobs, doing our work. To try to maintain any sense of equilibrium, you have to grapple both with that personal anxiety but also that limitless anxiety of the world and its crazy, calamitous collapsing. And what does one do? Because one’s own personal realm of control and efficacy is tiny, and yet you’re always aware. The weather, for example, doesn’t let you forget what’s happening to the climate. Then there’s the daily insanity of the changes in our government, in our society—one of those things alone would make anyone feel existentially powerless, but there are, like, three hundred. For me, and I assume for anybody with any awareness, the combination of those two sources of anxiety is difficult to bear. Apparently, when I was writing these pieces, I was desperately trying to articulate something of this fear, probably to have some control, however illusory. I do think that making something out of your fear is a hopeful act, at least on the level of the individual. You can, however insignificant it seems, try to assert some control or make some order out of the utter chaos of yourself in the world. I think that’s how artists get by.
Rumpus: How has this new writing process changed your work as a writer? Did it change you personally?
Watel: It changed everything, in a way. For one thing, it sent me a message that I should be less rigid about how I write. I actually had some contempt for writing quickly. I thought it was sloppy
and it felt, to me, a bit out of control. I really suspect those feelings now, because I believe they came from my own rigidity and fear. Writing fast has made me more flexible and more interested in getting to what I may be hiding from myself. I’m a firm believer that if you want to change something about yourself, you have to see it first, acknowledge it. Writing it down can help you see it. In this way, you can make yourself an object of study. You can look at your own handwriting and say, “Oh, that’s me! That’s how I feel. That’s really pathetic and sad. Wow, I would like to be different. I would like to feel better.” I was always aware I had anger roiling under the surface, but I don’t think I was quite aware of just how angry I was. I had no idea I was as anxious as I was. Writing it helped me to see my tendencies, and if I could see them, then I could study them, and if I could study them, I could figure out where they came from, and maybe I could change something. In that respect, writing that way was transformational over the long haul.
I think there are many ways to change, and there are many ways to look at yourself. But I think most people don’t really write for this reason, or from this place. I don’t have any opinion about why anyone writes or what they want out of it. I think it’s all fine. I feel compelled to write to try to understand myself. More broadly, to try to understand other people and how we relate to one another, how the world works, and how we live with one another. I’ve found that the more I can be at ease with myself, to see myself in all of my embarrassing flaws and weaknesses and to like myself regardless, the more I like other people, too. Writing this book helped me to see the person I was, get to know that person, and to be forgiving of that person.
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Author photograph by Ashley Kauschinger
