Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with Max Gregg from our thirteenth issue.
Tiny Spoon: What kindles your creativity?
Max Gregg: A day when I don’t have to go to work. A day when I go to work. A day when I’m depressed. A day when I’m giddy. The birds in my yard. I’m inspired all the time, and I have to write all the time. What makes me write well is a different question.
Tiny Spoon: Are there any artists/ heroines/ idols/ friends that you look up to?
Max Gregg: Trans people. Oscar Wilde, my stepfather John, and everyone who is in prison, has been in prison, or who has been impacted by the carceral system. My sister Lauren, a brilliant lawyer who is working toward dismantling that system.
Tiny Spoon: Do you have specific superstitions or divinatory practices that you adhere to?
Max Gregg: Tarot, bibliomancy, and dream analysis are all commonplace in my household (I live with poets) and family lore has it that my sister and I are descended from water witches. My partner (the performance and video artist Red Rae) and I have experimented with dowsing as part of a hybrid video piece called Divine Portal, made in collaboration with the ghosts of Gertrude Stein and Divine. Divine Portal is showing at Area 405 in Baltimore, as a part of Red’s show, Paradise Portals (May 9-June 13, 2025).
Tiny Spoon: We love insight into the creative process. Could you share what it is like for you, either with your work that appears in Tiny Spoon or in general?
Max Gregg: DREAMS OF TRANSSEXUALS AS WILDLIFE REFUGE was initially generated through a technique I learned from Raisa Tolchinsky’s Glass Jaw (Persea, 2024), in which she takes a sentence of prose and writes in between each word. Tolchinsky’s method of feminist reappropriation seemed like a formal strategy for enacting the kind of writing my MFA thesis advisor Sumita Chakraborty suggested I was edging toward, which was a writing that would get inside of transphobic discourse and make it say something it didn’t want to say. The text I used to generate the first draft of this prose-poem was a sentence from a 1973 study that came out of the University of Virginia (the same school where I completed my MFA) called “Dreams of Transsexuals Awaiting Surgery.” The study sought to undermine trans ways of knowing by using our dreams against us. I wrote inside and against it, and this text, in the end became a container for my rage and grief during the 2025 election cycle. I revised a lot, throughout that season. The multiple revisions felt important; I got to perform not just one, but a series of operations which dramatically altered the original body of text, leaving a smooth and resistant surface for readers to interact with.
Tiny Spoon: Do you have any current or future projects that you are working on that you would like to share?
Max Gregg: This poem is one in a sequence, all written against the walls of the same 1973 dream study. It is part of the manuscript, CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR THE SURVIVAL OF ANCIENT GENDERS, which contains other poems drawn from the trans medical archives with a special focus on Virginia history.
Tiny Spoon: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others?
Max Gregg: I speak in the poem about dissection and the idea of “anatomical truth;” alongside the curiosity cabinet and the asylum (“men in white”), the practice of anatomy here summons the violent systems of thought and practice put into place during the Enlightenment: a system we are still, in many respects, working inside of. Here in Virginia, that has historically looked like the violent subjection and ownership of human beings. UVA”s medical school, much like many other medical schools during Thomas Jefferson’s era, was involved in unethical practices of body-snatching, and performed dissections on these bodies for the purposes of proving false claims of white racial superiority (see: James Breeden, “Body Snatchers and Anatomy Professors: Medical Education in Nineteenth-Century Virginia”; Elizabeth Catte, Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia). I say in the poem that “the subject is an elegy;” this idea comes from Billy Ray Belcourt’s amazing A History of My Brief Body. Subject might, in the context of my work, mean test subject, or it might mean (as Michel Foucault uses it) an individual who is subject to power. I’m interested in histories of subjection, and how we might, through creative practice, shape a collective way of speaking back against that lonely idea that we are discrete individuals who only exist in relation to the systems that bestow and violate our rights. I have been fascinated to learn about Bacon’s Rebellion and the great lengths to which the ruling classes went in Tsenacommacah or colonial Virginia to shore up power by dividing our communities along racial lines (See: Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South; Ethan A. Schmidt, The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia). This poem is indebted to the Chartists, Luddites, and other radicals and machine-breakers of the 19th-century; it was in reading about them that I learned the political history of the word “combine.” This got me thinking about what can happen between us in proximity: when we touch, mix, and conspire together (with one another and with nonhuman life). If you want to read any of these books or articles, DM me. I have PDF’s.
Tiny Spoon: Is there anything else you would like others to know about you, your creations, or beyond?
Max Gregg: I’m starting an archive of transsexual dreams. You can submit yours at: https://www.max-gregg.com/about
Tiny Spoon: Where can people learn more about what you do?
Max Gregg: Insta: @mid_evil | Website: max-gregg.com