Catching up on Creative Process with Brink Literary Fellow Simone Zapata

Re:Viewed by clayton scofield

Summer 2025

RE:VIEW

2023 Brink Literary Fellow Simone Zapata showcased an exhibition of work called Required Transfusion March 7th–21st, 2025 in Iowa City. The body of work expands on Zapata’s work published in Brink Issue 7: Relief. 

Required Transfusion explores medical malpractice and bodily disintegration through erasure. Words are subtracted from medical documents and displayed alongside reduction cuts of CT scans that visualize the body breaking down over time. 

Across genre and form, Zapata explores processes of cutting away—words from documents or material from linoleum blocks—to make meaning of what has been lost and cannot be returned to. 

Clay: How does site specificity shift the meaning or experience of your body of work? (As in, the context of this particular site of the exhibition.)

Zapata: Required Transfusion is a series of reduction-cut linoleum prints based on my aunt’s CT scans, which evidenced that her colon cancer had metastasized past the point of intervention. Since I knew that Required Transfusion was going to be placed in a medical school, I wanted to leverage the knowledge that students and practitioners would apply to the work. This motivated me to study the technicalities of CT scans, how nodules form in the lungs and what their different sizes indicate, what cues warrant additional testing versus discharge. I was invested in sharing a lexicon with my viewers, and as many writers know, working with unfamiliar terminology—what Brink contributor Elizabeth McTernan calls “productive misuse” of tools—is an especially ripe place for experimentation. One such term that came up is “ground glass opacity,” a relatively common occurrence that presents as a haziness in the lungs; metaphors are everywhere! Inhabiting this vantage point also allowed me to treat Required Transfusion as a kind of object study, and that de-personalization was a refreshing place to create from.

C: In one form, we can experience an excerpt of this project published as printed matter in Brink. In March, you showcased an excerpt as an exhibition at The University of Iowa. How do these different iterations expand your understanding of your creative work?

Z: The movement between forms, scales, processes, and audiences really underscores the power of adaptation. When practiced with care and intention, diversions from one iteration to another never lose the potency of the original; they layer it. Adaptation creates dimensionality, an energetic tension that defines itself outside of the artist’s control. There’s a certain trust that needed to develop (is still developing) between myself and my work in order for that tension to feel generative rather than constrictive. Whenever I begin a new iteration, my default fidelity is to the source—or rather, my interpretation of the source. I fixate on “getting it right,” being “accurate,” and this is most often to the detriment of my work and my process (and my sanity). It took many, many drafts of Required Transfusion before I abandoned my allegiance to the “source” and followed what the work wanted to do.

I’m understanding now that my aim for accuracy becomes a scapegoat for what I’m actually confronting: my limited interpretations, and an anxious attachment to these interpretations. When the work isn’t turning out the way I thought it would—the way I want it to—this is a signal to step back rather than double-down. Now that I think about it, this lesson extends into everyday life, too; the same approaches yield the same results. I used to think that changing my approach meant changing my tactic, but I found that tactics are just pawns in service of the approach. The way we approach challenge is rooted in how we perceive that challenge. To approach it differently, we have to be willing for the paradigm through which we view it to shift.

C: How do you discover ways of meaning making through your process of working with reduction, across media?

Z: Ah, well, I’ll continue riffing a bit about paradigms, since they provide the foundation for meaning making. The most radical paradigm shift I encountered with Required Transfusion (the exhibition) was learning to reframe mistakes as detours. I know that sounds trite and I’m rolling my eyes as I write it, but hear me out:

Reduction is a printmaking technique that creates multilayered images using a single matrix—in this case, a block of linoleum. Unlike single-layer or multi-block prints that can be reproduced, a reduction print is limited in its edition because once you carve each layer, there’s no going back to print the previous one. As the matrix reduces, the final image emerges. Required Transfusion is a six-layer reduction print.

After each layer is printed, the room for error gets smaller. Typically you double the amount of prints you want to end up with so that half can be test prints. I quadrupled this number, and I still ended up with only one shot to print the sixth and final layer. Overcaffeinated hands, dull carving tools, air temperature, the viscosity of the ink, the humidity of the paper—there are countless circumstances that show up in the final print, and it’s impossible to account for all of them. Outside the studio I worked in, every couple hours a train would pass and the vibrations would loosen the settings of the press ever so slightly. I didn’t catch this until I was ten prints deep, totally losing my mind over what variable was causing these inconsistencies. My point is, no amount of drafts, plans, or practice will give you exactly what you set out for. Printmakers know this, and they embrace it. Writers? Not so much. Writing gets all the revision it wants, and no matter how much you give it, it seems to always want more. You can edit a piece clear into oblivion; will it be what you want it to be then?

In printmaking—and I imagine in other analog art forms—to fix a mistake does not mean to redo it; it means to adapt to it, to make space for it, to learn from it. A brilliant piece of work is brilliant because of the artist's ability to improvise and listen to what the work has to teach them. The work becomes a collaboration between you and [                   ]: call it God, call it chance, call it synchronicity—whatever it is, it’s conspiring in your favor, though not in the way you anticipate.

The series of prints I exhibited in March was far from what I aimed for, but by the time I completed it, what I aimed for no longer mattered to me; my aim had been rooted in this self-imposed imperative to “get it right.” What I got instead was a humbling record of bodily endurance: my big ideas and subtle instincts, messy progress and gratifying failures. In my attempt to render the composition and collapse of my aunt’s body, I had inadvertently recorded my own. I’m still making meaning from this.

C: How did your time as Brink Literary Fellow impact this work or influence where you are in the project now?

This project definitely wouldn’t be where it is today without the support and guidance of Brink. I had been working on the printed piece for so long and submitting it everywhere, just getting rejection after rejection. I convinced myself that the piece made no sense, that it wasn’t even poetry, that I was theorizing into a void. When I came across Brink at the AWP bookfair in 2023, I met the editors and I was excited by the work they were publishing, and I thought, let me give this weird project one more shot. And lo and behold, I had found my audience and a crew of passionate, critical thinking partners who reinvigorated my belief in my work.

I think, aside from the validation that my work mattered, the most impactful part of the Brink Literary Fellowship was the questions the editors asked of Required Transfusion and my process composing it. Here’s where I really began the work of letting go of that compulsion to “get it right,” and to let the piece breathe. Brink brought a whole range of interpretations and ways to relate to it, and my concerns of singular legibility began to subside. I had forgotten that was what drew me to poetry in the first place: the universe that a single poem can open up for a reader, and the different points of contact it makes with all who choose to dwell in it. It’s one of the most thrilling and comforting things about being alive.      

Z: What did you learn through this exhibition when you returned to your work?

While preparing for the exhibition, I lamented my growing pile of test print after test print. The paper was expensive! And the month of full-time attention and energy I had given these six prints. But I had never worked on a visual art piece at this scale, and it had been years since I had an active printmaking practice, so I tried to cut myself some slack.

After taking some time and space from the experience, I returned to those test prints last month, and you know, they’re not that bad! I went back to the studio to experiment with them and what I had left of my linoleum block, and I got nine more prints! What I’m finding now is that this series is actually modular; I can rearrange the prints to create a kind of flip-book effect of undulation, which, ironically, is the effect I was fretful I had lost in my adaptation from the CT scans. 

C: What’s next for you and this project?

Z: I’ll be incorporating these prints into my manuscript-in-progress, which is now eight (!!) years in the making. That’s a long time, right? I’m not sure who I was eight years ago. But right now I’m the 2025 Poetry Fellow with Miami Book Fair, so I’m living in Miami for the year and working on this manuscript full-time.

Also! Key fact here: the section of my manuscript that I applied to Miami Book Fair with is the very one I worked on with Brink! I’m not sure who needs to hear this today, but I know I need to hear it: Do not give up on the work that excites you. If you love it—in all of its complication, its mess, its jagged edges—others will too, but it takes time and patience to find those people. Find them, and let them travel with you on the path that your work wants to take.  

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SIMONE ZAPATA is a queer writer, editor, and educator from San José, CA. Her recent work appears in Dilettante Army, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Brink Literary Journal, where she served as their inaugural Emerging Writer Fellow in Hybrid Writing. Simone is currently the 2025 Poetry Fellow for Miami Book Fair, and she holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. (simonezapata.info)

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