Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Eli Clare, "Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming" (Duke UP, 2025)
Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Clayton Gerard (he/him)
Guest: Eli Clare (he/they)

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features author and activist Eli Clare discussing his new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, Clare explores themes of queerness, disability, nature, time, categories, access, and dreaming. The conversation offers insights into the creative origins of Unfurl, its structural innovations, and the activist, philosophical, and deeply personal roots of its essays and poems. The episode is notable for its exploration of fluid identities, ways of being, and the importance of dreaming liberatory futures.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Structure of Unfurl

• [04:02] Clare describes how Unfurl began with a commission from Alice Sheppard of Kinetic Light, a disability arts ensemble, to write a poem for a performance prioritizing multilayered, nonvisual access. The resulting piece became the title poem and inspired a broader exploration of transformation and kinship.
  • “It was a poem, a long series of almost poetry fragments called ‘Unfurl and Invitation.’ And in that poetry ... I started working with this idea of becoming … transformation and porousness and kin.” (Eli Clare, 04:02)
• [07:20] The book is rooted in four core “practices”: remembering, survival/sorrow, porousness, and dreaming—framed as ongoing, dynamic processes rather than static themes.

2. Practices: Remembering, Survival and Sorrow, Porousness, and Dreaming

• [09:17 – 09:52] These practices reflect lived, embodied processes across time, each rooted in Clare’s decades-long engagement with memory work, survival, attunement with nature, and dreaming futures.
  • “Practices are ongoing and fluid and responsive to conditions, both material and social conditions.” (Eli Clare, 09:52)
• The book treats temporality (past-present-future) as intertwined, “fluid and bendy,” challenging linear Western notions of time.
  • “I write about time as an accordion. I write about time as a trapdoor swinging wide...time arcing, about time skipping...fluid and bendy.” (10:58)
• Clare credits Black feminist thinkers, particularly Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Octavia Butler, with reframing the work of dreaming the future as both personal and collective practice.

3. Porosity: Intimacy with More-than-Human Life

• [15:32] The sense of being “porous” with land, water, and non-human life has shaped Clare’s experience since childhood, despite cultural foreclosure by white supremacy/colonialism.
  • “The practice of porousness ... started for me from a really early age ... people weren’t going to believe that ... But more recently, it’s like, this is a big part of how I move through the world.” (Eli Clare, 15:32)
• Boundary-fluidity extends from literary genre (poetry and prose merging) to gender, resisting rigid binaries in both.

4. The Violence and Limits of Categorical Systems

• [24:31-31:27] In the essay “Creating Categories,” Clare interrogates Library of Congress headings that mis-categorized his earlier book Exile and Pride—erasing self-chosen descriptors, imposing diagnosis, binary gender, and nation-state framings.
  • “Systems of categorization never exist in isolation. They’re always interlocked, they’re reinforcing each other. And that’s part of how the social control of this works.” (Eli Clare, 24:31)
• Calls for flexible, “bendy” categories or, in contexts like gender, abolishing the binary and resisting any new rigid categorization.

5. Access and Intimacy

• [36:31 – 46:43] In “Moving Close to the Ground,” Clare reflects on the intimate and tactile ways that crawling, scooting, or using alternative mobility creates different forms of access and connection to nature—beyond walking.
  • “Moving close to the ground brings me to those details in this incredibly both intimate and porous way.” (Eli Clare, 41:07)
• The concept of “access intimacy” (coined by Mia Mingus) describes the deep connections forged through access practices—sometimes joyful and smooth, sometimes awkward or incomplete.

6. Innovations in Accessible Literary Form

• [50:10 – 58:40] Clare discusses his use of “format notes”—explanatory, descriptive textual guides to the visual arrangement of poems and prose for readers using screen readers or alternative formats.
  • “Format notes are part map and part description ... meant to be a provocation to ask other people—okay, what do format notes look like?” (Eli Clare, 52:36)
• Writing format notes led Clare to revise poems, exemplifying how access work is integral to the creative process, not an afterthought.

7. Dreaming as Practice

• [58:40 – 63:39] Clare highlights “dreaming” as a teachable, collective skill.
  • “Dreaming as a skill we can teach each other ... what gets stolen away when we don’t dream? How does patriarchy and white supremacist settler colonialism benefit from our kidnapped dreams? And how can we teach each other to dream?” (Eli Clare, 59:57)
• He recalls being pushed by queer/trans BIPOC activists to imagine not just what he opposes (the “no’s”), but the affirmative “yeses” and possibilities for the future.

8. Memorable Close: “May Day 2020”

• [64:44 – 67:33] Clare reads the poem “May Day 2020”, celebrating mutual aid and the refusal to give up imagination even amidst the losses of the pandemic.
  • “We must not relinquish imagination.” (Eli Clare, 67:31)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the formation of practices:
  “There was something about writing this book that clarified those four framings, those four actions, those four ways of living as practices ... the writing itself clarified the process behind all four of those.” (Eli Clare, 07:20)
• On porosity and childhood:
  “The sense of being porous with the land, with the water, with the earth... started for me from a really early age. For a long time, I didn’t talk about it... But more recently, it’s like, this is a big part of how I move through the world.” (Eli Clare, 15:32)
• On categories:
  “We need to create categories that are flexible, that are changeable, that bend and break to match what’s being categorized rather than vice versa.” (Eli Clare, 24:31) “As a categorization system, I believe the gender binary needs to go. ... There are way too many genders in the world to easily categorize.” (Eli Clare, 24:31)
• On moving close to the ground:
  “Moving close to the ground slows me down. It makes those details, it makes the spores on the undersides of ferns and the orange newts that are hanging out in the crevices... incredibly both intimate and porous way.” (Eli Clare, 41:07)
• On “access intimacy”:
  “We need to take Mia Mingus’ wonderful coining and early work about access intimacy and develop it and deepen it. And I hope that this essay of mine does a little bit of that work.” (Eli Clare, 46:43)
• On format notes and access experiments:
  “I realized...I had written a bunch of pieces where the literal shape of the piece wasn’t necessarily accessible. ... What do format notes look like? If format is important on a page, then how do we make where the words are on the page more accessible to more readers and listeners?” (Eli Clare, 52:36)
• On dreaming as skill:
  “Dreaming as a skill we can teach each other and as a skill we can practice together.” (Eli Clare, 59:57)
• Closing poem:
  “We must not relinquish imagination.” (“May Day 2020”, Eli Clare, 67:31)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:36] Start of the interview: book summary and author introduction (skip to here)
• [04:02] Origin of Unfurl; commissioned poem and the evolution toward the book
• [07:20] The four practices described in the introduction (remembering, survival/sorrow, porosity, dreaming)
• [10:58] Eli’s conception of time; influences from disability theory and Black feminists
• [15:32] Porosity with the more-than-human world; childhood experiences and cultural barriers
• [24:31] The violence of categories; Library of Congress headings and their limits; dreaming of post-binary worlds
• [36:31] “Moving Close to the Ground”: access, intimacy, and non-walking forms of connection with nature
• [41:38] Access intimacy, Mia Mingus, and deepening the idea in disability practice
• [52:36] The invention of format notes for accessible poetry
• [58:40] Dreaming as a practice to be collectively cultivated, including healing from trauma and shifting from “no’s” to “yeses”
• [64:44] Reading of “May Day 2020”
• [67:33] Closing thanks and invitation to read Unfurl

Tone and Language

The conversation is contemplative, generous, and intimately engaged. Both participants speak in reflective, occasionally poetic language. Clare’s tone is thoughtful, vulnerable, and activist-oriented, always returning to the idea that lived experience, community, and dreaming are practices of both survival and rebellion.

Summary Takeaway

This episode offers a deep, accessible exploration of the philosophy and practice behind Unfurl, emphasizing that processes like memory, survival, porosity, access, and dreaming are collective, dynamic, and intertwined. Eli Clare calls listeners to question rigid systems—not just by critiquing or naming harm, but by inventing new, flexible modes of living, writing, and relating, always making space for rebellion, joy, and liberatory imagination.