Travis Cohen
What have you been up to these last couple of months?
2025 has been a very busy two months. I’m currently in the process of finishing my MFA at Florida International University with my thesis defense coming up the first week of March. I’ve begun sending the manuscript out to contest and trying to find an agent and submitting even more than usual to try and use all this momentum. More submissions means more rejections, so that’s been a part of it these last couple months too, though I guess that’s always a part of it. I also applied to PhD programs in Creative Writing in December and January and have started hearing back lately, and again, more submissions means courting more rejection. This year has started out with a lot of rejection, but it’s also involved a lot of exciting news and new beginnings, like bringing Gulf Stream Magazine, the literary journal I currently serve as the Editor-in-Chief for, back to print for the first time in 17 years. More submissions means more rejection, but it also means more room for hope.
What are your long-term creative plans? Are you working on something big and secret or taking it day by day?
I’ve got a lot of projects that I’m excited about. The manuscript that I’m trying to find a home for is a short story collection and all the ideas I have are pivoting away from that. Without getting into too many specifics, I have 5 or 6 longform projects I’ve been wanting to get back into that have either been sitting in a drawer waiting for me to finish my thesis and bring these last two issues of Gulf Stream home or in my notes app or in a pile of index cards that periodically accordion their way across my desk or make my work bag look a bit like a bomb has gone off inside it. But these are good problems to have. I’m very excited about the work, I’m very much looking forward to having my hands full.
What’s the status of your mental health these days? It’s in all ways prosaic to say that we live in trying times. How is the zeitgeist responsible? What are some actionable ways in which you’re taking steps to quiet the void, if any? (If it’s a glass of wine and an episode of Mad Men at the day’s end, that counts, please know that).
Recently, I was fortunate enough to see Ada Limón do a reading at the University of Miami. At one point, while she was talking about meditation, she mentioned that if she doesn’t meditate or have something playing in the background, she feels the weight and pressure of the silence welling up. I don’t know if we try to quiet the void or if we try to scream into it to avoid listening to ourselves in the quiet. In the past year, I’ve lost count of the rejections I’ve received, I’ve stopped trying to keep track of how much of the news is bad news, I’ve seen as many endings in my personal life as I have seen beginnings. But I have been focusing on the beginnings, focusing on hope, focusing on looking forward to things, including change, including uncertainty. I think part of what makes the void so unbearable is that you populate that silence of the unknown, of the empty with your own fears. But emptiness is also a space for things to grow. I’ve been trying to remember this. The new beginnings in my life, whether in love or in work or in where I’ll be living in a few months, these are things I can either look at through the anxious lens of uncertainty (and of course, sometimes I do) or through the excited lens of possibility. I’ve been working harder lately to look through the latter and it’s been good for me.
What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regards to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?
It’s okay not to be okay. I pretty much only write about people who are not okay and mostly ones who don’t know what to make of that or how to internalize the why for that state of not okay. And yes, there is a degree to which that’s Storytelling 101: Only Trouble is Interesting and so on, but for me it has more to do with the resonance of seeing a part of myself reflected in the characters I read and wanting to do that with my own work for people looking for pieces of themselves. I want you to be able to see someone who’s not okay and have that make you feel a little more okay with not being okay because nobody’s okay. There is nothing more human than to feel pain and ask why and not have an answer. I try to write characters who are also asking why because I think it’s important to see and be reminded that we’re not alone, any of us, in this experience.
Why do you create, still, despite the climate and political current and pervasive doubt we’re made slaves to?
Because there is nothing else to do. There is the work. That’s it. The rest is bullshit. It’s not, but it is, it has to be. Doubt is part of it, fear—of the world and of your own failings—is part of it, loathing and loneliness and absolute devastation is part of it, bleak moods that make you not want to move, not want to breathe, not even a little, these are part of it too. But nothing else makes this world a place where I feel alive and feel like living except the work. To quote Sister Corita Kent’s seventh rule of the Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules:
“The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”
When was the last time you told your psychiatrist or therapist something you were afraid to disclose? In your own words, how do you feel about going up against the stigma?
I’ve worked as a therapist and I’ve been in therapy for many years, so it’s been a while since I was afraid of saying something in that room. I would always tell myself the same thing I would tell patients which is that I you can either spend your time and money being honest and maybe get the help you need and deserve, or you can spend your time and money and lie and get very little in return. That’s not to say it’s easy or comfortable to be so vulnerable, it’s just meant to serve as a reminder that growth and healing rarely come from a place of comfort. I’m a fan of the Brené Brown notion of leaning into discomfort.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Find the thing that makes you happiest, that makes you feel like all of yourself and not just a piece, and then find a way to do that all the time. Whatever that work is for you, find a way to give it to yourself. You deserve to be happy, you deserve to be whole. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
Travis Cohen is a Cuban American author and poet whose work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine, Every Day Fiction, (In) Parentheses Magazine, Litro and Permafrost and is forthcoming in the South Dakota Review. He is currently enrolled in Florida International University’s MFA program, where he is the Managing Editor of Gulf Stream Magazine.IG | X