At the End of the World Interview
Q&A for the End of the World (WordTech, 2025) is a collection of poems from Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue. The collection was inspired by weekly movie nights that the two authors had where they would watch sci-fi films together. Q&A’s structure is a call-and-response, where Robert’s poems pose “questions” about each of the movies while Gushue provides “answers.”
DM: What was the moment that really set this project in motion?
Kim: My fiancé, Tracy, saw that the Smithsonian Sackler Museum was showing a free matinee of Mothra versus Godzilla, and she got us tickets. I’d never seen any of the Godzilla movies, and she immediately suggested that we get an extra ticket for Michael, who is an aficionado, someone obsessed with these movies. We came out of the theater, and I was just flabbergasted by this movie.
I had heard about Godzilla movies, but I kept peppering Michael with questions about how un-sciencey the science fiction was. Michael was like, “You’re missing the point.” I went home, and I immediately wrote a poem called “I Have So Many Questions After Watching Mothra vs. Godzilla.”
We’ve been in a writer’s group together for a long time, so I brought it to the writer’s group. Then, Michael went home immediately and wrote the answer, “I Have The Answers to Mothra vs. Godzilla.” We know each other’s work really well, and because Michael thought my questions were so absurd, he decided I needed an education.
DM: Where did your inspiration to collaborate on this project come from?
Kim: Michael invited me to start going every Wednesday afternoon to his house because he owns all of these movies.
Michael: It was every single week for 9-10 weeks. Normally, I’m a slow writer, but having to respond to Kim’s poems so quickly was a prompt that I don’t normally have.
We decided on a theme, which was the “end of the world.” We divided the theme into three categories: something giant stomps us to death, something giant crashes into us and kills us, or we blow ourselves up.
DM: How did you decide on which movies to watch?
Kim: Michael picked movies that he thought were essential to my education, but as extra added value in the book, we included a list of additional movies that we did not get to watch.
Michael: And we had great fun watching them. I would try to avoid extensive lecturing and would just give a brief summary. Then, Kim would go off and write a poem, and then I would try and catch up with her. My “answers” are probably not completely accurate and are more of a response.
DM: If you were to pick a new-release film to add to the poem collection, what would you pick and why, if anything at all?
Michael: Maybe I would pick Arrival. But genres have become so entangled with each other that a lot of science fiction is really more like horror. They’re more fun to watch. I think you could have plenty of questions about that movie.
Kim: I would want to argue for, although it’s not that recent, 12 Monkeys. La Jetée is the last movie in the book that we wrote a pair of poems about, and it’s an adaptation. So is 12 Monkeys, and it’s really fun to re-watch that movie after watching it. The thing about the original movies is that since they’re all set in the 50s and 60s, we forget how much racism and sexism were just sort of taken for granted. I think there’s no way not to see them with nuance.
DM: Do you think if you were to write this book based on modern sci-fi movies, that your general sentiments and thoughts would remain the same?
Kim: You would have to say yes, not only because we’re in a different place in terms of fear of nuclear annihilation, but also just the special effects. I mean, talk about how movies have changed.
Michael: I think science fiction movies tend to reflect the anxieties and concerns of the times. Our concerns are different now. But also, I think there’s a real purity to the 1950s science fiction movies where sci-fi was a new genre, and they were creating stuff for the first time. Movie genres have been smashed together so often in order to attract wider audiences to the point that sci-fi is almost not even the same thing. Q&A For The End of The World would be a very, very different project today.
DM: Which of the films’ directors would you most want to sit down with and have a conversation with? Would you ask Kim’s question-poems, talk about Michael’s answer-poems, or have a conversation about them both?
Kim: I have questions for the director of the Godzilla movies (Ishiro Honda).
Michael: I’d certainly want to ask Honda about the complexities of putting it [Godzilla] together. Honda has done other things besides Godzilla films, but it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about the studio system, and how he negotiated through the studios to get those made too. There’s also the whole Godzilla evolution, where Godzilla is a villain through Mothra vs. Godzilla, and then he becomes the hero of Japanese culture, where he’s defending Japan from things like smog monsters, which represents everything bad that comes out of America.
DM: “I Have No Answers to La Jetee,” clearly the movie was very avant garde and quite an inspiration to films following its release. Interestingly enough, Michael, it feels like you do give an answer to the film and its subject matter like you do have an understanding, but at the end you say you don’t know what it means.
So then, why in particular was this the poem you found yourself having “no answers” to, despite having a lot to say?
Michael: The film itself is inexhaustible. Its themes are entangled with many of my obsessions: the themes of time, memory, the substance of the past and the substance of the future, things like that. Even though I have seen it a bunch of times, I still find it mysterious. There’s something inexplicable about the end, as there is with all moments of beauty.
What’s compelling is, “what do they [themes] evoke inside us?” is a question I really don’t have an answer to. Even though it might seem like a satisfactory poem to read, I don’t really feel like I know the film yet.
Kim: It’s the one movie in all of the group that resists narrative the most. You can’t understand the beginning until you’ve seen the end.
DM: Kim, this next one is for you. “I Have So Many Questions.” This piece feels like the wrap-up of the continual conversation between you and Michael. The poem has a sense of finality not only to the conversation, but to the discussions of reappearing themes and subject matters in sci-fi films (the portrayal of women, frequent religious undertones, questioning the morality of humanity, nuclear annihilation, etc.).
Kim: How did it feel to end the conversation? Do you think it’s best that some questions go unanswered? I think that what these types of movies do is reflect American culture. But also, it was a way for me to actually learn more about Michael. We’ve been close friends for a very long time, and it was a different sort of understanding. This obsession of his goes back to childhood, so in a way, it was like investigating his childhood again with him. There’s that personal part of how these movies affected me because they were seen with Michael.
Then there’s also sort of that larger conversation about the purpose of pop culture, the purpose of these kinds of cultural touchstones for serving as a mirror of the larger cultural obsessions, and the imagery that we sort of get imprinted with and how that affects us, how that affects our identity as Americans. I just think that with these movies, there’s something that is worth examining further. And Michael was right. I needed an education in this.
DM: Do you think you’ve fully come to embrace that? Do you think by the end of when you wrote Q&A For The End of The World, that “I Have So Many Questions” embodies that feeling?
Kim Yes. My skepticism remains, but I do have a greater appreciation for science fiction.
DM: What movie are you both looking forward to seeing next? Will you stick with watching sci-fi movies or switch to another genre?
Michael: This has been an ongoing discussion between Kim and I’ve offered to switch genres, but that’s an open question. As far as our projects go, I’ll go see anything.
DM: Is there anything else you want to say about this collection now?
Kim: I made up a form for the poems themselves that helped sort of propel them forward for me. So, you will notice that there’s repeating end-words. Each poem is written in couplets. The end word of the second line becomes the end word of the next stanza’s first line, and then I repeat the first line in its entirety as the last line. Having that form gave me a shapeliness for putting these together. I tend to write more in forms than Michael does. Michael’s free verse ended up being, for the most part, in couplets, because I had started that way, but we decided it was okay for the questions to be formally different than the answers as well. So, I think that the poems still remain distinct. They reflect our personalities.
Michael: The whole project from the beginning was a lot of fun. I was amazed at how quickly it went, how quickly it got picked up and into the public eye. I also had so much fun writing the notes, which are a little bit eccentric. I just try to pick the weirdest stuff about each movie and say it. And I had a great deal of fun, so I hope people don’t bypass that either.
DM: The element of collaboration is very central to Q&A. In what way does the collection speak for the art that collaborative efforts can produce?
Kim: Both of us have written books in collaboration with others before, and I don’t know that a lot of poets are doing these kinds of collaborations. But both of us are drawn to it.
Michael: If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said, “I don’t even understand how something like poetry can be collaborative, since it’s so personal.”
Kim: I never would have thought I’d be doing back-to-back collaborative things. For me, a lot of that is a direct consequence of the pandemic, and wanting to feel like I just wanted to connect more with other artists whose work I admired, and collaboration is one way to do that.
Working with someone else sort of pulls you out of yourself, and you end up doing stuff that you normally wouldn’t.
Michael: You can’t underestimate community and collaboration, and those kinds of things that link us together. It’s so important.