i wrote a poem (as one does) and then it languished, half-born, split between my iphone notes and a journal from 2019, until last june, when i was submitting for a flurry of different awards and publications and the like, and i realized i had run out of all my good finished poetry to submit. and so this one came back to life, out of pure necessity for a submission i’d told myself i must submit to or else i would have to hang my head in shame forevermore, and i sent it off feeling way less sure of its caliber than i did the other things i sent out for my summer round of prize submissions. and then of course it was the only one that got accepted for anything.
the poem is called blasphemy, americana and the head judge, roger robinson, described it as “the syncopation of jazz [being] used to comment on the maelstrom of American politics,” which is a sentence i love and feel deeply emotionally attached to now. it won one of the ten highly commended prizes that the competition gives after it awards 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place each year, and if you want to support my work you can buy a hard copy of the anthology here (or you can buy an ebook version to read from your devices).
which is all very well and exciting, but what’s even weller and exciting-er is that as part of being on the list of winning poets i got to give a mini interview to the prize committee, which i present to you now in lieu of having any other bulk of words to send your way for the end of the month. actually, i would have shared this anyway, even if i wasn’t stupidly and mind-numbingly lodged within the chokehold of writers block, because, well, it’s really fucking nice to have a space to talk about your work with other writers, and i very much appreciate the opportunity to talk at length about some of my underpinning beliefs and literary philosophy as a grown-up amongst other grown-ups. i don’t know when the last time any of y’all had someone come up to you and ask you questions about what was going on inside of your head like you were a real adult, but it had been a minute for me and it felt really fucking good to be acknowledged. the end. go buy the fucking anthology !!!
What’s the first thing you wrote or read that made you want to be a writer?
i don’t know if there was one specific book i read that made me want to be a writer, but i do remember that once i learned to read i had my head in a book for about six or seven years straight. i think the simple fact of being very young and aware of books and language, but not yet being initiated into literateness, made that jump into understanding written language fascinating for me - it was like having the world opened to me, like an initiation into a much bigger existence. and so i read a lot, and i started writing the same way any kindergartener or first grader starts writing and telling stories, and somewhere not too long after in that whole experience i went from being fascinated by other people’s writing to discovering that i could someday maybe do that. and then before you knew it i was one of those kids who was six years old telling people, “i’m gonna be an author when i grow up.”
Why do you write?
i write because i think i have to in order to stay sane and understand what’s happening in the world, and in my life, and in my head. i’ve heard other writers describe it as something along the lines of ‘i don’t know what i think until i’ve written about it,’ which i find true for myself. there’s that essay by lorrie moore called how to become a writer and the very first line is just, “first, try to be something, anything, else.” and i think, to paraphrase a very rambling path over the twenty-seven-years i’ve been here, that couldn’t be more true. i’ve tried to do other things. i’ve even managed to succeed at doing some of them. but i just have to write, and the harder i fight that fact of my nature the more off the rails it all gets.
What obstacles have you overcome as a writer?
i was kicked out of highschool and then institutionalized against my will, because i was a depressed and extremely opinionated and extremely scared teenager, and one of the consequences of that meant i scared a lot of people, whether because they genuinely loved me and wanted me to be alright or because i was always starting arguments about what was real and what was fair and what was good or not, a line of questioning that a traditional u.s.american psychiatrist sees in a patient and immediately deems as a problem with authority, compliance, or reality itself. and then i went to college, and had to withdraw because i was still dealing with the aftermath of my childhood & my time being shoved in and out of hospitals and therapist offices and rooms where adults told me that my feelings about the world were wrong, and then i spent two years floating around until i went back to community college again. i did about the equivalent of an associate’s degree in literature, and found myself deeply stimulated and also just incredibly moved by the community i was in and the fact that these cost-effective, resilient public institutions not only existed for people who were poor or lost or getting back on their feet, but that you could go there and get a genuinely good education and meet like-minded people and be effectively challenged and grow into yourself. and then, when i had just a few credits left and i had already applied to get a bachelor’s somewhere else, i had this big early twenties quarter life crisis where i felt this deep conviction and angst to be leave school and to be open and to just write, instead of talking about all the things other people had written. so i dropped out, much to everyone’s horror, and then i did some more backpacking and i fell in and out of love and i met loads of people and tried to really become a human being in a way that made sense to me, all of which are things that, even if it appeared to everyone else that i had lost my mind, ended up being an ongoing source of material that i’m still drawing from today. and so i was content to just float for a little while, up until i read an academic paper about climate collapse and the political ramifications of crop losses and water insecurity and grain prices going up and the way that all of the very bad things that our capitalist and neocolonist systems are already doing day in and day out would only become intensified by climate catastrophe. and then i had a much bigger and worse existential crisis that consisted of me being too depressed to get out of bed or do anything for six months, until my boyfriend at the time suggested i go back to therapy. and then i found someone who did cognitive behavioral therapy and it rewired my brain. and then i went back to school to study geography & planning, because i had finally determined with my therapist that even if i accomplished zip squat in my efforts to make the world a more humane and habitable place, i would rather fail in all my efforts than be old and dying one day and have to answer to myself and the universe for why i had not even tried to make a difference. and so i spent two years studying urban geography and i became deeply engaged in campus politics and in the environmental club, and i had a fantastic time showing up and causing a fuss in meetings with the college staff and administrator; and then i transferred to a bachelors program in a new state where i knew no one at the exact same time that i got out of an abusive relationship, and the stress of being totally physically isolated and trying to reconstruct my sense of self and reality after having been gaslit for so long caused me to have a nervous breakdown and drop out of school for the third time.
all of which is to say: i have no college degree, let alone an MFA in creative writing, because i am a three time college drop out (arguably the funniest number of times to have done it, although four would probably be even funnier). and since i did not go the traditional route (or what is currently considered the traditional route for middle class aspiring creatives here in north america), i have had difficulty getting into organizations and finding well paid writing or editorial work - even though i’ve been publishing on & off since i was sixteen - because i don’t have a degree or the network that a degree gets you. and of course that gets me down on myself sometimes, and of course i’m already neurotic and melancholy as a writer (what else would i do with those traits, but turn it into words?), and of course i would like to make better money or feel more stable and less like i’m working against an invisible clock i’ve never seen but can hear in the other room no matter where i go. but i refuse to just give up and get an office job and stop trying to build the life i’ve been building all this time. i’ve managed to live a really interesting life despite (or perhaps because of the fact) that i refused to take the path that was expected of me as a suburban born and raised white kid, and i’ve made it work this far more or less. and if i’m neurotic and melancholic and can’t afford health insurance and don’t have any of the inside access to the journals or fellowships or writing rooms that a properly educated writer might have, at the very least it’s all good material.
How do you juggle writing with your everyday life?
i’ve tried to build writing into my everyday life as much as possible, to varying degrees of success, and i’ve also tried to make it a point to not beat myself up if i’m not writing. i think it’s very common, whether because of externalized pressure and commentary or because we’re all pretty hard on ourselves to begin with, to believe that we need to be writing every single day and willing to fight tooth and nail to make that daily practice the foundation of our lives (whatever that means), but i refuse to do it. i despise the mechanization of human life that capitalism and colonialism has an extremely vested interest in keeping us all engaged in, and i refuse to give power to a capitalist or patriarchal narrative about what my work and creative life should look like. i also believe it’s much more effective for your brain and heart and soul and body in the long run to find as many ways to be kind to yourself as possible, versus trying to squeeze every ounce of creative juice and energy you have out into your work. i spent more years being mean to myself than anyone should, and i eventually reached a point where i decided i just wasn’t going to bully myself anymore. creating this separation between what i had been taught artists should be, and what i myself wanted in my life as an artist, was the first step in really being able to define or even question what i wanted and on what terms. and knowing what i want and on what terms - to write but never to the extent i drive myself insane, to be creative but not under contractual obligation by my own inner critic to constantly be making more, to allow myself to exist and be and experience life in a way that refuses to cede power to the current power structures which are killing people and our planet and other life forms, and are interested only in the profit of the few at the expense of the billions - has all helped me to keep myself from falling back into the trap of self hatred. and so now if i start judging myself because i haven’t been writing lately, i think, “this is my internalized capitalism speaking,” and i’m able to detach from the critical voice because capitalism is an incredibly fucking stupid and wasteful organization of time and energy and resources. i think, also, as someone who has been incredibly hard on themselves in the past and has been disenfranchised and abused and traumatized by the psychiatric industrial complex, i simply do not want to contribute to the cruelty i or anyone else has to go through in this lifetime. it simply doesn’t serve me, and it doesn’t make my writing any better either; and even though it means i maybe won’t write as much as i want to or could hypothetically be capable of, it’s more important to me to have balance and take care of myself and find other ways of channeling that creative spirit and creative rage instead of obsessing over having to prove myself as a singular, irreplaceable genius or whatever these very patriarchal, very isolating narratives tell artists they should be. and i think of van gogh and sylvia plath and everyone else who made these incredibly beautiful things but also suffered very much in their lifetimes, and how people who clearly don’t have firsthand experience with things like this will say things like, “well, that’s the cost of great art,” or “well, if they had been healthy they never would have made such good work.” which, not only do i not believe for a single second, but also feels like a very flippant and consumptive, entitled stance to take toward these people who experienced horrible pain and suffering and who, in reality, owed you or i nothing in terms of making these works. it feels very removed from the reality of making things, and very in line with the whole trope of the suffering artist, and i no longer want to do it and i no longer believe in it. i don’t think i have to cut myself off from the world and suffer in order to be a good or great artist; i would like to maybe cut myself off occasionally, to focus and go inward and fully commit, but i would also like to come back and go dancing and have my friends over for dinner. and if i’m wrong about all of this, and the only way to make truly great, legacy-creating art is to torture yourself and give everything else up, then it’s not worth it to me. i write because i need to know what i’m thinking, and also because it’s stimulating and challenging and rewarding and breathtaking, but i’m not going to write at the expense of my well being.
and not that anyone asked for a further critique of the suffering artist trope, but suffering is not created in isolation. van gogh had been institutionalized and hospitalized, which made others suspicious of him and robbed him of many chances for community and intimacy and mutual trust, things which are necessary in order for all human beings to be well and thrive and emotionally settle. maybe he had the genetic predisposition toward depression or insanity, but he lived in a society that was cruel and violent and unkind to people with that predisposition, and no one has ever gotten better from cruelty. and if we want to talk writers, we can return to sylvia plath - brilliant, undeniably i think, but also living in a time when that mistrust and suspicion and violence very much dominated what it meant to be mentally ill, let alone – god forbid – mentally ill and a woman. and she married an older man who was also a poet, and he left her for another woman, and she was not only depressed but raising two children on her own in a country in which she had no family or background care. and of course a man marrying a younger woman and then leaving her and their children for another woman is a tale as old as tale, and a tale that is bolstered and made possible by the invisible hand of patriarchy. and what is also bolstered and made real is that the care work and responsibility of raising children primarily falls to women because of patriarchy; and the isolation that a newly shunned woman and her two young children will face, not only because of the fear of contagion that all repressed societies have toward the unlucky, but also because raising two children alone takes up all the time and space in your life that connecting with others and maintaining outside friendships used to fit into – all of this is a feature of patriarchy and capitalism and the isolation they create for us. and then of course there are the suicides itself – there are scholars (and not necessarily a small minority) who believe van gogh was shot by a member of the village he was living in who had bullied him already, and that he claimed to have shot himself in order to save his bully from trial or fallout, and thus he died slowly over the course of two or three days determined to either make it through or to not take anyone down with him in the process. and then you have sylvia, and the infamous head-in-the-oven jokes, but what most people don’t understand is that the act of suicide can be incredibly impulsive, even in people who have struggled with depression for an extremely long time, and that simply having an accessible way to do it right then and there can be the difference between if you die or don’t. suicide rates increase exponentially in households in the u.s., for example, that have firearms, versus those that don’t; and in sylvia’s time, the rate of suicide in england went down drastically after carbon monoxide was phased out from the public gas supply. it went from accounting for more than 40% of the suicides in england and wales in 1963, to the gas being eliminated completed by 1975. and then there’s her electroshock therapy and institutionalization and the impact both of those things had on her long-term health and wellbeing – all of these are not events that occur in isolation or that shouldn’t be considered when we talk about who’s a genius and who’s tortured and how to make it as an artist and at what cost.
and so not only are suffering and illness and isolation the result of these very real cultural and legal barriers toward equity and self-determination and wellbeing, but there are also the circumstantial elements – the fact that she lived in a home in a time and place where you could give yourself carbon monoxide poisoning easily and without any planning or effort, or the fact that van gogh was shot in a field by someone who he didn’t ask to be shot by, but whom he was vulnerable to because he had already been labeled as ‘odd.’ and so i refuse to believe that that level of suffering is required to make good art, and i refuse to believe it’s worth it even if it is necessary. and so when i am working between my writing life and my mental health and late stage capitalism and the rest of my life, and trying to find that balance, i prioritize my wellbeing and i focus my energy on projects that aren’t as stressful or don’t require marinating in a basin of total darkness. and i try to carry on and i try to make art that feels good to make, and no matter what else goes on i refuse to bully myself into being more productive. and regardless of anything else that’s going on in my life, i do my best not to add to the dogpile of cruelty and to instead treat myself like the eternally sensitive, occasionally anxious, incredibly opinionated, lonely person that at least part of me is.
another factor of this question of juggling and finding balance – i think the luxury of being able to make art or write all day without having another job or raising children or taking care of the house or other people, is one that has been afforded to a relatively minuscule portion of the world’s population since we started having written language. to this day, whether or not someone has that capability, or will ever have that capability, is firmly situated in issues of class and race and privilege and circumstance. to even be literate was a privilege afforded only to the relative few for most of recorded human history, and when we look at not only just the canon but really all of who was afforded the ability or time or space or education to write, the numbers are tiny. and now we have higher levels of literacy, and a beautiful public library system, and public education and institutions and all of these other little beacons of hope that continue to exist despite the increasing frequency of far-right attacks on them, and so for the first time in history the gap of possibility has been widened. which is not to say it’s an even playing field; it’s not. but to pursue writing full time or seek publication or representation in any way is a relatively newer phenomenon for anyone outside of a very small circle of the upper class, and even with this new window of possibility it’s still nearly impossible to write full time. i think of this article in the new york times which of course now that i’m referencing it i can’t find anywhere – but a few years ago a latin american man who worked as a janitor or a street sweeper – something in heavy, menial, manual labor – published an incredible novel, and the new york times treated it with the worst exoticism i’ve seen in a while (which is saying something for the new york times). like, can you believe a person who is poor and didn’t get their mfa at the iowa writer’s workshop or intern with us or another paper of our caliber is able to write about the human experience and create effective moving art? which is not only gross, but is also just a blatant misrepresentation of reality. most of the people in the history of the world have had to make things with very little time and very little extra energy and very little privacy, and yet they made things anyways – it’s something that we’ve been doing for as far back as we can see, and what we’ve done is to take these extremely rarified examples of professional novelists and people who grew up with the money to fuck off and take a few years to write without worrying about paying the bills, and we’ve placed them at the pinnacle of human art and creative achievement. and i think it’s important to demystify just what kind of struggles it takes to pursue art in the current hierarchy of things without a specialized degree or family money or mommy and daddy paying your rent or getting you your first internship somewhere. and it’s important and maybe even crucial to make things despite these limitations, and to persist with writing despite the seeming impossibility of it, and to help people to continue making things on their own terms and in their own time, and to actively create and support ways for amateur and not-yet-financially-successful writers and artists to keep making things. and it’s important also to remind people who haven’t “made it” yet that making it is as much plain old luck (and privilege) as it is about talent or hard work or skills learned. furthermore, if we view making it as the goal, we will have lost a very real reason to practice creativity and be out here doing this in the first place, which is that the act of making and contemplating these things and trying to make things in our mind’s image, whether it’s a nobel prize winning novel or a watercolor painting or rearranging our furniture, is in and of itself a worthy and beautiful thing. i think of toni morrison waking up at five am to write for a few hours before she went to work as an editor, all whilst raising two children as a single mother, or of james baldwin, who left school to help support his family despite his teachers and mentors having recognized that he had a brilliant mind all the way back in elementary school, and who worked at meat-packing plants and did manual labor as part of a predominantly white workforce in new jersey where he was treated vilely by his crewmates, or jeannette winterson, who was raised heavily religious and then left home at sixteen after she came out as a lesbian and got through college working odd jobs, or any of the other thousands of artists who had to commit in a way that the landed gentry and idle rich have never had to.
and then of course you could argue that the separation between creativity and life is a fallacy, and they are one and the same and support instead of compete with one another, but i don’t think we have space for another paragraph.
Who is your inspiration?
i find the most inspiration in anyone who is doing something that is either extremely technically difficult or is creating something genuinely original - musicians and producers who take a cut or bassline or break and push and push and push until it’s in its own territory, or people who play with form and take their work into something the average person would maybe never think to do. and then of course it’s this lovely paradox, where the first person who does it is revolutionary, but then also as soon as it’s done, we all think, “how did no one do this before?” i think of someone like joe brainard, who is probably best known for his memoir i remember, where he just wrote out all the scattered memories of his childhood and early years in an ad infinitum repetition: i remember drinking vanilla milkshakes, i remember the first boy i kissed, i remember the boxes the cereal came and the crossword puzzles on the side… this project that’s relatively simple as a concept, right, but which no one had actually gone and done. the beat poets had my whole heart in late high school because of their breathlessness and their departure from conventional poetry and their merging of high and low and the sexual and religious and their really integrative work that mashed everything together in a way our real lives are mashed together, but which you didn’t really see mashed together in literary art. joan miro, and the expressionists and impressionists and surrealists and those movements, and guernica by picasso, which made me cry when i saw it in real life even if he was not so good of a man. live at folsom prison by johnny cash - hearing the prisoners roar at the mentions of the prison, and booing whenever a warden comes onstage and tells some inmate they have to go be seen somewhere, and johnny telling the inmates, “well, i just want you to know that this show is being recorded for an album release on columbia records, and you can’t say hell or (censored beep) or anything like that.” i just love that kind of stuff.
waking life by richard linklater was one of the first films i saw that really challenged the idea of what a film is, which isn’t a very deep cut, but it was one of my first experiences of that kind of work and it opened a doorway in my head. boyhood, too, where he followed the same actors over a twelve-year-period instead of using aging techniques or casting new people – anything like that, that engages seriously with the demands of making art and the dedication of time and views the art’s terms as critical to the project itself. you could make the same film with the same script in a year or two just by switching out the actors or using special effects, and that’s what a lot of directors would do because then you get it to theater and make your money a lot more quickly. and so just to see a u.s.american filmmaker lean into the demands of the work and value the project over the money and also take that time and slow down and give the work its due diligence instead of sloughing off whatever’s fastest or whatever hyperspeed levels that hollywood executives demand – it’s so much nicer for it, and as an artist to see someone doing something like that, even if you’re working in completely different fields, i think it’s affirming to the essence of creativity itself. someone has to open the door in your brain, you know?
john s. boskovich’s piece electric fan (feel it motherfuckers): only unclaimed item from the stephen earabino estate. san yuan and peng yu’s can’t help myself. félix gonzález-torres’s untitled (portrait of ross in l.a.) from 1991. i like things that are pushing the idea of what art is, or what a certain genre must or must not do, or just playing with form in some way or another, regardless of whatever medium it’s working in. i don’t even listen to mac demarco, for example, but i read somewhere that he recently dropped a two hundred and something song album on streaming services – thinking about how the a-side b-side format was shaped by the limitation of how much could fit into a single record, and then the rise of the full album, and then the transition from vinyl to cassettes and then cassettes to cds and cds to online – recognizing we are living in a unique moment of history where all the previous size limitations placed on artists releasing music no longer exist, and seizing that opportunity to fuck with our perception of the album and to create something unbounded from every other piece of music and their physical limitations – i don’t even care if the songs are good, which i don’t know if they are or not - the concept and delivery of it alone are so worthy of respect in my eyes. because you need people like that, you know? you need people who are watching the technological and cultural shifts in real time and are able to identify when a new opening pops up and are willing to be the first one to break that door down. and often times it’s not even a door, it’s the mere suggestion of a door. and now it’s been done, and so it will happen again, and maybe in the future we have artists releasing eight hour albums that tell the story of an entire relationship from start to end, or we have artists who write a song for each year and then put them all under one album or are doing other conceptual plays like what mac demarco did with that length and break from tradition – i don’t know. but he opened a door, which someone would have done eventually i think, and now we have so many more opportunities to see new and creative and genre bending work by musicians because they quite literally have the world as their oyster now.
Do you have any writing quirks?
i think writing in and of itself is enough a quirk.
What do you do besides writing?
i had the fortune of working in a small diner in coastal san diego when i was 21, and it was cramped and not big on yelp and had been run by the same family with the same waitresses since the 80s, and so it was very much a local’s only kind of vibe. and i had a regular who would sit at the bar and i would chat with every tuesday at 7am when he came in with his son, and one day in our conversation i had mentioned in a throwaway sort of way that i was a writer and a poet and whatnot, and he had told me he was opening a coffee shop a few towns over and asked me on the spot to teach a writing workshop. i had never taught a workshop before, and i told him so, but he encouraged me to try it anyway. the closest i had come to teaching anything before was that i had spent several years babysitting and working with children, which turned out to be a legitimately transferable skill to managing a group of poets. and so i started teaching writing workshops, and then i realized we were all entirely fucked in the head from whatever unhelpful and entirely unrealistic narratives we had internalized from growing up in the very broken society we grew up in, and so i switched the workshop to focus on helping other writers (and myself as well, because lord knows i needed it) to develop more sustainable creative practices and challenge our entirely irrational fear of ever making anything that wasn’t good, which was then keeping us from making anything at all. i made zero dollars the entire time i taught at that coffee shop, but it was my start.
and then i started teaching online during the pandemic, and then i started teaching in person again once i moved to colorado, and now i actually make money doing it. and from teaching the writing workshop i learned how to take better care of myself as a writer, most notably in realizing that, if i was going to remain semi-sane in between my rare publishing wins or when i wasn’t possessed body and soul by a piece i was working on, i needed to do things besides write. and so i started doing photography, and i played around with comedy and acting for a little bit - not for money, just for the sheer fact i needed to use my brain in non-writerly ways or i was going to drive myself off a bridge; and i learned to surf and i took pottery classes and i started making highly elaborate memes to send my friends in the middle of the night when i couldn’t sleep. i realized i had robbed myself of the possibility of even thinking of being creative in other ways because i had identified so young as a writer and all the adults in my life told me i was good with words and should be a writer (my more supportive teachers) or a lawyer (my parents). for over twenty years, anytime i tried something new that i wasn’t automatically good at i would throw in the towel, because if i wasn’t good i was too ashamed to do it because i needed to be good in order to justify doing anything. and my life just sort of exploded creatively once i learned to sit with the discomfort of being bad at something, and now i use that discomfort to make things all the time – i will start a new sketch and my brain will decide it’s ugly two lines in, and then i tell myself i can’t leave it until i’ve made it into something i like. and that forces me to actually examine it from a curious standpoint, instead of being so tied up in my emotions and my ego’s fragility that i hate it on instinct and crumple it up or slam my notebook shut.
of course, none of this has answered the other half of this question, which is asking how do i make money or what do i do for work; but it is interesting to think about, no?
i pay my rent and get my steps in by working in restaurants and bars as a server, which not only serves to make me good money with built in flexibility (and the ability to pick up and leave whenever i want), but also gives me the necessary amount of human interaction i need to not go entirely insane. the last few months i’ve been only doing odd jobs and freelance projects and teaching workshops, because i turned twenty-seven in july and felt old and so i decided it was time to be a full-time creative. but then i realized, because i am a loner by nature, working from my computer in my apartment all week was probably the worst thing i could do for my brain, and so now it’s time to dust off my resume and find another dinner spot to work at. i genuinely like restaurant work. i care about food, and wine, and i genuinely want the people i’m serving to have a good time, because there’s nothing more disappointing than going out and spending money and at the end of it feeling like it wasn’t worth the money you spent. i get to talk to people i would otherwise never meet, and i get to move and be on my feet and be in video game mode, where it’s just task and then sidequest and task and then sidequest, and the balance of working like that and then doing my writing and photography and other art projects when i’m not at work is a satisfying balance because i’m using different parts of my brain. and then, of course, there is no one in the world who gets to observe more people up close and personal on a daily basis than a bartender or a server at a busy restaurant. each table is a case study in human dynamics and melodrama. every table you meet you will notice something about, whether they’re another sequence in a pattern that predominates that city (the nouveau riche of boulder are an entirely different species than the nouveau riche of san diego, for example), or if they talk to you a certain way or look at their kids a certain way or look at each other a certain way. and because the number one skill you have to develop if you want to be good at anything in the service industry is that you have to learn how to read people, you will inevitably pick up on so many human interactions there and in all the other areas of your life. and if you’re going to be a writer, or someone who’s making art about people or the human condition in whatever form that takes, you have to learn to see these things. you and i and everyone else is here to bear witness to what is happening around us, and there’s nothing like a 20% tipping standard to teach you how to pay better attention to who’s in front of you.
What do you hope to get from writing?
i hope to understand myself more, and i hope to understand the world better and to clarify for myself things i wish to see change and ways in which i can help affect change. i also write to dazzle myself – the opportunity for total immersion in a piece, and puzzling things out to see what my brain is capable of intellectually and creatively, and the joy and satisfaction of working through a piece and seeing where it can take you and how you can fine-tune it into something better or more harmonious or more intense. as long as it’s keeping me interested and intellectually engaged, i can’t think of a better reward from the process. and i want also for my writing to have a bigger life than just sitting on my shelf unread or unseen. there was a brief period a few years back where i had gotten some nasty feeling rejections for things i had delusionally told myself i would win or be accepted for, when of course the reality is that you could be the most brilliant writer in the world and still get rejected from everywhere because it all comes down to being in the right time at the right place in front of the right pair of eyes. and after these successive rejections i was feeling very low on myself, and basically i had to sit down and seriously ask myself before i could really begin writing again if i willing to accept that i might never be published again, or that i could be published and it could be the worst to be published thing in human history, or that i could be published and - crueler than being the laughingstock of the entire world - no one would care at all. and i eventually i realized that even if i was humiliated or condemned or just completely ignored, i would still write. granted, i would take the time to bury my face and lick my wounds, as we all do; but when the time came i would write again. and that’s when i realized that yes, while awards and money and an agent would obviously be very much appreciated at this point in the game, i wanted my things to exist outside of me because i wanted them to be engaged with and seen by other people, and not just simply gather dust in an old folder somewhere. i wanted them to be bigger than that. and so i made my peace with the inevitable ten million failures i will see between now and my death, and i decided i would write and submit and just hope to reach someone, even if it was somebody with nothing to give me. just to have someone reading something i’d written, and talking about it, or holding it in their head for a little while – that was what i’d always been going for.
Who has been your biggest writing influence?
toni morrison, infinitely, for her precision and the sheer scope of the worlds and emotional landscapes she drops us into; james baldwin, not only for his obvious brilliance but also because he so deeply cared and committed to using his talents and voice to speak out against everything he saw as wrong; joy harjo, whose work i found for the first time on the shelves of a used bookstore when i was nineteen, and which lived in my head that whole fall; sylvia plath of course - i read the bell jar for the first time when i was like twelve and thought “finally, a character i can relate to” - which is just what every mother dreams of for their little girl; lucille clifton, june jordan, linda gregg, marianne moore - resolution #1,003 by june jordan, and i may, i might, i must by marianne moore hit me in a way that i feel like they became some deep, guiding bow inside of me, these things that i can return to at any time and feel the same wave of recognition of myself and my purpose. they are my determination and my resiliency, in a way, or a mirror of what i would like to find inside myself when i look for those traits. same with prayer by galway kinnell: “whatever happens. whatever / what is is is what / i want. only that. but that.” i call them my foundational poems, because i don’t just love them or am impressed by them or like the way they sound. they are these literal chants that i play at the core of my being, and to find them all within a short period of time and realize oh my god, these are the words that my heart has been chanting all this time - or on my worst days, the words i wish my heart could be chanting - it was a very peculiar feeling. i’d never felt that way about a poem before, despite writing poetry for ten years and reading it for most of my life. or i don’t know, maybe i’d felt it before and then i’d grown and i’d forgotten how earth shattering it was and i outgrew it or it outgrew me or we simply passed separate ways. i don’t know. who ever knows with these things?
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