Interviews

It’s easy to give up on writing or move away from it for five years and come back, but when you keep other writers in your life, it just makes it more likely that you’ll keep writing because you’re still in those conversations.

I wanted to show in World of Wonders that you can be your full authentic, true self on the page and still have an encyclopedic knowledge about flowers, plants, rocks, and crystals.

Poetry has always been about community for me. This might be because I started off on slam teams, but I have no interest in being a poet alone. I only want to be a poet among other poets and among my loved ones and among my community. So find your people, take care of them, and let them take care of you. Ask for help and let them ask you for help. Edit their poems, let them edit your poems, and read to each other. Celebrate each other’s work!

We’re at a time when there’s this reckoning, a kind of cultural and racial reckoning going on in this country. It’s racial and also sexual; over women and then over sexual identity. So, all of this is coming—and then climate change—all of this, all at once.

For me, I often start from the opposite. I start from an emotion. And you’re very right, with Dept., it was this thought of loneliness, and also about how loneliness looks different at different parts of your life. It seems like it’s going to be about whether or not you have someone with you, whether or not the loneliness will go away.

Lesley Nneka Arimah is the kind of writer that doesn’t mind holding your hand. When you open her work, she will gladly offer her palm, you will gladly take it, and the both of you will (gladly) walk down a familiar street, in a familiar town, on a familiar day. Only when you’re a quarter-mile into this walk and have reached a busy intersection will you look around and notice that something’s . . . off.

Wandering appeals to me enormously. I find it to be regenerative and creatively enriching. Like everything, however, it has its downsides. Belonging somewhere takes time. Forming a community takes time. Wandering can make you an outsider to certain kinds of knowledge—which can be tricky for writing. A lot of my work tends to focus on displaced people, or passers-through, people trying to make sense of settings to which they are fundamentally outsiders, and I suspect this is tied to my own experience of the world.

For a book publisher like Gian—a purveyor of trade make-believe—labeling “narrative” senseless is a paradoxical statement. Like, would Magellan have said it’s silly that water keeps his ship afloat? Gotta believe in the craft that carries you along the medium, don’t you?