What drew you to submit your work to RED SKIES?
This year I've started to use twitter to connect with the poetry community, so I've been keeping my eye out for submission opportunities there. When I read the title RED SKIES it felt like the perfect home for this particular poem, which I wrote right in the thick of quite a difficult period mentally. I think there is a time and a place for hope, but sometimes you have to honor and respect your feelings of terror, sadness, pain, without trying to dilute them with optimism. That's what RED SKIES evokes for me, and I'm really looking forward to reading everyone else's interpretations in the anthology! What has your experience been like performing poetry? Are there any others in this field that inspire your work? What is it like performing your work in front of an audience, compared to having it in print and read privately?
My entry into the world of poetry was through performing, at an Open Mic in 2017 in Nottingham, UK where I study. I've been in plays and musicals before but performing your own work is both ten times more terrifying and ten times more rewarding. The shift in focus to page poetry was tricky, probably no too dissimilar from how dog owners feel when they get a cat. Less dopamine flood immediate gratification, more slow-burn brain teaser, but when something clicks it's the best feeling ever. It's completely changed the way I write too, without the pressure to fill a three-minute open mic slot I can allow myself to strip it back to the essentials and produce something relatively short but far more rich. Have there been any books this year that stood out to you?
One which actually came out in 2019 but which I read in 2020 was Ocean Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.' The way Vuong writes prose is completely delicious, that whole book felt like drinking squeezy honey from the bottle. Sometimes when I get really into a writer's work I start to mimic their style so it's funny to look back through my poetry notebooks now and see exactly when Vuong was influencing my poetry. That's all the practice of writing is really, it's melting together your own experience with the influence of the writing that has touched you the most and producing something that only partially belongs to you. For me to say that what I write comes completely from my brain underestimates the role of community in the creative process. Are you currently engaged in any projects?
Just writing, studying, and teaching at the moment! What themes do you like exploring in your writing? There are some themes that have always come to the forefront. These are the kinds of things that I would write in my journal about before I even saw it as poetry - love, queerness, family. Poetry has been a really important tool in understanding what all of those things mean to me. Then there are other themes which I only see emerge looking back through my work like memory, shame, and loss, which sometimes appear in more subtle ways (and sometimes slap bang in the middle of the title.) I avoid micro clichés like expressions or tropes but I try not to avoid macro clichés like entire themes because if I'm drawn to write about something it's for good reason.
Is community important to your work? Are there any small presses or magazines that you feel especially fond of?I'm incredibly grateful to the magazines who have published my poetry so far: Impossible Archetype, I'll Show You Mine, and Inklette. And now you - Splintered Disorder Press!