Portraits of INSPIRATION
“I believe in writing through the difficulty of a truth, the ugliness of a truth. I believe it is worth asserting that we have value beyond the humiliation, hurt, oppression, and trauma we face in our lives and our skins every day.”
Why do you write? I write in order to live; to be sane in this world; to expand my own ideas of what’s possible; for the girl inside me who did not believe she was valuable; for the woman inside me who trivializes her own pain; for all the living people, especially women of color, who feel the same way; to rail against silence and erasure; to center my own narrative; to recover history; to imagine a future; to record and witness the present; to tell the truth. What has changed you as a writer? Perhaps it’s the way I process or address trauma in my work. Before, I rarely wrote poems that were autobiographical or about my personal experiences—if I did, they were hidden or tucked away. Recently I began taking steps to approach the personal in a way I’ve avoided before, and I do recognize something liberating and comforting about allowing poems to carry the weight of a pain that is both deep-rooted and fresh. I am probing
