“Embrace the fear”: An Interview with Bryanna Licciardi

“I like to put myself in minds that aren’t mine because I feel like that helps me understand people better.”

Bryanna Licciardi is an educator and writer, with an MFA in poetry and a doctorate in education. She’s the author of poetry chapbook Skin Splitting (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and full-length collection Fish Love (Alternating Current Press, 2024). When not teaching, her favorite roles include cat mom and technical supporter for a local reading series, Poetry in the Boro. You can find her work in journals such as Poetry Quarterly, BlazeVOX, Peacock Journal, and Cleaver Magazine. Or just check out her website at www.bryannalicciardi.com.

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Would you like to introduce yourself quickly?

Okay. Hi, I’m Bryanna. I teach at MTSU in the English department and the Women and Gender Studies Department. On the side, I also serve as the Professional Development Coordinator for undergraduate English.

You are a writer and an educator and an editor and I’m sure many other roles. I’m wondering how these all intersect in your life? Is it hard to balance an academic and a creative career?

I’ll answer the last part first: It is absolutely hard to find energy for the creative when the academic is so cumbersome. I’m still finding ways to get around that — learning to take advantage more of my time in the summer to kind of play catch-up on the creative things, forcing myself to read more. I joined a poem-a day-group with a colleague, so we’re exchanging one poem we’re writing every day for May. It’s quite a challenge. I’ll let you know in a few years.

As far as how they intersect, I feel like they go so much hand in hand. I mean, editing comes into play when I’m working on papers with students; the creative side comes into play when I’m helping students overcome anxiety about creating anything, sharing my own ideas or stories, or helping them build their own creative ideas. And learning how to be creative in lesson planning is a challenge today. Students do not want to pay attention in class; they want an hour-and-a-half-long class to go by in five minutes. Being creative about keeping them engaged is a challenge that I’ve been eager to undertake. So, I feel like they actually complement each other.

I’m interested in how you found your passion for writing but also how you found your passion for education. Was that something you always aspired to be a part of or something you discovered in your own higher education?

I have been a writer since I learned to write. I wrote little stories and picture books all the time when I was a kid. It’s actually a really funny story of when I wrote what I thought was a masterpiece about two flowers that fell in love and created a little bud. And when I tried to staple the papers together to share with my family, and I stapled them to our hardwood table. They stayed there for like a week because I was afraid to rip it off and rip my paper. My parents felt so bad they couldn’t punish me. I kept writing. I wrote for myself; I didn’t really think anything would come of it until college. I took an intro to creative writing class just as an elective and loved every single genre. Met with the teacher to show them my work. They didn’t like many things that I’d created, but the few that they did like, they really, really liked. So that kind of gave me motivation to keep writing. I went on to my MFA program in creative writing because that’s all I knew I liked. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living. Education was not something I saw myself doing. I’m pretty introverted and shy. Public speaking is my biggest fear, so I imagined standing in front of a classroom for a living, would, you know, kind of exacerbate that fear. But I was an academic tutor on the side, all through undergrad and graduate school. That was my job. I loved that one-on-one dynamic of helping in higher education. I didn’t look at it as teaching at the time, but looking back on it, it was very much teaching. Then I became an academic advisor because it seemed really similar to tutoring. While I was doing that, I met people in the English Department who learned my writing background, and they said we need teachers to adjunct for us. It took some convincing, and I was terrified at the though of doing it, but I finally did it one semester. Walking in that first day, I was surprised that I had no nerves. That was crazy to me. And I really liked it. I kept doing it on the side. Finally, I convinced myself it was something I could do full-time. It’s still hard to look at myself as a teacher because I spent so many years thinking that was nothing I could do. I’m going into my third year and it feels right.

Do you find do you get inspiration from teaching young writers?

It’s really exciting, especially teaching Gen Ed English classes, the classes no one’s there to take by choice. I find it a fun challenge to help students see themselves as writers and to look at writing differently — as a way of being creative, as a way of opening doors that they thought were previously closed to them. So yeah, I like it. I do feel inspired to inspire. It’s definitely a boost of energy.

So, in your chapbook Skin Splitting, the work is macabre and grim, yet still deeply personal. I’m wondering what your process for entering the headspace to be able to write on such dark themes is and if it came naturally, or if it was a learned skill?

That chapbook actually came from my time in my MFA program in Boston. I was in a workshop, probably my second year in a three-year program, so I’m halfway through, and I’m writing poems to try to fit in, the poems that sound like poems, and it’s just, it’s awkward to me; it doesn’t feel right. I read and watch nothing but horror, but I never write about it. So one day, I fell asleep watching a documentary, don’t judge me, about John Wayne Gacy. I had a dream about him, and we were just hanging out at a party and nothing weird happened. But I woke up like with goosebumps because I was like, that was so creepy. Just the normalcy, knowing who he was. I thought oh, I need to write about this. That poem is in the chapbook. I brought it to workshop and everyone hated it. Oh my gosh, I can’t explain to you how grossed-out they were by the fact that I would choose to write about him. It was creepy, and they were just disturbed by it. I was really defeated. My professor told me to stay after class and I thought, “He’s gonna kick me out of the program.” But he said, “That reaction means you’ve gotten your niche. You are writing something that no one else is writing, but people are reacting to. Keep going in that direction.” I think that was what I needed. All my dreams are creepy, I get a lot of inspiration from my dreams, and I have a lot of anxiety, so for me, reading or watching true crime is like a way to plan out survival. But I just watch human nature, and I think what makes a lot of things so scary is the fact that we’re unpredictable, that on the surface, everything’s fine, and you never know what’s going on underneath that surface. It’s something that I’m just fascinated by, and I find weird ways to connect to it. That’s why I think humor is important to throw in that balance.

There seems to be a recurring theme of self-exploration in your work. It gives the reader a sense that we’re looking into your deepest fears and insecurities. I’m wondering if you would say that’s true or if there’s a separation between you as a person and you as an author?

Yes and no. I’ve definitely pulled from some biographical moments and some emotional truths, but then I have a lot of fantasy in there too. I like to put myself in minds that aren’t mine because I feel like that helps me understand people better. Being someone who has always felt like an outsider, being analytical about people in that way, helps me feel like I’m fitting in in a creepy way. So yeah, that would be my answer, yes and no.

So in your upcoming book, Fish Love, scheduled for released at the end of July with Alternating Current Press, it appears like you’re going to delve into some more dark subject matter, the creepy and the grim. Could you discuss the process of writing this book and the inspiration behind the work?

Yeah, this book kind of happened unwittingly as I was focused on promoting Skin Splitting. I started putting other poems together that didn’t fit into that, or I didn’t know what to do with, and I’m just kind of keeping them all together because that’s the way I was organizing my mind at the time. Then maybe a year or two down the road, I looked at them and I realized that this is an interesting collection of dark, funny, personal. There’s a lot of complications with the idea of love; there’s some with complications from violence and exploitation. It also was inspired by the one love poem I’ve ever written, for my now husband. That’s the title poem, “Fish Love.” I thought that was an interesting way to tie these hardships and painful and funny things together. In my mind, I don’t think I could ever write another love poem.

Why do you say that?

I’m not going to be hopeful. That’s why I lean on humor; it’s my attempt at getting out of dark places. It’s really hard. Even in the love poems there’s some grim moments of course; I had to throw that in. I saw this video interview of this rabbi, and he was talking about love from the way that we normally look at it, and it’s really selfish and harmful to the person we claim to love. He calls it “fish love.” He tells a story of a man who’s getting fish by the river. The rabbi asks why he’s doing that and he says,“Because I love fish.” It was sad but true. I was like, this is the way we need to interpret our relationships. Is the way they love me taking what they love from me? Or is it replenishing me and giving things to me? Is it giving or taking? That was the way I could write a love poem.

How would you describe Fish Love in five words?

That’s a really hard question. I would say feminist, funny, discomforting, familial … Hopefully moving.

Relating to you as a fellow female artist, I’ve noticed an expectation for my work to be authentic and speak to my experience as a woman, but also, at the same time be easily digestible and safe. I think of your story from grad school where everyone hated the poem because it’s gory and whatnot. I’m wondering if you face similar challenges with these oxymoronic standards that we have?

Yeah, I think that’s why I lean into making people uncomfortable, because that gets shut down, right? Right away. And they’re like, okay, she’s not gonna follow the rules. It’s actually hard, especially in the South, there’s a lot of expectations to make art about nature and beautiful things, touching childhood memories, marriages, and I just, I don’t fit in that way. It’s not necessarily making my career by going against the grain, but I feel like I’m being authentic and true to myself and hopefully paving the way for someone coming up behind me to do it a little better.

What advice could you give to young authors to remain authentic in their work?

I think it’s important to share your work frequently; see how people are reacting to it. Don’t rely on workshops to feel like you need to edit everything that they suggest. But if you’re writing, to have your work put out there, it’s really helpful to see how people are interpreting it. You want to be authentic to yourself, but you also don’t want to get stuck in a rut of like, this is the only way I can write. Because then all of your stories, all of your problems, all of your creations, start looking and sounding the same. You will never grow and try new things. So figuring out what you’re writing consistently helps people to understand who your voice is. But don’t feel like everything else has to stay the same. Try weird things. The thing that always helped me the most was doing prompts that forced me to write out of genre, out of form. Mimic other writers that you’d like to figure out what it is like about them. Figure out how you can synthesize that into your own interpretation. You can always go back to the thing you’re comfortable with, but it doesn’t hurt to step outside of your box.

I think some of the best advice I ever got from one of my art teachers was “you’re too young to have a style yet,” which I think about pretty frequently.

Actually, we’re in the process of moving, and I was packing and cleaning out a cupboard. I found some old letters and stuff from my MFA program, and in one of them I wrote to my professor asking him to tell me what my style was. He was like, “I can’t tell you that. I don’t think you have one. I can read something you wrote and I definitely know you wrote it, but you shouldn’t try to find your style. That’s going to limit you and turn you into a caricature.” That was frustrating, but now I will say that was truthful.

What do you think some of the most important moments in your career leading up to this point have been for you?

Any book publication is always a huge triumph. The writing world, especially the publishing world, is limited with funds. So getting an organization or publisher to be willing to put money on you, well, you really feel like you’ve accomplished something. And it’s so amazing to hold a book in your hand with your name. It’s really exciting. Other than that, I would say that I haven’t given up on it. I’ve had some dry spells, especially while I was in my doctorate. I don’t think I wrote one whole poem a couple years towards the end, which is sad to say. Whenever I felt like I should do something, I would just go to an old poem and edit it. I felt like it was something, but that’s not the same. So I think the fact that I haven’t given up on it. It’s hard to not compare yourself to the people you grew up with. That’s something to be mindful of, if you go into an MFA program, is you’re kind of subconsciously informed that you need to be comparing yourself and doing it better than the person sitting next to you. And that’s a horrible way to feel as an artist, to feel competitive about it. I wasn’t the standout in my graduating class, but I felt like I was different. I’ve held on to that.

Is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Before we wrap up, anything you want to touch on, any inspirational closing words?

I don’t know how inspiring I am. I would say something that I’m leaning into, outside of my writing, is the idea of embracing things that you’re afraid of. I’ve done that with my poetry, but I’ve also started to try to do that at readings, speaking events. In my classroom, I’m very transparent about anxieties, quirks and insecurities that I have, because I feel like the more we try to hide them or wear the mask of perfection, the worse they get and the worse and the worse feel about ourselves. Then what kind of message is that that you’re sending to the people in front of you that you’re teaching? You can’t be successful and also be afraid at succeeding, at the same time. I actually gave a speech about being afraid of being up there public speaking. It was going to either go really, really well or just crickets. Like, why did we pay you to be here and talk about why you don’t want to be here? But it went over really well. People came up to me to say, “I’m scared of things too and I feel like I can’t talk about them.” So I think if you can’t do that in your real life, do it in your artwork.

Embrace the fear.

Grace Haley is a writer and artist recently gradated from MTSU. She is currently painting a mural in Franklin, KY.