“Linguistically Interesting”: An Interview with Francisco Aragón

“Find your community, find your network, find your tribe, and try not to isolate yourself.”

photo by ND Studios

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. His books include After Rubén (2020), Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and Puerta de Sol (2005). He’s also the editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). A native of San Francisco, California, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. His work has appeared in over twenty anthologies, and he has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, the Dodge Poetry Festival and the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. For more information, visit http://franciscoaragon.net

Thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to meet with me. I would love if you could give a glimpse into your history and story, what you’re getting into today. I’d love to hear about the professional aspect of your world.

In fact, this month, the month of July of 2023, is going to mark my twentieth year as a faculty member at the university, Notre Dame. Specifically, my home on campus is the Institute for Latino studies at the University of Notre Dame. So while I’m a faculty member of the Institute itself, and my specialty is is literature and creative writing, the way the Institute works is that we have affiliated faculty members in various departments — in English, political science, history, theology, visual art — and so students at Notre Dame are going to either minor or do a supplementary major in Latino studies. For example, the courses that I teach — I teach an undergraduate course on Latinx poetry, and then I teach an undergraduate course on poetry writing. But the writers that I bring to the classroom to read and use as models are Latinx poets, and so my particular courses are cross-listed as English courses but also Latino studies. I pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Notre Dame. So I was actually a graduate student before I became a faculty member; between 2001 and 2003, I was a Master of Fine Arts student. And prior to Notre Dame I was in California doing a master’s in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing at UC Davis. So that was between 1998 and 2000, and prior to UC Davis, I had been living in Spain for 10 years — eight or nine of those years in Madrid and one year in Barcelona. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I decided that I wanted to do one year of my undergraduate degree abroad, and I selected Spain. And so in 1987 and 1988, I did one year of my undergraduate degree in Barcelona. I was born and raised in San Francisco and my particular ancestry, my parents — I’m the son of of of of immigrants. But my parents migrated to San Francisco in the late 50s from the Central American country, Nicaragua. So my ancestry is Nicaraguan.

Your story is so culturally and visually rich and has encompassed so many backdrops. You so clearly have all of these vivid images and places to draw from to inspire your work. When did you first realize that you were a writer, and what initially was the subject matter of your work? Was it always poetry?

While I was at UC Berkeley I began to take creative writing workshops, and the story I like to tell is that the first time I enrolled in in a creative writing class I applied for two courses: One was Introduction to Poetry Writing, and one was Introduction to Fiction Writing. Those classes were so in demand that in order to take [them], you had to submit a writing sample, and the professor or instructor would then select the 12 students that they wanted in their class. So I applied. And the way it works is, the professors leave a little sheet outside their office with the list of the 12 names of who’s in the class, and so I went up to there. I went up to the sheet for the fiction class, and nope, I did not make the cut. My name was not on that list. I went to the sheet for the poetry class, and there I was. My name was on the list. And so basically, that’s the reason why I started to take poetry writing classes — because with the fiction writing class that I applied for, I was not accepted. And my first poetry writing teacher was the African American poet and fiction writer Ishmael Reed, who is still alive. He’s probably in his eighties. I didn’t know who he was. Oh, it’s only later later that I learned what a distinguished trajectory he had, not only as a poet but as a fiction writer and as an essayist. But he happened to be my very, very first poetry writing teacher, and in his class, he would bring in poems for us too. And so the story I like to tell on this front is that when I was in Ishmael Reed’s Introduction to Poetry writing class, he brought to class one day the Puerto Rican poet, Victor Hernández Cruz, and at the time the tremendous Cruz was a mailman in Oakland. That was his day job. So taking Ishmael’s poetry writing class was a revelation. The second thing I did when I was an undergraduate which had a huge influence on my literary trajectory is that I decided to sign up and join the staff of a student-run poetry magazine. Yes, it published student poets, both undergraduates and graduate students, but it also published poetry from whoever submitted. We were encouraged to solicit poems from anyone we wanted for consideration in the journal, and so we were encouraged to attend local poetry readings, and if we happened to encounter a poet at a reading whose work we liked, we [would] approach that writer. We introduced ourselves as staff members of the Berkeley Poetry Review, and [asked] would they consider submitting work to our magazine that we would be honored to publish. And so that experience of working on a student literary journal and then being in a poetry writing class, those two experiences really got me on my way in terms of pursuing the art, the artistic practice. So that’s how that got started. And so what ended up happening is that it came time I had to choose a major. Well, I decided to marry my love of literature with my desire to perfect my Spanish, and I became a Spanish literature major — that is to say, reading and analyzing literature in Spanish. And so when I went to Spain, I continued to write. I also became interested in translation. It’s that year abroad in Barcelona and that experience — the experience of living in Spain was so transformative that I knew I had to return to Berkeley to finish my degree. I had to. My final year on campus had to be on the campus itself. So I actually took five years to do my undergrad degree. And then what happened is I loved Spain so much, and I found that NYU, New York University, had a master’s program in Madrid, and so I applied to what was called NYU in Spain, a one-year master’s program, and was accepted. So when I concluded my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, I went back to Spain, this time to Madrid to pursue the one-year master’s program. One of the wonderful things about that program is that you were given two options. You could either pursue a master’s in Spanish literature, which meant that your thesis had to be a work of literary scholarship, or you could pursue a master’s in Hispanic civilization, which gave you the option of doing a thesis in literary translating and work with literature from Spanish into English, and then writing a critical introduction to your translation. So that was perfect for me. I did the master’s in Hispanic civilization, and then my thesis was a translation into English of the poetry of the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego. When I was in Spain, I realized that I loved living in Madrid in Spain so much that I didn’t want to return to California. And so I began to sort of think, Okay, what can I do to stay in Spain? I wasn’t trained as a teacher of English as a foreign language, but I was able to land a job at a language academy teaching English as a foreign language. I did that for one year. And while I was in Spain I did what was called RSA for University of Cambridge certificate in teaching English as a foreign language. So that’s an intensive 110-hour course you do in a month. So two of those years in Spain were as a student, and then eight years as an English language teacher, all the while writing my poems and the book that eventually became my first book of poems, all written during those years that I lived in Spain. And so what ended up happening is then in 1998 I finally decided to return to the US because, as much as I liked living in Spain, I wanted to form part of it right in the community. So I decided to try and pursue graduate work in creative writing, but back in the US, and to form part of a cohort, and that’s why I returned. I was at UC Davis for a couple of years as a graduate student, and then that’s when I began to sort of continue writing and working on my first book and doing some more intensive reading in poetry but also being part of a cohort.

So much of your story sounds so serendipitous. I also loved that you utilized your resources as a college student. I’m guilty, and I know others are also, of not utilizing the university’s benefits, one of them being the travel abroad programs. You found your life’s journey by utilizing study abroad programs. For me, that’s one of my takeaways: I really need to be better at utilizing the university’s programs. I love that you have experienced so much life and so many different spaces in your story that you can draw from. Within that what do you think makes a good story or a poem?

Well, when I began reading poetry more intentionally was when I was an undergrad in college, and that has actually evolved over the years. This is probably an answer that many poets will give, including me, and that is, first and foremost, a love of language. I love language. The difference between a poem and say the work of journalism or fiction — at the risk of oversimplifying, because I’m sure that people who write short stories and and who write novels also have a love of language, but I also think and, again, at the risk of oversimplifying, I also think that short stories and fiction are very much about a good, compelling, engaging story, right? I think we as a human species hunger and crave the idea of story, what’s gonna happen next, because sometimes we see ourselves in those stories or those stories offer lessons. But those of us who pursue it as a literary art, we’re our raw materials and language. Poetry, I think, is probably a deep love of language. And poetry — its origins were oral around a campfire, listening to stories. It’s an oral art. And so for me, the visceral pleasure of listening to a poem out loud or reading a poem out loud is the same way that we, as a species, get visceral pleasure from listening to music listening to our favorite pop song. We’re listening to our favorite symphony. It’s sound. It’s orchestrated molded sound that’s entering our body and producing a visceral response, whether that response might be dancing or whatever else. It’s just a visceral response of those sounds in our body. And so getting back to your question about what makes a good poem: A good poem first and foremost for me is a poem that’s linguistically interesting, that when I’m reading it, even though I might not necessarily be understanding it completely, something about the way the artist has been putting language together is interesting to me, especially if I’m hearing it aloud, or if I’m reading it aloud. So for me, the first thing that I’m interested in is, what is that language doing? How I’ve been engaged with that language. And then not far behind will be whatever the actual words are, are meaning what? Whether it’s a narrative poem, whether it’s a lyric poem, whether it’s an epic long poem, it’s telling a story. A Homer or Virgil or John Milton, you know, Paradise Lost. But first for me, anyway, the materiality of language and language that approaches song. That’s what makes it interesting for me.

I love that. And I also love how you specifically said, “sitting around a fire, and reading poems.” I hear “community” within that. A lot of the time, as a writer, when I get in my head or I’m in process of writing something I get so stuck internally that I forget, that at the premise of writing, this is really about storytelling, and like you said linguistics. So I love that verbiage. I’m going to read a snippet of your poem, “In Light, Yogurt and Strawberry Milk.”

I first I want to compliment you: I love how you just completely obliterated time. I mean, this could be my childhood, this could be your childhood, this could be my grandfather’s childhood. That is so clever and also really hard as a writer when you’re writing something that is so specific to not date it. So I really love how you how you completely just got rid of time and how this could be about anyone at any age. Was this an act of an imagination? Or was this an act of remembrance? And if it was imagination, how vital is it for a poet to marry fiction to poetry?

First of all, thank you for the question and that particular poem in many respects is emblematic of one of the things that most interested me into a certain degree still does. But in that early work, because that poem is from my first book, Puerta Del Sol, one of the things that really interested me in that poem and in others from that period in my writing is how memory functions, and what I’m trying and attempting to capture in that passage that you read is a speaker who is, well, I’ll share the anecdote. That was the trigger for that poem. I’m living in Spain. I get up in the middle of the night, or let’s call it a late night snack for lack of a better term. Walking to the refrigerator, take a yogurt out of the refrigerator, and begin to eat the yogurt, but before I eat the yogurt, I take a sip of this little strawberry flavored stuff that’s on the top of the yogurt, and for some reason that sensory experience of taking that sip of strawberry yogurt jolts a memory to the surface of when I was six or five years old in which my mother in the mornings would bring me a glass of milk. So the idea, then, is that how do I try to recreate in language that jolting experience of remembering something that you haven’t thought about for years. But the trigger of that memory is something sensory in this case, taste. And so that is sort of what’s happening. What I’m trying to sort of reproduce in language. And so that was just something that was really interesting to me. When you’re trying to recreate a memory, you may not necessarily remember every single detail, and that’s where the imagination comes in. So you’re trying to create this verbal artifact. And if you don’t exactly remember exactly how it happened, then you use your imagination and fill in those blanks. And so even though you might have written a piece of literature that was inspired by a memory, you may still fabricate and embellish because ultimately you want to try to write the most interesting text, the most interesting fragment of language. You want to try to give your reader that experience. And one of the best ways, in my view, of trying to give your reader that same experience you know, bringing that reader on that journey with you, that journey down Memory Lane, is to engage their senses. And so the more vivid the language then the more the reader has to sink their teeth into and to experience that alongside you. You know in some ways a poem or a work of literature you create, you, you create that, but then the reader completes the work. The work of literature doesn’t fully exist as the work of art until the reader completes it by reading it aloud, or by reading it in silence, by bringing their own imagination, their own experience, their own life story, their own memories to the page. Then there might be things in the text that they’re going to identify with. So in a poem like like “Light, Yogurt, Strawberry Milk,” it’s a poem about childhood, but accessing childhood through deep memory and that memory is accessed through a sensory experience. In this case, the speaker, taking a sip of the strawberry liquid at the top of a strawberry yogurt, right? You have an emotional truth you want to try to reproduce, and so you try to use the most interesting language you have access to, to produce that work of art in order to give your reader a sensual experience. The work of literature doesn’t fully exist as the work of art until the reader completes it by reading it aloud, or by reading it in silence, by bringing their own imagination, their own experience, their own life story, their own memories to the page.

I love, how you said, “the work of art is not complete without the reader,” and I feel with writers it can be difficult to not be a slave to the facts and to draw deeper into the vividness of imagination and to forget to factor in the reader. We all have these moments, whether it’s with strawberry milk or chocolate milk, or a specific cookie that jars our senses. And so that’s what I love about your use of sensory and language. And on the note of sensory in your poem, “City Moon,” I love how you capture the senses of this specific line:

In that line, I see the moon, I see the simmer, and I feel the grit in that filthy horizon. And so how do you go about factoring in which sensory elements are key to a story without mudding a poem, or trying to engage every sense, to ensure such vivid language feels like a treat, and not a crowed buffet of sensory elements? How do you do that?

Well, I think — and this is something that I learned from an early mentor and a lot of writing — I think the origin of a good piece of writing, whether it’s a poem or a short story is making yourself available, making your imagination available. Trying to be attentive to the physical world around you and to notice things that engage your imagination or engage your senses and basically beginning to just gather this raw material. With my beginning poetry students, I require students to keep a blank pocket notebook, and I tell them during the 15 weeks we’re going to be together, I want you to, when you go about your day, if you encounter something, a site, a smell, something you touch — I want you to sort of populate your notebook with images and you decide with what frequency you’re going to do that. And sometimes, at least in my experience, a poem might just be a gathering of different images that have engaged me over the period of time, and I see what’s in there. And then I begin to sort of stitch it together into a poem. So a lot of it is being available and being attentive to the physical world around you. And that can be the raw material for a poem, and then, of course, you just have to get it all on the page. And then in my particular case, then it’s a matter of sculpting, and then taking away some of that language until you’re left with what you thought is the essence of what it is you were trying to create and reproduce whatever that experience was. And of course if you’re part of a writing community or if you have one or two or three trusted readings, at some point you can you take the poem or the story, or the essay, as far as you can take it. And then you have to sort of share it with someone to see what their take is. And so there’s a process, and at some point I’d like to get someone’s take or someone’s feedback and just try to get what they’re getting out of the poem and seeing if if it’s aligning with what I’m trying to do. When I’m teaching my poetry writing class I tell my students that you’re going to be getting feedback from your peers. Your job is to try to incorporate, internalize the feedback that is useful to you, so you can’t please everybody. You can’t. You can’t try to take everybody’s feedback and apply it to to your to your poem and your story, but you take the feedback that’s useful, including mine, and then you go to the next level in terms of writing your next version.

I love the image notebook that you mentioned. One of my professors, Dr. Arroyo, did the same thing, and it really changed my writing life because it reminded me that there is so much story within small mundane trinkets of everyday life. And so I love that discipline and that practive that you mentioned in writing and capturing those images and stitching them together. We go to poems and to writing to feel something. What do you look to feel when you read another poet’s work? And what do you hope people feel from your own work?

Let me go back to that that first class I was in Berkeley with Ishmael Reed to try to say two things first. When I pick up a book, or I pick up a story, or in this case, since we’re talking about poetry, I pick up a poem, I don’t want to be bored. I want to be engaged with the language, right? So first, before I even consider what the poem is about, I want to see if I’m engaged with the language that the poet is gifting to me whether it’s a particular rhyme scheme, whether what they’re doing with verbs or whatever that is. I want to feel like I’m reading something and it’s engaging my linguistic imagination. And then a bonus not far behind from that is whether or not I am reading something that perhaps speaks to or engages some of my experience. Do I see myself in this, in this work of literature? This points to something that I experienced in Ishmael Reed’s class. He brought in a whole plethora of voices. We read poets from many different backgrounds, and that was a really valuable experience that we were reading. Poets no longer with us and poets that we’re also living poets. One of the best, most moving that I was exposed to in that class was a Japanese American poet named from Hawaii, Garrett Hongo, we wrote a beautiful first work called “Yellow Light.” And a lot of that first book was set in Los Angeles in the communities that I grew up in. Not just Korean community, Japanese community, but also Latino community. It’s a beautiful, beautiful first book, and that’s a book that I was exposed to in Ishmael Reed’s class. He brought to our class the work of a Chicano poet named Gary Soto from the San Joaquin Valley. His background is he was born and raised in California and he came from a family that worked in the fields. And so there’s that in terms of I want to be exposed to lives and experiences that are not like my own, that expose me to other kinds of communities and other kinds of lived experience. So in some ways, I think one of the roles of poets is to exercise what I’ll call our “empathy muscle,” that gives us the tools to empathize with other people’s experience, and if it does it in a way that is at the same time producing some linguistic pleasure for us, then all the better. That for me would be the difference between a poem and, say, reading a human-interest story in the Sunday paper giving us a portrait into another life: If it’s done in a poem, it’s done in a way that is linguistically interesting and fun like listening to your favorite pop song, or whatever genre music you happen to be interested in.

I love how you said you read things to gain insight and to also feel things from other aspects of culture that you wouldn’t normally have that bird’s-eye view into. Like you said, it’s important to remember that honest raw aspect of it, to just bring your own gritty identity and your own fingerprint and your own culture into your writing. Because that is what is going to generate that feeling, even linguistically, a good piece that is intriguing to others. So I love how you said that to just basically remember as writer to be honest. Going back to that cultural aspect: You are a huge advocate for the Latinx community. You established the Institute of Latino Studies Literary Initiative and were honored with their outstanding Latino Cultural Arts and Publication Award while also being acknowledged by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. As an advocate for Latinx writers, in what ways have you seen the rise of Latinx writers, and in what areas do you think there’s room for improvement to showcase more Latinx writers within the writing community?

Earlier in our conversation, you used the term “serendipitous” to describe how my life has unfolded, you know, how I got into a writing class and decided I wanted to study abroad for a year, and going to Spain for the first time, which eventually led to living in Spain. My work for Latino studies also has a very similar origin story, and that is that the reason why I even went to Notre Dame in the first place, to pursue my MFA, is because in the spring of 2000, when I was completing my master’s degree at UC Davis, I was at an academic conference, and at that academic conference — no, actually at the hotel bar — I met the person who would go on to become my first boss at the Institute for Latino Studies. The Institute for Latino Studies was founded in 1999, and in the spring of 2000 the founding director of the Institute was at this conference, getting the word out that the Institute existed. The conference was the annual gathering of an organization called National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and that year it was being held in Portland, Oregon. I was at that conference because I was invited to give a poetry reading, but one evening I was upstairs at the hotel bar and we got into a conversation, and he asked me about what I was doing, and I told him that I was finishing my master’s in creative writing at UC Davis, and at the conclusion of that conversation, he just casually said, “If you think you might want to do more graduate work in creative writing, keep Notre Dame in mind. We have an MFA program, and we have a Cuban American poet on our faculty.” And so that’s how I ended up at Notre Dame — because after I finished my master’s at UC Davis, I wanted to see if I can do a little bit more graduate work, which was another way of saying I wanted to see if I can get a program and subsidize me for another two years to read and write, and so I applied to a number of programs, including Notre Dame. And they made the best offer, and so in the fall of 2001 I found myself starting my program at Notre Dame. But again I made a very strategic decision to maintain that relationship with the director of the Institute for Latino Studies, who is in another part of campus. And so because I intuitively made a decision to keep that relationship alive and keep him abreast of what I was doing, when my time as an MFA student was winding down, he offered me a job. And so in 2003 I started with the Institute. At the time it did not have a literary component; it was more doing things in public policy, immigration, visual art because he was an art collector. But there was nothing literary. There were no literary initiatives or programs, and so I was hired to start creating programming initiatives in Latino literature. And that’s how that work got started. I was very lucky that I met that person at the hotel bar. And then for my part, it was crucial that I maintained that relationship with him, and he saw something in me. He hired me, and that’s how I began to create what eventually became, a year later in 2004, Literary Initiatives for Latinos. And so to get to your question, in these last 20 years, what I noticed when I started that job is that a lot of literary journals, a lot of presses, were not publishing Latinx voices. We were not a vibrant presence in a lot of mainstream spaces, if you will. And so my work was to try to create opportunities and to enhance the visibility of our writers and our poets, primarily our poets, because that was my strong suit; that was my my background. And so in the last 20 years there’s been, I think, significant progress in our community. There are certain presses that when I started this job 20 years ago did not publish Latinx writers, and and now they do. There’s now more publishing opportunities. There’s now writers of younger generations who are making their presence known. I think we as a community my hope is that there will be more of us in positions like I’m in right now — where I can actually create programs and initiatives to enhance our voices. And that’s starting to happen. It’s happening. Little by little. A few weeks ago an organization based in New York called the Academy of American Poets just name their first Latino executive director, a Puerto Rican poet named Ricardo Alberto Maldonado. He’s going to assume the executive directorship of the Academy of American Poets. First time that’s ever happened. There’s an organization in Seattle, Washington, called Hugo House, named after the poet Richard Hugo. It’s a literary nonprofit in Seattle, and for the first time the executive director of that organization is a Latina, a woman named Diana Marie Delgado. The Academy of American poets in New York and Hugo House in Seattle are now run by a Latino poet and a Latina poet, and that’s huge. It’s huge. And so we need to be in more positions of leadership at literary organizations and presses and foundations. You know Elizabeth Alexander, who’s an African-american poet who is President Obama’s first inaugural poet, she is the president of the [Andrew W.] Mellon Foundation. We need to have people in those positions of leadership because once we begin to populate those areas, then that’s when we begin to sort of enhance our visibility. I think we need seats at these various tables, more seats.

You’ve done so well at putting yourself in those positions. It sounds like I need to hang out at more hotel bars! But that’s so incredible how you put yourself in these positions where you were willing to network and to touch base. So often, as you know, students and writers, we get so focused on the task at hand or just completing our degree that we completely negate that universities are a networking hub. We should utilize our resources and the faculty and even interviews like this. I mean, you’ve given so much insight into these different foundations and houses and different people within these leadership positions. And it really just sounds first and foremost, there has to be this willing heart to engage and really just put your name out there and just ask questions. So: What about the Latinx community inspires your writing the most? Because I mean again, as a part of the Latin community myself, it’s very passionate, very romantic, very vivid culturally. But what specifically inspires you from the Latinx community for your writing?

I’ve never thought about it in those terms, but I guess what I will say is that I am inspired — and this could apply to someone who is aspiring to be, you know, a doctor or a teacher, a lawyer and engineer in addition to a novelist or a poet — I’m inspired by our community’s resourcefulness and resilience and being able to overcome obstacles in adversity. And you know not necessarily having access to opportunities. But they’re trying to figure out a way to get access to those, anyway. And I’m inspired — you know my own story, my mother, my parents, their story of deciding to migrate to San Francisco to try to improve their lives by coming to the US. Because, you know, many people migrate, we as a species migrate, because we want to try to improve our lot. And so, my mother and father: I think my mother went as far as the sixth grade, and my father went as far as the ninth grade. But yet they came to this country and built a life and instilled in us the importance of education and modeled hard work, and so that inspired me to try to get as far as I could by aspiring to go to college and completing college, and then once in college, identifying. No, my mother did not say, I want you to be xyz. Her only prescription was get as much education as you can because that’s going to be useful. She didn’t say I want you to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or I want you to be a writer, just get as much education as you can, and then I identified my passion. My brother went to Berkeley as well, but then he went in a different direction. He went to medical school, and then he became an epidemiologist, and now he runs the Department of Public Health of the state of California. And so even though we both were born into the same family, the foundation was having a mother who encouraged us to get as much education as possible. Her story and the stories of other people in our community are what inspired me. This doesn’t necessarily translate into specifically my writing, but it it gives me a model in terms of trying to be resourceful and trying to be resilient if we encounter obstacles along the way, whatever those obstacles might be.

It’s drawing from your own perspectives and your own culture. How do you stay inspired and find the discipline to stay writing? I know a lot of times as new writers you can get to a place of stagnation after you’ve written your story and are then faced with, “and now, what?” How do you find inspiration when are so busy? How do you find the discipline to stay writing?

I’d say that I’m probably, first a reader and then a writer. So one of the ways I stay inspired is by reading. Widely reading works of literature that I find engaging and in fact, my most recent book, the book that came out oh, a couple of years ago — this book is probably unlike Puerta del Sol, which seems to be more of an explosion of memory. Much of the work in After Ruben is work that’s inspired by other works of literature, whether it’s through translation or whether it’s through responding, writing a poem that’s in conversation with another poem. And so other works of literature keep me inspired and then, in terms of you know my job, the work that I do for Notre Dame, which involves teaching, but also literary arts administration, is very demanding and it’s a struggle and a challenge to find time for my own creative work. But over the years I have come to rely — and this is just me particular. You know this, what I’m about to say is not meant to be, that this is how everybody should do it, or other people to do it. This is what has worked for me with mixed results: There are these things called writing residencies where you can go away for two weeks, or a week, or even a month if you can spare a month away from your day job, where you go with a real focused project in mind, and that has been really useful for me. I’ll give you an example: In July, I’m going to be heading to San Antonio for a week to take part in something called the Macondo Writers Workshop. I’m going to go there with a project in mind that I’m going to be working on, and I’m going to be just focusing 24/7 that week that I’m there. So writing residencies have been very, very crucial for me because when I’m teaching, it’s very demanding; when I’m creating these programs and events, it’s very demanding. Having said that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that works for everybody. There are some people who are disciplined enough. I’m not one of them who get up at 5 in the morning and write for two hours from 5 am to 7 am. That hasn’t worked for me. I need uninterrupted spaces of time, like a week, or even a long weekend to chip away at projects that I’m working on, and then over time eventually, hopefully, there’ll be enough work to gather, whether it’s a chapbook, or whether it’s a a full-length book. You know I’m the author of three books. I have peers who have 10 books, so we are, you know we’re not in a race. We just have different work methods, and some people are more prolific. I’m not one of them. But one of the things I’ve come to recognize is that the work that I do on behalf of other writers is also part of my work. There’s my creative work, but there’s also my work in the field.

My last question is what would you tell incoming writers? What words of affirmation or what advice would you give them that you maybe wish someone had told you or that you could have taken along in your writing journey?

Well, I’m gonna give a two-part answer. The first one, not very original, but it’s still very crucial, and that is to be a voracious reader and not only reading in your own field. Read widely. If you aspire to be a fiction writer, read poetry and not just fiction. Read, you know, read widely. Advice I perhaps may have appreciated when I was first getting started that I didn’t necessarily explicitly get would be don’t be obsessed with publishing. Some people just want to get there, want to get their name in print, and that’s the goal that will take care of itself if you do the work and try to be the best writer you can be. But don’t be overly obsessed with publishing. I also wish, although eventually I found out for myself, I would have appreciated hearing, Find your community, find your network, find your tribe, and try not to isolate yourself. Find the community that you feel comfortable with, whether it’s one other person or whether it’s part of a creative writing program or part of a writing group outside of the academy. You know, getting an MFA is not necessarily for everybody, but you can still find your tribe by trying to find out that like minded-people would be willing to read your work and offer you feedback. So those are two pieces of advice, reading voraciously and don’t be overly obsessed with getting into print too soon. That will eventually come. And don’t be obsessed with publishing in certain prestigious journals, or certain prestigious publishing houses. Some people end up having very distinguished careers with a mid-level or small presence. Focus on the work, and focus on sharing your work with your immediate community, and then eventually, leaders will find you.

That’s such great advice. I think that with our culture and with social media, there is such a need for names to be known, and to have something that lasts longer than 15 min of fame. And as writers, we feel validated by a publishing, whereas I think we forget the entire point, which is storytelling, and it is communicating cultures and languages and going back to that that fire. And, like you said, finding your tribe. So thank you for that reminder. Lastly, where can we find you and your work?

Well, I have a website that has all that information. My books are published by small presses. My most recent book is published by a press based in Pasadena, California, called Red Hen Press. My first book is published by a small press out of Arizona State University called Bilingual Press, and my second book, Glow of Our Sweat, was published by Scapegoat Press.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I will try to definitely allow more serendipitous moments to move my academic career and my writing profession as well.

And I’ll look forward to hopefully meeting you in October, when I come to MTSU.

Lynette Burns is a Senior at MTSU, majoring in Communication and also works at Apple within Music and Radio Broadcasting for Apple Music. Lynette’s next academic goal is to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing and learn a second language. To nurture her writing Lynette keeps the art of letter writing alive as well as exchanges writing prompts with her pen pals. Her manta is: Thrive fiercely. Exist critically. Work joyfully. Stay relentless.