We love learning more about our contributors, and an interview seemed like a fun way to hear more about the writers and artists we publish, so we gave them a choice of questions to answer. We hope you also enjoy hearing more about the artists and their works. Read on and check out issue 28 for two poems from Sreeja Naskar.
Who are some of your favorite writers, and what do you like about them?
I actually have an array of poets whose work I absolutely admire: Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Audre Lorde, Ada Limón, Kim Addonizio, and Rita Dove, to name a few. Simply reading their poems changes how I even think about language and tenderness and how I look at the world without flinching. What moves me the most is how their work blurs the ordinary and the sacred, and how they can make grief shimmer or joy ache a little.
And though he's not a poet, I've always loved Ruskin Bond.His stories taught me that simplicity can still ache, and that small-town silences and everyday gestures can hold immense beauty. I think that's something I try to hold onto in my own writing.
What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
I'm not sure if I actually have a defined creative process. It's really impulsive; things just come when they come. Most often, it happens while I'm reading. I'll stumble upon a single phrase, an image, or even a fleeting emotion, and suddenly it unravels into a poem. I love how reading feeds the urge to write. Sometimes I try to plan things out, but that almost never works. They either lose their spark or end up rewritten entirely. The best ones usually arrive out of nowhere, in moments when I'm least trying.
What turns you off when you see it in a work? What are your creative pet peeves?
When it comes to novels, my biggest turn-offs are overly ornate metaphors or language that feels overwrought for no reason, and characters who exist solely to serve the plot rather than feel like real people. In poetry, I often get put off when trauma is used as a shortcut to depth and/or when poems are made 'pretty' just for the sake of prettiness. Quite frankly, beauty without purpose doesn't move or stay with me.
As for creative pet peeves, one of mine is having to explain why a piece is fragmented, when the fragmentation is entirely intentional (sometimes that's just how a poem wants to exist). I also get a little frustrated when readers ask what a specific line 'means.' Not everything needs decoding. I wish more readers would approach poems as spaces to experience rather than puzzles to solve.
What is your "white whale"?
I used to write short stories before I started writing poems, but I could never finish one because I've always been terrible at plotting. My brain just doesn't work in neat story arcs. So my biggest white whale is to write a full-length novel one day. I'm more of a stream-of-consciousness writer; that's what comes most naturally to me, and it's what I lean into when I write prose poems. But there's still a part of me that hopes I'll one day have the patience (and maybe the obsession) to shape all the chaos into a story that lasts longer than a few pages.
We think of "after happy hour" as the time you can really let loose and be yourself. What is your after happy hour?
The time when I close my textbooks and let my curiosity choose what it wants to learn. I usually end up surfing through sculptures, Greek art and mythology, random science facts, and deep-dive videos about things that have nothing to do with my syllabus but everything to do with what I genuinely find fascinating. It's the hour when I'm still learning, just without the pressure.