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 get yourself a print edition of Issue #25 for work from
Virgina Smith

Or you can let them read to you!



What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
The vivid and surreal images from a dream that I describe in the first stanza both mystified and delighted me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized those dream images reflected my panic after a year of snorkeling on the coasts of the Caribbean and Kenya, where the coral reefs were dying. In the poem, this imagery is connected to both my own practices around cooking with sustainable sources and yet acting out a nonetheless human-centric response to the harm we have caused our mother oceans: "I may be anthropomorphizing."

Who or what inspires your work generally?
My work, like that of many poets,  comes out of a variety of sources: my family of origins, current family and friend experiences, meditations connecting a living or non-living thing (an orchid, a dung beetle, a broken bowl ) to other, larger personal experiences or psychological, cultural, social or political notions) .My life as a partner, woman, mother, grandmother, or other situated or socially constructed identities. Like so many poets in this "post-inconvenient truth era," I write a good deal about the desecration of our environment and the hopeful struggle to reverse the damage.(Not gonna happen during the Trump regime.) Because I live in a city, I don't tend to write much nature poetry.

Who are some of your favorite writers, and what do you like about them?
Some of my favorite poets are: Sharon Olds, Ellen Bass, Traci Brimhall, Mark Doty, and Ocean Vuong.
Olds for her microscopic view of the body and sex, often very weird and lovely; Bass for the ways that she renders the ordinary things of this world in gripping metaphor; Brimhall for the ways she writes about big themes--love, death, motherhood, murder--in stunning metaphor that skirts magical realism, making old ideas completely new; Doty for his connective leaps that make of his common subjects the stuff of epic significance; Vuong for the wide-eyed innocence and old man wisdom of his gorgeously rendered poetry and prose. And for how he makes of suffering a gift to his reader.

What is your #1 advice for other writers?
Read other writers/poets constantly, daily. Allow for a continuous flow of language into your conscious and unconscious. Read widely. This reading will school you over and over again. Learn to seek out solitude to allow for stillness and thought. Do those things far more than you write. That is a secret sauce combo.

What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
Both! Some poems tend to develop in my head over time, and so I capture the accretions of ideas and images as they arrive and keep notes until I am ready to begin. That's been happening with a hippo poem for the last 6 weeks, and I am only now ready to begin. But a few weeks back, a voice text from a friend instantly sparked a poem, and I
wrote it on the spot. I like the yin and the yang of that writing process.