What do you do in the rest of your life and how does that connect and/or conflict with your creative life?
Working for a humanitarian organization, my day job can admittedly interfere with my creative life, but also with my personal life. The world being relentlessly cruel as it is, crisis mode has been our default mode for the last five years; and it’s exhausting, it’s discouraging.
I started writing poetry again in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, at first just as a way to keep my sanity. There was so much frustration I couldn’t give voice to, and so much grief. Then as I was doomscrolling the net, I found a poetry blog that had shared lines from the recent collections of Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie Akosua and Jessica Helen Lopez. I felt like I’d been pulled above the tideline. I then read poetry from Michellan Alagao, Allan Popa, Kaveh Akbar and many others before attempting to write the littlest haiku.
I try to read poetry everyday, especially after particularly difficult days at work. I still often feel close to drowning, but I’ve mostly stayed above the tideline ever since.
Why did you feel like After Happy Hour would be a good home for this piece?
Can we take a moment to appreciate the journal’s acronym? AHH. That is all kinds of brilliant and I’m all for it.
I also loved how the journal felt like an escape from the street noise of the internet. I first read Issue 21 and it gave a such sense of quiet in the night, despite lingering unease. Reading the featured pieces was like that walk home we take alone because we have to, but along the way we get the urge to hum or carry a conversation with ourselves. There’s a defiance of emptiness there no matter how small the act, a defiance of despair. Somehow that makes the distance bearable.
If you're part of a workshop group or other creative community, tell us about it! How did it form, what all do you do, and how does it help your creative process?
I joined the SEA Lit Circle during the Southeast Asian Poetry Writing Month (SEAPoWriMo) last year. It’s a very active group of readers and writers who are from Southeast Asia or can trace their roots to the region. The group’s support has been immensely helpful in maintaining passion for the craft of writing and literature in general. We have monthly workshops, deep dives into themes, other writing or other art forms that influence or inspire us, and we just generally cheer each other on so that we never lose sight of why we love what we do.
I credit the group for helping me see where my work could go or how else a poem might want to be. The members are an integral part of the writing experience because they’re often the first audience of my early drafts and it fills me with so much gratitude to be able to know firsthand how something I wrote could resonate with others, even if — or especially when — the message received may be something other than what I intended. I love being surprised that way, I love the potential it offers to find new meaning just by sharing my work with a community.