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. Get yourself a copy of our Work and Labor Issue to read "Now I Am Seeing" from Karolina Zapal...
What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
I struggle to call it an inspiration. It was more like an inciting event. I was working as a Residence Director at a university when I found a student who had committed suicide. It was devastating. I started writing to process what I saw and the mixed emotions I felt as a staff member in charge of the residence hall where it happened. While writing, I started paying more attention to everything at the job: the meetings, the protocol, the university hierarchies. How imposing the systems and important people were, yet how they continuously failed students and the people hired to support them. I wrote this piece quickly. The words poured out of me, wiping everything in their wake. I was drowning.
What is your #1 advice for other writers?
Leave your inhibitions at the door. Let your creativity and imagination fly, roam, skip, hop, pedal fast downhill. In the years since earning my MFA at Naropa University, where innovation and rule-breaking were celebrated, I have compared myself to other writers and tried to imitate them; I have wrestled my writing to make it more accessible; I have gotten stuck in my head about what counts as acceptable or publishable writing. I have at times stopped acting on my creative impulses, pausing before putting words down on paper. When I reread or edit a piece, I can immediately tell when I have stifled my imagination. The writing has less heart. It has an arrhythmia, and suffers from overwhelming fatigue. My advice, to other writers as well as myself, is to write what comes to mind and edit later, to play with genre, form, sentence structure, images, language. Your writing may not be for everyone, and that is okay. It is for someone. Take your writing for a walk in the sun.
What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
I mostly let pieces happen as they come. The pieces born from heart, lightning inspiration, and often recent experience—pieces that come into being in one or two sittings—tend to be my best work. When I plan too much or over-edit, the writing starts to lose vitality. Maybe that’s part of why I struggle with fiction: I write mostly poetry and hybrid nonfiction, forms that allow for more instinct and immediacy. I would love to write a novel someday, but novels, for most writers, seem to require a certain amount of planning and research. And right now, as a mom of an active toddler, I do not have much uninterrupted time to do those things.
What turns you off when you see it in a work? What are your creative pet peeves?
It’s funny, I feel like this changes all the time, as I grow as a writer and human. I used to be turned off by inconsistent punctuation. I would want the writer to either include all the proper punctuation or leave the punctuation off completely. If I read a poem mostly without punctuation but then with a random comma in the third stanza, I’d really burn up. It seems I was as interested in following the rules as I was in breaking them. But that doesn’t bother me as much anymore. Now, I’m more interested in following the language and breath in a work than the rules. My turn-off now is work that engages only with sex or the emotional whirlwind of bad decisions. I think this pet peeve comes from entering a different chapter of my own life. If there’s no emotional depth or sense of growth—if the work isn’t reaching toward something beyond glamorized chaos or desire—I’m more likely to stop reading.
What is your favorite vice? What are you drinking at happy hour, in a literal or a metaphorical sense?
My favorite vice is that I drink way too much caffeine. I love the taste of coffee, I love the energy boost, I love the first sip and jolt to the brain, the heady feeling when I’ve had just a little too much. So, at happy hour I’m most likely drinking espresso shots or an americano or an espresso martini (though I must admit I’ve never tried one!).