Sara Ardenne

Well, it was actually modelled after my concept of a child's relationship with their mother. Several moments in the poem did stem from my own experience, but the large majority of it was a story - which is something I try to tell with all of my works. For example, in the later lines when the speaker addresses their mother, explaining that they don't know what to do because of their endless contradictions ["stand mute, speak your truth"] is I feel an accurate interpretation of parenthood, especially in Asian families - you aren't to talk back, yet they demand explanations that they deem excuses. The line "You are not home...I've never felt less alone" is echoed a couple timed throughout the poem and that, I feel, is a child trying to convince themselves of their resentment for their mother - that they like to be alone, the contradiction being that they feel alone when their mother is around. Yet in the very last bit of the poem when another figure comes into picture, the speaker finally acknowledges that they do need someone - and now they are not alone. I was thinking of my sister when I wrote that, actually, but that 'comfort figure' definitely varies from person to person - and I think that having one is really important.

This is such an interesting question! I think a song that kind of fits the poem is "Princesses Don't Cry" by CARYS. Of course, that song is about the relationship between girls and boys - but when you kind of reframe the lyrics [e.g. "so heavy the crown, they carry it tall, but it's weighing me down"] you can see that the perspective really matches. The child in the poem talks a lot about being 'weighed down' in a sense ["...shy from clippers of death that bite their wings."] and of course, as a writer, as someone who wants to tell a story, this child to me feels like they're carrying something very, very deep and something really harmful. And they keep trying to convince themselves they're not alone, they're all that they need, and it really ties into the 'a princess doesn't cry' lyric.

So, I've been a writer all my life, absolutely. But when I first started writing poetry, that was maybe two years ago, I think? Before that, I wrote a lot of stories to channel out a lot of negative emotions that lived inside me at the time. But because they were always temporary moments, they never led anywhere, and they really just got me into more frustration and it just didn't quite work to let out what I felt. I believe that at the time in our English class, we were doing a poetry unit where we analysed a lot of poems and I remember looking at them and just loving the amount of interpretations that came, the amount of hidden meaning. I've always found words fascinating, really, and I wrote my first 'real' poem a while after that unit slipped by. I really liked it, so I tried some more. For a long time, I experimented with short-form poetry (under probably 10-12 lines) and really enjoyed it, so I slowly explored longer forms and when I was introduced to the litmag community, something in me just knew that this was something I really, really wanted to continue doing.

Do you know that saying, "Home is where the Heart is"? It's something I've honestly carried all my life, partly because I've lived in too many apartments and houses to dig my heels into and declare a little plot of land as my home. Home to me is where I feel the most comfortable, where I can feel that I'm loved and that I have love for. If that means going out and eating at the Cheesecake Factory on my birthday, or painting rocks with my itty-bitty cousins, that's home for me. It's a place where I can give and take love in equal measure. It doesn't have to be familial - home is also when I'm with my friends and we're walking, laughing, sharing memes in class, or when I'm writing a speech for my debate club. That's home, to me - it's a place where my heart can really feel.

I take writing inspiration from a vast range of places. From classic mythology and folklore to even childhood nostalgia. My writing often features inspiration from a large variety of sources, from what I can observe of societal tensions to perhaps Homer's timeless Iliad. Inspiration is everywhere: golden hour filtering through the trees, leaves drifting across a pond, a scroll through my trusty Pinterest. Rather than drawing from a single writer, I find that I work best when finding meaning in patterns across literature and lived experience.