What was your first start to writing?
Well, I always say the summer going into sophomore year because I started writing a couple of personal essays. In my sophomore year, I got really into writing this short story that I spent months on, and then that was what I used to apply to the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. And so I feel like that was the first time that I really put effort into the revision process. I can't pinpoint the first time I got into poetry. It's more difficult.
But I can pinpoint the first poetry collection I read, which was The Waste Land and Other Poems, a collection by T.S. Eliot. I don't even know how I got that, but I picked it up somehow. “Marina” was my favorite poem for a while because I hadn't read any other collections.
Did you have any mentor figures in terms of writing?
It's kind of paradoxical. I love to write, but I don't have a lot of reasoning for how I got into it or why I do it. I started writing with personal essays. At the end of freshman year, we had to do a series of vignettes, and I went all out. I was like, ‘This is what I've been waiting for. I'm gonna have so much fun with this.' I mean, it wasn't fun. There were really sad vignettes that I ended up writing. I wrote one about the night my mom left, and I wrote another about my relationship with my dad. But I got really into writing them.
Then I ended up getting a 3.75, which is a low A, but some other kids got a four. It really upset me. I just wanted to prove to myself that I was competent at this thing that I thought was really important, to be able to express myself. I was going through a lot, and I realized that I enjoyed being able to process it in that way. But I really did not like my freshman year English teacher. So I find it funny that I'm citing her now as one of the reasons that I started getting into writing, because I think that really is it. She was one of those teachers who were critical of kids when they could tell that they actually cared about what they were doing. She pushed me to work harder. And it worked.
Do you feel like you're a person who tends to put a lot of pressure on yourself?
Yeah. I think so. It's like that constant feeling of putting all this pressure on myself, and I wanna do all these things, and I'm still gonna wind up feeling like a fraud. Imposter syndrome. And I feel like that's just how it is for a lot of people. I'm a lot healthier as a person now, and I think that I'm better at handling my stress. But in certain ways, I hold myself to a standard that I'll never reach. Just that I'm already failing. It's been really difficult this year, being junior year. I can't help but feel like I'm not going to get into college. And I'm a pretty good student, but it's that kind of anxiety.
What do you think people need to know about you to understand your poetic voice?
That's a good question. To be truthful, I don't think of the poetry that I write as being 100% connected to who I am. Everything that goes into my poetry is me, but it's just not that everything I am goes into my poetry.
I think it's funny because one of my first stepping stones into poetry was Bukowski, which is my bad. So I thought for a while that poetry was supposed to be brutally honest and almost vulgar with its honesty. But then I started reading really nice, happy poetry that's really sweet. And I thought that poetry is supposed to be more of an ideal thing, and I wanted to write about what all these famous poets wrote about - nature, love, and beauty. So, I think most of what I write is an idealized version of plucking the good things or just plucking a specific moment out.
I mean, I don't wanna say plucking the good things out because a lot of what I write is kind of sad. But I don't think you need to understand who I am to understand it, and I don't really want people to, because I'm really into the technical aspect of poetry. I said in an interview a few weeks ago that I got into poetry because I got really into my rhetoric class, which my teacher commented on and told me she'd never heard that before. I want people to be able to read my poems and understand whatever my point is without me clarifying this and that. But that being said, I also admit that my specific perspective as a young person, or that my specific perspective as a trans person, or my specific perspective because of the way I grew up, influences that. But on another level, I want it to be able to stand alone.
How does that relationship to your writing impact your approach?
I think that there's this idea that the first step is finding out what you wanna write about, and all the technique and form and learning the rules kind of comes later. I figured out what I wanted to write about and the stories I wanted to share while doing my other writing, outside of poetry, and thinking. The technical aspect of poetry has made my writing better, but I can't say that objectively. But I think my ideas are more concise.
It also helps me be more confident when I understand why this works and why I like it. When I would go straight from the heart and whatever I was thinking about, I just felt really insecure. I still feel like that's a deep-rooted problem in me.
When I was submitting my poems and resume for the Youth Poet Laureate program, I felt like the judges were going to be able to see through that and think ‘This kid doesn't know what he's doing’. What was able to ground me and give me the confidence to submit was that I was confident in the way my poems sounded.
Do you have a favorite thing you've ever written?
I am most confident in the poem that I read at the inauguration and put up on the website, In Plein Air. The thing I like the most, even though it's not very good, is a short story I wrote for the Iowa Young Writers Studio workshop that I went to. It's kind of like an ironic play on On the Road of this sick kid, and I just really enjoyed it. I remember that part of the story is that everyone is identified by the books and authors that they read. Everyone's kind of characterized by that, and I just had so much fun with it.
What other passions do you have in your life?
I really love to paint. I just got some oils for my birthday, so hopefully I'll be painting more. But writing's my niche. It's my thing. I have painting and I have photography. I really like taking pictures. Maybe if I end up studying journalism in college, I can also do photojournalism. All my stuff is arts-related. I don't do many other things.
I do stuff in school, but I'm not going to any calculus club after school. I was never really into sports, but I was into basketball for a while. I know Mason mentioned that in his interview. We were on a basketball team together for a few years, and I really enjoyed that, but then I stopped.
I also did a lot of different kinds of horseback riding growing up, which is a good thing for me to bring up because I want to get into that again. I rode western and did vaulting from the age of six until I was 13. I'm just scared. There aren't a lot of places in the valley where I necessarily feel welcome anymore. I'll figure that out, because that'll be really fun to get started up again. That's something that brought me a lot of joy.
I noticed that you submitted some of your poems to magazines and zines. How did you find out that those publishing outlets existed?
It was after I went to that writer's workshop in Iowa, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Everyone was doing so much, and they had all been publishing these kinds of things. And I thought that was insane. Many of them were in print, too, and I was really impressed. So I just looked into whatever they had been looking into.
It was really interesting. Putting your stuff out there is one of the hardest things to do. There's creating it, and then there's being able to just put it out there. And I've been rejected a lot of times, but then you start applying more. But it blew my mind. It was cool to have that opportunity, and I want to put my work out there more.