Nine Questions for
Kelly Grace Thomas

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Next nominee. She currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Education and Pedagogy Advisor for Get Lit-Words Ignite, and as an active screenwriter and young adult author. Boat Burned is her first full-length collection of poetry, released in January 2020.

In this interview, Kelly Grace Thomas talks with Hannah Lazar about how she got into writing poetry, her writing process, the aspects of her life that influenced her poetry, the ways poetry intersects with other mediums of storytelling, and what she hopes to accomplish with her latest collection.

1. I noticed that you’ve done other writing (namely screenwriting and an upcoming YA novel), so is there anything about poetry that particularly attracts you to it?

So, I initially wrote some really horrible poems when I was in high school, as an angsty emo teen, and then stopped at the time. Though, I’ve always had the mindset that I wanted to be a professional writer, because there’s nothing cooler than to be paid for doing the thing I love. So, I went to Emerson College in Boston and studied for a degree in Literature and Publishing. There, I learned how to write fiction, journalism, and memoir, and I took one poetry class. I was really into fiction and thought I would do that and worked as a journalist for a number of years after college, for a local San Diego newspaper group. The job was great, but I found I didn’t have any energy to write for myself when I got home at the end of the day. So, I quit and decided to get my teaching credential, and I eventually taught at Triumph Charter High School in Los Angeles. When I was there, the principal encouraged me to use the curriculum of a poetry non-profit called “Get Lit: Words Ignite.” Through the program, you teach it for three months and then take a group of kids to a poetry competition. I had always wanted to do that with my students, so I was like, “Yeah, I’m in 100%!”

This ended up being my first real introduction to poetry! The program lets both students and teachers redefine what poetry means to them, especially because most get introduced to it through standardized testing, which has done a massive disservice to how it’s taught in school. “Get Lit” accomplishes this by putting together a classic slam poetry anthology, which contains a wide range of poems that align with the motto “a classic is a classic because it’s great, not because it’s old.” To give you an idea, it contained work from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Smith to Tupac. The students then claim a poem that resonates with them, memorize and perform it, and then come up with their own spoken response. While coaching this, I was so incredibly interested in how poets like Rachel McKibbens and Patricia Smith were breaking the rules of language in ways I’d never seen before, all while connecting so quickly and deeply on an emotional and experiential level. I also was amazed by how it affected the students; there was one kid who was suspended and on drugs and suffering from so many things, and because of the program she started attending school every day, and wrote so many drafts of poems. They all became the best versions of themselves and found community through it, which made me think — maybe I’ll try this poetry thing!

So, I started writing alongside my students. That happened in 2012, and that May, I had something very traumatic happen to me, and I felt like I was going to implode, that things weren’t going down a good path and I wasn’t the version of myself I wanted to be. I decided to stop any destructive habits I had and write a poem a day for a year. Eventually, I was approached by a friend in the community to take her poetry workshop and gave me a free scholarship for it. I took it so seriously, and I studied with her for three years and now I teach with her, and now I work for “Get Lit.” Poetry has literally changed my life in every way possible for the better, and brought out who I really want to be.

What is your writing process? Do you like writing in a particular location? What especially gets you inspired? How do you tackle writer’s block?

I’m very lucky that I have a writing office, where I’m surrounded by inspirational quotes that help cheer me on. Writing can be very lonely, so it’s nice to have the words of other writers around me. Above my desk there’s a wall of post-it notes, with words from Sam Sachs to Mary Oliver to Ernest Hemingway that keep me inspired. Some weeks are better than others — I have an accountability sheet I’ve started putting together that helps me keep track of what I need to do. I also like writing in the mornings, and take poetry workshops to hold myself accountable, which, for me, is the best way to do my best work because it really pushes me. I’ve also been studying with Kim Addonizio since January, and she’s an incredible teacher, which also helps — what I’m writing’s gotta be good because I’m bringing it to Kim!

Two things bring me to writing: language, the structure of something can be inspiring so I’m a huge fan of reading other poets and learning from them. I think a poem is like a beautiful machine, so when I find one with an amazing structure, I usually try to take it apart to see how it’s built. Then, I go to my own work and see how I can rebuild that with my own style and approach, all while crediting the author. Essentially, everything I learned about poetry I learned from books. I usually find that if I’m blocked, I need to read more, and right now I’m doing a challenge for 2020 in which I read 100 books this year. It’s been around 3 books a week, since I started late, but it’s been helpful in informing my writing.

The second thing is, I feel like if I don’t write poems, things build up, like language and, more commonly, emotion. I feel like if I’m feeling overly emotional it’s because I need to let it out. I usually try to write at a desk, but sometimes I’ll be on a walk, or at the gym, or a hike, and a poem will come to me, and I try to write it then. One of the poems that gave Boat Burned its backbone — “The Boat of My Body” — came to me when I was in a Korean spa in Los Angeles. I was sitting there in my little pink bathrobe, and I was thinking about the body, and my relationship to the body, and you know I’m a weird person, as most artists are . . . no, not weird, more like imaginative, and was wondering, “What if every woman took off her clothes and was something that wasn’t human underneath?” and then thought “I’d be a boat.” Then I wrote the poem. So, writing is a practice of showing up all the time and being willing to put whatever it is you’re doing aside if you hear a poem knocking at the door.

As far as writer’s block, I don’t quite believe in it, I think we’re just being overly critical. I have a friend who I teach with, Trisha, who always gives people the assignment to write the worst poem you could write, and that’s still writing. So, when I do that, I remember, “Oh, I can write, fear’s just driving the car!” So, just sit down and write whatever, and lower the stakes. Call it a brainstorm, or notes. We get so hung up on the finished product, especially when seeking publication and validation, and if we remember why we became writers in the first place — because we love it — it’s a fantastic cure for writer’s block.

What went into organizing Boat Burned? Why did you divide it into four sections, and what are the overriding themes of each section?

What brought me to writing the book was that I felt like I didn’t like the person I was, and more importantly, I didn’t like the woman I was. I was focusing a lot on how the world judged me based on appearance, on subjugation and submissiveness, and how women and men are extremely programmed by the media and our parents. I wanted to unlearn all that, but I didn’t know I needed to unlearn it, until I started writing poetry. It started as a private conversation between me and me, to figure out what I didn’t like about myself, and thinking about where that started. Then I thought about who I wanted to be, and how to become that person. There were a lot of poems about my parents’ relationship, which is beautiful but very interesting and sometimes complicated (they’re divorced but they’re best friends), so I was thinking about the role of family. We spent a month sailing on a sailboat from New Jersey to Florida when my whole family went bankrupt, and my father lost everything except the boat. So, we stayed with him in New Jersey but sailed to drop him off in Florida and left the boat there. That trip ended up playing a huge role in my writing.

I also thought about my past relationships and why I felt the things I did, starting with my parents, then going to my first boyfriend (who was very emotionally abusive and it took me a long time to fully realize that), and then my husband Omid, how sweet and tender he is. He’s Persian, and I also think a lot about the racism he encounters on a daily basis that I, being white, had not encountered. There were a lot of poems about the body, and issues about the body, and eating disorders. So, the book covers a lot, and I think I broke them up in this order: what needed to be healed, some of the events I had experienced or witnessed, what needs to be collectively healed (in terms of power structures, racism, etc.), and a reclamation of strength. I wanted to make sure consecutive poems worked well together, and that there was a narrative arc, so the reader can see how I’ve changed and hopefully experience change along with me.

You seem particularly interested in using environments as metaphors for bodily and emotional experiences, such as in “Portrait of a Roofless House” and “How to Storm.” What inspires these connections? 

Whenever we experience anything internally, we as humans seek to be understood, and when we feel understood, we feel loved, and when we feel loved, we have community. I think we are normally so stuck in the internal, and metaphor is a way to create an emotional community. I say, you have an image like a house, or a storm, and you know what that image looks like, and by connecting it to what’s happening to you internally, others have a frame of reference for what you’re experiencing. All the metaphors I use are reoccurring images in my life. For instance, when I grew up, my father was a contractor. I would go visit him at project sites and there would be half-built houses and sawdust and the like, so a lot of the imagery surrounding my father has to do with building and construction. Also, when we were on the sailboat, since there are a ton of hurricanes in Southern Florida, it was common that we would have to outrun a storm, or go into the Inner Coastal to dodge it, or take the sales off the boat and tie everything down. So, I have a close relationship with storms; it eventually felt like a family member was coming every time there was one. Essentially, the metaphors I use represent both internal emotion and an external experiential timeline of my life.

Your poem “We Know Monsters by Their Teeth” really stuck out to me, both in content and form. I was struck by how you used page orientation to break up the stanzas, because the visual space between each individual stanza made them individually stand out, while still being a cohesive whole. I also noticed many other poems in Boat Burned have an unconventional structure. How do you determine which form to use?

A poem’s concrete visual presentation creates as much of an argument for analysis as its content. For example, I used a “left and right justified” structure for “We Know Monsters By Their Teeth” because I wanted to convey a pushing and a pulling, a tension inside me, how I’m torn between different aspects of identity or grappling with an extremely complicated situation.

In terms of other poems, I close my eyes and imagine how, without words, a poem’s visual representation would be. For example, there’s a poem called “Owned” that’s all about worry and anxiety, and it’s one big block that runs on and on and on, which is how I feel when dealing with worry and anxiety. That’s what I do when working with free verse, though I’m also extremely interested in form. It’s like a cage you thrash around in with limits that truly challenge you to find the most important thing to say. There’s a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay that goes like “I will put chaos into 14 lines and keep him there.” So, it’s a way to contain what feels extremely wild, and I think that so much of my life and the experiences of my life felt extremely wild and emotional, in good and bad ways. Form can really give that a house to live in.

The most recent poetry book I’ve read is A Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, which takes advantage of how poetry can play with how you visually understand text. As a film student, the more I’ve gotten into film the more receptive I’ve become in free-verse poetry, and the ways it impacts how you process words.

Yeah, you can play with the breadth and the space and the distance! I co-wrote a book with Dianne Luby Lane called Words Ignite, and in it I wrote about a method called “Four Reads,” and I used “Blessing The Boats” by Lucille Clifton as an example – if you turn the poem on its side, it looks like waves, which, isn’t that the coolest?

And I love the relationship between poetry and film. I was in a workshop with Denise Smith, who said, “being a poet is like being a screenwriter with an unlimited budget,” and I totally agree. You’re creating these tiny worlds using scene and images, just like a screenplay would.

I took beginner screenwriting last semester, and I’ll be taking advanced next semester! It was very informative and improved the way I write novels, typically by showing me how you can meander – my professor said the “cruel efficiency of screenwriting” is the way to go. With novels, you can write on and on and on, but eventually it stops being profound and just becomes indulgent, so I’ve been trying to cut down on the latter. You don’t have to have chapters that are 10-15 pages, you can have them be 5 pages and be just as effective.

I think the word for me is “intentional” — what is the intention of this and how does it function in the story? I’m currently reading a book called Wired for Story, which is about the neuroscience of story, what turns audiences on and off of writing, so I think it’s important to interrogate our stories. Making the hard choice makes the experience easier for the reader.

Definitely! Though, to revisit a past topic, many of your poems in this book are about female experiences, whether they be positive or negative. One that was striking to me was “In An Attempt to Solve for X: Femininity As A Word Problem,” which attempts to break down what it means to be a woman into simple math, only to conclude that simplifying it to such a degree is harmful. How does feminism influence what you write about?

I grew up in a matriarchy. My mom’s side of the family was almost completely women – my great aunt was the head of Yale’s divinity school, my great grandmother was one of the first nurses in World War I, and my mom and her sisters were powerful too. However, while some recognized that power, I watched them apologize for that power and who they were throughout my entire life, downplaying their strength and power and talent. I also watched a lot of men not be kind or stick with them through the hard parts, while the women still held them in a really high regard. So, I was interested in seeing why is it that the women I’m surrounded by were reaching for power outside of themselves? What’s generational, or what have they been taught, or programmed, or told themselves? My interest in femininity started as an exploration to understand and eventually heal what I felt was a tendency for women to not give themselves enough credit. I heard from a publisher once that women typically won’t submit something that’s finished, while men will submit things that are hardly even put together. Women are so difficult and hard on themselves, while men have been given a free pass because the world has promoted their active behavior. Part of “We Know Monsters by Their Teeth” is exploring how the world reacts to a blunt, powerful woman, and how sometimes, it’s extremely negative, and you feel you need to apologize for your power. I also thought about all the times I had apologized for being the woman I am, and why that was, and how I don’t want to apologize for that anymore, nor should any other woman, ever. In fact, I wish we would be a little more confident and comfortable in who we are. This book was a call to action for me and will hopefully encourage other women.

To wrap up, and expand upon your last point, what impact do you foresee Boat Burned having on readers?

I hope that it will keep someone company, and make them feel understood, or seen, and not alone. I’ve spent so much of my life feeling alone, and I think others do too. There’s a poem in Boat Burned called “The Surgeon General Names Loneliness A Medical Epidemic,” and the surgeon general did say in 2018 that we are so lonely we’re dying from it. I hope my book will help people feel less alone, and help women recognize and reclaim their power and strength. So many people came up to me after readings telling me how my poems have helped them articulate their experiences. Or, if their life is different from mine, I hope they get a glimpse of my different perspective, since reading builds empathy, which is so important right now. This country is extremely sick because of a lack of empathy, we haven’t been empathetic to BIPOC people, to LGBT communities, to women. Ultimately, I hope to provide community and comfort.