Author of “Letter to You Beginning at a Dead Lake” (Volume XXX, 2026)

When did you realize you wanted to write? 

Pretty early in high school I started to write in a notebook. It started by trying to write a song, and I found it so difficult. I remember sitting there for hours and never finishing it. The difficulty of trying to translate my thoughts into words fascinated me and that never went away. My childhood was complicated, so trying to make sense of that through writing (whether that writing was fiction or nonfiction) helped me sort through events and moments I needed to reflect on. It’s that difficult translation between thought and words on the page that’s very interesting, and I don’t think I would find so much joy through writing if it was easy.  

Is what you write now the same as what you wanted to write when you started?

In a sense, yes, but it’s so much more nuanced than how I started. I didn’t start by wanting to write about any specific thing other than my life and questions that simply came up by living. That has never changed. My understanding of poetry, the books I’ve read, and the writers I’ve studied with, or have become friends with, all have deepened my process, which is completely different than how I started.

How does using technology—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or even just your phone—influence how you write?

Technology mostly has a negative impact on my writing. The positives are obvious. It’s nice to be friends with a lot of great writers through social media. You can talk to them. You can see what their latest works are and read them before they come out in book form. All of that is very interesting, and given so many of these people do not live where I live, feeling “connected” to them in some way is great. It’s also nice to be writing and realize you want to research something, so having the ability to look things up is helpful. That said, technology is powerful distraction, and writing is about attention. Studies suggest that it takes 10-20 minutes to get into a creative mindset, and when we consistently stop working to check our phones, we pull ourselves out of that creative mindset. It then takes another 10-20 minutes to get back into that head space, but most people check their phones every 5-10 minutes, so do that math. We also have this false believe in our abilities to multitask, which isn’t real. What we call multitasking is really splitting our attention. You stop doing one task to do another. You can’t write a good poem and read your phone in the exact same moment. You do one thing, and then stop and do another. It’s never at the same time. Also, reading on a screen is dreadful. I retain half as much as I would from reading a hardcopy. On top of all this, we live in an attention economy, and many of the tech bros who profit from that are not good human beings, so disconnecting from that world is an intentional choice that we all need to make more often. Unfortunately, promoting yourself is difficult to do, and phone addiction is a real thing, but social media gives you the ability to share work that’s been published and promote your books. It’s a difficult thing to manage. The positives are there, but the negatives are extreme.  

What advice would you give an aspiring writer who wants to put their work “out there“? 

There is your writing process and what you create, and then there is publishing and self-promotion. They are not the same thing. In fact, trying to get out there and promoting yourself, takes time away from creating. It’s important to see these things as distinctly different. The most important thing you can do as an aspiring writer is develop a love for the process of writing. There is nothing more important, in my mind, than that. If you develop a love for the process, you will love to write. All creatives need to put in a lot of time and attention to work on their craft. It takes years, but after that time, the growth will be obvious, and then getting it “out there” is much easier. But don’t be in a rush. You’re only competing against yourself. After that time where you do a lot of work, you need to work on learning the literary magazine market and presses. This too will take time. Ask friends what journals they like. Go to book fairs with small presses and journals. Go to journal reading launch parties. Buy sample copies. Follow journals and presses online and see what sort of work they promote. Always remember, you can’t give a journal the ability to say yes to your work without giving them the ability to reject you. See rejection as a path towards acceptance. Rejection can be discouraging, but all writers go through it.

Where do you typically seek inspiration and guidance for your work?

I don’t seek inspiration. Life just happens and poems drift your way if you’re paying attention. You just pluck them out of the sky or pick them off the sidewalk, and if you don’t grab them as they go by, well, then Ocean Vuong gets them.

How do you manage writer’s block?

I don’t have writers block as much as I have moments when what I’m writing isn’t living up to my expectations. You just have to write your way through those moments. Again, you need to fall in love with the process, and that often involves working on writing that may not appear in your next book or get published in a journal. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re writing, and you know that not all of it is going to be your best work. But you have to trust that working through those not-so-great poems or stories will lead you to the next thing and the next.