I stopped erica lewis (author of multiple books, curator of the John Oates House reading series, and a fine arts publicist who will visit Miami this Wednesday) with some questions about her process, recommendations, and life soundtrack. (Read Lewis’s daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015), murmur in the inventory (2013), and new poems from the forthcoming mary wants to be a superwoman.)
- What’s your process like?
It’s very organic. It’s structured, but only in the sense that once I think about doing a project, once I work the logistics out in my head, realize how the poems need to move from point a to b to c, then I can start writing them. They are structured before they are even written. When I write the pieces, I write them in order, so I basically write a poetry book straight through from beginning to end; it’s not a poem here and a poem there and then piece things together. It helps to keep the individual poems working with each other and advancing the story I want to tell. It keeps the whole book moving. I used to be more rigid and create all sorts of rules for projects, constraints that didn’t let me really deviate from what I was doing or explore other things I wanted to do in the work. Those books were very very different than what I’m doing now with the box set trilogy.
- What are some influences on your work, and how have they manifested in your writing?
Visual art, music, history – they all influence my work in both content and style. If you read through the box set trilogy books, you’ll find references. If you look beyond the literal influences, you can see it in the language and visual formatting of a page, or the way a poem flows, how the language works with the visual and the lyrical. It’s all interwoven. And then, of course, you have to know your lineage in order to put it all together. The writers who came before you, you have to learn the craft of what they were doing before you can mess around with it and flip it and make it your own and create something new.
- What would you tell your undergrad self about the literary world that you know now?
The people that love your writing and get your work and champion and support you are not necessarily the people in your immediate surroundings. Sometimes you have to find your people. You have to go outside of your immediate community to be accepted and supported. If you stay within the confines of what one writing community is doing or offering you then you are limiting the potential of your work. Find your people.
- Do you have any literature or poetry recommendations?
Read everything.
- If your life had a soundtrack, which song would you pick for it?
Ha ha, my life does have a soundtrack. The “box set” trilogy uses the music of Hall and Oates, Stevie wonder, and Diana Ross. It takes the concept of sound tracking your life and explores songs as memories and triggers. Now, if I had to pick one artist right now, I couldn’t. One song, I couldn’t. And that says something about all of the music that makes up our lives, all of the people, energy, influences, art that makes us whole beings. That soundtrack should never stop.
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Brie Moore
Editor-in-Chief of the Creative Writing Department Blog and English Department Ambassador
Creative Writing and Biology ’18