What’s your creative process like?
Pieces of ideas for poems hit me out of nowhere, usually in the middle of the night while I’m lying next to my partner, barely awake. Sometimes it finds me in the shower. Sometimes I’m driving and have to pull over to type a phrase into my phone. It’s literally all I can think about until I jot it down somewhere. I feel as if the words struggle to stay inside me, like I could literally burst at the seams if it doesn’t find a place somewhere else. And then next-day-me has to sift through the notes app, jargon scrawled onto fast food napkins, and one sentence email drafts to try and piece together a coherent poem. Sometimes I can get one together, sometimes I have to let it sit for a while and figure out the words that’ll glue it all together. The more I write, the more I learn: a poem builds itself.
What keeps you motivated to create? Do you have any big dreams or goals for your work?
The easiest answer is my partner. There have been many times when I’ve doubted myself and wanted to stop writing. I’ve thrown the towel in on submitting to journals more times than I care to admit. Through it all, he’s pushed me to continue because he truly believes in me and there’s so many things that I wouldn’t have accomplished without that support. He is my backbone, and he keeps me motivated to create.
My biggest dream has always been to publish a collection of poetry, and I hope one day I have enough pieces I’m proud of to be able to do that. I would like to get my work out into more spaces throughout the next year. It means something to me when people read what I write, so that’s the overarching goal: get more people to read it.
Are any movies, music, books, or poetry collections (or any media at all, really) particularly inspiring to you?
I’m a huge fan of Angie Sijun Lou. I remember when I was still in high school and skipped class to hide out in the bathroom stalls and read “Neon Babylon” for the first time. And then I had to read everything she’d ever written, of course. She is an insanely talented writer and definitely someone I’ve aspired to be like.
Maybe it’s weird, but I tend to write about (and think about) oranges a lot when I’m in the creative zone. I love oranges, orange juice, clementines. All of it. I’m afraid all of my poems have that undertone and I’m also afraid I don’t care.
Give us some background on the piece you contributed to this issue.
“Ripe” was the lovechild of my fear of growing old and, at the same time, my acceptance of it. Rarely do I let myself think of being fifty years older than I am (really because I’m terrified of the idea), but when I do, I tend to go into these long bouts of existential dread and fear for the future. I was speaking with my grandmother during one of these bouts, and just realized how much love and admiration I have for her. I saw the appreciation she has for life, how proud she is to have lived the way she has, and I understood somehow that it was all going to be just fine. I see myself wholly in her decades down the line, proud of the woman I am and the things I have and have yet to go through. That’s what “Ripe” is—peeling back the skin of your life and knowing that it was worth it. The struggle and the fear and everything.
Jaylee Marchese is an American writer from a tiny town in the deep south. Her work focuses on everything it means to be alive. She has work either forthcoming or published in Rattle, Creation Magazine, Persephone Literary Magazine, Moonbow Magazine, and Nixes Mate Review.