Three Questions for Naa

What inspired your choice of genre(s) and/or form(s) for your work?

I have been working on a chapbook that I hope will come out later this year or maybe next year (all depends on how contests and queries go) that focuses a lot on using religion/religious imagery to talk about becoming in a very broad sense. I think I am very fortunate to have not had any severe religious trauma but I have certainly found myself finding some disillusionment with it. I think religion has been a way for me to explore my relationship with sex and intimacy, as well as grief for the world that I found myself born into. The pieces are very much free verse and much of "Is there anything left to offer?" was heavily inspired by people like Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine and andriniki mattis. I think each of them finds a way to use space to tell a story and for that poem and honestly, so many poems I've written since, I've been really interested in seeing how shape/space can further emphasize the words on the page and give greater power to them.

What was your creative process?

Poetry is a very different creative process to me. My degree is in creative writing with a specialization in fiction. With fiction, there is a lot more "intention" to it. That is not to say I don't put in work in my poetry, but in fiction, I find myself having to really sit down, create a whole outline, write the ending of the piece first and work my way back. With poetry, something about the freedomness of it allows it to just naturally flow. Since I never formally learned poetry as much as I wish I had, I've bought probably about 50+ different collections over the past year and have taught myself how to become a poet. Reading different collections has shown me styles I like, styles I don't really like but I want to try out, older poetic styles with contemporary twists that have made me go back to drafts of poems I have and try to change them up. Oftentimes, a poem starts because I see a particular word or phrase while reading an article, a tweet, a collection and in the span of five minutes on my phone or laptop, I craft a world around it. This can get a bit problematic when I'm in my lab and I need to be focusing on counting my cells and not writing (oops), so I do my best to kind of keep repeating that word or phrase in my head till I can get to something I can write down. Sometimes, I don't have an idea of where I want to take a poem but at the very least, that word or phrase will be written in my notes and in due time, i'll come back to it, let myself stare at the screen for a bit before my fingers take over and something starts to get drafted.

What is the significance of this work to you?

Over the past year, I have seen my writing change drastically. I was reorganizing my website the other day and I looked back at old pieces I have published and while I was proud of those pieces at the time (I still am), I almost want to cringe at some of them (lol). Mainly because pieces like these two show how much I've grown and matured as a writer, and how I've found my voice. It's a reminder to me that everyone starts somewhere and maybe in a few years, hell, in a few months, I'll look back at these pieces and think about what I would change with them, what I'd do differently, words I'd add or remove. But honestly, these were pieces I wrote and I remember coming back to them, especially as a sea of rejections was flooding my inbox, as a reminder of how much I've grown as a writer and I'm just honestly so proud of myself. I don't always give myself credit or say that, so I'm glad that these pieces have allowed me to do that.

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging. Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth. Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.