Love Letters to Poetry | Hybridity, Voice, and Vignettes: An Interview with Ari Tison
GLORIA: First off, CONGRATULATIONS on the publication of SAINTS OF THE HOUSEHOLD!!! It's so exciting. I hope you're pausing in the whirlwind of the book release to take in all the goodness of this moment!
ARI: Gloria, thank you so much. That really means the world. I’m so very happy to get to talk with Diverse Verse about poetry! This collective is so beautiful. It is its own pantheon of poetry folks.
GLORIA: I am really interested in the form and structure and many of my questions will focus on this and on genre.
ARI: Fabulous! Two of my favorite things to talk about.
GLORIA: What made you decide to write a hybrid book, where one brother expresses himself via poetry and the other through prose?
ARI: Yes! I had been obsessed with vignettes and loved House on Mango Street and A Step from Heaven. Saints of the Household started out just as Jay’s perspective. He arrived in the shorter prose/vignette form, and I think it really exhibits how his mind works. He’s a dweller, mathematical, and so his sections show up in that heavy prose form. Max’s voice came to the book next, and I knew he was a painter right away. I had been introduced to the verse novel (Long Way Down specifically) in grad school, and thought, how perfect of a match–art and poetry? I always want form and function to go hand in hand, and this felt like the right opportunity.
GLORIA: I love the necessary blurring and mixing of genres to serve a character's voice. Speaking of, I'm curious about how these particular characters came to you. How long had you carried them before sitting down to write?
ARI: The two literally materialized pretty quickly on the page and really didn’t exist in my mind before that. I still remember sitting down and Jay just showing up. Max not far after. I think most characters carry parts of us and maybe in a way, the boys were parts of myself I hadn’t fully processed but had been there surviving for years, and so when the time came, they showed up and there was material and also things for me to process. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t revision to be done, but the bones were there right away. This is not so with my second book though!
GLORIA: How did writing this book surprise you?
ARI: Oh this is a good question. I feel like an aspect of writing this book that surprised me was building a subplot in Saints. My editor felt like we needed a bit more of a plot, and my poet-self was game for it! I wanted to learn and grow my skills. Really this book taught me a lot about plotting and how to actually do it on the page. I also learned how to weave it in after I had the emotional beats of the main characters already established.
GLORIA: What role does hybridity play in your writing before/or outside of your novel?
ARI: I just went to a panel at AWP about how many Indigenous and Native writers write hybrid work. The panel talked about how we can be fragmented but it’s not an example of being un-whole. It’s really the opposite. We use fragmentation in order to show you a whole that exists differently than what is expected out of western craft. My people tell stories through song, through nature, through oral storytelling, and it would only make sense that the stories would combine different elements like that in my work. I’m often thinking of how I can combine Bribri legends with metaphor for my work with anthologies. My poetry tends to be more prose poetry and very narrative. But my prose then tends to be more poetic, according to my editor. Ha! It all gets “goey” but I really enjoy not feeling like I have to stick to one thing in my writing.
GLORIA: This last question has to do with your writing process. I'm always interested in learning about writer's habits and rituals. How and when do you make room for writing, especially writing poetry?
ARI: I’ve found that my habits have changed depending on life. Pre-baby, I could sit at my pretty desktop computer and write for hours. Now, that is my workspace, and I find I can’t work on my novels there anymore because it saps the joy. So now, it’s my crappy old laptop with keys that fall of that I take to coffee shops to get out of the house or I go upstairs to our library and sit on our green chaise lounge tucked away from everyone. But the common denominator? Coffee. Always coffee.
I find that writing for poetry comes like little unexpected gifts. I get an idea from something that happens in life (I’m thinking of thousands of dragonflies descending on our valley last year) and it goes in my notes or I find a moment of quiet and it goes down on a word document. I haven’t had much time for revision on those because of life time restrictions, but I know they’ll be there to return to when the time is right.
Ari Tison is a Bribri (Indigenous Costa Rican) American poet, essayist, autoethnographer, and author of YA hybrid novel SAINTS OF THE HOUSEHOLD (2023) + Untitled YA (TBD) with FSG/BFYR. She is also forthcoming in a Latine YA anthology OUR SHADOWS HAVE CLAWS with Algonquin Young Readers (2022). Her poetry for children has been featured in POETRY's first ever edition for young people, and her work for adults has been published in Rock & Sling, Yellow Medicine, and The Under Review. She has her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University where she was the winner of the 2018 Vaunda Micheaux Nelson award for a BIPOC writer from Lerner Publishing.
