by Stef Nunez and Jay Rafferty
In this week’s edition of our Sage Talks series the wonderful Virginian poet and recent college graduate Candria Slamin sat down with our Editor-in-chief Stef Nunez to discuss her work, Sharon Olds, Destiny 2 and the audacity of some bitches.
STEF NUNEZ: I’d like to know how you got started writing poetry? What was the first poem you remember really touching you?
CANDRIA SLAMIN: I started in high school. It’s always really weird when I tell this story because it sounds really elegant and its not. I ended up at an art school. I was a writing major there and when I first went there I really thought I was going to be a novelist, like a YA novelist. Every thirteen-year-old thinks she’s going to be the next Stephanie Meyer.
STEF: Of course, same here.
CANDRIA: So, I took my freshman year of classes, then in my sophomore year I took fiction and poetry. My poetry teacher had us read Sharon Olds, an entire book’s worth of her work and I was like “um, so about that fiction thing… poetry is my new love now.” That was back in 2011 or 2012 and I have literally never looked back. I owe my entire life to Sharon Olds and my teacher from high school.
STEF: Hey, that’s beautiful! I’m sure Sharon would appreciate that. Everybody wants to know that something they wrote affected somebody.
CANDRIA: It was very specifically a poem about her mother, or grandmother. The image is still stuck in my head, it was her describing their hair having gone grey at the top, but when she pulls it up it’s still black at the roots, at the nape. It’s been more than a decade now and I still think about that one line, that one image,
STEF: I love that. Thank you, Sharon Olds. I would like to know, what does poetry mean to you?
CANDRIA: In my head, I guess, the answer has shifted over the years, but really, I don’t think it has. I think the answer has always been the same. It is just a way to get my thoughts out, my feelings out. It’s also a way to play with time and my memory. I have, what I’m suspecting is, ADHD. So, the memory thing is not great. I remember my life in short snippets of time which is hard when you want to write non-fiction and longer prose, when you can’t remember a lot to put in the prose. I found that poetry became my way to think about what I can remember and how it’s kinda mushy in my head, because poetry will allow you to be mushy and timey-wimey weirdness.
STEF: Do you watch Doctor Who by any chance?
CANDRIA: A long time ago.
STEF: That phrase just sticks with you. Wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey.
CANDRIA: But it’s sort of how my brain thinks and so, poetry is a way to communicate a bit clearer than the ramblings that prose will let me do.
STEF: So let me ask you, since you mentioned that you feel like you may have ADHD, do you find yourself being inspired randomly by little things that you just have to write down?
CANDRIA: Yup. All the time! I will go day where my brain has decided that it wants to think about everything else under the sun but then, one day I’ll wake up and I‘ll have a line stuck in my head. That day I’ll write six poems nonstop.
STEF: Gotta love the writing process. That’s actually my next question. What’s your process for sitting down to write? Do you just let it come to you or do you sit down specifically like “I’m going to write right now”?
CANDRIA: If I feel like it has been ages, I’ll force myself into a chair with a notepad and say “Okay, we’re not leaving until you have at least a couple of words on this page.” But for the most part it’s whenever my brain has decided that we have words in here. Sometimes I’ll have an idea, sometimes there’s a line before the idea but it’s a lot of waiting for it to come, like an ebb and flow. I’ll have an idea, black out, and then there’s a poem on the page. I will think “Oh, it would be nice to write about this!” Then before I know it there’s a draft and I haven’t thought about where words should go, it just sort of comes.
STEF: That’s talent. That’s actually a really beautiful thing, I think. Some people just can go really long stretches without writing anything like last year, rather than do NaNoWriMo I was participating in the poetry one. Day two I said, “Alright, let’s do this!” and then I would just sit there.
CANDRIA: I understand. That’s kind of why I gave up the dream of NaNoWriMo. I can’t do it! The brain doesn’t operate that way and a lot of my process has been learning to be ok with that, refusing to think I’m not a writer because I can’t sit and force myself. My professor in college told me he has an hour block every day where he sits down and just writes. That’s great. My brain does not work like that. It’ll never happen over here and that is ok.
STEF: It is ok and I think it’s very important that you said that because even for people who are not writing poetry, who are writing novels or flash fiction or whatever, it’s ok to not be the same as everyone else. What is the main thing that distracts you from writing?
CANDRIA: Everything. It’s probably the ADHD brain but right now it’s video games. My other love in life. My girlfriend recently got me into Destiny 2 which works on a season basis so every block of time there’s no content and new stories. I can’t write right now, I’m doing this!
STEF: I’m the same. I’ve put all distractions away for right now though and that’s okay too. It’s not like you have to continuously crank out content. I know you don’t currently have a chapbook out right now. Do you plan to?
CANDRIA: I hope so. One day hopefully, if the stars align and a publication says yes.
STEF: I see, well your work is tremendous. What is the main thing you want people to take away when they read your poetry?
CANDRIA: There’s someone, who will remain nameless, who I admire, and she often says to tell your truth. I think I would like for people to just hear me and what they decide to do with that information is up to them, I’ll give them that reader barrier. But just let me be in the space. I will appreciate that time. If they enjoy it? That’s awesome! If they share it? That’s even better! But, letting themselves take time with my work and truth and words is all I look for. That in of itself is commitment, right? Just sitting down and reading this. No one asked you! That’s all I ask for.
STEF: That’s basically what I took away here. I spent time with your work and what I look for when I read a poem— I’m always looking for an emotional attachment. I don’t always find that, but those are the ones I keep close to my heart. I picked three of your poems that really stuck out to me. So, ‘And the Universe said I Love You because You Are Love’ made me cry immediately and I’d like you to talk about that poem.
CANDRIA: It starts with a funny story. Last October I re-read the large poem that scrolls out when you finish Minecraft. It comes out of the blue but it’s an incredibly long poem that comes after you finish the big quest and so the title was one of the lines from that 30-something minute long poem. I was re-reading it and thought that it would be very interesting to take these lines as titles and see where I go with them. I wasn’t expecting to go to my niece being born when I got there but when I wrote the title on the page I thought about her tiny little hands when she was born. She was born, maybe a week or so early, not super premature but a little smaller than we would have liked her. She was 5lbs 6oz. I wasn’t there at her birth. I was actually in Maryland for some odd reason, so I didn’t get to meet her until she was three days old. Babies always seem to lose a pound or so by the time they’re home for some reason, so she was a little less than that when I actually got to meet her and I refused to hold her for a while. She was so small. It was the first time I had ever been around a new-born. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen when she was born. It was the first time I had ever been around something so small. I didn’t hold her until she was a month old, when she had some substantial weight to her, but my mom would hold her and I’d just sort of look at her and pat her little, tiny baby head. The first time she reached out, she grabbed my index finger and I was just like “Oh I get why children happen now.” As a kid I really didn’t understand, back then I was going through my I-never-ever-ever-want-a-family phase that teens go through.
STEF: And some adults!
CANDRIA: But it was the first moment I kind of understood life. You know, kids sort of have this moment where they’re like “Oh yeah, I am a person, there are other people, life continues, children are born, grandparents die.” It was my moment where I felt that I’m not living a story, this is, she is real and she’s here, and so small. I cannot get over how small that girl is. Now she is ten going on eleven.
STEF: That’s so wonderful to me because I had the same realization. I was not thirteen, I was an adult, maybe twenty, as adulty as you can be when you’re twenty when my niece was born. I was there, my mom made me be front and center like “If you have children, this is what it’s going to be like.” It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life and my niece is ten years old going on eleven too. Seeing her going from that tiny little bean into this big girl who has this personality and loves Minecraft which is hilarious. It’s such a natural thing and I connect with that poem so hard. I hope others also do too, because it is beautiful
CANDRIA: Thank you.
STEF: And you know, our magazine really strives to be inclusive. My family are really involved (mainly for moral support) but we really want to make sure that people know what we stand for. That’s why there’s all the blackness on our website. It is a thing that is every part of me, it is a thing that matters, it is a thing that is important and you had two poems here that just were so good, so very much what we love. Not to say anything negative to other types of poems but this is what I want. This is the bones, this is the blood here. ‘Me and You Must Never Part’ is my favorite piece of yours. My favorite line in it was “I’ll let you call me ‘big head’.” I just want to know what you were going through when you wrote that poem.
CANDRIA : Thinking about my sister calling me “big head”. I wrote that poem last year right after George Floyd, and during all of the million and one protests going on in the country. I’d been scrolling through Facebook right before I wrote it and came across the Ted Talk with Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw where she says there is no frame to hold black women who are killed and abused by the police, because their stories are not written in the newspapers. It’s part of a much longer Ted Talk about intersectionality and what she had originally thought of when she coined that phrase but when she said “There’s no frame to hold them” I thought about my sister, because my sister was going through that fear every black mom goes through. She’s got my little nephew, who’s six now, and she doesn’t know what to do if it’s him one day. I was thinking about that and about the women who get written away, or never written about at all and how there’s a sisterhood between every black woman because we’re the only people who are going to hold us. Whether or not we are blood related, marriage related, if I met you yesterday or thirty minutes from now. We’re gonna hold each other to the best of our abilities. I don’t think I’d written that poem until after I had read The Color Purple (Alice Walker) all the way through. I’d seen the movie plenty of times. I was thinking about that scene when I was writing it, it always makes me cry because sisters, you know? But I hadn’t read the book. So, I read it and the poem sort of spilled out. Yeah, I’ll let you call me “big head” because no one else is going to. No one else is going to understand what that means.
STEF: My heart! This is why I wanted to interview you because this is so important to talk about. I hadn’t read The Color Purple but obviously that’s going on my list, I’ve seen the movie, but I haven’t read the book.
CANDRIA: The movie is a very good adaption but there’s something about that book. It changed the way I think about a lot of things.
STEF: Absolutely. I read Roots (Alex Haley) when I was in the seventh grade because I was the only black kid in the class, and we had to do a report. I made sure those other children sat through “This is where I came from!” Somebody has to talk about it and I love that we’re here, right now talking about it which leads me to the last poem, ‘After Heather Quinn’. It ripped my whole soul open so, I just wanna know where you were when writing that one also.
CANDRIA : So, the story behind that is both mine to tell and kind of not mine to tell. A literary journal who’s name I cannot remember published their daily feature of a white woman named Heather Quinn who had written this whole poem about what was going on in the world last year and at the end of it she included Danez Smith’s grandmother in an image that read a lot like their grandmother was stepping over dead black bodies to go sing Hallelujah with MLK in heaven. Of course, Danez Smith saw this and we all promptly ripped that woman a new asshole. It stuck with me because, for starters, their grandmother is still alive, they had just talked about her in this long New York Times article about what was going on in Minneapolis, and I’m pretty sure that’s why that poem got written. I don’t know what would cause someone to think that was ok and then defend themselves when Danez Smith was like, “Why are you writing about my grandmother like this?” It was a mess. I remember being so confused and angry on their behalf. That was the first poem I had written in a year. I graduated college in 2018 and did not write another poem until then.
STEF: It be like that sometimes.
CANDRIA: It does! But the confusion, it was too much on the soul not to have it come out somewhere. I wrote it and sent to a friend to ask was it too much to name this after her. And my friend replied, “I don’t think so!”
STEF: There are no rules here clearly, because that person wrote that poem.
CANDRIA: It wasn’t even a good poem, objectively. The gumption even—
STEF: The audacity.
CANDRIA: The caucasity.
Thank you so much Candria for sitting down with us, it was an absolute pleasure talking to you. You can follow this awesome nerd over on Twitter @candyslam_ and you can check out more of her poetry over on her website https://candriaslamin.com.
Stef Nunez is the editor-in-chief of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
Jay Rafferty is the poetry editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
