Astrid Nicole Ortiz
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Astrid Nicole Ortiz: The most challenging part for me as a woman, as a mom, as someone socialized in the servant leader and martyrdom culture of the white American Evangelical church, is convincing myself that it’s okay to prioritize my time to write. As soon as I sit down to write, I think of 10 different things that I “should” be doing instead. Writing, and any artistic practice, requires us to believe on some level that we have deep value beyond our labor and our utility for others, and I do struggle with that on any given day. But the euphoria of writing something that I love is the thing that keeps me returning to that vulnerable place.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
ANO: I am in the process of learning Spanish, and I’d say I’m lightly conversational right now. I started a personal project when I began dating my fiancé, who is Cuban and bilingual, to write them a poem in Spanish each Valentine’s Day, with the vocabulary and language grasp that I have at the time. The idea is to have an anthology of love poems that grow in complexity over the years as I keep learning. It is very humbling to try to express such complex feelings with so few words at your disposal. But I’m enjoying already seeing the growth from year one to two, and I look forward to producing a decently non-embarrassing poem in Spanish one day in the not too distant future.
ORP: How do children influence your art and/or writing? If you’re a parent, do your children like your art and/or writing?
ANO: My oldest kid, who is 10, thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that I'm a writer, and it makes me glow inside. Both of my kids have attended several readings and signings for my poetry book and it is an incredible feeling to look out and see them feeling proud of me. Becoming a parent was a huge contributing factor to my shift from primarily writing fiction to primarily writing poetry. I felt my writing life slipping away in parenthood, and it was more feasible to squeeze in 20 or 30-minute sessions to chip away at a poem while nursing or during naptime than it was trying to write like I used to—feverishly producing a short story over the course of three all-nighters in a row. Raising kids in the shadow of ongoing climate change also influences the themes in my writing. I have a good amount of work that is speculative about the near future, or that wrestles with climate dread, and I spend a great deal of time wondering how the arc of my kids' lives will play out over the next few decades.
I also have several poems that are specifically about my kids and our relationship, and I hope that they read those poems when they are adults and are able to see themselves as I saw them in those moments, like a time capsule. I also hope that them seeing me be unapologetic about having an identity outside of parenthood—pursuing creative endeavors, actively participating in our community, and cultivating passion about my craft—will give them affirmation that they can do the same if they choose to have kids one day.
ORP: Do habits help or hinder creativity? Why or why not?
ANO: I'm a special education consultant, so my answer to this will always be that it depends 100% on the writer and their unique needs and circumstances. For me, I've always benefitted from structure, routine, and consistent writing practice, although I don't always give myself the gift of those things. Whenever possible, I prefer to write in community—I've never produced as much work that I'm proud of as I do when I'm in a writing workshop. I also love a good prompt, and exploring how I can be creative within the bounds of some kind of construct. Sometimes that makes the blank page feel less overwhelming. It took me a long time to realize that a writing practice, and a writer themself, doesn't have to be chaotic all the time. In my MFA program and beyond, I definitely had this image in my head that Real Writers are all manic pixie dream girls whose deeply unstable personal lives are the infinite well of their genius, and that had just never been me. Although coming out as a lesbian in my mid-thirties and leaving a toxic polyamorous marriage has certainly made that less true than it once was. But mostly I lead a quiet, predictable life with a lot of big feelings and bigger questions, and those people can be writers too.
