Isabel Armiento

Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues? 

Isabel Armiento: Before I was a creative writer, I was a reporter (and still am), so I habitually resist inserting my social or political opinions into my work. As I begin to write creatively, however, I'm finding that writing can expand beyond objectivity, reaching outward with compassion and love. I'm delighted to realize that I can use words to imagine worlds that I would be proud to inhabit. 

ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?

IA: Don't make assumptions about a person based on the way they communicate! If someone seems "socially awkward," it doesn't mean that they're anti-social, insecure, unintelligent, etc. Of course, I hope that my readers will challenge and resist the ways they have likely stigmatized stuttering; for example, by pathologizing it (like many stutterers, I resist the idea that I have an "affliction" I need to "overcome"). But I also want readers to reconsider the broader assumptions they make based on how people communicate and interact with others. A good place to start is this lovely editorial detailing how society has trained us to (fallaciously) value extroversion but condemn introversion. 

ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?

IA: This is such a wonderful question! I've long since realized that I don't write because my voice needs to be heard; rather, I write to neaten up the tangle of thoughts that clutters most of my brainspace, and often eclipses the useful stuff. I begin writing an essay draft whenever I find myself obsessing over some abstract idea, hopeful that writing will help me figure out exactly what I want to say about it. After a few drafts (and likely also an awful poem and a failed novel attempt), I may have organized my thoughts into a coherent argument. Maybe I even found out a truth about myself along the way. 

ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?

IA: Jia Tolentino! She is so smart, and I adore everything she writes. She always manages to articulate, with wisdom and grace, some profound truth that I have been fruitlessly chasing for years. She does the work so I don't have to. 

ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?

IA: Don't write to make money! The goal of the artist should not be to maximize profits; not only is it bad for your art, it is also unlikely to ever work out the way you want it to. I believe that art, like feminism, fundamentally cannot exist under capitalism.

Isabel Armiento studies English at the University of Toronto, where she founded a campus literary blog, Mnerva, and is editor-in-chief of a campus newspaper. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Walrus, The Mighty Line, Adelaide Literary Journal, and elsewhere, and she was a winner of the Hart House Literary Competition for prose fiction. Her essay, “Stuttering in Isolation,” appears in Issue 4.1.