Lola Anaya

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?

Lola Anaya: I was always interested in mosaics and collage, the way that a larger image can be stitched together by smaller moments and fragments, and so I think that my interest in poetry came from my interest in art. I thought about how I could take what I like to observe and put it to the page and I started writing actual poems in middle school. That source of inspiration has always been there but it shifts back and forth between different ideas that get stuck in my head. I was obsessed with the sonnet form for a semester in college, and I was obsessed with ekphrastic poetry for a while as well. It always comes back to this idea of a cut-and-paste work.

ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?

LA: Honestly I don't know. I think it depends on the piece because sometimes poetry can function similarly to a journal entry where I want to get some thoughts or something that's been bothering me down onto the page, which is a very personal thing that oftentimes will remain private, but if I continue to revisit the idea then I want it to be created for my family and friends. A lot of my poetry boils down to the important relationships in my life, whether they are family members that I grieve or my friendships, so I think ultimately it's for them. This means that I have to consider what I am writing and how it will be received, but I think that finding the balance between allowing poetry to be a vessel like a diary entry and a form of communication between myself and those around me informs my creative process heavily.

ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs? 

LA: I think a lot of my inspiration comes from who I am reading at the time, and some strong recent examples would be Ada Limón and Mark Doty. I am very interested in how Limón explores larger themes of grief and relationships through nature and takes on such an immersive relationship to her environments. I try to channel this connection or a longing for connection that she does and I truly admire her work a lot. I saw her do a reading back in April and I still think about it every day. With Doty, I love his attention to detail and the intensity of his descriptions. I wrote a poem with lines from his "A Display of Mackerel" for a creative writing workshop and his work has really resonated with me a lot in my practice.

ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?

LA: Creative writing energizes me because once I get hooked on an idea, it really stays with me for a while. If there's a phrase that I come up with, I just hold on to it in my mind and don't write it down until I feel struck by something else to add to it. I feel very rewarded when the pieces come together. Sometimes I'll have ideas of the ending for a future poem and need to work toward finding the beginning by going for walks and spending time outside or doing some brainstorming on the page or going to bookstores and looking through poetry books that catch my eye. I find the search to be challenging because sometimes a line will stick with me for weeks but I feel unable to write it down until I find something else to go along with it. I just have a catalog in my mind of ideas or even singular words that always follow along with me.

ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?

LA: Vulnerability means coming into truths that you weren't expecting to with your writing. I had to write and edit a chapbook of poetry for my capstone course in college and I was very focused on writing ekphrastic poetry about this one painting I was interested in called "Mourning Picture" by Edwin Elmer. I ended up writing this collection about my great-grandmother's passing, grief, and the idea of the physical clutter left behind; and I ended up writing a lot about friendship, my immediate family, and the seasons of a year as well. It just blew up into a larger, more personal idea than I was coming into the course with. So I think vulnerability is being open to the fact that you won't always land where you aim to land and you may be able to uncover a lot about yourself that you weren't expecting. There's this element of mindfulness that comes with writing and vulnerability that you have to tap into.

 
 

Lola Anaya is a Puerto Rican poet from New York City who explores visual art and selfhood through poetry. She has been published in Same Faces Collective, mOthertongue, Ahora Sí (the newspaper of the New York Boricua Resistance), and Milk Press. She has read her work at Unnameable Books, Spoonbill & Sugartown Bookstore, and the 2023 New York City Poetry Festival.

Read Lola’s poem “autopsy” FROM ISSUE 7.1 HERE.

Brigid Higgins