Lindsey Saya

Oyster River Pages: Do you consider your writing/artistic time to be work or play?

Lindsey Saya: I approach my writing as work, a job. I sit down and punch in. I think, as writers, we must, or risk never giving life to the kaleidoscope of ideas and stories and voices of characters we keep in our minds. However, there are those moments when the words spill out, when that wonder, that child-like wonder grabs a hold of me, and it’s then that my writing, my work turns to play. And it’s only then that my work becomes my best work.

ORP: How does this work connect to your personal experience/identity?

LS: This piece is the most autobiographical, the most personal, that I’ve written. Though it is fiction, I poured much of myself and my experiences from prison into it. I tried not to, make it too personal. But writing, when you don’t fight it, tends to find its way to the truth, a truth, whatever that may be.

ORP: How do you pay it forward?

LS: Writing. There are a lot of ways to pay it forward. Writing is mine. It’s not enough, I know. Perhaps, it’s just a small way of seeking redemption for myself. I’d like to believe when I write, I am writing something for someone, somewhere, that can be related to, a connection. Something that that someone can say, “I understand. And I am a little less fractured because of it.” At least that is the comfort I have felt when I have read something that moves me.

ORP: What is the space that has shaped you?

LS: Prison. It is there that I learned, really learned, of cruelty and hopelessness, of solitude and sadness, of longing and love, of humanity and the loss of it, of blind hate, of remorse and redemption, and of unexpected kindness. Yes, kindness, I learned of the power of kindness. I don’t think I’d be able to write how or what I write without having suffered that space that was a wound that is a scar in my heart now.

ORP: What are your food issues?

LS: My view on a big bag of potato chips: If the packaging isn’t resealable then it’s one serving.

Lindsey Saya spent the past 15 years incarcerated in the Arizona Department of Corrections. It is there that he discovered the magic and transcendent power of the written word. His fiction and poetry can be found in Iron City Magazine and Poetry Spot at AZCentral.com. Now he resides in Peoria, Arizona, where he continues to work on his craft as a free man. Read his story “A Life Lost” in Issue 3.2.