We’re getting meta! In this contributor supplement, we ask writers to consider their process and share what might not have shown up in their accompanying essay on true. Here, writers respond to questions about the generation of their work and what they discovered while writing it.
“Writing Against: Training, Genre, and Poetic Interference,” appeared in the October 9, 2026 issue of true.
What inspired you to interrogate the primary question of your craft essay?
There are actually multiple questions I’m interrogating in my essay. Questions about training and discipline, permission and arrival, recognizing yourself as worthy and believing in your own legitimacy. But at the core is a question about being honest with oneself while writing through insecurity and around imposter syndrome when one hasn’t had the “proper” training. Can someone really be self-taught? Does that make them less than? There is so much discourse right now around how certain creative writing programs beat the creativity and curiosity out of you in exchange for the same standardized approach. It’s a marketable and successful approach: you’ll be recognized by publishers and received by critics. But what does it do to the rawness or playfulness of or experimentation in the writing? On the other hand, without the official blessing of a creative writing program or stamp of a graduate institution, what is taken away from the potential or legitimacy of the work? That was the constellation of thoughts I had while writing this essay.
Did the writing reveal any secondary concern or insight that perhaps you weren’t even aware of before you started writing the essay?
At some point, it is about permission and standard. The permission to become without waiting for an external authoritative voice or institution to tell you you’re official. It took me years after earning my Ph.D. to actually believe myself to be a legitimate scholar. Someone in the field, yes. But an actual scholar? In some ways, that permission is meant to keep standards. There have to be some kind of baseline rules or measurement or process by which one learns fundamental structure, methods, approaches, and mechanics. But between that and actually naming yourself, allowing yourself to stand in the literary and art canon or scholarly field as a poet, a scholar, an archivist, an artist, a writer, is the permission. This essay is really about giving yourself permission and reconciling with standards: both the formal, institutional standards, and your own informal or personal standards.
We noticed a slow build to self-acceptance in this essay; that is, you spent time examining the tension between being a self-taught poet and a trained academic before marrying the two in your work. What did the conjoining of these genres in your work resolve for you?
For me, the resolve is accepting and being fine with the tension, with the non-streamline nature of being a writer who exists between formal training, self-taught practice, new and experimental forms, and expectation. But in truly accepting and recognizing myself as a writer, a real writer, a good writer, has been a process. This process has everything to do with my own relationship to writing, the need for external recognition and validation, and my own confidence in my voice and the right to take up space. This has been a slow evolution for me. I grew up in a family where there were unhealthy manufactured dynamics around power, control, conditional validation, and (in)visibility. Part of coming into self-acceptance has been to reconcile my own complicated relationship to ownership: owning my own voice and giving myself permission to exist in contradiction, to learn, to grow, to explore, to fail, to not be good enough and be good enough still. This is where I’m at. Writing and self-acceptance are lifelong practices and relationships.
Tell us a bit about your decision to use white space and line breaks in this essay.
As a poet, I’m used to white space. It’s a hard break or an insistence on pausing. For awhile I was scared I was doing it in the wrong place. I never formally learned where to use line breaks, but I’ve become more comfortable since releasing the idea that other poets and poetry readers would know, just by looking at my line breaks, that I was the equivalent of a folk or outsider artist. Just terrible. The levels of self policing and fear. Now, I have begun to be more generous with line breaks and white space, which means I’ve relaxed in both my creative and scholarly writing to allow more room to pause, stop, consider, rest, think, recalibrate, hold, anticipate, build. I think that academic writing, and especially the format of the research paper, has a tendency to prove and overstate in the most precise and heavy ways: source, data, theory, argument, examples. So it’s necessary for me to encourage breathing, thinking, and interruption in what is otherwise serious business.
How did you decide on the balance between the academic and poetic in this craft piece?
I’m always heavy handed when it comes to dates, historical eras, political context, economic pressures. The poems in my debut poetry collection Black California Gold have been both praised and critiqued for this fact. Half the book is devoted to wrestling with history, both that of the northern part of the state and its development from colonization and the Gold Rush to the impact and afterlife of the Second Great Migration west. There are moments where the poems live in abstraction, in focus on detail, in the delicate nature of telling a story. And there are other moments where I am working really hard to analyze and drive home a point in ways a poem isn’t meant to do. I think it reveals that at the deepest level, I am most definitely a trained academic. Even when I’m in a creative trance, I’m so scared of leaving out the “important stuff.” At the same time, whenever I’m working on a scholarly project, I’m working as a poet. I actually had to negotiate unnatural breaks, sentence structure ruptures, and poems embedded in the manuscript with my current editor and production team of my forthcoming academic book Chasing the Sun: Staging Black Life and Belonging in California’s Bay Area. I don’t think there really is a healthy balance. It’s all organic for me.
