"This book is both a letter to my past self and written for young people." (Adrienne Novy on Crowd Surfing With God)
As part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Adrienne Novy's Crowd Surfing With God, Adrienne has stopped by various blogs, social media profiles, and literary journals across the Internet to share exclusive unreleased poems, guest posts, and interviews pertaining to CSWG. Don't miss an interview with The Cerurove, a review of & excerpt from the book in Fly On the Wall Poetry, a guest post by Adrienne & giveaway of the book at L'Éphémère Review, a review on Eric Tu's Facebook page, an interview in Rag Queen Periodical, and a guest post here on the Half Mystic blog. Today, Adrienne joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of the book...
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HM: Crowd Surfing with God is wonderfully musical in every sense of the word. In the collection’s notes, you mention a variety of tracks, albums, and films that inspired or influenced individual poems. Could you describe your writing process alongside these works? Who are some artists that repeatedly came to mind each step of the way?
AN: I wrote a lot of poems based on the books that I read over the course of writing Crowd Surfing With God, and the same goes for the music I listened to. After I’ve read the poems of some of my favorite writers, I get their voice in my head, and it guides my writing. Sometimes I’m genuinely nervous that I sound too much like them, that I’m not that good of a writer and am just copying. That doubt I have in my craft often leads me to desiring validation from other people, since I struggle giving it to myself. Learning to find that self-compassion is a big part of my writing, I think.
Sometimes my writing influenced by working alongside other artists starts off with a quote by that artist. I want my readers to know where I’m coming from and who helped me get there, as well as to support the work of the artists who have made an impact on me. I think back to the books I read during the creation of my book, as well as after the final edits were sent in.
Some of the artists that come to mind are Kaveh Akbar, Bernard Ferguson, Bill Moran, Jess Rizkallah, Hanif Abdurraqib, George Abraham, Julian Randall, Sabrina Benaim, Sierra DeMulder, Cristopher Gibson, Lewis Mundt, Donte Collins, and Kristen Prevallet. I also learned a lot from John Colburn, Katrina Vandenberg, Bill Reichard, and Sun Yung Shin when I took classes with them; I credit a lot to them as well.
You describe your experience with Cat Eye Syndrome in vivid and raw honesty, connecting memories to pop punk bands and other artists as well to illustrate the act of healing. Is this book written to any specific audience in mind, or rather as a letter to a past self? What are you hoping for readers to embrace wholeheartedly from this collection?
It’s both a letter to my past self and written for young people, specifically emo high schoolers and queer youth, kids who feel confused and caught in-between. I knew I wanted to talk about my experiences with Cat Eye Syndrome, because as a kid I could have really benefitted from having literature that I saw my disabilities in.
I do hope a young person with Cat Eye Syndrome is able to find some comfort in Crowd Surfing With God, and same goes for the kid in the back of the class who wears all black sometimes and needs a friend to sit with them.
I hope my readers are able to embrace the awkward younger versions of themselves, and forgive those past selves. I hope this book makes them want to listen to the music they loved when they were in high school, and think about how much they’ve grown. I hope it makes them want to get up and dance.
How would you summarize Crowd Surfing with God in five words? Do those words carry with them the same meaning before and after writing this collection?
It’s not a phase, Mom!
Okay, okay, I’m only kind of joking. There’s this GIF with a Gerard Way doll broken in half with the caption, I got so emo I fell apart, and to be honest, I think that sums up the book pretty nicely.
From "The Pop Punk Bible" and poems that celebrate a personal relationship with 2000s alternative rock, to lines that depict what playing the clarinet means to you, Crowd Surfing with God is breathtakingly sincere and close. What part does vulnerability play in creating art, specifically yours? Is building strength from healing something that has shaped your identity as an artist?
I feel that if I’m not vulnerable or writing from a vulnerable place, I’m not being completely honest - especially when it comes to poems that are very personal to me. I think that’s because the poems that I do for slam have to be honest, personal narratives. My poem "All That Grows Here" is an example of this - I feel strong when I perform it, even though I have cried while reading that poem. It’s shaped me as an artist in that it makes me feel empowered by my own body. Poems like that one help me break down shame I have towards my body and what it cannot do, as well as create conversations about issues that regularly go unspoken in some artistic circles.
What kind of music, besides songs and the like, live in your everyday life? Is there anything unconventional or untraditional that you consider music? Why?
The happy-grumbles my dog makes when you scratch his head or behind his ears in just the right spot / my four-year-old cousin teaching me about birds / the first bite into a chocolate shell-dipped twist cone / my grandpa falling asleep in his easy chair / the bells on a cat’s collar / crickets & cicadas / bird chirps / bumblebees drifting from flower to flower...
I think that these unconventional things can absolutely be music. The world around us is full of rhythm and noise, and some historical and contemporary songs could be considered unconventional too! There are so many patterns in the world around us, and music theory and art can be applied to them.
Of all mediums, why poetry?
It’s something I really fell in love with in high school that I never stopped doing. I remember being sixteen and asking one of my friends to send me his poems after he won my high school’s poetry slam. As a genre, poetry has given me a lot of experimentation and play, both in and outside of slamming. Being part of a community and making friends through this art was something that I wanted when I was a teenager - I competed on my high school’s speech team for three years, and poetry is an event some of my friends did that I eventually focused on competitively as well. Poetry was an art form that allowed me to put my competitive streak as well as my love for writing and performing all into the same space.
Memory appears as a recurring theme throughout Crowd Surfing with God, particularly in poems reflecting on childhood and identity, such as "Diary of a Young Girl". Are there any authors or books from your adolescent years that still resonate with you today?
Oh, absolutely! I’m currently rereading the Harry Potter series, and it’s such an interesting experience to read it as an adult instead of being around the age of Harry and his friends when their adventures happen. I also got really into Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye’s poetry in high school, and their writing still brings me a lot of joy.
I also loved The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod series by Z. Brewer in middle school, as well as Half-Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer, The City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, Letters From Rifka by Karen Hesse, and The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I read mainly fiction in my adolescent years - I did like poetry too, but at that age I only thought poetry was only real unless it rhymed and had meter.
Fantasy was my favorite genre in middle school. I loved escaping into books, and that longing for escape was most likely brought on by my struggles with making friends, being bullied, and trying to fit in. Back then the two librarians that worked at my middle school were my two favorite people in the whole world, and librarians and teachers are still some of my favorite people today. One of the librarians, Mrs. Kimball, would recommend me new books, and I loved talking about those books with her. She was the one who got me into the Vladimir Tod series. I remember rushing in to the library one day before first period started to tell her that I had gone to an event where I met the author and got my books signed. I felt that my teachers and the two librarians were my friends.
Right before I graduated high school in 2014, Z. Brewer visited my old middle school and talked with the students. Mrs. Kimball remembered how much I loved those books by Z., got a copy signed for me, and had it sent to me in my study hall. I’ll never forget that. I owe so much to her for her friendship and helping establish my love for the world.
The forms you chose to use were abundant with highlights of imagery and visceral description, capturing a sense of voice that sings to the reader. How intentional were you with the forms in which you chose to present each poem and what did you hope to accomplish through them, if anything?
I was very intentional with this! Placement in regards to form can really be important and increase the strength of a piece of art, especially when that art is experimental. I really wanted to play with the layout of poems on the page, and I didn’t want every poem in the book to be formatted in the same way. In one of my college classes, we discussed formatting so deeply, even to the point where we read solely the first word that started each line of a poem: there is a weight that those words carry too. What value do they bring to the piece or take away from it? I thought about that through the entire drafting and editing process.
Adding on to that, do you think experimenting with form in Crowd Surfing with God allowed you to convey more meaning? Would you have done anything differently?
Oh, totally! I think it made the process more fun for me, and let me pull more out of the poems in turn. Experimenting with form inside and out of class showed me how much poetry was capable of doing, how far it could go, how weird it could get.
I think if I had done anything differently, I would have taken my time. I am incredibly proud of this book, everything that's gone into it, and the pleasure of working with the Half Mystic team - but I was so plugged into attaining my goal of publishing my book, that I wanted it to happen and I wanted it to happen now. Since many of the poems are about my experiences as a kid, I didn’t want to grow too far away to where it didn’t feel honest or right anymore for me to talk about those experiences. I definitely think that if I write another book, things will go much slower. I love this process and my poems, and I deserve the gentleness and kindness that comes with space. I want to do some mini chaplets and broadsides, and would love to commission other artists and work alongside them. Putting art out into the world is so much fun, and doing those little things that are both powerful and soft would be more than enough for me.
Are there any subjects you would like to explore or continue exploring in the future? Where is your writing taking you?
I really would like to write more nonfiction! I’m taking a class on nonfiction writing in the fall, and I’ve enjoyed reading nonfiction essays and memoirs more than I ever thought I would when I was a kid. It makes me a little sad that I used to think that nonfiction is boring and that the process of writing it wasn’t fun - but more than anything, that both of those things are ingrained into us when we’re younger, especially since nonfiction never had the fantastical kind of adventure I always craved in books.
I’d love for writing to take me towards teaching more. I’ve been a teaching artist for a nonprofit organization called Teen Writers and Artists Project since the end of my senior year of high school. Going from taking their workshops as a high schooler to teaching the workshops and facilitating open mics felt like coming home all over again. I also learned a lot when I coached a youth slam team last year, and I hope I can use that to keep growing and empowering kids.
Since I’m moving back to Minnesota, I’d love to get involved in nonprofits and teach creative writing and writing workshops there. I also have a dream of becoming a librarian. At the heart of everything, I’m still the little kid that loves reading, and the spellbinding feeling that comes with being completely surrounded by books.
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