On Flow States and Shelter Dogs — Author Interview with Bella Rotker

Bella Rotker (they/she) studies creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy. She was born in Venezuela and grew up in Miami. Bella is a 2023 Scholastic Art & Writing National Gold and Silver Medalist in Poetry and an American Voices Nominee. She also has received recognition from the YoungArts Foundation, DePaul University, and Albion College. She won the Haley Naughton Memorial Scholarship to the Iowa Young Writers Studio in 2022 and their work has appeared in The Lumiere Review, Full Mood Mag, Neologism Poetry Journal, Fifth Wheel Press, JAKE, and Best American High School Writing, among others. This summer, Bella joined the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program for Poetry and the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop. When she's not writing or fighting the patriarchy, Bella’s hanging out with her friends, watching the lakes, and looking for birds. 

Emily Pedroza: What originally drew you to creative writing and poems? 

Bella Rotker: I’ve written a lot of “why I write” essays and artist statements and honestly every time I have no idea what to say. My relationship with writing is like that of a shelter dog and its millennial (insert some cliche about “I didn’t pick it, it picked me”). All of my writing professors have been millennials so I’ve gotten very familiar with the bond between a white woman and her dog. In a few too many ways, writing and I mimic that. A lot of strange coincidences lined up to make me start writing. I did classical ballet for some 13 years and was a little too intense about it despite not being very good––that’s what I applied for when I tried to get into art school. Color me surprised when I got the email that said “we considered you for writing instead, say yes please and thank you, love, Art School.” I had intended to casually take some writing classes but hadn’t realized what that would look like as a major. I agreed pretty entirely on instinct and four months later there I was in a tiny cabin in the literal actual woods full of teen writers complaining about the “teen poetry industrial complex.” What fun. 

I quickly learned three things in my first few weeks there: teen poets are really intense about everything (something I was good at). I knew nothing about anything people were talking about––what was a “caesura,” or “heteroglossia?” I had no idea. I was not a fan of not knowing what was going on ever but looking back I think that period of forcing myself to “not know” was crucial to learning how to poem that quickly. Also, poetry was much harder than I was expecting. Anyway I’m not really sure who I am in this metaphor of the shelter dog or the millennial, but I do know that poetry and I wear matching plaid bows and frolic through pumpkin patches together and occasionally I get bitten by writing too many poems or not enough poems. I love what I do though, so I’m willing to buy the gauze.

EP: What does your writing process look like right now? 

BR: When I sit down to write, all logic and rational thought just seem to evaporate from my brain. I really like being in a kind of “flow state;” I find it quite comforting. I tend to write when I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed and the words are just kind of swimming in circles around my brain. Then I get to sit down and just kind of piece the language together in interesting ways. Often when I write, it’s in response to a prompt or some language I had jotted down in the section of my notebook I lovingly call my “junkyard” (one man’s trash is another’s treasure and whatnot). If I’m feeling stuck or lost for an image I’ll confer my Personal Universe Deck, a spreadsheet of all the images that exist or don’t exist in the mental universe all my poems come from, a la Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town (in which he says “Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words”).

The magic happens for me in revision. I try new techniques out all the time but recently I’m a fan of printing poems, cutting up each line, and rearranging or relineating to see if I can come up with something new and interesting. I’m really blessed to have workshops, peers, and mentors in my life who will read and critique my work, so I tend not to think of a piece as closer to done (because no poem is ever done, really) until I’ve had at least another set of eyes on it.

EP: What themes are you drawn to? 

BR: I’ve been on a girlhood kick recently. Being a girl is so weird and horrifying and nobody wants to talk about that. How eerie it is to have something beautiful; grace, perhaps in the same way it is haunting to inhabit a girlhood. I spent a lot of this summer trying to figure out what grace is in this context and what it means to have it––or not have it. Since I was little, I’ve been obsessed with parallels––yes/no, this/that, on/off, especially light/dark. The very idea that one can exist both negates and proves the existence of the other. Something is either present or it isn't. It’s on or it’s off. And yet, as Ross Gay says, joy and sorrow are intrinsically connected. One cannot experience joy without also experiencing sadness. Where there is light, there are shadows. Light, etymologically, also implies the existence of that which has weight, and that which does not. Is darkness a kind of heaviness, or is this a false equivalence––does darkness not also provide space to breathe, rest? What about all those nocturnes about cicadas singing in the dark or launching their small bodies into the sky and whatnot? Where there is darkness, there is light also. Where there is girlhood there is me, in opposite and in agreement, and you know what they say about all good poetry being wildly ambivalent.

EP: Has it changed from the past, if so, how? 

BR: My writing definitely goes through phases––if you search through my google docs, you’ll find evidence of such phases like my aubade era, my sonnet era (which I’m still in), my bird era, my monsoon era, etc. I think a really interesting thing about living with other writers and constantly being around each other is we tend to influence each others work. There have definitely been some times where it’s been pretty clear that we as a writing department were going through some phase together. On occasion we’ll discover we’ve all written a roadkill poem one week or the fiction workshop will go down a murder story rabbit hole. There was a week or two last year where you would walk into the writing building and hear 15 teenagers tapping out iambic pentameter on ever surface imaginable. It’s pretty fun, honestly. I think some of us get scared that what we’re writing isn’t “original enough” or something but I find it really refreshing and exciting to see how we all approach writing these things as filtered through our different perspectives. 

EP: What sources do your inspiration stem from? How was your process of finding them? 

BR: Coming of age is weird and happens so fast, so of course my writing changes to reflect that. I get bored so easily, so I like to find new challenges to tackle thematically. I never really “decide” to write some topic or enter an era per se. The universe just kind of throws them at me in different ways. I’ll hear a prompt or read a poem I really like and all of a sudden I’ve written ten poems about that one image that spoke to me. I wish I had a more creative response but that’s the truth. I really love prompts and writing to interact with other art or writing. I think the best way to have stuff to write about is to live a life worth writing about, so I do things that interest me or challenge me in some way and occasionally I’ll get a poem that way too.

EP: Who are your favorite authors or artists and why? 

BR: This is a hard question because it changes so often. Largely I’m really interested in how other people play with language and how that’s different from my own experiences. As a rapid fire: I’m obsessed with Carolyn Forche and poetry of witness, and Ilya Kaminsky. Also Eileen Myles and Jaques J. Rancourt, and the idea of the queer pastoral. Other favorites include Diane Seuss, Traci Brimhall, Emily Pittinos, Dorothea Lasky, John Berryman, Lucie Brock-Broido, Corey Van Landingham, and Rebecca Hazelton.

And then my all-time fav: In October of my sophomore year, my poetry teacher handed me a packet with the words Alphabet, Inger Christensen scribbled in the top left corner. I remember hearing the poem mentioned in passing before then––huddled conversations before workshops or apricot trees painted in an alleyway at the Iowa Young Writers Studio, but I’d never read Alphabet in full until the weekend I sat down with it for class. I was a little weary reading the first few sections, the speaker only insisting that things like apricot trees and doves exist. I realized later what she was doing; building along the fibonacci sequence to index a universe of things. What struck me was the sense of simultaneity she created by just placing images together instead of trying to bridge them to the reader. Then what that filled the gaps between apricot trees and atom bombs was so unexpected and beautiful. I’ve tried and failed more times than I’d like to admit to recreate that sense of the sublime in my own writing. The unassuming intensity of the poem hadn’t quite struck me until I tried to repeat it and realized how difficult it is to write something so big from very little. What gets me about the poem is that it is exactly what it says it is, a list of things that exist, and yet is so transformative and beautiful. 

EP: What was your experience like publishing your poems? How was the publishing process for you?

BR: I honestly don’t really remember why I started publishing when I did but I guess it was always just kind of a given for me. I’ve always been encouraged to submit to places and, as my teacher says, “get used to hearing no.” Eventually I got my first “yes” and realized how excited people were for me. It made me realize poetry can have an audience, that people want to read my work. So, I kept submitting. I still hear no 70% of the time (yes, I keep track) but when the rare yes graces my inbox it reminds me how great that feeling is of having my work reach new people. Plus, I got a pretty cool spreadsheet out of it.

EP: How was the process of attending Adroit Mentorship and other youth workshops for you? What are your thoughts on the significance of mentors?

BR: There are all these people and events that led me up to these defining moments in my life; my teachers and all the advice they’ve given me, all the people who came before them and given them advice, my mother and all the people that made her the way she is so I can be the person I am, all the poems I’ve read and all the people and events that have informed them, and so on, like a family tree. If you look at a poem or poet from above, and zoom way out, you can see this web of people and events and obsessions that surround. I guess in this way, writing makes me consider myself as a moment in time, a series of transformations as much as anything else in my lineage. I am not the same person I was before writing, even before writing the last poem I wrote, because each one writes a different part of my experience and perception into existence. So I think mentors are significant in this way––every poem a person writes hints to the voices of their mentors and their predecessors speaking through it, even if silently or rebelliously. I really would not be the writer I am without my instructors. 

We’ve seen this shift recently in how writers as a whole think about mentorship and education at large. It used to be (from my understanding) pretty exclusively a very direct “old wise poet and his protege for life” type structure. Some of that still exists, which, if that works for you, does what makes your heart sing. More and more, though, we’re seeing that people tend to seek more a group of peers to push them and tend to seek out their feedback more, like a workshop style or a cohort. I think what’s really special about a lot of the teen writing programs I’ve been at or heard about, like Adroit, Kenyon, Iowa, etc, is that they bring teen writers together and allow them to find their people and form these relationships that make writing last. 

I should say that I write this from the perspective of someone who is really lucky to study creative writing full-time at school. It’s an incredible opportunity, and I immensely value and appreciate the instruction and workshopping, though when I think about my time at those programs and at school, the memories that surface are not just sitting in a basement in Iowa listening to Gilad Jaffe talk about “Me and the Otters.” I also remember walking out of the basement to the bookstore with my friends and talking about poetry that fueled us. I remember going to the only coffee shop in Gambier, Ohio (best coffee of my life by the way) and talking to two girls from my workshop about that new writing practice we learned and how hard but worth it it is to write that braided essay. I remember crying over Anne Carson with my friends and all of us writing imitations and kind of failing because well, Anne Carson. What I mean to say is, I think almost as or equally important as the lessons and mentors themselves is finding people who are going through the same writing struggles and triumphs as you. Mourn together, celebrate each other. Those are the people that push you. This model, I think, is so much more sustainable and accessible. There’s that ongoing debate about “is poetry dead,” which I don’t really find worth going into because obviously it isn’t, I’m sitting here writing this, but anyways now it’s on us to push each other so we keep writing, so it stays alive, so when we finish one thing we have someone to send it to for an honest opinion, and then we start another thing, over and over again. Writing shouldn’t be, or at least doesn’t have to be, as lonely as we often think it is.

EP: How do you think the process is different when it comes to writing poetry vs prose?

BR: I write in all genres, but most things I write outside poetry start off as a failed poem. Most essays of mine are sequences I had too much to say about and most plays (which I also write in sequence, fun fact) start off as poems but are repurposed when I realize I want more than just a speaker and a subject to work with. Maybe that’s why I hear a lot that I “write prose like a poet,” whatever that means. In terms of inspiration for plays, too, most of my pieces end up somewhat experimental or absurdist because I’m a really big fan of camp and the spectacle of theater. I’ll sit at my computer and be like “what’s the most impossible thing I could ask for?” In other words, I really like asking “what if?” What if instead of dialogue, the whole piece was silent? What if instead of one guitarist there were two hundred and then they became and ocean at the end and then… you get the point. I guess a lot of my poems happen that way too, just pushing further and further until the whole thing breaks open, or at least that’s how I revise.

EP: What is your biggest writing aspiration? 

BR: Honestly I have no clue. Right now I’m just kind of drifting from poem to poem and having fun with my writing, perhaps to counterbalance the impending doom of submission season. There’s some opportunities I think would be cool to do, but I think when people start to talk so much about “I want to win X competition” or “I want a book with Y publisher or by Z date” they start to pin the value of their writing on those achievements and it starts to be something of a self-worth thing and then you burn out, which I try hard not to fall into. For right now, I just want to continue to write what challenges me and fulfills me in this stage of my life. Who knows what the future will bring?

EP: What projects are you currently working on? 

BR: I’d say I’m kind of in between projects right now. Poetically, I’m kind of riding out the end of an era, so I’ve not been writing much poetry the last few weeks following the end of Adroit. I’ve been sneezing out quite a few nonfiction pieces recently, which is fun and new. The fall semester’s just picking up for me, so I’m really excited to see how the classes I’m taking will affect my writing––I’m taking two really cool ones about monster theory and the portrayal of monsters in the media, and about unreliable narrators in different modes of writing. I’ve also just finished the skeleton draft of a full length theater piece. I’m not really sure how to describe it, perhaps like hybrid theater musical weirdness. Now that I finally have the thing written, I’m really looking forward to working on revisions and especially working collaboratively towards the score/actual written music for the piece. 

EP: What advice would you give to beginning writers? 

BR: I’ll try my best to recreate the best advice I’ve ever gotten from my poetry teacher. About once a semester I’ll sit in her office and shed a couple tears and be like “why does anyone do this, every time I finish something I’ve been working towards I have to start all over again afterwards.” The thing is, you never stop being a beginning writer. When you finish something, whether it’s your first poem or your first book, you always wake up the next day expecting to be a totally changed person. But you still roll out of bed and the coffee you pour in your mug is the same coffee you drank yesterday, and you go to class or work and it’s the same job or school as before. As my Adroit mentor, Asa Drake put it, “being a famous writer is like being a famous mushroom.” You can work really hard to be the biggest mushroom around and you can want all the little mushrooms to look up to you but at the end of the day you still have to be a mushroom. If you want people to see you and “get it” or you want to get however close to famous writing can get you, then you’re writing for the wrong reasons. The reality is that even if you get there it’s not gonna do you any good if the writing itself does nothing for you. You have to give yourself a reason. Why do you care? Why do you sit down at your computer or notebook every day and stretch your brain until you cough out some words? What does writing do? You hit your milestone and then you begin again and are, again, a “beginning writer.” You have to have a reason beyond the material things. What makes you want to start again?