JM: How were you introduced to writing?

BB: Slam camp, for sure. I really wasn’t much into writing before then. I kept some journals when I was younger, but nothing consistent. I would sometimes write some stories but I really wasn’t into it, I was more into inventing and other things. I got my first props for writing poetry at Slam Camp. Even after I was exposed to spoken word for the first time when I was 15 and heard Sierra do her thing, I didn’t really try writing anything of my own until camp.

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JM: Who are your inspirations? Who influences your writing?

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BB: I have a couple. I think that my first influence was definitely Sierra DeMulder. But after her, I was super into Khary Jackson and Siaara Freeman. I definitely consider Sierra and Siaara my biggest influences, both in my personal life and in my writing.

 

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JM: What do you think is the most important thing you’ve learned

since writing  ‘Give Me a God I Can Relate To’?

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BB: I was definitely in a very different state when I wrote that, because

it was a compilation of things I wrote between the ages of 16 and 18,

primarily in the year of my senior year of high school and a little bit

of my first year of college. In that space, I felt so indebted to my

community and so thankful that people were vibing with my work and

willing to take the time to stop and talk to me about their appreciation

for my work that I would feel like I owed them something. Now, I’ve

learned that you don’t have to owe people things.

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But I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that slam and spoken

word can be an amazing vestibule for healing for yourself and building a

community, both on a personal level but also with career connections. You

can build a platform out of spoken word and use it as a form of activism.

I don’t think I really understood that before. I didn’t look at it in that way. I

was writing mostly for myself and it happened to resonate with people, but now I can definitely think more about the bigger picture.

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JM: How has the process of publishing and having people react to the book impacted your life?

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BB: In a lot of ways that I didn’t really prepare for or expect it to. I’m super thankful to be considered a role model by some people, but that was definitely not something I came into it equipped for. I didn’t know that this was going to happen. I didn’t expect that I would have to become self-conscious. It’s a line that I didn’t realize I would have to think about, how much I should disclose or leave out. I don’t want people to become influenced by the mistakes I’ve made. There are bad things that I wouldn’t necessarily want you to read about, but still want to write about.

 

Also, I think that since the book came out, I’ve had to get used to people sometimes knowing my poetry before they knew me. Then when they would talk to me, they’d have a completely different perception of me. People would often say, “Wow, you’re so much like the person in your book but also not”. I would come off differently in real life than on page because you know, the part I write down is the version of myself that I have time to edit and articulate and work on. In person when I’m not as eloquent, I’m often very hard on myself.

 

I’m super glad that the book has had success. I’m super thankful for it, but I didn’t account for how it was gonna change my schedule. In addition to doing homework, I have to do different professional hustles that come along with being an author. I didn’t think of myself as an author then, I thought of myself as an 18 year old. I had to learn the professional side very quickly in order to compensate for not really knowing what I was doing. But it taught me a lot, in that time, about balance and spending my time more productively. It taught me to surround myself with people who are ambitious, willing to fight oppressive structures, and trying to make a change in our society. I’m really thankful for poetry for introducing me to everything that I now hold very dear in my life.

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JM: What have you been passionate about lately? Are there any projects that you’ve been working on?

 

BB: Honestly, lately, I’ve been really passionate about writing creative non-fiction. I switched my focus at school from poetry to creative non-fiction. But right now, I’m excited to be working on my second collection of poems. I’m glad to have more time on this one. As soon as I finished ‘Give Me a God I Can Relate To’, I started working on this next one. I have a little bit of a different lens now, a couple years later, and I’m really excited to keep working on that and have it come out pretty soon.

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JM: In your writing, do you often find yourself focusing on particular subjects or themes? Do you have any that you always come back to?

 

BB: If something hasn’t resolved itself within me yet, I tend to come back to it. I find myself writing a lot about my parents, especially my mother. I find myself writing a lot about mental illness, specifically my eating disorder, about sexuality and trauma, and sometimes even that relationship. Lately I’ve been writing a lot about relationships between my personality and other things in my life.

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JM: If you could travel back in time to any age, what would you tell your past self?

 

BB: That it’s okay. I’d probably tell myself that I don’t have to please everybody all at once, and I don’t have to be everything to everybody at the same time, and that I shouldn’t stress myself out over that as much. I would also tell myself to be more understanding of people’s multifacetedness and to try to understand that people consist of more than one dimension, and are capable of both good and bad things. I’ve learned to be a lot more forgiving with people, and I think I would probably tell my younger self to be as well. But I guess maybe if I could go back, I wouldn’t tell my younger self anything because maybe that would mess up the whole time-space continuum.

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JM: What have you been reading lately?

 

BB: I went to the Twin Cities book fair not too long ago and got a decent

haul from there. I also won a couple little contests that I put my name

in a raffle for, so I got a couple free books which I was super excited

about.

 

My professors at Hamline University have these wonderful books

out, so I’m reading Patricia Francisco's ‘Telling: A memoir of Rape and

Recovery’, and Katrina Vandenberg’s ‘The Alphabet Not Unlike the World’.

I also read a wonderful creative non-fiction book from Coffee House

Press, a publisher based in the Twin Cities, called, ‘I’ll Tell You in Person’

by Chloe Caldwell. It was the funniest thing I’ve read in a hot second.

It’s interesting because only one of those books, Katrina’s, is a book

of poetry. I used to only read poetry, and now I’m expanding my horizons

a little bit more. I’m reading a lot of memoirs. They’re my favorite.

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JM: To stay true to our name, do you like sweet or sour food better?

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BB: Oh, I don’t know, I like both. I like sweet in moderation but if it’s a whole chocolate cake, I get overwhelmed quick. So I’ll have like, a strawberry cheesecake, and that’s it. I do like sour things. Not sour suckers though. But I’m gonna go with sweet.

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