JJ: How were you introduced to poetry?

ELA: Like most kids, I was introduced to poetry through mini lessons weaved into my English classes' curriculums. I was forced to consume a lot of classic material per my school's requirements––very conventional poetry that adhered pretty strictly to form and meter––and as a result, I took off running in the opposite direction. The material we read didn't ever hold my interest (I just wasn't a fan of iambic pentameter or poetry about love). That's not to say traditional poetry can't be good. I think it's very much a matter of personal preference, and for me, there was––and is––power in rule-breaking and embracing free verse.

 

There's also a lot of intellectual elitism in mainstream literary spaces, specifically traditional poetry circles, where the idea of choosing to write in free verse is sort of scoffed at, as if it's a betrayal to our poet predecessors. I'm sure there are old, gray-haired poets somewhere out there who are currently lamenting poetry's death because the kids are doing something new with it. It's like, ABAB rhyme schemes are essential to a poem's beauty to some of these people, but the mainstream is still hesitant to recognize rap music as the subversive poetry that it is.

 

So as a kid, I was vehemently anti-poetry because I was only shown one side of it––the super elitist, white/Anglo side that includes names like the now-dead Shakespeare, Frost, and Dickinson. They are maybe some of the most tired, boring poets in the world, widely-known and hailed in academia, and their work felt worlds away from my experiences and wants and dreams. I think that's a failure of the education system and a testament to the covert racism that hides in the crevices of most of our literary spaces––Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Sandra Cisneros, and other equally-talented poets of color are not afforded the same level of respect and care that their white counterparts are.

 

In fact, they didn't even make it into my poetry curriculums.

 

When Shakespeare, Frost, and Dickinson are the first poets you're exposed to as a kid, it's hard to see why poetry matters anymore. So I spent most of my adolescence grumbling about how pretentious it all was. It wasn't till around late middle school–early high school that I realized free verse is very much a thing and started trying my hand at poetry.

 

As a kid raised on prose, free verse was perfect for me because I could create these hybrid-monsters that felt half-prose, half-poetry, and I didn't have to follow any rules but my own. No subject matter was off limits and I liked to write about the ugliest things I could think of.

 

And even though poetry and I didn't get along too well when we first met, we eventually found our way back to each other when we were much older and wilier and liberation-craving. I'm still pretty new to it all, but right now I'm having fun breaking rules.

 

 

JJ: What has influenced your writing? Who inspires you?

 

ELA: My friends influence and inspire me every day.

 

I'm lucky enough to have found my way into a small and intimate writing community wherein LGBT artists of color are the majority rather than the minority. The group has dwindled over the years, but most of us have stuck around to watch each other grow as artists/writers. That's important to me because I like to surround myself with art created by the underrepresented, so having this community facilitates the sharing of our own unique experiences and perspectives. I've said this to them before, but we all keep each other in check, and because we each come from different cultures, circumstances, and locations, we're constantly teaching each other new things through our art.

 

Some of us have known each other for as long as 5 or 6 years, while others have only recently become part of the group, but we're all very close friends and we've sort of built this private space around each other. It's a support system, but it's so much more. I can't explain it, really, because I've never had friends like this before and I'm still processing the fact that I really get to have this. It's like every day is a new adventure with them, as overdone as that sentiment is, and we're always brainstorming and planning and creating with each other.

 

So, they inspire me more than anyone else.

 

Of course, I love writers who I've only ever admired from afar––Gloria Anzaldúa, Kristin Chang, Ocean Vuong, Juan Felipe Herrera, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, and so on and so forth––but I'm always talking about them and I rarely share how important my friends are in helping me develop and hone my craft. They're some of the most inspiring, talented people I know and sometimes it's hard to believe we've all found our way to each other by chance.

 

 

 

JJ: Do you have any other passions? Do you fell that they bleed into your writing?

 

ELA: For a while now, I've been interested in interdisciplinary studies––the idea that when one art form interacts with another, it becomes something much...more. The way Neil Gaiman's book Coraline became Henry Selick's screenplay Coraline became the movie Coraline, or the way a film's raw score and its footage can fuse together to become this sort of hyperintense, transient experience that requires multiple senses to fully enjoy, like in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (which I could literally drone on about forever), or even just the idea of writer and artist collaborating to bring a comic book to life.

 

I've ventured into all those fields before, more as a consumer than anything else, but doing so professionally would be the coolest shit ever.

 

As an IB film student, for example, I've sort of been forced to appreciate and analyze cinema for the last two years of my life. I've had the chance to create my own films as well (this year I got to make a documentary about gentrification in Barrio Logan called "Nuestras Calles"), but my interest in film has definitely grown in recent months.

 

One of my best friends, Sahro (@sahroali on twitter) wants to go into screenwriting, which has made me appreciate it even more as an art form, and we're always Rabbiting films together and then discussing them afterwards. Then there's Shirley (@thursdaygrls on twitter), another one of my best friends, who's like the biggest film nerd I've ever met. She'll send me articles about the sorrow and darkness in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or just rant about color grading and film scores, which I thoroughly enjoy. Both of them have kind of rekindled my love for the art form.

 

I'm also into activism, and I think writing, and art in general, is intrinsically tied to that. Over the next couple of years, I want to start doing more groundwork through college––organizing workshops, planning walkouts, starting grassroots fundraisers, and so on and so forth.

 

I've sort of been able to use Kerosene Magazine––a joint effort between my aforementioned community of friends and I––as a vessel for online activism. We have dreams of creating writing workshops for  LGBT women of color and with CONTRA, our forthcoming anthology of anti-Trump art and writing, I think we can really kickstart this platform we want to develop, wherein marginalised voices are prioritised rather than disregarded.

 

For most of my life, I've been scared of activism. People from my past have said before that I'm too political and I think that led to a lot of self-consciousness early on, sort of surrounding the notion that I speak too much and too loudly. I know some of my ideas are too radical for certain people, but I've only recently started accepting that that's okay. As long as I'm not co-opting someone else's struggle, or speaking over another community, I'm fine with being "too political."

 

I don't know how to be anything but political, honestly.

​

 

JJ: In your newsletter, wolf suite, I recall you sharing a list of artists and writers to pay attention to as the politics of the world are weighing down on us. Since then, have any specific pieces of media or writing really leaped out at you?

 

ELA: Always. The anthology Gloria Anzaldúa edited with Cherríe Moraga in the 80s, This Bridge Called My Back, is made up of essays written by women of color examining radicalism in feminist spaces.

 

"Imperialist Feminism" by Deepa Kumar is a great piece that introduces readers to the idea of "NGO-ization of feminism," something that's common with neo-liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

 

"...the imperialist feminist narrative," she writes, "is a false feminism. It not only fails to address or 'liberate' Eastern women, but it also does a disservice to Western women." I think that's an idea that America needs to start swallowing in the wake of Trump and the desperation for a return to democratic policy-making. Liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton use political models built around the idea of imperialist feminism to further America's colonial agenda, which is obvious if you look at her enthusiastic support of Israel's apartheid policies or even the mass deportations and drone-related deaths that occurred under the Obama administration.

 

Something I've had to learn the hard way: the struggle for true liberation for all peoples will not be won through neo-liberal politicians.

 

"Black Riot" by Raven Rakia is a great piece on the racialization of protests led by dark-skinned people. "Fighting Cops and the Klan: The History and Future of Black Antifascism" by Ashoka Jegroo, INTIFADA's Vol. 1, Issue 2 movie syllabus which includes incendiary titles like Black Panthers (1968), The Black Power Mixtape (2011), and Uprising: Hip-Hop and the L.A. Riots (2012), and Remezcla's "The Stop Trump Reading List: Arm Your Mind With These 16 Books."

 

 

JJ: As one of the ten founders of Kerosene magazine, can you talk about what your vision for the mag was? Is it shaping up to be like you’d imagined it? What have you learned through the process of making it?

 

ELA: At first, the 10 of us wanted to carve out a space for LBPQ girls and non-binary people specifically (that's the core of all of our identities and something that often makes it hard for us to find a place in the literary mainstream). So, for a while last year, that was our sole vision. Then, late November 2016, Donald Trump became the President-elect and we very quickly conceived CONTRA (translation: against), a prospective anti-Trump anthology. CONTRA seemed to be the exception to the rule, in that we were opening our gates to all marginalized people, not just LBPQ girls.

 

We immediately started taking submissions and as the political art and writing poured in, our team was swept up in the excitement a project this subversive generates. I started putting CONTRA together through Lucidpress and that was a powerful reminder that this platform, when accessible to more than our demographic, can do a lot of good.

 

Our team convened and, after several lengthy discussions, we decided we wanted to rebrand+expand.

 

In early 2017, we made it unofficially official. Our magazine was to exist for all marginalized peoples, especially those who exist at multiple intersections of oppression, not just LBPQ girls. 8/10 of us are women of color, some of us are immigrants and/or have immigrants in our family, others are mentally ill, and all of these facets of our identities reminded us that we face oppression on multiple levels.

 

They also reminded us that other people exist at all these levels––people of color, undocumented immigrants, and neurodivergent people––and they deserve a home for their art too.

 

Shirley, one of our art editors, drew up some designs and the next thing we knew, Kerosene had gone from pastel pinks and plant designs to blacks/reds/whites and drawings of open flames.

 

Now, there seems to be a lot of excitement about CONTRA and our new vision, which we're hoping to unleash very soon.

 

I think I originally imagined Kerosene being pretty non-threatening, in terms of aesthetic and politics. When we created this magazine last year, it was almost unconsciously modelled after publications like Rookie, which in hindsight, are not as unflinching in their politics as we want Kerosene to be.

 

The election of Donald Trump and our subsequent creation of CONTRA radicalized us and our magazine. Sometimes that's scary, but it's mostly freeing. I think of the period between November 2016–Present Day 2017 as a renaissance and rebirth of sorts.

 

If we've learned anything from the process, it's that all art is political, even in its desire to remain non-political. That means we have a choice––we can shy away from politics, and as a result, our realities, or we can embrace those realities, attack them creatively, and turn them into something revolutionary.

 

 

JJ: Kerosene Magazine created CONTRA, an anti-Trump zine gathering protest art and writing from marginalized groups. From what you’ve seen from it so far, what has stood out to you the most? What do you think the importance of poetry is in America today? How do you feel about the idea of art as activism?

 

ELA: Oh, the visuals, for sure. I don't think we expected so much protest photography and art, but what we've received is profound in its ability to evoke rage and grief and hope, all at once. I'm especially excited by how many of our featured photographers are Latinas taking photos on the streets of their hoods and hometowns, while Donald Trump piñatas are being lit on fire and people are standing on cars, screaming into the night. It's a reminder that young people without degrees are capable of making art just as––if not more––powerful as professionals.

 

When these young women of color are given a camera and a platform and the art world opens its doors to them, they can capture images beyond words.

 

In terms of poetry, I think work written in verse has been important since its creation and will remain important as long as humans exist. Just as rap music was born out of a need to decry the oppression of black people, poetry will continue to serve as an outlet for the suffering of the marginalized.

 

And when the white man attempts to claim the medium––in the case of Marc Smith, "founder" of the slam poetry movement––people of color will remind him that there is no art without us. Poetry will remain important as long as men like Marc Smith are allowed platforms at events like The College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, that they then use to read racist, misogynistic poems to a crowd dominated by LGBT poets of color.

 

Those very poets of color will then leave the auditorium in protest, later reclaim the stage he defiled, and defy these institutions by agreeing on a 4-way tie for the championship, banning Button Poetry from filming them, and blasting Chance the Rapper after booing said racist off the stage. Just as they did at this year's CUPSI.

 

Art that doesn't yearn for political+social change has always bored me. I think I speak for the entire Kerosene Team when I say, our art will always be our activism.

​

 

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

 

ELA: Spicy! Is that considered sour? I love drenching all of my food in hot sauce. I'm also a fan of sweet though––dark chocolate, Baskin Robbins’ Love Potion ice cream, and pastel de tres leches really do it for me. It's all about what kind of mood I'm in, actually. I'll straight up drink taco shop hot sauces and kill a tub of ice cream within the same day. I just realized I'm exposing myself by admitting to my unhealthy dietary habits. Oh my god.

 

 

JJ: Is there anything you haven’t had the opportunity to share that you would like to?

 

ELA: Yes. Dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate and I love art and my close good friends. Also, thank you so much for interviewing me! It's been a ton of fun.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to us, Elisa! We encourage all of you Rascals to check out Elisa's work and Kerosene Magazine online.

 

Don't forget that submissions for Issue Three will be opening tomorrow, and to sign up for our weekly reading recommendations newsletter before you go! Follow our social media accounts as well to stay updated.