1. Why did you start writing?
"I have always been invested in language — the aesthetics, the meaning, and the structure. One of my favorite things to do is to find connections between languages and break words apart by etymology. As a child, I never was consciously aware of my linguistic abilities, but I have memories of making anagrams for my parents to solve and being that kid who would guess the Hangman word on the second try. Words have always been inherently pretty to me and my first true love. 

During elementary school, I wrote silly stories that I lost interest in after a week in favor of other hobbies, like art, ballet, and martial arts. It was in sixth grade when I began writing fanfiction and decided that writing was going to be my thing. Looking back, that decision was important to me because it was the first hobby that I developed outside of external influence. 

I switched from prose to poetry in my sophomore year of high school during my English teacher's poetry unit. That unit was the lightbulb moment when poetry just made sense. For our final project, we had to write 17 poems. Writing that much for two months gave me the momentum I needed, and I never really stopped since. Poetry is such an integral part of my identity that I sometimes forget that writing and language claimed me before I claimed them."

2. Where do you draw inspiration?
"Maybe it’s possession (or a blessing from the Muses), but there are moments when words naturally flow. Slowly, a scene unveils, and I am left painting the rest of the poem. I think that process stems from making connections in my own life and the media I consume and then merging them in my writing. The end-product is a love letter of what currently haunts me. 

Because writing is also the art of analysis, I am interested in the intersectional. I love incorporating myth, language, and science in my work and seeing how different themes interact with poetry. They are all mirrors for the same world we live in and the humanity we are a part of. Poetry’s power lies in connection, and it’s my role as the poet to leverage that power to search for how the world is interrelated. 

I am currently trying to be more honest in my writing. I am going through a period of reconciliation with my history and experiences, and it just comes with growing up. While my already published work relied more on the themes that I am familiar with (i.e. childhood, nostalgia, and culture), what I write now bleeds into vulnerability and experimentation. I don’t know where this new style will take me, but I am glad that it is through poetry that I will build the foundation for my exploration and growth." 

3. What is your method of writing? Notebooks, computer?
"Usually, I write on my computer! Because all poems have to be typed up in the end, writing on a laptop gives me a better sense of what the poem will potentially look like. Many of my poems originate from my Notes app, so the act of just transcribing ideas from brainstorming to Google Docs allows me to assess them from a new angle and if they are still worth completing. It is my ritual as if saying: 'I now commit myself to see this idea through and watch it bloom.' 

A recent habit I’ve picked up is printing my poems, cutting them into stanzas, and trying to rearrange them in a way that makes sense. Physically interacting with the poem and playing around with it with my hands is just very helpful. The more perspectives and directions I find, the better, since much of my genius lies in sudden sparks and old obsessions." 

4. How do you title poems?
"I title poems mainly by vibes. Some poems just come with a title, while others have to be derived by working backward after I finish the poem. I see titles as a preview of what the reader can expect from the poem or what the poem couldn’t say." 

5. Who are your go-to poets?
"I love this question! My classic fallbacks are Sally Wen Mao, Anne Carson, Kaveh Akbar, Alicia Ostriker, Chen Chen, and Leila Chatti. Just reading their work makes me want to write my magnum opus. This list, however, would not be complete without my writing Twitter friends! If you are one of them and you’re reading this right now: 'Hi! I love you! You inspire me to take my craft to greater heights every day!' They are my catalyst, and reading their work leaves me breathless and wanting more, which usually leads to me writing my own work. You can say it’s a wholesome positive feedback loop."

6. On your author page you have a unique feature where you include bookmarks linking work by other writers. What brought this about?
"It started when I read Steph Chang’s 'Ghazal for the Moon Maiden' from COUNTERCLOCK. Needless to say, I was very much in love. I just kept on revisiting that site till the point it got a bit ridiculous, so I created a bookmarks page, following the footsteps of my many writer friends. Now, the bookmarks page is half a storage place and half a shrine to the pieces that left an imprint on me. The feelings that I felt when reading those pieces is what I want to emulate in my own writing. It’s the page that I send to my friends if they ask for writing recommendations and the page that I read when I’m feeling down. The bookmarks page is my home port, and I always welcome rediscovering the magic within it."  

7. What do you do when you’re in a writing slump?
"I haven’t been in a slump for a while now, and I think that may have been due to the adrenaline rush of discovering the writing community and the cycle of writing, submitting, and publishing. I stress-write a lot (Fight, Flight, or Write!), and the past few months have been pretty harrowing with college applications. But now that things are starting to calm down, I think a slump will soon come. Writing slumps don’t bother me as much as they once did. I look at slumps as opportunities to hone my craft in smaller bites and develop new skills. This change in perspective has definitely made me more forgiving to myself. I plan on using the next slump to learn HTML, brainstorm fanfics, and study classical Chinese!"

8. Would you like to share what current writing project(s) you are working on?
"I’m working on a personal project where I write poems dedicated to my friends! I want to get them published in print magazines and give my friends physical copies before my high school graduation. Since there is a great chance that we will never be as close as we are right now, I wish to give my friends poems to remember me by and myself the closure to say what I will never be able to say again. It is an emotional rollercoaster, but I am happy that I chose to do this. I want to encapsulate our memories in my poetry."

9. What do you hope people take away from your work?
"I once saw a tweet saying that a stanza means room in Italian, and it stuck with me. I hope when people read my poetry, they walk through a cute gallery with light streaming through the windows and leave with a feeling of wholeness and completion. My dream is that people feel they have read something worth their time and that a fraction of the poem stays with them – may it be a glimpse of imagery, a clever line, or a shimmery feeling."

10. And finally, what do you enjoy doing that you don’t talk about enough? Tell me all about it!
"I love watching video essays! I started watching them for character analysis and fan theories, but it has since then expanded to many other topics. Right now, I’m into Internet mysteries, quantum physics, breakdowns of horror video games, probably because these are the things that I will never understand. I like scaring myself to build tolerance and to satisfy my morbid curiosity. I am also behind in pop culture so video essays are my way of catching up and understanding the origins behind them. I want to start a video essay channel on YouTube someday. I don’t know what it will be about, but I want it to scream Laura and be something I will dig to page 6 of Google searches for."  

Hear Laura​​ read her poem "to you, two thousand light-years later."

Bio: Laura Ma is a young writer from California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Lumiere Review, Parentheses Journal, Claw & Blossom and elsewhere. She loves light, wings, and all things that fly. Find her on Twitter @goldenhr3.

1. Why did you start writing?
As a kid I had always had an aptitude for writing. In retrospect, I can see where that natural inclination sprung from. I read a lot, I had a big imagination, and I spent a lot of time daydreaming, absorbed in my own head. (All three of those things still apply, actually.) The turning point for me came in sixth grade. I had a teacher who gave us monthly writing prompts for us to respond to. I loved writing those assignments, and my teacher loved reading them. The little words of encouragement he left in the margins of my assignments really stuck with me. He was the first person who told me that I was good at this writing thing and that I should keep doing it. He was my 'why,' pretty much.

In terms of poetry, I didn’t read it or write it or submit it until the summer before high school started. I spent about a year writing a bunch of terrible poems, and then I wrote this poem that ended up being a part of Gigantic Sequins’ annual Teen Sequins feature later that year. I knocked that poem out in 20 minutes. It was magic. It felt like everything had just clicked, you know? I remember reading it back and thinking, 'I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life.' And I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. 

2. Where do you draw inspiration?
"Usually a song or a quote from something I’ve read online or in a poem will make me think deeply or help me discover something about myself and my own life, and I try to write towards that discovery. Although all of my poems have teenage angst at their core. You could give me the best, most intelligent song lyric ever, but I wouldn’t sit down and write a poem after that lyric unless something within myself compelled me to."

3. What is your method of writing? Notebooks, computer?
"As wonderful as it must be to write drafts of poems by hand, I have to write on the computer because my handwriting is atrocious. I’m also visually impaired, so getting to invert the page colour so that my words are white-on-black, getting to make the font as big as I want it to, changing the font to Garamond so that my words feel more poetic than they actually are - all of these things are necessary parts of my writing process."

4. How do you title poems?
"Honestly, vibes. It took me a long time to get good at titling my poems. Sometimes I’ll come up with a title that outlines the shape of the poem from the onset. Usually, though, I’ll write the poem without the title and then pick a title halfway through revision and try to match up the thematic contents of the poem with that title."

5. Who are your go-to poets?
"Alex Dimitrov, Richard Siken, Kaveh Akbar, Dustin Pearson, Ada Limón, Max Rivto, Mary Oliver. Also Elliott Smith, Taylor Swift, and Phoebe Bridgers, if you would call them poets. As well as all of the teenage poets that I’ve befriended online, whose work is so powerful and so necessary."

6. What do you do when you’re in a writing slump?
"I’m in a poetry slump right now, actually. I couldn’t tell you what I did last time the last time I was in a writing slump. Right now I’ve been reading a lot: a good number of books, a few litmags, a bunch of tweets (actually, this last one is still something I do even when I am writing poems). I don’t want to force my return to poetry too much.  The lazy part of me wants it to happen organically. I’ve been trying to remind myself that I’m not going to outdo myself every time I sit down to write. But I can try to say something I’ve said before, just in a different way. I’ve said XYZ already in another poem. Now it’s just a matter of: how can I add to that conversation? How can I push the boundaries of my comfort zone? How can I go deeper? Those kinds of questions, I think, are going to help me get back to my best."

7. Would you like to share what current writing project(s) you are working on?
"Nothing concrete at the moment. Unless you count the Substack, but we’re getting to that. You know, every January I tell myself that I’m going to write a chapbook, but it never ends up being written. One day, though, it will happen, and it will be glorious.

It’s funny how my long term goals are so ambitious and yet my short term goals essentially boil down to me begging myself to write any poems at all. I’ve always dreamed of having a poetry collection, or an essay collection, or a novel to my name. All three, honestly. Those things will come with time and experience, but I can’t wait for them to happen."

8. What do you hope people take away from your work?
"The goal of my work has always been to make people feel, laugh, and think a little. Maybe even all three at once! I try to make that checklist apply to all of the essays I write. (I’m a bit more serious in my poems, though. One day that’ll change.) Honestly, I’m just grateful I even have an audience at all. At my core I’m still that kid in her room writing depressing, angsty poems just for herself, because she felt she had to."

9. You recently started a Substack, Things You Otter Know. What brought this about? Can you tease the topics you plan to write about?
"Last year I started writing more essays than usual that weren’t for school because they made me use my writing muscles in a way I wasn’t accustomed to. I love short, serious, and powerful poems—those are the kind of poems that I try to write. But these essays are long, low-stakes, and funny. They’re full of swearing and puns and exclamation marks. Which has always been my writing style. You just wouldn’t immediately know that from reading my poems. So that’s what the Substack provides for me—a way to return to my writerly roots while also helping me create my own motivation to write. 

The newsletter itself is split into two 'columns,' for lack of a better term. One of them involves me spending a long time talking about something that recently happened and which irks me deeply. The one I just wrote was about Elizabeth Holmes and the whole Theranos scandal. In the future I’d love to tackle fun stuff like the Winter Olympics, the Royal Family, and the elections happening later this year in the U.S., as well as here in my home province of Ontario. The other column is just a 'here’s what I’m up to, and also, here is all the media I have been consuming in great amounts' column. It’s essentially the 'blog' of sorts that many of my friends have wanted me to start for a while now."   

10. And finally, what do you enjoy doing that you don’t talk about enough? Tell me all about it!
"I enjoy making to-do lists. It’s basic, I know. But I enjoy writing dish every single thing I have to do in a day because I think it helps me relieve stress. And then I enjoy the satisfaction of crossing off the things I accomplish and tricking myself into thinking that I’m productive. I’ll sometimes have it right down to the minutiae and cross off things like, 'brush teeth,' and 'drink water.' It’s the simple joys in life."
     

Ottavia Paluch is a disabled high school student from Ontario, Canada. Her work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Hunger Mountain, Gigantic Sequins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Best Canadian Poetry, among other places. She’s also an alumna of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, Flypaper Lit’s Flight School, and the Iowa Young Writers Studio.