We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bryanna Licciardi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bryanna below.
Bryanna, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Since I can remember, I’ve been a writer. As a kid, I had a “book series” about two flower friends Rosie and Daisy who helped raise a baby bud. I felt like I was always at the top of my class in any English subject so teachers pretty much left me alone to do my own thing. It wasn’t until an “Intro to Creative Writing” class I took my sophomore year of college where I was told for the first time I wasn’t all that. My professor encouraged us to apply for a writing scholarship, so I sent him a huge stack of my poems and stories and met with him to discuss my application. I will never forget that I sat down to my writing in two piles on his desk — one large and one with just a few pieces of paper. He pushed the small pile at me as said, “These are okay…” The large stack, he recommended tossing the in trash. To say I felt shocked would be an understatement. I’m a pretty sensitive person, but for some reason, I accepted his rejection as a challenge, declared a Creative Writing minor, and took as many classes with him as I could. He taught me many great things about craft–how to read, how to mimic the greats and expand my repertoire, how to interact with strong criticisms about your work. Not only did I eventually receive that Creative Writing scholarship, but I went on to win awards and earn that professor’s letter of recommendation to a master’s program. I tell this story not to say this professor’s criticism made me a writer, but rather to say this experience of rejection at something I thought I was so good at taught me how important it is as a writer, as an artist of any craft, to be wary of complacency. Never assume you know it all and don’t be afraid to lean into learning new things about your craft. You have nothing to lose but potential.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m an introverted, sarcastic, horror-loving, cat-collecting writer. I’ve lived all over the US and currently reside in a small town outside of Nashville. Though I mostly write poetry, I also dabble in short stories, memoir, and educational materials. In college and graduate school, I felt like I never really “fit in” to the poet mold. Though I enjoyed what I read and who I met, a lot of it felt over my head… like it wasn’t written for me. I consumed horror and true crime, so it wasn’t long until this content began appearing in my work. Towards the end of my writing program, I brought pieces in about serial killers, evil Santa, Big Foot, and at each workshop, my peers reacted viscerally. “Why are you writing about creepy things?” they’d ask. After feeling particularly defeated one day, my professor asked me to stay behind and told me to be proud of their negative reactions. He said I found my niche, a voice that didn’t yet have a place in poetry, and I needed to keep going. What came from that was a series about imagined dates with serial killers that appears in my poetry collection SKIN SPLITTING, published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. And another full length collection FISH LOVE is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.
Something I wish my mentors would have better prepared me for, knowledge I want to bestow on any future writers, is the extremely social aspect required of professional writers. I got into writing because I love to tell stories and hate talking to strangers. However, to make money in this industry, to get your work out there, you have to network: seek out events where you can read, attend conferences to meet important folks, stand on stages and sell your book to an audience of strangers… I would say what sets me apart is literally the fact that, compared to other successful writers I know, I am the worst at selling myself. Even after a decade of doing this, reading my work aloud is still one of my greatest fears. What I’m most proud of, though, is that I don’t let that fear stop me. I have a dark sense of humor, so my writing likes to toe the line between making people uncomfortable and making people laugh. I think people laugh when they’re uncomfortable because they’re in the process of learning something about themselves or the world that doesn’t yet make sense. So I try to draw on that “idea” whenever I’m feeling crippled with anxiety about an upcoming reading. It’s become a mantra, “I’m uncomfortable because I’m learning. I’m scared but I probably won’t die.”
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I’m a very logic-driven, pragmatic person. My everyday life isn’t typically driven by emotions. Many people in my life with similar traits don’t understand why I’m drawn to poetry. I’ll show them a poem and they’ll say, “Ok, so what does it mean?” Writing poetry forces me to complicate, to blur, to distort, to tease. A poem doesn’t need to have a start or an end. And yet it works because it gets stuck in your head, or it reminds you of this thing that happened to you as a kid, or you start to tear up and aren’t really sure why. A “non-creative” should read more poetry because it helps you break out of the black and white. Life will make no sense. Love will be unrequited. Projects you care about will go unfinished. Poetry helps you get out your head and into your body. In my opinion, creativity is where you get to meet a little part of your soul.
Have you ever had to pivot?
As I alluded to earlier, I’m an introverted person but I’m also altruistic. Though I wanted to help people, I didn’t want to be around all the people all the time. This drew me to jobs wherein I could work one-on-one. I started out as a writing tutor and absolutely loved it. It was intimate, helpful, and allowed me to talk about my favorite thing all the time–writing. People asked why I didn’t want to go into teaching and I’d tell them, “Hello? Have we met? What part of standing in front of large groups of strangers and talking every day sounds like my cup of tea?” Eventually my love of tutoring led me to academic advising. I felt the two shared a lot of the same qualities–individual relationship-building, a helping profession, and it stayed within the education field I’d grown quite fond of.
After 7 years of it, though, I started to feel like the job wasn’t fitting me any more but didn’t know what else I could or should do. During that time, I’d been also working on my doctorate and as I got deeper into my research and nearer to my defense, I realized that I deserved a job that made me happy so I began to think about what that would like like. I decided that I needed a job that allowed me to be creative and more involved with student life. Around this time, a colleague in the English department discovered my writing background and encouraged me to teach a composition course. It took all of my strength and a lot of sleepless nights of stress, but I showed up that first evening and met my first class. To my surprise, I had no stage fright. All of the anxiety I feel reading on a stage was non-existent in front of my students.
It still took another 2 years to fully accept that I needed to move on from advising, and then to convince myself that teaching was the profession I was meant to have, but here I am now–teaching full time for a public university in both the English and Women and Gender Studies departments. I’m glad I accepted this career pivot not as an admission of failure–because I’d initially saw advising as my lifelong career–but an acknowledgement of my growth. We as people are changing every day. Our skills, interests, and ideas are ever evolving, so it only makes sense that our career pathways will likely need to change to fit the new us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bryannalicciardi.com/
- Instagram: brick_house88
Image Credits
Author headshot by Kelly Chapman Photography