We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Garcia a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Michelle, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

Art has always been the only option for me. It’s undoubtedly cliché, but it’s true—poetry is (and will always be) the be-all-end-all. Even in my earliest memories, becoming a writer never felt like a goal or dream profession to me, but a calling. Storytelling was what I pursued naturally as a kid, creating my own fictional worlds as early as three years old, reading my construction paper “books” theatrically to my preschool classes. As I got older, those made-up stories turned into pieces much more influenced by the real-life complexities of girlhood and navigating identity. I fell in love with poetry specifically in middle school. Like everyone else, I was faced with the suddenness of growing up, and copious amounts of journaling turned into free verse poems. It was my way of coping with life-altering changes and making meaning out of confusion. It was therapeutic to have something I could confidently call entirely my own, as I felt extremely disillusioned by the realities of what it meant to be a teenager—socially and emotionally. I’d always felt a little out of place: a neurotic, autodidactic, melodramatic child… definitely an over-feeler and over-analyzer. Poetry was an accepting vehicle for expressing emotions I didn’t know where to put otherwise. In high school, I took a leap of faith and shifted focus from other artistic passions (dance, music, visual art), and joined our fine and performing arts creative writing specialty program. It was there that I truly discovered the “craft” aspect of poetry—that it can be an act of resistance and celebration, that it can (and should) test the limits of structure and language, and that having a supportive community of fellow writers is everything. My creative writing teacher and now mentor, Mrs. Cathy Hailey, helped foster my preexisting love of writing and challenged me to keep pushing myself past self-doubt and the fear of failure. I carried that ethic through college at Virginia Tech, and still carry the lessons close to my heart as I serve as the current poet laureate of the same county I grew up in.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a 23-year-old Filipino-American poet, memoirist, and multimedia artist hailing from Lake Ridge, Virginia. In October 2022, I was crowned poet laureate of Prince William County, Manassas, and Manassas Park, Virginia, representing the Washington D.C. metropolitan area as an arts advocate, educator, and public speaker. I am the youngest Prince William poet laureate to ever hold the title.

The core of my writing lives at the intersection of place and identity. In my poems, I often find myself weaving my own personal myths and memories into a larger collective consciousness. My work grapples with themes such as nostalgia, complex love, the sacred profane, and finding the sublime in seemingly mundane spaces and objects: a perfectly continuous orange peel spiral, a toothbrush collecting dust in a medicine cabinet, a dorm room box fan, a dog-eared, coffee-stained copy of The Bell Jar. Recurring themes in my writing include girlhood, spirituality, mental illness, redemption, and literature.

I try my hardest to find the morsels of magic in it all.

My debut book of poetry and creative nonfiction, Cul-de-sac Angels, was independently published in April 2021. Within 24 hours, it became an Amazon bestseller in women’s poetry. Over 1,500 copies have been sold internationally. The second edition of Cul-de-sac Angels was on March 1, 2023, to critical acclaim.

I graduated summa cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa from Virginia Tech in 2021 with majors in English literature and language, creative writing, and communication science and social inquiry. I currently work and live in the DC area as a marketing manager and multi-genre book publicist for a hybrid publisher, where I help independent authors fulfill their goals.

You can visit www.michellegarciawrites.com to learn more, connect with me, and purchase my book. I’m @mooopsy on all of my socials.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Without a doubt, vulnerability and honesty is what fuels my work. I used to fear being scrutinized over my willingness to write about sensitive topics, such as mental illness, grief, and relationships. I’d sugarcoat my writing and “hide” my emotions under figurative language and vagueness, but found it to be inauthentic—which goes against everything I stand for as an artist. These days, I’m not afraid to immortalize the raw details of my lived experiences because, to me, it’s an act of rebellion. Our culture insists that young women be quiet and docile, that we should minimize grand expressions of conviction since drama and passion equates to weakness in the eyes of the world. I hate that. Now, when I write, I do so with tenderness and respect to the craft while still honoring the act of being real and truthful to who I am as a person. I write so other people know they are not alone in their chaos—whatever that may look like. My own chaos is unique to myself in that I lead by my heart, which has led me to many revelations I would’ve never had otherwise. I want everything I create and put on paper to be something defined by its realness, even if it is uncomfortable or awkward or expository. All I want is for my work to resonate with people in a way that is healing, empathetic, and genuine. I want my poetry to be like sitting down with a nonjudgmental friend, someone who has been through the depths of darkness and confusion… a friend who will make you a cup of coffee and listen to you cry or laugh or rant, without expectation.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Full transparency here: I’m just now emerging from a period of chronic burnout and existential crisis. I’ve struggled with mental health for as long as I can remember, but after graduating from college in three short years, a time in my life where I finally felt free to explore the nuances of my identity, I moved back home and found myself feeling completely and utterly directionless. It was depression at its finest, and a cocktail of other instabilities. I stopped writing after my first book was released. I didn’t journal or brainstorm or flood my iPhone Notes app with ideas anymore. Music, movies, pretty much everything that used to spark joy, became bland. I isolated myself from the world, avoided applying for jobs, and spent months wallowing in the paralyzing feeling that life was over for me—which sounds dramatic, because it was. I own that. Change has and always will be a bit traumatic for me. When I bury roots, I bury them deep. Being forced to reconcile my new, older self with my younger, more naive self (literally moping around my childhood bedroom) made me feel inadequate and lost. I truly felt like the oldest 21-year-old girl to ever exist. When I was crowned poet laureate of the county, and as I was working on the second edition of my book, I was still convinced I’d peaked—and that everything was just going to be a downhill slow burn. I felt like an overgrown child with nowhere to go, and I resented myself for being ungrateful for the opportunities I was given. I’ve been feeling more optimistic lately. Now that I’m on the verge of 24, I’m writing again, slowly but surely, and have since been training myself to believe that not everything I write has to be my magnum opus. I can write just to write. I don’t have to write for an audience. I can write something that’s bad just for the sake of writing anything at all! And I’m still young! For some reason, I keep forgetting that I’m still in my early 20s, and that this time in my life is supposed to be for experimentation and fun. I think that, when you grow up as a creative person and feel chronically responsible for churning out quality art, it’s too easy to feel far beyond your years. That can get exhausting. But I’m healing now, and feeling better about the future. I’m writing and brainstorming and working on new projects… and hoping to get back to school soon. But that’s another topic altogether.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://michellegarciawrites.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mooopsy/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellegarcia2021/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/michellegarciawrites