We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alex Poppe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alex below.
Alright, Alex thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
In a pre-ISIS world, my accepting a teaching position in Kurdistan, Iraq was to swing on a rope of convention and let go. Most people, including me, hadn’t heard of the Kurds or Kurdistan. When I told my restaurant patrons I was moving to Kurdistan, they thought Kurdistan was “one of those stans over there, near Russia.” When I said it was in northern Iraq, they would go all silent for a moment, look at their shoes sticking to the wine-soaked floor, assume I was military, and thank me for my service. My fellow servers thought I was “just plain crazy” when they saw the Arabic for Dummies, which I dutifully lugged on the subway for some light reading. A punk rocker who helped me break into my apartment using my credit card and my driver’s license when my key wouldn’t work asked me if I was CIA before he promised not to come back later and steal our computers. Telling people about my impending move to Kurdistan was a dose of reality interrupting long blitzes of mental static. Beyond updating my vaccines and deciding which dresses to pack, I was flying blind. After all, Kurds speak Kurdish, not Arabic.
Moving to northern Iraq was one of the best decisions I have made. I built a career as an educator, speaking at international teaching conferences and winning teaching awards. I have trained teachers for the Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad and at a US State Department initiative in Panama. I could afford graduate school, earning a master’s degree in creative writing. Drawing on my experiences in Iraq and the West Bank, I have written four works of literary fiction, three of which have won numerous awards. I started volunteering in the humanitarian aid sector in northern Iraq, which led to my present job as a content manager at Search for Common Ground.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I can’t write anything worth reading unless I have an emotional connection to what I am writing. I was an actor before I became a writer, and that creative discipline informs how I write. Academy Award-winning actress Sally Field once described her acting preparation as a metaphorical exfoliation of her skin, removing layers of deadness to open herself up so she could feel and then act/react in a scene. I bring a similar sensibility to writing. I may not have experienced what I fictionalize, but through imagination and embodied cognition, I feel an emotional truth as I write. The emotional truth fuels the imagery, which sets the mood of a piece. I learned about having an emotional connection to what I am writing at The Writers Studio.
If I can hear the main character, writing is easier. Duende, my coming-of-age novella which uses flamenco as a metaphor for becoming, was difficult to write because, at first, I could not hear Lava, the narrator, whereas my novel, Moxie, was easier to write because its main character, Jax, was screaming “Fuck!” in my ear from day one. In my short story “Family Matter,” the main character, Nastasia (whose name came from a barista in a Leipzig café where I used to write), barged into my consciousness with the line, “I’m pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to.” I was writing something else, but this voice pestered me until I embodied it on paper.
I write beat by beat, starting over at the top of each writing session, rewriting as I go along, so I don’t plan characters. My writing is deeply rooted in place. My first short story collection, Girl, World, and my latest, Jinwar and Other Stories, feature many stories set in Iraq or the West Bank, where I have been lucky enough to live. Moxie is my love letter to New York as Duende is to Seville. In those places, I listen to the city’s soundscape. For Seville, it was the rhythmic gallop of horse-drawn carriages competing with the machine gun fire of flamenco heels pounding the pavement. I watched how sunlight imbued the pastel-colored building lining the Guadalquivir River in a sherbet glow. How the high morning sky was a Windex blue, backdropping a fireworks explosion of violet bougainvillea before it turned an astringent pink at sunset. These kinds of details are the basis of imagery, which fuels mood.
There are as many ways to write as there are writers. Perhaps the best advice comes from my mentor, Jere Van Dyk, who gave me the push I needed to go to northern Iraq in 2011. “Live your dreams and then write about it.”
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
In an Uber, a driver asked me about my work. When I explained how I had been an educator and then worked in humanitarian aid as a writer to amplify an organization’s impact, he commented that I must like helping people. I thought about that and replied, “No.” What drives me is a sense of justice. We all have the right to the same rights, but gender often creates two labor markets, two justice systems (I live in Tulsa, which incarcerates women at a rate of 80% greater than the national rate.), and two tiers of personal rights. Being a creative gives me the space to amplify gender-based issues to promote change.
I worked with youths for many years, and I am fascinated by how adolescent girls develop their sense of identity and self-respect in cultures that devalue them or usurp their agency. Adolescence is a tumultuous time for women; our bodies are revolting, our physical maturity may sprint past our emotional maturity, leaving us ill-equipped to process the wrong kind of male attention from males intoxicated on privilege. The denigration amplifies when adolescent girls are not white: a 2021 study by the American Psychological Association shows that Black teens are disciplined in school more harshly than white teens. This same inequity exists in how unsolved rape, murder, and missing person cases are pursued. So often, cases of missing girls fade from the public’s attention, especially if the victims are not white, and the perpetrators remain at large to re-offend. Social justice issues backdrop all of my books.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I lifted my head from the dark asphalt and pushed myself onto my elbow. The right side of my body throbbed; the skin on my back screamed with fire; blood was streaming from the right side of my head and along my right elbow. Looking down, I saw my own naked breasts. What had happened to my dress? Shame pushed out panic as I registered an older couple coming towards me from across the Neapolitan street. Must cover my breasts, I thought. I looked for the straps which had tied my halter dress around my neck. They were hanging near my stomach. Tilting my head so the blood would run into my hair and not in my eyes, I pulled them up, but one strap was too short while the other had a large knot and was too long.
I needed a moment.
Images recollected and arranged. A man passing on a motorcycle had snatched my handbag, but he hadn’t bargained for it being secured around my wrist. To be fair, I hadn’t registered that I was being robbed. At first, I thought my bag had snagged his handlebar and I was about to shout my apology when he took off, taking me down to the ground. The left side of my body got slammed with the initial impact, but as the mugger sped down the moderately-trafficked street, I was banged onto my back. Being dragged along the pavement lacerated my back and shoulders and shore through the straps of my dress. As I was being dragged and skinned, I saw the handle which held the handbag to my right wrist tear a little. The keys to my Airbnb, my phone, and my only credit card were in it. I turned, so my left hand could gain purchase on the body of the bag, and my right hand, strangled in the strap, clawed upward. Now, the right side of my body was suffering the friction of being pulled, but I had a firm grip on my bag. The purse-snatcher must have realized I wasn’t letting go, so he did and gunned it. That’s when my head smacked the pavement. When my boss, Ophelia, heard about the attempted bag grab, she joked that the bag snatcher “had picked the wrong woman” before adding the incident was a metaphor for how I live: “You don’t let go. You’ll fight.”
As long as you love your creative endeavor, fight for it. I took on-line writing classes at 3 am local time in Iraq when I first started learning the craft of writing. I didn’t let go while I was teaching and earning my masters. I coaxed the whispers of characters into fully formed stories by having the discipline to sit down and write while my friends went to the local bar. Fight for your creative voice to be heard.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.alexpoppe.com
- Instagram: alex.poppe.girl.world
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.poppe.16
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyalexpoppe/
Image Credits
The photo of my book covers was taken by me. The photos of my standing alone against a colored background were taken by Josh New; https://www.instagram.com/joshnew.photography/ The photo of me writing in a notebook with a water tank behind me were taken in la Guajira, Colombia on a humanitarian aid assignment. it was taken by Harold David Brito Ortega. I took the screen shot from a reading advertisement for the Chicago Public Library.