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

Ashley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I’m incredibliy happy with the balance I’ve struck between my writing career and my “regular job”. I think that for a while I romanticized the notion of being able to support myself full time as an artist, but I’ve since come to realize that what I do as an educator is just as important to me as what I do as a writer.

Ashley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started writing in the first grade. Our teacher had us write stories in our daily journals; parent volunteers would type them up and have them wire bound at Kinkos (or whatever version of Kinkos was available when I was in first grade). I remember teaming up Danielle, who was the best artist in our class, to draw the illustrations for my book after it had been typed. That sort of encouragement – from the belief that my words were good enough to be bound into book and even read aloud to my class during story time – propelled me into a love of language that has never diminished.

I began considering myself a poet in high school. Couple that with my love for theatre, and it was very natural for me to cultivate a love for performance poetry and spoken word. Today, I create multi-genered work for the page and stage, and I also facilitate workshops on the crafts of poetry and performance. In my own work, I like to create conversations about faith, mental health, and what it means to sit in the intersections of complex identities.

I am most proud of the stories I hear from folks who’ve been inspired to change after engaging with my work – everything from middle school students who were brave enough to read one of their poems to a class for the first time, all the way to survivors of domestic violence who started moving towards leaving those relationships. It is my hope that whether folks engage with me as an audience member or workshop participant that they leave encouraged to tell their own stories, confident that there is power in doing so to change the world.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

One of the harder things for folks to understand about my journey is that I hold my work as a writer and performer in the same regard that I do my work as an educator. “The dream” for me isn’t about one day being able to leave the classroom so that I can write and perform full time; it’s about finding more and ways to show up to the classroom fully, to the page fully, to the stage fully.

There are milestones I’ve reached or moments of succes I’ve had where people have wondered how I was going to use those moments to launch my career as an artist into its next phase. But that kind of thinking assumes that for now, education is the “real job” that’s maybe standing between me and my passion – when that’s not at all the case.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I understood the importance of community as a resource earlier in my creative journey. I so romanticized the idea of the artist as a lone figure, rebelling against the ills of society, that in the early stages of my journey I isolated myself from some of the great artist communities that would have been available to me. But. Iron sharpens iron. Some growth can only happen in community – when someone you love and trust can critque the craft and the ideas that inform it.

Contact Info:

• Website: ashleylumpkin.com
• Instagram: lumplestiltzken

Image Credits
Jackson Hall