We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elaine Hill. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elaine below.
Elaine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
My learning has come through so many avenues, each serving a role in craftwork, and there’s never an end to learning. In my role as a creative, there is the writing, editing, speaking, and performing/engaging the audience aspects, plus the marketing and business sides.
The mechanics of the craft received early and often training, since I have, like so many writers, been writing my whole life. I journaled often and sometimes excessively since 1st grade, so the pages run deep. I went to college and took a number of classes to hone my craft, which, in the academic world is very specifically the writing and editing sides, both highly functional as the building blocks with which the craft can be designed. As they say, you have to know the rules to break them with any intentionality, and that is, honestly, half of the fun of the creative process.
Putting my words in front of other people, especially on a stage in front of people, was, for me, the most difficult. If personality and upbringing could be considered an obstacle, then that would be the way I would describe my “obstacle.” I was a journaller; I would be in my pajamas and glasses to allow me to see the pages, jamming out at midnight, pouring out all my teenage or adult or childhood angst into books and books. I would occasionally show my best friend something I’d written, where she would announce that surely I would be the next Emily Dickinson, with all my quirky brilliance with random capitalizations published posthumously.
The shift began to happen when I heard spoken word for the first time. I was old, an adult before I saw it happening and realized what I was hearing sounded exactly like what I had been writing. For me, this was- and still is- the biggest challenge. Biggest challenge like: I heard spoken word, had the thought that that, too, could be me, and it literally took me TEN YEARS to make a move in the direction of trying it on for myself. Don’t get me wrong, I continued building the mechanics of the written craft through this time, but I literally had no avenues for learning “what it takes” to hone the aspects of performance, speaking, engaging, and finding a voice that is authentic and connected to me while still inviting an audience to experience the words I so diligently dropped onto pages.
Perhaps there is a better way to do it, but the way I learned to speak on a stage was I started showing up. I do not actually recommend the way I learned. I wanted to do poems in front of people, so I showed up at a Poetry Slam, which is a poetry *competition,* where audience members judge you on your performance. It was on a stage in uptown Charlotte during a poem about women being like a rose or something that I realized, halfway through the poem and the blinding stage lights, that I was utterly terrified of being on a stage in front of people. I dropped (forgot) the poem and froze. My scores reflected the long way I had to go to become adept at this skill. I kept coming back. I kept asking questions and starting conversations and listening in and, well, learning- in a significantly different way than I’ve ever learned anything else in my life. When I started showing up in performance spaces, what I found was a different style of learning, where it is more heart-based, where learning is ‘caught instead of taught.’ So far, so much of what I have learned is through watching others, being in conversation and practice and writing and speaking workshops with masters of the craft.
Much of what I’ve learned shows that, in a performance, there is another way of thinking about words past the functional, mind-based, mechanics of the writing and editing, all of which I learned through a top-down style of learning that I have a lot of skill in- going to school. There are genre-specific skills in rhetoric and being in character, but there is also an essential skillset best described as an embodied knowing. As a performer, there is skill in feeling out or checking in with your body what words (or poems) are resonant to you that may also connect to the people who have shown up in the space. In a performance space, poets and speakers talk about ‘reading a room,’ and this is not a metaphor or some unnecessary fun thing to do; it is literally the HOW of what makes the difference between ‘just words’ or a ‘performance’ when you get on a stage. I have, in a slam, performed the poem I thought in my head I needed to do, when my body felt a different poem. Later in the slam, a poet did a poem similar to the one my body wanted to do; it received a very high score; my body knew, and the lesson was learned.
Elaine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Sure! Though the iterations are many, I have as my main title an English Language Specialist.
By day, I am a linguist and a teacher, bringing the English language to life in a way that is accessible to everyone, from English language learners to preschoolers to people at open mics and poetry events at bars and Zoom rooms across the nation.
With my Master’s degree, I tutor and edit English writing and teach English language learners.
As a creative artist, I am an author, a writer, a poet, and a curator of heart-focused experiences.
As an author and writer, I craft words to meet the needs of companies or events to transform potential into client, curious into customer, or observer into involved. I do readings from my currently published books, which are themed around finding home and motherhood/ parenting small children and post-partum depression (PPD). I also lead writing workshops for novice and craft-conscious alike and specialize in writing-for-healing and problem-to-solution workshops, where we write ourselves through a difficult scenario to find what’s on the other side.
As a poet and curator of experiences, I bring heart to events. I have a knack for creating transformational experiences. If the crowd is used to thinking a lot, I might make them feel. If the crowd is used to feeling a lot, I might make them think. The poetry I bring into spaces can be used on its own to bring a depth of nuance to a topic or theme within a presentation or as the presentation itself.
With a Master’s in English Linguistics and certification as a HeartMath Mentor and a Civic Reflection Facilitator, I teach and lead mindful discussions on social, interpersonal, and self-help themes and ideas, such as the concepts of home, forgiveness, the bases of mental health, racial issues, and emotional intelligence. The appeal of these sessions is the centering of a specific piece or pieces of art or a text that allows groups to have a discussion and access difficult societal and personal concepts in a non-conflict way.
I also work with individuals and small groups by providing practical tools to level up their productivity and innovation in both personal and professional spaces. The HeartMath tools for personal resilience are super practical steps for training our bodies to act at higher capacity. I’ve worked with clients who were in conversation with their doctor about anxiety medication who were able to lower dosages and come to a place of higher functioning within a month of working with me (and in close work with her doctor; this is not medical treatment, as it is important to say).
These are a few of the main iterations of what I do. I see my work as a win when a client or clients leave with more bravery, confidence, or connection to a deeper purpose than when they showed up, and I’ve seen it happen so many times when they get to connect words with their own personal experiences.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Oh, this is a fun one. In 10th grade, I took a test that rated how likely you were to be an entrepreneur, and who knew?! There were negative answers, and I scored somewhere in the negative 200s! How likely are you to be an entrepreneur? NEGATIVE 200. Nope. This rule-following kid was not into taking risks or trusting my own process.
That whole 10+ years of knowing about spoken word but not doing it was spent following rules for living a good, traditional life. I hate to admit it took until I had run my body into the ground and was faced with some health challenges before I realized that maybe living MY purpose and heeding my process might need to play into my life at least a little bit if, you know, I wanted to stay alive. The story, like all good stories, got really rocky there for quite a bit, because tectonic plates of lives shifting sometimes have major aftershocks.
What I’ve found through the process is that there are no rules to follow. There are steps to take, but they are very much contingent on which path we are walking. There is a treasure map of people helping: mentors who lead lives that are worth emulating and connectors who know who we need to know, and there are friendships to cultivate to help me stay going. There are fans and there are people who are not thrilled to see others succeeding. It is such a rich journey steeped in so much of what makes humans human- emotional ranges from joy to sorrow to rage to exuberance, the nervous system whole-body response over some small thing like an email coming in, the daily grind of making sure there’s food on the table around 6pm while meeting with those along the path, figuring out social media marketing, studying the craft, and planning the next event.
So, for me, stepping into my creative vision has been unlearning a deep-held belief that I find success by following someone else and their ideas. It is a daily, momently reminder running through my head that I can trust myself and that the contribution of my creativity does not HAVE to fit into any already-predetermined boxes, since my craft sits sometimes uncomfortably at the intersection of spoken word and page poetry. It is a knowing that what I need to do lies inside and does have rules, but I’m listening to no one but my own inner wisdom to tap into those ‘rules’ and allow myself to do what only I can do. It is at once the most exhilarating and terrifying place to be at the same time, and I hold that with immense reverence and gratitude.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Absolutely. The first class I developed was a “Resilience for the Holidays” class. It was an online meet-up that met for about 1 month weekly with some teaching and a practical tool to take into the holiday season each class. The catch was that the planning occurred in the fall for the class in the winter.
As the dates approached for the class, they settled in to land exactly during the weeks I was moving. The first class was taught in front of a wall of boxes. I remember hosting at least one of the four sessions literally sitting on the floor in the freshly-painted and without-light-fixture bathroom of my new-to-me house after having centered myself for it doing yoga in the garage. No furniture, the painters were downstairs while I was upstairs with just my computer, charger, and a notebook.
The entire series of practices I taught on resilience occurred while moving, navigating major life change for my children and myself, and getting ready for the holidays, all in the same month. If you’ve heard the phrase “practice what you preach,” I’m pretty certain I had no other option at the time!
Contact Info:
- Website: elainechill.com
- Instagram: @elaine.sweetnightingale
- Facebook: Elaine Hill
Image Credits
@fists_to_cuffs (inside black dress); Shane Manier (yellow dress); Jennifer Dow (black dress outside, brown dress + book photos)