We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emily Marie Passos Duffy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Emily , 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 am a poet, writer, editor, researcher, and performing and installation artist. Language is my primary medium. Working within and between languages shapes most of what I do! I found my way to writing through my parents and the love of books storytelling and that they imparted. My mother immigrated to the U.S. from Brazil as a child, and my father is the son of Irish immigrants. Both cultures have a strong vein of storytelling and a sense of place that influenced my upbringing.
While I create in many mediums–including dance, collaborative installation work, event curation, and collage–writing is the craft I rely on to weave together seemingly disparate experiences. Through language, I can identify patterns, and bring together threads in a way that feels gratifying and true. I can plumb the depths of my complex family history, my experiences as a woman, and sensory input from the world and metabolize it into something that feels transformed. I am endlessly fascinated by language’s ability to communicate, illuminate, or obfuscate. It is a powerful tool, and I feel like a perpetual student of my own writing process.
My writing primarily deals with longing, family heritage, erotic labor, and spatial identity. My debut poetry book, Hemorrhaging Want & Water has just been released with Perennial Press. I describe it as “pastoral city smut for bad girls with big hearts,” and it is a love letter to the cities and spaces that have shaped me.
Currently, I am at work on a series of essays about time, shame, Christian mysticism, and the strip club.
A few years after completing my MFA in Colorado, I moved to Lisbon, Portugal where I am working on a Ph.D. in Translation Studies. I am also a freelance copywriter, proofreader, and editor specializing in academic writing. I am a teacher with over five years of experience teaching writing in academic and non-academic settings, and I love creating learning environments that feel safe, playful, and intellectually invigorating.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
The biggest mission driving my creative journey, whether through writing or performance, is to stir others to write, feel, share, express, and create. I want my poetry to invite readers into feeling more deeply and noticing more about their surroundings, bodies, and relationships. I want my creative acts to be an invitation for deeper intimacy with inhabited spaces–and quiet portals into new ways of being and making. Poetry is such a potent medium for that task, and I believe it can be such a powerful vehicle for connection. When coupled with community care and collective action, it can be an antidote to the harmful and alienating effects of techno-capitalism and a tool to keep us tethered to our humanity and in touch with our creative power.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Buy things directly from local artists, support humanizing policies around housing, and decriminalize sex work. Support your local mutual aid networks. Artists and creatives of all kinds tend to dance at the peripheries of society. There are often a lot of risks involved in forging a creative path, especially without familial or institutional safety nets. With that in mind, it is important to invest in artists at all stages in their respective journeys and careers. Everyone deserves housing, food, and access to quality medical care and mental health support. As a collective, we tend to glamorize the struggle and starving artist tropes. While it’s true that powerful art can be borne of struggle, we need to take substantial material steps to reduce precarity for artists to create healthy creative ecosystems that are not extractive or exploitative.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @duffylala
- Other: Substack: https://duffylala.substack.com/
Image Credits
The first image (me by the window) is taken by Inês Oliveira. The photo of me on the stage in blue pants is taken by Florian Rutzmoser The cover of my book was designed by Madi Giovina the rest of the photos are taken by me