We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Virginia Crawford. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Virginia below.

Virginia, 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?

Happy is not the correct word. Yes, I’m glad that I’m a creative person. I cannot imagine life without creative work. I started writing poetry at age 11. Not out of happiness, but the opposite. That didn’t necessarily make the negative feelings go away, but it was thrilling when someone read my poems, could understand and identify with them and with me. That human connection has been extremely important to me ever since. A former boyfriend once told me that if I were happy, I wouldn’t be a poet. At the time, that made me even more unhappy – because I knew there was at least a kernel of truth in it. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.
I can’t say poets in general are exceptionally blissful people. We have our moments. And many poems celebrate those moments… Sadness and loss tend to inspire more art, though, yes?
It can feel cathartic to express those things, but, personally, that shared understanding between people is so satisfying.
And poets need other jobs even if they are successful. Wallace Stevens sold insurance, Martín Espada was a lawyer before he was a professor; Mary Oliver taught for years, decades, and Sharon Olds still does.
Teaching at least keeps us close to language.

Virginia, 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?

My goal is to write poems that engage and move people. The first step is awareness of problems. Hopefully this leads to thinking which hopefully leads people to take actions toward a kinder, more equitable world. I use experiences in my own life, things I witness or see in the news to focus on specific human experiences. For example, I have two young-adult children. Their – our – experiences in their high school years provided maybe too much to write about. As a mother in a country with more guns than humans, I remain terrified of the possibility of school shootings. This isn’t a distant, philosophical position. Every time I hear sirens, I pray they are not rushing toward injured and dead children in their schools. Once they rushed to a school only half a mile away from where I’d just dropped one of my children off. An angry family member had taken a gun to school and shot a security officer. My other child experienced a lock down while police searched the school for a gun believed to be inside. His telling of that experience as a fourteen year old freshman… that’s not something I’ll ever forget. Writing about these intimate and horrifying experiences, about seeing people crush into trains trying to escape war in Ukraine on the news, the strewn beheaded bodies of those who didn’t, my own anxiety during active shooter drills in the elementary school where I now work. I write about such things because I don’t know what else to do with them. There’s no getting them out of my mind, and nothing I personally can do to change any of this. All I can do is hope those who hear or read my poems feel some of what felt writing them and then do whatever is in their power to make such things happen less frequently. Not all of my work is about such intense experiences, and a few share positive experiences.
Recently I’ve considered how my life would be different if I’d made a different decision at a particular point. This led to a series of poems from the perspectives of those women I might have become. Then I had the opportunity to be part of an art show, so I created an imagined apartment building where all these different versions of myself might live. It’s a large, mixed-media collage. I hope to complete four or five poems from each perspective and publish them as a book.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The need to express ourselves is strong and natural. Doing so through language, poetry, is my way of attempting to explore and provide a structure for things that don’t make sense to me. Language is a kind of order. We can’t read every word at once. We take them in one by one, and that’s how our understanding of something develops. While there’s obviously an expressive element, my higher goal is writing in a way that promotes connection. That is the most satisfying element of being a poet in my experience. It’s the point of all kinds of art. It would be easier to write if I didn’t want others to understand, but it would be relatively pointless in my opinion. My goal is to describe experiences in ways that bring understanding and clarity, ways that point to our human similarities.

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

You could say good writing of any kind takes time. Writing and editing use different skills and generally can’t be done at the same time. Writing poetry is certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme. Most forms of art require a significant investment of time, attention, and practice. All this to say that I expected to publish books far more quickly than what happened in reality. Similar to other art forms, you produce something, send it out or put it in a show and hope someone likes it enough to publish it in their journal or buy to hang it in their home. But those “yes” experiences are never guaranteed and can’t be forced. They take time and, specifically, persistence. Everyone will experience some rejection, and your rection (to give up and never try again vs trying again, over and over) will impact your career as an artist. If I had given up because I hadn’t published a book before I became 30, well, I wouldn’t be here answering your questions. And what a waste the almost 20 previous years would have been! The point is – Don’t give up. Keep working, keep sending it out. No one knows when a poem or collection will be accepted for publication. But it will NEVER happen if you don’t keep trying.

Contact Info:

• Website: virginiacrawford.com
• Facebook: Virginia Crawford

Image Credits
Photo of Virginia Crawford by Sam Schmidt Eleven Voices, collage and photo by Virginia Crawford