basil payne
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?
basil payne: The feeling of the spiral in spiral bound notebooks touching the meat of my right hand makes me feel ill, so half of the pages in all my notebooks—specifically the left ones—are all upside down so I can avoid my hand and the spiral touching. I realized that this counted as a quirk when I turned in a writing journal for one of my classes… with half the pages upside down. Thankfully, my professor got a good laugh out of it.
ORP: What books have you read many times?
bp: Then the War by Carl Phillips; Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer; The Tradition by Jericho Brown; and Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
bp: After an anxiety spiral about my writing, I told my mentor that, no matter how hard I tried, I was worried my writing would never get better, that it would end up being a pathetic, unfortunate slump of words. My mentor, Ben Gunsberg, sat me down and said that as long as I’m enjoying the act of creation, my work will be great. I remember we were sitting outside of our campus library together, the sounds of construction so loud that Ben had to nearly-yell the whole conversation, and one phrase he said has stuck in my head ever since: “just mess around!” Messing around, having fun, and experimenting while writing gives me the most interesting, most flavorful, most human work, so I think the advice I would give another writer would be “mess around!”
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
bp: That much like other pieces of nature, you have your place. All plants, animals, fungi, and other little creatures belong in their ecosystems, and so do you. Nothing is wrong with being a different type of human, and—if we look to nature as our guide—difference is necessary for a healthy world. We are all a little funky and weird! Keep doing it!
