Emily Rose Miller
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
Emily Rose Miller: I would say that I write with myself in mind, and edit with an audience in mind. If I wrote for an audience I would never get words down on paper, and if I edited for myself my poems would never make sense to another soul. That said, I find that there is a delicate balance between editing out the “heart” of a poem and sticking to content that might be uncomfortable or strange when it comes to refining a poem for the reader. Even if it might bring a smaller audience, I find that staying true to what I want to convey in a piece will attract readers who are similar or who are open to exploring new realities, and I prefer that to casting a wide but impersonal net.
ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?
ERM: For me, writing is simultaneously the hardest, most exhausting thing in the world and also the most necessary and rewarding. The whole writing process is hard for me, but I also can’t imagine a life where I don’t put that effort into expressing myself in a way that both honors my experiences and speaks to an audience. I think the most difficult aspect is just getting past the urge to keep my words bottled inside and convince myself that they don’t have to be good at first, they just need to be written. Once the words are down, they can be edited into something that might mean something to someone besides only myself.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
ERM: In my writing, vulnerability is derived from radical and total honesty. Most of my second, third, etc. drafts are spent trying to cut away all of the fluff in my first draft and getting to the real heart of what I’m feeling and trying to convey in a poem. From my perspective, if my work isn’t completely honest and vulnerable, how can I expect anyone to find real value in it? A big part of my editing process is me whittling my poems down (or beefing them up) to reflect my reality in the most honest way possible.
ORP: What books have you read many times?
ERM: I always come back to Danez Smith’s “Don’t Call Us Dead” and the collected works of Anne Sexton. These are the two poets I feel most inspired by over and over again for their unabashed honesty and refusal to shy away from writing about their realities. If I can be half as open in my own work, I can feel proud of that.
