Fiona Stawarz joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read her poem "Crimson," featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Fiona discuss writing about current events, exploring BIPOC themes in creative writing, the challenge of being called upon to be a representative of your race, the importance of many drafts and of fiction writing, and the adrenaline rush of sharing your writing publicly. Fiona is currently part of The Telling Room’s Young Writers and Leaders program.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Fiona Stawarz: It takes one minute or less to read that, maybe two. I was honestly proud of myself, which I don't let myself be proud of myself enough. It felt like a really big accomplish to read poetry in front of that many people.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices of the Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine, all of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in this series are featured in A New Land, an anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill. and courage. Some of them were born in Maine, others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures. Fiona Stawarz is a senior at South Portland High School. She's currently part of The Telling Room's Young Writers and Leaders Program. In this episode, Fiona reads her poem, “Crimson,” which she wrote last summer after the murder of George Floyd. And she talks about what it was like to read “Crimson” in front of hundreds of people.
Fiona Stawarz: “Crimson” by Fiona Stawarz.
Long blades of grass sway
As the wind roams.
Vibrant flowers begin to bloom
As the sun shows its face again.
The dark crimson bark of the tree
Protects the layers of tradition beneath.
It stands tall, though weathered by many defeats.
Birds chirp, unaware
That the blades that dance only by
Manipulation of the wind
Will soon be cut short.
And the dark crimson bark
Will be taken down by man to be used for things
Of the meaningless sort.
Just like the earth that used to be free
Of our feet, of our polluted ways, and concrete streets,
We are an endangered species.
In danger, we have remained.
Our thick manes and melanated skin
Are targets on our backs.
We have been laughed at,
Spat on, hunted, and abused
While the culture of our ancestors has been
Imitated as a muse.
Do we deserve no respect?
We’ve been stepped on,
Held down,
Knee to the neck.
A negro falls in the concrete jungle.
No one dares to stand witness.
Do his pleas make a sound?
Or will they be met with indifference?
Like the ground beneath us we have remained resilient.
It seems as though we are screaming in deaf ears
And our tears will never be seen.
400 years of bondage from slavery to incarceration.
We continue to bleed
And you continue to praise an America
That was built by our calloused hands
And on stolen Indian lands.
Unlike our tears
Your corruption will not go unseen much longer.
Dear America,
The eruption has already started.
The institutions that hold our freedom
Are begging to fall.
All those you have wronged
Now stand together.
Our roots are strong and deep.
We are tethered
By your cruelties.
Will you finally see?
Will you finally listen to our pleas?
Or will you turn a blind eye yet again?
This time we have nothing to lose.
Try and silence us.
Try to sew our lips shut.
We will still be heard.
Still we will rise
And your lies of life and liberty will become truth.
We will rebuild this country into what it was always meant to be,
A real democracy.
Mere fear cannot control us,
Our anger and sadness can lay dormant no more,
For
The power we have is undeniable
And change is inevitable.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you. Oh, what a powerful poem. And you wrote that recently.
Fiona Stawarz: I believe I wrote it a week after the death of George Floyd just as a relief. And it was nothing like the poem that you're reading right now. It had gone through various edits, but then a friend reached out to me to speak at a protest. She said that I could do a speech, do a poem, anything. So I decided to use that poem and I just added onto it and edited it a lot. I think it actually may have first started out as a creative writing assignment by our teacher. It was one of the last assignments.
Stuart Kestenbaum: In South Portland?
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah, at South Portland High School, yeah. We were supposed to bring in two different themes and connect them. And so I had started off by writing about nature and then I hadn't really connected it to the African-American community yet or the POC community. And then after the death of George Floyd, I just continued on it and made it into what it is now.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah. As you started out, it felt like a poem written in Maine because of the close observation of nature. And then it moves into talking about discrimination. Such a passionate voice, and you wrote it to be spoken aloud.
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah, I did.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What was it like to read it?
Fiona Stawarz: So it was for the Juneteenth protest and it was down at Deering Oaks at the little concert hall. I had been there for two plus hours because Deering Oaks was the last part of the protest. We had walked all through Portland and we went to the Abyssinian Meetinghouse, I think. And I had all that time to get nervous, too. But it wasn't really a reality until I started walking up the steps onto the stage. That's when I really started to get nervous. I'd never performed poetry in a space like that. I had done it here before, but at The Telling Room, it's easy to feel really comfortable. But there was at least a hundred people there. And it was also a bunch of people my age, which aren't always the most receptive crowd. But one of my teachers from The Telling Room was there, so it was just nice to see some familiar faces. And I was scared that I was not going to have a receptive audience. But in two seconds, it went away because people just stood up and were clapping and clapping. The people that I knew were being really supportive, and you get this adrenaline rush from public speaking, and almost like I was going to cry, but I was not sad at all. I was content with how everything had gone, but I was just so amped up from what had happened. It takes one minute or less to read that, maybe two, and then you're done and you have all this adrenaline. And then you just go and sit down and I'm still super amped up. But I don't know, I just think I was honestly proud of myself, which I don't let myself be proud of myself enough. And it felt like a really big accomplishment to read poetry in front of that many people and have a good experience
Stuart Kestenbaum: As you're reading it, I felt your passion was evident. When you write, do you do a lot of drafts of the poems?
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah. I think with all my writing, I have a million drafts, a million different ways that it could have gone. And then I usually just choose a certain draft to run with it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: When do you know when it's done?
Fiona Stawarz: Honestly, I don't. And I think this poem is proof of that, because as you said, I had first written it to speak. It wasn't to be read. It was difficult for me in my head trying to figure out if the reader is going to read it this certain way that I can speak it, because I feel like it doesn't have the same power if you are reading it. So I think I kept going through it and going through it and trying to figure out how to make my voice come across to the reader, whether it was through different line breaks or changing up the punctuation, changing up the wording a little bit. But I feel like pieces can always be improved and that's definitely one of my problems, because I always try and expand and expand on my pieces.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah. With writing, I'll find sometimes I don't actually know exactly where I'm going until I'm writing it. Sometimes, the writing tells you where it needs to go.
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah, absolutely. I think for some reason, I have a block right now. So usually, that does happen for me. With “Crimson,” that's what happened. But I'm just getting to this point where I feel like so completely stuck, I don't know how to show what I'm trying to say. But I'm hoping that that will happen in one day, I'll just pop up and start writing and writing and writing and I'll have a draft that I like that I can grow off of.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. And you'll go back to older work, too. And you also write fiction.
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah, definitely. I think poetry, I'm not as comfortable with it as I am with fiction because that's what I normally write in my free time. But yeah, I love writing fiction. The piece that I have in the anthology for The Telling Room is called “Illumination.” And it's about a flashlight, which is weird. But basically, he guides this old man who recently lost his wife through somewhat of a journey. And it weaves in different cultures. So when I first wrote it, I was learning Spanish. So I brought in a lot of Spanish culture and I did research on their connection with these candles called veladoras and God and their faith, because I brought that into the piece. So usually, I think because sometimes I feel living in Maine, I feel isolated from the rest of the world, everything that's going on, and I feel isolated from culture, I normally bring in pieces that I'm missing. So I'll make everything vibrant if it's the winter time, I don't know. It's really based off of what I'm lacking in the moment and I just go off on a tangent.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yeah. So living in South Portland, greater Portland, being a person of color, Maine is the whitest state in the country.
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah.
Stuart Kestenbaum: The whitest and oldest state in the country. And so when it comes to an issue like George Floyd that has affected everybody, do you feel like people look to you now because they want to know how you feel or want more from you?
Fiona Stawarz: That's honestly a problem I've struggled with even before George Floyd, is this idea that I'm a representative for my race and this idea that I have to uphold certain aspects of myself so I don't look like the angry black girl. So I think going into this, I was already holding that position. I was already trying to be representative for my race, which I don't think is necessarily a healthy thing and I don't think that's an antiracist belief to think that I'm a representative from my race. And that was something I had to change, but I keep walking across this line of, should I just be educating people? Is it my responsibility to do that? And what is their personal responsibility? Because if I was not a person of color, I would look to a person of color for guidance around these issues. But at the same time, it's like you need to take your own personal responsibility for it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: This poem, I mean, you're speaking to a group who's thinking about the same thing. Have you done any talks like that ever?
Fiona Stawarz: Yeah. I think I've done several public speaking events. One was the NAACP Martin Luther King Day dinner. And then we had a protest couple of weeks before the Juneteenth protest in South Portland and I spoke there. And so I wrote a speech for that. And I think nonfiction's definitely more difficult for me to write, but because the emotion was so fresh because everything had just happened with the death of George Floyd and the uncovering of the death of Ahmaud Arbery, watching those videos, it made it really easy to write the speech.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It sounds like you've done a lot of writing in your life.
Fiona Stawarz: I absolutely hated writing when I was younger. We came here as a class when I was in second grade and they made us write and I was literally so angry. I did not know that The Telling Room was going to be such a big part of my life in however many years. It was always really difficult for me to pan down my ideas and get it on the page. So I always struggled with it. And then I had a really, really, really great sophomore English teacher named Miss Saviski who awakened this like for writing in me. And then my friends told me about The Telling Room and I applied to it and I got into the summer program. So I did the summer program and I really started to love it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: This time in our history to have the pandemic allowing people to focus on issues maybe they wouldn't have as people look at it now, you were in school remotely, did you write more then, do you think, or less?
Fiona Stawarz: At first, it was really difficult for me to write because I think a lot of people, my mind was racing a lot and I was overwhelmed with figuring out how to do remote school, how to make sure that I'm still going to be okay for applying to college and figuring out home stuff, just managing everything. I was overwhelmed thinking about the possibilities of going back to school, it's just the stress kept building up in different areas. So it was really difficult for me to write. And I think I often desensitize myself to certain things and try to push them to the back so that I can keep going and continue throughout my day. But it was really difficult to do that with the death of George Floyd. So I think definitely that situation sparked another bout of writing for me.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode by Jordan Kramer. The series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum, thanks for listening.