Moon Beams #9 - Kelli Allen

Kelli Allen, poet, dancer, editor, and instructor (and one of my very favorite instructors on the way to catching my MFA in creative writing from Lindenwood University) shared a conversation as varied as her roster of talents on episode 9 of “Moon Beams,” including a workshop-flavored call to look inward for creative strength, in lieu of defaulting to digital research or AI.

“Can you find the -ness of something?” Kelli asked, taking her stuffed-animal axolotl as an example,* “Can we write about that, can we talk about that without AI, without having to look up on Wikipedia what they are, let’s go look at one, let’s borrow Kelli’s, let’s bring it into the room, let’s watch it move, let’s maybe touch it, can we discuss that?”

When asked to share lines that she found noteworthy for the audience, Kelli read lines from Michelle Bitting’s “Requiem:” “….So much spit and polish, /this life, a lantern-saints /smiling in the dark, /your crown of skulls releasing /a lasting, solitary spark.”

She also gave sage advice in pointing me in the direction of David Whyte’s “Revelation Must Be Terrible,” which is monumental, truly a new North Star.

On the exciting and unique opportunity to see the imminent re-issue of Kelli’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Otherwise, Soft White Ash by C&R Press, she said, “Writing from places of pain is super important, and not turning away…. Looking at that, I thought, would be cringe-worthy for me, I think, in a lot of ways, because I was desperate and I was so excited to show who I was becoming. But I can look back and say, I’m kind of proud of that chick. She did a lot.”

My deep gratitude has been and always will be with Kelli for the bar-setting work she does in pushing new talent and routinely publishing new work of her own, and I’m elated and honored that we get to share this chat with the world.

Much more to come soon, but y’all already knew that, find the -ness and embrace difficulty and happy trails, everybody.

*In a soon-to-be-released episode of “Moon Beams,” Kelli Russell Agodon shared that her family has an axolotl as a pet, and when I shared as much with Kelli Allen a few days later, she shared that Agodon had blurbed one of her books, and that she is one of a few poets she “fan-girls” over.