Artist Biography: Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), & poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (Math Paper Press 2017). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project, & as co-editor of Kopi Break, a journal of new Singapore poetry. Her work has been published by Waxwing, The Drift, & Poets.org, profiled in Vogue, The Straits Times, & The Business Times, & performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre for Fiction, & the Singapore Writers Festival. She lives between New York & Singapore.
Instagram: @topazwinters Facebook: @topazwinterswriter
Spotlight Transcript
Co-Executive Director and Program Facilitator, Dom Witten, interviews today's Poet Spotlight, Topaz Winters.
Dom: How would you describe your creative process?
Topaz: My poems always begin with a seed: a line, image, or idea I find fascinating, inspiring, frustrating, or electrifying. From there I write toward further astonishment. I'm always trying to say something that feels uniquely true to the self I am as I write, even knowing that that self evolves with every passing moment. This is the great joy of language to me: to excavate the depths of what I believe to be emotionally, narratively, formally possible on the page, that the "possible" shape-shifts with every poem, that I can continue to surprise myself even as I build a creative practise circling the same deep wells of thought.
Dom: The first edition of Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing was released 5 years ago, how has your relationship to the themes/poems changed with the revised work and 10 new poems in this upcoming special edition?
Topaz: I wrote these poems between the ages of 14 & 18, the years of my life when I was acutely suicidal & believed wholly that I would not be around five years after the book was released. There's a desperate urgency to the original manuscript as a result, a ragged & fatalistic allure that my teenage self found irresistible. Returning to the desire & loathing of this collection as an adult was both an emotional excavation & a push toward healing. In some ways I felt thrust back into the arms of the person I used to be, who was hardly equipped to carry herself, let alone me. But as I continued revising & writing new poems -- filling in the gaps of the stories I used to shy away from, prioritising slow reflection over manic documentation -- I felt as if I was the one holding her. It was a kind of tempering, a reconciliation with the ways that younger self found to run from the future. I hope she's proud of me. I know I am of her.
Dom: Across your poems you are constantly traveling between time zones, generations, hunger and emotional origins. How do these communities push you to "create art that defies complacency & celebrates messy miracles?"
Topaz: I am alive for & because of the communities that have made space for me, in ways intentional & accidental, physical & spiritual, tender when I needed it & harsh when I needed it more. I believe that art, like community, is a refusal to look away. To inhabit a body & a world that often want me dead is a miracle of the greatest proportions -- albeit one that isn't always beautiful in the way I grew up expecting miracles to be. Instead it is a clawing out of the mouth of darkness, an act enabled by the communities that have too borne witness to that darkness & are still breathing. I know where I came from. I know who I belong to. By making eye contact with these truths, I turn at once against complacency & toward the fantastic & terrible miracle of survival.
Dom: What are you excited about in your work lately?
Topaz: I'm really excited about the possibilities of character & persona poetry. I spent 11 years of my career writing confessional poetry, & recently I've been considering the ways my work stands differently on the page when it forms a study of a character apart from yet necessarily of me. My current work-in-progress follows a genderless god negotiating a relationship with their worshippers ("the man is coming in an hour & they’re just trying to be pretty enough to pray to") & a girl falling in love with an alien she meets at a roadside Dunkin' Donuts ("in line in front of me she ordered a strawberry frosted donut; beneath her nails was dirt the colour of American money"). I am drawn to fun as a form of rigorous & necessary creative work, & right now character & persona poetry are useful openings to such joy.
Interview Published: 08/16/2024
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