Dusty to Polished: Joey Parson
What sparks your urge to write, is it always the same?
Every individual urge is different but the motivation behind each one is the same. I’m really focusing on filling in the blanks of the literary canon or the tradition or the things in media that I want to see. You know the Toni Morrison quote, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I really want to just – I don’t want to say platform – but usher in an array of voices that I feel are being overlooked like queer, southern, colored voices. That’s what I wanna hear. Heavy emphasis on the southern. That’s my more prominent urge because we don’t get a lot of southern stories and the south got something to say hahaha. There are just so many facets of history that have yet to be explored. So that’s what I wanna do in my writing. For sure.
I am heavily inspired by every single thing that happens in my life and the lives of the loved ones around me. The complexity of it all. There’s a lot of stuff going on that no one talks about. It could be any little thing. Usually it’s involving relationships because my work tends to delve into the most extreme and momentous parts of said relations, especially love and the way that it shows up in people’s lives. Or doesn’t show up. Or maybe it’s misplaced or skewed. Right now I have been doing a little reflecting on stuff that I have experienced and making that autofiction leap or whatever. Like taking an idea from when I broke up with a friend in high school and just fictionalizing it and making it into something that I would like to read myself. Stuff like that. Or hearing the crazy stories about my friends. These are the nuggets that inspire me and then snowballs, unravels, or ascends into something greater.
Do you follow a specific process or set of steps when editing?
I actually have this really terrible habit of editing while I’m writing. I revise while I’m in the process of composition. I’m trying to break away from that. I’ll write a paragraph and I’ll sit with that paragraph for thirty minutes to an hour. I’ll just keep going over the lines again and again, trying to make it work and then move to the next one and then go back and look at the entire page. Now, when it comes to the specifics of line by line edits, I’ve been trying to give myself a critical distance. I imagine I am not me, or that I am a character in the story, for example, and reading these words. How does it work? How does it fit? Am I really coming from a credible place? Is this ture to the character or is it specific to me? So now I just sort of, you know, read it aloud. I read it in a different voice. I take a step away. I’ll write something and I’ll wait a day or two. Then I’ll go back and look at it and see how I feel about it then. Often when I’m in the process of writing, I’ll be gassing myself up. Oh this is so good. This is great. Let me keep going. Then later I’ll realize, okay that whole section was not it. Critical distance is the main thing for me and testing out different voices and definitely hearing it aloud because if it doesn’t sound right when you speak it aloud then it’s not gonna flow while one is reading.
It also kind of depends on the type of piece. Some stuff is just easier to write for me. I’ll write, edit. Write, edit. Take a step back, go back. Edit some more. Maybe write some more. Sort of like that. But just making sure I’m being open and not hypercritical of myself or too lenient. Because often, like I said, I’ll be like, oh this is so great, when I first do a line. In reality, everything is not perfect. Everything could be improved. I like to imagine that ten to twenty years down the line I’ll still go back to something and think hey, I could do this or I could do that. That’s just how we are as writers.
How do you know when a piece is truly “done” and ready for publication?
For me, it’s when I’ve exhausted all possibilities. I usually begin with an interrogation of a thematic concept that I want to unpack. I want to make sure that by the end of say, a short story, that I really drilled in whatever are the specifics of the theme that I’m focusing on and why I was motivated to write. It begins with a question. For example, right now I’m working on a piece that interrogates how people act when they truly are interested in one another but don’t know it yet and they have barriers to their relationship. They’re colleagues and they collab on projects they’re playing this game because neither one of them wants to accept what the reality is because they don’t even know it’s a thing because they’ve always been friends. I just see how that manifests or pinpoints exactly what it is that I’m trying to say within that.
I know it’s done when I’ve answered my question. When the theme, the concept, the idea that I have has been stretched and the characters have been brought to their pushing point, their boiling point. I like to bring my characters to the precipice and see what happens. Like let them play it out or whatever. So yea I guess when I’ve answered my question. That’s when I’m done.
How would you describe your writing process with an image?
I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I mean I guess this is the most obvious answer since we’re surrounded by them. Trees. Hahaha. Well, when I think of a body of work, I think of it as a tree because the anatomy of a tree is very complex. I guess, at its most basic, it has the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the roots. And I like to think of the trunk as the volume in the body of work, whatever it is, and the roots being the literary tradition, southern black tradition, queer tradition…the story lines of my predecessors, our ancestors that came before us. This mineralizes, fuels, nourishes the root, the body, the trunk and then the leaves, the branches, the twigs. Everything all at the top, it’s all pretty and floral – that’s the product. That’s what I’m offering to the world. But I think if we’re talking about the actual composition process… I don’t know. Like a spider web, I guess? Hahaha. I like to think that when I am writing, it usually starts with a question and idea but then I have multiple things that I’m bringing together in one piece. I don’t want to force my story lines. I want things to just come that make sense for the original idea. So, I guess a spider web would work in that sense because I’ll have the foundation just waiting for the characters, the themes, the language to just come and fuel whatever it is that I’m writing. I don’t know if that makes sense.
I don’t really know how spider webs work really. But I know they catch bugs. I know they’re sitting there waiting. I think of the setting and circumstances, the history. And then like a bridging together of the setting and the characters. They come together and fuel the narrative. Something I learned in Dale Peck’s world building class. So I guess when I begin writing – it’s like a waiting process for me. And I’m waiting for the prey to come. Which are my characters, the language, the ideas. Certain scenes. Sometimes it is a scene and I’m just like okay well what am I doing with this? How do I make it work within this concept? So the web would be the waiting game. Waiting for those pieces to come together…. and then I have the feast.
What do you think makes the writing community at The New School unique?
I did undergrad here so I’ve always been very fond of The New School. It was my top choice. I didn’t really want to go anywhere else. I was drawn to the reputation of the kind of kids that come here. The students. Everyone is unique. That’s such an on the nose word now but it’s very true to the school. There’s a lot of ingenuity. There’s a lot of generosity. Everyone seems genuine. And they’re very tuned into all the different pieces of the program. Everyone, especially the faculty, genuinely want to see each student succeed. And I really like that. And workshop is amazing. I feel like everyone in the workshop is truly invested in improving. They want to improve themselves and they want the people in the space to also improve. People care. Most people here are not faking it. They’re serious about their work and they’re serious about other people’s work.They’re giving genuine feedback that shows that they actually paid attention to the material and you can’t buy that – genuine investment in your work. They show up and they provide adequate critiques that aren’t just rooted in their personal bias but judge the story on its merits. And I really love that. And everyone’s great and super creative and talented. So it’s been a blast hahaha.
Bio:
Joey Colassa is a creative writer, scholar, and fine artist whose work delves into the extremities of human relations and histories untold. Inspired to bridge the gaps in the literary landscape, he works to augment the tradition by cultivating a space for queer, Black, southern expression. A graduate of Eugene Lang’s Undergraduate Workshop, he is a first-year MFA candidate here at The New School. His work has been featured in Eleven and a Half and Sterling Notes, and he can be found on medium and substack; sharing stories, thoughts, and other poetic things.
This interview series is produced by Hijab Ahmed