Writing Your Own Process: Jason B. Crawford
Alumni share their experiences and insight on polishing the craft and finding their own voice.
How has your writing changed throughout the years? What has surprised you the most?
JBC: When I started my undergrad creative writing program, I was a fiction student. This was the case up until about midway through my second semester, which is when I changed to poetry. I think what surprises me the most about my craft is how much I still rely on my fiction background. I am writing about future possibilities more and more, whereas when I was in undergrad, I was writing about collective past trauma. Even in the writings about the past I try to incorporate some sort of fiction.
What has changed the most is just my understanding of the written practice and where I need to push a poem for it to say what I want to say. There isn’t a space on a page of a poetic work that isn’t doing something for the poem. Line breaks, em dashes, even semicolons are all working simultaneously to help the reader grasp something in the piece. Over the years, I have become more trusting of the poem itself and less trusting of what I wanted the poem to be. The poem is always smarter than the writer.
What do you enjoy about writing the most? The least?
JBC: I love that there is still wonder to be found within a poem, my own and my friends. There is always something special about a poem once you get it down on page. I think of it the same as the “honeymoon phase” where everything in that poem is perfect and it’s your lil baby and you love it. I enjoy that moment, when writing a poem feels new again, even in the hardest poems, the saddest poems, the grief, I find something to smile about in the poem.
On the other hand, I hate the politics of publishing. I grow very tired of waiting for something to be published or publishable. Somedays, I want to go back to the 1950’s of poetry and start throwing poems off of New York rooftops.
Who have you been reading lately? How have they influenced your writing or inspired you in any way?
JBC: I teach Essay writing classes, so I have been reading essays more than anything, but even with that, I think I have learned how to craft a better sentence. I have been reading and re-reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us which I believe firmly places the ideas of how pop culture is an inherently stolen Black commodity, but also acts as a vessel to help us filter and decipher our growing griefs. I have also been reading Just Us by Claudia Rankine for another class I am teaching. Rankine’s work asks us to continually question the norm and what we have been told or given, especially within our own work.
How did completing an MFA help you find your style or purpose in your writing?
JBC: The MFA, for me, was really a space for me to understand the craft of reading more than the craft of writing. I feel like I knew a little bit about poems and writing when I joined the MFA program. I had chapbooks out and a full length on the way. But truly what I was missing, which ultimately helped my ability to write better poems, was the ability to close read a poem and speak directly to the author within my own responses and my own work. I am a better reader and teacher of poetry because of my MFA.
What piece of advice would you give to current students who are in the process of crafting their first novels/collections?
JBC: The process of creating art takes time and you have time to make it. Not every poem needs to be for everyone or for the manuscript in general. I say this because when I was younger, I felt I needed to have a book out right away. This led to me rushing through poems and edits without fully taking time to appreciate the poem for what it was, always seeking for the best possible version of a poem. Let the art sit, breathe, learn its way around the world first, before you deem it anything more: a book, a project, unusable. That would be my advice.
Jason B. Crawford (They/He) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. The are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.