Q&A with Breakout 8 Winner Nicholas Weaver
Nicholas Weaver is a teaching artist and spoken-word performer, with work appearing in This Land Press, Columbia Poetry Review, and others. He lives in Oklahoma, where he enjoys daydreaming about ocean trenches and post-apocalyptic wastelands.
Nicholas is one of eight winners of the 2019 Breakout 8 Prize, co-sponsored by Epiphany and The Authors Guild. Read his prizewinning poems, “Daddy Issues” (excerpted below) and “Queenless Roar,” in the Fall/Winter 2019 Issue of Epiphany.
From our Fall/Winter 2019 print issue.
How did you first come up with your winning piece?
My graduate thesis collection “Daddy Issues” started from the idea I had that, in contemporary gay subculture, sex and death are particularly interlinked because of an entire lost generation. These poems are my own attempt to reconcile with missing paternal elders and abandonment, as well as me trying to understand a specific sort of hatred and fear, to conquer the feeling of danger when being intimate.
What do you hope to gain from the year ahead?
I’ve been doing academia for so long without a break, I’m ready to take some time off to work, travel, party, try and collect some life experiences instead of trying to process past ones all the time!
What, for you, is the most exciting development in contemporary literature?
Horror and science fiction as a genre gaining more respect, and developing wider fan cultures.
What resources are most valuable for writers just breaking into publication territory?
A good friend and reader, doesn’t matter who, that you can trust to show your work and trust in an honest response from. I unfortunately didn’t learn what good criticism was until I entered a workshop, but I can also say that open mic nights are great places to get an immediate “this is working/this isn’t working” temperature readout.
Who is your favorite underappreciated author we should all be reading?
Otessa Moshfegh writes these fabulous psychologically alienating novels that I’m absolutely in love with, all about people trying to get what they want in the worst ways possible. She can disturb me more with a single sentence than any horror lm released this season.
Do you have a memorable experience of an influential teacher you’d like to share?
My high school English teacher Mr. Parker was singlehandedly responsible for both founding the school’s slam poetry team, and introducing me to spoken word, without which I never would have started writing, refining, or even have had the confidence to speak.
It’s been said we write what we obsess over. What themes do you find keep cropping up in your writing again and again?
Deviant behavior, misunderstood villains, repression, robots, masculinity, failed attempts to connect with other humans, death, pop culture mascots, sex, bees, deep ocean trenches, black holes.
What was your favorite book growing up?
I was a huge fan of this underrated Roald Dahl book, “Danny, Champion of the World.” It’s about a boy who lives with his father in a caravan and saves him from a big game trap, then later helps sabotage an upper-society pheasant hunt. It has descriptions of meals that are to starve for, but the close, complicated bond between a developing man and his father figure stuck with me forever.
If the pursuit of writing is a quiet solo one, what are some ways you connect with other writers?
Connect with your favorite authors and their surroundings fans on social media, visit more bookstores, read at an open mic!
What’s one bit of advice you wish you’d have gotten early on?
Edit early and often! You almost always use more words than you need on a first pass, but I’m the type that gets obsessive over what ends up on the cutting room floor. The bene t is that anything excised can be repurposed in a different work.
