An Interview with 2023 Fresh Voices Fellow, Dawn Angelicca Barcelona
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a poet and Epiphany’s 2023 Fresh Voices Fellow. During her fellowship, she helped curate and ready poetry for both print and online publication, and it was a pleasure to have her be a part of the editorial team. She is also the cofounder of Maker, Mentor, Muse which offers writing workshops and literary salons that encourage building a sustainable creative life. In 2022, she won the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022), and is an alumna of The Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. She likes to dance, talk about mental health, and travel via public transportation.
Dawn was interviewed over email by our Web Editor. Their written exchange is collected here and lightly edited.
I’d love to start by asking how an interest in artmaking first came into your life.
Both my mother and sister are beautiful writers, and while they didn't write poetry specifically, when I was younger I was moved by the expansiveness and emotional resonance their words and stories had. I also loved looking at the photo albums my parents kept. They are both from the Philippines and left in their 20s to work in Saudi Arabia (where they met) before immigrating to the U.S. I started to imagine a lot of what they experienced and always asked for stories. Whenever I visit my parents now, I try to use one or two photos as writing prompts.
Has your interest/inclination towards words always expressed itself through poetry?
I actually started out writing short stories in elementary and middle school, but in high school I had a poetry teacher who encouraged us to write from the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (to quote Wordsworth) and that unlocked the world of poetry for me. I love to dance and craft as well. I find the embodied practice of making tangible art to be poetic as well, in the sense that I can bring into being the things I imagine.
Do you remember one of the first things you wrote?
I wrote a story about a girl losing a mitten in the snow, then doubling back later and reuniting with it. I was in second grade, and [I wrote it] on that big handwriting paper with really large spaces used for practicing cursive. I ended up filling four of those sheets with my story. Our teacher stapled everyone's work to the bulletin board outside of our classroom and it was exciting to see it! I think having to write that story in class in a short amount of time somehow motivated me to write a lot, and I definitely think that's still true for me now. Though I mostly identify as a poet, I'm trying my hand at writing a short story right now, and recently thought of my lost mitten story!
Because you’ve made art in other ways, what has kept you interested in continuing to explore the poetic form? Do you find that poetry complements the way you think or experience the world?
I think that poetry allows for a playfulness with space and the page that makes for a more engaged reading experience. For example, I wrote a bit of a meta-poem about serving as an Editor-in-Chief and I formatted the poem as if it was a newspaper column. I’ve also written poems about eating in the shape of bowls, and in “Bilateral Stimulation,” published in Epiphany’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, utilized lines that sprawl across from left to right to reflect how Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is done.
Writing poetry has trained my eye and ear to look and listen to my day with deep attention. Sometimes when I'm out with friends I might notice an object or sign that I want to write a poem about, so I'll take a picture of it. When I look at that photo later, I might start my poem by describing how it looks from multiple angles, how the light highlights/obscures the object, and then launch into emotional associations.
I can see how the shape of a poem is as important to you as the content. Do you find that there is a relationship between noticing and shape in your work? It’s so interesting that you'll take a picture of something you find inspiring in your day-to-day and later explore it from different angles. That seems to speak of shaping. How the eye or memory also shapes an object.
Some of my poems that assume a container or form are often first written in the form of a large chunk, sometimes even a prose poem, then as I edit I play around with spacing and shape. The playfulness is really exciting! And I’ve become interested in how elements of erasure and blackout poetry can guide meaning in poems. I recently read torrin a. greathouse's Wound from the Mouth of a Wound which inspired me to try out the burning haibun form she created.
In addition to writing poetry, I love to collage which involves collecting materials (magazines, photos, brochures, junk mail, fabric scraps, tickets, etc). I might notice that a material is interesting to me because it has a unique shape, or a pattern I don’t see often, or maybe the image feels really potent.
I would love to hear you speak a little more about your poems published in Epiphany's Summer/Spring 2023 issue. What was the initial inspiration? Were there any specific questions or ideas that you sought to explore in them?
"Dear Violet" and "Bilateral Stimulation" were both written while I was attending the week-long Community of Writers at Olympic Valley conference held in Lake Tahoe in 2022. I had to write a new poem every night to bring into a morning workshop.
"Bilateral Stimulation" came to me first because I had just started EMDR therapy [which] involves moving your eyes in a specific way or holding buzzers that alternate between left and right as you process grief or trauma out loud. The idea is that bilateral stimulation will help reduce a flight or fight response when triggering memories come up. My therapist encouraged me to write down any thoughts or dreams that came up in between sessions. I used my notes to craft this poem.
"Dear Violet" came to me while I was waiting for a bus back to Olympic Valley after picking up groceries in Truckee, the next town over. The bus was really delayed and I was waiting with another woman for almost an hour. We shared a lot about our lives in that time and it was a surprising moment of connection, waiting at a bus stop. I sat down to write my poem for the next morning and ended up wanting to write a letter to her daughter, Violet.
In the same issue you also have a beautiful poem, "Muse," about the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. There is such a sense of journey in it as if it's trying to put together her life from the spaces in which she once lived. There is also a strong sense of kinship in the poem, especially in the line, "In another life, we'd have met." Can you talk to me about the importance and influence of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha on you?
I first learned about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha the summer before my senior year of college. I was feeling pretty disappointed when I realized that there was only one Asian American literature class offered at my university, especially since I was eager to read books that I could more closely relate to as an Asian-American woman. One of my professors who became my English honors thesis advisor suggested that I check out Cha's Dictee and it really captivated me in terms of themes—immigration to the U.S., separations due to war and civil unrest—and how it incorporated poetry, prose, photographs, diagrams. I think a big driver of my writing is trying to understand my parents' immigration journey and what it was like for them to settle into their new life in New Jersey. I also loved that Cha was a filmmaker and performance artist. My thesis advisor was classmates with Cha and I felt a sense of kinship through her, and this kinship inspired me to fly out to UC Berkeley to see Cha’s work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
She continues to be an artistic muse and a reminder that I can embrace all parts of being an artist though I primarily describe myself as a writer. Her work inspired me to live in South Korea for two years and I felt a connection to the places she had written about, and after South Korea, I moved to San Francisco where [Cha] had gone to high school. As many folks know, she died tragically shortly after Dictee was published, so I have imagined what it would have been like to meet her in person and perhaps collaborate with her, or help organize a showing of her work. Whenever I meet people who are familiar with Dictee, it is an instant bond, and I love to share her work with others.
Speaking of muse, could you speak about the organization you co-founded, Mentor, Maker, Muse? I love the name and from what I've read it seems to be partially led by the idea of writing as community and spiritual practice—lowercase s. Can you tell me how you came to co-found Mentor, Maker, Muse, and the type of space you hope to provide for artists?
I love sharing the origin story behind Maker, Mentor, Muse! Mary Volmer and Maw Shein Win are writers I met in the Bay Area in different contexts and at different times. I met Maw when I took one of her classes on collaborative zine making in 2018, a class in which I met friends I still write with regularly. I met Mary while I was attending a writing retreat she helped organize. Maw was also a guest teacher at the retreat.
The three of us come from different cultural and spiritual backgrounds and communities that live adjacent to each other. Mary and Maw had an idea to start an organization that focused on the different roles artists and writers live and how we shift through each of them: maker, mentor, and muse. We want to expand the idea of a muse beyond the Western classical sense of the nine Greek muses (which Cha utilizes as an organization framework in Dictee but replaces Euterpe with an invented muse, Elitere). From this expansiveness, we want to help folks explore what other sources of inspiration exist in addition to [established] mythological, religious, or classical frameworks. A muse could be a person in your immediate life, an object, a place, etc. Lowercase s spirituality encapsulates all of these aspects.
We're currently running a monthly virtual reading series, either themed (in January we had the theme of "Making Space") or featuring an author and a recent publication. We also offer several multi-genre writing salons with guest speakers, and will be running our second cohort of two-month poetry and prose workshops led by Maw and Mary. Because we're running most of our events and programming online, we are able to connect with participants in all different geographies and time zones. Our offerings focus more on process and community. It's always nice to get publications and awards, but sometimes this focus overtakes the joy of creating. Being able to collaborate with Maw and Mary on building up our community has been so nourishing.
I admire this view of a holistic balance between life and art. Especially in terms of spiritual practices and community but leaving it open to manifest in non-traditional ways. Do you think those two things have been particularly important in your journey so far, in helping find your voice as an artist?
For me personally, the idea of spirituality has shifted quite a bit. I grew up in a rigorous Catholic environment, went to Catholic school for ten years, and found times of profound comfort and profound guilt. As I got older, I explored different modes of spirituality that involved mindfulness, sound and somatic exploration, and recently incorporated tarot and oracle decks in my writing.
I think it’s been helpful for me to be in community with folks who share the same enthusiasm for writing. I have friends I meet with regularly to do generative prompts together, and then we read our work and reflect back what resonates with them, what makes them curious, what lines were surprising. They've been able to point out recurring themes and images in my work over time, which has helped a ton whenever I think about writing a series of poems. I began to volunteer for virtual open mics during the pandemic and reading my work to an audience helped me develop confidence. It's always awesome when someone in the chat shares that they feel seen by my work, or that they were moved by it.
Despite the insanity of the current moment, or maybe because of it, what are you looking forward to in 2024?
These days, I try to ground myself in small, tangible rituals, and the one I’m gravitating toward right now is trying a new fruit or vegetable every week from the locally-owned grocery store near my apartment. This week I bought a lemon plum, cactus fruit (tuna), and in previous weeks I’ve tried nopales, starfruit, dragonfruit, Lion’s mane mushrooms, Minneola oranges. I’ve got my eye on soursop and guava for next week, if it’s still there! I like the surprise of seeing what’s there day-to-day. Since cooking is part of my creative life, I like the constraint of having to incorporate something new into a meal, versus going in with a preset list of items to buy for a specific recipe. These are the comforts that help me slow down and center myself to be ready to tackle (as best as possible) the difficult personal and collective issues that come up. I want to cultivate more joy in 2024.
