Lyric Essentials: Jessica Nirvana Ram Reads Aja Monet

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Jessica Nirvana Ram joins us to discuss the work of Aja Monet, falling in love with writing at a young age, and the process of editing a manuscript. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.

Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Aja Monet’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?

Jessica Nirvana Ram: When I started college in 2014 I joined the SU Slam Poetry club where we read and listened to poetry, wrote, and performed. Being a part of this club led me to attending the Dodge Poetry Festival that year where I actually met Aja Monet alongside a few other poets. Her work really stood out to me so I started following it. When her collection My Mother was a Freedom Fighter released in 2017 I got it immediately and read it after I graduated college in 2018. It was so grounded in matrilineal lineage, I didn’t even realize how much it connected to my own writing until a few years later. Her work is all about inheritance and connection, I was in awe at how she could speak simply yet poetically about relationships.

Jessica Nirvana Ram reads “If you ever find yourself on the J trains” by aja monet

RW: What is your earliest memory of creative writing?

JNR: I’ve always been told I was a good writer, my third grade teacher kept my writing portfolio at the end of the year to use as an example for future classes and that was my crowning achievement for years. But the first solid memory I have of writing a story was this goofy little piece called “Angel in my Closet” that I wrote shortly after we moved from New York to Pennsylvania. I think I was processing the emotions of leaving everything I knew and channeled it into this story about waking up one day to a literal angel in the narrator’s closet. The narrator of course was a poorly veiled self-insert but it goes on to be about getting harassed in the street and the angel protecting the narrator. I remember showing it to my mom and being really proud of it and she asked why there was violence involved, and then I never touched it again. I wrote other things but I think of that little story often. I referenced it in a recent poem actually! Fiction was my first love, I wasn’t very good at it, but boy did I love it.

Jessica Nirvana Ram reads “The ghosts of women once girls” by aja monet

RW: What is your editing process like?

JNR: It varies. When I’m in a groove with writing I do all my editing during the initial drafting of the poem. I’ll write the first draft and then immediately move into the second and third draft. My professor, Anna Lena Bell Philips, introduced me to the process of keeping all your poem drafts in one document so you could scroll up and see previous versions without having to open multiple documents. It’s become a practice I share with all my students. Usually then, I draft rather quickly and come to the final version of poems within one to three hours typically. But again, this is when I’m in a good writing groove. During slower periods when my focus is less honed in, I’ll start bits of poems and leave them half finished. These poems tend to need time to sit before I figure out what they want from me and it’ll take weeks or even months to really complete them. I find that I need to experience certain things or read particular writers before I can arrive at the ending needed for certain poems. After grad school I worked up a practice where I don’t really need other people’s feedback to figure out what needs to be worked on for my poems, but I do have a friend who sees all my first drafts. Mostly as a hype-woman to say, yes my instinct is correct. I don’t usually get line level edits until I’m at the late stages of a bigger project.

RW: Your debut poetry collection, Earthly Gods, was published recently with Variant Lit. These poems balance grief, love, lineage, and religion, among other things—what was the process of writing this? How was editing it, publishing it? Anything you found surprising or difficult?

JNR: I wrote the entirety of Earthly Gods while getting my MFA at University of North Carolina Wilmington. When I first got there I thought the project would be more of a history of my family but the more I began to write the more the project unfolded as my personal mythology, my journey with faith and family and love. Writing this during the height of the pandemic and through a major breakup really shaped the themes and narratives of the collection. Once I made it to the heart of the poems the final pieces came together rather quickly, by midway through my third year of the program I had a completed manuscript and so the thesis I defended is not all that different from the completed collection that is on the shelves today. There wasn’t a major editing process with my press, I made one change to the ending of a poem and then I pretty much left it alone. I think the most difficult part of the process was ordering the collection. At first I didn’t have sections until my thesis director, Melissa Crowe, told me to try it in sections. I needed some kind of guiding principle which is why I decided to have epigraphs not for the entire collection but for each section, sort of as an entryway into the emotionality of the section. Once I came up with the quotes, the sections fell into place. I feel like all things considered this collection came together really organically, like it was something I’ve been working toward for a long time. It was like one of those things where everything you’ve ever worked hard on, all the studying and reading, all the lived experiences, all culminate into this moment in life where you have the right skills and the right mindset and it feels so easy that sometimes I have to remind myself it wasn’t easy to write, it was the end result of years of being a poet and being a person and living and loving and what a gift it is to be able to package a period of your life into something as beautiful as a poetry collection?

aja monet is a contemporary poet, writer, lyricist, musician, and activist based in Los Angeles, California from Brooklyn, New York. She has been awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry and the Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, as well as the New York City YWCA’s “One to Watch Award.” You can learn more and read monet’s work at ajamonet.com.

Purchase My Mother was a Freedom Fighter by aja monet

Jessica Nirvana Ram is is an Indo-Guyanese poet. She is the author of the poetry collection Earthly Gods (Variant Literature, 2024) and the chapbook in the aftermath (Prismatica Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. Jessica was a 2022-23 Stadler Fellow, she currently works as the Publicity and Outreach Manager for the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. She is the Director of Sticky Fingers at Honey Literary, a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine and Okay Donkey Magazine, a poetry editor for Variant Literature, and an Associate Editor for West Branch. Find her on Twitter @jessnirvanapoet.

Purchase Earthly Gods by Jessica Nirvana Ram

Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The Alternative, Porkbelly Press, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com or follow her on Twitter @wannderfullll