Interview with BeeLyn Naihiwet, Author of Plenty.
BeeLyn Naihiwet is a Seattle-based Ethiopian-American poet who immigrated to the United States when she was ten. A mental health therapist by day, poet by night, she discovered poetry was her second language when she read Rumi in a Medieval Literature class.
Most recently, she has studied poetry at the Hugo House in Seattle, as well as with Denver’s Lighthouse Writers instructor, Joy Roulier Sawyer. BeeLyn’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Kweli Journal, The Halcyone, and Ginosko Journal.
BeeLyn Naihiwet’s full-length poetry book, Plenty., is out from FinishingLine Press. She sat down to answer questions about the personal and the universal, the power and destruction of love, and the intersections of identity and gender.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on your collection, Plenty.! What inspired these poems?
BeeLyn Naihiwet: It was a combination of my work as a therapist facilitating the journey of agency and authentic living for clients and my father's sudden return to the United States with three young daughters (8, 6, and 4 years old) twelve years after he'd moved back to Tigray, Ethiopia. I unexpectedly found myself helping take care of my little sisters as their mother was still in Ethiopia.
This experience of co-parenting with my father brought up many feelings for me about my own upbringing and my relationship with my father. I realized that I couldn't ask my clients to get in touch with their innermost feelings and ask themselves difficult yet important questions while I continued to push my own aside.
These poems were borne of the necessity to reconcile my feelings, thoughts, and values with the details of my life.
Scott: What were some pleasures and challenges you experienced when creating work that explores the personal and the universal, the power and destruction of love?
Naihiwet: Thank you for that description of my work. One of the biggest pleasures for me is coming up with the titles of the poems. About half the time, the title comes to me before the poem. When the poem comes first, I enjoy sitting with it until the title makes itself known to me, and I find that the poem usually has more to say in the title.
Another source of pleasure is the revision process. There is great relief once I get a poem out of my head and heart and onto the page, which I find makes revising less emotionally potent. I get to focus on editing and refining without the burden of trying to identify a feeling or thought, which is one of the challenges for me.
Another is that in the process of writing a poem, I'd at one point or another arrive at a revelation that pains me. I have an idea when I start a poem, and where it'll take me is often unknown and, sometimes, devastating.
Scott: Why was exploring those dualities important to you?
Naihiwet: I think I've always been aware of dualities and how complicated they make life and relationships. As a kid, I felt conflicted when I observed them in those around me because it didn't allow for any one right answer, which made the world feel scary. When I came to recognize dualities in myself, I experienced them as threatening until I learned to tolerate them. In doing so, I began to sense that this was the work of being human and it made me endlessly curious, so I knew that this exploration had to be part of my writing process.
Scott: Some of these poems explore the intersections of identity and gender. What was navigating that space through your work like?
Naihiwet: In a word, it was heartbreaking. My family is Tigrayan, from Ethiopia and there is much gender specificity and significance in our culture. In writing this collection, I got in touch with a lot of messaging about how my being a girl meant my choices were few(er) and that I was inherently at the mercy of public opinion.
I realized how easy it is to internalize powerlessness when there aren't many examples of empowered women. It made me curious about the inner worlds of the women in my life, especially my mother. I was thrilled when I noticed small and subtle ways that they created space for themselves amidst immense barriers. I also saw that there were great social consequences for those who dared to live out loud, which both inspired and depressed me.
Scott: How did you decide to order the poems in this collection?
Naihiwet: I mostly felt my way to it. I initially sorted them by theme, such as “searching” (for meaning, voice, a way, etc), “falling” (in loss, in love, into trouble), and “finding” (words, God, myself). I read them over and over and came to identify something of a pairing among many of them, which helped with ordering. I was intentional about interspersing short poems in between the longer ones to give the reader some breathing room.
Another thing was that once I decided which poems would be in the final manuscript, I knew right away what the first and last poems should be. I thought of those two poems as the entry and conclusion of my story up to that point.
Scott: Why is vulnerability important in writing poetry?
Naihiwet: I think of poetry as the process of revealing more of ourselves and the world to us. Vulnerability is necessary to that process because only when we make ourselves emotionally open and available can we receive the truths that writing poetry makes possible. In a way, writing poetry is like inviting ghosts.
Scott: How does your work as a mental health therapist inform your work?
Naihiwet: As a therapist, I'm able to challenge myself to dig deeper when I write a poem that doesn't seem to be saying something real, even though it may sound good. My clinical training informs my curiosity about what more there may be to explore about a topic or a feeling. However, every once in a while, this training can get ahead of a poem and decide what it is trying to say, which can thwart other possibilities, so I find it's also helpful to suspend “knowing.”
Scott: How do you like readers to connect with you?
Naihiwet: On Instagram @naihiwet and via my website naihiwet.com
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Naihiwet: I'm working on a collection of micro-essays, 300 words or less, after taking a class on the genre with author Darien Hsu Gee. I haven't decided if I'd like to publish it, but I'm enjoying experimenting with the form.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Naihiwet: I always return to words from my poetry mentor, Joy Roulier Sawyer: “To be concise, to whittle away a line to its bare bones, is an art. To neither overwrite or explain.”
From FinishingLine Press:
Plenty by BeeLyn Naihiwet
These poems oscillate beautifully between observing the vast and the small. They often live in the metaphorical world of the eye and its power to capture, to name, to make real, and to erase. As Plenty reveals the uncertain power of sight and of the word, this collection reminds us of the enduring echo of a past that shifts under our gaze. This vibrant and multilayered collection meditates on the ache of love and its fluid capacity to nourish and destroy, like water. In one moment, we see the mirage of the one person’s salvation in another’s face. In the next moment, we see that same person gathered together, whole, through the power of her own recognition. These poems compel us to see ourselves and see each other anew.
–Natalie J. Graham, author of Begin with a Failed Body
In this fine first collection, BeeLyn Naihiwet offers us tender, unflinching poems that immerse us in experiences both personal and universal. Through her clear-eyed and compassionate observations on love and family, the poet provides us a map through the often-treacherous geography of the heart. The narrator of Plenty is one who fights courageously for relationship; accepts disappointment with fierce grace. In these exquisite poems, Naihiwet reveals she is more than enough as both a woman and poet: she is plenty.
–Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels
BeeLyn Naihiwet’s Plenty is full of gifts. It tells stories that take readers into an intimate moment or through a life’s journey rendered on a page. It is also peppered with short poems as quick as a koan that flash with brilliance, bright as well-cut gems. I appreciate Naihiwet’s voice—candid, clear and straightforward, yet full of range—humor, flirtation, anger, and longing. At the same time, a current of sound and craft ripples pleasantly underneath these poems, never distracting from the stories she tells, but adding an extra depth of pleasure. I came to look forward to the characters of her family who reappear, whether at a diner or from the dead, who help tell the larger story of a woman finding her place in “the northwestern corner / of a stable and racist Western Society,” a place within a family, with an intimate other, and in congruence with her self.
–Jayne Relaford Brown, author of My First Real Tree (FootHills) and “Finding Her Here”; 2019-2021 Poet Laureate of Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Get your copy from FinishingLine Press.
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