Welcome to “Contributors’ Corner,” where each week we open the floor to one of our contributors to the journal. This week, we hear from Ryder Collins, whose chapbook The way the sky was now appears in 3.1.
Ryder Collins has a novel, Homegirl! Her chapbook, The way the sky was now, recently won Heavy Feather Review’s first fiction chapbook contest. She has a chapbook of poetry entitled, Orpheus on toast, and another on the way called, i am hopscotch without hop.
Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
Being suddenly banished to a small town in the Alabamas where the only real and true expression I could find for myself was writing … that & pretending I was the mama of a large brood of urchins who ran through my neighbors’ swamps as I rocked myself to sleep under the spell of the sun & the moonshines.
What are you reading?
Anything mama can get her goddamned hands on. I just finished The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia … I will always be a fan of anything meta & anything that lives in that liminal space between “reality” & art cos all our lives are narratives & we are all just fueled & policed by narratives.
Can you tell us what prompted The way the sky was now?
The thought of balaclaved babies smashing shit up makes mama laugh.
What’s next? What are you working on?
I just finished a very different series of prose poems (compared to The way the sky was now, that is) heavily influenced by radishes and Rapunzel called They don’t know my beast. I’m currently being torn apart by two novels. I give one a quick fuck & then I run to the other one & tenderly caress it long into the night, & then come daylight I go back to the first one & whisper sweet sweet words until it takes me back. Mama always wanted to be a baller …
Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
Christopher Cross is mama’s spirit animal.
Read The way the sky was now in HFR 3.1 here.
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