Kayleb Rae Candrilli is author of What Runs Over, forthcoming with YesYes Books and winner of the 2016 Pamet River Prize. They are published or forthcoming in BOAAT Press, Puerto del Sol, Booth, Vinyl, Muzzle, Cream City Review, and others. Candrilli is a Best of the Net winner and a Pushcart Prize nominated poet. They serve as an assistant poetry editor for BOAAT Press and they hold an MFA from the University of Alabama. Candrillinow lives in Philadelphia with their partner. You can read more of their work here or find them on Instagram @kayleb_rae. Why I Write: Kayleb Rae Candrilli
I’m a person that works hard daily to maintain stable and productive mental health, and learning to process complex emotions and their interplay has been critical to both my survival and the ways in which I’ve learned to thrive. When I approach any piece of writing, I try to collect the parts of myself or my experience that I find most unrelated and then find the language to link them. This act forces me to understand how inexorably everything is tied, and how, with discipline, I can make sense of it all. Simply put, I think I write as an act of self-care, to push toward clarity, toward maturity.
I also turn to writing because I want young readers to have a wealth of narratives to choose from. I was in my early twenties before I read anything that featured queerness. I had never read characters or narratives that felt applicable to me or my body. So, I suppose now I write the narratives I needed when I was younger, and hope they can do what I had yearned for, and maybe more.
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In order to preserve the artistic arrangement of the writing, this piece has been created with Print2Flash Flashpaper.