This week we interviewed Natalie Padilla Young (she/her/hers), our featured reader for our June 22nd Helicon West event at the Cache-ARTS Thatcher-Young Mansion at 7:00. Natalie is the author of All of This was Once Under Water.
Helicon West: Hello Natalie! Please tell us about your background.
Natalie Young: I live in southern Utah now, but grew up in Bountiful. I like to say I’m half Puerto Rican and half Brigham Young, because my mom is Puerto Rican and my dad’s great, great grandpa was Brigham. I got my BFA at Utah state, where I majored in art with a minor in English. Which is where I caught the poetry bug in my poetry writing classes with Brock Dethier and Star Coulbrooke. I actually met my husband Nano Taggart in Paul Crumbley’s poetry class, where we studied Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Rita Dove.
HW: What role does writing play in your life?
NY: Even though I didn’t really intend for my writing life to overlap with my professional life, I do write quite a bit of copy for the ad agency I work for. Being a poet is great practice for editing things down and distilling messaging, which is good for marketing. Now is marketing good for poetics? Not necessarily.
Poetry-wise, I wish I was someone who wrote every day, but I”m not. I’ve become much more of a writer who jots a line or thought down as they come and then later assemble and connect things. I’ve also been much slower in finishing poems. I like to let them sit at different stages for a bit—it helps me see them better. Typically, I’ll write a draft out by hand in one notebook with all kinds of scribbles and arrows and multiple word choices. Then I’ll write a clearer draft in a different notebook with larger paper, then it might be ready to be typed up, but it will still go through more revision and will definitely need some eyes that aren’t mine to look it over.
Truthfully, my writing often takes the back burner to Sugar House Review, because the magazine always has a schedule and deadlines, and my own writing usually doesn’t. After 14 years of running the magazine, I still haven’t found great balance.
HW: What role has publication played in your writing career?
NY: I just had my first book published—All of This Was Once Under Water. I worked on the poems and manuscript for over ten years. Do I think I could have finished it faster? Yes, but I also think it would have been a different book if I had, and I’m proud of what it is. It’s weird, but also a unique vision that I’m not sure anyone else could write. (For reference, it’s based in Utah with actual scenery and history mixed with speculative fiction. There’s a monster that lived in the Great Salt Lake for centuries, a space alien, and a human woman.)
A lot of the individual poems from the book were published in journals, but because I worked on the series for so long, I also had plenty of time to work on getting them published. And getting individual poems published is work—sending writing out and being rejected is a drag, right? But that’s the name of the game. Running a magazine helped me realize how subjective the process can be and a lot of readers and editors just have so much to read, there’s no way they can catch or publish all of the good ones.
HW: What inspires you to write?
NY: A lot of my writing ends up being therapeutic. I may not even realize it when I start a poem and then wham, there’s the thing I needed to meditate on or work through. I think because I work in advertising, I’m also sparked by weird things people say or weird products, especially when they’re combined with nature.
HW: What advice do you have for up-and-coming writers?
NY: Like you’ve probably heard before, get a writing group or at least a few people you trust who understand what you’re trying to do and can give good feedback for your particular writing. And read loads and loads of whatever kind of writing you want to create. It may sound prejudice, because I run a magazine, but I think anyone who wants to have their work published in a lit. mag. should be a reader for a lit. mag., at least for a little while. It will help your writing. You’ll see a huge chunk of what’s being written, both good and bad, and that will help you hone your own,.
Helicon West 