Word Witch Correspondence

Jackie Braje, Poet, NYC

The Word Witch Correspondence series is a pair of letters between myself and a Word Witch friend. These letters are meant to muse over the creative process, discuss what it means to build a writing life, and weave interview and ritual into the text. The word correspondence comes from Medieval Latin, meaning to harmonize or reciprocate. This harmonization and act of reciprocity shows that we never write alone. We’re a part of a vast web of Word Witches who love the magic of writing.

Readers, for context: Jackie Braje and I first met over tequila sodas at House of Yes in Brooklyn while acting in The Poetry Brothel's NYC Cast. Jackie is now the Chief Operating Officer of The Poetry Society of New York, a professor, a Word Witch, and a poet whom I immensely love and respect. Beyond that, Jackie is a chosen family member of mine, a best friend, and a sister. She was in my wedding last year, and I'll be in hers in the next. We were single girls in NYC and have stepped across many thresholds together. We are both born under the star sign Aquarius and blessed with the same Cancer Mars and Pisces Venus placements. We speak a similar language. We are constellation-tied! I'm so grateful that she was willing to correspond with me like this and share her insights with all of us.

Jackie Braje (Professional, Poet Person Bio): Jackie Braje is a Brooklyn-based poet, a friend of poets, educator, and arts administrator. She serves as the Chief Operating Officer of the Poetry Society of New York, a 501(c)-3 non-profit that produces a number of initiatives to make poetry culturally relevant, fun, and inclusive. She also serves as the Managing Director of the New York City Poetry Festival, a free, annual event on Governors Island that attracts upwards of 14,000 poets & poetry lovers each year. With Stephanie Berger, she co-founded Milk Press—the publishing arm of PSNY— and serves as the Editorial Director.

Her work has been published or featured by The Adirondack Center for Writing, VOLT, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn Poets, Free People, the Minnesota Review, the Oakland Review, the Westchester Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Statorec, the Quarterless Review, the Nottingham Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.She was the Allerton Park Fall ‘22 Artist-in-Residence, a 2022 artist-in-residence with the 4heads initiative on Governors Island, and the recipient of a 2022 Himan Brown Award and a Truman Capote Fellowship. She teaches workshops at Poets House, and she received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, where she also teaches as an adjunct poetry & creative writing professor. She has presented and performed for organizations like The Met Opera, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Film Forum, and more.

Dear Jackie,

I haven't written a letter in a long time. In the world of social media, my communication style has shifted to quick messages, fleeting voice notes, the many e-mails (that manage to find me!), or those sacred moments face-to-face (over wine on your stoop in the case of you and me). I am so grateful you're willing to correspond with me like this about word witchery and everything! Something so sacred to my heart. And I know yours as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing how you take and run with the thoughts I offer at the altar of this letter below!

What does Word Witchery mean to you? What it means to be a Word Witch and how you Word Witch in your life. I am thinking specifically about your connection to the dream space in your writing and how you might access or work with these liminal spaces in your work. How is a poem like a dream? How is it different? The liminal is genuinely the earth and land of the word witch. If you made a map of your creativity, what would be the landmarks?

I am also thinking about the threads of creativity and Word Witchery that tie us together as I write this—things we love. What came to mind were Kate Bush, Dolly Parton, photo booths, Elvis, cooking meals, typewriters, hand-drawn and hand-written things, film, dogs, making things with others, and dancing.

I'm so curious: how do these things feed your creativity? When I look at this list of things that I know we both love, I feel a hand-made quality to their texture. I imagine your poetry where you speak about Paris, Texas, and Elvis, and making sweet potato casserole from Dolly Parton's recipes (by way of your relationship to your grandmother) in your words. There is a deep nostalgia here. One that is true.

I googled the etymology of nostalgia, which is from Greek algos, "pain, grief, distress," and nostos, "homecoming," from neomai "to reach some place, escape, return, get home. How does your writing help you return home? Is this home a literal home? An imagined home? One you're actively creating? I find it fascinating that writing is a way to travel in time and to look both forward and backward. In my own work, I am never telling the full truth, but I'm also constantly telling on myself, revealing truths through every word I choose and string together.

I know you and the luminous Stephanie Berger taught a writing workshop about writing rituals over the summer at Poetry Camp for PSNY, so I'd love to know how to create and craft these rituals in your life. When you read the word ritual, what is the first thing that comes to mind? I think of the rituals of CA Conrad (who feeds the crows at their windowsill, creating an altar of crow offerings), who we both know, and how they've created poems from ritual spaces. Bhanu Kapil's work also comes to mind (I know she is the author of your favorite book!). When she came to visit Sarah Lawrence when I was studying there, she spoke about how she finished her book, threw it out her window in fall, where she left it all winter, and in the spring, she went and found the text and brought it inside, excavating lines still legible after a long winter and that's how she wrote Schizophrene. Who do you look to for ritual inspiration in your writing? How does ritual change your poetry?

I have the wonderful pleasure of knowing your partner and future husband, Nate, and I know that the act of writing is something that you two do together. In this way, how is writing and editing about love for you (if it is!, of course!)?

As a professor, what is one piece of advice about teaching you have? And on the other side of the coin, what is one piece of advice you have about being a student? Is there a poem or a quote you keep in your pocket? What is a question you're currently grappling with in your creative practice?

I love you, Jackie! Thanks for writing with me.

More soon,

Kate

Dear Kate,

What a joy to be constellation-tied in a new medium! I love writing and receiving letters—I even keep a letter box on my bedside table with mine and my partner’s initials engraved on it. I love that letter writing can unlock a distinct, more honest voice in me any time I set out to write one. It’s like how certain shaped wine glasses enhance aromas and flavors for certain wines. That sounded less silly before I wrote it down, but now I’ve committed to it.

In regards to Word Witchery, I do think the very act of writing is something magical. I often think of the Black Mountain School and theories that it’s catalyzed, like the idea of a poem having an “organic form” or “invisible architecture”; that the poem already exists in its truest form, innately, and the role of the poet is to build toward it on paper. I feel mostly agnostic when it comes to theory, especially these theories, but I do think there’s something alchemical about translating the depths of your experience into poetry. And I feel the same way about dreams! How can it be that the deepest, most unfiltered parts of our psyches are a complete mystery to us? Dreams and poems are the same. Both are constantly breathing and changing shape off the page or in our waking lives, and presenting themselves to us when we sit down to write, to dream. Both feel transient and difficult to explain—at least for me. If you were to ask me what any of my poems were about, I would simply have to guess.

And yes, you’re definitely right about nostalgia sewing a lot of my writing together. I get so obsessed with my own memory, or memories that don’t even belong to me. Again, I think there’s something sort of magical about how stories can live inside of us forever; it’s time in a bottle, like your favorite Jim Croce song. I do also love engaging with music, film and archaic artifacts in my writing. I just think all these things are intrinsically bound to poetry in so many ways, but I also feel that way about everything. Writing my manuscript about Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS has taught me firsthand that relating to another narrative can shine new (in this case neon) light on my own. I know this idea isn’t new, but it’s the first time I’ve experienced it so closely.

Is the poem a home… that’s a great question. If it is, it’s one that I grossly neglect on and off, and it could probably use a good paint job. I definitely feel a strong sense of return any time I write in that I’m reminded of my voice, my ideas, my power; I think we all forget those things sometimes. I’m also thinking of Joan Didion’s famous line, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” It’s like meditating—after sitting with yourself in silence for a few minutes, all sorts of debris you forgot about floats waywardly up to the surface. It’s interesting what you said about never telling the truth in your writing, because your poems always feel like confessions to me. Maybe even the fabrications we write are telling on something that’s true for you. Going back to our dream talk, I find what’s most important in dreams is often not the content, but what stuck with you, how you tell it, and how it made you feel.

Honestly, I wish I had a writing ritual as committed and creative as CA’s or Kapil’s. Usually I just pour myself a couple inches of white wine (okay I promise I’m not a lush), light a candle, and play one of my many writing playlists. So I guess my ritual is creating space and consuming something that takes me out of the mundanity of my day; doing small acts that break with my non-writing life.

Music, also, is a powerful force in my writing practice, like I mentioned earlier. I think I need the emotional landscape it paints for me. And I love your question about writing and love. In the early days of falling in love with Nate we would send long emails back in forth with our writing, songs we were listening to, films we were thinking about. We’ve also written a great deal of things collaboratively, and our goal one day is to write a book together that intersects poetry and investigative reporting. He’s the first person to read any little thing I write. So writing, in short, is intricately wrapped up in love for me. Editing too, I guess? That’s more of a love-hate relationship, but I guess attention is always a form of love.

The best piece of writing advice I’ve been given is the same advice I give to my students: locate your biggest impulse and push against it. If you have a proclivity for over lyricism, then try to ground yourself in more imagery and descriptive details. If you’re a short-winded writer, try to make your lines just a tad longer. I don’t know. Maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t, but I went into grad school with a giant impulse toward abstraction, and this definitely inspired me to want to make more sense in my poetry. The main question I’m grappling with in my writing is why I don’t do more of it. Dear readers, I’m open to answers.

Yours always,

Jackie

Learn more about Jackie’s work on her website here.