BL interviews #BLauthor9 Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

"prophet rejected," by addison

If you haven't checked out two new prose poems by Sarah Hulyk Maxwell yet, do that because in the upcoming interview, Sarah talks about the characters in those pieces, and shares how she disciplines herself to write regularly.

BL: Tell our readers a little more about the characters of Gingerine and DagoBerto from your prose poems. How many pieces have you written about them? What draws you to fleshing out characters in short prose/verse like that?

SHM: Gingerine and DagoBerto are both guilty pleasure characters. I say this mostly because I have so much fun writing about them and their always-imaginary, never-for-real love story. They are actually two parts of a triangle, a character named Anderson making up the third part, but he doesn't appear here. Roughly 20 poems make up their little saga as of right now, and while the manuscript they are contained in may gain muscle mass, I'm not sure Gingerine and DagoBerto will take part in more than these 20 or so pages. These poems are heavily influenced by Sabrina Orah Mark's Tsim Tsum and Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, so their prose form is no surprise to me. For me, Gingerine gushes in containment. She is mostly emotion and memory, and living in her head. The block-like, prose form felt appropriate for those moments, tiny windows of text, where she is trying to tell you so much in so small a space that there is simply no time to break or breathe.