Prompt to Page, Episode 57: Lucy Oquaye
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Lucy Oquaye. Lucy is an educator and writer from Louisville, Kentucky.

She earned her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she received the Betsy Owen Combs Recruitment Scholarship and the MFA Award in Creative Nonfiction. She won Fourth Genre's multimedia essay contest in 2023, and her poetry won the 2024 Kentucky Monthly Penned Contest. A Foundation House resident and Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment grantee, her work appears in "Georgia Review," "Vast Chasm," "Deep Overstock," and "The [00:01:00] Big Windows Review."

She teaches English and creative writing at Bluegrass Community and Technical College and serves on the board of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Welcome, Lucy, and thanks so much for joining us. 

Lucy: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here today. 

Carrie: I know we've had past guests who have been members of the Kentucky Poetry Society, and I'm a member as well, but I'm not sure we've ever talked about it.

Would you like to tell our listeners a little bit about the organization? 

Lucy: Yes, I would love to. So the Kentucky State Poetry Society is a statewide membership organization. We have really affordable memberships. I think we just raised the rate from 35 to maybe $45 for the whole year, but it comes with monthly programming.

So we've had workshops with Kathleen Driskell, who is the state poet laureate. Last night, we had a great workshop with Deidra White, a [00:02:00] local poet. And then we have open mics and poetry readings also. So every month, you'll get an open mic and a poetry reading, as well as a craft workshop. Everything is virtual so that we can kind of reach people across the state.

And this year, we're celebrating our 60th anniversary. So if you are a member, you will get to attend our annual conference for free. 

Carrie: Oh, wow. 

Lucy: So the conference is also mostly virtual. We try to have an in-person maybe open mic or just kind of mixer, but since most of us are based in Lexington, we keep things virtual, so our people in Western Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky can join easily.

So if you're already a member, look out for that, but if not, joining as a member will get you access to that conference, and it's a really great way to stay connected with other poets in the state and work on your craft. [00:03:00] 

Carrie: Yeah. I think that the poetry conference in particular is such a great value.

Like, it's such a low cost for a writing conference. 

Lucy: Yeah. It's so nice, too. I love that it's virtual 'cause you can kind of attend a workshop, go throw in a load of laundry, come back, listen to poetry. I've listened to the Affrilachian poets read, and I was still in bed, like. [Laughter] 

Carrie: Right. Yeah, you can keep your camera turned off if you want to.

Lucy: Yes. 

Carrie: Okay. And I did wanna mention, you said there was a workshop recently with Deidra White, and she has been a guest on the podcast as well. So if you weren't able to make that workshop, you can get a workshop from Prompt to Page. 

I read a piece of yours, the one that won the Fourth Genre multimedia essay contest, and it's called "Remapping an [00:04:00] Unraveling," and it's a choose-your-own-adventure essay.

And I loved how that form, you know, recalls the Choose Your Own Adventure series that some of us may remember from our childhood, and it contrasts with that form because the subject is so, so adult and serious. I was just wondering if you could talk about your process of writing that essay and, you know, it's really kind of a hybrid essay, what your thought process [was], how you came to that form. 

Lucy: Absolutely. So that is a hermit crab essay. And just a quick definition of the hermit crab essay for people who don't know. Some people call it other things, but the idea is that you take a non-literary form or so maybe it's meeting notes or a to-do list, or in this case, you know, it was choose your own adventure, which is a [00:05:00] literary form, but not traditionally used for creative nonfiction, and you fit your essay within that form.

And I think similarly to using prompts, when you use some kind of constraint on your writing, you end up telling the story in a different way than maybe you would've told it if you just told it outright. So I have written multiple experimental hermit crab essays, and that one, I was inspired by Carmen Maria Machado.

She has a book called "In the Dream House," and it's a memoir about domestic abuse, and each chapter takes on a different kind of literary trope. And I saw her speak at AWP and was just fascinated by her process, and I had-- My subject matter had lended naturally [00:06:00] to choose your own adventure in my mind.

I grew up reading them, but then also what I was really grappling with when I was writing this essay is, it's about an abusive relationship I was in, and I was thinking about all the kind of opportunities I had to make a different choice, and leave that relationship earlier than I did, and I really wanted to analyze why I didn't.

So it was a very unwieldy process, because I essentially wrote the narrative straight. So I wrote what happened, and then I looked back at all of these forks in the road- 

Carrie: Mm-hmm ... 

Lucy: you know, that you can see in hindsight. And I thought about an alternate kind of ending. So there were moments that I could've made another choice, and I got to kind of imagine what that choice would've looked [00:07:00] like.

And then that was a challenge 'cause, you know, at what point is it no longer nonfiction?

Carrie: Right.

Lucy: So I went back and forth a lot with my mentor. My mentor is Eric Reece, and he writes creative nonfiction, and we talked about how to keep the truth of the essay, but use that form. So I ended up either kind of breaking the fourth wall and letting the reader know this isn't what really happened, or I would write something that was so kind of outlandish you could tell it wasn't the truth.

And then the form itself forces, so every time you choose a route I didn't take, the story ends, and you only get all the way to the end of the essay if you make those choices. And that was not... once I published it, I realized it had that effect [00:08:00] of kind of forcing the reader to make the same choices I made.

And I found that to be powerful because I know, I thought, "Oh, I would see people in those kinds of relationships before I was in one," and I'd think, "Well, I would've just left. That would never be me." And of course it's never you until it is you.

Carrie: Right

Lucy: ... so I thought the immersive form worked well because when you make probably the better choice, you know, to leave or not go home with a stranger from the bar or something like that, the story ends, and you have to kinda keep making these poor decisions to keep reading. 

Carrie: Yeah. And it also, I mean, it's a very active process for the reader because you're participating, you're making the choices. And one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading is, "Well, this might be what I would want this person to do, [00:09:00] but what's the more interesting choice?" 

You know? Or what is... 

Lucy: Yeah. 

Carrie: so it kind of brought up questions about why you read or, you know, I don't know. It,

Lucy: Yeah

Carrie: ... puts the reader in an interesting position as well. 

Lucy: And I, and I'm really thankful for Fourth Genre 'cause they host this multimedia essay contest. So if you, you know, do illustrated work or any kind of work that doesn't fit maybe as nicely into a book, they have a home for that. 

And I'd originally tried to write this like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books were, where you had to flip to page 75 to see what happened, and not only was the formatting a nightmare, readers were getting annoyed. It was too much work for them. 

So to find a place that could make it more interactive and, you know, if listeners go see it, [00:10:00] it's, you click through it kinda more like a video game. And it really expanded my ideas of what publishing can look like beyond just-

Carrie: Yeah ... 

Lucy: you know, a traditional book. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. And something that online formats can give us, allow you to do that a literary, a print literary magazine couldn't either.

Lucy: Yeah. 

Carrie: So you kind of, you know, that was sort of a prompt for you. Do you use prompts elsewhere in your writing? How has your relationship with prompts developed or changed over time? 

Lucy: Absolutely. So I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I always kept a diary. I think I have diaries going back to 2005 in my house right now.

And it was just kind of compulsive, and I didn't really understand that I was writing to understand my [00:11:00] thoughts, until I heard, it was Joan Didion say, "I don't understand what I think until I write it down." 

And I was always just writing about my life and what I was experiencing, and then after, about 10 years after I graduated from college, I was pregnant and moving back to Kentucky, and I applied for a MFA program because, you know, my life had kind of blown up.

And I thought, "Why not?" And I got in, and I had never been published. I had never tried to publish. I was writing very authentically and writing for me. And my relationship to writing really changed within that program. I felt more pressure to kind of publish, publish in prestigious magazines, get grants, get residencies, and, you know, I had new measures for success, and all of those [00:12:00] measures were external.

And I graduated in 2023, and I've been kind of trying to unlearn that and get back to my practice without the rigor of a MFA program.  

And that's where the prompts come in, because I've been trying to think of myself as more a devotee to a creative practice and a devotee to writing, and not measuring my success so much by, like, capitalist measures.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Lucy: And so I say that to say when I hear a prompt that sounds interesting, I will always, will always try them because I'm, I'm not- I'm trying to think less of like, "Oh, what will get published?" And more just writing for myself again. So I listen to your podcast. 

I follow a lot of accounts on social media and subscribe to various newsletters and just get- if [00:13:00] I see a prompt that looks like it would be fun to try, I try it. And then, as a teacher, I use prompts even more. 

So I teach English and creative writing at a community college, so my students are from very, very, very different backgrounds, and we'll- we do a lot of low stakes writing in my class.

So a lot of in-class writing, and I'll pull prompts from these various sources to use with them often too. 

Carrie: Yeah. And how do they respond to those prompts? Does it vary or, I don't know, I guess I'm not really sure what I'm trying to ask. I guess the fact that you use them so much, must influence their reception of them.

Sometimes I have felt in the past, like prompts, especially in a classroom setting, are too restrictive. So I guess I wonder how, [00:14:00] how you address that, especially as someone who is pushing back against some of the external pressures that you might feel from writing. 

Lucy: Yeah. I think I always give students the option to not use the prompt or write about whatever they want. 

And, but a lot of times I think it helps people get started, you know? There's nothing more intimidating than a blank page, and I've been moving more and more to pen and paper writing in my classroom. And I started doing that just to combat against AI- AI use.

And what I've found, I think what's most beneficial about using prompts is really that you're just taking time to write. So what I've seen is most transformative for the students isn't so much the prompts, it's sitting [00:15:00] down. You know, they, they can't have their phones out, they can't have their computers out, they're writing in a notebook for 20 minutes, and, that might be something they've never done before.

I know-

Carrie: Wow

Lucy: ...we did it in high school- ... and in college, but they might have, that might be completely new. And I thought they would hate me when I first started doing that, but I actually had students, multiple students come up to me after and say, "Oh, I wish all my classes were like this. It feels so good to just write freely.

I feel like I'm coming up with such better ideas. I'm not distracted." And so trying to, like, create that environment so that they can then go replicate it in their own practice.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lucy: 'Cause I think if, no matter what the prompt is, if you're just taking 20 minutes to try something, and the first five minutes the writing might feel really bad.

The first-- Sometimes I don't feel good until I'm, like, minute 18 and I only have 20 minutes. 

But something will come from it, and [00:16:00] even if it's just one line that you can pull and then go from elsewhere, I think that that kind of focus is really beneficial to anyone's writing practice. 

Carrie: Yeah. Absolutely. And it is heartening to hear that your students appreciate that time away from devices and AI, and I think, you know, the boos that graduation speakers are getting right now show that young people are concerned about it too. 

Lucy: Yes. And I get that a lot. I think that's a misconception with this generation, because my students are actually very concerned about, like, cognitive offloading.

They're concerned about having AI think for them. So any chance they get to kind of be creative and not worry about the grade, which, you know, for us is like publishing, it's those external measures. 

And [00:17:00] they're, they're just being experimental. It, it's something I hope that they can apply long after they leave the classroom.

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree that sometimes it's really difficult to find a balance between writing for yourself and writing for external validation. What made you want to kind of step back from that and find your own personal writing practice again? 

Lucy: Honestly, I think that's where I get my most quality writing.

I think when I was writing authentically and I wasn't, you know, reading my own work through the eyes of someone else as I was working on it. I got more kind of interesting ideas. And then I also had been going through- [00:18:00] So you read the essay "Remapping an Unraveling." I worked on that in my MFA, and I have a collection of essays about that same relationship that I was really trying to make a book.

And I had a lot of people invest in me to help make that a book, but I had gotten to a point of it that I realized I was only trying to make it a book to have a book. I didn't wanna grapple with that subject material anymore. I didn't really even have other things to say, but I felt like, "Oh, you know, I've gotten grant money towards this book," and, "Oh, I have 120 pages.

I need to write. I put so much into it." So putting that to rest helped. And I changed my mindset away from, "Oh, I wanna publish a book," and more to why I got interested in creative nonfiction in the first place, which is because my interests change. And if I find something interesting, I wanna research it, I wanna learn about it, I wanna, make [00:19:00] interesting and surprising comparisons.

So moving away from the pressures of writing a book and more into like, "Well, I wanna write an essay about this, and now I can be obsessed about this for three months." [Laughter] And then, when I'm done with that, I can... It made, I think, the writing, you know, if you're, if you're just forcing it through and you don't really have anything to say, but you're trying to make, "Oh, I need to write this many pages.

I need to get this many words"- it was just falling flat. It didn't have the energy and, you know, the heart that I felt like my other writing did. 

Carrie: Sure. Yeah. And yeah, that's something that I love about poetry, too, is that you can get obsessed about a topic for one poem and then move on to the next topic that strikes your fancy.

So yeah, I think the shorter forms definitely allow for that more than longer work. [00:20:00] So what writing prompt would you like to talk about today? 

Lucy: This prompt is really simple, but I find it effective. So I mentioned Eric Reece is a mentor of mine, and I took creative nonfiction as an undergrad with him back in, like, 2011, and he uses this in his classes, and I've adopted it and used it in mine.

And, you know, brainstorming in creative nonfiction is a little different than fiction. I haven't written fiction in a long time, but, you know, you're taking your own life and using pieces of it to tell a story. You can't just, like, make things up or change things. But you don't just wanna, like, submit your diary either.

You still need the elements of fiction, you know, characters, setting, scene, dialogue, maybe some elements of poetry with a language metaphor. And using this simple prompt or exercise helped me get those elements. So again, it's so, so simple, but all [00:21:00] you do-

Carrie: Okay

Lucy: ... is if you have an idea for an essay, you'll set a timer.

I recommend, like, at least 20 minutes, and you just write "I remember" statements over and over and over again, the whole 20 minutes. So I'm gonna talk through what that might look like. 

Carrie: Okay. 

Lucy: So I'm wanting to work on an essay about my grandmother I've been thinking about and I knew I wanted to enter that essay by talking about her vanity, because I used to love to sit and look at it, and we didn't have a close relationship while she was-- or an honest relationship, I'd say, while she was alive.

But when she passed, I inherited her tarot cards, and I got a little curious about her spirituality on my own spiritual journey. 

So in hindsight, I realized her vanity was more like an altar. And so if I wanted to use this prompt for that, you know, I would set my timer for 20 minutes [00:22:00] and again, would just start, "I remember" every detail I could think of.

So it might be something like, "I remember the black and white wallet photograph of your husband. I remember the lavender amethyst. I remember the eggs you'd cook in the morning, the bright yolks that would burst onto the plate." So it's just free association, but using that repetitive "I remember" term. 

And you just, what really helps is going, you know, even if you think you've thought of everything, you go until your timer's done, and you call up all the tangible and intangible feelings and memories associated with this event, this place, this person, wherever you're starting. 

I think that helps you get a lot of sensory details. And, you know, you can, that setting and environment, they do a lot of work in creative nonfiction. My grandmother's bedroom looked really different from mine, but they would tell [00:23:00] you a lot about us both as women and mothers, people.

So by using this exercise, I can then start the essay and instead of telling people that my grandmother was this free spirit and the way I felt at her house, I can go back and pick out those sort of sensory details to create the environment that gives that.

Carrie: Right.

Lucy: And I just find that it really gives you a good place to start once you have an idea of what you wanna write about. 

Carrie: Yeah. Thank you for walking us through a specific example like that. I feel like that is helpful for people who might not really know what the, what the aim is of a particular prompt. But just the examples that you were reading, those sounded very sensory, and I think you could probably use that for a poem as well, or fiction, you know, maybe if you wanted to focus on what a character remembered or something like [00:24:00] that.

Lucy: Yeah. I love that idea. 

Carrie: Do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? 

Lucy: Yeah. So my biggest advice is that when you write, you know, to really write, especially your early drafts, like no one will read them. I think, I feel like a book is wasting my time if I sense that the author is holding back or hiding.

You know, there's so many things out there to read. 

And even beyond that, shows to watch, movies. You know, I don't really wanna spend time with something that doesn't feel authentic. But I think in particular when you're writing nonfiction, there's real implications on your life and your relationships, what you choose to publish.

And those things can get in your head when you're writing. So I think you, you need to write, like, not only not thinking about the audience, the people you [00:25:00] don't know, but thinking about the people in your own life too. So I'm not saying you should go and, like, carelessly air out your family's dirty laundry, but I think, you know, there may be people that are in your life who you care about deeply that acted poorly towards you, and then that becomes a part of your story.

And you don't wanna shy away from those parts to protect those relationships in the drafting phase. And you also don't wanna shy away from anything about yourself. You want to be honest about your own shortcomings. I never like reading something that, you know, the narrator's done nothing wrong and everyone else-

Carrie: Right

Lucy: is the problem either. I think when we're reading, we're looking for something that either echoes our own life or experiences, or even if it doesn't, it feels authentically human. And all of us are gonna be flawed, we're all gonna make mistakes, we're all gonna hurt people. So I say, [00:26:00] you know, write your draft like no one will read it.

Write the truest version you can. And then when you're getting closer to publication, that's when you can start thinking about those relationships. And you'll want to look at those parts of your story and think, "Is this necessary?" So do I need to talk about, you know, maybe my-- This is just an example, like if your, a parent's mental health issues, you know, do-- Is this necessary to tell my story?

If that answer is yes, then ask yourself, "Did I tell it as generously and kindly as I could?" And then the third step, some people will even show that work to that person before they publish it. I will admit that I've never had the guts to do that, but I think it's an admirable practice.

And so yeah. Yeah, my advice is, is really when you're first writing it, don't worry about those kinds of things. You can think about it later. And then [00:27:00] know, you know, I think as long as you're writing about people with the best intentions and, you know, if they don't look the best in your essay, is that necessary to tell your story?

You know, just making sure you're not trying to take someone down or write something mean just because. 

Carrie: Right. 

Lucy: But you really just, I think the more honest and vulnerable you can be, you can always scale it back and, and choose to keep some things for yourself as you get closer to sharing it with the world.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great framework, I think, for all writers to keep in mind. Do you have any writers or books of creative nonfiction that you think does that balance well?

Lucy: Yes. I would run to recommend "This Is Your Mother" by Erika J. Simpson. Erika J. Simpson graduated from UK's MFA program, and her memoir [00:28:00] is about her mother who passed away, and I will never-- There's one line in it that she's calling her, and she's talking about, you know, she feels the pain of someone hurting, but also it was hurting her.

And I think she just writes about a complicated relationship with her mother, as well as a difficult reality that they were living in, with so much grace, so much kindness. It's so honest. Crystal Wilkinson had given a blurb for it saying it gets right to the white-hot center. 

And I agree. That is one I'd absolutely recommend getting to, to see that balance. 

Carrie: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Lucy. We really appreciate it. 

Lucy: Yes, thank you for your time.

Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit [00:29:00] jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all-instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington-based university professors.

Find out more about Archipelago: Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website