Interview by Jessica Colleen McDermott
Line Rider: Tell us more about your background and how you first started writing poetry.
James Diaz: Well, I come to poetry very much from the outside, I never went to college for it but have been reading and writing it since I was 13. The first moment it dawned on me that it might be something that could save me, and that I could do, was after reading the poetry of some death row inmates in, I believe, a Rolling Stone Magazine in the early 90’s. These men had turned to poetry to cope with their impossible and harsh circumstances. My life felt pretty impossible then, and I thought if it helped them to write through it, maybe it could also help me.
LR: In your poem “For the Birds,” I love the image of a “brother” walking down to the river with no shirt or shoes and how this image carries the poem. How do you see the struggles of poverty and everyday people at work in your poetry?
JD: I wrote that poem after a painful phone call from my little brother, who was stranded at a Waffle House off the highway in the bitter cold, he was crashing from drug use and had been trying to walk along the highway to get to a homeless shelter. I felt so helpless and I couldn’t really fix that moment for him. He has been struggling with addiction and homelessness for over a year and it amazes me that he’s still standing. Addiction is the darkest way to try and reach a river or get back to God, and a poem is sometimes all I have to try and make a bit of hope from that, from what I know and where I’ve been and offer it up to those who need it; my brother, and everyone else.
LR: Tell us about Anti-Heroin Chic Press and your role in its creation.
JD: At the time I was frustrated by what felt like a real lack of diversity in the lit community, especially the minuscule inclusion of poor, non-college educated, working class, disabled, formerly incarcerated voices, and those who struggled with mental illness, self-harm, SA survivors and addiction. I thought the idea of an intentional literary community imbued with the all-inclusive spirit of 12 step recovery meetings, where the only requirement for memberships is, basically, a desire to heal and to share, would be the best way for me to do something tangible about what I felt was missing and needed. I had to heed the advice someone gave me early on in recovery; “once you see what’s missing, you have an obligation to try and be the thing that is missing.” It’s evolved over 6 years into an incredible community of mutual healing, kindness and caring that humbles me to the floor.
LR: As a writer and poetry editor, what kind of poetry do you find yourself most drawn to publish and read?
JD: I am drawn to a similar feeling that I felt at 13 when I read the poems of those men on death row, the sense that what a person is bringing to me is something they could not have made it through this life without. I am often as touched by poet’s sharing their personal stories with me in their cover letters as I am the work itself, and 9 times out of 10, knowing that story pulls me toward including the work. It’s important to me that AHC feel like a warm community shorn of pretense, come as you are, and my feeling has been that people yearn for that so much more than they do the pedigree or prestige of a place. I know I do.
LR: Anything else you’d like to add about your writing or writing/poetry in general?
JD: I think something Joyce Carol Oates says about fiction applies to poetry too. She writes that “everyone has at least one story in them.” I think the same about poems too. I believe everyone has an innate urge to creatively talk about their lives, their traumas, their recovery. Talk therapy, and 12 step meetings, is often a form it takes all the time out in the world, and I would wager there have been many poems spoken aloud out of the center of one’s life in those rooms by people who have not thought themselves capable of a poem. I look for that, everywhere, in everyone.