Contributor Spotlight: Anne Champion
Anne Champion’s collaborative poems with Jenny Sadre-Orafai “Spell for the Girls Who Want Spells” and “For a Bruise” are part of Issue 76 of Bellingham Review. Subscribe or purchase a single issue through our Submittable page here.
What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?
I met Jenny Sadre-Orafai at a writing conference in New Mexico, and we immediately connected over our love of magic. We made a pilgrimage to a church know for its “magic dirt” that causes miracles, and during that trip, we decided we would collaborate on a book of spell poems. My whole process was completely inspired by Jenny—every day we’d each write a poem, and our poems became a conversation with one another while simultaneously being self-examination, interrogation of pain, and feminist manifesto. “Spell for the Girls Who Want Spells” was a poem that really embodies how I saw Jenny and I then—as women with untapped magic inside us, grasping for all the magic we can find around us.
Tell us about your writing life.
I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old—I initially wrote only about vampires, werewolves, witches, until I was told that this was “not literary,” so there is a real irony that I created a collaborative book with Jenny that harkens back to the magic of my childhood, and that’s probably why the process was so thrilling: I got to tap into the imagination and creativity that the world had trained me to suppress.
Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life most influences your writing?
Politics and the question of justice influences me the most. I’m always examining the histories that led us to the equalities and oppressions that exist today.
What writing advice has stayed with you?
A teacher told me that the most important part of my writing process is my reading, and that I should read everything I can and absorb it like a sponge. I tell my students that now.
What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? Favorite writer(s)?
Sylvia Plath made me a poet and she liberated me as a woman.
What are you reading right now?
Me and Nina, poetry by Monica Hand.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
My new work is solely focused on current American politics and the issues of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and war that America has used to wreak havoc on the world. I’ve done peace activism in Cuba and Palestine to research these poems, and I’ll be going to Nicaragua this summer to do more research.
Anything else our readers might want to know about you?
My cats are named after Game of Thrones. (Oh, and I have a book coming out this summer from Black Lawrence Press: The Good Girl is Always a Ghost. It’s all poems for iconic women in history).
Where can our readers connect with you online?
ANNE CHAMPION is the author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Epiphany Magazine, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, New South, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poet’s Prize recipient, a Barbara Deming Memorial grant recipient, a 2015 Best of the Net winner, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Featured Image: “Spells” by Tanya Linskey