Coffee Break: Inspiration

A dive in to what inspires us

 Bryant: Hi, welcome back to another Coffee Break, I’m here with Ray and Ellen. Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about inspiration. I teach a few classes and I've got lots of great speakers on storytelling and, and how they come up with prompts. Ray and Ellen, you guys are writers and storytellers, what inspires you? 

Ray: Having participated in a few writers' workshops, I’ve found that reading any sort of works by authors and learning what makes their style unique contributed a lot to helping me develop my own writer’s voice. After reading these pieces, we would get prompts to try to write a poem or a piece that can encapsulate a writer’s voice, and doing this helped guide me in developing a more distinct writer’s voice. 

I’ve also found that reading as much as possible is very beneficial. I love reading the Poetry Foundation and seeing all the new poetry that gets released monthly and trying to learn what makes a poet unique. 

Bryant: I’m going to push you, Ray. Be specific. What has inspired you in the last week?

Ray: I’ve been reading a lot of Ocean Vuong. I love his book “Night Sky With Exit Wounds”, which is a poetry collection about his parents immigrating from Vietnam during the war and his experiences growing up as a child of immigrants. Since I also come from an immigrant household, it was nice to read a collection that holds similarities to my upbringing and see elements that I can connect to and bring to my writing. 

Bryant: So Ellen, what inspires you to be creative?

Ellen: I think as Ray said, reading is definitely very inspirational. I find now that I'm in the hospitals and working with patients, the experiences they share with me and the interactions we have are also very inspirational. For me, I actively think about how I can find little moments and incorporate them into my writing. I will typically have the notes app open on my phone and I have interesting ideas that I want to incorporate into poems.

It doesn't necessarily mean that each idea will be a poem, rather, they’re fragments of ideas and different phrases that I think about or hear throughout the day. That’s how my creative process works. 

Bryant: So it's important to have some reflection and appreciate what's going on in your day-to-day. Again, I'm going to push you. Give me a specific example of something that's inspired you in the last week.  

Ellen: I'm seeing a lot of patient interactions these days and I’m currently on the outpatient side, so a lot of what I've seen is people coming in with different issues and wanting to talk to their doctors about an issue. One particular patient came in with her loved one and was talking about their issues and I think it was inspiring to see how well-connected they were. I don't think I came out of it with a particular phrase, just an idea that I want to encapsulate it into a poem.

Bryant: I totally agree, patients always inspires me. I'm very visually inspirated, there’s this lemon tree on the property that I’ve been living on for the past 16 years. It's a big lemon tree and one day we noticed with all the rain, there were so many lemons on this lemon tree. The weight make the limbs started to bend, and then suddenly my son said ‘Hey, look’  the tree was looking strange. The tree had actually tipped over, but it's still alive with parts of it in the ground. I was inspired by how the tree has fallen over, but is still very vibrant and the lemons were still growing. 

Students also inspire me.I'm just amazed by the kind of work they're doing in the class and that's in part why I teach. 

Are you guys also visually inspired like me? Is it food? Ray? 

Ray: Yeah being in the city is definitely very inspiring 'cause there are a bunch of jazz clubs. I remember the first week during the summer we went to a bunch of jazz show and just being in a new environment that was very like very audibly simulating was very inspiring. Similar to how you are visually inspired, I find that I'm very audibly inspired. I listened to a lot of Frank Ocean and Hozier, and I think these artists are very poetic in their lyrics. Oftentimes, I find myself paying too much attention to the lyrics and finding that their lyrical sense slip into my writing. 

Bryant: Interesting. So they're sort of inspiring you directly. That's great. How about you, Ellen? 

Ellen: You mentioned food, which I think is interesting because we think of food as a connection between cultures, languages, and people. I think the key takeaway is that we all have so many different ways we're able to be inspired. It's definitely possible to channel it into your own type of creativity, which leads to the question of being able to make space for creativity, which we've also had another coffee break on. 

Bryant: Fantastic. I think that's the great way to end today. Thank you!