Today we’d like to introduce you to RJ Ingram.
Hi RJ, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started writing poetry when I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University. I worked on the editorial teams of the literary journals Prairie Margins & Mid-American Review & after I felt confident enough with my writing I started submitting poems to literary journals & contests across the nation. By the time I had graduated from BGSU with a BFA in creative writing I had over twenty five publications. Then I moved from my hometown Vermilion, Ohio to work with my mentor Brenda Hillman in the San Francisco Bay Area at Saint Mary’s College of California.
While I was there I worked as a social media & poetry editor for the press Omnidawn as well as collaborated with my soon to be publisher on the Saint Mary’s literary journal Mary. I graduated from Saint Mary’s with two MFAs in creative writing, one with a concentration in poetry & the other with a concentration in creative non-fiction. While I was in college & grad school I accumulated over a hundred publications in literary journals & had my name printed in dozens of books either as contributor or editor. But I was also a social poet & performed for several reoccurring & one-off poetry open mic nights for nearly a decade. After graduating from Saint Mary’s I worked various part time jobs trying to juggle my writing & performing with making money.
I never expected to make money writing poetry or selling books, but I kept applying to residencies, part time poetry teaching positions & bookstores in & around The Bay Area until the Covid Pandemic shuttered public spaces. In 2020 my husband & I relocated to Portland, Oregon to be closer to Michael’s family.
When stores started opening up in Portland I applied for a bookselling job at Powell’s with no luck. I went into Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette shortly after to get some resume-building advice from their Job Connections vocational program & walked out with a job offer to work in their largest superstore’s biggest book department. For four years I have been working as a used bookseller for one of the most successful non-profits in Oregon & our online bookstore is one of the biggest bookstores in America. Goodwill CEOs from all around the world come into our location to see how we merchandise, organize our production warehouses & handpick valuable donations to sell online.
It wasn’t until I had this steady bookselling job that I started working on my debut poetry collection The Autobiography of Nancy Drew. I have always considered myself a sonneteer & frequently work in 30 day bursts where I will write a sonnet every day for thirty days, take a short break & start again. My notes app on my phone has over a thousand sonnets from these 30/30 bursts & although my writing had stopped after I graduated I wasn’t prepared for how fast I would pick it up again once I had enough poems for a collection. Three years ago I started joining Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project Marathon every July. We share the poems we write during the months on their website for fans to see as they’re written down. This public facing vehicle has been one of the most important generators I have used recently, even though I am almost always engaged in a more personal 30/30 project. I always recommend joining Tupelo’s 30/30 Project to writers trying to get into the swing of things. It is an ongoing endeavor always looking for folks to join in for a month to help raise money for the press. It is an ever growing American literary national treasure.
I stopped drinking shortly after we moved to Oregon & devoted a 30/30 project to communing with potential higher powers. I wanted to devote my prayer to fictional divas who could lift me up & find in me the powers they wielded that I admired. My Nancy Drew collection opens with Thirst Trap For Miss Piggy & ends with Thirst Trap For Padme Amidala the first & last poem I wrote for that early-sobriety daily writing project. I considered Thirst Traps to be the best forms of prayers for divas & I feel like the 30 or so women I wrote to would appreciate the self reflection needed when taking a good sexy selfie even the ones who aren’t sex symbols. But The Autobiography of Nancy Drew is a debut poetry collection that features other poems about growing up in Ohio, living in a long distance relationship for three years, and car accidents among other thing sprinkled among the thirst traps.
My publisher & I are working on putting together the sequel to my first collection. This time I am writing about The Diva’s proverbial best friend The Dandy. The Dandies in my next book titled Peacock Lane move into a fictionalized neighborhood in Portland. But instead of writing Thirst Traps for them I’ve been attempting to write them into Tarot Cards putting some obvious ones like Sherlock Holmes as The Hierophant next to some less obvious choices like The Green Power Ranger as The Moon. Several divas make cameos next to their dandy counterparts–it was hard to not include Padme Amidala when she fills the role of Temperance perfectly as my chosen higher power. But since the logistics of making an actual tarot deck seemed a little out of reach I’ve written the cards into a choose your own adventure game giving readers the option of following the fool’s journey from beginning to end or popping in & out a bit more randomly with alternative routes & dead ends.
The plan is to have Peacock Lane out at the end of June 2026. We’re shooting for a Summer Solstice release date & will be advertising for pre-orders in early spring. I’ve been reading the poems I’ve been writing for the book at open mics in Portland over the last couple years & readers can’t wait to see the collection all together. this past summer Deep Overstock published the 10 page choose your own adventure story the book grew from in their last issue which is still available to read online or order physical copies.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I am a glutton for rejection & am not afraid of polite “no thank yous” from literary journals who don’t seem to like me as much as I like them. I just checked my outbox on Submittable & on that popular submission platform I’ve received over a hundred rejections from some of my favorite literary journals which also doesn’t include the other hundreds of rejections I’ve received from other platforms. I spent ten years on editorial teams having to say no to sometimes really good poetry just because it doesn’t fit with what we are working on. To counter rejection-fatigue I always devote one of my 30/30 projects at least once a year to sending out 30 submissions in 30 days. Not only does the work of putting together 30 submissions distract from the burn out that can happen from bad news in the in-box, but every time I do it I get at least one acceptance which means at least one other editor out there likes what I’m doing & that reminder is really all that I need.
Another response to rejection I like to practice is to send out five submissions every time I get a rejection. This hydra style submission response can be tricky to keep up with as literary journals can take a long time to send a rejection & rejections can come at any time in the day. But if I’m prepared & already have a stack of journals encouraging me to submit again I can usually get ready to submit the same packet of poems to a fresh place rather quickly.
Lately I have been trying out my Peacock Lane poems at poetry slams & those can be defeating too. Judges for slams come from the audience so a lot of the time folks who aren’t poets or editors end up ranking the performances. I’ve been competing for two years now & haven’t had much luck getting the judges favor. But I’m convinced that improvement is possible & the only person holding me back is myself & when I do finally win a poetry slam it will be because I have not only convinced a panel of five strangers that my stuff is good but I will have also convinced myself that my poetry is worthy.
Rejection is often portrayed as The Bard’s adversary when in reality that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Sure, rejection can sting especially when you’re not expecting it, but rejection is our greatest collaborator. Without rejection the bard sings only to themself.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Folks tend to mislabel me as prolific because of my use of daily writing practices. I don’t think of daily writing practices as a method of generating new poems. In fact, if I were to put out on display everything I write from my 30/30 bursts like I do in July you would see my daily writing projects are often attempts to say something the way I was meant to say it & a lot of the time it takes much more than 30 attempts to say something in such a genuine way. I wouldn’t call that prolific, if anything it is slow-moving. The copious amount of poems from my daily writing projects are merely side effects. The reason I write in those 30 day bursts is because I am an old fashioned workhorse that has trouble focusing unless I do it rigidly the same way over & over. Not to say that my methods are static. But at the very least when I write I like to sit down, turn over a 14 minute hourglass & give myself the remaining amount of time to get fourteen lines down. If I can carve away 14 minutes of my day & devote it to the sonnet, I’ve achieved my spiritual check in for the day & am recharged enough for the next twenty four hours. It doesn’t have to be 14 minutes or 14 lines but both of those things are reasonable goals no matter what the rest of the day looks like. And if something happens & it doesn’t get done, or I forget to do it (although I hardly ever forget to do it) the work I do the next day becomes that much more important. So I never stress about it &would never say the work is prolific although I’ll take the compliment.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I grew up in Vermilion & have always admired it for its fleeting beauty. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has called it The Affordable Cape Cod & snowbirds from all over the world flock to our stretch of Lake Erie to summer while prices in their homes skyrocket bc of commercial tourism. I grew up learning how to sail before driving a car & was probably a stronger swimmer before I figured out walking. For three & a half months Vermilion looks like a picture perfect American postcard, but as soon as the leaves fall the snowbirds fly home & the streets can get cold & barren in a season that always feels longer than the previous winter. Vermilion is beautiful bc it’s beauty is temporary & that is such an incredibly human manifestation it can be very depressing if you’re not careful. Seasonal Depression can be made permanent & turn even the sweetest lemonades sour. I love my hometown & I love the people who raised me & the community who taught me how to be myself & succeed. But I mourn for it when I return home during the off season.
Pricing:
- The Autobiography of Nancy Drew can be found on White Stag Publishing’s website for $12.95 https://whitestagpublishing.com/poetry-books-1/p/the-autobiography-of-nancy-drew-by-rj-ingram-pre-order
Contact Info:
- Website: https://whitestagpublishing.com/poetry-books-1/p/the-autobiography-of-nancy-drew-by-rj-ingram-pre-order
- Instagram: Instagram.com/RJ_Equality
