Ask the Author with Ashley Halm
TT: How long have you been writing? What interested you about it?
AH: I started at age 11 with writing song lyrics and over-ambitious first pages of novels and short stories. I wanted to write books just like my favorite authors did.
TT: What inspired you to write this piece(s)?
AH: I first wrote "It Will Come Back" for a speculative fiction writing course in the fall of 2020, at a time when as a student I felt really left to my own devices by the university as far as staying physically and mentally well in the middle of a pandemic. It's about a group of friends who flee from their college dorm into the woods and quickly start to lose touch with reality, and it was really cathartic for me to work through the feelings of helplessness and unreality in a character removed from myself.
"Someone Will Remember Us" was created for my Form and Theory of Writing course this past semester, out of a prompt to create an erasure poem that experiments with form. I've always loved Sappho's poetry, and I've always hated how much contemporary scholars focus on speculating about her sexuality rather than examining her merit as an accomplished lyric poet. The erasure's content comes from a 19th century essay about Sappho written by a white male scholar, which I attempted to re-frame in an emulation of the Sappho quote, "Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
TT: Is this similar or different to other things you’ve written? How so?
AH: Both of these pieces represent new experiments in form for me. "It Will Come Back" has a linear narrative that's interspersed with flashbacks, and it's narrated by a mute protagonist who feels a disconnect between what she thinks and what she can communicate to others. With "Someone Will Remember Us," erasure as a form was not a new concept to me, but using the nature of erasure and its relationship to source material to inform the content was an exciting challenge for me.
TT: Who is your favorite author or writer? What do you like about their work?
AH: It's a little basic, but I absolutely love everything that Sally Rooney writes. Her dialogue and narration styles are so simple and economic, and yet so impactful. Her characters and their relationships are naturalistic almost to the point of being mundane, so that the relationships are incredibly complex without being unbelievable.
TT: How long have you been writing? What interested you about it?
AH: I started at age 11 with writing song lyrics and over-ambitious first pages of novels and short stories. I wanted to write books just like my favorite authors did.
TT: What inspired you to write this piece(s)?
AH: I first wrote "It Will Come Back" for a speculative fiction writing course in the fall of 2020, at a time when as a student I felt really left to my own devices by the university as far as staying physically and mentally well in the middle of a pandemic. It's about a group of friends who flee from their college dorm into the woods and quickly start to lose touch with reality, and it was really cathartic for me to work through the feelings of helplessness and unreality in a character removed from myself.
"Someone Will Remember Us" was created for my Form and Theory of Writing course this past semester, out of a prompt to create an erasure poem that experiments with form. I've always loved Sappho's poetry, and I've always hated how much contemporary scholars focus on speculating about her sexuality rather than examining her merit as an accomplished lyric poet. The erasure's content comes from a 19th century essay about Sappho written by a white male scholar, which I attempted to re-frame in an emulation of the Sappho quote, "Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
TT: Is this similar or different to other things you’ve written? How so?
AH: Both of these pieces represent new experiments in form for me. "It Will Come Back" has a linear narrative that's interspersed with flashbacks, and it's narrated by a mute protagonist who feels a disconnect between what she thinks and what she can communicate to others. With "Someone Will Remember Us," erasure as a form was not a new concept to me, but using the nature of erasure and its relationship to source material to inform the content was an exciting challenge for me.
TT: Who is your favorite author or writer? What do you like about their work?
AH: It's a little basic, but I absolutely love everything that Sally Rooney writes. Her dialogue and narration styles are so simple and economic, and yet so impactful. Her characters and their relationships are naturalistic almost to the point of being mundane, so that the relationships are incredibly complex without being unbelievable.