“Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks With Monica Prince”

Monica Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation. Prince is the
author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem; How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A
Choreopoem; and Letters from the Other Woman, as well as the co-author of the suffrage
play Pageant of Agitating Women with Anna Andes. Prince’s work has appeared
in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap
Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net
nominee obsessed with yoga and maxi skirts with pockets, Prince teaches activist and
performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University
in Pennsylvania. Members of the Santa Fe Literary Review editorial team were honored to
interview Prince over Zoom on Wednesday, September 6, 2023.

Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, let’s talk about taking risks. What does it mean to
you to take a creative risk? And why does risk taking matter when we make art?

Monica Prince: I love this question. I love the idea of discussing risk. I think I learned about
Risk as a writer actually, in the fall or in the summer of 2018 with [poet] Tina Chang. I was
at a fellowship in Aspen, Colorado for a week, and I worked with Tina Chang that week, and
on the second day she asked us all what the difference was between risk and courage. She
asked us to think about a moment in which we took a risk, and what it taught us about
courage. And so when I think about risk, I mostly think about having the ability to do
something in spite of fear. It shows up in my writing a lot. The first thing, of course, is that
writing choreopoems feels like a risk because it’s a very niche genre. It’s very specific, and
a lot of people don’t know what it is, unless they’ve read Ntozake Shange, or if they’ve seen
“For Colored Girls.”

And there’s just this sort of risk-taking in terms of writing the show, producing the
show, getting the show published, trying to help theater companies understand what it is,
trying to help publishers understand what it is. So as someone working in the genre, it’s
difficult—it’s a risky genre indeed. I think that as writers and as creative people, it’s our
responsibility to take those risks, because if no one has ever done it before, or if it’s been
done, but no one is still doing it, then it’s our responsibility to keep it alive, and to pave
spaces for other people to create.

I remember [poet, painter, filmmaker, and editor] Richard Siken telling me during a
reading he hosted that if you’re writing something, and it feels like it’s going really well, and
it’s easy, and it’s just coming out of you, then you’re probably going in the wrong direction.
But if what you’re writing is difficult, and scary, and is just surprising you at every turn, then
you’re on the right track. I think about that when I consider the risk of creating
choreopoems, especially because the genre itself is meant to encapsulate as many
performative elements as possible, and that can be difficult to demonstrate on the page.
What I appreciate about the genre in and of itself is that you don’t necessarily have
to imagine who specifically will play these parts, who’s going to perform them, what it’s
going to look like. You can imagine your creative space, but you don’t have to hope that
someone, somewhere, will be able to do it. You just have to trust your directors. You trust
your choreographers to find the people who can do this work.

SFLR: Please tell us about your writing routine. Are you an early-morning type of
writer? Late at night? At a coffee shop? What does a day in the writing life of Monica
Prince look like?

MP: When I have time to sit down and write, I’m one of those midday writers. In the
morning, writing is not a thing for me. I do not enjoy mornings. I think they’re reserved for
lying in bed, drinking water and tea, and playing video games on my phone, but around
eleven, I feel motivated to get up and get dressed, make more tea, and then wander to
some part of my house, or just stay in bed, actually, and just write. And then when I get into
the groove of writing, I will do it for hours until I finish whatever individual project I’m working
on. That can be confusing, whatever that project might be. Sometimes that project is a
choreopoem that I’m working on. Sometimes it’s an essay, but the last time I sat and really
powered through a bunch of work was when I was writing another choreopoem called
Hysteria. It’s all about trying to navigate what it means to decide to have a child. It just
flowed out of me, based on all these other poems I’ve been writing for years, and so I think
my process, or my writing life, is frenetic and varied, and it’s really dependent upon what my
schedule looks like and what my day looks like.

When I’m teaching full time, my writing happens randomly, essentially whenever I
have a moment. But when I’m not teaching, like in the summer or winter, I’m able to choose
that space a little bit more intentionally. I can write pretty much everywhere. When I’m
writing poems, I need silence. But when I’m revising, I could do that anywhere. I don’t like
coffee shops for writing, because it feels too stereotypical. [Laughs.] And in my little town
we only have, like, one really good coffee shop. The rest are just like bars, and then that’s
also a stereotype, being the drunk writer in the bar. They’re all complicated! There’s no win
in the spaces like that in my town right now. But overall, I can pretty much write anywhere.
And that, I think, is a good thing.

SFLR: It is a good thing! And it also speaks to your talent, probably, that you can do
that. Monica, we admire your harnessing of a range of artistic forms, including the
lipogram and the concept of erasure. What are the benefits and limitations to using
forms like these?

MP: I love form poetry. I love formal poetry. It’s almost a shortcut to inspiration, because
you just have to follow the rules. So in Roadmap, my choreopoem, there’s a lipogram in
there that is called “Black Boys are Missing,” and it’s a lipogram for the word “suicide.” I
recently fell into the form of lipogram because it’s one of the Oulipian constraints. I got really
into writing lipograms, because somehow, it’s the hardest thing. It takes you like six hours to
write one poem, but it’s really rewarding because you did this complicated thing.
When I utilize erasure in the form of the lipogram specifically, it allows me to think
through how to say something without saying something, and it asks: How do you allow
your readers to truly understand what’s going on? And the lipogram has a trick in it, right,
where you utilize every other letter in the alphabet, but you can’t spell out the word that
you’re talking about, and then you have no choice. You can’t think about anything else,
because you can’t say it. I remember trying to write a lipogram that was not about whatever
thing was missing and just failing miserably, because it’s like the only thing you can think
about. What I really appreciate is the ability to combine forms in the quarry poems and on the page, because it allows me to not just do a lipogram. I can also do an etymology poem,
or I can write the lipogram in the form of a hustle or a sonnet, and I haven’t done that yet.
That feels like a lot. It feels very exciting. But adding the etymology to it has actually shifted
a lot of how I understand the words I’m erasing.

Plus, because the premise of Roadmap is that there’s a young Black man trying to
subvert his most likely cause of death, which will be homicide, it’s interesting to have a word
in the show that is not what we think the whole show is about. The whole show is about him
avoiding getting murdered, but then he performs this poem about avoiding taking himself
out of the world. I wanted to demonstrate that sort of balance in the show, and to talk about
the underlying erasure within the show, which is that we’re losing black bodies: they are just
not available anymore. They’re not present anymore. And because it’s this epidemic in
young people that we don’t pay attention to as an epidemic, I think it’s really important to
include those sort of erasures within performances and within full-length collections,
because they allow us to think, “What’s the thing that’s actually missing in our show? Or
what’s the thing that this show is trying to call attention to that’s missing?”

SFLR: We’re interested in learning more about the collaborative aspect of
choreopoems. How does performing your pieces allow you to explore new elements
of activism and expression that may exist beyond the written word. While you’re at it,
please define the choreopoem for our readers!

MP: Of course! I always forget to do that. A choreopoem is a choreographed series of
poems that includes performance, poetry, dance, music, art, yoga, Parkour, Zumba,
burlesque, voiceovers, short video clips—any kind of performance media you can think of,
all rolled in together and thrown onstage like a play. It’s a super accessible form in the
sense that you don’t have to know how to do any of those things, to ask your actors to do
those things. I know how to do Zumba, but I would never know how to put that in a show.
What I like about the choreopoem genre is that it is inherently collaborative because
it does require other bodies in order to come alive. I think when we write plays, there is an
inherent idea of the performance. In a play, we don’t emphasize, “How do we move from left
to right?” There is not really blocking involved in writing the play. The blocking might be
specific in terms of, like, someone needs to be stabbed, or someone needs to leave the
room, but it’s not as specific as entrances, exits, and what type of dances are happening.
And this is actually really fun when you’re writing a musical or a play: You get to see
your stuff come to life. But in a choreopoem, there has to be a little bit more intentionality
behind the choices of media you’re including, because if, for example, you have a voiceover
in the show, it needs to be intentional in terms of why it’s there. In Roadmap, I have a sort of
omniscient character named The Novelist, and in earlier drafts, she was just a voice that
would descend from the sky. This made sense in terms of the fact that no one can really
see her, and we don’t know where she’s where she’s coming from or who she’s speaking to.
But then I realized, there needed to be a physical form of the novelist, because if you
have that sort of “voiceover voice,” most audiences immediately think it’s God, or some sort
of deity in the sky, which is not my intention. So I made her a physical character on stage to
avoid that confusion. And I think when you’re making choreopoems, you have to be really
intentional about the kinds of works you’re including. In Roadmap, there aren’t explicit
dances performed except for L’Apache. The French L’Apache is a dance that involves a man and a woman more generally, but more specifically involves a pimp and a prostitute.
It’s a dance meant to show a man trying to destroy a woman onstage, and it’s a very violent
dance, a street dance, invented in Paris at the start of the twentieth century. And though I
don’t know how to do that dance, I do know that it’s an effective form, and it’s probably the
most effective form to demonstrate a shift in body language onstage, because it is such a
violent dance. [The choreopoem] allows a director to take that direction, and either learn it
for the choreographer, or have the choreographer know what it is, and then put it on the
actors, or else, if you don’t have actors who can do that, the director can still try to keep the
momentum of what is asked for in the text.

So the choreopoem is really wonderful, because you can write it by yourself, but the
whole time, you have to be thinking about the physicality of the words, physicality of the
choices you’re making onstage. If there’s going to be a burlesque performance, why? What
kind? Do you want it to actually be satirical, or do you want it to be sensual? I think that the
intentionality behind the choices of collaboration is very important.

When it comes to the collaborative nature of writing the show: When I edit my
shows, I lure all my friends into my house, and ply them with liquor and pizza, and I ask
them to read their parts cold. A lot of them have never performed before. A lot of them don’t
know what I’m looking for them to do, and it just helps me hear it. It helps me hear it from
other people’s bodies, which allows me to revise the show. Even that small collaboration
dramatically shifts the show. For example, the poem “Unfinished List of All the Ways Black
Parents Say I Love You” is what came out of two of my friends who played Raven and Neil
when we were just revising the show. They both said, “We don’t have enough lines,” and I
was like, “It’s ‘cause you all are selfish, you want more lines.” And they said, “No, no, no,
no, we really don’t have enough lines, we only have these three poems and we don’t think
that that’s long enough.” And I was like, “Okay, okay,” but then I didn’t know where to put it.
I was like, “How am I supposed to give you more lines? Where are you going to even show
up again? We’ve moved past your limb in the family tree.” And that’s when I ended up
writing the poem, which came in response to the way that Dorian is trying to change
onstage. The change is thinking about the way the ways that his parents love each other,
and the way his parents have loved him, is a way that he needs to actually consider how
he’s going to love Aisha. Even though it was a sort of flippant feedback because they just
wanted to talk more, it actually made more sense in the show to add more lines for them,
because they really did need to speak more. They needed to be more present.

Because you are always considering your director, you’re considering your
choreographer, there is no way to get away from who those people will be as you’re crafting
the show. I think that’s the best part of the collaborative aspect: you trust whoever it’s going
to be, but you also have the opportunity to be present in terms of what you want it to look
like. And that’s really lovely.

SFLR: So your poems are often rooted in a physical experience. How does
physicality empower your writing? And does the physical experience take
precedence during the writing process? In other words, what comes first—movement
or language?

MP: Yeah, language comes first. Well. [Laughs.] I want to say language first, but that might
not be true. In most cases the language comes first, because I have the idea first, but frequently when I’m struggling to write at all, I will just kind of be thinking about what I want
to see, if that makes sense. I want to know, what kind of image am I trying to put on a
stage? And that helps me write the poem. The poem that Ty reads in Roadmap, “Do Not
Pray,” came from an image I had in my head of a tall, Black man, wearing a hoodie, sitting
down onstage, and speaking very low and very slowly, and I didn’t really know where that
was going. I wanted, whatever happened within that moment, for him to eventually stand up
and kick the chair away from him and then yell at the audience, and I did not know who was
going to do that, or what that was going to sound like. Originally, I thought it would be
Dorian, because he’s talking about the hypocrisy of “thoughts and prayers.” But then I
realized, Dorian couldn’t say that, because he’s onstage for about ninety minutes, and he
says all the things for so long. But also, the whole show is just about trying on different
versions of his future. So he doesn’t have to physically do that. We can have someone else
come forward and be an imagined possibility. And so that changed the poem, “Do Not
Pray,” a lot, because at first I just wrote it in response to watching way too much CSI Miami,
because the first five lines are all about all the horrible ways that people die, and you find
their bodies.

And then it shifted almost immediately, to referencing all the ways in which unarmed
Black children had been killed in the last several years: one child walking out, taking out the
garbage, another child just walking home, or just being in their own home, and being shot
at. I felt the need to reference all of those horrible instances. The thing that was really in the
back of my head was this fear of doing mundane activities and being killed for it. And so I
emphasize that in the poem. And then, as soon as I was revising it, I realized that the
moment where he stands and shouts at the audience had to be a climactic moment in the
show.

So the physicality and the language sometimes come at the same time. I try to be
intentional about that, because I want it to be obvious to the audience that I can also do
some of these poems. It’s literally like this joke in my department, because I perform “Do
Not Pray” at admissions events, and at the end, you’re supposed to scream, and it always
terrifies these very well-meaning sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and then, of course,
three or four years later, they’re, like, “I remember you did this poem, and now I am here,
and I think it’s really cool,” and it’s very sweet, but I do it all the time, because it’s a really
physical and emotional poem that allows me to kind of, like, drop a mic and walk offstage,
but it also allows the characters within the show to realize that the stereotype of having only
two options as a Black man in the world—to go to jail or die—needed to be stark and
obvious. That’s why it starts with this negro spiritual song, and then it ends with this—this
rage.

And I like that the physicality of those emotions can come through in different forms
throughout the show. There’s a song that they sing, the Ring Around the Rosie song, that
they sing. There’s “On the Outside” that they also sing, which I heard someone else do for
the first time ever this past summer, and it was amazing and wild and so cool, because it
was a whole different tempo than I’d written in in my head. And I was like, “Excellent. This is
actually what I wanted.” I wanted the directors and the actors to take this song as it’s
written, and take it elsewhere. So that was really incredible to see. I think the physicality is
really important because it is a performance piece, and understanding what that looks like is
interesting for poets who are afraid to perform their work in public. I think it’s important for
us to think about how work sounds outside of our brains. It kind of comes at the same time, the language and the physicality. And I’m really interested in it, because, in a different
lifetime, I would be a dance major with a French minor, but I’m not that person, so, to make
up for it, I am just putting dance in my shows forever.

SFLR: Your work is often very intimate. What sacrifices must you make when you
share personal revelations with your readership? And how do you navigate privacy—
your own, your loved ones—while at the same time giving of yourself on the page?
MP: That’s a really good question. I had a student ask me that this morning—how do you
write about personal things and allow other people to perform them? A lot of Roadmap, and
How to Exterminate the Black Woman, which is the show where Dorian actually first
appears, is built around the sort of lack of privacy we have as individuals now. Like, we’re
constantly being surveilled. We’re being tracked all the time, whether it’s our own doing by
leaving our locations on our phone, or the doing of the criminal justice system. There’s just
sort of this acceptance that we will be watched all the time, and it’s upsetting to think about
in depth, but it’s a reality that we have all kind of passively accepted. And so in that sense, a
lot of things that were once private, are just not. I like the idea of bringing those things to the
stage, because I want people to talk about the things that we don’t normally talk about, or
that we’re not supposed to talk about.

In Roadmap, there are three poems in a row, when we meet Belle, who’s the
grandmother. And she’s talking about sex work. I remember I wrote that because I work
with a non-profit called Beautiful Feet Wellness, and they focus on supporting survivors of
human trafficking through fitness and wellness. I wrote that poem as a kind of response to
the work that I’d started doing with this non-profit, and to create a character who had made
the choice to enter sex work—while recognizing that it’s actually not really a choice,
because it comes from poverty, it comes from lack of access, it comes from lack of
education, it comes from the ways that we build our cities and our communities, and it
comes a lot from lack of resources in terms of what is available to certain types of people
when they’re trying to make their lives better. By working with sex work survivors, I learned
a lot about how to better understand that, even if you’re not forced into the trade, something
did force you into the trade. I was understanding the difference between coercion and a
willingness to put yourself in the space, recognizing that you wouldn’t even have thought
about it if you didn’t have any of these other issues that were structured to keep you from
success. And so you have “Sex Work is Real Work” first, and then that tumbles into “Cut,”
which is all about self-harm. And it was important to put that onstage as well, because I
think it’s a huge thing that we really don’t talk about, and we don’t talk about what self-harm
looks like in these different venues.

So with “Sex Work is Real Work,” we’re looking at an active choice to harm oneself,
because there’s so much like emotional and physical damage that occurs when women
enter the sex trade. We have this inadvertent self-harming. And then we have this
intentional self-harm of a character cutting themselves, and then that rolls into the sort of
self-harm of omission between lovers. Right? We have Raven talking about how she has
definitely been assaulted, but she doesn’t tell her partner, not explicitly. Neither of them
actually tells one another the explicit nature of their own destruction. That’s harmful in
relationships, and is also harmful, period.

By quickly bringing up these intimate issues onstage—they’re some of the earliest
poems in the show—I wanted to demonstrate that we have a lot of things that we keep from
other people or from ourselves. But we actually have to talk about them so that maybe we
don’t repeat them. It’s a cycle, right? There’s a moment within the show where they say,
“You have to break the cycle, because you can’t just keep experiencing this harmful
experience over and over and over again until someone finally learns their lesson.” Why
should we sacrifice multiple generations to make something stop? I think a lot about how
intimacy needs to be portrayed onstage for that reason. But additionally, I want to make
sure that my audience is aware that there are real examples of emotional, sexual, and
romantic intimacy with people of color and with Black people. I want to make sure that I’m
demonstrating what Black love looks like, or can look like. That’s why the line from Nikki
Giovanni comes in, “Black love is black wealth.”

There are just not a lot of moments where we get to see Black characters loving one
another outside of this sort of “Well, of course they’re together. They’re both Black” kind of
energy. I see the way that it happens on television. I’m re-watching House now, which did
not stand up to the test of time, but it’s quite interesting. Anytime there is an intimacy
between characters, it’s always racialized. The only character who can have an issue with a
Black patient is the Black doctor, right? The only character who can have an issue with the
white patient has to be one of the white doctors. I don’t know that they notice it, or if it’s on
purpose, but it’s so clear to me, it’s so obvious. I wanted to emphasize that they’re not just
together because they’re both Black. They’re together because they want to be together,
and they have the choice to be together, and they’re choosing it every single day.

In terms of privacy, I’ve kind of accepted that there’s nothing private about anything. I
write essays about my sex life; this is just where I’ve decided to live in the world. But when it
comes to choreopoems, I want to focus on providing titillating language that gets us close to
the thing without demonstrating the thing onstage, because that should be private, if that
makes sense. In terms of protecting my loved ones’ privacy—when I did a bunch of
interviews for previous choreopoems, I had to be really careful to make sure I wasn’t
utilizing identifying features or qualities. But when it comes to my shows now, because a lot
of my shows focus on Black people in their emotions, in their struggles, there is less
concern on my part, at least, that my family or my loved ones will feel some type of way
about it, simply because I’m talking about the things that we have always talked about in
secret.

I want those secrets to stop being secrets, because they hurt everyone. I think about
how we find things out after the fact, when our grandparents die, our great-grandparents
die. My grandfather died in 2009, and that’s when I found out he had a whole separate
family. And everyone knew, and everyone was fine with it the whole time. And I’m just like,
“That feels like something we should talk about!” I don’t believe that keeping secrets like
that saves anyone. It prevents gossip, I guess, but shouldn’t we have those conversations
to prevent harm in the future?

SFLR: To conclude our interview, let’s touch on writer’s block. How do you navigate
your own experiences with writer’s block? And how do you encourage your students
to break past their own blocks, from procrastination to a fear of examining trauma, to
find deeper expression in their creative work?

MP: I don’t do writer’s block very well, because I don’t really think it’s a block. I think it’s
mostly that I am hesitant to write something. I think we all fall into these cycles where we’re
afraid to write something because it’s going be hard [laughs], or it’s going to be emotional.
Or maybe we don’t think we have the talent to do it? One of the main ways I get through
writer’s block is through writing prompts and forms, because you have to follow the rules.
You don’t feel that bad if it’s not good at the end, because your whole point is not to focus
on the content. You’re just focusing on hitting the rules, right? So lipograms are really
helpful for writer’s block because you don’t have a choice but to keep working on it until it’s
done, and then you go back and see if you screwed it up, and if it makes any sense.
I’m teaching a class right now called Poetry and Magic, and my students are using
different forms to accomplish different spells, if you will. We talk about how an elegy could
potentially raise the dead. We talk about how sestinas can offer possible futures. We
discussed how the sonnet could be a way to bring a lover home, or to bring a lover to
oneself. It’s been a really fruitful conversation with these students, because they talk a lot
about how they don’t really know what they want to write. Following a form kind of helps
them get out of that moment.

I think we see writer’s block as sitting in front of your computer, and nothing comes
out for like three hours. And that sometimes happens to me. But I think my writer’s block is
more that I justify not writing, because I know that everything I’m doing goes into the writing.
I learned this in grad school, but I really learned it when I read Letters to a Young Poet by
Rainer Maria Rilke, and he has this moment in an early letter, where he says, “Ask yourself
in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if
this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I
must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”
Because I know that I have to write, I can’t not write, I need to, then I accept that
everything around me is feeding into the writing, whether I’m giving readings or interviews,
or I’m teaching, giving feedback on work, drinking coffee, going for walks—I just accept that
everything I’m doing feeds into the writing. We as writers, I think, give ourselves permission
to not get everything done all the time. Ada Limón talks about how she has a gathering
time, where she spends time doing anything but writing for months or years, and then she
spends six months just pouring out the book, and then she’s famous. I don’t think we as
writers give ourselves permission to do stuff like that, right? You don’t have to write every
day. Just make sure you write. There’s still @CountsAsWriting, a Twitter account—I don’t
care what he calls it, I’m going to call it Twitter [laughs]—that posts things like, “Today,
writing counts as staring at your unfolded laundry.” Or, “Today, writing counts as taking a
walk around the block.” Things like that. It’s about giving ourselves permission not to do the
work.

Procrastination is a big thing with my students and with me. But I also know that
ultimately, my writing practice is more about content than it is about frequency, and if I’m
doing multiple projects, I tend to get sidetracked. For the last three years, everything’s been
about Roadmap, and I haven’t written anything else. But well, actually, I guess that’s a lie,
because I still have publications coming out, but most of my work has been around
Roadmap. When it finally came out, I kind of just like sat around and thought, “I don’t even
know what I’m supposed to do with myself now.” So I try to allow that to be. I try to make
that acceptable for myself and also for other writers. Sometimes we don’t know what we
want to write about. And that’s okay? And it’s okay to just not be writing.

One of the best ways to write is a deadline. Deadlines are very helpful. You have a
workshop deadline, or you have a deadline for a place you want to submit to, or a contest
looming. That is the best way to get writing done, but other than that outside pressure, I
think I’m more interested in making sure that my writing is impacting me the way I would
want it to impact my audience. Sometimes that means not writing at all. Sometimes that
means writing the same poem over and over and over again. I have this lipogram that I’ve
been working on for probably a year. It is just the same stupid poem five different times, and
I think that’s helpful, because it allows us to really sync into what our intentions are with our
work, instead of just cranking stuff out for the sake of it.

I had my students do a semester of poems in the fall of 2020, because everything
was falling apart. “We’re all gonna die.” And so I was like, how about we put a little art into
the world? And so we wrote a poem for every day of the semester. That was about 103
poems by the end—it was a depressing thing to realize that we are in school 206-ish days a
year. By doing that, I suddenly had a lot of terrible poems, but a lot of good poems, and
some poems that I could revise, and some of actually made it into Roadmap before it went
to print, because those were pieces that I knew needed in order for the performance to be
sound.