September 30, 2023 - A Conversation with Ashley Falla
Ashley Falla’s innovative prose and poetry plays with form, narration and narrative while displaying poignant self reflection. As a writer, she cleverly depicts emotional scenes rooted in stream of consciousness, told through a unique type of conversational confessional. Curlew had the privilege of chatting with Ashley, exploring her intent when it comes to subject matter and visual storytelling as well as her inspirations, influences and her current time at The New School, where she is pursuing her MFA.
Ashley’s pieces “why is this a conversation babe”, “A Letter to my Father” and “Informed consent permission” can be read on our Daily page and will also be featured in our upcoming print issue (Issue No. 11).
- Elizabeth Lerman
Curlew: Okay, hi! So, firstly, when did you start writing and what keeps you going?
Ashley: I feel like I don’t have a choice. Honestly, when I got accepted into the New School and did my acceptance tour I spoke to one of the heads and he was like “you know there’s no money in poetry, right?” and I got that, but at this point I don’t think I have a choice.
Curlew: Absolutely.
Ashley: I wrote poetry from a very young age. It might not have been good poetry (laughs). Shel Silverstein was one of my first “wow this is awesome” moments. So, for forever, I really don’t have a choice.
Curlew: Well I feel the same way, so I love hearing that. I know there’s easier routes but what can you do. But we’re lucky to be drawn towards a medium because I think a lot of people want to express themselves, but have to look for the right way to do it. It’s easier, sometimes, to not have a choice.
Ashley: Yeah, exactly. I had a little bit of an identity crisis last semester because I was taking a seminar with one of my professors and he was introducing us to a lot of different forms and, I’ve always been a prose girl but recently started getting into the line breaks.
Curlew:Yeah, I have some questions there but we’ll come back to it.
Ashley: Yeah, I’m still not super comfortable with them but I was trying it, and then was in this seminar and we got these texts to read, like Anne Carson, and I was like these are long poems, and is that what I am?
Curlew: Right.
Ashley: I didn’t know what to do anymore – is it prose, is it this, is it that? Do I just want to write poetry essays and so I sat there and was like “am I a poet?” and my professor was like “yes, you can relax.”
Curlew: I think that’s super common. I had some thoughts on the way you were experimenting with form – you read certain books and you realize structure is sort of a facade. When I read Anne Carson, for sure, and Maggie Nelson too, when I read “Bluets” I was like “wait, I can just write prose paragraphs and have it come together as a narrative, that’s okay?”
Ashley: Exactly.
Curlew: So specifically my question for you was whether form was something you had played with from the start or if you were originally more comfortable in a prose space?
Ashley: Yeah absolutely. I remember I tried in undergrad – I went to Hunter, and I tried to do the line breaks but didn’t fully understand. I didn’t get that it was for dramatic effect or to make a piece more mysterious, I was just like you break it to break it, and when I did an independent study my professor said that I had a lot of raw talent but that I should stop trying to write poetry.
Curlew: Oh, that’s interesting.
Ashley: Yeah she was like whatever you think you’re doing, just stop and so that had me delve more into my prose era, and that’s where it came together, it made more sense. Me trying to put a line break here, where it doesn’t need to be, is unnecessary.
Curlew: I think I felt a very similar way, which was me writing in that standard form was disingenuous and I didn’t think I was doing it right and the minute I stopped trying to do it, it felt so much better. I’m also a prose girl through and through. I love a dense paragraph.
Ashley: (laughs) Love a dense paragraph, no punctuation either, I’m just going to give you a whole run on sentence.
Curlew: Yeah, and I love the way you use dialogue, where you kind of leave it up to the reader. I think one thing you do really well is give the reader a lot of credit to figure it out for themselves.
Ashley: Thank you!
Curlew: Nowadays I don’t like the clear “he said, she said” dynamic. I love having to reread and figure out who’s talking and who’s listening, and does it really matter? I think that's so freeing.
Ashley: Exactly.
Curlew: In your piece “why is this a conversation babe” you do that so well. You take a complex topic but don’t spam the reader with the event itself, you focus on a conversation that sums it up beautifully, saying nothing really, while saying everything. That stood out to me in your writing. Keeping it concise is such a smart practice. And in terms of line breaks and spacing, your spacing says so much on its own. Form becomes an emphasis on the way you would speak something. You do it very well.
Ashley: Thank you so much.
Curlew: So now that you are experimenting with spacing and tone do you find yourself getting an idea of certain text and then the visual form comes to you or vice versa?
Ashley: Yeah, so, I don’t know how weird this is going to sound because I’ve tried to explain it before, but there is legitimately a little voice in my head and it’s my own, but it’s an extra one, and I could be having a conversation with you, or watching a movie and the voice will be like “hey, write that down” and I’ll go to the computer and the voice with sort of guide me and I’ll question it out loud sometimes, like do I like that way that sounds? Does it sound better like this? And the voice will be like “hmm no”. So whatever’s happening in the moment, and maybe its due to ADHD or dissociation –
Curlew: (laughs) Same.
Ashley: – But I’ll start having all these thoughts and then I’m like oh, there’s a poem. And I workshop, but I don’t do too much editing, I feel like what it is is what it is, and that can be both a bad and a good thing.
Curlew: Yeah, I was also thinking about how writing is like ninety percent impulse for me. I know that there are writers who are so present and practiced in their schedule and sit down for their hours and I’m not like that at all. Are you sporadic in your writing?
Ashley: I have tried to plan it out so many times, tried to be like okay you’re going to write for this amount of hours, or this many pages but I can’t do it.
Curlew: Yeah, I understand why I should be doing it, I know it might help but it’s not happening (laughs) but we’re somehow still producing work.
Ashley: Exactly, yeah. And for me that’s another reason it has to be poetry. I couldn’t do fiction because I could never sit there and develop a character and map out chapters, I don’t think I could do that.
Curlew: Yeah, so you’re not into outlining, I get that. I’m not really a deep editor either, I usually spit something out and stick with it. Do you think you write in the realm of stream of consciousness?
Ashley: I think so, yeah. I feel like the way it's coming out for me is just the truth in it. Especially with prose poetry a lot of it is just like “I’m talking to you and this is what I’m saying” and to go back and edit my original thought, it’s like that was the thought, it's what I meant to say.
Curlew: Yeah, I find the more I edit those sorts of pieces, the more shallow it feels. I love your emphasis on lack of punctuation and lower case, it feels very brain to paper and puts the reader very much in your perspective and it works well. I think in the three pieces that we’re publishing we kind of covered three very different formats. “A Letter to my Father”, which I loved, feels like a mind map, almost, the way one thought triggered the next.
Ashley: Yeah, so the italics in “A Letter to my Father” is actually from a 1913 Italian manifesto by [Luigi] Russolo.
Curlew: I was going to ask where the text was from. So, a piece like that for instance – was this a text you found and thought you’d like to form a piece around it or did you need something to splice into a piece you had already started?
Ashley: So, a piece like that, this is going to sound bad but, I had homework due the next the day for class, a hybrid seminar on music and writing and I don’t even remember what the assignment was but she instructed us to write something based on this manifesto and I got home around ten or eleven and I’m half asleep looking at my computer and I read parts of the manifesto and I think because I was falling asleep, I was reading it and thought of my dad and started writing about him while I was reading that. I woke up the next morning and didn’t have time to edit or anything, I just read it over and submitted it and that was that. Then when I went into class we read it out loud and my professor said it was done.
Curlew: What a good feeling, that’s awesome. I think it comes across like you’re learning as you’re writing this piece so it’s very cool that that’s the context behind it. I love the idea of pairing prose with a source text. I think it's nice to analyze a moment in your life against another piece of work.
Ashley: Definitely.
Curlew: On that note, and this is a really hard question, and it doesn’t have to be all literary but who are your top five influences, whether its literature, visual art, music, film, anything.
Ashley: Oh man, okay. Honestly number one on the list, and it's always going to be number one and this is such a controversial thing and I’m sorry to everyone who’s going to hate me for it, but I love Charles Bukowski.
Curlew: Okay, that’s fine! I love Tarantino. We all have questionable favorites.
Ashley: (laughs) Right, thank you. But yeah, Bukowski, Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire.
Curlew: Love her. (points to tattoo) This is a Warsan Shire quote.
Ashley: Is it? I love her. Ocean Vaughn, too.
Curlew: Do you think with this MFA you’re doing that your ideal genre would be creative nonfiction?
Ashley: I have no idea, I don’t know what’s going on. Last semester I read Saeed Jones and he had brought his work to his agent as collection of poetic essays and his agent was like “I’m going to sell it as an autobiography” because that’s what was going to sell, and that’s what sold, but technically it is still a collection of poetic essays, so in that case can I just write a whole bunch of those?
Curlew: Right. Sometimes you can’t be precious about it and it doesn’t matter what it’s marketed as. Whatever sells.
Ashley: Exactly. So, I don’t know, I feel like I’ll write whatever comes to me. Ideally I’d like a poetic collection.
Curlew: I think it would be a very cool book visually if you had no rules when it came to form and it could stray from personal essay prose to a poem you have to figure out more. I feel like books that can't really be defined by genre are becoming much more accepted. Which is freeing but at the same time overwhelming because you’re like “I can write… anything?”
Ashley: Yeah, like I’m not into grammar or punctuation so if someone was like you have to do it, it’d be difficult.
Curlew: Totally. Where is your ideal writing setting?
Ashley: (without pause) My bed. I don’t understand how people like, go to a bar to write.
Curlew: (laughs) That’s me!
Ashley: How? I don’t get it! I feel like if my laptop is open everyone is staring at me.
Curlew: I need that. I know no one is actually looking at me, because no one cares, but in my head I’m like, must keep writing, people are watching. If I’m home and a line doesn’t come to me I’ll give up and watch TV, but if I’m in public I have to persist. It keeps me in line.
Ashley: I tried once, I was like I’m just going to go to the bar by Hunter and write this essay. No, my page was empty and I also had three empty beers. Or, I tried notebook on the train and thought people were reading over my shoulder.
Curlew: Some of my best ideas come to me in bed, under my covers, but if I need to finish something, I need a change of scenery. Then I say, “okay, I can get another beer if I finish this page.”
Ashley: Ah, the reward system.
Curlew: Love the reward system. Have you been reading anything in the past few months that you’ve been super into?
Ashley: Honestly, this summer for some reason, well it’s because I’m on tiktok and I stumbled across booktok, and now I’ve read every single Colleen Hoover book.
Curlew: Oh, I gotta go. (laughs)
Ashley: I know, it's embarrassing, I know.
Curlew: I get it though, if someone asked me, the answer would be horror books I found through Instagram videos called like “books that traumatized me so much I couldn’t eat afterward”. I’ve read no good literature this summer, it’s mostly just been me discovering Bravo.
Ashley: Have you heard about Scandoval? That’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s Vanderpump Rules.
Curlew: Oh no, that’s the only one I haven’t gotten into.
Ashley: Oh my god, really?
Curlew: This is so embarrassing, I have to delete this from the transcript (I did not) but I’m neck deep in Below Deck right now.
Ashley: People keep telling me to watch it.
Curlew: I love it. I will leave friends to go watch this show alone. When you’re stressed or sad nothing feels better than consuming the dumbest content you can.
Ashley: Yes, completely. This summer has just been like rot-your-brain summer.
Curlew: Cheers to that! So how much of your MFA program do you have left?
Ashley: It’s two years total, I’m going into my last year so this semester is our last with classes and then next is our thesis semester.
Curlew: What made you decide to do the MFA?
Ashley: I did undergrad in creative writing and thought if you’re going to do it, you might as well really do it. I think what I’ve gotten most from it, other than really good friendships, is discovering myself a little bit more. With poetry I am really into language and the way things sound, I get made fun of in my poetry group but I love alliteration.
Curlew: Never too much alliteration.
Ashley: Exactly. I liked meeting other people, learning how they write and then being more comfortable in my own writing.
Curlew: Since the program ends next year, what do you think your next goals are writing wise?
Ashley: I mean, ideally I’d like to get something substantial done.
Curlew: Is your final thesis a finished manuscript?
Ashley: Yeah it’s supposed to be sixty pages, so either individual poems or a longer form poem.
Curlew: Having a finished product will be so satisfying.
Ashley: Yeah, and I love meeting all these different people from different backgrounds that have come here for the program. so you meet people you would never have met before.
Curlew: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’m not a very good networker, but the more writers I meet, I find it is very nice and validating to speak to people with similar thoughts and processes to you. You can’t do something like writing by yourself, but it took me a really long time to realize that.
Ashley: Yeah, I didn’t really realize until this program. Without it you’re not pulling from anywhere, or getting any other perspective.
Curlew: Right, it’s an echo chamber.
Ashley: You need people.
Curlew: It’s so scary to present vulnerable work but so validating to have other eyes on it.
Ashley: Exactly, like I’m writing this but don’t look at it! My fiancé and friends are just now starting to read my work because I’ve just started submitting it, I’m doing it.
Curlew: It’s happening. So what do you think it means now to study poetry? I just feel like I never took classes that focused on proper form or line breaks.
Ashley: Yeah, so it is a lot of teaching forms I didn’t even know existed. A lot of reading other poets that came before, and a lot of talking to others within the program. It’s really just a lot of taking in then applying it all to your own work.
Curlew: Right.
Ashley: One workshop we worked on form for the beginning half of the class and then the second half of the class we workshopped, but it was different because you were able to read your piece and then explain it.
Curlew: Interesting. It sounds nice to be able to explain because once you hand something over you kind of lose control of it and that’s difficult.
Ashley: Yeah, once it’s out there, you’re not going to be able to explain what you meant to every reader and it’s just going to be what they’re taking so it’s really helpful to see what everyone else is taking because there have been times where I write something and they say “I’m picking up on this” and it’s not something I’m aware of. I think with a small poetry group like this it’s interesting since you learn everyone’s style of writing and so you would see my writing every week and know this is how I write so you would know how to offer the feedback to my specific writing in a way that’s actually beneficial to me.
Curlew: It’s interesting, hearing us talk about this I have a visual of a work of art where you see something new every time you look at it, or you’ve been staring at it for years and suddenly you see something in the corner you’ve never noticed. I think it's similar in literature, someone could read your piece and interpret it without even surpassing the first level of what you meant it to be and that’s still their experience, it’s how they’re taking it. It’s such a complete lack of control.
Ashley: Yeah, you’d like it though. It’s nice for people to see what you’re doing with your work and it’s because they care, like the people in your program care about you so they’re really paying attention.
Curlew: Yeah that’s really nice. Okay, I think I’m out of questions! Enjoy your last few weeks of summer, I always forget about summer vacation until I chat with someone in school.
Ashley: Summer vacation, woohoo! (laughs)
Curlew: Thanks so much for talking to me!
(lapses back into Bravo gossip)
