Jessica Anne Robinson : part one

Jessica Anne Robinson is a Toronto writer and, tellingly, a Libra. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming with Vast Chasm, untethered, Diagram, and Room magazine, among others. Her debut chapbook, OTHER MOTHERS’ FUNERALS, is being published with Frog Hollow Press. You can find her anywhere @hey_jeska.

How did you first engage with poetry?

My mom bought me Sharon Creech’s Heartbeat when I was about ten. Up until then I was a voracious reader but mostly read fiction novels, and it was then that I discovered you could write stories in verse, that poetry didn’t have to rhyme, that repetition could make for rhythm, and that you could in fact tell a story using a series of poems that interrelate. It paved the way for me to later learn that poetry does not necessarily need to be written in verse – and I did a lot of prose poetry writing for a while, particularly as an undergraduate. That book marked a turning point; from then on, when I said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I shifted from picturing a novelist to picturing a poet. Which was really for the best, because my novel drafts from those early days spent four chapters describing characters and scenery and feelings and never did get around to anything resembling a plot.