A Conversation with Phoebe Nerem
Phoebe Nerem is a creative writer and visual artist torn between beauty and terror. Their work explores queerness, feeling crazy, and having a romantic fascination with fire. After miraculously earning their Bachelor’s from DePaul University, their artistic and written work has been featured in numerous publications, including Get Back To Print's “Luminous Beings Are We” and Emotional Alchemy’s “Sex, Love, and Other Magic.” Now, Phoebe continues to feel crazy and ravenously reads, writes, and creates artwork for the beloved collective.
Phoebe’s poems, “floriography” and “floriography (reprise),” can be read in Issue no. 1 of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine.
Ridah: First, can you tell me a little about your writing journey?
Phoebe: I’ve been writing since third grade. I wrote a picture book about a bunny, and I was so proud of it. I was on and off writing fiction until I was like 13, and then I started getting, you know, angsty. Poetry kind of seemed to be like a more natural outlet for me.
Then, I kind of stopped writing until college. I don't think I really considered myself a writer until I started getting back into it, and I think the only reason I started getting back into it was because of the community that I found in my college with writing.
I think that having a group of people there to support you and give you feedback on your work and allow yourself to be perceived by was really motivating for me. Ever since then, I've kind of been non-stop writing poetry, writing fiction, stuff like that.
My poetry journey has always been my creative crutch, when I'm kind of processing something difficult that has happened to me. Or if I'm experiencing challenging emotions, then that's the easiest avenue for me to do it. I think because it comes easily to me, I'm always trying to push myself in that genre.
So now I'm at a point with my poetry, where I'm like, what can I do differently? What have I not been doing that I can start and be more experimental?
Ridah: In terms of being experimental, what are some things that you've done that felt outside of your comfort zone or your safe zone?
Phoebe: My safe area, I would say, is being very much an abstraction and using verbose metaphors that are kind of like an inside joke to me. Any reader who wasn't living inside my palace would understand, and that's like my safe zone.
But if I am writing a poem with the intention of it being read by someone else, I try to push myself outside of that abstraction. I try to connect it a little bit more to reality and use more concrete imagery and memory. I kind of just say what I mean more than dance around it like if I was writing solely to process something.
Ridah: Your poem, “floriography,” means the language of flowers, but what does the title mean to you?
Phoebe: I was inspired to write it because my aunt had given me this book called Floriography and it was based on Victorian etiquette of different kinds of flowers you would give for different occasions. And some of them can get really petty, like “hope you stay sick” flowers. Yellow roses? Don't take them as a compliment.
So I was really curious about how all of these different flowers can symbolize all these different kinds of emotions. At the time, I was processing something really hard that had happened to me.
This is kind of where I get into my abstraction. I used floriography as kind of a language to talk about my feelings in the aftermath of trauma and give it some color. I tried to find a more palatable, concrete language to examine them through, and that book Floriography was like my lab.
Ridah: Can you walk me through a little of your writing process? Are you more of a sit down and do everything in one sitting writer or going back to your work in pieces?
Phoebe: It honestly depends on what I’m writing, with poetry I’m more likely to do it all in one sitting. There are exceptions, but for me, writing fiction for example is like walking into the scene you're writing and being in a headspace you can make room for. Whereas poetry is more about tapping into a specific emotion.
I have to ask myself, do I want to escape reality or deal with reality? I think my best poetry often comes out like word vomit, like I just have to get it all down and handle emotions. The poems that I spend like weeks on, they just occupy different spaces in my brain.
Ridah: This piece, specifically, I felt a lot of raw emotion, a silent rage and tension, which connected with me emotionally. I think it fits perfectly in the “Tooth” section with that rawness. You mentioned using poetry as a way to process emotions through this piece, what else were you trying to channel or convey to the reader?
Phoebe: Specifically throughout the poem, I'm referencing a meadow, right? And I'm alluding to the fact that I made this meadow. To be super literal, the meadow is my defenses that have cropped up since going through something difficult, my crutches, the things I use to comfort myself. The recipient of my rage is this meadow instead of whatever caused me to feel the rage.
The emotions I felt, rage is definitely one of them, but also this sense of vindication and self-validation, and being like, maybe this meadow doesn't have to be so protective of me. I'm so fucking proud of myself that I made it and this is the product of something terrible that happened to me, so there’s also a sense of righteousness there too.
Ridah: With that rawness and righteousness in mind, you also wrote a reprise version of "floriography." This piece feels more mellow and reflective than the original. What was the thought process behind this piece, and was it something that came naturally or planned out?
Phoebe: I didn’t plan a reprise for this poem until I read it at a literary event and got incredible feedback from the audience. I realized I couldn’t incorporate everything I wanted into this poem.
“floriography (reprise)” is kind of me going back through the original "floriography" with this lens of retrospect. Towards the end of the poem, it mentioned something about the meadow and how I won't be sticking around, and I think the reprise is more flower-focused, but also more about letting go of all of this gravity and weight that has been building up since the original poem.
Ridah: I also noticed that there are a few religious motifs, like you mention Eve and Heaven as symbolism. What were you trying to showcase or comment on using those?
Phoebe: I’m not religious, but I’ve always considered myself a very spiritual person. So when something earth shattering happens to me, my first question is “God, why?” I think after experiencing something traumatic, there's such a gritty sense of unfairness, and, “why me? what did I do to deserve this?” that you're trying to reckon what happened to you with something that is presumably listening.
So when I bring images or references of God, or the universe, or spirits, or whatever into my poems, I think it’s kind of to demonstrate how existential these feelings can feel and how they really make you question everything that you thought that you knew.
Ridah: My last question for you, as you mentioned earlier with challenging yourself and being more experimental, what does that look like for you? What are some of your future goals?
Phoebe: I am currently working on a novel, which is a big and scary challenge. I really try to be disciplined about it because I’ve started like five different novels in my life and never finished. So I'm gonna try to really stick it out for this one because I believe in the idea a lot.
With my poetry, oh gosh, it's so hard to describe my writing. It can be like you're reading fiction even though I’m talking about real emotions, but I often do it through fictional or figurative lenses with my poetry. I kind of want my poetry to shift left from that and be punchier, a little bit more expressive and a little bit more unapologetic about what it has to say and about how it feels.
