Below is a transcript of our conversation with Weston Wise:
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. When you're in college, you're preparing for that first big break. If you're a writer, you want to get published, and there are competitions to submit your work for awards. A CMU graduating senior from Breckenridge, MI, has done both twice. Weston Wise, thanks very much for joining us.
Weston Wise:
Thank you for having me.
David Nicholas:
First inspiration to become a writer or, or more specifically to become a poet. What was the thing that lit the spark for you?
Weston Wise:
So, I've wanted to be a writer, I guess since coming to college, but I started out thinking I wanted to write nonfiction. So, for me, the intro to poetry was an Intro to Creative Writing class that I took as just an elective within my English degree. I had never really explored contemporary poetry before that, so that kind of opened the door for poetry to me, and I kind of fell in love with it.
DN:
What about the nonfiction? You said that that was the original idea. What, nonfiction was there a particular kind of nonfiction that you thought you might write?
WW:
Yeah, I thought it would be fun to write, and I still do think it would be fun to write accessible articles for science, particularly maybe social science, like anthropology, things like that.
DN:
Two awards and two publications in one year and we talked a little bit about this even before we rolled tape. The significance of that as an undergrad; talk about the significance of that and what position it kind of makes you feel that you're in as you're getting closer to graduation.
WW:
I mean, I think it's super significant for me, especially the first award that I got sort of realizing that not only did I enjoy writing poetry, but other people thought it was worth publishing and also enjoyed reading my poetry. And to win something that was a national level competition, I guess, made me think more seriously about hey, I could, you know, do this as a career.
DN:
Do you ever find yourself or as your art is evolving, that, your poetry tends to reflect a consistent thread? Or theme?
WW:
Yeah. I think the biggest overarching theme is that a lot of my work I would categorize somewhere in the realm of dream poetry. So it's sort of…I guess the best way I could describe it is thinking of it like our world, but not quite, you know, weird, strange things can happen or the scene can just change randomly if you think about, you know, if you remember your dream, sometimes it'll just things will randomly change, but it makes sense to you in the moment. And not all, but I would say a large majority of the pieces in both of these collections are somewhere in that realm of being kind of dreamlike in quality, I guess.
DN:
Maybe that comes somewhat from the taking science and making it accessible. I, maybe I'm making a connection that isn't there, but I just wonder that that if that's if that's something the science can sometimes be hard to understand, maybe those, those random ideas or inspirations are coming in there.
WW:
Yes, and some of it too…I'm thinking of one poem in particular is imagining you know, some event in human evolution that maybe didn't happen and it's kind of fantastical in this sort of thing, right? But it's, yeah, it's kind of inspired by, you know, the real world sometimes, yeah.
DN:
And what are your plans, hopes, dreams, if you will, as graduation draws near for you?
WW:
Yeah, so my current plan is to hopefully go abroad and teach English as a foreign language. So, I'm hoping to do that through a Fulbright grant, but if I'm not offered that, there are a lot of other opportunities to go and do a similar thing. So.
DN:
Certainly, off to a good launching point for a career of creativity, Weston Wise, CMU senior, published and award-winning poet. Congratulations and thanks so much for joining us.
WW:
Thank you.
