Where We Are: A Conversation with Ann marie Houghtailing
I will let your heart beat like an ancient drum
and let you feel the suffering place
that can feel like an ocean with no horizon
You may want to run
but I invite you to stay
“The Suffering Place”
The transcendent nature of the written word allows us to see and be seen beyond the boundaries of time. Storytelling allows us to share and shoulder the joys and burdens of humanity, and writers like Ann marie Houghtailing embolden us to embrace this philosophy in our daily lives.
Ann marie Houghtailing is a multigenre writer, visual artist, and cofounder of the firm Story Imprinting. Her debut chapbook, Little by Little, will be published by Yellow Arrow Publishing in April 2025. Today, we are excited to introduce Ann marie along with the exquisite cover of Little by Little. Reserve your copy at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/little-by-little-paperback and make sure to leave some love for Ann marie here or on social media. This collection reflects on layers of loss universally experienced and offers communal suffering as a means of embracing wild resilience. It is a celebration of domestic storytelling that calls us to truly see ourselves, each other, and a world in which we are free to shamelessly grieve all the sorrows of this life—however slight—together.
Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, and Ann marie engaged in conversation over Zoom where they discussed acceptance and compassion in the creative process and the world.
Who are some of your favorite women-identified writers?
This is an interesting question to answer, because for me, writing and language do not come from my formal education alone, but from the storytelling tradition of the women that I grew up with. I dragged around a complete collection of Emily Dickinson when I was a teenager and studied all the women writers you would expect in college. But the truth is I was surrounded by storytelling my entire life. I grew up among women who “talk story,” a phrase that comes from my mother’s Hawaiian upbringing. They shared their lives through this medium as a way to make sense of their struggles and connect. This might be an unsatisfactory answer, but it is an accurate one. My writing is rooted in the gifts I was bestowed by women in my family and my culture. My sister was a teenager when I was born. She learned words just so she could teach them to me. She wasn’t really engaged in school for herself, but she wanted something better for me. No writer has done more for me than those women who were not formally educated, who no one will ever know, who embraced storytelling as a means of survival. My mother, my sister, my aunties, and my extended family are the people who made me revere storytelling.
That said, of course there are many women writers who have inspired me. Someone who is not a poet, but who I love dearly is Cheryl Strayed for the rawness of her work. I think she’s wildly undervalued. I also adore Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop. But I think that so often these kinds of dialogues miss the domestic storytelling that all my poetry is very much about. This particular group of poems (Little by Little) grapples with the nature of loss and was birthed after losing four members of my family in just over a year.
Can you share more about how these pieces came together as a complete chapbook?
All the poetry was written in response to this year of loss that I mentioned. My nephew died at 44 years of age. He was my sister’s only son. Then, my brother died when I was in Portugal, three months later. Our mom died surrounded by my family in my home nine months or so after that, and then my sister’s husband died a few months later. My sister, in the course of a year or so, lost her husband, her only son, her brother, and her mother. Imagine that. My brother-in-law was somebody I knew my entire life. These weren’t distant relatives; I lost my family. This all happened during the pandemic. No one could come and be with me in my grief. People had to love me from afar.
I was using writing and painting to try to survive and not lose my mind. I don’t think I was considering this as a collection. I was just waking up with poetry in my mouth, writing it down, walking the dog, and then writing again.
When I later looked back, I saw that there were themes about different kinds of loss. I also wrote a poem about a little girl and the loss of feeling perfect when you’re young. You have all this power because you think you can be anything. You can wear all the glitter and a crown while carrying a sword and walk through the world feeling wildly powerful, and then life chips away at you. That’s another kind of grief and loss. Learning to be with loss is a constant thread in life and this collection. It’s broken up into moments, some about death, but others about being a woman and feeling crushed or silenced by restricting expectations. People are grieving all the time: children leave the nest, beloved dogs die, relationships end, and people lose their jobs. I was wrestling with these ideas about loss and what it means to sit inside of grief. There are a million ways in which we grieve, and I think that as a society we’re incredibly uncomfortable with talking about loss and death. We’re typically ill-equipped to be open about grief. Recently, I’ve talked to numerous people who shared stories about friends who cut them off without explanation. That, too, is a kind of grief that is such a common experience that people have so much shame around. Death and loss in all its forms is everywhere.
What drew you to Yellow Arrow Publishing?
A friend of mine, Candace Walsh, published a collection (Iridescent Pigeons) with Yellow Arrow. She posted about it on social media, and it caught my attention. I just thought, “I have all these poems that are sitting around. I’m just going to send them off.” I had read her collection—she’s extraordinary—and started looking through all the material from Yellow Arrow available to read online. It just encouraged me to put my work out there.
Can you talk about the process of creating your cover art?
I’m using my own art, and I sent it to Alexa Laharty (creative director) for consideration. In consort with writing, I produced a series of paintings called the See Jane Project. I did one small painting every single day that I posted and sold. They were small 8-by-10 pieces addressing visibility and invisibility. The name Jane is laden with cultural references. We call an unidentified, murdered woman, Jane Doe. Plain Jane is a phrase used to describe a woman that doesn’t meet cultural beauty standards. There are all these ways in which Jane, as a name, has cultural power that’s largely negative. I wanted to challenge that idea.
All these paintings came with little bios and backstories. None of the bios referenced the relationships in their life. It was all about who they were and their little quirks. If you go to a bookstore there are so many book titles that reference women in relationship to someone else. For example, the Pilot’s Wife, The Bone Setter’s Daughter, and on and on and on. It’s so interesting the way women are valued or defined in terms of their role in a relationship. The cover art is a collage piece of a woman with a typewriter on her head. It came from the same period as the poems, so it felt very right to pair these together.
I will rock in the cradle of sorrow with you
I will stand in the darkness until morning with you
I will go back and back and back to a place I’ve never been with you
“I Will”
Your poems on suffering are truly insightful. I appreciated the different spin on how this concept is usually presented or perceived. What would it look like to sit in someone’s suffering? And what would the world look like if we did more of this for each other?
This is really important to me. I just lost a dear friend. I was with her when she took her last breath. Sitting in suffering is allowing someone to be in pain without judgment or interference. It’s the ability to bear witness. I think most of us want to run away from it because we want people to be okay. It’s hard to witness suffering. To honor the suffering of another is transformational. We’re all guilty of saying that we’re fine when we’re not because we don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable. After experiencing so much loss I would say, “I’m terrible, but I’m sure it will get better.” I could tell that people didn’t know what to do with that. We don’t know how to be okay with people who are not okay.
I remember years ago I was going through a really hard time. I was with a friend of mine in a Target parking lot, and my seatbelt got stuck in the car. I just got so pissed off and was yelling. And she did the most generous thing anybody could have done. She put her hand on mine, and said, “I know you’re super angry right now, and you have every single right to be. Things have been so hard. This isn’t who you are, it’s just where you are, and I’m going to be here with you.” It was the most radical thing somebody could do because people want to shut down or turn away from somebody who is filled with pain or rage or sorrow. We want to tell them they’re fine or it will all be okay. I don’t know that we always need to be cheered up. I think we need to be where we are without shame or apology. There are some things you cannot fix. People will get sick or die, the worst things will happen. People lose their children; their loved one will be drug-addicted or mentally ill. It is agonizing. But being with somebody, just being in it, is not nothing. It’s everything, but most people can’t do it.
It always shocks people, but after all this loss I experienced I did a year of volunteering with hospice. People would say, “Oh, my God! How could you do that? Why would you do that? After all this?” For me it was affirming and made me useful. Being with someone at the end of life is a singular experience. It’s the most vulnerable anybody is ever going to be. It’s honest, pure, and sacred. It’s the most precious place you can occupy. I can think of no greater privilege than sitting with the dying.
I also loved the concept of poetry as food in your collection. From your perspective, how is poetry important for our world?
Everyone who reads poetry knows that it’s the most nutrient rich language. Everything’s packed in there; you’re getting the most out of the language. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the right story or the right poem at the right moment can save you. It’s like medicine for your soul. Poetry is a portal to go deeper and examine what it means to be human. It’s a way to connect with other people who may not even be living anymore. You realize you are part of this greater human experience. You are a person who has a broken heart, as millions and millions of people before you. It makes you feel less alone.
The modern version of this is why people are obsessed with memes, right? There’s something that strikes some little chord in them that vibrates when they hear the right thing. They think, “That’s me. You’re talking to me.” That’s what poetry does. It speaks to us. For me, who is not a spiritual person at all, the closest I can get to spirituality is through poetry.
We did not need bread
nor butter
We feasted only on words
fat with truth
dripping with the warmth of breath
“Feasting on Truth”
Can you share more about your visual art process and how that might speak to you or interconnect with your poetry?
I didn’t know anything about neuroaesthetics until after I’d gone through the grieving process. Then I read about it and understood why I was painting and writing. It was keeping me present. It was definitely the tactile aspect of it for me. I distinctly remember being in my studio and having moments where I couldn’t even use a brush because I didn’t want that distance between myself and the canvas. I wanted to get paint on my hands and under my nails and in my hair. It was a way to hold on to life. All my work is filled with color, which is very much rooted in my mom’s background from Hawai’i. If you look at the room I’m in right now, it’s like an explosion of color. Color is joyful. It’s life affirming. The cross-section of painting and writing were the ways in which this intersection of life and death were coming together for me. Pain coexists inside of life. All my suffering had something to do and somewhere to go. I spent lots of really late nights in my studio making bad art, and okay art, and kind of good art, and none of it mattered. It was process focused. I could feel it making me a little bit better every day, just a little, tiny bit better every day.
Would you like to share about your work with Story Imprinting?
Story Imprinting is the business that I run with my business partner, Holly Amaya. We work with large corporate clients and teach them the neuroscience, application, and structure of storytelling for leadership. They learn how to use storytelling in business development, recruiting, and management. Storytelling is something that humanizes the corporate world, and it helps connect people more deeply than just data, statistics, or fact patterns. Whether you’re talking about how to give somebody feedback or how to deliver a keynote or a presentation, storytelling is the most powerful tool at your disposal. This is not just my opinion. It’s backed by neuroscience and extensive scholarship. We train large corporate clients all over the country, largely in big tech, big law, and big accounting. Those are primarily the verticals we operate in.
Do you have any words of wisdom for the women-identified writers in our audience?
Writing can be such a tender, fragile thing. There’s an impulse to want to keep it to yourself and not let the world step all over it. The fear of criticism is real. If you want to be true to yourself, you have to turn off that noise. Don’t get me wrong, you need quality feedback. But not all feedback is equal. Writing isn’t for you to stick in a drawer. Writing is for readers. You have to make yourself vulnerable. You cannot be defined by the people who don’t love your work or think your work is garbage. Those aren’t your people. But if you have enough people that support your writing and say that it’s meaningful, that’s all that matters. You don’t need everyone’s approval. You don’t need anyone’s approval to write. You need to write, because that’s who you are. Be brave.
Do you have any future projects that we should keep an eye out for?
I’m currently working on a book proposal. It’s still an infant. It’s also about grief and the creative process. I’m hoping it finds a home. I’ve learned so much from my own experience and will also discuss what some of the research says about how creativity can support the grieving process.
Thank you Ann marie and Melissa for such an engaging conversation. You can find out more about Ann marie Houghtailing and her work at annmariehoughtailing.com and can order your copy of Little by Little at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/little-by-little-paperback. We appreciate your support.
Little by Little by Ann marie Houghtailing explores the universality of human suffering and how we find our way to meaning and purpose. Houghtailing is a visual artist and cofounder of the firm Story Imprinting. She delivered a TEDx Talk entitled Raising Humans and performed her critically acclaimed one woman show, Renegade Princess, in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and San Diego. “Little by little” is the phrase that Houghtailing’s mother used to say when things were hard. Things were almost always hard. Houghtailing grew up in a culture of poverty and witnessed violence, struggle, and wild resilience every day. What she did not realize was that her mother’s phrase would become a life affirming strategy. It was a map that took her back to herself when life took so much from her.
From 2019–2020, four members of Houghtailing’s family died in rapid succession, including her mother. Their deaths were an extension of historic and epigenetic trauma that would require her to sit inside of suffering and paint, write, and garden her way through to transformation. Little by Little delves into how Houghtailing was able to find meaning in the suffering by examining the beauty of life itself. Every day we experience loss. The loss of innocence, youth, relationships, jobs, money, confidence, power, life, and hope are in constant play. Learning to sit inside of deep suffering can be intellectually, emotionally, and physically demanding territory that invites us to examine who we are and what we are made of. Little by Little is a way to see, a way to suffer, and ultimately, a way to live.
Melissa Nunez makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of south Texas, where she enjoys exploring and photographing the local wild with her homeschooling family. She writes an anime column at The Daily Drunk Mag and is a prose reader for Moss Puppy Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and interviewer for Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her work at her website melissaknunez.com and follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez and Instagram @melissa.king.nunez.
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