Get to know our authors, the foundation and heart of Yellow Arrow Journal, and what writing means to them through our monthly series.
W.o.W. #57
Maria S. Picone
Describe an early experience where you learned that language has power.
I’m five or six years old. My uncle has been diagnosed with ALS [Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis], my father, his brother, is struggling with workplace injuries and depression, and I’m at my grandmother’s (his mother’s) watching a TV special about Lou Gehrig in black and white with her, listening to his “luckiest man in the world” speech. The words are echoing in the stadium and in my head. There’s a black-and-white quality to the way meaning and irony enter my grandmother’s living room, something about the idea of “luck” that adults always tell me I’m the recipient of as an adoptee. I learn that “lucky” isn’t always a good thing, that it’s something people call you when facing bad circumstances.
What period of your life do you find you write about most often?
I find myself returning often to childhood, a well of memories and emotions that I fear losing access to as I get older. But sometimes it’s the most miserable times in my life that are the most vivid—graduating into the recession, losing loved ones, struggling with mental health and self-harm.
What does your inner writing voice tell you?
I’m not sure if I have an inner writing voice, but aside from the compulsion to check on the dishes and the cleanliness of the bathrooms when I sit down to write, a lot of advice to wait and be patient has been inculcated in me from various sources. A type of Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day feeling toward my writing career and body of work.
How did you first publish your writing and what was it?
My first pieces, translations of Rilke’s French prose poems, were published in Able Muse in 2014. At the time, and when I came back to writing in late 2019, I was desperate for credits so I’m lucky that I had such a great experience with some of my earliest publications. As for self-publishing, I think grade school has great bookmaking experiences—construction paper, staples, visual illustration. and all that. I wrote my first book when I was six and my intended audience were classmates who were reading picture books.
Maria S. Picone/ 수영 is a queer Korean American adoptee who won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. Her debut chapbook, Adoptee Song, was published in late 2022. She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, The Seventh Wave, Fractured Lit, and more, including Best Small Fictions 2021. Her work has been supported by The Juniper Institute, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, GrubStreet, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. She is Chestnut Review’s managing editor, Hanok Review’s poetry editor, and Uncharted Mag’s associate editor. Find out more at mariaspicone.com or on Twitter @mspicone.
“They need to invent a Korean word for adoptee sorrow” was included in Yellow Arrow Journal PEREGRINE, Vol. VII, No. 2, Fall 2022. You can find Maria reading her poem with other PEREGRINE authors in Fly to Me, Speak to Me: A PEREGRINE Reading on the Yellow Arrow YouTube Channel.