I’m always writing about soil, and water, and trees, and places that revolve around these things. I never intend on the first go round with a first draft of prose or a poem to add those things, but it always seems to happen. One of my favorite poems I’ve written, is in which feminine perspective in regards to the loss of societal control over one’s body is shared. The voice that houses this perspective is encased in lotus flowers, as I offer up another version of the section of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus comes across the island of the lotus eaters. Ironically, I’m currently writing a short story in which a man loses his wife to the sea, and now he’s haunted by siren song that drives him to madness. I know both of these pieces seem mystical, and are based off of supernatural creatures and stories, but I suppose that’s because the natural elements that construct them feel supernatural themselves. That’s probably why all the great, old, and dead writers people study probably wrote about running around in the forest, being in awe of everything. I think I’m always subconsciously adding the natural world into my work because I am subconsciously always trying to explain things bigger than myself. The thing that is bigger than me can be societal expectations and the span of time from which they grew, or it can be racial commentary, or a good old existential/spiritual questioning. This is easy for me to do, combining nature in my pieces, because nature is something that always has been and always will be bigger than people. Even though man manipulates the earth, the rocks, the water, and the trees, the Earth will still be here, regenerating itself long after people are gone. The natural world is like a phoenix. No matter how many times it comes to the brink, no matter what occurs within it and upon it, with time, it will heal itself. Nature is a balanced thing. Humans disrupt that balance. Then there’s chaos. So I think that juxtaposition itself too, draws me to use nature. It’s like the stories we’ve heard of people taking things from the land they aren’t supposed to, facing great consequences. Humanity has built itself up to think that we are the best thing there is to offer, that we are all there is, when in reality, a hurricane can destroy us so simply, and with such ease. Earthquakes swallow us up like old gods waking up from a nap. It’s insane to think about, how perfectly constructed it all is. If you have nature and people at war with each other, man may seem to win, but there’s always the underlying knowledge that we are so temporary compared to everything else. The land only needs itself, it never ever needed us, and on the occasions it does, it’s only because we have compromised it in a way that makes our own conscious feel heavier. Nature is all powerful. It is reliable. It is something that cannot be questioned. That is why I feel the need to incorporate it into my words, because I want my words to be like that, even if sometimes I don’t know it. It’s beautiful and unknown and an enigma we can see and cannot see at the same time. I think I crave the balance. That’s why there’s always rolling waves, or petals, or soil birthing new life in my words. –Kiara Ivey, Layout and Design Editor

I was outside a lot as a kid; my dad took me to the woods, my grandma took me to the swamp, and I took up the habit of reading outside, beneath the adolescent peach trees we planted before moving from South Carolina. Not only did being outdoors afford me a wicked tan, but my contact with nature throughout my childhood has given me a foundation of ideas to spout from in my writing. Emotionally, nature has a lot to offer in writing. As a general example, weather can impact a scene’s tone as strongly as making a character explicitly weep. The sun brings happiness. The heat brings stagnancy. The storm brings violence. The rain brings rejuvenation. But, to step even deeper, it helps me to draw from personal experience with nature in order to create a stronger emotional output within my writing. Nature, for me, tends to be a communicative setting that my characters or poetic speakers interact with in a way that brings up certain childhood memories. I have written many times about one place called Kingsley Lake; if you live in North Florida, you may have heard of it, but otherwise, it’s a body unknown to most. This lake is where I have spent a week from each of my summers since I was nine. It’s a place where I feel safe, detached from the world, and uninterrupted. In other words, it’s pretty zen there, aside from the sunburns. But what can I write about this place when it feels entirely positive? There is always some meat to an experience if you ponder it long enough. In my poem “Kingsley Lake Escape” (which you can read in Élan: Fall 2016 Online Edition at https://elanlitmag.org/issues/archives/), I had to dig for the reality of being at Kingsley Lake, and in doing so, I discovered how scared I am of leaving that place every year to return to reality. To communicate this idea, the natural aspects of the setting can be manipulated and interpreted in order to portray the appropriate emotions to match the intention. The main aspect of the lake that I focused on in the poem was the water, in its bathwater-like serenity that I wanted to communicate the calm of chilling in the lake. But there are a lot of other aspects of nature at the lake that I didn’t mention in the poem: the tree whose leaves spill over the lake house during bad storms, the sand that stains your feet beige by the end of the second day, and the heat lightning that silently lights up the sky when night rolls around and the air cools accordingly. In settings, nature can be used to make the reader feel almost any emotion; you just have to be willing to make the sensation personal, and in doing so, allow yourself to write from your own experiences with storms, forests, and other natural occurrences that hold emotional potential to draw from. -Logan Monds, Co-Social Media Editor

Poetry seems to be a sort of elusive creature to a lot of people. When people read poetry it seems to slip right past them, the words on the page cluttering together and then becoming a smaller and smaller dot on the page until they are almost nothing, the meaning gone with the readers want to find meaning, and writing it can be very much the same way. You don’t know what you are writing until it is out there on the page and even then, you find yourself wondering “what even is this?” or “am I okay?” But, in the words of poet Li-Young Lee “a poem is like a score for the human voice.” Poetry may be elusive, and will confound us at times, but it cannot be denied that when truly and thoroughly read poetry is a universal language in which all our souls connect and speak in. Thoroughly written, it becomes a language for us to explore our own selves, and by extent, other people as well. Therefore when posed with the question of what inspires my poetry, I have to say that I think that everything inspires my poetry, even things that I don’t know inspire it. If you were to ask me two years ago what I thought about poetry, and what inspired me I couldn’t have given you an answer. That is because poetry was still an elusive beast to me, and I had yet to unlock the deep emotional connection with my writing that it takes to write it. I only began to write poetry, and get inspiration for it, when I realized that there was something deep within myself that begged to be explored and heard. A voice that could not be let out in my everyday life. A score that I needed to write, for my voice, and for the voices of people who have lived through similar experiences and don’t have the privilege (and curse) of knowing how to write about it. I am inspired every day, by the things I feel, and the things I see that make me feel. If an experience is strong enough to make me cry, or laugh, or be angry I know that it is worth writing about. I am inspired by the words of poets like Li-Young Lee whose craft and mastery of words seems otherworldly to me, being able to string together the perfect line that makes even the people who don’t want to read poetry stop and think for even just a moment. Poetry is an elusive animal, one that I don’t think even the most skilled poets have learned to tame. It is an animal that resides inside every one, a voice that is waiting to be unlocked, a voice spoken through the inspiration of every humans common experiences and connections. -Zac Carter, Co-Art Editor

Growing up, I wasn’t a big fan of the outdoors. I was a brownie in a Girl Scout troop, but I always skipped out on the camping trips. The thought of sleeping outside of a house where bugs were most definitely present and there was the prospect of wild animals never seemed alluring to me. I sometimes walked around parks with my friends, but if a bug even buzzed around her heads at a pitch too high for our liking we’d make our way back inside. I found air conditioning and glass sliding doors more comforting than any ducks’ pond or shady tree. Since I have started writing, I have learned to pay attention to the smaller details. I’ve been in line to buy an item of clothing and heard a single sentence from my fellow customers behind me that spark an idea in my head. I’ve watched my mom fiddle with her bracelets and watch the sound they make tumbling down her wrist, and knew that I needed to write that moment down. The neon color of a hat will give me a story idea. The way a stranger glances back at her car while walking into a store will give me a poem idea. This attention to smaller details of human nature made me feel as if my lack of appreciation of actual nature could be holding me back in my writing life. How could I pay attention to the smaller details in life when I wasn’t paying attention to the smaller details that made up the physical realm of everyone’s lives? It’s the squirrel that seemed to run into the road as soon as it saw me coming at 45 mph. It’s the Japanese plum trees that grow bulbs of yellow and tilt slightly to the right. The smallest of details are the ones I pass everyday without even thinking about them, the ones that were here before I was born, before my mother was born, and beyond. I now try to incorporate the physical beauty of nature into my writing, but not in just the description of setting or comparing someone’s eyes to a blossoming rose. I try to compare physical nature to human nature, two very present aspects of our lives that are both predictable and unpredictable. I think that is why both natures are so interesting to write about. For example, the ocean is vast and what lives underneath is surface is both a mystery and perpetual fear to humans. However, what we know for sure is that the white bubble waves of the ocean will always come back and meet the shore. I think humans are like that as well. You can think someone is the most complex person in the world, but everyone has habits and flaws. Everyone has basic instincts that kick in when in a situation. It is human nature. I still don’t find myself in nature, but it’s not because I’m avoiding it. Somehow as I’ve written about the beauty of nature and what it can represent in humans, I’ve found myself wanting to be surrounded by sunlight, whistling birds, and crouching trees with swinging moss. When I’m able to write outdoors, I breathe in crisp, spring air and breathe out whatever I’m writing, all while swatting at a mosquito the process. -Chelsea Ashley, Digital Media Editor

Nature is wonderful—Baobab trees are mystifying, marvels of Peru are enchanting, and Nudibranchs are striking. The ocean is terrifying considering how much we do not know. In the words of Walt Whitman, “give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed”. But, given where I live, this is not quite so easy to access. I see many trees dripping with moss from inside my car as I drive and I see pruned wax myrtles swell with bobbing lizards while I walk my dog Neither of these are particularly inspiring to me, having become a part of the early-morning/way-too-late-night generic landscape. They are beautiful, but spark no inspiration. They’re pleasant and colorful—like Mike and Ikes—but ultimately fade to the background. For me, the exception to this rule is birds. Descended from dinosaurs, wickedly smart and completely misunderstood, these feathered heroes (when observed in the world) can’t not inspire. European Great Tits bludgeon bats to death. Nuthatches booby-trap their nests with poison. Lyrebirds can perfectly mimic the sounds of camera shutters and chain saws. They behave particularly, and often bizarrely, and the least flashy are sometimes the most interesting. I have written many short stories and poems about birds, and briefly considered studying ornithology in college. I think the draw, for me, is both the mystique and the opportunities for anthropomorphization. Specific birds remind me of specific people, and for readers, a bird is something often easy to understand as the first layer of a metaphor. There’s a reason that there are state birds (Florida’s is the Northern Mockingbird), and that ancient peoples worshiped them. They’re ancient, but still quirky. They’re hollow humans that can fly—and have personalities often just as defined. PROMPT: Research a bird species and write a poem or short story where the bird is a metaphor for a person in your life or a character’s life. Fiction minimum 400 words; poetry minimum 15 lines. -Zarra Marlowe, Managing Editor

Lately, all of my poetry has depended on prompts and lessons given in class. I think it’s good for a poet or just a writer to get their poetry from a classroom structure, but I also think too much structure can lead to less creativity. I’m guilty of not often taking time out of my personal day to write anything. But when I do find the time, I go to the bookshelf for inspiration. I only own a few poetry books. The one I go to most often is by Nikki Giovanni: “Black Feeling Black Talk Black Judgment.” What I find inspiring in this collection of poems is the speakers that Giovanni brings to light. They are some of the most unapologetic, emotionally vulnerable speakers I’ve ever seen in poetry. It’s something I think Giovanni has mastered in her poetry and I seek to create in my poetry as well. I’m in Junior Poetry and we’ve learned about sound and meter and different forms of poetry such as ekphrastic and ars poetica. Understanding these elements of poetry causes me to look at it differently when I read and write. I can find different intents through the form on the surface or the sound beneath, underlying the contents of the poem. This inspires my poetry because it is the foundation for all poetry. I’m no Poe or Longfellow, I’m nowhere near to mastering these foundations, but I think it’s incredible the power that lies in the confines of poetry. It is one of the more compact forms of writing, but in that short time, short if you don’t count epic poetry, an entire story is delivered, narrator, conflict, resolution, or lack thereof, and the reader can make a connection, one I think can be even stronger than a full-length fiction piece. What inspires me to write poetry most of all are experiences. When I’m lost for an idea, I go back in my mind and find a personal moment I can create a new speaker from. This can become overused as there are only so many prominent experiences one can access, but that’s another thing about being a writer. Experiences can be reshaped, seen through a different lens every time to create the freshest recounting. This also applies to experiences that aren’t personal, something I’ve seen on TV, in the news, or something I’ve watched someone else go through. I think these experiences are just as strong as personal ones and can create the most universality. –Lindsay Yarn, Creative Nonfiction/ Co-Web Editor

In most conversations about what makes a poem a poem, form is discussed. One of the seemingly defining factors of a poem is its line breaks. Whether it be sprawling free verse, or the strict nature of a sestina, a key identifying factor of poetry is its visual appearance. Line breaks are a key poetic tool to manipulate mood and to segment images—they are, in many ways, one of the few things poetry has no other genre does. I’ve always considered myself someone who can express themselves better narratively than abstractly. Because of this, I have struggled with the more nebulous nature of poetry, particularly regarding telling a story within the form. Then, I discovered the prose poem. Prose poems are the Weird Westerns of the writing world. Prose poems dip their French fries in milkshakes, and put Cheetos in their sandwiches. Prose poems pronounce milk “mulk”. The ability to anchor my images within a prose-like structure in many ways enables me to let the images flower naturally, and my idea tend to follow a more natural progression when they aren’t being stuffed into visual tube tops. Don’t get me wrong—poetry is a majestic form, and line breaks are the stakes keeping the vine growing up. Take the stake away, the vine collapses into a bowl of spaghetti. A prose poem is a bowl of spaghetti that you can read. For some reason, surrealism blooms in prose poems. But so does honesty, because the imagery and syntax of poetry bring emotion into the space that swells without form to keep it clean. For a long time, I thought prose poems were not in fact poems, largely because of the aforementioned belief that line breaks are the foundation of poetry. Humans naturally reject things they can’t easily categorize, and prose poems trample on category. Some think they should be considered as a genre of their own—my previous self, included—which is fair. But genre, like so many other things, is only a set of rules meant to be broken. However, the foundation of poetry is music—poems were originally meant to be sung. It is the sound of a poem that makes it a poem, which is why when you remove the line breaks of a poem, you can still tell it is one. It doesn’t matter to me if the prose poem is a poem, or something else entirely. What matters is that they are uniquely dynamic and engaging worms of writing that sometimes kick you in the face and tell you to like it. PROMPT: Take an experience within your life and explore it through a surreal prose poem. Use aliens, mythological figures, or any other fantastic images/language you can think of. Through the fantasy/sci-fi aspects, explore the emotional consequences of this experience. -Zarra Marlowe, Managing Editor

Until my junior year of high school, I hadn’t given poetry a thought, or a chance. I decided that non fiction, was my first love, and felt it was my last. That's the thing, I didn’t understand first loves, or last loves, and I’m not claiming I do now, but I do know that in order to love something, to love it hard, you, have to explore it, make the effort to understand it, and fully accept it for it’s truest form. Writing is no different. I never expected poetry to so quickly grasp me in its arms, and shake some sense in to me. Before poetry I constantly doubted myself as a writer, I didn’t think I was deserving of that title. How did I know I was any good? Poetry on the other hand taught me, that its not always about being good; it’s about feeling. Non fiction allowed me to tell the truth, but only parts of the truth that I wanted to say, fiction allowed me to hide. I was surprised to find out that when writing a poem, every part of me fell on to the paper, and I didn’t know, until I was done, and there was no going back. Not only was I writing poetry, but I was exposed to so many great poets that year, Richard Blanco, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Smith, Naomi Shihab Nye, just to name a few.  Exploring poetry, and realizing that every word counts, made me a better writer when it came to fiction, and non fiction. Thats what I mean, when saying that in order to love something you have to explore it, you have to understand the mechanics, and the rules, and the reasons.  Now I can’t imagine a life with out poetry. Poetry feels like writing in its purest form. Writing that can’t be harmed by too much emotion, and the slow meaningful process of revision. Poetry made me believe in humanity, and empathy more than I ever knew. Poetry is life through metaphors, too beautiful to ever be ugly, but powerful enough to hurt. A writing prompt that I constantly go back to, is one recommended by Patricia Smith: imagine the  person you have had the hardest relationship with is dead, lying on a marble slab in an empty room. It is your job to dress them, describe each item of clothing that you place on their body, describe the room, describe what it feels like to touch that persons body. This prompt will bring up emotions, you may need to feel, and helped me let go of a lot of things I held on to. If you attempt this prompt, don’t over think it, just go with what you feel. You can always revise later, but you can’t revise words you never put down. -Mary Feimi, Co-Editor in Chief

In school, we are tested by our ability to comprehend prompts and answer their questions through essay format. We are graded on our diction, syntax, and if we actually answered the question. Before students even get to college, where it seems term papers are at their peak numbers, we know the five paragraph format like the back of our hands. Sure, we can cut it down to four or three paragraphs and even up the ante with as many paragraphs as the teacher requires. We are not writing for ourselves, but for the teacher and most importantly: the grade. That is what worried me about creative-nonfiction essays. I was tolerant of essays about books I’d read over the summer or what president was my favorite, but writing an essay on an experience that was actually personal to me seemed a little over the top. I was first introduced to the idea of writing creative non-fiction work my freshman year of high school. We read pieces out of miscellaneous collections by well-known writers and also writers that weren’t as known but had stories that needed to be shared. That’s how my teacher hooked me on the idea of writing essays about your own experiences. We all have stories that need to be shared, whether we consider ourselves a writer or not. My teacher allowed us to explore the idea of writing these essays for ourselves instead of feeling as if we had to write about the experiences that would shock or allow happiness for other people. That was a worry of mine. I, along with my fellow classmates, had been writing academic papers for so long that I felt the need to write for my audience. With creative non-fiction, you are your own audience and when you cater to the needs of yourself you will consequentially impart wisdom to your readers. That year, I wrote about everything my thirteen-year-old mind could possibly imagine. Deaths in my family, lost dogs, and self-esteem riddled the pages of my composition books. Now, these topics seem weak to me. I’ve experienced new things, learned from them, and can write about them with stronger diction and tactful syntax. However, one aspect of my creative non-fiction writing that has not changed is how I can learn about myself from these pieces. When writing fiction and even poetry, you can find yourselves in the characters, imagery, etc. When writing creative non-fiction, I have no choice but to find myself in the work because I am the entire piece. Sometimes, the piece doesn’t revolve around me but I am there in the background or on the sidelines. Either way, it is illuminating to step outside of your body and see yourself on that page in a way that you didn’t see yourself in that moment. Presently, I find myself using creative non-fiction outside of the essay format. I dabble in writing strictly about my own experiences from time to time, but I find my experiences expand and grow into something bigger than myself when I input them into my other work. I insert milestones of my life into my poems and place poignant moments of my own into stories. It doesn’t have the same effect as creative non-fiction, where I put myself out on the page and make the reader analyze me. However, it does allow me to flesh out ideas and characters with the one thing I know better than any five-paragraph-format: myself. Prompt: Pick one room of your house randomly. Think about all the events that have happened in that room, no matter if they are monumental or seemingly irrelevant. Choose the event that you weren’t directly involved in but somehow impacted you. Write a creative non-fiction piece about it from your perspective. -Chelsea Ashley, Digital Communications Editor

When I first started writing the only genre I enjoyed was Fiction. I liked making up stories and being placed in worlds greater then our own. I thought Poetry was what you see on the back of milk cartons and what my sister hides under her pillows. Poems about romantic love and heartbreak, both of which I have yet to experience. I continuously tried to write "poems" but I always ended up gagging and throwing away the paper. I was afraid of poetry until I was shown the work of writers like Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Chin, and Billy Collins, new writing that introduced me to words and images I had never thought of before. They also had different points of view and I really loved exploring each writer's likes and dislikes. Reading some contemporary poets helped me understand that poetry is not only about love. After reading and realizing that it isn't something to be afraid of, I started looking for more poets and wanting to learn more about the art form. The first poem I wrote is about Vesuvius and Pompeii and children being caught in the dark smoke. I think the idea was really original, but my execution sounded more like prose then poetry. What I had yet to learn was how to use poetic language. Diction and the way it's placed in poetry is something that I struggled with when I first started. It was something entirely new that I had yet to experiment within my fiction. The specific choices writers make with every word isn't something I learned until I studied poetry. Poetry, although fiction does this too, relies on the word to give context to a specific meaning or tone that leads the reader into believing something that’s going on in the poem. With fiction the writer can rely on a lot more words and actual scenes. Having this type of structure forced upon me was extremely hard because I had yet to think that every single thing in the story can have meaning, even the placement of the word "they." It taught me to go deeper into vivid details. For example, when someone is talking about a paper cut they'll say, "This papercut stings." But using more poetic structure would be "My papercut sizzles like it was placed on a stove." Or something along those lines. Really thinking of how to describe something in a completely unique and descriptive way can give the reader a new view into the mind of the writer and the story. Without these combined genre techniques my imagery would not nearly be as well developed as it is today. What I challenge myself to do is to have an original idea and describe it in a way that no other would. Being different and not fully following the patterns is what I enjoy doing, so I'm hoping to move forward with my ideas. -McKenzie Fox, Social Media Editor

Writer’s festival my junior year I had the wonderful honor of meeting poet Lee-Ann Roripaugh. I not only respected her for her commentary on culture and identity, but I had always admired her for her unique form that her poetry takes, specifically in her novel Dandarians. Dandarians is a unique poetry novel in that if you open it to certain pages you may believe that you’ve bought a novel of very short stories. This form that Roripaugh plays with is considered hybrid writing. Though her writing reads much like poetry in some lines, and even breaks in places as if it was a poem, she often sets up a very vivid setting and sometimes characters throughout the pieces. Though not all her pieces play with this form, Roripaugh is very familiar with it. In her workshop, Cracks: hybrid/mixed genre writing, she said something that particularly stuck with me; “hybrid writing bridges the gap between fiction and poetry, it allows for the two forms to exist in one plane.” For me, a chronically narrative poet, I viewed this as a safe haven of sorts. I love poetry, I love the language of poetry and with work I can create this language, but too often do I find the need to create a concrete place and characters, so much to the point that it begins to sound like fiction. When I read some of Roripaugh’s work along with the examples she brought to the workshop, I connected with the form almost immediately. Hybrid writing allows for a writer to write with all the fluidity and language of a poet, even make the same stylistic choices like line breaks sometimes, but also lets you flesh our characters more, lets you maybe explain more than a regular free-verse poem might. Though I never personally used this form after I connected with it, I think back to it often and think of the possibilities it would afford me if I do ever choose to play with it. An example of this writing can be seen in Roripaugh’s poem entitled “Skywriting.” The outward appearance of this poem is a piece of short fiction with very short paragraphs. But, if you were to read it, it is scattered with beautiful poetic language like “sometimes she coils herself up into a neat, tight spiral of pin curl,/and then, for a moment, she’s a moon-green yoyo…” This poem perfectly exemplifies hybrid writing because it does have poetic language as seen above but it also can be read as a narrative of sorts, following the narrative of a caterpillar, of all things. Hybrid writing is not only a new emerging form that is beginning to get more recognition as edging the boundaries between genre’s, but is also a useful and unique tool for writers to experiment with their writing. -Zac Carter, Art Editor

Terrence Scott won Élan's 30th anniversary writing contest. He was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. He currently attends Flagler College, majoring in theater. Previously, he went to Douglas Anderson School of the Arts for creative writing. Poetry is his favorite form of literature and his biggest inspiration in poetry is Jasmine Mans. Currently, what role does art play in your life? Currently, art plays the role of catalyst in my life. It usually is a sort of trampoline that launches me into experiences that nothing else could. In my writing experience at DA, the art I was producing and inhaling worked not only as a means of connection and expression but also as a venue for self validation. A way for me to watch and document my growth and experiences, whether it be in a flash-fiction piece or spoken word poem. Each time I've written anything, it could be observed as a checkpoint in my life. What was your inspiration for your winning piece? The inspiration for my piece stimulated from my middle school experience at a private Christian school. I had learned so much about the spectacular side of biblical stories that I was left with a little bit of curiosity about the darker side. This piece is my exploration of that. What is your process for creating art? My process for writing is obtuse. A templated structure has never really worked for me. Usually, I get my best work after a emotionally, mentally, or physically  provoking event. It could be as simple as stubbing my toe on the edge of the bed or as life changing as a death in the family. Thereafter, [an emotional release happens] on paper. I just let myself say what I want to say. Finally, I revisit the piece after a few days of stepping away from it. Then, I can see things from a different perspective and attack metaphors and syntax and structure in ways that I couldn't while emotionally impaired. Do you have any tips for budding artists? If I could give any tips to young artists, it would simply be to write what you know. For example, in the piece that I was fortunate enough to win the award with, it is obvious that I have no experience with casting plagues onto an entire civilization. However, there are moments and experiences in my life that have similarities to what the people surrounding that event must have felt. This is the key to making certain aspects in writing that you thought were intangible, tangible.