A Gripping Conversation with Brice Maiurro

Brice Maiurro is a poet, storyteller, artist, and community organizer from Lakewood, Colorado. He is a co-founder of the nationwide howling movement, where in early 2020, thousands of people in all fifty states and over one-hundred countries went outside every night at 8 pm to howl. For this, he was featured by the BBC and NPR. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Heart is an Undertaker Bee, Clown Singing Opera, Stupid Flowers and Hero Victim Villain. He has released two EPs: Cheesman Park Session with musician Logan Chan (2023) and Everything is on Fire with musician Chadzilla Johnson (2019). He has told stories with Liminal, The Narrators, Ignite Denver and Unsent. He is the Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press and worked formerly as the Founding Editor of Punch Drunk Press and the Poetry Editor for Suspect Press.

He is the co-founder of Punketry, hosted out of Mutiny Information Cafe, and the founder of Snap Crackle Poetry, Mutiny Poetry Series and the Boulder Block Slam. He has collaborated on events with Jaipur Literary Festival, Arbor Institute, Denver Food Rescue, and the Village Institute, a live/learn/work center for immigrants and refugees in Aurora, Colorado.

Brice’s poems have appeared in Marrow Magazine, Twenty Bellows, Tilt West, Low Orbit, Boulder Weekly, Poets Reading the News, Suspect Press, and The Denver Post. He has featured with Headroom Sessions, Jaipur Literary Festival, Fountainverse Literary Festival, Colorado Poetry Rodeo, F-Bomb, Mercury Cafe Sunday Night Slam and at Denver City Council.

Recently, Brice has begun to offer workshops, including “Someday I’ll Love the Poem,” a poetry workshop on the ongoing process of learning to love yourself. He facilitated this workshop at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in 2021. In 2019, he was recognized by Westword as a Colorado Creative for his contributions to the Colorado arts community

I had the pleasure of asking Brice about his writing routine, what he looks for in writing suitable for publication and so much more.

UZOMAH: What is the role of an editor and its duty to the writer?

BRICE: I always recommend to writers that they at least consider taking on some kind of editorial role. I see it as the other side of the coin, or maybe another side of the Rubik’s Cube. That is to say, I think when you are dedicated to putting yourself out there as a writer, it is incredibly helpful to have the perspective of receiving people’s work, and more than their work–their stories, their significant moments of epiphany and trauma, and learning how to truly care for it. It’s an ongoing education. I think a good editor is a good listener. I think a good editor should be able to help the writer to better understand who they are in their writing, rather than try to align them to be more like the editor. There’s an opportunity to embrace diversity as an editor that I think is an important responsibility and learning opportunity.

U: How has being an activist and community organizer helped your understanding of humanity and also as a writer?

B: I’m hesitant to call myself an activist, as there are a lot of people who do a lot of incredible ongoing work in social movements that I am not as tapped into. I do see the activism in hosting poetry events, supporting a poetry journal, and finding partnerships with local organizations doing good work. I do feel like those things intersect with activism. That being said, my community work has helped me understand humanity largely through storytelling. I am a heterosexual American man, who has had a very white experience and only recently has been able to recognize that I’m a multiracial person, Latino as well as white. That is to say, outside of the challenges of my neurodivergence, I’ve had a life where the world at large has often been catered to me and centered me. Hearing stories at open mics, in poetry books, and in community spaces has been a very important disruption of that limited perspective of the world for me. I feel incredibly lucky that I fell into a community that allowed me to gain perspective on so many other lived experiences, and at times taught me that there are things I will not understand. Natalie Diaz really helped me with that last bit. I listened to a podcast about two years ago where she talks about us needing to acknowledge more often that we don’t understand someone’s experience. That has been a big lesson and a relief to me: to be better equipped to say “I don’t know what that’s like.”

U: Can you describe your writing routine?

B: It’s ever-evolving. It’s a bit of a hard question for me, but these things I do know. Cleaning my house is almost always part of my writing routine, at least when I write at home. Usually, I ruminate on an idea for a long time before I finally sit down to hash it out. I usually only write one poem when I sit down to write. I often leave it behind and revisit it a few days, weeks, or years later. I’m very inspired by what other people are doing in almost any art form. A big catalyst for me is seeing someone do something beautiful and saying I wanna try that. I write in the early evenings usually, and often to music. Anything by John Coltrane is great. Sometimes it’s just the infamous Youtube lofi station. That poor girl endlessly working on a paper while her cat’s just chilling in the window. I guess she is pretty prolific though. Maybe it’s not my place to decide she’s not having a good time.

U: What is the best tip or lesson you have gotten about writing?

B: One time I was really swept up into an almost manic state, writing as much as I could–gotta write more, write all the poems, find all the answers. I arrived in Boulder at the Laughing Goat coffee shop, where a local event, Jazzetry, was going on. I tucked into a corner, tense-shouldered, and just kept writing writing writing, probably breathing a bit heavily. My friend Eric Fischman noticed me and came over to me. “Go easy on yourself,” he said to me. So I’ve listened since then. I go easy on myself.

U: The Heart is an Undertaker Bee is your latest book; how did that come about?

B: Maybe two years ago, I told my partner, Shelsea, that I wanted to be an ecopoet; that I wanted to write about nature and climate change. You can’t be with Shelsea and not fall madly in love with nature. I realized that, while important, so much of what I saw in the climate change conversation was doom and gloom, rightfully so, but I didn’t feel particularly inspired by that framework alone. I wanted to foster a healthy relationship with nature as well as contend with humankind’s unhealthy relationship with nature. I started growing mushrooms, going on forays; I spent some time in the Sacred Valley of Peru, and I was doing it. I was falling more deeply in love with it all, and also finding myself healing through it as well. 

September of last year, I was curious about a Colorado-based publisher, Middle Creek Publishing, so I attended their now-annual poetry festival at Wolverine Farm in Fort Collins, Colorado. I loved the community. I loved the press’ ethos around human ecology. I rustled through my poems and realized I had a nature collection. Much quieter than the punk-rock anxiety-riddled collections I’d put out before (and love as well). Shelsea and I also do some beekeeping and I thought it was really incredible that there is a type of bee dedicated to taking the dead from the hive, an undertaker bee. Caring for the hive through that grief work. In the age of COVID, grief was everywhere. That really inspired the collection as well.

U: When selecting which poem goes into a collection regarding a theme or not having one, what is the most important trait you look for in a poem that makes it be put into a group?

B: You know, I’ve historically had some anxiety that I couldn’t put together a cohesive collection. First of all, I’ve realized it’s ultimately up to me to define what cohesion looks like, but also, with this new collection, I think I arrived at that feeling a bit more. What I usually do is pull a handful of poems I like and write their names on Post-it notes. I put those post-it notes up on a door or another big flat surface and I see if I can arrange them into something of a story. I draw some inspirations from albums. I noticed a lot of times the hit single is not the first song on an album but usually third. The first song has a lot of fanfare and tone-setting. It’s the welcome mat. The second song often is kind of an Alice falling down the rabbit hole type situation, or like the tunnel in Willy Wonka–“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going.” It disrupts stasis and creates a new normal. Of course, these rules are made to be broken. This is all to say, I think of the arc of the book, find a way to visualize it, and I consider how other artists have structured their arcs. I also think that feeling that tells you a poem doesn’t fit is usually a very honest feeling.

U: As Editor-In-Chief of South Broadway Press, what do you look for in writing suitable for publication?

B: I look for heart. I look for vulnerability. I look for those little indications of care that the poet put into their work. I look for radical social ideas rather than ideas that kind of reiterate what we’re hearing in the echo chamber.

U: How would you explain to someone why community organizers and activists are still needed today?

B: We’ve been so institutionalized as a world. In 2020, I witnessed some decent political candidates fall to the wayside while the status quo took center stage again. We are mandating violent laws and policies against trans folx. The local craft beer you’re drinking is more likely than not owned by Anheuser-Busch. Individualism and exceptionalism run rampant. There’s a lot of money put into making folks feel lonely and powerless, into actually becoming lonely and powerless. There’s a lot of money put into standardizing just about every element of the human experience. Community organizers and activists are often some of the stewards of deinstitutionalizing our world. What’s happening in your apartment complex matters, what’s happening on your street, your block, in your neighborhood matters. I think about the permaculture design principle of “use small and slow solutions”. In a big and fast world, local activists and community organizers can create real change. We need people, in person, in their bodies, exemplifying love, and by love, I mean the disruptive kind, the difficult kind, doing that thing you’re scared to do, but you know it’s the right thing to do.

U: How has writing helped shape your life and helped you understand who you are?

B: I used to think someday I’d be a world-famous writer. You know? Like the High Priest of Writing. But that wasn’t it for me. Now it’s just one of my best friends. It’s been with me almost my entire life. It’s helped me find myself, and my community. It holds me accountable. It’s often the important act of spending time with myself.

U: Can you explain the importance of having relationships with musicians and how it has affected your writing?

B: I love the conversation of it all. I recently watched a documentary on beat poet Ruth Weiss. First of all, check her out. She’s amazing. Secondly, she looks like she’s having so much fun on stage with the musicians. I get that same feeling of play and joy. They challenge me. I’ve performed with a punk band that’s told me to try to keep up. I’ve performed with a jazz band that knew exactly what to play behind my poems. I performed with classically trained musicians who told me that 13 measures in I need to be at exactly this point in my poem. All of that was learning how to communicate. It was all an opportunity to grow through a relationship.

I think there’s truth that poetry doesn’t need music and has its own lyrical quality, its own musicality, but also poetry and music are such good friends. I think both are true.

U: What is your favorite theme to explore through writing?

B: Honestly, probably my identity. I have ADHD, and only recently have I come to understand that means I’m neurodivergent. All of a sudden, so many moments of social tension and confusion make sense—so many moments of feeling like a square peg in a round hole. Poetry has been a space where I can try to answer the question of how does a square peg learn to fit in a round hole? Or why am I trying to? Poetry has provided me the opportunity to have a psychologically safe gray space to play around in, to figure out who I am in any given moment. I think identity will always show up as a theme for me.

For more information about Brice’s poetry, please visit his site and follow him on Instagram.