We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Han Raschka. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Han below.
Han, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience, to me, isn’t something I chose. I’m often looking back at difficult moments in my life and seeing the quiet movement of my loved ones holding me up. Being resilient is not an individual experience, it’s not a singular, heroic effort. There are parts of my life I wouldn’t have made it through without my community, and sometimes my community was just a single person. Connecting with others, finding that communal space to transition from surviving into living, that’s where resilience comes from.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a poet, in short. My writing often focuses on queer identity, intergenerational trauma and its effects on my family/myself, and themes of disability/mental illness/survivorhood. I’m a sexual assault survivor, and my first poetry collection Splinters reckons with the aftermath of assault in tandem with my burgeoning relationship with my now fiancée. I released a chapbook seven months later entitled Enamel, that I consider a companion piece to Splinters. I’m currently working on a few different poetic experiences. I collaborated with an artist to create a painting that incorporates my portrait with writing from Enamel. She goes by Green Goodies or GG, and it’s a stunning piece. I’m also working with my fiancée on a poetry short film about a piece I recently wrote, and putting together my second full-length collection. I’m grateful to be so busy with my poetry!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three qualities I always keep in my back pocket are flexibility, persistence, and generosity. Being flexible about your own work is a huge asset as a poet, because oftentimes you’re walking into a workshop or editing session with a poem, and leaving with it in a completely different state. There’s always the joke of poems as our children, our babies. Doing away with that and recognizing poems as things that can be disassembled, blown up, and reworked anew is good for your soul and your writing.
Persistence, of course, is essential with writing. I remember that I got my first acceptance for publication, and then went about a year before receiving another one. It wasn’t for lack of submitting! It’s difficult to feel like it’s “worth it” to keep submitting when you’re in the midst of a rejection spree, but I find a weird comfort now in getting the rejections. A lot of the time, it’s not you. But I go back to my poems anyways, see what there is to tighten up or mess around with. I’ve had pieces accepted after rejection, and all I changed was a line break and a few words. Committing to your craft and yourself in that way requires persistence, and practicing it early is so helpful.
I’ve found the best quality to have, though, is generosity. Be generous with your time, your presence, your effort. Show up for readings you aren’t performing at. Help other poets how you can, whether it’s looking over a piece for them or connecting them with someone in your circle. Poetry is a community, and a fairly intermingled one at that. Being genuine in your generousness means more to people than you can ever truly learn. I’ve read over other poets’ submissions before they’ve submitted to the same contest as me. We’re not here to compete. We’re here to better our writing, and hopefully the writing and lives of other people. Ultimately, I’ve had that generosity returned to me tenfold.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I’m always looking to collaborate! I’m interested in multimedia poetics, such as 2D/3D art, film, etc. I’ve been working on collage art a lot lately, and I find that incredibly rewarding. I’m also of course open to working with another poet. The best place to reach out for collaboration is Instagram: @hraschka is where I reside. 🙂
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @hraschka
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hraschka
- Other: Poets & Writers Directory Entry: https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/han_raschka
Image Credits
Splinters Cover: E. Lynn Alexander, Jess Schindler Enamel Cover: Craig Mullins
