Meet Alyshia Tuyet Gonzalez

We were lucky to catch up with Alyshia Tuyet Gonzalez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alyshia Tuyet, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

I feel that to answer this question appropriately, I have to set the stage. So, let me give you a little background on my life from a year ago. At the end of April 2023 after completing a 9-week publishing course, I released my first self-published chapbook “& Also With You”, a multimedia exploration of love, lust, and heartbreak. I was so proud of myself for reaching this milestone in my career and putting out a collection that I felt was fresh, innovative, and most importantly, honest. I believed in the deepest parts of me that this was the first step to a new resurgence in my creativity and artistic practice and I felt unstoppable like there was nothing I couldn’t do. A couple of months later in July of 2023, I was unceremoniously laid off from my job at a boutique DEI agency. It was also the same day I found out I was pregnant. While I was overjoyed with the news, the immeasurable stress of figuring out healthcare and how to pay my bills amidst this layoff really took a toll on me. A few weeks later, I miscarried. While I can’t prove that the two are related, in my body, I feel like they are. I think the grief of a miscarriage is a very unique experience, you mourn not only the life, but all of the “what-ifs” and “could have beens.”

Naturally, creating was the last thing on my mind. I think I was afraid to create. I felt like it was a disservice to this experience I just had. Nothing seemed to have a meaning to me anymore. I was also afraid my creativity would never be the same after this. This book I had just put out and was so proud of began to feel like a chore and something I wanted to avoid. My art is the most honest part of me and I think I needed a moment to hide from myself, and I can’t hide from myself when I create. I put the pen away and just tried to put one foot in front of the other and survive.

The first thing I wrote after the miscarriage was about drinking tea. You would think I’d be bustling with ideas from this thing I needed to process but I think I was just learning to be curious again. Curious about my life and forward motion in general, how life just keeps going. I started going on more walks and looking at people, really looking at them. Wondering, what were they secretly holding? I knew I couldn’t be as alone as I felt. I knew someone was walking past me holding grief with me, we were just unknown to each other. I think this is when I began to use my creative muscles again, not just the muscle required to create, but to keep the forward motion, to start believing there was more after this. I started walking. I started physically moving forward. I always tell my art homies, if you’re feeling stuck go for a walk, and if you’re still stuck at the end of the walk, you haven’t walked long enough. I still stand by that now, being in my body with one foot in front of the other allows my mind space to wonder, space to create. It was in this space, I found that I am much more than just a writer. I can be anything I want to be, so long as I am honest.

So the first thing I would say to keep your creativity alive is to honor your need to not create. Whatever season you are in is a valid one, and sometimes that season is taking a breath. We are not constant machines. In the era of being an “artist” meaning you also have to be a business, a content creator, and constantly produce, I think it is a radical form of ownership over your art practice to say enough, now is not the time. Especially, in moments of grief. My truth required that I take a breath. My honesty with myself allowed me to stop fighting the necessary breath. I was still not ready to write so I started playing with other mediums and it opened a whole new world for me. I am much more fluid with my creativity now. I’ve tried so many different things I never thought I was good at. I started playing the guitar again, I picked sketching back up, and I even sang for a couple of close friends. Even in my hiding space, my creativity was finding me. It was carrying me forward.

I think a year later I’ve been able to reengage with creating as a discipline, which is necessary. You won’t always feel like creating. Sometimes you create something because it requires your attention, because there is a voice saying get this out, never ignore that voice. The difference between pure talent and being an artist is the discipline to do it even when it doesn’t make sense or feel good, not just because you want to. This clarity didn’t find me when I was looking for it though, it all started with a walk. A walk I was admittedly taking to avoid the call to create. Coming back to myself started with not creating. It all started with honoring the humanity in me and the honesty required to produce good art. I see the creative breakthroughs facilitated by the discipline I now have, and I see how much fuller of a person I became when I wasn’t focused on the discipline. I see that we are all more than one thing. I see that the boxes we put around ourselves don’t actually exist. I see the forward motion of life and the necessary pauses along the way. I see that there are always many paths forward. I see keeping my creativity alive the same way I see feeding myself, taking care of my mind, and nourishing my spirit. I need it to survive.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

My expertise lies in critical race theory, abolitionist societal formation, and diversion advocacy, focusing on reducing the suspension, expulsion, and arrest of Black and brown students and ending the U.S. drug war. I’m really excited to share that I just accepted a position as the Associate Director of Organizing Programs at Essie Justice. A Los Angeles/Oakland based non-profit of women with incarcerated loved ones taking on the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration.

Our award-winning Healing to Advocacy Model brings women together to heal, build collective power, and drive social change. We are building a membership of fierce advocates for race and gender justice — including Black and Latinx women, formerly and currently incarcerated women, transgender women, and gender non-conforming people. Our goal is to create a network of Black and Brown women with incarcerated loved ones to disrupt the cyclical impacts of the criminal justice system through breaking isolation, healing trauma, leadership development, organizing, and building political power. We hope to ultimately break the isolation of hundreds of thousands of women with incarcerated loved ones, increase resources to families, and confront mass incarceration’s harm as a unified, loving, and powerful group. If anyone is interested in supporting our work or if you or a loved one was previously incarcerated and you want to get involved you can find us at essiejusticegroup.org

On the creative side, I recently released my first self-published chapbook “& Also with You” a multimedia exploration of love, lust, & heartbreak. I like to say I did what Drake did but first and better! My book is a full-color coffee table book complete with photos, poems, song lyrics, a playlist, and some other sweet surprises. I wanted to turn poetry on its head by curating an experience where words come alive, paving a new way for feeling to be more than flat text on a page. The book is available for purchase on my website alyshiatuyetgonzalez.com.

While never formally trained in poetry, I’ve been writing since I was 12 years old. I began performing poetry at Arizona State, where I won first place at the annual NAACP poetry slam. Since then, I’ve been invited to perform at Ray of Hope Walk LA and been a guest teaching artist for Compton School District and Broadway for Arts Education serving students in South Central LA & the South Bronx. I’m a proud alumnus of the Spoken Lit LA Poetry Intensive. My work has been featured in the SJSA Voices of Change Gallery Guide, and Homies Who Submit’s inaugural zine. I will be performing at a few venues around LA in the fall. The best way to keep up with product launches, performances, and my blog is by subscribing to my newsletter on my website.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think my big three would be hope, discipline, and active listening. I think all 3 skills inform one another and build upon each other. I think in order to build and cultivate these skills we must involve ourselves in deep intentional relationship-building and accountability to our communities. In June Jordan’s poem “Poem for South African Women” her last stanza is:

“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea

we are the ones we have been waiting for”

She wrote this poem for the over 40,000 women and children who, on August 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. I think of her last line often, “We are the ones we have been waiting for” because it is true. Every generation brings new breath into our movements and our creative practices. It begins and ends with all of us and all who we are responsible to. It begins and ends with community. I think to believe a different world is possible, to hope in the face of all that is wretched, is a discipline. To keep believing and orienting yourself towards the work to make your creative endeavors a reality is a discipline. How do we learn these things? By actively listening. Anyone can talk, it is much harder to sit in stillness and curiosity, to listen to someone with your full attention and not think about what you are going to say in response. It requires incredible discipline.

I do this exercise when I facilitate where I pair people up and tell them to tell each other a random story about a topic and the listener has to repeat back as closely as possible what the other person said. Then they switch and repeat the activity. At the end, I ask, “While you were listening to all the details of the story, did any of you stop to think about what you would say in response?” And almost always the answer is 100% no because they were too focused on paying attention and I say to them “THAT is how much intention I need you to have with your listening every day. Be so busy listening that you don’t have time to come up with a response. See how much deeper your conversations and connections get.” I think the best way to learn this skill is to connect with the people you are responsible for in your community, with a special emphasis on the elders and children. Such wisdom hides in the intergenerational minds around us. Take them out to lunch, offer to babysit, and listen without interrupting. The more we listen, the more we learn.

What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?

I feel like I’ve touched on a lot of my learnings in the past 12 months, but if I had to sum it up poetically it would be: Honesty opens doors and windows. Vulnerability vanishes walls. There is always something on the other side waiting for you. Don’t be afraid to grasp for it, even in the dark.

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