Interview
with Hyla Maddalena
L
GS&NS: Hi, Hyla! Please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hyla: I’m a fairly young writer and artist from Vermont. The daughter of writers, photographers, and farmers, I truly can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t write. I’m a huge fan of classic films, organized desks and notes, and enormous libraries. I love being in new places, but I’d often rather stay home and watch a movie with my parents, cats, dog, and partner. I write mostly about the people in my life--at the moment, actually, I’m slowly working on a book of poems about people I know and/or have inspired me!
Hi, Hyla! To start off, can you please briefly introduce yourself to our audience?
Where are you from? What kind of art do you create? (and whatever else you’d like to share…)
GS&NS: Your essay, “Beautiful” is a tribute to friendship. Why was it important to topic for you to write about?
Hyla: The two friends I wrote about have both struggled a lot with self-image, and especially their worth and place in the world. They’re also both (in their own ways) fairly unfeminine women, and I wanted to highlight their nontraditional femininity by using the sometimes hyper-feminized concept of beauty. Essentially, I wrote it for these two women, R and L, in order to show them that at the very, very least, I saw them and loved them for their own attributes--which is an enormous part of friendship, as far as I can see.
GirlSense and NonSense