Hi, Hannah! 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…)
(Optional): Provide links to your website, social media, or other places where readers can connect with you. (3 links max)
Interview
with Hannah Van Zee
GS&NS: Hi, Hannah! Please introduce yourself to our readers.
Hannah: My name is Hannah Van Zee, and I study Writing and Rhetoric, Media, and Social Change at Drake University. I’m from Des Moines, Iowa, and while I’ve written poetry since I was fourteen years old (it rhymes less now than it used to), I’ve recently started writing creative nonfiction and taking a class on memoir. Someday, though, I hope to write young adult fiction and influence teens to be critical, subversive, transgressive -- to question everything.
GS&NS: What inspired you to write your poem, “Utah”?
Hannah: The moment I was in, I suppose. I was on this road trip across the country, and the scenery we were driving through somehow brought out the frustrations I was having with my relationship.
GS&NS: I liked how “Utah” juxtaposes natural and physical imagery in certain places. How does that function in the poem and how does it contribute to its overall meaning?
Hannah: Obviously, this is up to interpretation by the individual reader, but I think my goal was to make clear how unable to escape the narrator is in her thoughts, particularly when the physical details that have struck her in her relationship with the boy are reflected in nature.
GirlSense and NonSense