LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a vocalist, writer, and sound artist who publishes and performs extensively. She is one of twenty-nine authors from around the world whose work appears in the new anthology Writing That Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream from Red Bridge Press.

Seth Amos: Your poem in the anthology, “bacche kā pōtRā,” is a golden shovel, a form created by Terrance Hayes when he used a line from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” Why did you decide to use this form, and how do you approach form for other poems?

LaTasha Diggs: I was invited to submit to another anthology that was focusing on the form. Before that time, I knew nothing about the golden shovel. But upon reading Terrance's poem and understanding how it was constructed, it made me curious. I ended up writing about eight within a week. Most loosely stuck to the formula. I don’t consider myself a formalist. When I decide to play with one, often it has to do with examining a language and finding ways in which my interests in using multiple languages can be juxtaposed against a form. Basically, I give myself a bigger headache.

Seth Amos: What was the moment or event that made you realize you wanted to be a writer? Was it a different one that made you want to write poetry?

Michelle S. Lee: I have been writing stories in one form or another since I was a kid. I still have the small, stapled pages that tell the tale of a lemon meringue pie who just wanted to be eaten. When I was a little older, I sent a query letter to a publisher of Beatrix Potter books, believing I also had, in a manuscript pecked out on a typewriter, captured the lively happenstances of mannerly and quite moral field animals.

[A poem] is a pinhole for the reader: he/she peeks through, squints,
into this tight space and sees an entire world that will only last a second.