Meet Our Interns: Faith Padgett

We’re so excited to be working with two wonderful and talented interns for the seventh issue of Spry Literary Journal. For the next few months, you can expect to read alternating blog posts from Faith and Preston on Mondays. This first week, we asked them to take a moment to introduce themselves. We’re sure you’ll love our new teammates just as much as we do.

PART ONE- Basics:

Hey, everybody! My name is Faith Henley Padgett, and I am thrilled to be an intern for Spry for issue 07! I was born and raised in the suburbs of Texas and am currently a Creative Writing and Spanish double major at Oberlin College. 

As another way of introduction, I feel I should tell you who all I read and have read.

PART TWO- Semi-Shameless Suggestions: A Road Map:

Some of my chronically favorite authors are Louise Gluck, James Merrill, Linda Greg, Jack Gilbert, James Toland, Yusef Komunyakaa and Jorie Graham, who I had the pleasure of meeting this spring. I believe firmly in recognizing one’s influences— who has wormed their way into your head with their words, themes, structures, etc.? The list above is a skeleton form of mine and other than one exception, it consists of poets I regard as figures and not as people, necessarily.

But influence does not function singularly or solitarily; and so I would be remiss if I did not mention the two teachers I have had, and their work, in this list. Luke Jacob, my longtime friend and teacher, just released his first chapbook “A Hole in the Light” and I highly recommend it as a summer read— its subtle tenseness will keep you delightfully on edge. Shane McCrae, my current creative writing professor and advisor, has several books in print, as well, and each is worth discovering if only to immerse yourself in his structures.

I didn’t exactly intend for this to become a reading suggestions post. But, as I am sure you understand, I find it very difficult to tell anybody who I am without telling them where I have been and, in this case, those places are poems.

So, as a last-ditch effort at introduction, let me tell you a story.

PART THREE- The Tale of Becoming Defined:

I am exceptional in that I am exceptionally lucky— to have been born, to have been raised on words and a thickly-matured heritage, to have been given Fleetwood Mac songs and delicately-dropped hints about femininity, desire, and trust. My parents have been married for 25 years. I have had the same best friend for almost as long as I can remember, and she lets me braid her long almost-black hair when nobody else is allowed. Poetry knocked me over the head before I knew what it was, and coming to call it part of me has taken years, is taking more and more time, though I don’t shirk to tell people what I do anymore. Writing is an unflinching process of birth, an extension of the human. The best writing says something fundamental about being a person in this world that, simply put, could not be articulated in any other way than the way it is said. In this way, our work strives to be immovable and concrete, fluid in scope, design, time, texture, and theme, but cemented in its correctness, in how any other similar articulation would not be similar enough to convey the exactitudes of one piece, of one experience or moment.  For me, the nearly inexplicable desire to write is encapsulated in this idea. When you tell people you are a writer, they often need clarification, resolution. So, here’s my working definition: the person who cannot stop working toward immovable articulated exactitude, and a person who, in anticipating an audience, writes what they must and trusts themselves to be the voyeur for their work.

If you would like to read some of my poems, a few can be found in Hanging Loose and several anthologies including the Poetry Society of Texas’ student anthologies and the YoungArts anthology for 2014.

Faith Padgett was born and raised in the suburbs of Texas and is currently a Creative Writing/Spanish double major at Oberlin College in northern Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Hanging Loose and several anthologies including the Poetry Society of Texas’ student anthologies and the YoungArts anthology for 2014. She has won several Scholastic regional silver and gold keys, and was a semi-finalist in the Presidential Scholars program in 2014. When not working for Spry or writing, Faith can be found sipping tea with a book of poetry or walking through the prairie with one of her four adopted mutts.