Friday Five: poet and writer Chrissy Stegman

Today’s featured Friday Five writer is Chrissy Stegman, a poet and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work appears in Gooseberry Pie Lit, Jake, UCity Review, Okay Donkey, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, 5 Minutes Mag, and BULL. She is the author of the chapbook Somewhere, Someone Is Forgetting You (Alien Buddha Press), a two-time Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, and 2025 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellow.

1. What draws you to poetry, prose poems, and flash fiction as opposed to longer forms of creative writing, and how do you decide whether a particular idea or story is best expressed as a poem or flash? 

I think it’s a combination of temperament and necessity. I have five kids, four still living at home, and a full-time caregiving role, there’s not a lot of time to stretch out and luxuriate in a novel draft. Poetry, prose poems, and flash fiction meet me where I am, which is often in the messy margins of the day, between a doctor’s appointment and figuring out dinner. That said, I genuinely love the compressed heat of short forms. The way that compression can detonate a story/poem. As for deciding form, it’s usually a matter of voice and energy. If it arrives in a blur and won’t stop talking, it’s likely a prose poem. If it’s more of a distilled image or moment, I might shape it as a poem. Flash fiction tends to show up when a character with one specific obsession crashes into my head.

2. Congratulations on the publication of your chapbook Somewhere, Someone Is Forgetting You. What inspired the themes and creation of this collection, and how did you approach weaving together its emotional or narrative threads?

Thank you! This chapbook began, in many ways, as a love letter to visual art. I’m an art obsessive, and some of my earliest poems were ekphrastic pieces, responses to particular works that haunted me, like [Gustav] Klimt’s Pine Forest II. Over time, the collection evolved into something else. It felt like I was wandering through my own mind as though it were an art gallery that had caught fire. I followed those threads. Everything emerged out of that belief and love for artistic tension.

3. Your writing often explores generational trauma and resilience, rooted in your working-class and Appalachian background. Can you share how these personal experiences shape your creative process and the stories you choose to tell?

I come from a family of steelworkers (Baltimore) and farmers (Virginia), essentially people who did what they had to do to survive. I feel lucky that I paid attention, that I learned from my family heartaches and tragedies instead of repeating them. There’s something about the way stories were told around me growing up that shaped my voice. What gets passed down, what gets buried. I also think a lot about representation. I didn’t see many people like my family in literature, unless they were flattened into caricatures or used as plot devices. I write to complicate that.

4. What two or three writers have most influenced or inspired your approach to writing, and how have their works impacted your style or perspective? 

Brigit Pegeen Kelly rearranged my molecules. Reading her is like standing in a cathedral with the roof ripped off. Mary Ruefle gave me permission to be strange and deeply tender in the same breath. I admire her for being emotionally slippery. And Anne Carson … what do you say about Anne Carson? She’s the map and the detour. But my influences and approach often change over time. Nothing feels static when it comes to writing.

5. What advice would you offer aspiring writers of poetry or flash fiction to help them find their voice and navigate the challenges of crafting concise, impactful work?

Assume the reader is smarter than you, lonelier than you, and has only a minute for your bullshit. Make it beautiful. Cut what you love if it doesn’t serve the heart of the piece. Read everything, especially what doesn’t resemble your voice. Let yourself be porous: to music, visual art, overheard conversations at bus stops. Kitchen noises. Go to museums. Be obnoxious in your love of art. The work will always outpace you. You don’t need to catch up. Just keep writing.

Follow Chrissy Stegman on X/Twitter at @pimpledrose and on Instagram at @thegoosefaerie.