Julie Marie Wade Part 1 | Open Channel Interviews

Writer Julie Marie Wade

I’m so delighted to share with you today my conversation with Julie Marie Wade. We had such a great time chatting that it’s too long to fit into one newsletter, so this will be split into two parts, part one today, and part two next Wednesday.

I was lucky enough to meet Julie in 2015 at the Miami Book Fair, after admiring her poetry and creative nonfiction for years. Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest project is Fugue: An Aural History, out now from Diagram/New Michigan Press.

What does creativity mean to you?

Creativity is one of those things where it always feels like, well, I know it when I'm being creative, and I know it when I see other people being creative. And also I feel like creativity is so inherently surprising that you can find it in context that haven't been, you know, pre-approved or bracketed as creative spaces. When I went to my PhD program, which was very unconventional in so many ways, they had a whole track in creativity studies Oh, wow. That you could take. And so the minute I got there, it was an interdisciplinary humanities PhD. But the minute I got there, I just signed up to take all these classes in creativity studies.