Discussing the Lit Blitz: Alixa Brobbey's "Eurydice"
Discussing the Lit Blitz, previous finalist Annaliese Lemmon talks with the finalists from our most recent contest about their work.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Annaliese Lemmon: Welcome, everyone, to the Mormon Lit Lab podcast. I'm Annaliese Lemmon, your host for this series where we discuss the 15th Mormon Lit Blitz. Today, I'm joined by Alixa Brobbey, author of “Eurydice.” And Alixa, could you introduce yourself and explain what your experience is with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
Alixa Brobbey: My name's Alixa Brobbey. Both my parents were the first in their families to join the church. So my mom joined in the Caribbean, my dad joined in Belgium as a teenager. And then I was born in the Netherlands, raised in the church my whole life. I was able to experience it in the Netherlands, also in Ghana for a couple years as a teenager, and then out in Utah and now in New York, which has given me just a wide range of different experiences and has been really great to enjoy.
Annaliese Lemmon: That's great. I love hearing about experiences that are well outside of what I've had. So, for “Eurydice,” I've seen other retellings of this myth that have Orpheus turning around due to doubts or insecurities, but your poem implies he would've turned from a desire to help along a treacherous path. Why did you choose to explore this kind of Orpheus?
Alixa Brobbey: When I first started writing this poem, I wasn't really thinking about, like, a great metaphor or the implications or anything. Where I grew up in the Netherlands is super, super flat, and then I started dating my husband in Utah, and it's obviously more mountainous, and we'd go on hikes and things. And at first I would, like, trip all of the time.
So we'd be hiking, and he'd always be turning around and looking at me, and I was like, "This is embarrassing. I don't want you to see me fall. Just, like, keep walking. Pretend you're Orpheus. Just, like, lead me up this mountain." And so when I was writing this poem, I was really thinking about just our relationship together and how it had grown, and how he started off just, like, very, very protective of me, and eventually I got better at hiking. He trusted I wasn't gonna fall every 10 seconds.
And then I also really love the musical Hadestown. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's this retelling, and I've seen it three times now, kind of every year over the last three years. And even though we know how the story ends, you kind of want them to have a happy ending, and I was thinking about that in the context of this poem as well, because I think if you want them to have a happy ending and you want to root for them, then maybe you want to envision Orpheus turning around because of his love for her and not because of this darker, more negative thing.
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, my daughter would really love to see Hadestown. I think our school's gonna be putting it on, so at least she'll get that kind of experience with it
Alixa Brobbey: Sounds awesome
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah. And, the metaphor of the treacherous path is also a great description for the trials in life, the ones that are easier to get through with a helping hand or where you can only be a silent witness. Is there a place that inspired these specific slippery steps? I don't imagine there's much moss in Utah where you learned to hike.
Alixa Brobbey: There's a little bit of moss. He's very obsessed with lichen and with moss and things like that, so even if there's just a tiny little bit, he's gonna stop on a hike and take a picture of it. But specifically, we were in Costa Rica when I was writing this poem, and he was far ahead of me, looking at all of this moss, and I was trying to, like, very daintily walk through and make sure I didn't fall down on our honeymoon, and that's when I sat down, and as he was taking pictures and looking around me and being like, there's this interesting constant where we met in Utah and we spent a lot of time there.
We spent time in Massachusetts. We're in Costa Rica, and anywhere we go, I know he's going to be taking pictures of moss. Anywhere we go, there's gonna be, like, this green constant, which is both, like, very beautiful, and then also, when it's wet, can be a little bit treacherous and slippery as well
Annaliese Lemmon: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've spent a lot of time in Portland where you get moss on all sides of the tree, so it's very different from Utah.
Alixa Brobbey: Yes, very different
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah. And I also just really liked how the line breaks split the sentences to give emphasis to certain words. How long did it take to figure out how to deliver the emphasis that way? What went into the craft of this poem?
Alixa Brobbey: I think the first draft I wrote just as like a paragraph, just very stream of consciousness, trying to get out all of the images I was thinking about. And then as soon as I was revising it, I knew I wanted to write it like this. Most of my poems are free verse and make use of enjambment, and I always like that it draws more attention to specific words and phrases if you break off the lines in kind of unnatural points.
For this one especially, 'cause it's a retelling of a story that everybody knows, and you know what's going to happen, so it's not that interesting necessarily. I wanted to add these line breaks to kind of add these pauses and tension in little bit of places and make it a little bit more interesting for the reader
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I really enjoyed it, so I think you did a great job with that.
Alixa Brobbey: Thank you.
Annaliese Lemmon: Is there anything else you'd like to share about this piece?
Alixa Brobbey: I'm not sure. I think I wrote it as a very straightforward love poem. To me, it was just like this little thing to jot down on my honeymoon and be like, "Look how our relationship has grown." And when I started hearing your questions, it really made me rethink the poem because to other people it's not about me and my relationship, it is about Eurydice.
And so to me, these last lines are like full of that youthful hope of like, of course we're gonna grow old together. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna survive everything. And then I hadn't realized that titling it “Eurydice,” everybody knows how it ends, and so this feels like a poem in the middle of a story, at the beginning of a story where you're still hopeful, you still think you can overcome everything, and I think that's something that makes art very fun is that the way you think about it when you write it isn't always the way it's perceived by readers, and it's not always how you feel about it like 5 or 10 years down the road.
So I think that that's been something kind of fun in hearing how it's been received by other people
Annaliese Lemmon: Hmm. Yeah, that is always interesting that you don't have that control once it leaves your hands or your computer.
Alixa Brobbey: Exactly
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah. So something I like to ask everybody is, do you have a piece of media, any format, any genre that you would recommend for our audience?
Alixa Brobbey: Yeah. The piece of media I would recommend is a poetry collection called Rose. It's by the poet Li-Young Lee. It's a lot about family, his relationship with his father, a little bit about immigration as well, and it really inspires a lot of my writing and trying to, like, share these family relationships and just explore kind of these things that are universal to the human experience
Annaliese Lemmon: Very nice. And do you have any projects or places to find you online that you would like to tell our audience about?
Alixa Brobbey: Nothing specific. I try and share my poems on Instagram and Facebook when they're published somewhere. I'm hoping to have a collection done sometime in the next couple years ideally, and if that comes together, I'll post about that as well.
Annaliese Lemmon: That'd be great. I'm sure there's many people who would love to see a collection.
Alixa Brobbey: Thank you.
Annaliese Lemmon: And any final thoughts?
Alixa Brobbey: No, just I love the Lit Blitz. I love that we've like, created this space for writers. I remember being a college student at BYU a few years ago and feeling like there wasn't really a space for like religious art that really resonated with people and wasn't just like truly preachy, and I love that I found the people who are creating art like that and are part of my faith community. Yeah.
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I love that the Mormon Lit Blitz has created that for us, and it's helped me to discover some of the other magazines as well where, they have similar, feelings to it.
Alixa Brobbey: Me too
Annaliese Lemmon: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and hope to see you again
Alixa Brobbey: Thank you. Likewise
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