Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, VONA, and the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project, Daniella was the profile writer for The Kennedy Center’s Next 50 and is currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. They received their MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where they were awarded a Zell Fellowship and Graduate Hopwood Award. Daniella lives in New York with their pup, Faye.
Daniella’s debut book What We Do With God will be published with Haymarket Books in 2025.
…
Interview with DANIELLA TOOSIE-WATSON:
At this point in your life, why do you write?
At this point, writing is survival. I love to write, yes, and what I love keeps me alive. Poetry has made so much possible for me on a very material level.
Also, writing is full of so much pleasure. Delicious pleasure. Pleasure is necessary for living, too. I love playing with language. It’s visceral—clay in my hands. Messy. And then, to create something of it and wipe the edges clean. I’ll say this: I have sensory sensitivity. When I write, come up with something new or strange (I love strange), it’s tactile, it feels good in and to my body. Writing is, indeed, a sensory experience. Beyond the feeling it gives me in my body, it’s the sitting down, the feel of the keyboard at my fingertips, the sound of the clicking keys. It’s soothing.
What’s more, I’ve been through a lot to get to this point in my writing life. I fought for it. Each time I sit down to write it’s a promise to my younger self who wanted this for me—to be a writer. It’s a privilege I don’t take for granted. I cherish every moment I get to approach the table, sit down, and get to it. So, I write to maintain the life I’ve built with and alongside community. For me, writing has never been a solitary experience. I’ve always done my best writing in community. Whether that looks like writing with a workshop cohort or engaging in intellectual play with a friend, I’ve always been a writer who needs other people. I think this is partly due to my neurodivergence. Body-doubling is a useful tool for people with ADHD.
You (appear to) have a really open, free flowing relationship with social media (sharing your experiences trying to make new friends in school, or sharing a new face mask you’ve tried, etc.) How is this relationship different from or similar to how you write poetry? Are the audiences for these two mediums different for you?
The answer to this is twofold. I made the decision to be open about my life on social media when I started to publish poetry. As I saw it, my poems were intense, heavy. I didn’t know how to write about joy. I didn’t know how to be funny in poems. I wanted my social media to have levity and playfulness, so I showed that part of myself on social media to bring balance.
As I started gaining traction and having successes, I decided to be open about my life’s difficulties to try to help people. A way to say, look what I’m dealing with, and look what I’m doing, in spite—you can too. Being alive is hard. My social media, and my poems, really, are my way of trying to help my friends stay alive.
I want to offer people what I would offer a friend. When I think about audience and sit down to think about what I’m going to post, whether or not they are people I’ve ever met, I call them “friends.” I suppose it’s similar to how I write poetry. But when I write, I’m also writing for myself, and I call myself “friend.” The dedication in my poetry collection, What We Do with God, forthcoming June 2025 with Haymarket Books, is addressed to Gabby. Gabby is my childhood name, derived from my middle name, Gabrielle. No one in my family called me by my first name. When I hear Gabby, it’s a rush back in time. I write to and for her, my younger self who could never say it. I think of Vievee Francis’ “Say It, Say It Anyway You Can.” When I first started writing about myself, my “I,” (after I learned that I could write about myself at the Callaloo Creative Writers’ Workshop) and I would have trouble saying the hard thing, I would think of Francis and repeat aloud and tell myself, “Say it, say it anyway you can.” And that gave me the courage to write what I couldn’t say, what Gabby couldn’t say.
I want to be honest with my friends, so I tell it straight. People may or may not like it—I may not like it—but I must tell the truth.
What does dance do for you? How, if at all, does it feed you?
I grew up in church. I became strict Christian in undergrad in response to a traumatic spiritual experience due to a ritual-gone-wrong. In church I was taught that moving my body in ways that dance requires was sinful. That being sexy or feeling sexy was sinful. I used to get counseling from the First Lady of my church and when I said that I love dancing bachata and salsa, she said, “those cultural dances aren’t of God.”
During that time in my life. Salsa was a space where I could move sensually without it being sexual. Dancing in the club or discoteca became a safe space from God and the church. I could engage in intimacy and touch another person. I had never had sex because I was waiting for marriage and was averse to being touched, but for dancing. When moving my body, my hips, my chest, in the ways that salsa and bachata calls for, I wasn’t tempting anyone, because sensuality was the structure or form of dance, if we think of it in poetic terms. When lockdown started, posting dance videos on the internet became a way for me to feel like I was in the club with my friends. I post dance videos to be in community when I’m feeling lonely or disconnected, to dance with my friends.
In your poem Cedar Waxwing, there is a structure and an intuitive flow. The poem is so beautiful. What is your relationship to structure and poetry? And how much does your intuition, or spirit, guide the shape of the poem?
The structure of Cedar Waxwing is after my favorite Ross Gay poem, “The Opera Singer.” The poem follows a speaker in the throes of sorrow until the speaker hears the sound of “opera streaming through an open window.” The speaker, taken, for a moment, out of grief, then notices another beautiful thing—“the sun [peeking] ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl”—and then another beautiful thing, another. The speaker begins to jog towards the sound of the opera, and on this journey, notices all of the beautiful things around them. In Cedar Waxwing, I was thinking about the idea of noticing as a guiding principle. The speaker is sitting on the front stoop of her apartment when she notices these birds, the Cedar Waxwing. As opposed to The Opera Singer, where the speaker jogs down the street into the town, my poem moves into an interior landscape, an emotive space where the speaker meditates on the birds; the transfigurations of the birds become the image system that scaffolds the poem.
My intuition around poetry is guided by study. Study is a touchstone for intuition, like formal constraints are a touchstone for play, experimentation, and deviation. If I can offer an image: it’s like stones in the water—the water, an intuitive flow, the stone, the framework or guiding force through which it flows.
Are there areas in your life where you felt like you were trying to actively do, when in fact, what was the most rewarding was to allow, or to receive?
My relationship with my God. I’ve had a complicated relationship with spirituality for most of my life. You know when Lauryn Hill says, “Tell me who I have to be/to get some reciprocity.” That pretty much sums up my relationship with God at the moment. But I’ve been practicing just what you said: allowing myself to receive God, as opposed to trying to figure out what I have to do or who I have to be in order to get God to fuck with me in any substantial way. It always feels like I have to punch in the right code to get the blessing to fall out of the vending machine. The times I’ve let go and rested are the times I’ve felt God the most. Still, that feels formulaic. Bueno, one of these days I’ll know how to be God’s friend.
You have received quite a few fellowships and awards. Are these opportunities you seek out or that come to you or both? How do these impact your writing if at all? How do you feel that, institutionally, poets are or are not supported today?
When you ask if poets are or are not supported, I would ask in return, which poets?
When I was in grad school, just before the stress and discrimination-induced mental break that sent me to the psych hospital, I was crying on the phone with a trusted friend and fellow poet who said, “these institutions weren’t made for us.” Being at the will of these institutions, the people with the power to help you will try to gaslight you into believing that you are why things are going wrong, or worse, that nothing is actually wrong, that you are wrong. Folks often talk about institutions as if they are self-run entities, almost spiritual in nature, having its own self-functioning heart and body. Institutions are run by people. That is not to say that there are not systems in place, but who is turning the wheel?
I almost lost my scholarship because of the discrimination I faced for being disabled. Let me pause here to say I almost said “I lost my scholarship for being disabled,” but being disabled is not the issue. The issue is, these institutions were not made for us. So yes, when I almost lost my scholarship because of discriminatory people and policies—which would have made it so I would have had to leave the program because I was poor and didn’t have $22,000 to spare for tuition—the only reason why I was able to stay was because I advocated for myself like hell (with my domestic violence counselor by my side) and the overarching grad school that ran the MFA program had people who saw how I was being treated and paid the $22,000 in tuition so that I could stay.
I cannot act as if my awards and scholarships don’t afford me privileges. They do. Opportunities come to me. I’m a better writer for having been able to work with the folks who have mentored me. I have access to other people who have successfully navigated the institutions who can help me.
I was in the elevator with two smart, white, cis, attractive, able-bodied, male-identifying poets in my program. One of them was my friend. I remember being burnt out, spent, expressing my pain and experiences and the man who was not my friend said, “well, I’ve had a wonderful time in the program.” Yeah, no shit, white, cis, attractive, able-bodied poet in an institution that was made for you.
So yes, I ask, which poets.
Who are three artists, in any genre, that you recommend?
Gregory Fage, a brilliant, Costa Rican visual artist. Kyle Abraham, the choreographer (you can read the profile I wrote about him for The Kennedy Center Next 50, here: https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/a/aa-an/kyle-abraham/ . Nonso Njoku, a brilliant, Nigerian poet.
What currently gives you the most joy?
Dancing on the internet! Specifically, on Instagram! More specifically, on my Instagram stories! I feel so brave when I post my dance videos. I feel most myself when I’m brave, and being myself brings me great, great joy. I used to think that I could be loved, but not endured. I used to try to fix myself so that people would want to be with me, or around me. I care much less about how people perceive me now a days. Now I shake my butt on the internet and call it a day. It’s the very best thing.
Experience more of Daniella’s work here.