Interview with Alexandra and Audrey Spensley

Alexandra Spensley is a student at Avon Lake High School in Avon Lake, Ohio. Her writing has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Hollins University, Brigham Young University, Sierra Nevada College, Vincennes University, and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Her work has also appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Cadaverine and The Postscript Journal, among others. When not writing, she enjoys running and playing violin. Her fiction piece "Filter" was featured in Issue 2 of The Blueshift Journal.

Audrey Spensley lives in Avon Lake, Ohio. She was named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year by the Poetry Society of the UK and a National YoungArts winner in poetry. Her work has been nationally recognized four times by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and is published or forthcoming in Vademcum, Canvas, Crashtest, and Magma, among others. She has also been nationally recognized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and Notre Dame of Maryland University. Her poem "Blue Glass" was featured in Issue 2 of the Blueshift Journal.

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How did you start to write? Did you begin writing together?

Audrey: I think my writing grew very organically from my love of reading, which is a pretty common process for young writers. Although Allie and I didn’t begin writing together directly, we definitely shared a lot of our work and bounced ideas off each other.

Allie: I’ve been “writing” stories for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t get interested in writing seriously until I was in high school and read some of the national winners of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards online. I remember being amazed that fourteen- and fifteen- year old kids were writing poetry and prose that sounded like it was ripped out of a bestselling book. In the most basic sense, Audrey and I did start writing together, typing out three-sentence stories on my dad’s computer.

How does your relationship affect your writing?

Audrey: It’s definitely nice having someone who can critique your writing and offer valuable feedback. We have distinct styles, but I recognize aspects of myself in Allie’s pieces, and I’m sure she thinks the same about mine.

Allie: We encourage each other to write, and recommend good books or stories to each other. Because we have shared so many experiences together, I often feel that our writing reflects similar themes or shares identical details and elements taken from our lives.

Do you have a preference for poetry and prose?

Allie: I definitely have a preference for prose. While poetry obviously has emotional power in its own right, I’ve always responded better to stories. Plus, writing prose is more natural to me than writing poetry.

Audrey: I’m the opposite! I love prose, but I find poetry a more accessible form of expression—probably because I’m too impatient for the structure of plot sometimes.

You both address issues of family in your writing. What would you say your most common themes are and how do you deal with them?

Audrey: I would say family dynamics is a recurring theme in my work. I don’t think this is a conscious decision, but family is such a central point of human interaction that it’s hard to avoid. The search for identity is also a defining aspect of my writing; that complicated internal process lends enough material to last a creative lifetime. Those two topics are also very central to a teenager’s life, which imparts an almost therapeutic element of writing for me—it’s an organized way of dealing with emotion.

Allie: Family is inherently a source of so much conflict and interaction, so it’s very interesting to explore it in writing. I also find the beach working itself into a lot of my writing, whether as a setting or only a passing reference. Maybe just because I really want to be at the beach.

Is there any writing you two don’t show to each other? What are your rules about that?

Audrey: We typically don’t share much! Sometimes if I want specific advice on a piece I’ll ask Allie for help, or we might talk abstractly about something we’re working on, but other than that we’re both very private.

Allie: Usually I have to wait for one of [Audrey’s] poems to be published to read it! When we were younger, though, we actually made email accounts for the sole purpose of sending writing to each other.

Have you ever tried writing poems together?

Allie: We’ve never tried writing poems together, but that’s a good idea!

Audrey: I think it would be interesting to see how our styles combined and if we could pull that off.

How do you handle markets? How do you approach success and rejections together?

Allie: I believe that I take rejections harder than I would if I didn’t have Audrey to compare myself to. Sometimes this can make writing feel very high-stakes.

Audrey: I try to support Allie in everything she does, and I know she does the same for me! It can be difficult if we are both submitting to the same place, but we can also let each other know about different publication opportunities, which is very helpful.

Do you have any other siblings who aren’t arts-oriented? How does the rest of the family play into your writing life?

Allie: We have a younger brother who is more into drawing and music than writing. Our parents are very supportive of our writing— they often find themselves trying to congratulate one daughter and console the other about the same contest, and they do it really well.

Audrey: Our brother isn’t exactly a poetry fan, but neither was I in the eighth grade so who knows what might happen! I never share writing with my parents—I feel like it’s on par with showing them a diary—but they’re very supportive nonetheless.

Where do you see yourself taking writing next?

Allie: This summer I’ll be attending the Iowa Writers Young Studio with a focus on fiction, so I’ll be concentrating mainly on prose and stories. I’m very excited to hear some new perspectives and have more free time to write, and hopefully develop and improve in terms of prose writing. Although I’m not sure what I would like my major/career to be, I’m sure it will involve quite a bit of writing in one way or another!

Audrey: I want to continue pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone in writing—for a long time, I was comfortable writing only short stories, but I found that expanding to new genres, though uncomfortable at the time, proved to be a good decision in the long run. Lately I’ve been experimenting with different forms and spacing structures of poems, so I hope to continue delving into that. More generally, I want to continue immersing myself in the world of creative writing.

What were the inspirations behind your subsequent pieces in Issue 2?

Allie: I remember reading a piece with shorter sentences and liking the effect that it created. I wanted to apply that kind of style to a piece about growing up and the general changes in your viewpoint that occur as you get older—becoming more skeptical, branching out, etc.

Audrey: I wrote Blue Glass while on the Foyle Young Poets Course in rural England. The house we were staying at had this haunting, ethereal atmosphere and I found myself turning to darker subject material. The poem doesn’t have any concrete inspiration from my personal experience (thankfully) but it grew from experimentation with spacing—the numbered stanzas—and my desire to incorporate the second person viewpoint into a poem.

Any advice for our readers?

Allie: Read everything you can get your hands on, and don’t be afraid to take risks.

Audrey: I would agree with Allie. And above all, remember to have fun with your writing and let yourself experiment and grow.

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