Justine

To start, I’d love to hear a bit about how you got to where you are today as a writer. Your portfolio truly covers a lot, from creative writing, features and cultural critiques, to journalistic reporting. Many writers dream of making a living by writing—what was your journey to get there?

Elly

Maybe this is not very satisfying for others to read but honestly I’ve never known what else to do. I’ve also done professional photography and videography, but I’ve always been so steeped in writing as a practice since I was a kid that it’s felt like the most reliable skill to lean on. I’m estranged from my parents now but growing up, my mom was an English teacher. I started helping her grade papers when I was like 6. She taught me how to write a thesis statement before I was 7. I did stuff with the school newspaper in elementary school and then began editing school newspapers in middle school.

That continued into high school where I did photography for and also was an editor for our award-winning newspaper, which I became editor-in-chief of my senior year. I was also heavily immersed in the spoken word poetry community in LA at the time. We were in the middle of the recession that started in 2008 and I was wavering on if I should apply to colleges for journalism, which felt like a bad idea to me because I could see the ways that the media industry felt unstable. But I felt like people would always need writers and storytellers of some sort. I also wanted to cushion that with other skills and subjects, so when I went to college I ended up majoring in communications and PR, along with religion and psychology. (Yeah I did too much but I also fully put myself through college on my own working anywhere between 2-5 jobs at a time, so I wanted to get my labor’s worth, ha.)

I’ve done ghostwriting, worked at nonprofits and ad agencies, and worked as a freelance writer. I don’t feel like it’s glamorous, though I do love writing. A lot of the time I end up not liking the writing I’ve done professionally because it was just for a paycheck and not something I really believed in or cared about. I think once you’re actually doing it, it no longer always or often feels like a dream unless you’re one of the super lucky rare authors that doesn’t have another job and literally gets paid to write your novels.

I’ve always counted myself very lucky and blessed when I actually get to work on projects I care about. I think that’s why I feel so precious about poetry and songwriting which I do as well, because it’s so personal to me. It feels more authentic to me when I get to do writing that I am not being paid for, because I’m sure I’m doing it for the love of it and to explore more of myself and the world. I’m not sure if I’ll do writing professionally forever. I love journalism and always want to get to write about the world and tell stories that have been buried. But journalism and media are precarious industries that are really tough to stay in if you don’t come from privilege.

So honestly right now I’m trying to figure out what other skills I can lean on and what other types of work I can do to supplement things. Sometimes I like writing much more when I’m in a period where I’m writing for money less, you know?

Justine

One thing I hear from a lot of people in the writing world—whether they are editors, or folks like yourself writing in professional spaces—is that the balance between working with words and actually writing your own creative work can sometimes be in conflict. I feel this tension sometimes as a ghostwriter myself. What has your experience been? How do you find that balance?

Elly

That’s why poetry has always been so important to me. I’ve been writing it and reading it my whole life but it was more forced when I was a kid. It didn’t totally feel like mine or for me, so it felt like every other type of writing I did. When I was a teenager I was welcomed into this wonderful poetry community in Los Angeles while I was living there in high school, and it really felt like it was about community instead of competition, even though it was within the slam poetry scene. It was about people writing together and going to poetry shows together.

Maybe it was just because I was a teen so I wasn’t focusing on publishing or anything like that, and there actually was a lot more competition around me than I was aware of. Probably. But because I built that foundation of poetry as community, it gave me this rootedness in… understanding that writing is just as much about living as the capturing and getting it down on paper. So when I have a deadline for a feature or a journalistic article or something, I have to meet that deadline. I have to get words down on a page.

Poetry and more creative work reminds me that the words might be in me and the story might be in me but won’t come out until I have the experiences I’ve needed to have, and I can’t live on deadlines. So allowing myself to go out into the world and be with friends, and take walks in the park, and just live and feel things helps me get to a place where I can actually sit down and write, instead of pressuring myself to be doing that all the time.
Ironically, I also need the structure of being told to sit down and write to actually get my poetry written. I rely a lot on small workshops or co-writing time with friends to hold myself accountable to actually getting the words out.

Justine

As someone who writes about the environment/climate change, and feels passionately that storytelling can be a catalyst for action, I love your focus on advocacy-centered creative work. How do you think about your role as a writer as it relates to advocacy?

Elly

I believe that the purpose of writing should be helping people get in touch with themselves while also noticing more about the world and the people around them. So much of writing in this world, like for say advertising or even some journalism and creative writing, or more right-wing advocacy is about distracting and dividing. I want the writing I do to move people to build a better world. Emotionally and physically. I feel like if you’re someone who is gifted at communicating or story-telling you have an obligation to try to move people towards something truly meaningful.

That doesn’t have to be big, but it can be. If you can write something that moves someone to go sit down and eat pie with their grandmother, that’s great. Remind someone of shared intimacy and family and why it’s important. If you can write something that moves someone to donate to Palestine or Sudan, great. I grew up experiencing a lot of abuse, and it made me very passionate about injustice and using whatever skills I could to help people feel less alone but also to improve material circumstances for people. To let someone know with my words: you are not alone.

And get people to take action in ways that literally helps people be less alone. I guess I don’t really know much of any other way to be. I’ve done my fair share of writing ad campaigns and things like that and it always feels slimy to me personally. I’d rather use my words to help change a policy that harms more people in prisons, or do something that can bring people closer together in solidarity and action than say convince someone to buy something.

Again, writing is not just about art or ego to me. I try to kill my ego as much as possible around it. I think not being focused on submitting to lit mags or competitions for most of my time writing has been a big part of that. I’ve written for the love of it—to try to wrap my head or heart around something, to get to know myself or others better, and suddenly I do have all of this writing that I can submit somewhere if I choose.

For public-facing work like journalism or community organizing or advocacy campaigns, I always want whatever I write to be centered in community and how it can foster community, how it can bring us closer to each other. How writing can make us more human or reveal our humanness, what we share, and how in this life together we are and should strive to be. Fady Joudah said in an interview with Aria Aber about the genocide in Gaza recently, “All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. And perhaps that’s all we want from poetry. A language of life.” I think any writing worth something is that way.

Justine

Another thing that caught my attention is that you say all of your work is done through a transformative justice and abolitionist lens. What does that mean to you, and how is it reflected in your work?

Elly

Whew. This feels like a lot to unpack. I’ll provide a trigger warning for abuse and sexual assault though I don’t think I’ll get too detailed and will keep it vague when I do mention it. I have been a prison abolitionist for a long, long time, most of my life even when I didn’t know the language for it.

I grew up with my mom getting arrested a lot and also being institutionalized, and I grew up seeing friends being institutionalized a lot for mental health struggles. I’ve dealt with my fair share of that as well. But I grew up seeing these systems that were supposed to “rehabilitate” only cause more harm, and not help people change or get the resources they needed.

Then I started reading a lot by Angela Davis and other leaders in prison abolition, more recently in my life Mariame Kaba for example, who helped me understand my own viewpoints and experiences much more. I’ve taken a lot of anti-racism workshops to hold myself accountable for unlearning, re-learning, and practicing doing that work. Your beliefs, even the ones you don’t realize you’ve held, will always show up in your writing.
That all became really useful as I moved through the world and experienced sexual assault and rape from people I’d trusted. I was already able to recognize they were passing on hurt to me and that causing more suffering or punishing anyone wouldn’t help.

When I say that I work through a transformative justice and abolitionist lens, I mean that I want any stories I help tell to imagine a world beyond punishment and carcerality. I want to use language intentionally and kill the cop inside my head. I double check my work a lot to see what perspective I’m writing from. I take undoing internalized white supremacy very seriously. I try to make sure my work is rooted in love and growth and not revenge or the promise of someone else’s suffering to pay for my own or others’.

Justine

We’re starting this interview at the very beginning of Pride Month, so I’m wondering if you can share a bit about how your identity influences your writing—if it does—and, perhaps, the way in which it shapes how you view our society at this particular moment in time?

Elly

I mean… I’m really, really gay. (Said tongue in cheek but also like… y’know.) I’m queer and trans and to me that’s not just about who I find hot or who I want to date, it’s about how I show up in community. It means I want to read other queer and trans writers and learn from them and support them. It means I want to find ways to bend the rules in writing, whether in poetry or elsewhere.

Being queer definitely influences everything I do but especially my writing. It means I don’t want to write about or from the status quo. I want to write for people who have been oppressed, who have been outcasts, who have had something taken away from them. I want to always consider my own privileges and what I can’t understand because of the identities and experiences I don’t have. So many people, even queer people but especially white queer people, write from our own experiences and don’t consider how they might be harmful or flawed or just only specific to us.

There are so many ways we reproduce and uphold the status quo that we don’t think about all the time. I think about who has access to writing and reading, and who doesn’t. Not to be a killjoy but I think queer and trans identity is useless if it’s not influencing how you show up in the world, especially if you’re white or white-passing. Especially if you’re an American in the heart of empire, as we see America funding genocides across the globe, in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and supporting and making possible the degradation of so many vulnerable people in other violent ways.
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To me, identity feels useless if it’s just a label or for yourself. I think it should translate to and have an effect on how you write, where you write, what you write about. I don’t write with a straight audience in mind, I write from expansiveness for people practicing expansiveness. One queer writer I absolutely love is Chen Chen, whose poetry is often silly but often serious. Danez Smith and Chen are two of the queer writers who have really inspired me.

As for how I view society? I mean, queer and trans people are in such danger. There are so many laws taking away rights and killing queer and trans people, and there are so many ways that affects how people treat queer and trans people and are violent towards them and us in the world. It’s a terrifying time but I also think that makes it the best time for us to stick together, show solidarity with each other and take action to help each other and other oppressed people, whether that’s helping to raise funds for Palestinians or show up to a protest or wearing a mask in public spaces because we’re still in a pandemic.

Justine

You write on your website that you were born with multiple disabilities—including being autistic and partially deaf. How do you think the literary world can do a better job of being not just more accessible, but of uplifting anti-ableism and promoting disability justice?

Elly

Oh here we go, one of my favorite topics! I try to talk about this with people all the time. So much of the literary world is inaccessible and it makes me very sad. Disability justice, as set forth by queer disabled people of color who are part of Sins Invalid, is rooted in collective access and collective liberation, prioritizing the most marginalized and impacted. In much of the literary world, disabled people are an afterthought.

And what it says is that creative writing is not for you—whether to participate in or read or contribute to somehow. So many lit mags and publications are not ADA compliant or use fonts that while they’re really cool, they’re just not readable. And a lot of in person events are still very inaccessible. They have stairs but no elevator so they can’t accommodate people with mobility aids like wheelchairs or caves. That just feels so unfair! If you’re not a disabled person, imagine not being able to participate in things the same way that others can because people just… didn’t think about you, or worse they did but decided it wasn’t necessary or important to prioritize your access. It feels awful. Again whether you want it to or not, that’s saying “this space is not for you” to disabled folks.
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I go to a few poetry events that I feel like I have to mentally and physically prepare to go to because I’m going up a lot of flights of stairs so that’s basically it for me for the week, I can’t do anything else that week. I already use a cane sometimes but at some point might need to use a wheelchair and already feel anticipatory grief about all the things I might miss out on because people don’t prioritize accessibility in the literary world. On another note, it’s relatively simple to have virtual options for events, too, and I love it when literary events also have that. It makes it so more people can participate and why wouldn’t you want that?

On another note, I really wish we’d have more masks required events. As a high risk person, I put myself in danger every time I go to a literary event that’s crowded, poorly ventilated, and I’m the only person in a mask. It’s the biggest risk I choose to take to be in community with other writers but it also definitely feels …surreal is not the correct word but I’m struggling to think of the right one for it.

COVID and other airborne illnesses are very much still a risk and there are a lot of disabled and immunocompromised poets and writers I know who have given up being in person in the literary community because they’ve been shut out, and I know others who, in order to “fit in,” have put their own health at risk by not masking anymore.

I’ve been isolated, treated poorly by some people or treated like I’m nuts for still masking. I don’t want to just ramble about what people are not doing without uplifting folks who I have seen doing this work. Danilo Machado, a queer poet of color, co-hosts a queer and trans poetry reading series in Brooklyn called Exquisites and they always make sure it’s outdoors or masks required with air purifiers, and is most often wheelchair accessible. It’s one of the few spaces I look forward to going to.
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All this to say anti-ableism and disability justice are rooted in action not just words. We have to actively combat the kind of thinking that says we shouldn’t have to put in more effort or time to make everything we do more accessible to more people. If you don’t have disabled and chronically ill people leading, participating in or advising you (and ideally fairly compensating for labor which is of course a whole other issue in the lit world), it’s very likely you’re missing something that could make what you’re doing more accessible whether it’s a lit mag or an event.

Lastly I’ll just say that I’m not trying to be a killjoy. I say all of this from a place of love. I want us to do better so that we can actually be about liberation in literary community instead of being clique-ish, hierarchical, and just as exclusionary or punishing as every other facet of capitalism.

I’m not saying everyone has to be an activist or a community organizer or anything, but all of us have the opportunity to do so many small things to be more welcoming, more thoughtful, more in community and we should take those opportunities as often as possible.

Justine

My last question is about hope. You write that you’re motivated to use storytelling to make a real difference, but to also spread hope. The world is pretty fucked up right now, and I think hope is a hard thing for many people to tap into. What gives you hope? And what advice would you offer to those who see so many things going wrong, and are struggling to find a bit of hope amidst the chaos?

Elly

Hope is definitely a hard thing to tap into. I’ve been through it* (*read: the horrors) for most of the three decades I’ve been on this planet. Spending time with people I love and who love me and who I see actively trying to build the better world we want to live in, alongside me, gives me hope.

Seeing people trying to build more accessible community spaces gives me hope. Mostly though, I want to point out that hope is not given but is co-created. A book I really love is from organizers and writers I deeply admire in general, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes.

I’d recommend it to anyone and everyone. I think hopelessness comes from a sense that we’re each of us alone. That “I can’t do this, I’m only one person” feeling. But that comes from individualism. And we’re not alone. There are people who want to build a better world, who care about the same things you do.

The only way to really combat hopelessness is with solidarity and community care, I believe. A good bubble bath or a little treat can only sustain you momentarily. But community love and care can help sustain us much longer.

All of the writing I do, whether it’s more serious or silly, is a reminder that you’re not alone and someone else has felt this, too—and an invitation to feel that and then do something with it. How will you act once you leave the page and help other people feel less alone in tangible ways, too? Hope is not something you give or receive, it’s something you create together with others.

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Elly Belle is a multiply-disabled queer and trans writer from Brooklyn, who takes puns, friendship, and mycelium networks very seriously. In general, they are always foraging for hope. Elly writes about coming from generational trauma and abuse, and everything it takes to unlearn unhealthy “love” through that lens—aiming to breathe new life and care into others who seek to describe and understand their own healing processes. They love threading poems together with lyrical repeat phrases to trace where they've come from and where they are. Recent and forthcoming publications include pieces in no, dear magazine, Dead End zine, and an upcoming anthology from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Elly has regularly written and reported for outlets including Teen Vogue, Prism, SELF Magazine, XTRA, and more.

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