Aimee, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

I am learning that how I am perceived–or misperceived–has become the fuel to my writing. We are born into boxes. These boxes determine how we are treated in life. When you start to feel like the boxes are too tight, too inflexible, life can become itchy. Imagine walking down the street and everyone keeps calling you by the wrong name. But I am ______. Much of my writing considers, interrogates, reflects on my gender, my body, this building of bones and blood and inconsistencies. I walk out of the house and because of my hair or because my box doesn’t coincide with others’ perceptions, I am mislabeled, mischaracterized. Sometimes this keeps me inside. Makes me not want to even try to go out. So I write it out. I write out the invisibility. I write, hoping one day someone will read my words and feel more understood, or feel like they can stretch out their box too. We have never really lived in a binary world; we just thought we did or pretended we did. So when people exist who challenge that or who are just trying to breathe within a space outside of that, people get uncomfortable. My writing has always allowed me that space to be myself: the misfit, the weirdo, the nonbinary person just trying to find a way to exist amidst all these boxes.

Aimee, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started writing when I fell in love with Emily Dickinson and thought that maybe I could be a poet too. All of my English teachers were the ones who made me feel like I could, who made me feel like I could exist, who made me feel like I could exist within my own squiggly lines. That led me onto many stages, searching for other creatives, finding inspiration amongst the community I started collecting.

My identity as a writer is very much weaved into my identity as a teacher. I can spend all day telling you about my failures, but being a teacher is truly the one thing I feel most proud of. I enjoy being in spaces with other writers, (trying to) inspire them to keep exhaling their stories and poetics on pages. I’ve facilitated workshops for all ages, including memoir, poetry, spaces specifically for queer and trans folks, for kids, and I currently host a free workshop the last Sunday of every month in Boulder before an open mic, which I host.

I’m not sure there is anything that sets me apart from others. That’s the thing, right? We need to be sharing our stories more, so we see more of the connections we have with one another. I’ve got traumas and bad decisions and regrets. But I also have been in love many times and have met people who have changed my life and I just want to exist in a place where we can all have basic humans rights that allow us to feel alive, safe, celebrated and understood.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Being a creative person comes with a lot of rejection. That is just part of the process. Luckily, I had quite a lot of practice with this earlier in life. The thing is, we are often taught that rejection is bad, that we should feel ashamed of it. Because rejection is somehow attached to failure. Earlier in my years of submitting my writing–back when I would mail in my work with a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope), I would collect all of my rejection letters. And there were many. I had a green folder that was bursting with “no-thank-yous” but that folder reminded me how often I took risks with my writing. It took awhile before I received my first “yes” and all those “nos” beforehand allowed me to truly savor that acceptance.

I still have those days (and months) where I feel like maybe I am just not good enough as a writer, maybe I should just give up. But then I read a book that lights up my insides or I hear someone read a poem that reminds me why I fell in love with poetry all those years ago.

Being resilient is an important ingredient to being a creative person. Not giving up. Being persistent. Being your biggest fan. Not allowing those rejections to determine your worth.

I am still learning this every day.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Here is why I write. Here is why I perform my work on stages. There have been many times in my life when I didn’t want to exist anymore. Being a queer person (especially when I was younger) taught me that I was less than others. That my life wasn’t as meaningful as others. I’ve been hospitalized many times for trying to end my life. When I was younger, I didn’t know any older queer people. I didn’t even realize then how valuable that would have been. Now, I am (ahem) a queer elder. While I still have some difficult days, what often keeps me here is showing my students (many of which are queer and trans) that they can survive this life too. My poetry on the page is more honest than I am in person. I write about my top surgery, about the bruises on my body that still haunt me, about falling in love, about what it was to come out, about making it through to the other side.

I want other queer and trans people to know that the laws that try to hold us down will never be stronger than we are.