Exploring Spirituality, Self, and Pleasure with Poet Maya Workowski

Hi, fam!

February is a tough month. The shine of the new year has worn off, and we’re still getting back into the swing of things. Plus, for many of us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s cold and dreary outside.

Which also means it’s the perfect time to stay in and cozy up with a good book. 

Look no further than Maya Workowski’s bestselling and award-winning Quiver. 

Maya, a Franklin & Marshall College graduate, has already made her mark as the founder and editor-in-chief of FEM&M Magazine. Her poetry, featured in publications like Wingless Dreamer Press and Polaris, navigates the complexities of life with a raw and relatable touch. 

Quiver, Maya's debut collection, dives deep into the enigmatic realms of divinity, prioritizing your authentic experiences over any kind of judgment. Her poems navigate a spectrum of themes—from spirituality to pleasure, goodness, and religion, exploring their interconnectedness. Its playful tone consistently avoids any hint of pretension, encouraging you to approach your own experiences with curiosity, openness, and renewed vigor.

My questions are in bold. Maya’s responses are directly below each question.

It’s a question that I think stirs up the loveliest of responses. So, I’ve got to ask: why do you write? (Question inspired by Joan Didion’s essay.) 

I write because I have so many things to unravel. I write as a way of examining different ideas, situations, and feelings. Of asking questions and pushing readers to their intellectual limits and getting people to say “what if.” I think it’s fun to engage in critical thinking via literature. It is fun and necessary. Oftentimes, I also have a muse that I want to immortalize into history. Writing does that. It freezes a memory and says, “We were here. This happened. And you are/were important to me.” That was especially important to me, writing about my first few queer partners. At the end of the day, I am a massive romantic with my Mars in Scorpio, a love of eye contact, and a soft spot for grand, sweeping promises. I love the sweetness that unfolds between two people and I want to somehow share that loveliness. I will always want to do that archival work. 

Tell us a bit about your book. Plot. Characters. Spice. Drama. Whatever you want to share, we want to hear. 

Haha, spice. There is a lot of spice in Quiver. It is a queer, feminist, spicy poetry book that I often refer to as “confessional narrative poetry.” Basically, that means “poetry that focuses on a moment, turns it into an anecdote, and reveals the speaker’s inner revelations as a result.” The collection in Quiver sits at the intersection of sexuality and spirituality, and how the human body becomes this pendulum connecting the two. I grew up Catholic. Ultimately I decided to leave the church, and this book is the result of me leaving and taking the leap into a new way of conceptualizing existence. 

Is there a particular poem in your book that holds special significance for you as the writer? Is there a poem (without spoilies!) you’re hoping the reader really connects with? Could you share what makes it stand out and any challenges or surprises you encountered while crafting it? 

I think the first poem in the book (Letter from us to the first pyou) is the most significant for me. It ties the whole collection together and prepares the reader for what is to come. It is definitely the most vulnerable poem in the book and the one I most often consider faltering in standing beside. As a young writer living in multiple systems of oppression, it can be hard to say something true and radical if you are standing alone. Even though not everything in that poem is “true” as in “factual,” it contains lots of truths about stepping into your power in the face of something scary and massive and outdated. I think that poem took me a total of five minutes to write. It was just such an outpouring of all these feelings and thoughts that I hadn’t given a spotlight to before. That poem is their spotlight. Linguistically, I was also really brave. The poem pairs a singular subject with plural verb forms, and I did this to amplify the sense of community in the speaker’s words. It might be one person saying this, but there is a whole litany of others who have the same experiences. It’s about seeing yourself as a drop in the ocean; You are a singular drop, but you also have an entire community that you belong to. That structure also speaks to the desire for other people to share your experience. You are singular but you want community, and part of you knows it’s out there, but you haven’t found it yet.

How did you decide on the title of your book? What does it signify in the context of the story or subject matter? 

The title, Quiver, is kind of a triple-entendre if that’s a thing haha. 1) quivering with anticipation, excitement, or pleasure 2) quivering in “fear” juxtaposed with meaning 1. Relates to the Catholic catchall phrase, “the fear of god.” 3) The satchel used to store arrows, particularly as used in Greek and Roman mythology. I like to think about all three of these meanings mingling together to create an image that is complex, self-contradictory, and more than any one of the meanings could be on their own. I used it to mirror the idea that life is hardly ever interpretable in one way. There are always multiple ways to view something, and that that’s okay. That’s what makes consciousness so stunning. 

Most books have some sort of core message or theme that drives it. Or a feeling you want your reader to walk away having felt. For your book, what would you say is its heart? How did you weave this central theme into the collection, and why is it important to you personally? 

Quiver’s heart is the ideal of nonjudgment, curiosity, and universal compassion. Thematically it pushes against having a set take-away and instead invites the reader to critically engage, consider the speaker’s experience, and see what it stirs up for them in their own life. This rejection of imparting a moralistic message onto the reader is important to me because so much of Catholicism is about judgment, and the speaker is breaking away from Catholicism. True open-mindedness is much more interesting to me.

What makes something (literature or otherwise) good? And one more follow-up: how do you develop a palate for good? 

This is a great question. I prefer slice-of-life media where “nothing happens,” and I know that many people do not prefer that genre, so I think my answer to this question is that “good” is subjective. You just have to find the art that speaks to you personally. This is also a great lesson in creating art and learning to be your own biggest advocate. Knowing that what you create won’t be for everyone is ultimately a freedom, albeit a scary one. My idea of “good” is vulnerable literature that makes you think about a character’s motivations and actions. It’s really about the depth of a story’s characters and thus how deeply an author is willing to examine themselves and what that says about the human experience that makes something good for me. When developing your own palate for “good,” just keep looking for works that make your heart beat faster. Eventually, you will see a pattern emerge in your tastes, and if you are a writer, you will see how you want to change or add to the conversation in your own unique way.

Do you find if you’re sad, your characters/plots become sad too? Do you have to be sad to write sad stuff? Conversely, do you have to be happy to write happy stuff? In love to write lovey stuff? 

This is an interesting question. Hmm. Ultimately, I don’t think you have to be in a certain mood to write about it. However, if I’m feeling especially overcome with emotion (usually longing, wistfulness, or lust), I try to write a few lines on my notes app while I’m in that moment so I can come back to it later and have an authentic starting point. I do think there is an inherent urgency that comes from writing in the throes of emotion, but there is also something to be said for coming back to that idea when you are level-headed and seeing if what you wrote still makes sense. 

When you're deep into writing, do you ever find yourself lost in your characters' world? How does it feel to come back to reality? Do you ever want to just stay “lost” in their world?

Sometimes, yes. Writing is such a specific state of flow, however, that it can be hard to maintain that level of concentration for a long period of time. I think the worlds I construct in my books are closely modeled on our own world, so for me, it begs the question, how can I make my own life more sparkly? My favorite author uses a phrase, “true to life and yet more beautiful” to describe her worlds. I would like to claim a similar approach. I also like when developing a body of work to leave easter eggs in each book that connects all the materials. Spoiler, I am working on my debut novel right now and one of the most fun parts as the creator of my own world is getting to interweave elements of my first poetry book into the new manuscript. I think this goes back to the whole reason why I write; Making sense of things and archiving love from my own perspective requires an aesthetic commitment as well. It’s cool to think about the possibility of all my characters living in a unified world where maybe they could run into each other at the coffee shop. 

Thanks for tuning in, y’all.

Want to get a copy of Quiver for yourself? Buy here OR enter our giveaway by saving her book to your “To Read” shelf.  

Interested in hearing more from Maya? Of course, you are! Join her Instagram community for poems, polls, motivation, fun memes, and sneak peeks of upcoming projects.

Lookin’ to befriend her on Bookworm? Follow her here.

Stay cozy. Talk soon. 

Yours in dirt, 

Ali