'Stay Brave' with Myka Kielbon
‘Stay Brave’ is an interview series by woman-identifying creatives for woman-identifying creatives to inspire bravery in the creative life. [Created and curated by Leah Umansky]
How do you interpret the phrase, "Stay Brave?"
My friend Angella said to me recently, “Keep going, puppy!” and I love that. I think that means “Stay Brave” to me.
As a woman-identifying writer, what are the ways that you “stay brave” in your life?
My poetry is very personal. People often tell me that what they like about it is how vulnerable I am in my writing. For a while, this surprised me. I’m a very frank and open person, so the writing never felt of course from my own manner. I suppose I stay brave by keeping that up. On the professional side, I have the privilege of working as a producer with writers I admire deeply, who generally have much more experience in the world of poetry. I get to act as the liaison between that poetry world and the public media world. As much as people tell me otherwise, I often feel like I’m sliding by on the seat of my pants. So when I find myself, a young woman without a degree in writing, editing the work of, say, an esteemed professor, I have to lead with trust in myself, in my gut feeling, in what I learned in high school English class, and in my loves of poetry and audio. I make audience-facing work, so I put myself in the seat and in the heart of the listener, and by what sometimes feels like magic, that takes us where we need to go.
Who is someone in your life who models “staying brave” for you?
At the end of 2022, I found out I was getting scammed in an apartment in Crown Heights. The coordinating roommate didn’t pay rent, and I was furious. I moved everything I had, that I had lugged across the country, that I had accumulated over almost a year in New York, into a storage unit in Kensington. I decided I would find a studio apartment in the New Year and lined up dog sitting and subletting and couch surfing to keep a roof over my head. I ended up going back and forth to that storage unit often over Winter and Spring in New York. There was no cell service, so I’d pre-load an album of music onto my phone, put in headphones, and buckle in for an hour of the tetris and scavenging to find the book, or sweater, or tax document that I sat through a long trip on the F or G to retrieve. One of those times, I noticed my copy of Ada Limon’s “The Hurting Kind” on top of the milk crate of poetry books I’d pulled out while digging for my backstock of contact lenses. I opened it up and sat on the cold concrete. Something told me I needed that book in that moment. The first poem, “Give Me This”, describes encountering a groundhog. It ends “She is a funny creature and earnest, / and she is doing what she can to survive.” — and that sunk into me so deeply, at that moment a creature underground, doing my best. Ada as a person has taught me so much about bravery. That moment was one where her poetry helped me name my own.
What writers, artists, and/or musicians do you look to to foster a sense of “bravery?”
My artistic mentor, Jocelyn Pedersen, hammered home for me that bravery comes from the habit of making. There isn’t bravery without doing – something we sometimes riffed from Corita Kent, but that Jocelyn brought into such vivid practice in her print shop. I often watered the plants and fed the chickens for her as well, and I felt how your art can come into your home, into daily practices. Into your tools and tasks. Jocelyn and her husband, the writer and editor Erik Pedersen, took me under their wing and showed me how to keep going every day towards what matters.
Two of my closest friends have undergone serious medical problems in the last few years. They have new relationships with their bodies now, and with everything in their lives, including their artistic practices. They show me their bravery by saying no to what they do not care about – people who aren’t nice, people who don’t want to talk about hard topics – and yes to what they do – road trips, liberation and abolition, board games, mac and cheese.
What’s a piece of advice you would pass on to your younger self about “staying brave?” What’s something you know now, that you didn’t know in the past?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about myself at 21-22. I feel a lot of the same anxieties, the same fears, the same frustrations. And yet, I know that she would be so proud of me now, surprised even at what’s come. What is different now is that she thought that the feelings would go away with a certain amount of career success, with a certain number of years under that belt, with certain experiences. But they don’t. So I want to tell her: You’re going to feel this way again. And the root of this anxiety is so often that I’m not enough. That I wasn’t adult enough yet, that I don’t know enough now. People, though, really don’t care if you’re young, if you’re fresh to the world. That energy is actually so valuable. And those feelings go away when I lean into learning and creating. That’s the only way out. Not success, but generation
Can you remember a time in your life where you realized your own bravery? How did you use it to propel you forward?
I’ve lived in LA for all of my adult life, until I moved to New York in early 2022. It didn’t hold, and in the summer of 2023 I decided to return to the West Coast. One framing of this choice calls it giving up. But I see it as a kind of bravery to come back to the place that I know and love. I also have made a choice, by staying where I’ve lived since I was eighteen years old, to live in conversation with every version of myself I’ve been. It used to feel like a curse, but now it feels like a gift. There are so many stories everywhere I turn.
What do you do when you aren’t feeling brave? What inspires you or motivates you?
When I’m not feeling brave, I lean into history. I love biographies – this kind of close storytelling about past lives reveals how similar we are across time. History has always been my comfort zone. I loved historical fiction as a child, and I studied history in college. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve discovered the fluidity and expansiveness of the past. History changes every day, not just by the passing of time, but by what we discover, and how we retell the stories. Usually, I’m not feeling brave because I don’t know how to move forward. Reading stories of the past reminds me that people used to feel that way, too. What I find in the past won’t give a roadmap, but it will always give me something to do that makes me feel alive in an animated reality with endless uncharted possibilities.
In what ways would you like to be more brave in your creative life?
I want to self-publish more. I want to have that trust in my own work.
What is your proudest moment of bravery?
It’s hard to call it pride, but I know that I should acknowledge my strength this fall. In August, someone I was in love with died of an overdose. It was devastating. It was complicated. It still is, every day. Life turned upside down. And it won’t be the same, ever. And yet, so many things are the same. I wake up and I hear car alarms and I have things to do that I want to do and things to do that I don’t. I wear the same underwear and I buy the same food at the grocery store. And it also isn’t really about me. It’s about this person who is gone. It’s about the opioid crisis and how it takes away people who are loved. It’s about a world that is so damn hard to live in that people need numbness. And to wake up every day and to, most of the time, try to find love and beauty in it – I do feel brave.
What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on creating a stable daily life. I moved around a lot for the last two years, and just returned to LA and moved into an apartment of my own. Making a nest for myself is my priority. Painting, hanging picture frames, organizing kitchen cabinets, trawling Craigslist and flea markets. I’m also working on poems all the time, and working on the uphill battle of submitting them to journals and magazines. Of course, I work on The Slowdown every business day, too
Thank you, Myka! A pleasure to have you and thank you for all you do to share poetry with the masses!
Myka Kielbon is a poet and the producer of the award-winning daily podcast The Slowdown, which has been hosted by Tracy K. Smith, Ada Limón, and most recently, Major Jackson. She previously was a producer on the team of Blind Landing, an independent podcast on the world of elite sports. Her work in multiple disciplines has appeared with LAist, KCRW, the Altadena Poetry Review, High Noon, Feast, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. She can be found on Instagram, at @kiel_bon
Leah Umansky is the author of three books of poems, most recently the forthcoming OF TYRANT, (The Word Works in April, 2024.) She is currently working on a memoir Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, The Bennington Review, Minyan Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day and others. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.