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The London-based magazine/publication, Enigma, with main focus on creative writing under the shape of poetry or prose, has chosen to portray Soar for its first 2012 Issue, Spring Release. A 3-page interview and the poem Leaf to welcome spring and its meanings. The full interview follows below or can be read online on the publisher’s website. Thank you very much for this blooming experience!
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As part of our themed issue on Love, what better than to hear from those whose love and passions for words vibrate through song, through image and through poetry? We interview Soar, an international poet living in Germany who has published a poetry book in 2011 and is working on a trilogy of works, as well as a novel. But that?s enough from me ? my interview with her should provide the pieces to this captivating puzzle!
1. What inspired you to write, first of all?
Becoming a writer was the last thing on my mind in the summer of 2010 when I started working on my very first manuscript. It had been on my mind and in my heart for much longer, I just didn’t know how to call or voice my inner strings for world-shared melodies. You could think of a family heritage (my grandmother’s brother was an established writer in Bessarabia), but I believe that, whatever beauty lies within ourselves, it’s not enough to possess a sprout if we don’t release it into the light and nurture it constantly to allow it to flourish.
As for my poetical beginnings, life often leads us on a path, whose course we can’t anticipate, but the faith we carry within and the positive curiosity to learn and acknowledge the world enable us to harvest the flowers of such experience.
In my case, the flowers were feelings. Feelings that wanted to be released and tamed at the same time through the means of this beautiful artistic form. Feelings, from a simple emotion to their utmost expression of passion: love.
2. For people new to your work, how would you describe your writing style?
I don’t want to tell the readers how they are supposed to feel/interpret me, nor to search for me in a stereotyped category. I would like them to define me through their own emotions and world perceptions. The same poem may evoke to some a melancholic veil of a forgotten feeling, while to others an invitation to explore more vibrations of their hearts and find beauty inside. An interesting dichotomy, worth the cause of my writings.
If I were to see my own poems through the eyes of a reader, I would say that my writings bear a subtle unraveling of love and its passion, intertwined in vistas of complex but not complicated vocabulary and figures of speech to render an effect of originality and charm through the truth of its pure existence.
3. What has influenced your work the most?
People. Especially those who influenced my life in such a way as to stop it and enhance it with the beauty of feelings and experience. I don’t see people as passers by in someone’s life, while we rush to the next train or boat. I believe the people who join our life path become a part of us in some way and are worth the appreciation. I believe we shouldn’t rush to catch the next boat or train, for we’d always be on the run to catch something, while never having anything. Instead, we should stop, feel and love, or we might miss something, which may be an entire universe.
I see human beings as wonderful creatures, much more beautiful within than what they display outside. The latter can always be fixed and matched to the social context, but the former will always be the same: a naked truth, therefore beautiful in all its imperfections.
Culture. It’s amazing how enriching this world can be, through traditions, lifestyles, languages, art. It is a never-ending realm to explore.
Music. An essential beauty to my soul’s chords. When words are suspended between the past and the future, music is the paramount present.
4. Why the name Soar in particular?
As a messenger of truth and true values in all my writings, I didn’t want to choose a “pseudo” name to represent me. Soar is in fact the literal translation of my middle name (Ioana), which in Hebrew translates “graced by God” and in Hawaiian “to soar”.
As I want my writings to soar and reach out my readers? hearts, I thought it would be appropriate to “translate” myself:-)
5. I particularly enjoyed reading your work on the ?Library of Life?, it?s such a captivating analogy. How would you describe the art of writing and the world it inhabits?
The “Library of Life” (www.soaring-words.com/lang/de/2012/02/the-library-of-life/) is an article emphasizing the relationship between humans and the experiences they have, or rather attract in their life. It’s about the challenge between the fatalistic idea of life being as is and the indeterminist choice of changing life into as hoped for, if we trust our inner resources.
Writing may be seen as a similar purveyor of the same message: it shouldn’t be about a pretty window to display shocking mannequins, void of heartbeats. Rather, the alluring inner light of a distinguished bookstore with an antique flair on a high-tech street, which hides its best books within and where you’re surely tempted to step inside and wrap your curious heart in the coziness of emotions and rooted values.
In a high-tech world where a push of an app’s button gives you the world’s newsfeed, it’s not the time to be obsolete, yet neither lost in a myriad of anti-/avant-/post- trends with contradictory tendencies. Rather, it’s the time to bring the best out of you, to be original and share with the world positivity and light.
I don’t see a better purpose to writing.
6. Who is your favourite author and style of writing to read?
As strange as it may seem, during my writing periods I tend not to read, nor to follow any writer or lines of thought that may influence or interfere with mine. But I do have a long list of writers who have colored my life throughout the years and to whom I have been faithful ever since, from Dostojewski to Maupassant, through the stages of Bassani and Blaga.
Yet there is one book, which is a must-take for me every time I make a longer trip somewhere: The Catcher in the Rye. It is an amazing depiction of the human traits in all their complex aspects through the mature glass of immaturity. It is a great legacy in universal literature.
7. What have you found the most challenging about writing in general?
Discovering myself through the mirrors of others, while exploring the outer world with an open soul. It’s a constant exchange of energies and a continuous learning experience with respect to the beauty of life.
8. I was very interested to find out about your talent for languages. With which one do you feel at most ease to express yourself, and which one do you feel aids the musicality of your poems the most?
My mother is Romanian, my cuisine is Italian, my adolescence was French, my work is in German and my souls paints English poetry, so you may wonder which one I am:-)
I don’t see a language as a barrier circumscribing someone’s life with cardboard social contexts, but as a runway to explore cultures and civilizations. Every language has its own beauty and musicality once it’s perceived from within.
In my case, I didn’t pick up a language to express myself; it’s the language that picked me up: I write in the language of my feelings.
On the other hand, I must admit that I find it much more challenging to write in the language of your passion than in the language of your parents.
9. What projects are you currently working on?
My heart beats constantly:-) I am working on 2 projects and others are taking shape, but I prefer to reveal them once they are ready for the light of their message.
10. Are there any additional thoughts that you?d like to share with our readers?
My artistic work blooms with every drop of water and appreciation from my readers to whom I am grateful for continuously enriching my world perceptions. I thank them for all the support, kind words, encouragement, “likes” and “follows” of my writings.
A famous quote said “whoever saves one life, saves the world entire”. If through the mirror of my attired words, my naked beliefs and positive values will reflect a smile, a heartbeat or even a tear in my readers’ heart, then my purpose is more than served and there is no better fame to me than the one to be read, perceived, finally felt.
Time is precious, love is wonderful. Use the time not to impress, but to be yourself and pursue true values. Share love!
Thank you very much for this interview,
Soar
April 2012, Germany
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(Published on April, 17th, Enigma Magazine, Issue 8 – Spring 2012, Interviews Column, pages 10, 22-25, http://www.enigmacw.co.uk/)
