Ignatius Valentine Aloysius

Ignatius Valentine Aloysius is a talented writer who SAI is excited to welcome on January 25, 2025, for a reading celebrating the release of his forthcoming collaborative poetry collection, Salt Pruning. In advance of the event, we were able to have a conversation with him about what “collaborative poetry” means, his role as host of Sunday Salons, and more!

Ignatius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he teaches. He is the author of the literary novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books) & Salt Pruning. His prose & poetry have appeared in several journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, & The Rumpus. He is the current host of the popular reading series Sunday Salon Chicago, and is Co-Editor of The Overturning Anthology, due out in early 2025. Ignatius serves as Co-Chair of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale Foundation, where he is also a Board of Trustees member. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Your new collection is one of “collaborative poetry.” Can you say a bit more about what that means, and how you came to this form?

Let me answer it this way: While artists generally work alone and prefer to create work alone, sometimes they are drawn to collaborative projects with other like-minded creators. The energies that pull two (or more) people together often surge from a common focus or point of inspiration, such as a theme, event, or purpose, and this may happen even if the collaborators practice a different form of the arts. In my case, the difference between David and me is not the form (poetry) but rather the level of expertise in the form. Salt Pruning is my first poetry collection (and I already have a published novel with an independent press), while David Allen Sullivan has already published half a dozen poetry collections, and he is a recent poet laureate of Santa Cruz, California.

David first reached out to me via email in early 2022, asking if I would bring him on as a guest reader for Sunday Salon Chicago (sundaysalon-chicago.com), the popular literary reading series which I currently curate and host at Roscoe Books in Roscoe Village on the north side. It was after his reading a few months later that I reached out to him with an unusual proposition, never knowing if he would say yes. I asked if he’d be interested in working on a collaborative book together. Mind you I was taking a chance and thought he’d turn me down. I pointed him to a list of published poems of mine in online zines, and was, at that time, also shopping two poetry collections. But that’s how we got started. He agreed, and so we relied on a call-and-response method, where I sent him a finished poem and he responded to mine with a poem of his, and so on.

How has the role of collaboration in your writing evolved, and more specifically, the role of your relationship with David in this collection?

I suppose you could say that we have become good friends, and that we understand our collaborative process well. And we respect each other’s style; this is important for any collaboration to prosper. David inspires me, and I think it’s fair to say that I also do the same for him. We continue to write and send each other a new response poem as time allows, since we’re also working on a second collaborative collection. We don’t set a time limit on the delivery of a finished poem; it happens when it happens. Salt Pruning contains a couple of invented poetry forms, which the second manuscript-in-progress doesn’t yet have.

When we first began, however, we didn’t know each other, so it was important that we put aside our egos if we were to get anywhere with our collaboration. By this I mean that we kept writing and exchanging poems as we got to know each other’s voices and methods, and this took a little time; but it also meant that, if we were to produce a decent body of work, we had to refrain from criticizing or judging poems or verses right after they were written. We began editing all the poems in Salt Pruning only after we got to the end of the finished manuscript.

In addition to being an author, you are also engaged in the literary community as an educator and as the host of Sunday Salon Chicago. Could you say a bit about how that space and those other positions inform your writing?

The act of writing, for me, is separate from how I engage in the literary community. You might say the community is a beneficial extension of the act of creating work. Writing is really a more personal and private endeavor, and I rely on down-time to produce work, but I also want to make sure that I’m staying unique without being influenced by what’s out there in an ever-changing marketplace. One can only try. A good thing about being active in the lit community is that it keeps me informed about what’s happening locally (and nationally), and the role that I play in nurturing this local community. Readers for Sunday Salon Chicago will approach me from all parts of the country, and I’m constantly curating their new published books for the right fit with each reading in the series.

We’re so excited to be hosting you and your fellow readers at South Asia Institute. What’s your relationship to the space, or to your identity as a South Asian writer in Chicago?

It’s a real treat to be reading at South Asia Institute in early 2025, and I’m pretty sure that David will be enchanted by the space as I am. We’re also fortunate to be reading with Faisal Mohyuddin and Nina Sudhakar, both local writers who are doing amazing things with their own work. Both Faisal and Nina were once also part of the South Asian writers’ poetry workshop group, along with Dipika Mukherjee, who ran it, I believe. As for me, I was born in India and raised in Mumbai by a Tamilian father and Anglo-Indian mother, so being involved with SAI in this way is very special to me. It’s a question of belonging, and SAI offers that.

Congratulations on the publication of Salt Pruning! Looking ahead, could you share a bit about what kinds of projects you are keen to work on next?

I appreciate that! Salt Pruning means a lot to me and David. We worked very hard at reaching this goal of publication, but we also stayed focused until the very end, before and during the production process. One good thing that also came out of our collaboration is that I’m part of David’s poetry workshop group on the West Coast, after he invited me to join the group, which meets monthly on Zoom. And, as I mentioned earlier, David and I are getting close to completing our next collaborative collection, because we just continued writing without a break. So I’m looking forward to seeing where that second manuscript takes us and how we’ll find a new home for it. I also think it would be nice if David and I could give presentations in different cities on the collaborative process as poets.