by Emily Gillette
It’s Friday, April 21st at 1:04 p.m., and we are just sitting down on the fifth floor of the Lamont School of Music. In one of the practice rooms nearby, I can hear a French horn player practicing for their recital, and even further away someone is warming up their scales on the piano. Today I am interviewing Ruby Pucillo, a fourth-year English and Jazz Studies double major at the University of Denver. She is the current president and founding vice president of the DU Writers’ club. She currently works as an editorial assistant in Critique at the Denver Quarterly, and as a freelance editor. Before Ruby graduates, we at the Writing Center wanted to get a deeper look into the club that she co-founded.
How long have you been leading the DU writer’s club?
I founded the DU Writers’ club with Callie Miller, who was a great friend of mine and is now an editor out in the world doing her thing. We founded the club together in February of 2020.
I was the vice president and she was the president, which seems crazy to me–that she had met me and never heard any of my creative writing, but just for some reason believed that I was the person to start the club with her. And it was amazing. It started off really strong and then through the COVID years, it was difficult to keep our numbers up. But I’ve been doing it ever since. So that’s been all four years of my undergraduate where I’ve been a leader of the Writers’ club.
For any readers who may not be familiar with the writing club, can you tell me about what a typical club meeting would look like?
Yeah! So it gets a lot harder when there are fewer people coming to the club because we like to spend a lot of our time sharing and talking and enjoying each other’s company. There have been some years where maybe four to six people show up to a meeting. This year, it’s been great. We’ve had sometimes 15 people at a time, which is just so exciting. And we have our regulars, like you, which is awesome! So we come in, we sit down, we usually banter for far too long…
And then we tend to ask everyone to introduce themselves regardless of whether we know everyone because we want to be cognizant that everyone has really busy lives and has a lot going on and won’t necessarily remember each other, but we want to create a feeling of community every time. And I think making everyone’s voices heard right from the beginning is smart.
So we’ll introduce ourselves, we’ll say a little bit about ourselves, and then we tend to ask some silly questions. You know, ‘what kind of thing would you be?’, ‘Which of these items do you associate with the most?’—just something to get people thinking a little outside the box. And then we generally present some sort of prompt. Sometimes that takes the form of a constraint where you can’t use a certain letter of the alphabet. Sometimes it’s a personalized prompt where I’ll collect a series of proverbs or palindrome sentences or anything that could get you thinking a little differently. Sometimes it’s just a really open prompt, like ‘write about losing one’s memory’ or write about something as incredibly simple and trite as a lost love, right?
But it’s great because people don’t feel any pressure to share their writing. We do have a moment where we open up for sharing at the end, but people generally just write whatever they want. The prompts are helpful, but not everyone uses them. And it’s really great.
And the second hour, we tend to reserve for workshopping, so people will send me materials in advance… Sometimes the author reads [their work], sometimes they have someone else read, and then we provide feedback. And that’s really interesting because everyone comes from different backgrounds and formations, so we get all kinds of different advice coming from different angles.
Would you say you get a lot of people from different backgrounds, different majors, interests, writing styles?
Yeah! It’s been amazing to me to see that so many of the people who come back very regularly are, in fact, not people who study literature, but people who study something else and have this passion that they don’t get asked about very often…I just love to see that we get math majors and communications majors and STEM majors, and you know, psychology majors—we get a lot of those…history majors as well. All kinds of people. And really every discipline that you enter has some aspect of storytelling. So it’s always interesting to hear what stories people encounter in their studies. You know, math majors have some crazy things that they’ll bring up in their writing, and things that most creative writing majors wouldn’t even know where to begin with. So that’s always fascinating.
And yeah, DU definitely has always had a problem with representing people from different backgrounds, probably because of how prohibitive the tuition is and where the university is located. Denver is just such a historically white city.
But all that being said, we see a lot of representation in the club. It’s great. I see people from all walks of life, from all socio-economic backgrounds, people of many different races. And we have a pretty wide gender distribution too, which is interesting in English, which is so often a very, very female dominated space. But we see a lot of men come to these meetings too, and non-binary folks and trans folks, which is great. I think we’ve created a really wonderful community here of people who really share that love for writing.
Do you have a favorite piece you’ve produced from a writing club meeting?
I’m not sure…I think Writers’ club has helped me find my style for sure, which is very aligned with the postmodernist tradition in its themes and cadence and historical influences. But it’s hard for me to say.
There’s one piece that I wrote about a man working in a grocery store, who observes this other man come in and the other man is luxuriating in all the different things that he can buy at this grocery store. And, meanwhile, the man working at the counter has this addiction to eating tabloids and he loves to just taste the ink of stories that include Kendall Jenner or UFOs or celebrity drama or weight loss advice, just these very deeply American stories and falsities. For some reason he’s really infatuated with eating that stuff. And a lot of my pieces are interested in food and consumption. I love supermarkets. I love cooking. I love the way that food sort of carries us through every day.
And for some reason, I can’t get enough of it. I just love writing about the things that we consume. And I think there are lots of ways to consume. It all sounds pretty silly, but that’s sort of the track that a lot of my writing takes: consumption in various forms…
Yeah, I keep coming back to that piece. I think it’s hard to find stories that you write that you haven’t already read. And it’s not to say that I haven’t already read a story like that, but finding different colors and shadows than what you’ve encountered before is all we have left in this world. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Chekhov or Plato–it could be one of the two–who said that there are really only seven stories that exist. I don’t know if it was seven or nine.
What is the ratio of prose to poetry writers at Writers’ club?
We get a ton of poetry writers. I think that poetry is so broad in its potential. And being a prose writer myself, I don’t gravitate to poetry necessarily. But that being said, we just get so many different kinds of poets. We get tons of post-structuralists who tend not to share, but they’re exploring words. We get a lot of people who are writing poetry about their feelings, and that checks out. That’s what poetry has historically come from. It’s a sort of journaling. We get a lot of people who are interested in rhyming and in literary structures, and poetry is a great place for them to go with that.
And also, I think the structure of the club is conducive to poets because we write in 12-minute chunks of time, but sometimes shorter. So, developing a story during writer’s club is actually very difficult. And that’s why what I often end up with would be called ‘flash fiction’ because I have this prompt, I need to begin immediately, and I need to create some sort of narrative. A lot of poets don’t need to worry about that to the same extent.
So we get a ton of poets, but I have noticed that there are a lot more prose writers showing up this year and I think it’s because we have tons of people who write fantasy, and we also have tons of people who are just interested in stories more so than the language itself. And a club attracts what it contains.
How did getting involved in the Writers’ club impact your writing, or your view of yourself as a writer?
I’m someone who has always taken everything I do extremely seriously, sometimes to a fault. Being under a time pressure, having to deal with prompts and constraints, having to set an example for other people around me as a leader…All that has helped me take myself a little bit less seriously.
It’s even improved my sense of humor to be in the Writers’ club, and I’ve seen more humor emerge in my writing since I started by a wide margin.
I also have just been exposed to so many different styles. I’ve actually seen a lot of what I don’t like because I’ve encountered so many people that obviously, once in a while, there’s going to be something that comes up…Seeing the things that I don’t want—just being exposed to so many styles—is helpful for me to whittle down what are my writerly values. And then that being said, I’ve seen so many more things that I love than things I haven’t liked.
And I give myself a pass, first of all if we have many people at a club meeting, but also I allow myself to keep one thing to myself per quarter. So every 10 weeks I get one pass card. So if I want to write something really personal or really sexy or really, really out of the box, I can keep that to myself. Or if I just have a bad day. But it has raised the quality of my writing as well, because I’m making every single word count in order to be a valuable sharer.
Since today we are in the Lamont School of Music, I wanted to ask you a question about the work you do here. I’ve seen one of your vocal jazz performances in the past and learned that you write song lyrics as one of your applications of writing. So I was interested, where do you draw inspiration from those lyrics?
I love this question. I do think that creative writing and lyric writing are very different. I actually believe that lyric writing is a more musical practice than it is a literary one, because you need to serve the function of the song. I never ever write lyrics before I write the music. I feel that the music should always take precedence. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in co-writing lyrics and music, but I would struggle to see a situation wherein music…actually I’m gonna change my mind. Text setting is an extremely valuable practice. Text setting is where we take pre-existing text, and we write music to it. But you will see a wide divergence between those two scenarios [lyric writing and text setting]…
So writing lyrics is an incredibly time-consuming process. I love it because I am a language fanatic through and through. I am obsessed with the way that language functions and I’m obsessed with its communicative properties, and that has translated to my writing very much as well. I think that a lot of my writing prioritizes rhythm and sound over the narrative. That’s not to say that the narrative isn’t important, but I feel that the narrative needs to be supported by words that are so compelling in themselves. That it really is writing, and not just a story. So I feel that that has a lot to do with my music.
And I feel that when it comes to text setting where we have pre existing lyrics, the music that follows that text setting needs to be so compelling on its own as a composition. So I really believe in balance—that’s what I’m trying to get out, I suppose. The lyric needs to honor the music so deeply that the music becomes better somehow. And music that is composed to honor the lyrics needs to honor those lyrics in such a way that it finds that deep seated, lyrical structure that might be hard to extract otherwise.
I think that is my response to that question, that’s how I approach combining the two, and that means that it’s a very arduous process for me, but in the end I have come out with very, very few products that I don’t feel are my best work.
I believe that every lyric I’ve written is actually the best possible lyric that I could have written. I cannot say that about my writing as it exists on its own, and I cannot say that about my music as it exists on its own, but I actually believe that every single lyric I’ve set to music and every single piece of music that I’ve set to a lyric is the best possible partner for the thing that came first. So okay, very long-winded response, but I feel a great deal of conviction about that.
What advice do you have to anyone who is interested in creative writing—or really any form of writing—and isn’t sure where to start?
I think you’ll get a different response from every single writer when you ask this question.
I often draw a blank in writer’s club. And the first thing that I do is I write down some words that I am hearing today.
“Oxtail, splint, shivers, slither, grass stains on the backpack.” Right? Those are some of the sounds that I’m hearing today. There are probably a few things in there that will call to me in some way and suggest a narrative, but I really start with the sound of it, and I think that goes back to my interest in language. I learned to speak French because I wanted to and I thought it sounded great. And that’s what opened up a whole new world of communication for me, but the thing that first called to me was the sound of it. So as someone who is preoccupied with sounds, I would always advise you to find your sounds first.
Because ultimately, although writing is a really unique art in that it’s just a bunch of characters that represent other things, and it’s set on a page that is static, and once it’s there, it doesn’t change…
Despite all of that, the first thing that enters your mind is the rhythm and the toothsome attitude of words.
And I think a lot of beginning writers are either so invested in that, that they forget the importance of narrative, or they’re so invested in narrative that they forget the importance of that, but I think that the voice really comes from that rhythm, cadence, and sound.
And that’s always been what’s gotten me to a point of beginning.
Ruby Pucillo will be graduating at the end of this quarter, and has plans to move back to New York to pursue her interests in publishing. Right now she is in the process of planning an open mic night here at DU for writers, musicians, and other performers, which will take place in week 8 or 9. This summer, several of her prose works will be published in Foothills Magazine.
The Writer’s Club will continue next year under new leadership after club elections take place.
Interview transcribed by https://otter.ai