TRICIA DAVIS-MUFFETT
Tricia Davis-Muffett is an award winning poet and senior director of customer marketing for Google Workspace. Her poetry has appeared in countless literary journals and she was featured in the 2022 Best New Poets anthology.
Tricia has been a senior marketing executive for over 25 years, and before joining Google she was the director of public sector marketing for AWS (Amazon Web Services) and was the VP of Marketing at Booz Allen.
Tricia’s latest book of poetry, The Alchemy of Yeast and Tears, published in 2023, is a collection of original poetry that explores the griefs and joys of motherhood and daughterhood as she navigated her mother’s death along with the challenge of raising children in a broken world.
Tricia holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and is based in the Washington DC area, where she lives with her husband who practices environmental law.
Tricia can be reached at info@patriciadavismuffett.com
When did you begin to write poetry? And what was it about poetry vs say, novel writing, that led you on this path?
I started writing (bad) poetry in middle school and high school, but the music of language became a part of me from my earliest days as a little kid in my grandparents' Episcopal church. The psalms and the hymns soaked into me and I was addicted to the sound and rhythm of language. I love reading novels, but I've never been drawn to writing them. I like the way poetry freezes a moment in time. I'm drawn to its imagery and musicality.
Who/what was your inspiration that led you to becoming a poet?
I had an amazing English teacher in 8th grade who introduced me to Robert Frost, which started my appreciation and understanding of poetry. Then in college, I discovered Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds and Joy Harjo and Denise Levertov and Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton. I just absolutely fell in love and there was no turning back for me.
What was the inspiration behind your latest book, Alchemy of Yeast and Tears?
When I started writing again in 2020, it had been 13 years since my mom died and I think I was finally ready to write about my grief. My mother died two weeks before my youngest child was born, so that was a complicated time. This book really is grounded in that time and also in the feelings of grief of so many kinds that were so present during 2020, as well as the joys of my family, which I was also able to see more clearly during that time of quarantine.
You balance a demanding job in tech with being a writer. How does your brain reconcile these two very different disciplines and demands?
I have to give my writing the time when I first wake up if I want to generate anything interesting. Otherwise, I'm too distracted with all of the other things I need to get done and problems I need to solve. One of the things I had to train myself to do was to develop a habit of waiting for the muse to show up every day. Sometimes she joins me and sometimes she doesn't, but I have to show up if I want to have any chance to invite her in.
What is the biggest challenge you face in striking the balance between corporate vs creative?
It's easy to let the stress of the corporate job take over and push everything else to the side. I did that in a previous job and as I was leaving it, I made about 15 pages of lists of things I had abandoned for my job that I promised I would never do again. Writing was one of those things. Now that I found it again, I am trying hard to never let go.
Does having this creative expression make your corporate work easier, and vice versa?
There is so much rejection in creative work. Having some other way to make my living and have tangible accomplishments makes it a lot easier to deal with the crushing weight of rejection that artists fight every day. But I also think that my creative work helps me to see problems in a different way than most people and gives me a little space to let new ideas in.
Congratulations on being included in Best New Poets 2022. How important was it to you to receive this honor?
It's interesting-I got my MFA in 1996, so it feels a little odd to suddenly be a "Best New Poet" so many years later. When I came back to writing and publishing, I thought hard about what I wanted out of my writing career and realized it wasn't about prestige (like it had been when I was a new MFA) but was really about connecting to an audience. That's how I approached my efforts to publish. But still, getting a recognition like this is pretty incredible and gives validation to all of the hard work I've been putting in.
Have you ever suffered from self-doubt with your poetry and how did you tackle it, if so? If not, where did your confidence come from that validated that poetry was your calling?
Every time one of those "thanks but no thanks" emails rolls in from a literary journal, I doubt whether I should be doing this. But then, a poem comes out and people I never expected to resonate with it tell me that it meant something to them, and it keeps me going.
As a poet, what is the biggest obstacle to success? How do you navigate such obstacles and stay encouraged to continue writing?
It's a very rare thing to be a successful poet. It's different from being a novelist. You pretty much have to do something else to make a living. I think about William Carlos Williams, who was a pediatrician, or Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive-and I also think of the famous poets who hardly published in their lifetimes, and I realize that you just never know what will ultimately resonate with audiences or stand the test of time, so the only success I really care about is that I just keep going.
Success looks different for everyone. How do you define yours? In what ways has reaching your definition of success been more challenging than you initially thought, if at all?
It's hard to pick yourself up after every rejection and take a hard look at your work and just keep slogging along. I took a lot of solace from Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, where she talks about submitting a story to The New Yorker that they had rejected before she was famous and once she was famous, they took it. That rejection was arbitrary. My goal is to find a good publisher for my full-length collection and my main issue is just being patient enough to wait for the right opportunity.
Aspiring to anything outside of the status quo is fraught with risks. What was the scariest risk you took in building your poetry career and would you change your initial steps of your journey, knowing what you know now?
In early 2020, I had just left a toxic job, the pandemic was looming, and my kids were teenagers and much more self-sufficient. I hadn't written for nearly 10 years and hadn't written seriously for about 20. I was terrified that I might have forgotten how to do it. I signed up for a workshop at The Writers Center in Bethesda (which had gone fully virtual) and decided I wouldn't tell anyone that I had an MFA and some publications under my belt. Luckily, I hadn't forgotten how to write, but those first steps back to my writing life were truly terrifying. Part of me wishes I had never stopped writing, but another part of me thinks I needed that time to just live my life and collect what I needed as raw material.
Where can people find your work?
You can read my work and buy my book at www.PatriciaDavisMuffett.com. My book is also available on Amazon.com and through my publisher, Kelsay Books.
