If you know what you're looking for, the illustrations might give you a tip about what is coming in that section. But it takes a lot of study and familiarity with the work for anyone to really "decode" it, and there are also images that are just thematically important, and not necessarily pointing to specific poems, so mainly it was just a fun puzzle for ourselves.

Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.

I don't think it's about art being a career but it's about making sure that if art is something that you love, something that brings you joy, it's about you having a duty to find time in your life for that thing that brings you joy...even if it can only be a small amount.

I write about love and family a lot, because I'm always trying to figure those things out. At different points in my life, just when I think I've finished writing about it, the dynamics shift, and then I have a whole new set of questions and worries and misunderstandings to wrestle with.

I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.

The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.