Diamond J. Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has performed at Chicago’s Stage 773 and her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio. She has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Vice, Pitchfork, Lenny, PANK, The Offing, Fjords, Winter Tangerine, JoINT Literary, Wellesley Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, BLACKBERRY and others. Sharp has been an editorial fellow at The Root, a features editor at Rookie, and a staff writer for Laundry Service. Her essay “Friends for Life” and her interview with Margo Jefferson were recently featured in Tavi Gevinson’s anthology Rookie on Love. A Callaloo fellow, Sharp has also attended the Wright/Hurston workshop, and is a member of the inaugural Poetry Foundation Incubator class. She has a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. Sharp lives in Brooklyn.

EB: How did you begin writing in general and nonfiction specifically?

DJS: I feel like this is one of those questions that everyone answers by saying when I was a child I was writing short stories, but, I mean, yeah.

EB: [laughter]

DJS: Let’s fast forward past elementary school. I didn’t really start writing seriously until high school. My high school had a spoken word club. At the time it was a unique program, that I think a lot of schools have copied since, but then it was an unusual thing. There was an after-school spoken word club, but we would also have spoken word poets come to our English classes. Some poets from England, a lot of local poets, and they would do readings and run workshops. Looking back on it, it was an unusual thing they were doing in the early aughts, as it was an introduction to poetry that wasn’t just poems by dead white men.

EB: That’s so cool.

DJS: Then from spoken word club, I made the decision to try to join Young Chicago Authors. At the time, they did let people in from the Chicagoland area—the suburbs directly across from the city line, like Evanston and Oak Park and Calumet City. Where I grew up, I could roll out of bed and be in Chicago in five minutes, but that’s my secret, actually, that I’ve never actually lived in Chicago.

EB: [gasp]

DJS: [laughter] I’ve never had a Chicago address!

Anyway, in 2005, when I was trying to get into Young Chicago Authors, they were trying to limit the amount of non-Chicago people in the program—which makes sense—but I was able to finally talk myself into the program as a junior. It was through Young Chicago Authors that I really got the beginning of my education as a writer—not just poetry classes, but there were nonfiction classes, a lot of really innovative courses, like I took this math and poetry course. There was all this interesting work being done there, all on Saturdays, and not just spoken word poetry—there was essay writing, scriptwriting, screenwriting, a lot of education that was happening. I would get there at 9 and not leave until 3, which is a really nerdy way to spend your weekends.

EB: So as someone who has written in a lot of different genres, do you find that your writing process is different depending on if you are writing, say, poetry versus an essay? Or if you know something is going to be performed versus read?

DJS: I am a procrastinator, so everything has to be done one way which is just me finally sitting down and doing it. I have a hard time concentrating and focusing my thoughts. Now I know that I have ADHD, but I didn’t know that in high school because people are dumb and they don’t diagnose it in girls. So it’s hard for me to hone in and get work done—once I can focus, I can do it, it just takes a while for me to get there. My process is mostly me jotting down stuff in notes on my phone, quotes, lines I’ve seen—usually for poems—and for essays, I tend to do a lot of research ahead of time, make notes, make an outline, and go from there.

EB: When you are writing nonfiction in general, or essays specifically, what do you find most challenging about it?

DJS: When it comes to essays, I’ve mostly been writing about myself, so it is usually an issue of disclosure. I talk about my mental health pretty freely. I don’t have a problem with that.

EB: What about disclosure when it comes to other people?

DJS: For the most part, I’ve chosen to write about myself. But I also come to the conclusion that when two people are involved in a situation, what happened to them also happened to you, so I think there is something to be said about being okay with writing about your experiences.

EB: Mary Karr has said something like that, if it happens to me, if you did it to me, then I get to write about it.

DJS: I think she is right about that. If it happened to me, I get to write about it.

EB: Once you decide how much you want to disclose about yourself, is it difficult or weird or freeing or rewarding to have that information out there?

DJS: Freeing might be the answer. Once I started writing about mental illness, I realized that people thinking I’m a little off was fine by me. They’re going to think it regardless, so, might as well write about it.

EB: [laughter] And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

DJS: It helps me process. That may sound like a novice observation, but it’s really the truth in my case.

EB: I totally get that. I never know how I feel about anything until I’ve written about it.

DJS: Yup.

EB: So, you’ve done a lot of work as an editor, too, right?

DJS: Yes. I was a poetry and features editor at Rookie.

EB: So, as an editor, when you’re looking at nonfiction, what do you think makes for really good nonfiction? Or, I guess, good writing in general?

DJS: Again, this may sound obvious, but something that is really clear. You’d be surprised by how many essays you read and you’re just not sure why the person wrote it.

EB: I get that. A lot of times with essays, including essays I have written myself, I find myself wondering, did I just write about this because it happened to me, you know?

DJS: Oh, yeah.

EB: So have you found that writing nonfiction has affected your life in any way? As a writer, or as a person?

DJS: I think so, in terms of what I am able to tell in my writing. Different mediums use different things. I wouldn’t be as up front about my mental health problems in poetry as I am in nonfiction. But those are different mediums, and so they have different ways of writing themselves out on the page.

EB: Going back to the idea of disclosure and having information about yourself out in the world, this may be related to that, but a lot of your nonfiction work appears on the Internet. What role do you think the Internet plays in nonfiction writing?

DJS: Obviously it allows it to get around the world in a minute, and that’s good and bad. I don’t think anything can be said about the Internet and nonfiction writing that hasn’t already been said. It’s the best of times and the worst of times.

EB: [laughter] Yeah, exactly. Though I do love how the Internet allows a lot of voices to be heard that are often underrepresented in traditional publishing.

DJS: Definitely, but it’s two-fold. There are people who are able to write now who wouldn’t be able to write otherwise, without the Internet, and that is fantastic. But then there are also people shouldn’t be writing. It’s a gift and a curse.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com