Daily Inspiration: Meet Vesta Vaingloria

Today we’d like to introduce you to Vesta Vaingloria.

Hi Vesta, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’m a Los Angeles native, a poet, performer, podcaster, and overall deathrock dandy. Being from LA – which is allegedly rare but I don’t buy it – I value community, subculture, and human support systems above all. Those who say that LA is only flakes, networkers, and name droppers are just looking in the wrong places. As such, all of my artistic pursuits are inextricably linked to my experience within social communities, ranging from the goth community, Rocky Horror, the poetry community, queer communities and bar culture.

Since 2014, I have been working with The Poetry Brothel, originated by The Poetry Society of New York, a 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization. This immersive poetry cabaret which fuses original poetry, advocacy, burlesque, vaudeville, live music, mysticism, and one-on-one poetry experiences has offered an ideal venue to showcase and co-create work around the idea of decadence and hedonism as meaningful parts of the artistic and intellectual experience. We perform every other month at El Cid in Silverlake to sold-out house of wonderfully eclectic patrons, whom we call Johns, Janes, and Jeans.

As a writer with a tangential and seemingly unrelated history in burlesque and sideshow (though I believe they’re all related), when I discovered The Poetry Brothel in 2014, I felt that I had found a community of my people who could directly support and strengthen mutual artistic growth. When I began my MFA at Calarts in 2012, a now-friend told me it was imperative I look up The Poetry Brothel after knowing me for a whole 10 minutes. At this time, the Brothel was still strictly NY based and only came through LA while on tour. In 2018, we officially established a permanent LA chapter of the Brothel, with Bernadette McComish as our Madame. I am proud to say I am one of the longest-running LA performers. Thanks to working with The Poetry Brothel, I can also be found performing every summer at The New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island, also curated by The Poetry Society of New York.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I doubt there is such a thing as a smooth road for any artist, or any human, really. With an MFA in Writing and a BA in English, it looks on paper as if my passions and trajectory have been pretty straightforward, but this is far from the case. I grew up with a cacophony of undiagnosed learning disabilities, a common problem which I believe is only beginning to be understood with the latest generation of kids and teens. I had what now seems to be understood as the stereotypical “gifted” child problem: the intelligent and creative child perceived as lazy when they aren’t able to meet expectations. As early as first grade, I was completely overwhelmed with what other kids and adults seemed to take for granted as basic human existence. I still feel guilt around expressing this sentiment at all because this struggle seems to pale in comparison to the hardships and traumas of others. I was and still am very lucky to have experienced a certain amount of privilege and support that is tragically and problematically inaccessible to so many.

When I say that being a kid was not for me, I don’t then mean that being an adult is. Being a person is hard. It just is. I think that what was so hard for me about being a kid was having to deal with daily emotional challenges without the experience, skills, autonomy, and ability to put words to this experience. Adulthood is rough, but at least I can use my words. I believe that my desire to write can be traced back to this experience. My greatest fear is being fundamentally misunderstood, and I see life as a writer – and simply as a person – as a constant uphill battle to be heard and understood.

Though I have always been a writer and a literature nerd, I don’t think I ever once finished a book in high school and rarely turned papers in on time. My frustration around this peaked when I was tasked to read The Picture of Dorian Gray, my favorite novel to this day (my first tattoo was of Oscar Wilde), and couldn’t even finish that in time and participate. This recurring problem led to a certain level of hopelessness around academia and conventional society as a whole. I aimed to get my GRE at the end of junior year so that I could cut high school short, but I couldn’t get it together in the executive function department to even do that. Looking back, I am grateful that I was stuck to do a conventional senior year, but that doesn’t change the feeling at that time, and ironically, the feeling of added failure that was compounded by NOT dropping out of high school.

The two poetry chapbooks that I have in progress, which have gotten incredible feedback at live events, are also suffering from the same executive disfunction that has been with me since childhood. I do not know how to be my own secretary, and I have let this hold me back. I am still aiming to get them published, but this is one of the most difficult parts of being an independent artist.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a poet, performer, and essayist, I create work that explores the gray areas of sexuality, subculture, and the confusing condition of being a human person. Informed by Dandyism, the Gothic, Feminism, and Queer Studies, I aim to shine a figurative light on literal darkness, which is just an intentionally goth way of saying marginalized and isolating experiences.

In 2015, I founded, curated, and hosted a monthly literary event called Wilde Words at The Wilde Thistle cafe & pub in Culver City. It was meant to showcase original work in the spirit of Oscar Wilde, Dandyism, decadence, darkness, queerness, and otherness, ranging from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, music, and really any performance that could be done in this relatively small space. It ran for a year and a half until sadly The Wilde Thistle shut down. I still intend to bring something like this back.

I have two poetry chapbooks in progress, Poems to Read in Bars (and Other Ways to Dignify Dysfunction) and To Dream of Live Things (Poems from a Pandemic), both of which have rather self-explanatory titles. The first was written before the pandemic, and once the bars shut down, the meaning of that collection was inevitably altered. For that reason, I’m almost glad that I was too disorganized to publish it at that time because the two collections are now in conversation with each other in a way that I want to make more intentional as I refine them. In the spirit of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, I do a lot of my writing in bars. I have a particular brand of ADHD that makes it nearly impossible for me to work at home, but being in public in an enjoyable and sometimes chaotic environment provides a unique combination of decadence and accountability. The circumstances of writing, and the places in which it is performed, are all present in the writing itself, not separate or circumstantial. I can be found on barstools all across town, sitting like a gargoyle while drinking wine, reading, and writing.

Most recently, I (along with seemingly the rest of the world) have started two podcasts, and it feels exciting to work in a different and more casual medium of communication. The first is called Open Graves, co-hosted by Heather Noel Aldridge. As self-identified adult goths who have been in this subculture in LA for, let’s just say, a very long time, we dig into the psychological and sociological experience of living in this subculture when it turns out that it’s not a phase. We invite guests from the goth community to describe their journeys, opinions, and experiences. The next is Breaking Spirits, co-hosted by Sofonisba Merula. In this series, we explore the cultural histories that spirits, liquors, distillers, and cocktails carry with them and into our own imbibing experiences. Sofonisba does the heavy research and cocktail making, and I essentially show up and drink and learn things. Unsurprisingly, I feel very lucky with this arrangement. These are both in fledgling states and available on Spotify, other platforms to come soon. I’m proud to have pushed past my crippling perfectionism, self-judgment, and sometimes unreasonable expectations and publicly be an amateur in a new medium. They are both sincerely fun to create and feel very different from the more solitary experience of writing that I am accustomed to.

In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
When I had a corporate job, I worked in digital marketing as a copywriter. I had amazing coworkers and employers, in fact they originally came from the goth community as well. However, I am just not meant to be in an office. I am nocturnal-leaning by nature, and the 9-6 life was a constant uphill battle, just like K-12 schooling. What made this even more frustrating is that as an introverted writer, I felt that most of my work could have been done partially remotely and with less time constraint. Since the pandemic, everyone had to learn how to go remote, and for some fields, this was problematic, but for writers, designers, and programmers, it seems to be working. If I ever get back into a corporate setting, I feel optimistic that flexibility is one positive attribute that has come out of the pandemic.

As for poetry and performance, that did not work so well during isolation. The Poetry Brothel did several zoom shows, which was a very surreal and not entirely satisfying experience. Now that we are back at El Cid, we have full houses of enthusiastic patrons (Johns, Janes, and Jeans), most of whom had intended to check out our show pre-pandemic and are now seizing the night, so to speak. Shows and interactive experiences are having an amazing resurgence now that most folks are vaccinated, and I see this enthusiasm escalating as the pandemic continues to dwindle.

This pandemic brought up a lot of conscious and subconscious feelings of memento mori: the constant reminder that death is a fact of life, and we must make the best of our mortality. In addition to plain job scarcity, I think this has led to a lot of the career changes we are seeing and deviation from what was considered the road of stability, especially for artists. As a poet with no current conventional employment, I am still struggling with this, but I feel less alone with this feeling than I would have prior to 2020. Community is everything, and out of the ashes of isolation, I am seeing the rise of an even more global community for writers, artist, and subcultures.

Pricing:

• Poetry Brothel tickets: from $40
• Breaking Spirits Patreon: from $5

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thepoetrybrothel.com/
• Instagram: @vesta.vaingloria
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/7ehRK2NM7cIDbvGl0UpeC4?si=8dbb0245ea06410b
  Podcast Instagrams: @open.graves.podcast, @breaking.spirits
  https://www.patreon.com/breakingspirits?fan_landing=true

Image Credits
Winona Grey, Violet Schrage, Michael Achach