Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeanelle Fu.
Hi Jeanelle, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
2022 has been interesting so far. When Spring came I turned 32, self-published my first poetry collection and broke my foot all in the same season! In the beginning of the year at a friend’s place, we all shared what our “word of the year” was and I came up with “authenticity”.
So how do you find who you are? Physically, you look in a mirror. The light reflects back to you a visual representation of you as a person, existing as the only you in this world. But who are you, inside? And what does it mean for light to illuminate from within?
For this poetry collection, I wrote about things I’ve never written about before. Things like family, my heritage.
I wrote about grief, the feelings that broke me so that I couldn’t write for years. A piece of my soul roughly etched out, shimmering in someone’s dawn. I think what I wanted was to remember those that had gone from this earth, from my life. Because it felt like the forgetting came too quick, that the world moves too fast for those that had given everything while they were here. I thought even if it’s one poem, to remember someone’s face, their laughter, I would want to write this.
And as writing usually goes, it took me from different destinations from where I started. I wrote about the living. The joy in connecting, of sharing our sufferings and moving together.
Writing has always been a sort of refuge to me. I spent so much of my childhood in the library, falling in love with the characters from A Wrinkle in Time, Matilda, Holes. In high school, I started to write poetry and blog. I got my BA in English Literature from UCLA. During my time in college, I was very active with spoken word events on campus, performing original pieces at Mighty Mic and other fundraisers. I spent a lot of my twenties between jobs, exploring various fields and somehow ended up living in Egypt studying the Arabic language for one year. That part of my life became a main inspiration for a major part of my current book.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely has taken a long time to get here, as explained by the years of writing hiatus. To finally be able to put together a cohesive literary work, something that I can share with the world and hold closely to myself feels like coming home. I underestimate the courage it takes for authors to write: to face yourself. I think that was the hardest part for me, sitting with the grief, the narrative of my own family, the relationships that make up my world- to feel it all in a way I have not done so before.
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?
I am a freelance artist/writer and just recently self-published my first poetry collection, “Blueprints”. Since publishing the book has been reviewed by Taiwanese American (https://www.
Moments that make me proud of being a writer are when people personally reach out to share something from a poem or a writing that impacted them deeply. My writing style has been described by others as lush and lyrical, evocative and piercing.
What are your plans for the future?
I hope to work on a full-length book one day, to continue to publish at a more steady pace. Besides literary work, I also want to also see how I can tie in the visual arts with the medium of words. I have a background in contemporary dance and used to do choreography), and am interested in producing content that can utilize writing, dance, film, and music to tell a story.
Pricing:
- Blueprints – $15
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jeanellefu.com
- Instagram: @lovejnell
- Other: https://linktr.ee/Jeanellefu