1989
Photo credit
Angela Prpic

Biography

Kayla Czaga lives in Victoria, B.C., where she teaches poetry online, manages a Neapolitan pizzeria, and tries to write poems when she can. You can learn more about her and read more poems by her at kaylaczaga.com

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

Yes! I tried to. I read whatever I could find in my local library, which wasn't much contemporary stuff. "An Appearance" by Sylvia Plath really dazzled me. 

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I began writing poetry when I was ten years old. I started calling myself a poet a few years later. 

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

To write poems. 

If you have a poem in our anthology what inspired you to write it?

I was walking around Vancouver with my friend, the poet Raoul Fernandes, and we were talking about our online teenage lives. Though our experiences differed greatly, we both made connections online as young people. I used the internet as a partial antidote to the isolation and boredom I felt as a teenage girl in a small northern town. Neither of us could think of poems that dealt with online friends, and the very temporary world of the internet, the blog and message board universes that don't exist anymore, so I felt compelled to write Livejournal.com/lonelyradio. A poem by him about the internet is also in the anthology. 

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

Because I consider Raoul Fernandes' poem kind of a companion poem to my own, I'd want to keep his in my memory. 

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