Today we’d like to introduce you to Feral Kenyon.
So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I’ve been a writer all my life, but it was only after I graduated high school that I began to write poetry.
Truthfully speaking, I didn’t like poetry. At least the poetry I was forced to read in school. My niche was musical lyricism and fiction, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I wrote my first song when I was in the fifth grade titled Blood. It was written with P!nk and Amy Lee in mind, and as I got older, I wrote more and more songs because music was an escape for me when my depression and anxiety was too much to handle. Fiction was and still is, more of a challenge because of the complexity of creating your own worlds and characters along with having a steady plot, but it was fun to write nonetheless. Throughout school, I used to skip paying attention in class to work on a Naruto fanfiction I was so close to finishing.
It was after I graduated high school that I started getting more into poetry. I began reading poets like John Keats and Emily Dickinson and read more of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems than I did his short stories. I really feel like I was only able to get into the genre after I’d gained a little more experience in life and could appreciate it more.
Has it been a smooth road?
In 2018, I’d gone through the most severe emotional trauma I’ve ever gone through. It started at around the middle of February and got steadily worse as the year progressed until I ended up in a mental hospital for being very close to committing suicide. I was at the height of the worst mental health crisis I’ve ever gone through. I spent my favorite holiday in a hospital gown and surrounded by white walls because I wanted to kill myself. And when I got out a few days later, the people I was counting on the most had abandoned me for reasons out of my control. I was frozen out. I was isolated. I was excluded. I was made to feel like me reaching out for help or attention was a form of manipulation. I was directly told that I deserved everything I was going through by someone that was a constant source of negative energy in my life. I was more alone than I had been in a long, long time. The person I loved the most found their way out of my life no matter how hard I tried to sink my nails into them and keep them around, and despite my family being there for me, there was only so much they could do when no one but me knew what I was going through. There wasn’t a single second during the last half of that year that I didn’t want to find some way to make all of the overwhelming pain I was feeling stop permanently. To just make everything stop.
What happened to me, and how fast I lost everything I loved, still haunts me to the point where I think about everything that happened in detail every single night. At one point in time, I had to drink, get high, or take high doses of sleeping pills to even fall asleep without crying myself to sleep every night.
Then, I discovered Segovia Amil. Segovia is a poet that disappeared from the internet way before I found her, but she left a trail of awe-inspiring and beautifully dark poetry in her shadow and I was obsessed. Finding her work inspired me to write my own poetry and before I knew it, I was writing a book. Through a lot of tears, a lot of heartbreak, a lot of sleepless nights, and a lot of emotionally draining evenings, I’d finished penning my pain.
It was a rebirth. Though I was still in a lot of pain, the shadow of everything I’d lost no longer had any control over me and I was able to breathe. Once I hit ‘publish’ and the book was live, I knew writing was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I think what sets my writing apart from others in my demographic (being a black, queer pagan in a Christian-majority community) is the fact that I draw from dark imagery, horror, Gothic literature, and the raw emotion we generally never talk about. I focus on the ugliness of the south, mental illness, and heartbreak. While others typically focus on the healing bit of the psyche, I focus on the darker energy that we all need to shed in order to heal. With that being said, I’m quickly finding that there are people like me with a natural draw towards the darker side of things. I generally have a hard time finding friends to read my work because of how dark and abrasive my works are, but I find that it’s what makes my specific style unique.
However dark my works tend to be, I’m already working on my next book that’s due sometime at the end of next year. I can’t tell you any spoilers, but it is significantly lighter than Phoenix and specifically written for anyone of the sapphic catagory.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I love Atlanta. I was born and raised here, and I’m always discovering new parts of the city that I’ve never explored before. I love how rich the culture is and how generally creative and free its people are. As far as what I don’t like about it, I’d just say we could be a little more open-minded. My entire existence sometimes feels like a spit in God’s face and there are plenty of people here to remind me of that, especially the more south of the city you go.
Pricing:
- eBook for Phoenix – $6.99
- physical copy for Phoenix – $10.99
- autographed copy of Phoenix – $14.99
Contact Info:
- Website: https://feralkenyon.wixsite.com/phoenix
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/feralblacksheep
Image Credit:
All photography by Feral Kenyon. Art by Trepka Petkova
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