Meet Dameien Nathaniel | Trans, Queer, Autistic, Poet

We had the good fortune of connecting with Dameien Nathaniel and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dameien, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
I think I’ve always been a writer, but when I was younger I couldn’t see a future where writing was my focus, so I put it on the backburner. When I reached my midlife crisis, I realized that in reality, I couldn’t see a future without writing. So I decided to put my whole self into it and decided to go for my MFA in poetry, as well as finding my place in the local poetry scene and performing my work for others.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I started writing as a sad 12 year old, as a way to cope with a rough childhood and abusive home. When I got into college, I started exploring spoken word and the different forms that poetry could take outside of a stuffy classroom. Then, I discovered slam and found that poetry can be about competing and community. I decided to go back to school and struggled immensely. It’s not talked about in classrooms how spoken word, slam, and page poetry differ, so I found myself constantly teaching my professors and classmates more about poetry outside academia. I find there are differences in form, use of metaphor, bringing performance into writing, and accessibility, where spoken word is never talked about as an option for poets in this day and age. It was difficult to complete my degree, especially because my peers considered publication to be success, while pursuing success in my own way looked very different. Besides traditionally having poems published, I’ve won slams in my local area and been invited to perform at different events; I was the featured poet at an event in Providence, I was invited to perform a poem at the Statehouse, I was recently invited to perform at the second largest Pride event in my state, and I am the featured writer in an upcoming literary magazine. It’s hard, especially as an autistic person, to come to terms with the differences in what I’m told success is and what I find to make me feel best, but the greatest thing I learned in pursuing my degree was that I need to hold my integrity higher than anything. My peers provided a lot of great feedback, but in the end I knew what my poems were meant to be and what they needed to say. Protest is a big thing for me and goes back to the beginning of poetry, so upholding that history, while constantly being told that’s not what I was in academia for, was super important to me.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We should definitely plan around a ProvSlam night. I’m going to sign up for the open mic or slam, but you can feel free to just watch. We’ll grab a drink at AS220 while I show you that poetry isn’t always stuffy and quiet. Afterwards, let’s go to Helado Taiyaki on the other side of the city for ice cream. We’ll grab lunch the next day at Den Den and pop over to Ten One for bubble tea. If we’re looking to fill an hour, let’s check out an escape room! I work at Escape Rhode Island, so we can’t really play there, but there’s plenty of options in Providence! We can take a night and go check out Freeplay barcade, playing entirely too many games of original Frogger or pinball. If you want to get out of the city, let’s go to Roger Williams Zoo and Botanical Gardens. I also love Lincoln Woods for a hike, so as long as the weather is fair and you’re up for it, we can check out and wander the forest.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
At this point, I dedicate my work to the people who encouraged me to write my truth, my mother and my uncle, who read my early poetry and had great conversations with me about the impact my work had on them. Poetry was a way for us to connect when all other communication broke down and I wouldn’t have pursued my MFA, wrote a book, or gotten my work out there, without their help. My book, and this Shoutout, is dedicated to them.

Instagram: spasmoffeelings