A huge fan of the Hunger Games and its author, Kimberly Reyes recently learned that Suzanne Collins’ series was inspired by the dissonance she experienced when viewing online horrific images of the Afghan war juxtaposed against the internet’s trendy entertainment banter.
Reyes, an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, felt an artistic affinity to Collins, one of her favorite writers.
“It helped me realize how similar I am to my influences and the things I’m drawn to. The fact that I’m so obsessed with the Hunger Games and that this writer that I love so much had the same impulse to be repulsed by this dichotomy—well, of course, she’d be,” Reyes said. “That’s why I love her work so much.”
Reyes, the author of several critically-acclaimed and award-winning books, has often invited her emotions—especially anger—to inspire her own writing. Her newest book of poetry was inspired by the same sort of revulsion that her idol Suzanne Collins experienced.
“I was doom scrolling, seeing images of war and then TikTok videos of people dancing—this absolute dissonance of people seemingly ignorant to the most horrific things that I’ve ever seen on my phone,” Reyes said. “I was so disturbed by the dichotomy that it became the impetus and “Bloodletting” just spilled out of me.
Reyes described her writing as emotionally charged and recognized that rage is often her “jet fuel.”
“Unfortunately, rage is sometimes the only way that people know how to feel anymore. It’s how you get peoples’ attention, and it’s a feeling that people can relate to,” she said.
Yet while the anger or rage are relatively easy to feel, Reyes’ real message and artistic advocacy centers on accountability and empathy.
“There are all these things going on in the world, it’s far from a perfect place. But how do we all individually contribute to that and what are the ways that we can do that work to change things?” she said.
“I can talk all day and virtue signal—posting comments online and complaining about things. Somehow, you’re a hero to people when you do that, but you’re not actually doing anything to make someone’s life better.”
For Reyes, accountability starts offline and through self-examination.
“At the end of the day, it’s literally the only thing we can do. Yes, the world is a messed-up place because of the systems that marginalize us. And all of us are indoctrinated by these systems, all of us have internalized things, for example, me as a woman can have internalized misogyny,” Reyes said.
“But, I have to examine that in myself when I go out into the world. When I show up and stop doing things that are counterintuitive to my well-being, that’s only going to make my life better,” she added. “That’s not to say that it’s my fault that these systems exist, but I grew up in a world where they exist so I have to do the work just like everybody else,” Reyes said.
In her newest work, Reyes explores power dynamics and strives to “unearth the unspoken.”
“A lot of people dance around definitions of words that we take for granted – words like love, war—and that’s getting us into a lot of trouble.
Love, for example, is both simple and complicated. We miss the basic foundation of love, which is liking someone and wanting to care for them. It’s not meant to be transactional like the online dating—all about numbers, data, what can you offer me? How can you raise my capital?” she said. “It’s completely missing the point.”
In her doctoral thesis, which is steeped in gothic studies, Reyes explored the notion of these types of vampiric relationships.
“One of the major influences is the grotesque in society, what is unhealthy and how we’ve gone so far from these basic definitions and how it’s just acceptable these days to be and do these things that once a upon a time would be considered unhealthy and vampiric,” she said.
Reyes highlighted the “loneliness epidemic” going on seemingly everywhere in the world and suggested that the pandemic exposed a crisis point of hyper-individualism.
“So many people unfortunately nowadays go through their lives without ever knowing what care feels like. Care is not having to perform. It’s a place of growth, not just growth of individuals, but it’s a community-based place. We’ve gotten so far from that, she said.
What might counter this trend toward transactional, vampiric relationships that leave us so lonely and empty?
“Poetry is one of the few ways nowadays that you can resist this tendency, so I’m doing what I need to do in that way,” Reyes said. “All of my heroes, the people that have helped keep me sane, were poets, artists, musicians—it is art that, in a lot of ways, shows what love is. It was my first love.”
“One of the best ways to get people to empathize is to read novels. More than watching the news, it’s reading fiction and that would extend to poetry. It’s getting them to relate to any character that they’re not like and to immerse themselves in any world, whether it be a world of poetry that’s sort of based on truth or novels that are completely fictional—though I would argue that nothing’s completely fiction.
Reyes admitted her own challenges to restrain her online proclivity that often leads to gloom and doom.
“If I could take back all the apps that I’ve downloaded—I’m absolutely pointing the finger at myself,” she said. “I’m saying these are things that I do because we all do them.”
