Lauren Camp is an Arab-American poet.  She is a first-generation daughter of a Jewish-Iraqi immigrant.  Often, she writes about the immigrant diasporic experience and how that personally has influenced her.  Lauren grew up in New York, attended Cornell University ‘88, and now calls Santa Fe, New Mexico home. Before she dedicated herself to writing and being  an educator, she worked as a visual artist in fabric and thread, and was a radio producer and host. During 2022-2025 Lauren was the Poet Laureate of New Mexico. Is Is Enough (2026) is her ninth poetry collection.

Poet, author, and frequent reviewer for the South Broadway Press journal, Shelli Rottschafer, recently sat down to interview Lauren.

SLR: Lauren, thank you for this interview.  I have been excited to ask you questions ever since Is Is Enough was released this past March.

Is Is Enough considers your relationship with your father.  Like so many of us, we have interesting relationships with our parents.  In this case, your dad struggled with dementia.  

In some way, does your poetic verse try to recuperate memory before it is lost?

LMC: Thank you for making time for my new book! This isn’t the first book I’ve written that focuses on my dad. In my earlier book, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which imagines and tracks my father’s childhood in Iraq, I was definitely trying to gather and unfold memories long hidden and had been possibly already lost. 

Alzheimer’s Disease can’t support more than the immediate now. For Is Is Enough, I wasn’t probing memory; instead, my attention was on dealing with a present moment and whatever was happening in my father’s mind. 

Though it was difficult in my father’s last years to “daughter”—to watch what was disappearing, and in more action-oriented ways, to take care of his wellbeing, his finances, and his worries—it was a joy to craft these poems. I got to step to the side of responsibility and simply notice, and find language for, what was occurring. 

SLR: Many writers have the quandary of “do I write about family, or should I not?”  

How did you come to terms with that internal wonder? How would you encourage others to overcome that doubt?

LMC: I never question whether I should write something; I only question whether I should publish it. I wrote these poems for myself. I wasn’t writing for a reader. I didn’t know that some of the 100+ poems I wrote about this time would become a book. I hardly even know they were poems. For a long time, they were only notes—things I wanted to hold onto because they were my father’s behaviors, and charming or devastating. I wanted to tack down and keep what wouldn’t exist the next time I saw him. 

Families and relationships are complicated. I might write something in an early draft that expresses anger or hurt. But by the time I get through the revision process (which could last months or even years, with long stretches of waiting in between drafts), hopefully that emotion has tempered. While still being honest, I can look at any imbalance in my thinking and be more fair in my assessment and presentation of anyone else.

SLR: “Original Hope” was in particular very moving to me.  It seems to consider your father at his final moments.  Family is gathered and remembers.  What is interesting is that certain memories, especially those captured in family pictures, mean one thing to one person and symbolize something much different to another.  Each has their own perspective, their own interpretation.  

Can you speak about this poem for the South Broadway Press audience?

LMC: Surprisingly, I have no other drafts of this poem. I usually revise (quite happily), but this poem was fully formed when I got to the page. By using the impersonal pronoun “one,” the poem could be speaking to or for any reader. The perspective was not specific to the author, or any specific family member. That choice made “Original Hope” feel aphoristic or proverbial to me, and I liked that. When I write about or into a subject repeatedly, I leave behind approaches I’ve exhausted and begin to look for new language or angles to come at the topic. I love this effort and find it revelatory. By the time I get to the 20th or 80th poem I’ve written about something, things get wilder or shift in some other significant way.

SLR: Lauren, your writing has taken you to many interesting places.  Your collection, In Old Sky (2024) was written in conversation with your time spent at Grand Canyon National Park as the Astronomer-in-Residence. While there you worked alongside park rangers and witnessed the Dark Skies.  

Can you tell us a bit about your residency?

LMC: In 2022, I was invited to spend a month at the South Rim. Each of those nights I investigated the shifting darkness that surrounds the canyon, trying to figure out how it felt. My goal was to write for readers who might not know what pristine darkness is like, perhaps readers who live in an urban environment where light pollutes their skies too much to see anything above—and certainly not the Milky Way.  I found the darkness at the Canyon safe and enveloping. I couldn’t get enough of it. I watched as it dropped down and gradually closed off my ability to see. In fact, as that sense shut down, I began considering what was happening with my other senses. What could I hear? What was the texture of the air? 

I wrote a book worth of poems that month, which Grand Canyon Conservancy made into In Old Sky. A surprise gift, that collection. The experience changed my interpretation of self and culture. I now regularly have a perspective of our time and deep time, and I consider/re-consider my place in each. 

SLR:  In the poem, “Bluest” you ask questions of the stars.  

You look upon their sparkle, millions of light years away, and wonder:

How will I greet you when I am back,
the spectrum not yet diminished in me?

This liminality of time, a transcendence of one point in time to infinity, it makes us humans question our time on earth and what we do with that precious time.  

Is the answer ‘open ended’?  Or is the answer ‘be creative with that time’?

LMC: When I left the Canyon, I was challenged by how to shift from a place of endless, deep wonder to a place of ordinary goodness (my home). Whenever I leave a place I’ve loved, whether from a brief vacation or a significant immersion, I want to keep a bit of it for as long as possible, to incorporate it, somehow, into my daily existence. 

At the Canyon, I was reminded of the benefit of focus. Our lives are so full of multi-tasking. In the dark, I would do a single thing: sit on a giant boulder looking into a nearly invisible canyon, or walk, watching only the slight circle the red headlight offered in front of me. 

There’s a generosity in that.

SLR: As Poet Laureate of New Mexico, your project was “The New Mexico Epic Poem Project” and its intention was to visit all 33 counties within the state of New Mexico and to write in place with collaborative pieces from each audience you worked with.  I witnessed this in action myself as I attended your workshop at the Taos Center for the Arts.  

What was it like for you to lead others to write collaboratively?

LMC: I had done something similar while at the Grand Canyon, inviting park visitors to respond to prompts and statements about darkness. It can be scary and off-putting to ask someone to write a poem, but with this approach, individuals are instead encouraged to contribute a few elements to a greater whole. I adopted a similar approach for the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, giving residents a chance to write about the community they call home. Once I had those responses, I worked as an architect, building the poem from the scaffolds and details people contributed. The result presents a chorus of voices. 

SLR: As a result of this three-year project, which of all the many workshops you led, were you most surprised by?

LMC: Oh, such an unfair question! I couldn’t possibly pick. Each town or rural village—and the libraries, arts centers, coffee shops and other venues that hosted our gatherings—offered something wonderful. Some individuals showed up not knowing anything about poetry, but were receptive. Some showed up to figure out whether what they were doing in secret might qualify as poetry. And others had good experience with the art form already. Because of the format, I gained as much as (I hope) the participants did. I had the chance to learn more about each location through its people. 

SLR: Having had a career in Marketing and as a Visual Artist, how did that prior experience help you promote yourself once you dedicated to write full-time?

LMC: I have learned that full-time creative work is a bit of a myth. If you want to reach an audience, you need to either hire help or do the marketing yourself. When I worked as a professional artist, I understood that I needed to spend nearly half of my time on elements of the job that weren’t artmaking. Everything from correspondence and contracts to exhibit organization and other details; those all take time. 

From marketing classes in grad school, I learned the rule of 7—that it takes that many exposures before someone will register what you’re offering. It can be awfully hard to promote something even once, much less seven times. But this reminds me that there’s no shame in sharing something at least once (and maybe more, if I can stand it). 

SLR: If you could have a conversation with your younger self and knowing where you are now, and the knowledge you have gained as a writer, what would you remind young Lauren?

LMC: From the time I was small, I always knew creativity as my partner. I never veered from that, though the medium I worked in has changed a few times. I’d like to remind the me now that the “making” is always the revelation. The audience’s response is sometimes a side benefit, but the process is the true triumph.

SLR: Many readers of South Broadway Press also are creatives and appreciate a nudge.  

What are you working on now that you plan to incorporate into a writing workshop? Do you have a prompt or advice for our audience?

LMC:  Right now, I’m working poem to poem, focused mainly on poems that originate from a place and its facets. 

Advice? Remember to keep the “making” close to you. Make your poems for yourself, not for an outside audience. There is no formula, no correct way, no need to ever follow any other path than your own. That’s where the answers and excitement are. But also… embrace revision. I believe that’s where the magic is. I believe you (and I) can push a draft further from its start than we ever thought possible. Challenge yourself in some way with each poem. Don’t worry; 

it will right itself eventually. New amazing things come out of that process and the patience to wait for it. 

SLR: Thank you so much Lauren for answering these questions in support of creativity and the creative life.

READ:
SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER’S REVIEW OF LAUREN CAMP’S IS IS ENOUGH

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com