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I Was, Am, Will Be is a collection of poetry, prose, dramatic pieces, letters, and visual art that reflects on identity, loss, love, race, mental health, family, and the meaning of creative expression. Your work draws from Black literary traditions, hip-hop, pop culture, teaching, and personal experience. How do these influences interact in your creative voice?
Imagine a nice-looking sponge, absorbing every nutrient and vitamin from each food morsel touched. The influences gained throughout the human experience are similar in that we absorb the influences from the world on a daily basis. In my case, I grew up in Oakland, and I don’t leave that voice at the door when I write. Langston Hughes is a major influence, especially the way he brings music into language. Then there’s Too Short, Keak da Sneak, E-40, and the cadence and humor of Bay Area hip-hop. Albert Camus gets me thinking about purpose, and what we do with the life we’ve been given. I like letting all of that sit together, even when it seems like an odd combination.
Spoken-Word, or performance poetry, helped me figure out what that mixture sounded like out loud. I was on the poetry slam team at Cal State Long Beach and later spent a lot of time competing around the Bay. You learn a lot about a line when you have to stand in front of strangers and say it. I brought that attention to sound into Broken Pencils, even though it’s a novel. Studying in Greece with George Crane also taught me to cut words I didn’t need. I still get attached to a line that probably needs to go.
As an English teacher in Oakland by day, I’m always thinking about how to make writing matter to somebody who didn’t ask to read it. I ask students to connect what we’re reading to their own identities and experiences. That keeps me thinking about the person on the other side of the page. Hosting my bi-weekly Get-Hype Open-Mic series at Discover Community Cafe in West Oakland keeps me listening, too. There are so many ways to tell a story, and I get to hear people finding theirs.
Now I’m carrying that experimentation into music and film for I Was, Am, Will Be, including the short film Affirmations (Why Write). A beat changes how I deliver a poem. A pause, an image, even the smallest sound bite, can hold something I might otherwise explain in another line. I’m still learning those forms, so give me grace. I’m enjoying being a beginner at something again.
Your writing moves quickly between humor, vulnerability, cultural commentary, and grief. How do you decide when humor belongs in an emotionally difficult piece?
Humor, jokes, and playing the dozens are woven into nearly everything I write. Comedy is also one of the ways I cope. I often make a joke before I’m ready to say what’s actually bothering me. Sometimes it helps me get through the moment, yet sometimes I’m avoiding something. So when humor shows up in my writing, I pay attention to what the character is doing with it. In “Good Sunday,” Jonah moves through a day that can look pretty carefree from the outside, but his past keeps interrupting him. He makes witty observations, including about people dealing with some of the same emotional stress he carries. The joke can be funny and still show how uncomfortable he is with himself.
Grief has strange timing. You can be laughing and then remember somebody who should be there laughing with you. That feels close to life as I know it. I don’t want every difficult piece to announce its seriousness from the first line and stay there. When I revise, I ask whether the humor helps us understand Jonah or keeps us too far away from what he’s feeling. If I’ve let a joke cover up something the reader needs to sit with, I give that feeling more room.
What do you hope readers who have experienced trauma, grief, or mental-health struggles see in your work?
I hope that readers take away a better sense of hope and understanding that we are beyond our pain. Our lives are not defined by damage. In spite of loss, we still have a future. I started writing poetry after losing my best friend in a car accident when I was thirteen. I didn’t have the language for everything I was feeling, and writing gave me somewhere to put it. I’ve also had to work through the loss of my father and my own struggles with bipolar disorder. I’ve written about purpose because there have been times when I had a hard time finding my own.
Broken Pencils took fifteen years to reach publication. There were rejections, long stretches when I put the manuscript away, and times when grief made it difficult to care about the dream. Looking back, I’m grateful I returned to it. In I Was, Am, Will Be, Jonah is twenty-five and traveling through Europe, carrying questions about identity, love, and loss into unfamiliar places. That grew out of my own time abroad. Distance can change your perspective, but the past still comes with you.
I’m proud of the books and the work I’m doing now, and I still have days when taking care of myself has to come first. Therapy and the people close to me have helped me get here. I hope somebody reading can feel less ashamed of needing that support, or feel that their own story is worth telling. We are what remains from damage, and what remains still deserves a chance.
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Leaving behind the familiar confines of America, Jonah embarks on a three-month journey through Spain, Greece, France, and Amsterdam. As Jonah immerses himself in the rich European landscapes and cultures, will he confront the ghosts of his past or succumb to the uncertainties of his future?
I Was, Am, Will Be
J. R. Rice’s I Was, Am, Will Be is a collection of poetry, prose, dramatic scenes, letters, and visual compositions arranged as a journey through identity, grief, love, race, mental illness, family, and artistic purpose. Its seven chapters move from the compulsion to write through romance, cultural alienation, trauma, mortality, and remembrance, creating the shape of a coming-of-age narrative without relying on a conventional plot. Travel through Greece, France, Spain, and the Netherlands gives the speaker physical distance from Oakland, while memory keeps drawing him back to family, formative losses, and the experiences that made writing necessary. The result is an autobiographical work whose structure reflects its central concern: how a person gathers a coherent self from scattered places, relationships, and versions of the past.
Rice’s voice is energetic, exposed, and deliberately restless. He moves between formal allusion, conversational humor, spoken-word repetition, pop-culture references, and blunt confession, often allowing several registers to occupy the same poem. That flexibility suits a speaker who understands himself through many inheritances, including Black literary tradition, hip-hop, teaching, Oakland, family history, and European travel. In “Affirmations,” the repeated question “Why write?” develops into an account of writing as survival, witness, ancestry, and civic responsibility. Elsewhere, comic encounters in bars, museums, cafés, and bedrooms keep the book grounded in ordinary experience, even when its themes become philosophical. Rice’s strongest passages let wit and sorrow work together, so humor becomes part of the speaker’s endurance rather than a pause from serious material.
The collection’s emotional force grows as its recurring images gain meaning. Stairs, cliffs, flight, falling, trees, water, mirrors, and roads repeatedly place the speaker between danger and transformation. The line “You are what remains from damage” captures the book’s guiding insight: identity can contain injury without being reduced to it. The later chapters deepen that idea through accounts of bipolar disorder, suicidal thought, gun violence, childhood sexual abuse, pregnancy loss, and a father’s terminal illness. These subjects are handled with a directness that can be harrowing, yet the collection consistently searches for language capable of carrying pain toward understanding. Its repetitions sometimes feel incantatory and sometimes obsessive, accurately reflecting a mind returning to unresolved memories until they yield a different meaning.
The final movement toward family and remembrance gives the book its clearest sense of arrival. In “Depends,” the narrator’s care for his dying father transforms dependency, embarrassment, anger, and tenderness into a scene of difficult intimacy. Their exchange ends with the father’s answer, “Depends,” a modest conclusion that fits a book committed to uncertainty, choice, and continual becoming. I Was, Am, Will Be is ultimately a record of self-reclamation, one that treats writing as testimony, discipline, inheritance, and a reason to remain alive. Rice’s expansive form allows the collection to hold contradictions without smoothing them away, and its most enduring achievement is the portrait of a speaker learning that freedom comes through remembering, naming, forgiving, and choosing to live.
Pages: 34 | ISBN : 978-1088026465
