Athena Dixon's Highs and Lows of Writing
The author discusses moments that inspired her to write and ones that through her off the path
Listen on our host site, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and elsewhere.
In our last episode of the season, I interview author
, our first repeat guest for the podcast. A year and a half ago we released Neva’s interview with Athena, which focused on her book The Loneliness Files (Tin House, 2023). This time around, in January 2025, I asked her questions from my Perfect Recognition project focusing on intense aesthetic experiences and people’s life paths towards creativity.
Athena’s two nonfiction books, The Loneliness Files and The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip, 2020), are both autobiographical essay collections that explore different time periods in her life. Her poetry has been released in her own chapbook, No God in This Room (Argus House Press, 2018), as well as the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books, 2018). She’s also active as an editor and columnist for multiple publications including Split/Lip Press, Fourth Genre Magazine, and Open Secrets Magazine, and has landed residencies and fellowships with various organizations including Tin House, which led to the publication of The Loneliness Files.
This interview largely focuses on Athena’s path towards becoming a writer, including the ups and downs of the recognition she found in Black poetry in eighth grade, being told by a teacher in college that she didn’t belong in magazine writing, and then being encouraged to apply for grants and graduate programs by friends and colleagues in her adult years. We also talk about the universal balance of needing paid work to survive while trying to keep an art practice alive.
Embedded throughout our conversation are tidbits of our thoughts on how to approach writing (and music in my case) and take it seriously, along with the realities of making money and building an audience. There are no easy solutions here, and fellow artists might find some resonance and solace in our open discussion about our own disillusionment surrounding artistic pursuit and how our lived experiences deviate from the more common narratives handed down to us. As Athena puts it in the interview, “There’s such rarified air that we get sold as what writing careers look like, that unless you’re like Stephen King or Colleen Hoover or whoever else who’s a super popular, famous writer, you’re going to have to do something else. And I hadn’t considered that.”
After this episode the podcast breaks for the summer and will return with new episodes in September. In the meantime, we’ll be sharing some events and newsletters throughout the summer as things pop up. Until then!
—John Vogel
Keep up with Athena Dixon:
Keep up with Talking Writing:
 | A guest post by
|