Joshua Roark
Joshua Roark
Joshua Roark is the Director of PocketMFA. After founding Frontier Poetry in 2017, Joshua went on to become the Editorial Director of Discover New Art and helped launch several more literary magazines and platforms, serving writers of every genre and style. He also works as the main faculty for Antioch University Los Angele’s Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing as well as a Poetry Mentor for their MFA program. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles, where they’re always at work making stories, poems, novels, or films.
Please feel welcome to reach out to him at josh (at) pocket-mfa.com with any and all questions about the program.
What excites you about writing? How has it affected your life?
Since I was a kid, writing has felt inevitable. I had my first “Yes I can” moment in my high school english class—I got a perfect 100 on my Great Gatsby essay, and the validation of those words on the back “perfect!” have carried me for decades. The culmination of my journey today has been the leadership of communities of writers at literary magazines, universities, and now PocketMFA. The initial value of writing was always about processing my own experience and feelings and questions about living. However, today, what I find deeply valuable about writing, how it has transformed my life the most, is the way it brings communities of serious people together. More than I love the rush of finishing a great poem, or discovering a great character—I love being in solidarity alongside other serious seekers of truth. Writers. I want for the rest of my life to be spent in a community of writers, one way or another.
What mindset does a writer need to continue to grow and learn?
A writer, as any artist, must welcome and love a very specific tension: one the one hand, you must be a fanatical believer in your own work, and on the other, you must humbly welcome the idea that someone else might be able to see it better at any given moment. A growing writer holds an irrational confidence, unearned and mysterious, in their own expression, while also very rationally and practically pursuing the wisdom of others, of tradition, of experience. From my own experience, I’ve also come to believe that the most efficient path to growth for a writer is in active and engaged community with other writers. To be alone is safe, the challenges few and rare, and thus so the growth.
What makes a good writing mentor?
A good writing mentor carries three mindsets: service, solidarity, and growth. That means a good mentor does not dominate the relationship by transforming the writer into a copy of the mentor. That means a good mentor does not hide their own vulnerabilities and struggles but instead wears them on their sleeve to show the writer they are not alone. And that means a good mentor does not get distracted by “talent,” that every writer is believed capable of their own perfect self-expression.
A good writing mentor also has the experience necessary to set aside their own sense of craft and expectation as needed, in order to meet each and every work on its own terms of success. Mentorship is not just developing a marketable product, though that is important, and it is not just developing a self-soothing object of expression, though that is also important. A good writing mentor is able to hold the work at the right distance for its own authentic aims to become clear, apart from the market and apart even, often enough, from the writer’s own expectations of the work.
What is your style of feedback?
My style of feedback is conversational. I like to ask questions and dig into the answers and seek discovery with the writer. I neither want to cheerlead without any criticism, or tear down without any inspiration. The most important job for me is to get the writer to see their work in new ways and to return to the labor of writing meaningfully inspired.