THE
ELK’S JOURNAL ACE BOGGESS Interview with Ace Boggess by Keegan Lester, ERL guest author and acclaimed American writer with WV roots
Ace Boggess is a tremendous poet from Charleston, West Virginia, who has also lived in Huntington, Martinsburg, Morgantown, Huntington again, and the West Virginia prison system (Martinsburg and Welch). I’ve been following him for years. His poems gravitate around his incarceration, music, and day-to-day life. He is the author of two novels and six books of poetry: Most recently: Escape Envy. His writing has been published in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, River Styx, Mid-American Review, and Southern Humanities Review and he has received a fellowship for fiction from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Ace describes his poetry as “a mix of scrapbook, photo album, and autobiography. I write about everything,” he says. “Anything is worth writing about, as long as I can approach it with a mix of childlike fascination and a journalist’s eye. New experiences, however horrible, resonate with their own kind of beauty. And when I experience something, I have the urge to share it, not only to tell the story but to do it in such a way that other people can understand it without having to live through it.”
JAN 2022
There have been a handful of people who have recently made their careers writing about the opioid epidemic, but very few of them have experience using firsthand or have been incarcerated. This prompted me to ask Ace: What do people get wrong about it in their writing about the epidemic?
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“I get asked versions of this a lot, and my answer is not a popular one. There won’t be more addicts if drugs are legalized (all drugs, without exception), but there will be less crime, less cost to society, and a better chance
that addicts will seek help. That’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth. As for the people involved, well, we all have other underlying problems that we’re dealing with. For me, it was (and is) social anxiety and feelings of failure and self-doubt. If you get someone off drugs without dealing in some way with those underlying problems, it won’t end well.”
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I’d like to think that I write for the people who aren’t there with me. Social anxiety has forced me to spend much of my life hiding out away from other people. So, I write as my way of saying, ‘Hey, this is me, now tell me about you. – Ace Boggess
When asking Boggess about some of his favorite moments in his career, he says “Getting the acceptance letter for my book The Prisoners on the day I made it out of prison … that was a big one. Readings, though, are what I love. I enjoy giving readings more than anything else. They are the only times I ever feel completely at home. Before prison, I was reading in York, Pennsylvania, and after, I stood outside smoking a cigarette, when a young woman came up to me and said, ‘Thanks for being interesting,’ which I still take as the greatest compliment I have ever received.”
