Former Flame Fridays - Devon Webb
4/4/25
You were featured in volume 5, what has happened since? Besides the pushcart nominations?
I can't recall exactly when Volume 5 released but if we're considering the timeline of the past year: lotssss has happened. I've had over a hundred poems published, several essays, became a film critic, was invited to speak on a panel at a writer's fest, became an editor, volunteered for a press then offered to take over when the EICs dipped & it was a god-awful chaos, started another literary collective from that shipwreck & am now editing around 30 poems for a collection, made lots of friends in the community, made several enemies, received a suing threat, received five Best of the Net/Pushcart nominations in my first year qualifying, got my AuDHD diagnosis & medication which has been very helpful for navigating all this, continued being radicalised because what the fuck, & consistently had too many ideas.
Broken Porcelain Walking
I feel like I’m paying karmic debts for all my sins
as if my body is a graveyard
of when I was young & innocent
as if that innocence wasn’t ripped from me
by the demanding hands of men
Sometimes it feels like
my body is betraying me
this body shaped by jagged edges
sometimes it feels like
it has claws on the inside
scratching me, scraping me
scarring their initials
onto the interior of my skin
so that I can’t see them only know they are there
They don’t know
the blood & ashes that drift with dead apathy
through the pink warm resilience of my heartbeat
all I have ever wanted from this body was love
but I am broken porcelain walking
I am haunted
I am fallible
I am dancing with one leg dragging
at an imperfect angle along the sickening marble
in which we see our twisted reflections
I bring myself back around, & around
to this same recurring doom
& every time everything living about me
gets just a bit further away
till I am a distant figure
watching the past like a panorama
like the past is not my present
like it’s paper I can burn. What/who inspired Broken Porcelain Walking? How does it fit into your style/body of work?
'Broken Porcelain Walking' is very much in my 'sexual trauma' category when considering the themes of my work, the violent imagery reflects how it feels to have your body appropriated & narratives surrounding your sexuality fabricated & vilified. A fun fact about this poem, though is that I wrote it a few days after seeing 'Multiverse of Madness' so the imagery was sort of..... unintentionally but fittingly inspired by The Scarlet Witch & various motifs used in the film, such as reflections & brokenness ~ a surreal sort of body horror that makes sense for the theme.
Why Troublemaker Firestarter? What compels you to submit your work? Why be a writer at the end of the world?
I think I was originally drawn to Troublemaker Firestarter because of the mag's name & the theme. In terms of submitting/why I'm a writer - I submit because I don't want to write into a void, & I write to write myself out of the void. To romanticise the mundane, to immortalise my lived experience, that to me is the antithesis of apocalypse.
Who are your current favorite writers?
My favourite writer of all time is unfortunately a giant cunt but I can't deny that he single-handedly defined my career: Jack Kerouac. I love his spontaneous prose style & passion for autofiction, which aligns with my own work. Fuck him tho. The favourite writers that actually come to mind when I'm asked this nowadays are people I've met through indie lit or have discovered in my role as an editor: Jessica Bell, Amy DeBellis & Arushi (aera) Rege are all people whose writing has made my jaw drop, & the latter isn't even out of high school.
Are you a troublemaker, a firestarter, a heartbreaker, a lucky duck, a devil, a terror, or sad and horny?
...........all of the above? I think I used to be predominantly sad & horny but I've since transitioned to more of a fire-starting heartbreaker. A sometimes sad & horny often fire-starting occasional heartbreaker?
Where can people find you?
@devonwebbnz everywhere, most active on Instagram & Twitter but post some spoken word TikToks occasionally
What would you want the lovely readers of Substack to do?
Support indie authors & editors!