Psychology meets poetry

In his third year as a psychology and neuroscience major at Yale University, Rob only wrote poems for fun. After being encouraged by a professor to pursue poetry, he is now an author, poet, a recent MFA graduate and one of Augustana’s newest postdoctoral fellows. During his term, Rob will blend psychology and poetry by helping to pilot a new creative program that brings poetry workshops to current inpatients of psychiatric wards. 

How would you describe your role as a postdoctoral fellow for those who don’t know?

I am mainly helping to coordinate a program that offers poetry workshops to those in psychiatric wards. We have a team of writers who have experience on the mental health spectrum, and we're going to have those folks teach the workshops to current inpatients. We’re in the planning stages, but as the project progresses, I'll move into teaching in the wards and training teachers. Part of the postdoctoral role also involves just being a poet myself, so I also have dedicated time to work on my poetry. 

What’s one big problem you want to address or a goal you want to achieve with your work?

A lot of the time when creative treatment is brought into psychiatric care it's done with a curative or therapeutic intent. It's done as a way to fix you or rid you of your mental illness. More than solving a problem, we are focused on living disabled in a meaningful way, building community and helping folks author their own narratives. 

You started at the beginning of January, what’s your favorite thing so far about Augustana?

I really like the tight-knit, smaller community because I've been able to get to know people quickly. I’m in a hybrid role based in Toronto and on my first trip to Augustana, I managed to meet a lot of people in a short amount of time. 

How do you see the Augustana community playing a role in your work? 

I think because of the smaller size, folks are more connected and they hear about the projects going on. I hope people will hear about our work in psychiatric wards and that it sparks conversations about mental health and disability. Projects like ours that use a social model of disability rather than a medical model are new and they need to be talked about. I think Augustana has the right environment for those conversations to be had more consistently than on a bigger campus. 

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t be afraid to write well. When I was doing my MFA, I was writing grant applications, job applications and just doing a lot of writing that feels like such a slog. A professor told me “You write well when you're doing your creative writing. You can bring that to all the sterile, boring writing too.” I think that advice really taught me not to compartmentalize everything. You don’t have to separate the fun writing from the boring writing. And the same thing applies in life — you don't have to just enjoy the fun things. You can enjoy the boring things and have a really good time just going grocery shopping. So don't be afraid to write well. Don't be afraid to delight in things that are otherwise kind of boring.

What did you want to be when you were in Grade 3? 

I have a ridiculous answer. It’s not a thing third graders think about. I don't know where I learned about this and why I decided it was for me, but I wanted to be a motivational speaker. I wanted to go around and like, give talks about why you shouldn’t give up. 

When did you know you wanted to write poetry? 

In undergrad, I was a psychology and neuroscience major, but I had always written poetry, very much just as a hobby. In the spring of my third year, I had an instructor really push me to take it seriously. Once I let myself do it, I realized I didn’t ever want to stop. I told myself that if I could find a way to make it a career, I would like to do it. 

What’s the last show you binge-watched and loved?

I don't watch much television except I watch RuPaul’s Drag Race religiously. I watched all the seasons when they were airing and now I'm catching up with my partner. He and I have been watching all the old seasons together. 

What’s the best book you’ve ever read?

Oh my gosh, what a horrible question to ask a poet. How? How? What can I say? Well, my gut reaction is the poetry collection Crush by Richard Siken. The same professor who told me to pursue poetry told me to read this book. I left that class, picked up the book, read it and realized I should go be a poet. 

Where did you grow up and what do you love about your hometown?

I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first city north of Chicago. I love Evanston. It just felt like a perfect place to grow up. We got all four seasons, so I had really fun summers at the beach in Michigan, and really fun winters having blizzards and snow days. The Chicago Transit runs all the way through Evanston, and I went to high school in the heart of downtown Chicago which was so fun. Chicago itself is just such a great city and the surrounding area also just has a lot of heart to it. 

You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be and why?

I would invite Mitski, the indie singer. I think if I had one dinner with her, I could convince her to become collaborators and then become best friends.

If you had unlimited time and resources, what’s your dream project in your field?

I would love to create a poetry art gallery — like a whole museum of poems. There’s a disability art gallery in Toronto, and I love that the art is physically accessible and physically engaging. Literature can be about anything, but it's limited because it's always words on a page. I would love to release a book of poetry, but also have a museum so it becomes a full, embodied, accessible experience.

What’s one thing you’re grateful for?

My friends and family. Everything I've put out into the world has been given to me by other people. As much as I am an introverted poet, there’s nothing I have that I got without my friends and family. I could not have written the poems I've written without them. 

Learn more about Rob Colgate

Rob Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled, bakla, Filipino-American poet from Evanston, Illinois. He holds a degree in psychology from Yale University and an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas in Austin.

His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Kenyon Review, Lambda Literary, Tin House and the Canada Council for the Arts.