Building Creative Community

Editor, writer, and artist Aaron Lelito

This bonus newsletter is a monthly feature for paid subscribers. These extras showcase edited interviews with someone whose work intersects in some way with this newsletter’s focus—place, history, writing. I hope you enjoy this one and those to come.

Introduction

As I became a professional historian, I learned how to navigate scholarly publishing with the guidance of my professors and colleagues. When I began writing essays, I had to relearn publishing. Fortunately, I discovered supportive editors, like Aaron Lelito.

A former English professor, Aaron founded and is the editor-in-chief of Wild Roof Journal, an online literary magazine that includes prose, poetry, and art. (Twice my work has appeared in WRJ.) Aaron’s ambitions for WRJ includes creating a real community around the work, which is something difficult to do and infrequently tried. He is succeeding. Eager to try new things, Aaron has developed innovative initiatives to support the writers and artists connected with WRJ. It also includes its own Substack.

Aaron is from and still lives in the Buffalo, New York, region. He is the author of several chapbooks, including The Half Turn, as well as the collaborative project If We, which showcases his artistic sides.

Courtesy of Aaron Lelito

Adam Sowards

Who are you, and how do you describe your work?

Aaron Lelito

My name is Aaron Lelito. I'm founder and editor of Wild Roof Journal, which is an online lit mag that publishes art and literature that is loosely nature-themed. That takes up a lot of my time and is a lot of my focus.

I also edit as a freelancer—mostly poetry feedback, manuscript reviews, things like that.

Then I work on my own artwork and writing, which is mostly poetry as well.

Adam

How has the focus of your work evolved over time?

Aaron

When I really shifted into thinking of what I wanted to make creatively, maybe 6-ish years ago, I knew I wanted to be in the creative world, but I didn't know where to go. My background is in writing. I was an English professor at the time, so literature is my academic background. Initially, I saw my creative work as a way to play around, experiment a little bit, see what I could do that I found appealing.

Eventually, I recognized that “nature” was appearing in a lot of the things that I'm working on, like digital photography, some digital artwork, and even drawing or doodling or sketching. That clarified things because some of my interest in literature is in nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was a big inspiration point going back years, and I found myself refreshing it at different cycles over time.

Seeing the natural world as a backdrop for different subject matter seemed to clarify things and gave me a little more direction. A lot of my work has a nature theme, whether that's some kind of personal story that has nature as a background or at times it is more direct engagement through photography.

"Among Sparks and Scions (Night)" first appeared in The Good Life Review

Adam

Your website states, “Although natural imagery and environmental themes have become a primary subject matter of my work, the source of my interest in any topic invariably stems from a questioning of consciousness, its relationship to the world around us, and the creative process that is born out of the impulse to express one's unique vision.”

I'm curious about two parts of this. First, how did nature and the environment become the theme that you gravitated towards? Second, I wonder if you could say just a bit more about the questioning of consciousness. What is that? Where does that come from for you?

Aaron