“Trans people are important and trans stories and lives matter.”
Alex Noah is a queer trans writer. He spends way too much time sitting with his cats and partner watching teen dramas. You can find them shouting into the void on his Instagram @inmytimeaway.
Moara Flausino
INTERVIEWER
Moara is a journalism student from Brazil with a passion for literature, poetry, and art. Since 2021, she has been working in writing and content creation, and she has two poems published in anthology books of poetry. Learning new things excites her, and she believes that embracing different forms of writing and expression is always inspiring. Her goal is to write as many stories as she can, sharing their uniqueness with the world.
M: Can you start telling me a little bit about you? What do you do, what are your interests, since when do you write poems and how did you first start writing them?
A: I first started writing poetry when I was a teenager, probably around 13. It started as a way to express myself, I’ve been writing stories forever; I started playing The Sims 2 on the GameCube at my cousin’s house when I was a kid and would come up with all kinds of stories through gameplay.
It was all very very dramatic and I’ve learned to control that instinct but I still love to play an emotionally messy game of The Sims. Besides that I spend a lot of time with my partner, we watch a lot of movies and tv shows.
I particularly love the movie I Saw the TV Glow, my partner and I rented it and I watched it three times in two days. I love the aesthetic of the movie, and as a trans person I heavily relate to the messaging. It’s just one of the most beautiful and horrifying things I’ve ever seen.
Back to poetry though, I first started writing poetry because I couldn’t help it, I had all of these feelings that I couldn’t make sense of and I needed an outlet for them and poetry has just always been there for me. If I’m sad, angry or stressed out poetry has always made me feel better.
M: When writing, what do you consider most important to share? An idea, an emotion, a concept or a story?
A: Regardless of the format, for my writing I tend to focus on emotion, I think that’s what really connects people to a piece. I know that that’s what connects me to my favourite pieces of writing. I come back to Richard Siken’s poetry collection Crush a lot.
I wish I could write poetry like that, everything he writes is so gorgeous it’s mesmerizing. And it makes me feel, the main reason I love that collection so much is every time I pick it up I can feel the emotions he did when he was writing. Sadness, loss, confusion, fear, it’s all there and it inspires my own work.
I read Crush and it makes me want to write poetry, it makes me understand my own emotions better and I think that’s my ultimate goal as well, to write something so beautiful and touching that the reader feels inspired in some way to turn their own emotions into art.
M: Let’s talk about your poem for the 2024 Winter Issue! You seemed to put a lot of your soul and who you are into “Self Portrait”, could you tell us what led you to write this poem?
A: In November of 2023 I was working two retail jobs and at one of them I was discriminated against for being trans. My old manager had accepted a new job and my new manager would constantly misgender me even though I had a pronoun pin on my lanyard as well as having my pronouns on my name tag.
She then threatened to fire me because she had scheduled me to work on a day where I would be working at my other job and she knew that. She didn’t do this to any of my other coworkers who were cis and in the exact same situation as me.
I eventually had to leave my second job because I got a new manager there as well and it was too triggering to work. I would come home and cry for hours, I wouldn’t sleep or eat or function as a human at all. The whole thing made me feel disposable and worthless. I’ve been off of work for a year now and am still trying to heal and writing Self Portrait was a part of that.
M: During your creative process, did you have different ideas or verses that didn’t make it into the final version?
A: Usually when writing a poem I go through a few drafts before finishing, but for Self Portrait I didn’t. I went to film school for screenwriting and one of my classmates had said about her own writing that she feels like all of these ideas exist in the ether, and they’re just waiting for a writer to grab onto them and bring them to life, and that’s how I feel about Self Portrait, like it’s just been waiting to be written.
M: Mostly, artists are motivated by feelings. If you don’t mind sharing, what kind of emotions tend to appear when you’re writing or expressing yourself through art?
A: My work focuses a lot on my own feelings of melancholy and anxiety. I’ve had chronic depression since I was thirteen, I’ve had anxiety since I was five and although I’m used to it now it can be hard to live with.
Poetry is a way for me to cope, a healthy outlet for these emotions. I write with a lot of influence from my past, I grew up in not the best circumstances. Without going into too much detail my mom passed away when I was fifteen and I still have a lot of grief about that.
My dad doesn’t acknowledge that I’m trans at all which is exhausting. So I write a lot of sad poetry because those emotions need to go somewhere. But, since meeting my wonderful partner I’ve been able to write some happier poems too, which is really nice. It can be very refreshing to write a happy poem and focus on the better aspects of my life than constantly focusing on the sadder moments.
M: Mostly, artists are motivated by feelings. If you don’t mind sharing, what kind of emotions tend to appear when you’re writing or expressing yourself through art?
A: My work focuses a lot on my own feelings of melancholy and anxiety. I’ve had chronic depression since I was thirteen, I’ve had anxiety since I was five and although I’m used to it now it can be hard to live with.
Poetry is a way for me to cope, a healthy outlet for these emotions. I write with a lot of influence from my past, I grew up in not the best circumstances. Without going into too much detail my mom passed away when I was fifteen and I still have a lot of grief about that.
My dad doesn’t acknowledge that I’m trans at all which is exhausting. So I write a lot of sad poetry because those emotions need to go somewhere. But, since meeting my wonderful partner I’ve been able to write some happier poems too, which is really nice. It can be very refreshing to write a happy poem and focus on the better aspects of my life than constantly focusing on the sadder moments.
M: If you could share a message with the world, what would it be?
A: I just want to say that trans people are important and trans stories and lives matter.
Read Self Portrait in Culterate’s Issue 2!
Culterate Blog 
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