Dakota Warren on Poetry, Prose, and Transformation
interview and images by Kyla Rain
There’s something about Dakota Warren’s writing that lingers — something that seeps into the cracks of your mind, curling around half-forgotten memories and long-lost aches. Known for her confessional prose and poetry, Warren first gained recognition with On Sun Swallowing, a collection that blends personal reflection with a sense of performance, resonating with readers around the world. Since its release, the book has maintained a 4+ star rating, was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Best Poetry Book of 2022, and established Warren as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry—one that explores the complexities of love, grief, and self-mythology with nuance and honesty.
Now, Warren is venturing into long-form fiction with an upcoming novel inspired by Australian Gothic aesthetics and set against the backdrop of the late 1960s. With a working title drawn from an early draft of Anna Karenina, the novel builds on her signature themes, delving into obsession, possession, and the fragile balance between desire and destruction. Through the intertwined lives of two young women bound by an intense, all-consuming connection, she crafts a narrative where art, faith, and queerness intersect in profound ways.
In this conversation, Warren reflects on time as a central theme in her poetry, the immersive nature of her prose, and how her writing continues to evolve. With On Sun Swallowing still resonating with readers and anticipation growing for her novel, we discuss not just her approach to storytelling but the deeper emotional foundations that shape her work.
Your poetry collection, On Sun Swallowing, is a collection that feels deeply personal, yet performative in a way that invites the reader into something larger than themselves. Now that some time has passed since its release, how do you feel about the work in hindsight? Has distance changed your relationship with it?
Imagery from the On Sun Swallowing UK & Ireland book tour (2023)
It really has. Naturally, I suppose. I performed a few poems from On Sun Swallowing at an event recently and found myself struggling to so much as open the book. Not in a bad way, of course - these poems, when I wrote them, were true to myself then and as raw as I could muster at the time. I was young, and I’m still young, but I was the kind of young where you still think the world revolves around you, you know? I’ve grown up a lot and I think this inherently selfish coming of age experience is reflected in the girls of my upcoming novel - growing from this perverted and sad little girl all stuck in her past into a perverted and sad little adult all terrified for her future. We’re always growing and evolving, forever, and I am really thankful to have these time capsules of art to remind me of this. Still, it makes me laugh and shudder to think of all the people who read these words from this version of myself and have it be their only impression of me, an unelvolving idea of who I am. Maybe I care so much because it ties in with my internet presence. I wonder if other writers get all stuck on these things, too. I hope so. I hope I’m not mad.
Your writing often toys with concepts of very fleeting emotions — when you sit down to write, how do you go about distilling those thoughts into something more concrete?
I don’t really sit down to write like that - if I force myself to create something when I’m not there mentally, this lack of truth/passion/sheer desperation is reflected in the works I produce. I get these waves of very intense feeling every once in a while and have to sit down and work in these moods as soon as I can. It’s all very fleeting and I think that’s the beauty of it. That’s how I know it’s real.
Beyond the words themselves, there’s an unmistakable sense of world-building in your work. Even in poetry, you construct entire atmospheres that feel immersive. Is this something you consciously craft, or do these spaces naturally emerge?
I’ve always been very big on sensorial writing - prose that transports you to a time and place. Not necessarily via world-building, but by stimulating the senses so acutely that you really feel as if you’re there - you really feel as though that harsh summer sun from a place you’ve never before been is burning holes into your skin, too. Poetry and prose that immerses you, forces you to be present with the writer - that’s the sweet milky stuff. I always strive for that feeling in the works I produce.
You’re currently transitioning from poetry and short-form prose into your first novel — an entirely different kind of world-building. How has that shift been for you? Have there been any unexpected challenges or revelations as you move into long-form storytelling?
It’s been impossibly different and impossibly fun and impossibly terrifying. You can birth a poem in just minutes and edit it in just hours. A novel, however - this takes years. For me, at least. I’m not the kind of person who can churn out the big stuff quickly. I admire the novelists who can write a new book every few months but I’m an overthinker and an obsesser and I think I’ve rewritten this novel upwards of a hundred times. The core is the same - two girls, one summer, and something that feels like it could be love. Apart from that, if you compared the first draft to the final, you’d think two different girls wrote them. That’s because they did. When you’re young, three years is a massive and crucial time for development of voice and writing style. That’s where it gets tricky - you never know when to stop. I’m constantly growing and learning, so the things I create reflect this. How am I ever meant to know when to put the book down and leave it as a reflection of who I was at that point in time? In saying that, it’s been so intimate and special spending all these years with these fictional girls in their sweltering and surreal little world. These girls have grown up with me. Poems, you can forget about not long after writing. A novel - this is going to be part of me forever.
In On Sun Swallowing, you blended poetry, journal extracts, and prose, creating a layered and intimate reading experience. Does your new project follow a similar structure, or are you experimenting with a different narrative approach this time around?
I don’t want to give away too much - nothing too unorthodox or experimental, not for my debut at least - but a structure and narrative approach that forces the reader to be so present with the protagonist that it’s a little painful. Because it’s set in the sixties, it’s become a historical fiction piece, too, which was all kinds of exciting and challenging in itself with all that research, and I’ve tried to pay homage to this by splicing real-time political and cultural happenings relevant to the characters amongst their fictional world. Surreal meets hyper-real.
Do you find that your tone remains consistent across different forms of writing, or does it shift depending on the story you’re telling?
This is a question I struggle to answer because I really don’t think about it. That might sound insane or unprofessional but if I’m trying to convey a memory or an emotion I write the words and read them back until I feel the memory or emotion spat at me. I feel like because I’m so young and new in my catalogue of works my tone has been and will be very consistent - dark, confessional, maybe a little sticky and thick. The fun part is challenging myself as I produce more works and seeing how this morphs and unravels and what kinds of tones will emerge.
There are certain themes and motifs that seem to resurface in your work—themes of longing, identity, and contradictions between beauty and decay. Do you find yourself consciously drawn to these ideas, or do they appear naturally, almost as if they choose you?
I write a lot about these themes that tie to girlhood because everything always comes back to my own girlhood. I grew up in a myriad of tiny rural towns beneath the harsh Australian sun. Most of my memories are of scaling tall trees, dancing for an audience of ravens and lambs on the dry and cracked earth of the family sheep farm, and writing stories about it all. As a kid I witnessed a lot of beauty in all that land and a lot of death and decay - livestock left to rot, rifles taken into the bush with my grandparents to go hunting, and all that God-fearing. I think - and I’m saying this now ever so naively at the beginning of my career - this imagery and symbolism will forever be present in my work. These themes, pathetically, are the very crux of my being. They are the bones from which I was built.
Writing often feels like an excavation of the self — an act of searching for the most honest parts of our minds. What conditions help you access that space? Do you have any rituals or ways of getting into that headspace?
People often ask me this and my response is often rubbish. I’m a mood writer, which means I can only write when I get these intense bouts of feeling, which also probably means I have zero self discipline. One thing I’ve learned that is crucial to the quality of my work over the years is that I need to honour these cycles and patterns and not work against them or in spite of them. I’ll write/edit 50,000 words of my novel in a week then I won’t open the document for a month. This method works for me, I promise. It’s chaos, but it’s coordinated. Kind of like everything in my life.
If On Sun Swallowing was a time capsule of who you were then, what do you think your next book will reveal about who you are now?
I’m learning now that this is and will be the case with all projects. This is both awful and beautiful. I look back at On Sun Swallowing and think wow, I really had a thing for the word divinity, and a thing for the mythology of pomegranates, which as cliche as it is I think is a rite of passage for all girl-writers. I bet in three years time I’m going to look back on this novel and say wow, I really had a thing for the sixties, especially the Warholian shift in the art world that changed just about everything. Wow, I really had some unresolved issues with my mother and relationship with organised religion. I hope these are resolved by the next book, at least.
What led you toward writing this novel, and where did you find yourself drawing the most inspiration? From personal experience, artistic influence, or something else entirely?
What initially inspired me to write this book was my own girlhood in such a setting. The contrast of forging ambition against an unforgiving and blistering place that is so far away from any real scene feels hopeless and is enough to drive one, well, mad (à la Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides). The plot fell into place when I became ever-so-slightly obsessed with the ill-fated muses of great artists and the meaning and morality surrounding this seeming destiny (such as Edie Sedgwick, and earlier on, Elizabeth Siddal). Finally, perhaps more than anything: the sapphic experience.
And finally, what books, poems, or other forms of art are fueling your creative process at the moment? Have any unexpected influences shaped your writing lately?
I’m really into diarists at the moment, particularly those of writers. I love this voyeuristic insight into the inner workings of somebody, with or without their permission, as much of the great diarists were published posthumously. I’m going to publish my own diaries detailing the most magnificent and surreal and terrifying years of my life, forging my way as a small town girl who danced ballet to a writer and some kind of public figure living out my wildest dreams in London. I just have to wait until the confessions are a little less hot and will get me in a little less trouble with the people I write about, first. I already know the title of it.
Whether through poetry, prose, or long-form, Dakota’s writing has always been about documenting transformation, and perhaps, about confronting the parts of ourselves that refuse to stay buried. As she puts it, “We’re always growing and evolving, forever, and I am really thankful to have these time capsules of art to remind me of this.” With each work, she leaves behind another time capsule — one that readers will undoubtedly return to, searching for pieces of themselves within the turn of each page.