Tough Love in the Big City: Roni Simpson Interview
Where did you get your passion for writing? How did it get sparked?
I started writing at seven years old. I started with poetry, I had a poem book my mother had bought me and I would write poems on a daily basis. In the church I was the youth leader and often I would have to get up and read some of my poems. I also would begin writing Christian songs for the church and that’s where my writing career pretty much started. When I went to college I studied creative writing but after taking a semester and a half of it I realized I don’t like fictional writing. Then I changed majors and became a Communications major because at the University of California, Riverside they didn’t have a journalism …show more content…
I had put the Latest Reports on hold and the interviews I had gone on weren’t really working out. I started this Instagram page called Black Love Exists, highlighting relationships between black men and women. That began to grow and people would begin submitting photos and I would post these photos. People were using the hashtag #blackloveexists and now that has over 18,000 followers. I would post videos of old movies like Love Jones or old TV shows like a Different World and people were like ‘I miss this’, ‘where is this’, and ‘I need this’. I was like I miss this too and told my boyfriend - since he has experience in filming, directing, editing - we should make a web series. The web series community is really growing in Los Angeles and it’s not growing as much in New York. I was not confident when it came to my writing with fiction so I reached out to different people. I got some writing samples I was not into. I’m that friend that talks to all my different friends about their relationship issues and I had all these different ideas and stories that happened in my head. My mom is also a single woman and she’s been telling me stories for years and I was like let me just start writing this down. And that’s when I started just doing it on my
Where did you get your passion for writing? How did it get sparked?
I started writing at seven years old. I started with poetry, I had a poem book my mother had bought me and I would write poems on a daily basis. In the church I was the youth leader and often I would have to get up and read some of my poems. I also would begin writing Christian songs for the church and that’s where my writing career pretty much started. When I went to college I studied creative writing but after taking a semester and a half of it I realized I don’t like fictional writing. Then I changed majors and became a Communications major because at the University of California, Riverside they didn’t have a journalism …show more content…
I had put the Latest Reports on hold and the interviews I had gone on weren’t really working out. I started this Instagram page called Black Love Exists, highlighting relationships between black men and women. That began to grow and people would begin submitting photos and I would post these photos. People were using the hashtag #blackloveexists and now that has over 18,000 followers. I would post videos of old movies like Love Jones or old TV shows like a Different World and people were like ‘I miss this’, ‘where is this’, and ‘I need this’. I was like I miss this too and told my boyfriend - since he has experience in filming, directing, editing - we should make a web series. The web series community is really growing in Los Angeles and it’s not growing as much in New York. I was not confident when it came to my writing with fiction so I reached out to different people. I got some writing samples I was not into. I’m that friend that talks to all my different friends about their relationship issues and I had all these different ideas and stories that happened in my head. My mom is also a single woman and she’s been telling me stories for years and I was like let me just start writing this down. And that’s when I started just doing it on my