Dijon Bowden and his experience self-publishing...

Kallie Falandays:

Hi everyone. This is Kallie from Tell Tell Poetry and we have Dijon Bowden here. He is the author of From Infinity to Infinity Vol. 1, which is now available. I’ll be dropping the links below. He’s a multidimensional artist who believes in self-actualization as a means to inspire others to ignite their own divinity. The meditation retreats and yoga teacher training he has attended has allowed him to sustain a powerful connection to source energy and channel visionary art. Storytelling, music, poetry, photography, and filmmaking are vehicles he uses to share high vibrational healing energy. His musical project Indigo Keys creates cosmic soundscapes that are accompanied by cinematic visuals to create epic soulful experiences that speak to the human heart and soul. His storytelling project SOUL of Society aims to create compassion, empathy, and spiritual awareness and it has made millions of impressions online. We are so excited to have you here Dijon.

Dijon Bowden:

Thank you so much for having me Kallie.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah. And I know that I’m dying to hear more about what your writing process was like. I know you have an interesting process that you took on to finish this collection. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah, sure. I mean, I was having a conversation with someone on my birthday in 2019, which is April 8th, and she’s a poet. I was always trying to get her to write more because she’s really talented. So I said, “Let’s make a pact to write a poem every day and share it with each other.” And I’m a little bit older than her so I’m like her older brother. So, I started doing that and modeling the consistency for her. She didn’t do it every day but she was doing it some of the days but I just kept doing it every day and it was part of my growth and self-development process. And every time you commit yourself to doing anything it doesn’t matter what it is, like it could be yoga every day, or breath work, or poetry, or singing or whatever you’re going to get better at it just by virtue of doing it every day.

I started to really enjoy it and notice that I felt like the poetry I was writing was getting more interesting to me. And then I went on a meditation retreat in Morocco maybe two and a half months into the process of writing poems every day. And the poems that I wrote there were clearly on another level because I had accessed a deeper level of interconnection. And when I looked at them I was like, “Whoa,” I was like, “Who wrote this?” It didn’t even feel like I wrote it, it just felt like I was open enough to receive it. And yeah, that was really inspiring. So, I did that for around 100 days and I wrote about 125 poems and that was a really awesome process but honestly the most dynamic part of pulling it all together was connecting with you and Tell Tell.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, before we get into that I want to talk a little bit about the writing process. Were you writing by hand? Were you typing? Did it matter? What was that like?

Dijon Bowden:

I usually would write it on my phone in Evernote which is a note taking app and you can just make a folder of things. So, I have folders for all sorts of things because I am always getting inspired and always seeing things on the internet that I want to link back to. So I just make copious notes of things and I try to categorize them in ways that I could find them. So, I just had a poetry tab and every day I would put the date and then that day’s poem.

Kallie Falandays:

Interesting. And the poems in this collection… are any of them from that early journey? So maybe the first 30 days, or are they all poems that happened in Morocco?

Dijon Bowden:

No. No. I was only in Morocco for how long, like eight or nine days. I probably wrote 10 poems during that time. So, the majority of them are from before and after. And for me, the process of creating art and living really is a dynamic process. So it’s not like I’m only trying to have the “most enlightened poems” in the collection. It’s like there’s a lot of different emotions and peaks and valleys in the course of this collection and I feel like that’s the point. That’s what makes them more interesting — having the contrast.

Kallie Falandays:

Oh, absolutely. And what was your journey to publication like?

Dijon Bowden:

So, when I decided that I wanted to publish them the creativity in general was very easy for me and I think that I recognized that I wanted and needed support to complete this process. So I just Googled, I can’t remember what I Googled, how to finish a poetry book or poetry book editing or something like that. And Tell Tell Poetry was the first website that came up. So I opened that tab and then I also opened up some articles about top 10 poetry editors and then I read those too and then Tell Tell was also at the top of that list. And I was like, “All right so Tell Tell is the way.”

Kallie Falandays:

That’s hilarious. I didn’t even know about the poetry editing list that’s really cool.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. You had a lot of good reviews from bloggers and from the actual reviews on your site so that felt pretty good. And then I sent you an email and we talked on the phone and I was just like, “Yeah, she gets it. She’s on the level.”

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah. And then what made you decide to move forward with us versus partnering with a friend or just doing it yourself?

Dijon Bowden:

Well, I definitely didn’t want to do it myself because I wanted to hire a professional who had experience with it and there’s a lot that I do by myself and that’s cool but you just go deeper with somebody else. It’s like if you do yoga at home versus going to your yoga class you’re probably going to do it longer and harder and better with someone guiding you. So yeah, talking to you on the phone I could just tell immediately that we were on the same wavelength and spoke the same language. So, I didn’t even talk to anybody else I was like, “She’s the person.”

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah that was an awesome process. I think we moved forward pretty quickly after that because you had a clear deadline in mind on when you wanted to release the collection. And you mentioned that you did a lot of it yourself and I would love to talk about the elements of the book that you did. I know you designed the cover, right?

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah.

Kallie Falandays:

What was that like? I mean, if people are designing their own covers what program did you use? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. So, I used a program called Over which is a, I guess you would call it a graphic design program. And I think people probably or at least I mostly use it for Instagram stuff like you can use it for Instagram stories or posts. But they also can format things to any size you want it to be. So, you can automatically format it to a Facebook cover or a YouTube video cover and it will rearrange your design to fit that template but you can also make custom things. Like in this case it was a five inch by eight inch cover.

Dijon Bowden:

And then they have a free library of stock photography from different sources. So, I was just going through different sources and picked that one and I was just having fun playing around with it. And I am also glad that I got feedback on the cover because I designed three or four covers. And the one that we chose wasn’t actually my favorite but it was the favorite of everyone else. Everyone else…

Kallie Falandays:

Can we see it? Do you have the book with you?

Dijon Bowden:

I don’t, I’m in Atlanta right now visiting family and I brought some but I gave them away so I don’t have any copies with me right now.

Kallie Falandays:

We’ll post a link because the cover image is amazing. And my designer and I were joking because she thought another designer had done it and I mentioned that you did it and she was blown away by it. So, you did a great job with that. And I’m wondering what advice you have for authors that are hoping to publish their debut collection?

Dijon Bowden:

I would say definitely get help. It’s not just the professionalism, that is important and people seeing things that you can’t see at the time, but also the exchange of energy. Even just writing emails back and forth with you was a very inspiring process just because you feel like someone is on your team and they understand it. And especially when you did the line by line review and I was just reading how in depth you went and I was like, “Shit, I didn’t go this in depth into it and she’s going super in depth.” Which made me then go that in depth.

Dijon Bowden:

Because as a collection, I hadn’t really absorbed it in that way. I would write it on the day and then read it and be like, “Okay, that’s what today is.” And then it would just go in the list and I would keep going and I wasn’t really going back to look at anything. But after you arranged them in a certain way and then I could read them as a collection I had a different context. So yeah. I mean maybe I would have finished it on my own, definitely not in the same timeline and it would have been a completely different thing so get help.

Kallie Falandays:

That’s exciting. And what do you think in your opinion is the most important stage of putting a collection together?

Dijon Bowden:

Just starting and being consistent. I think maybe the hardest part of anything is beginning of the inertia like that. The hardest part of motion if you think about physics is when something goes from still to moving. Once things are moving and you develop some sort of pattern or routine it’s easier to continue it. And the thing I like about doing something as a daily practice is you don’t have time to get too in your head about it because you have something else to do the next day and you have to leave what you did the day before. So, the creative process and the editing process are very different and during the creative process there’s no place for judgment. It just is what it is and later you can decide if you want to edit it or if you want to exclude it or you want to include it or whatever but just keeping the momentum going.

Kallie Falandays:

Absolutely, 100% and I think for whoever is watching this video if you want to take on the Dijon challenge, we’ll call it that, of choose a timeline, it can be five days, 10 days, 100 days like you did, and just write. Did you set a timer or your only goal was to write?

Dijon Bowden:

There was no timer. First of all, I thank you for saying that. I don’t feel good, I feel right, calling it the Dijon challenge because I’m definitely not the first person to do a 100 day challenge or anything like that. But, I would say doing it with somebody was a big part of it. So either at least one person or a group of people to be accountable to, that you have to share it publicly with them. And then I would usually like to do it right after I meditated in the morning because I have a meditation practice but I didn’t always do that. So it would just be like sometimes I’d be in a certain mood and get inspired and then write it. But I always [did], like sometimes it was writing it right before I went to bed just because I’d be like, “I didn’t do it today and I need to do it.” So yeah, just having the group energy and the accountability because if you haven’t done it for that day and someone sends you their poem and you’re like, “Okay, I need to do mine.”

Kallie Falandays:

Absolutely. And I think this actually inspired me. So, if anyone is watching this and is interested in starting feel free to email me and we can start a group email chain and we can all just share work every day for a set amount of time like 30 days. That’s awesome. Yeah and so the book is called From Infinity to Infinity Vol. 1. Does this imply that there is going to be a volume two?

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah, definitely. I mean like I said there was 120 something poems so the first collection only had 88 and 88 because it’s from infinity to infinity. So there’s a lot of intention that was put into it. There’s 88 poems, it’s 108 pages and I want there to be multiple volumes that all have 88 poems in them. So, I would imagine that some of the poems that didn’t make it into the first collection will make it in to the second collection. Some of them are probably just personal because they’re just for me. But yeah, I’m excited to make multiple volumes and also be able to see my own evolution through the process of the books.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah. Absolutely. I love that.

Dijon Bowden:

Wait, I have an idea for anyone who decides to do the 30 day challenge. So, once you actually have a published book, which I’m maybe a week or two into having, it’s really cool. And especially as I was giving it to someone and they were like, “Well sign it.” So that was the moment where I was like, “Wait, I’m writing my own name and a message to someone in a book that I created” and that’s really cool. And I think it’s easier to do something that you already have done than something you’ve never done before. So, for the people that are doing it in a group maybe your first published work if you don’t have one already could be a group published work. So let’s say of the 30 poems that you write over the course of 30 days and there’s 10 people then everybody could contribute 10 poems to the collection or whatever you decide. But that way you get to publish one thing together and get over that first hump and you’re actually a published author.

Kallie Falandays:

And then the rest is easy, right?

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. Yeah. And then the rest is easy… or easier.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah. Easier. And what does it feel like to be a published author? Maybe that will help everyone get on the bandwagon and actually start this process for themselves.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. It’s great. I’m still getting used to it just because the cool thing about art to me is you get to experience yourself. Like you get to experience parts of yourself that you’re maybe not always consciously aware of. Because I feel like it’s always harder for us to really see ourselves. It’s easier for us to see other people. But for instance, having that moment of realizing when I was signing my book was really profound and then I gave it to another friend and we went to get something to eat and she was so excited that she was reading it out loud as we were walking down the street. So I was enjoying her process of experiencing it. And then we went in to get some juice and she started she was like, “Hold on y’all.” And she got everybody in the juice shop to listen to her. She started reading my poetry to the people and they all intently listened. And then when she got done, they were like, “I love that. It’s so beautiful.” And it was just hitting me on these other levels.

Kallie Falandays:

That’s amazing. She needs to come to all the stores with you.

Dijon Bowden:

I know right.

Kallie Falandays:

Sometimes that doesn’t even happen at poetry readings that level of listening.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. And I wouldn’t walk into a store to make people listen to my poetry so yeah.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah she’s your hype man I love it.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah she was my hype man, it was special. So yeah, just seeing that it impacts other people and that they get something out of it is really powerful. I know one other moment that was really fun. You know that version with the music that I sent to you?

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah.

Dijon Bowden:

Okay. So I recorded one of my poems to music and it was to a popular soundtrack so I can’t actually use that in public but it made me realize that I want to make my own music and read poems to it. But I was playing it for somebody and actually a few people and they started crying when they were listening to it. So that was really profound because you can get somebody from just being in their day to literally 90 seconds in tears coming down their face and you’re like, “Okay, this is reaching people.”

Kallie Falandays:

Absolutely. What are you currently working on? What are some projects you’re exploring right now?

Dijon Bowden:

So, the audio book of the poem I would like to do which will be all 88 poems but then I also want to do a musical version I guess which will probably have maybe 11 of my favorites with music that I create with them so that’ll be a separate album.

Kallie Falandays:

That’s amazing.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah. And then I just released an album with my music project Indigo Keys and I’ve made two or three videos with it so far but I want to make a whole visual album like Lemonade.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah. I would love that. I think you should definitely do that. And when it comes out I would love to share it on Tell Tell and I will be dropping a link to Indigo Keys and your book and your other projects. And of course we’ll be following along and we’re huge fans of yours.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah thank you so much.

Kallie Falandays:

Yeah thank you so much for being here with us and I can’t wait to read more of your work.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for your support. It definitely would not have been the same without your energy and your knowledge and just your bright bubbliness throughout the process so I really appreciate it.

Kallie Falandays:

Well, don’t make me cry now on camera. That’s amazing. Thank you so much.

Dijon Bowden:

Yeah, it’s my pleasure.