An Interview with Crista Reid

Crista Reid is a somatic therapist, artist, and permission-giver. She weaves the art of communication, creative expression, sensuality, archetype, and movement as pathways to aliveness. A lifelong Coloradoan, she is often found meandering in the mountains with her beloved hound dog, flowing on the dance floor, or moonlighting as a typewriter poet.

Proximity to Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics sparked Crista to integrate poetic expression with the sensual immediacy of embodied awareness. Her poetry has been featured in Inverted Syntax Press’ Fissured Tongue Vol VI (2025), Ouch! Collective Vol. 2 (2023), and at East Window Gallery, in the collection DISGUST: unhealthy practices (2022). She is currently preparing a forthcoming chapbook, Snake Woman Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2026).

View more of her creative journeys and visions at @permissionpoetry on Instagram.

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Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I think it started with my grandfather’s typewriter. The first hesitant lines I typed on a piece of printer paper felt like I was hammering a small truth into being. My early writing came in snippets written on tiny scraps of paper I would save. One moment, one thought, one line at a time. I spent years keeping personal scrapbooks of typewritten pages, inspired by the epistolary mixed-media style of Nick Bantock and the sentimental nostalgia of projects like PostSecret and The Museum of Broken Relationships.

Then, I took the typewriter to the street and began writing bespoke poems for passersby. As I read each poem aloud, I witnessed tears, laughter, and a prism of sentiments flow through. I saw how each poem created a vessel for emotion to move. I thank every person I have ever written a poem for.

I also thank my time and teachers at Naropa University during my master’s studies in somatic psychotherapy for sparking the urge to integrate years of poetic expression into a cohesive form and instilling in me the embodied tools I would need to enter into the symbols, shadows, and snake bites of this process.

What inspired you to start writing this book?

In 2018, I experienced a spontaneous spiritual awakening that shifted the trajectory of my life and changed how I understand the world. Perhaps I didn’t know at the time, but every page that filled in my poetry journal was part of the uncoiling of a dormant force of creative aliveness within me. This was all surrounded by a time of intense transformation and catalyzing of my healing journey. Like the snake shedding its skin, I had to learn to glide beyond that place which had become comfortable but not serving my soul’s purpose. Snake Woman Poems is the excavation of shadow and repressed emotions, and the alchemy born from this unraveling. To me, writing is a life/death/rebirth process. Poetry is not a destination, but a journey sparked by language. My forthcoming chapbook, Snake Woman Poems, will be released this autumn through Dancing Girl Press. Each poem marks a point along one woman’s journey of healing, from cave to mountaintop. The snake serves as the central image in the collection, a symbol of transformation and temptation, danger and rebirth, and the cyclical nature of life.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The title was the first piece of the book that found me. It appeared to me first in an oracle card reading: snake, the one who transmutes all poisons, who holds the power of creation and sensuality. Then in ink-drawn images, twisting gently out of my subconscious into form on the page. It was within weeks of my spiritual awakening that I first penned into my journal, Snake Woman Poems, and began to shape the notion of what this collection would become. Though the title of the book was always there, it took time for the throughline to be revealed. It was a deeply significant and ceremonial process to sift through writing from years ago to reveal who I am now, and to see from a bird’s-eye view the archetypical shapes I left on those pages.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Ornament by Snake Rattle Rattle Snake

The Rager by Kyle Craft

The Pills Won’t Help You Now by The Chemical Brothers

Looking for Knives by DYAN

Lover, Where Do You Live? by Highasakite

If You’re Brave by Chimney Choir

Visions of a Life by Wolf Alice

She by Alice Phoebe Lou

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

My current work as a somatic therapist specializing in intimacy, desire, and sexuality weaves in with time spent moonlighting as a typewriter poet under the name Permission Poetry. Anaïs Nin draws an apt comparison between these two worlds: “Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.” Apparently, I am called to indispensable work.

I once heard it mentioned by another typewriter poet that when someone comes to you for a typewriter poem, they are probably looking for one of four things: a psychic, a priest, a philosopher, or a therapist. By taking on the shape of what a guest is asking for in the moment, I inhabit the transformational power of the snake. Then, as I read the poem aloud, I witness tears, laugher, and a prism of sentiments flow through.

In the past, I worked as a goldsmith. I was only five years old when I made my first necklace out of rainbow-colored plastic beads and grew up wanting to be an artist and an archeologist. And my dream came true! Poetry and therapy both feel like a form of archeology, digging into the metaphors and meanings of the human experience.

What books did you read (for research or comfort) throughout your writing process?

Definitely Anaïs Nin, and Jeanette Winterson’s piercingly beautiful prose.

The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene and Seduction by Jean Baudrillard.

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and the Motherpiece Tarot.
And, of course, the eternal Mary Oliver.

What advice would you give your past self at the start of your writing journey?

As Nabokov says, “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.” Allow yourself to experience the miraculous. Allow yourself to clamor. Allow yourself to become visible.

What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?

I hope readers will bite into this book like an apple in a forbidden garden, and taste something of their own journey of exploring selfhood, navigating sexuality, and the aches and joys of creative rebirth. Or, as reviewers have put it:

“Sexy, earthy, intriguing.”—Dawn Spectre “Pungent, visceral, and erotic. It almost feels like a low, raspy, warm whisper from behind into my ear.”—Althea McWilliams

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